alex ries star trek

• Latest Posts
• Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Art
• Sci-Fi / Fantasy Movies
• Horror Movies
• Cosplay / Photography
• Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Books
• Trailers / Videos
• Video Games

The Science Fiction Art of Alex Ries

All the images in this post are Copyright © Alex Ries and have been used with the artists permission.

You might also like...

• Sci-Fi Artist
• Science Fiction Art

Interview: How the artist behind 'Subnautica' creates aliens that could actually exist

We love plunging into the depths of Alex Ries' artistic mind.

According to his portfolio website , Alex Ries is a concept artist who works in film, television, and video games.

However, he can also be considered a speculative zoologist: someone that uses their knowledge of real-world biology to imagine alien life forms whose appearance, behavior, and even evolutionary trajectory appear as complex and convincing as those of the animals found on Earth.

Even if you do not know Ries by name, you have probably seen his artwork before. After helping design mechanical monsters for the recently produced Hong Kong science fiction film Warriors of the Future , he got in touch with Unknown Worlds Entertainment. After looking over his drawings, the San Francisco-based developer quickly asked him to join development of the highly anticipated sequel to their 2018 open-world survival horror game, Subnautica .

Like its critically acclaimed predecessor, Subnautica: Below Zero (which was released last year) is about an astronaut exploring the darkest depths of a distant, largely aquatic exoplanet teeming with extraterrestrial organisms . Some of these organisms, like the pengwing — a penguin-like critter with a magenta-colored coat, four sets of eyes, and an upright-facing beak — are cute and cuddly.

Others — like the highly aggressive, 11-meter-long apex predator known as the squidshark — remind us of the truck-sized apex behemoths that swam through our world’s oceans during the late Cretaceous period. Each and every alien in Below Zero serves as an analog to creatures that exist or have existed here on Earth, and each and every one of them was born from the wild but surprisingly methodical imagination of Alex himself.

Tim Brinkhof: When and why did you first develop an interest in drawing creatures that don’t really exist?

Alex Ries: Everything stretches back to my childhood. My schoolbook margins were filled with doodles of odd critters, imaginary monsters, and alien machines. I love nature and real-world science — so much so that, when I was younger, I actually wanted to become a marine biologist — but I was increasingly drawn to the realm of science fiction when I came across the original Star Wars and Star Trek films.

Both of these obsessions merged into a fascination with what might be out there lurking in deep space. Eventually, I discovered that art was the best, most natural way to express this fascination and allow me to communicate the wonder I felt to other people.

Tim: You have designed alien creatures for numerous films and video games. Was working on Subnautica: Below Zero any different from other projects?

Alex: When working on stories that classify as hard science fiction — a subgenre concerned with scientific accuracy — I try not to break away from principles of evolution, ecology, and even engineering. I have to make sure my creatures look and act in ways that seem plausible given what we know about these disciplines. This makes the creatures seem more realistic.

Subnautica , by contrast, is much more playful. Its creatures, while designed to be animals rather than monsters, often push the boundaries of what is physically possible. They become stranger, cuter, or more terrifying because this makes them more fun for players to interact with. I also took real-world concepts like bioelectricity or the brinicle phenomenon and dialed them up.

Tim: Which Subnautica creature was the most challenging to design?

Alex: The biggest challenge for me was the Shadow Leviathan, an arthropod-inspired sea monster. Being one of the largest creatures in the game, it needed to be a truly horrifying creature. However, I still wanted it to seem like an animal that could actually exist. I went through numerous iterations. At one point, it was meant to look like a dragon. Then someone suggested I add centipede-like limbs to it, which made me think of the invertebrate predators from the Cambrian .

“I am often compelled by strangeness .”

Tim: Countless writers, artists, and filmmakers have tried to imagine what alien life might look like. What, in your opinion, is the single most compelling representation that popular culture has given us so far?

Alex: I am often compelled by strangeness. The less a particular creature resembles a human or even a mammal, the more I am drawn to it. Typically, artists working in the horror movie genre have been a bit freer to explore such otherworldly designs as audiences need not be able to empathize with the flesh-eating monstrosities they come up with.

