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| Links: How the Rusties got their name |
THE AUTHOR SPEAKS: DESIGNING RUSTIES
Aliens are humanoid, usually with slightly different facial features to Homo sapiens; they have two sexes, recognisably male and female; they have children much as we do and they live in family units.
Oh, and have American accents. In short, alien worlds are basically "abroad". Wrong. We all know they won't be like this; we even know that so many of them in films and on TV look like this because they're played by human actors under all that makeup. And yet, maybe I've watched too much TV in my time, but I was having severe difficulty in imagining my First Breed, products of my own imagination, as anything other than humans in costumes. Making them quadrupeds was my way out of this. Once I had that, other things followed. For instance, the grasping tentacles. Around the time of starting the novel I read a story in Asimov's called "The Nutcracker Coup", by Janet Kagan. This story irritated me for many good reasons, not least of which was its own quadruped aliens. Like the Rusties, they had grasping limbs. Unlike the aliens, if they picked something up (say, a gun with which to cover a prisoner) ... they hobbled along on the other three feet. Which was rubbish. No sentient species would evolve the ability to grasp something at the cost of essential mobility. They would evolve something else, as the sentient species on the Roving did. And now all I needed was a name, and First Breed was the obvious choice, for good reason ...
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