Alien Minds & AI Souls: Science Fiction Worldbuilding for the Truly Other

Science fiction is at its most powerful when its worlds feel alive—when alien landscapes breathe with their own mythologies, when artificial intelligences act with cultural depth, and when futures feel as textured and believable as history. This six-week course will offer writers, artists, and visionaries the tools to craft compelling, imaginative, and meaningful worlds that move beyond cliché.

We begin with the idea of environment as destiny. How do deserts, oceans, space stations, or tidally locked planets shape culture, psychology, and spirituality? Using examples from Herbert’s Dune, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Simmons’ Hyperion, we’ll explore how geography and ecology generate myth, ritual, and archetype. Students will sketch initial settings that grow from environmental foundations.

Week two we will tackle the challenge of the alien. Too often, extraterrestrials are humans in disguise. We’ll use speculative biology, anthropology, and depth psychology to design beings whose perception and consciousness emerge from truly different evolutionary paths.…