alien of the week

Spotlight on Darvellians

Spotlight on Darvellians

Darvellians are an older invention.

Background

Barking up the Muse Tree | jespah | Janet Gershen-Siegel | If You Can't Stand the Heat | Darvellians

First introduced in If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Darvellians were intended as a kind of alien of the week.

I haven’t written a follow up to this story yet, but I can absolutely see where they fit into my own personal Star Trek fan fiction canon.

 

 

 

Characteristics

I don’t have too much on them. They are gray and furry, and they like it cold. When they board the Enterprise, in an effort to kidnap members of the crew for their scientific experiments, they turn the environmental controls down to -20⁰ C. In Fahrenheit, that’s -4⁰. It is cold, particularly when a person is only wearing a standard uniform.

The only other piece of information I have on them is their use of sulphur-oxylic gas to knock everyone out. Sulphur-oxylic gas is utterly made up by me and the term really doesn’t mean anything.

With no picture, I am going with the gray wolf as inspiration.

Spotlight on Darvellians

Darvellian (gray wolf)

Certainly this animal fits the bill in terms of generalized look.

Darvellian Descendants

Well, not really descendants, per se, but the idea of the Darvellians has been used again by me, particularly in the creation of the similarly-named and similarly-looking Daranaeans.  The difference, of course, is that the Daranaeans are considerably better developed.

The idea of knocking out the entire ship with gas was repeated, to a far greater effect, in Together. In that story, it’s the Witannen, with their Imvari henchmen, who perform the deed. As with the Daranaeans, the second use of this piece of the plot is better realized. The older story certainly shows its seams, but some of the ideas were good ones. I just needed to mature more as a writer in order to be able to show them more effectively.

Upshot

These aliens were barely shown but the idea of them is, I think, pretty neat. I should figure out a way to trot them out again.

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Posted by jespah in Fan fiction, In Between Days series, Spotlight, 0 comments

Spotlight on Olathans in Star Trek Fan Fiction

Spotlight on Olathans

Olathans were an early invention.

Background

Barking up the Muse Tree | jespah | Janet Gershen-Siegel | The Adventures of Porthos | Olathans

The Adventures of Porthos

When I first started writing Star Trek: Enterprise fan fiction, I wrote a lot of one-off stories with an ‘alien of the week’ theme to them.

In this instance, I wanted an oppressive villain species, as that story line is a parallel to the rise of the Nazi party here on Earth.

Premise

This species would be hidden and mysterious, but nasty. Their purpose in life would be to suppress their overly-peaceful and somewhat simplistically weak neighbors, the Azezans. While the Azezans were purple in color, the Olathans were green. But otherwise they were to look more or less the same, and I never described them any further (my scene setting and world building skills have improved since that story was written several years ago). This allows for the deception in The Adventures of Porthos to be believable at all.

Spotlight on Olathans

Purple star image from Hubble telescope photographs

For the Olathans, their weaker peaceful neighbors are only good for one thing – exploitation. Azezans are worked to death and families are broken up. The Olathans are excited to meet with humans. They hope to be able to sell slave labor to them, or at least the fruits of slave labor. Porthos can tell that something is very, very wrong.

At the end of the story, Jonathan Archer has hit upon a fairly foolproof scheme to try to thwart the Olathans. The idea is to hoist them on their own petard. In order to root out any of them hiding on Azezi Prime, he proposes a gift of scent hounds and their handlers. Hopefully the act of outing any Olathans will spur the Azezans to drive them out of their home world, once and for all.

Upshot

While Porthos got his own pair of sequels, the Azezans and Olathans did not. Perhaps it’s time I visited Azezi Prime, to see what’s up.

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Posted by jespah in In Between Days series, Spotlight, Times of the HG Wells series, 1 comment