: Re: When an imagined world resembles or has similarities with a famous world Arguably this might belong in worldbuilding.stackexchange.com, but the question has to do with a fiction story and its

@Nickens642

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First off, copyright is not an issue. Or at least, it is an easily avoidable issue. Copyright does not protect general ideas, like "what this alien race is like". It protects the specific words used to describe those ideas. If you copied ten pages out of a Star Trek script word for word, that would be copyright violation. If you liked the general idea of a race of aliens like the Klingons and you described them in your own words, that is not copyright violation. It may be stealing ideas and lazy writing and uncreative and many other bad things, but it is not copyright violation.

Oh, if you used someone else's names, like if you called your aliens "Klingons", that could be trademark violation. That's super easy to avoid: don't use someone else's names. (Or symbols or musical compositions, etc.)

The real issue is, If you make your aliens too much like the aliens from some other well-known work, readers will say, "Oh come on, you just stole that from this other well-known work!" You won't have a LEGAL problem, but you might certainly have an ARTISTIC problem.

At that point, I think the question is how specific the similarities are, and how distinctive the idea is. If you say your aliens have blue skin, that's pretty general, and the fact that someone else wrote a story with aliens who have blue skin ... I doubt anyone would think twice about it.

If you say your aliens disdain emotion and pride themselves on being logical, that's pretty general, but I wouldn't be surprised if many readers think of Star Trek Vulcans.

If you describe 20 characteristics of your aliens and every one of them sounds just like the aliens from some well-known story, yeah, people are going to think you're stealing ideas.

You didn't say just who you were afraid of looking like you copied from and what the similarities were, so I can't give an opinion on the specifics. But in general I'd say:

One, are they really all that similar? I've heard many beginning authors get paranoid about looking like they were copying because they describe the hero as being handsome and brave and then they saw this other story that described its hero as being handsome and brave. There are some ideas that are found in a million stories. Don't worry about it. There's no way that you're going to write a story that is 100% original in every imaginable way.

Two, if your ideas really are looking too similar to someone else's, take a step back and see if you can change something. Maybe you can just add some irrelevant details that will distract the reader from similarities. Like if you're thinking that your aliens look too much like Chewbacca from Star Wars, can you make them short and weak and bald and have the story still work? Or if that's hopeless, okay, figure out what you CAN change without destroying the story you're trying to write.

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