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person in there somewhere but not quite getting a handle on what they are feeling.
So, given that I was writing a Doctor Who story, and needed to convey some kind of emotional content to what the aliens were doing, I had to make them interestingly non-human but still able to convey what they were thinking and feeling. The Jamarians I based, believe it or not, on an advert I had seen for a snack called Pepperami - a kind of thin spicy meat sausage.
The advert has a stop-motion animated Pepperami creature with the body of a sausage and stick-like arms and legs running around doing brutal things while Ade Edmondson's voice states: "Pepperami - it's a bit of an animal." So I scaled them up, gave them a single horn and made them paranoid and passive/aggressive, something like a footman in Upstairs Downstairs who's suddenly discovered a loaded gun in Her Ladyship's underwear drawer.
The Greld I based on a statue that I'd read about in a book about Venice. It's supposed to be a carving of some kind of lion, but apparently looks more like a large crab with a mane. What I wanted from the Greld was that they were scavengers and users of technology, and didn't particularly care about the consequences. The ultimate junkyard tinkerers, perhaps.
The Greld were actually a continuity holdover from my previous Doctor Who book, Original Sin. Although they never appear, we are told that their sun was blown up by humanity somewhere around the 30th Century, and serves them right too.
Alien dialogue is always a problem. Should they talk just like humans, or should they have their own distinct speech patterns? If the former then they don't actually come over as alien at all. If the latter then they usually end up sounding like Yoda. In The Empire of Glass I had it both ways, with the Jamarians talking "normally" and the Greld talking with a kind of scrambled syntax in which the verb gets shifted to the end of the sentence. Neither approach is particularly successful, and it all just makes me wince wh