As far as specific creatures go — and keeping in mind what I just said about horror — the Bioraptors from David Twohy’s Pitch Black are as iconic as they are unforgettable, not only in terms of appearance but sound design as well. I also appreciate the Prawns from District 9 for achieving that strangeness aesthetic despite being portrayed by actors in mocap suits.

In terms of individual artists, Wayne Barlowe is rightly considered to be one of the greatest speculative zoologists of all time. His book, Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV (1990), was one of the first to apply principles of natural history to the creation of alien life. It remains one of my all-time favorites.

I could say the same about the work of Terryl Whitlatch, a scientifically trained illustrator who helped to breathe so much color into the Star Wars prequels. She also designed a peerless book called The Wildlife of Star Wars , which is a kind of field guide filled with small facts about various creatures from the cinematic universe.

Unlike most people, my introduction to Alex’s work did not come through his involvement with Subnautica: Below Zero but by way of his as of yet unpublished pet project and astonishing magnum opus. Alternately referred to as The World of the Birrin or The Chronicles of Chriirah by its online following, it’s basically Alex’s solo attempt to map out — in as much detail as possible — the evolution of an intelligent alien species.

Keeping with his aforementioned design philosophies, Alex conceived the species in question — called Birrin — to look as distinctly non-humanoid as possible. Having evolved from basket worm-like ancestors, the Birrin resemble a cross between our world’s horses, birds, and dolphins, complete with six long, lanky limbs, two vestigial wings, and beaked mouths that open up in four different directions.

While the Birrin’s ocean-engulfed planet of Chriirah might look familiar to Subnautica veterans, Alex is taking his own worldbuilding aspirations further than any game developer constrained by time and money ever could. From the Birrins’ unique physique, locomotion, and clothing, down to the way in which they organize their cities and cultivate their favorite crops, his artwork leaves no stone unturned.

Alex’s art portfolio is a rabbit hole you won’t want to climb out of. A Tolkien-esque map, complete with epistemologically consistent names for every sea and region, turns Chriirah from a loose collection of doodles into a living, breathing ecosystem. While far from complete, the Birrin world is already on its way to becoming one of the most comprehensive works of hard sci-fi ever created.

Tim: When did your Birrin project start, and how has it evolved over time?

Alex: The earliest seeds for the Birrin project began sprouting back in 1998, when I was in high school. In hindsight, the original story was pretty similar to James Cameron’s Avatar with humans as the protagonists, following their discovery and colonization of Chriirah. While still strange-looking, the proto-Birrin were essentially fellow humanoids and remained so until 2005.

That year, I switched the narrative focus from humans to the Birrin, and gave them a more spider-like design, which I had originally created for a college art class. As I learned more about evolutionary biology and ecology, and my artistic tastes began to mature a little bit, my design for the species developed into what it is today.

Tim: As we just talked about, there is no shortage of artists out there who have imagined their own versions of alien life. What makes the Birrin so unique?

Alex: I wanted to design not just a species but an entire planet, a world that feels so real people could step right into it. I not only outlined the Birrin’s anatomy and evolutionary path, but I also developed their traditions and history. The Birrin are utterly non-humanoid, yet their civilization still possesses the same kind of social, cultural, and economic complexities as our own.

Whenever we see alien creatures in film or television, we learn next to nothing about the environments they come from. And even when we do, their societies are presented as small and homogenous. With the Birrin project, I wanted to explore an alien civilization that was actually diverse ; not all Birrin live in the same communities, speak the same language or share the same beliefs.

Tim: How do academic disciplines like anatomy, natural history, zoology, and ecology inform the way you designed the Birrin world?

Alex: There are tons of artists who know more about human anatomy than I do. However, what I bring to the table is my familiarity with the anatomy of invertebrates — animals like octopuses, spiders, and lobsters, and other creatures that dominated the Precambrian oceans — as well as ecology, both of which I learned through reading textbooks and research papers.

“I bring to the table is my familiarity with the anatomy of invertebrates ”

I can use the chattertail — a small, non-intelligent flying creature distantly related to the Birrin — as an example. Anatomically, they use the same body plan as their common ancestor, meaning both species share six primary limbs with two dorsal wing-like appendages. In the Birrin, these wings have evolved to regulate heat and communicate with other Birrin.

