Through others' eyes

I'm continuing with my rewrite of Darius this week.  The novel has an ensemble cast of characters, some human, some alien.  This poses a whole host of problems in describing  those people.  Even the human characters vary greatly.  Jian is dusky -skinned with black hair, her friend Brett pale-skinned and white-blonde.  Then there are the alien species, two of which are based on spiders and cats.  

So how to get the information across?  I cheat a little, by describing Jian running a hand through her black hair, for example.  This is an author intrusion, but it's so brief that I think I can get away with it.  But how to get across that the furry humanoid Ylanne have four arms? I've opted to do it by seeing that character through another character's eyes.

The Ylanne, Hes', is a friend of Brett's, so I have Brett describe him tapping a keyboard with two hands and using a third of his four arms to wave to him. I get across the alien's short stature by having Brett observe that Hes' always looks like he's drowning behind the reception desk.

To describe the cat species, the Sseppaa, I use the observations of Kyren, the shipyard's human general manager, as she follows  Puhuu, her security chief along the hallway.  I made the Sseppaa have their own language of cat-like hisses, purrs, and snarls.  Puhuu wears a voice box on a collar around her neck which translates those sounds into human speech.

With the spider species, the Krunnu, I turned the first pair of the arachnid's legs into handfeet with three fingers and an opposable thumb.  This gives them the ability to use tech, and also forms part of their language system.  They use their hands to communicate, using a type of sign language. So my human chief engineer can use the language to talk to his tech and ask him to check out a malfunctioning generator.

It takes more effort to see characters this way, but seeing them through another character's eyes allows me to present them as people familiar to each other that they work alongside.  It allows me to present even the most exotic alien as ordinary and everyday.

And that is surely the best way to describe characters, as if they are part of the scenery and fit seamlessly into the world of the story.