Seeing through other eyes

 This week I'm deep into the second draft of my science fiction novella with an intelligent cat character.  The first draft told the rough story, but now I have to add the parts that make that characters unique.

 If you were seeing things through a cat's eyes, the way she experiences the world would be very different.  We humans usually use sight as our dominant sense, and of course a predatory big cat will have good eyesight.  But she also has a much better sense of smell than humans, and this is where I saw an opportunity to personalise her.

Because she's been bioengineered, I thought I could get away with one of the side-effects being enhanced senses.  So I have her being able to read the emotions of the humans she works with by scenting these distinctive smells.

The only problem with doing this is that I keep forgetting to add in the smells at key parts of the narrative. My own sense of smell is very poor, and this makes it hard to remember to add this detail.  Obviously I don't want to mention smells all the time.  That would drive the reader crazy.  But at moments of high drama, when the characters are feeling afraid, yes I really do need to add them in.

I'm also using this character to observe and comment on human nature.  I've just written a scene where my character made an observation about commanders in war passing off responsibility for killing to their troops.  Seeing the world through the cat's eyes allows me to make observations on things without it being a straight preach.

I've also explored some of the consequences of making machine intelligences sentient.  I have a warship as one of my characters who is a sentient machine intelligence.  He is officially part of the human starnavy, but he is in fact a rebel, working against the government where the decisions it makes are morally wrong.

At one point in the narrative he has to destroy another warship.  In the process, he kills a sentient machine intelligence much like himself.  This allowed me to play with the idea of sentient machine intelligences having emotions.  I strongly suspect that, if we ever do create sentient machines, they will need emotions to make senses of the events they experience, and to create context for their world.

It's only a short stop from there to thinking that they might grieve when another machine intelligence is destroyed, and I wanted to show my character doing that.

This novella has really challenged me in many ways, but now I think  I have something complex and profound as well as a great adventure story.  I like the way it's turning out.