In the chattertails, however, these appendages have evolved into true wings. I based their ecological niche — their place in the ecosystem and its corresponding food web — on the one occupied by ibis and sandpipers in our world. The chattertails have specialized forelimbs that serve the same purpose as bills do for these birds.

Tim: Over the years, you have been slowly working your way through the history of the Birrin. What chapter of their story are you writing now?

Alex: Right now I have written so much of their history as a species that I am trying to turn them into a book. Several books, in fact. The first starts off a thousand years after “The Fall,” a climate change catastrophe that triggered nuclear war and destroyed almost all the progress Birrin society had made up to that point.

“Life always finds a way .”

Compared to previous generations, the survivors were forced to live much simpler lives in their partially destroyed world. However, life always finds a way. The book, which I am imagining as a Lord of the Rings -like story set in my fictional world, follows two Birrin sisters living in a quiet, uneventful life in a desert oasis.

That life changes when they stumble across the Reclamation, an organization that aims to restore Birrin civilization back to its pre-Fall glory. Ideally, I’d love to turn this storyline into a trilogy. Perhaps turn it into a television series or a movie. I just want to invite people into this world I created in any way I can.

A Man Once Tried to Raise His Son as a Native Speaker in Klingon

The man in question is computational linguist Dr. d’Armond Speers.  Speers is actually not a huge Start Trek fan himself. Indeed, many Klingon language enthusiasts aren’t, contrary to popular perception.  They tend to be language lovers fascinated by constructed languages, of which Klingon is a relatively thriving one, hence why they gravitate towards it. Speers became fascinated with the Klingon language after reading a flyer on a bulletin board at Georgetown where he was studying linguistics. The flyer was advertising the Klingon Language Institute (KLI), founded by Dr. Larence M. Schoen.  “I thought to myself, ‘A new language.’ The fact that it was a constructed language really appealed to me. It sounded like fun,” said Speers.

He soon became one of the more famous members of KLI when he decided to experiment with trying to teach his son Alec to be a native speaker of Klingon. He stated of this decision, “I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language.”

So as not to cause Alec to have potential learning disabilities and to make sure his son could fully integrate into society without language problems, Speers’ wife, who was fully behind Speers’ experiment, always spoke English to the child. (Lack of an adequate language for your brain to use before the age of 5-ish can severely stunt a person’s mental capacity and causes extremely detrimental learning disabilities in later life, even if a language is eventually learned. Through much of human history, this is largely why deaf people were once considered mentally deficient, even though with an adequate language taught to them at an early age, like a sign language, they are just as intelligent as anyone else on average.  For more on this, see:  How Deaf People Think .  Incidentally, Speers’ dissertation was on the topic of sign language, Representation of American Sign Language for Machine Translation .)

In any event, unlike his wife, Speers almost exclusively spoke to Alec in Klingon.  He even would sing the Klingon Imperial Anthem,  May the Empire Endure, as a bedtime lullaby to the boy, which his son soon picked up and would also sing.  You can hear a recording of Alec singing this here .

This experiment went on for about three years, during which time, as you might imagine, Speers was given a lot of funny looks in public as he’d converse with Alec.  At first when people would ask what language he was speaking, Speers would respond, “speaking Klingon”, but after getting a lot of dirty looks and comments for this, he switched to just saying, “speaking a constructed language”, which generally would forestall potential negative remarks.

Despite certain people being aghast that a father would do this, thinking it perhaps detrimental to a child, Speers, being a language expert, had a different view on it. “My feeling is that it’s good for people in general to know more than one language. You get different viewpoints and perspectives on things, and there is evidence to suggest that kids who are bilingual do better academically, whether their second language is a constructed language or not.”

Despite the limitation of the language, Speers claimed, “I’ve been able to say almost everything I’ve needed to say to Alec in Klingon… One of the reasons I find the Klingon language so interesting is that because the vocabulary and grammar is so limited, you really have to think to figure out how you’re going to say something.” For instance, “When I ask him to turn out the lights, I say the Klingon for ‘make it dark’.”

This joy found in the difficulty in saying things in Klingon over English didn’t rub off on his son, and Alec eventually resisted speaking the language, as Speers anticipated in the beginning.  “There’s going to come a time when he’s going to stop making the effort to speak Klingon because it’ll be easier for him to speak English.”

