It’s unlikely that any aliens we encounter will be as homogeneous as the ones that populate most science fiction films and television shows. Just as planets have diverse ecosystems so will intelligent species have a variety of political, religious and economic systems. They’re unlikely to all be warriors, all worship one set of gods and all be communists. If they all had the same beliefs they’d likely never build a civilization and never leave their home world. Intellectual and technical progress is much more likely to happen when multiple cultures are competing and trading and fighting with each other. When everyone gets along, when one lives in a Golden Age and everyone agrees that it’s a Golden Age, then life is likely to be kind of static. It might be an awesome, wonderful, even enriching status but a status it will be. Because if everyone is happy no one is likely to make an effort to change that status.

That doesn’t address what’s going on in this sketch (from 2003) other than to suggest that if there are Burrabb utopias this sketch doesn’t depict one. Or if it does the Burrabb idea of utopia involves a lot of snarling and waving of claws.

Back to the sketchbooks –

This one was probably done in 2003. Part of the fun of world building is creating the details of a planet, a species, a culture. What do they eat? What do they wear? What kind of manners and religions do they have. What are the differences between the various cultures. Of the species in the Sentient 39 universe the Burrabb are the ones I’ve spent the most time thinking about and there’s still so much room in the picture for me to find color and nuance.

This sketch is the result of considering what sort of beasts of burden the Burrabb might have. A civilization is likely to need domestic animals in order to become a civilization. Species probably don’t go from hunter gatherers to space farers without a lot of steps in between.

Burrabb cubs leave the pouch when their muscles have developed. Unlike human babies who spend a couple of years being pretty helpless and needing to be taken care of constantly Burrabb cubs are physically capable and active. They’re also not very bright. Burrabb brains take about 5 years to develop to a point where a Burrabb can begin to learn language and “civilized” behavior. Until that point they are also primarily quadrupeds.

The Burrabb are the non-terran originating species that I’ve spent the most time designing. They’ve been in my imagination in some form for decades. This version, from my 2001 Sentient 39 universe building exercise, is close to how I currently imagine them. Given that they’ve spread themselves across hundreds of systems and adapted themselves to a multitude of environments this could just be an example of one of the sub-races. The Burrabb have two sexes but a slightly more complex breeding cycle than human beings. Fertilization occurs in the mahas. At a certain point the (fetus? larva?) developing cubs leave the maha and finish their development in pouches in the herras. Imagine a social structure of a pride of marsupial lions in which the (not)male gives birth and the (not)females finish the gestation. Only not quite that. The mahas are about twice the size of the herras. A burrabb family has a single maha and two to ten herras.

A page of alien sketches. The fellow with the beaky nose is a variation on Ka D’Argo from the Farscape series. I liked that show. It was a bit of mess but it was a unique mess.

The burrabb get most of their information about their environment through a combination of hearing and smell, with sight being a somewhat secondary sense. Their hide is fairly thick and heals quickly so the burrabb decorate themselves with scars and piercings in much the same way that humans tattoo themselves.