Crafting Alien Civilizations: Build Believable Science Fiction Worlds From the Ground Up

About the Author

Micky Govan has spent twenty years working in and around speculative fiction as an editor, writing coach, and developmental consultant for genre publishers across the United States and the United Kingdom. Her clients have included Hugo and Nebula finalists, debut novelists whose first books became series staples, and one particularly memorable author whose aliens communicated through color changes and required a custom typesetting solution that still gives production managers nightmares.

She holds a degree in evolutionary biology from the University of Cambridge, which she puts to far more interesting use analyzing fictional alien ecosystems than she ever did in a laboratory. Her writing on speculative fiction craft has appeared in *Clarkesworld*, *Locus*, and the now-defunct but never-forgotten *Strange Horizons* blog series on worldbuilding. She is the author of two previous craft books: *The Alien Anthropologist* and *Making Monsters: Biological Plausibility in Creature Design*.

Govan lives in Portland, Oregon, where she maintains a small menagerie of arthropods that she studies for behavioral inspiration. She believes that the best alien civilizations are built from equal parts rigorous speculation and radical empathy—the willingness to imagine minds so different from our own that they challenge everything we think we know about consciousness, culture, and what it means to be a person.

She is currently at work on her first novel, which may or may not feature aliens that communicate through pheromonal arrays. The research is getting weird.