Speers was also the only person who would speak Klingon to Alec and the boy never saw Star Trek during this experiment, so didn’t ever see anyone but his father speaking it.  As everyone else spoke English, Speers stated when Alec was about three years old, “He stopped listening to me when I spoke in Klingon. It was clear that he didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t want to make it into a problem, so I switched to English…”

Today the teenage Alec no longer is fluent in Klingon and reportedly can’t even pick out the meaning of individual words of the language.

The Klingon Imperial Anthem, May the Empire Endure, sung to Alec as a lullaby is:

taHjaj wo’ ’ej taHjaj voDLeHma’  (May the empire endure, and may our emperor endure.) wItoy’mo’ vaj nuquvmoHjaj ta’ (We serve him, so that he may honor us.) Dun wo’maj ’ej Qochchugh vay’ (Our empire is wonderful, and if anyone disagrees,) vaj DaSmeymaj bIngDaq chaH DIbeQmoHchu’ jay’! (We will crush them beneath our boots!)

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show ( iTunes , Spotify , Google Play Music , Feed ), as well as:

• 14 Awesome Star Trek Facts You Probably Didn’t Know
• “To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before” is Thought to Have Been Inspired by a Line from a White House Pamphlet on Space
• Split Infinitives like “To Boldly Go” are Not Incorrect Grammatically
• The “Live Long and Prosper” Hand Gesture was Derived from a Jewish Sign
• The Actor Who Played Scotty on Star Trek was Shot Six Times on D-Day

Bonus Facts:

• The first Klingon word Alec picked up was “HIVje”, meaning “vessel”, which is the closest approximation to “bottle” the Klingon language had at the time, so what Speers used.  He also quickly learned “vavoy”, which means “daddy” and was one of the few Klingon words Alec would commonly choose to speak, though of course he began to understand the language quite well.
• It is estimated that approximately 20-30 people in the world, including Speers, are fluent speakers of Klingon, with another few thousand that are familiar enough that they can pick out words when they hear it spoken.
• The Klingon language continues to grow, despite the lack of new Star Trek shows or movies featuring it, with new words added each year, generally thought up by Marc Okrand, the person who often mistakenly is said to have first created the Klingon Language (in fact, “Scotty” did that at a very rudimentary level, coming up with the style and the first few words. Okrand took James Doohan’s work and made it into a full language, which is why he’s generally given the credit for first coming up with it, doing the vast majority of the work to make it into a real language.)
• Every year Okrand is given a “wishlist” for new Klingon words to come up with, and when he does so, they are published in the HolQeD (Language Science).  Okrand himself has published The Klingon Way: A Warrior’s Guide with such riveting tails as “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”  He also has put out a best selling audio instructional  Conversational Klingon , as well as Power Klingon (“Learn Klingon Jokes, insults, and toasts”.
• KLI currently has about 2500 members in 50 countries throughout the world.  Among other things, KLI publishes poetry and fiction in Klingon and hosts a 5 day conference every year called the qep’a’ (“Great Meeting”), open to anyone who wants to attend, whether member or not.  They are currently attempting to translate the Bible into Klingon and are also working on translating various works by Shakespeare, to which they’ve already translated Hamlet .  During the qep’a’ a $500 scholarship is awarded to a college level linguistics student.
• The official motto of KLI is qo’mey poSmoH Hol (Language Opens Worlds).
• Although getting into Klingon for the linguistic appeal, rather than Star Trek nostalgia, Speers does own a Klingon forehead piece.  Speers stated, “One time I dressed up [as a Klingon] it horrified [Alec], so I’ve never done it again.”
• Klingon as a Second Language
• Babble Revisited
• Company Creates Klingon Dictionary
• Klingon Language
• Klingon Language Institute
• Klingon Resources
• Featured Facts

12 comments

Every child should have a Klingon name. I met two Klingon officers from a Warbird squadron and they gave me the name (can’t spell it) Nisssjhu. The emphasis is on the JHU syllable. I wanted a strong name. It is a derivative of Sin.

I wonder if getting alex to watch the shows might have made him more interested in the language?

What a jerk … instead, he could have taught the boy something actually useful like Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or any language that applies to actual Humans.

The goal was not to teach a foreign language, but to study acquisition of a constructed language. It’s funny how judgemental people here are. Though personally, I’d chose one that has more varied vocabulary and is not so difficult to pronounce for a small child.

When your father is an idiot. Yes, why not teach him a useful language instead of something that wholly serves your own ego?

He clearly is the opposite of an idiot. If anything, more such experiments with constructed languages should be done to learn more about how human brains acquire and internalise language.

I seem to recall reading more about this, that he had trouble in general because Klingon Hol simply isn’t written with kids in mind, has a really limited vocabulary, and is largely about things most people who aren’t warriors traveling on a ship wouldn’t use very often. What I wanna know is A) did he continue calling him vavoy? because usually the name you learn for your parents is their NAME to you.. even if kids do generally shorten daddy to dad over time.. and B) how did he learn it well enough to speak it fluently enough for conversations not to be stilted as heck? I know linguists tend to be those kinds of people who are good at learning languages, but.. really? so good at it that you’re always ready all the time, when talking to your kid?

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Star Trek: Discovery

Ten years before Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise, the USS Discovery discovers new worlds and lifeforms as one Starfleet officer learns to understand all things alien. Ten years before Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise, the USS Discovery discovers new worlds and lifeforms as one Starfleet officer learns to understand all things alien. Ten years before Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise, the USS Discovery discovers new worlds and lifeforms as one Starfleet officer learns to understand all things alien.

• Bryan Fuller
• Alex Kurtzman
• Sonequa Martin-Green
• Anthony Rapp
• 4.5K User reviews
• 104 Critic reviews
• 22 wins & 87 nominations total

Episodes 65

Photos 1474

Top cast 99+

• Michael Burnham …

• Lt. Cmdr. Paul Stamets …

• Sylvia Tilly …

• Lt. Keyla Detmer …

• Dr. Hugh Culber

• Lt. Gen Rhys …

• Lt. Joann Owosekun …

• Lt. R.A. Bryce …

• Lt. Nilsson …

• Cleveland Booker

• Lt. J.G. Linus …

• Discovery Computer …

• Ash Tyler …

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Stellar Photos From the "Star Trek" TV Universe

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia The Starfleet vessels seen in the first season, including the Discovery, the Shenzou and the redesigned Enterprise, were all designed by production artist John Eaves. Eaves' work with Star Trek spans three decades. Probably his most notable contribution was the design of the Enterprise-E for Star Trek: First Contact (1996) .
• Goofs With Michael being the adoptive sister of Spock, the series has many flashbacks to their childhood and upbringing on Vulcan. Spock's Vulcan half-brother, Sybok, does not appear nor is mention during these scenes. In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) , Spock says that he and Sybok grew up together. However, since it's never stated when Sybok joined Sarek's home - only that he did so following his mother's death - or when he was exiled from the family, it's not impossible Sybok moved in after Burnham, and left before she graduated (the two extremes of the flashbacks). Also, since Sybok was never mentioned before Star Trek V, it seems reasonable the family never spoke of him again after his estrangement.
• Alternate versions The serif-font legends and subtitles in the "broadcast" episodes are absent from the DVD versions, where they are replaced with the standard DVD subtitles.
• Connections Featured in MsMojo: Top 10 Female Lead TV Shows You Should Be Watching in 2017 (2017)

User reviews 4.5K

• srayborn-47196
• Mar 12, 2024
• How many seasons does Star Trek: Discovery have? Powered by Alexa
• Why do the Klingons in this series look completely different to how they look in all of the previous Star Trek shows and films?
• Do I need to have seen any previous Star Trek TV series and movies in order to be able to understand and follow this show?
• Does this series take place in the alternate timeline of Star Trek (2009), or the timeline we are all used to from TOS?
• September 24, 2017 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official site
• Star Trek: Hành Trình Khám Phá
• Pinewood Toronto Studios, Port Lands, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• CBS Television Studios
• Living Dead Guy Productions
• Master Key Production
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour
• Dolby Digital

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• IMDb Answers: Help fill gaps in our data
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed.