I’m looking for any essays or books that take an unusual view of any aspects of the universe or life on earth as if an alien or even extra-universal being was describing it for the first time (either reductively or holistically). I say “as if” because it doesn’t require an alien narrator. It can be about the universe itself (it’s a quantum computer attempting to compute itself), life on earth (selfish genes ultimately using electromagnetic energy from their nearest stars to reverse entropy and replicate), funny takes of life on earth (humans are a bunch of talking monkeys riding on a giant spaceship made of rock hurling at 60k mph through the space), human culture( sort of how the Desmond Morris analyzes it through a zoological lens).
While it’s not exactly what I’m looking for, it’s a close enough cousin to enjoy. I happen to be a big fan of wild anthropological studies as well. If you haven’t checked them out I’d suggest back to you to read “Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians” --it’s about what happens when missionaries give steel axes to aboriginal tribes who have complex set of rituals around producing and distributing a limited number of stone axes. And there’s my favorite of all time - Cargo cults. The prior is a googleable pdf and the latter is just googleable. Sorry the link for the first was weird.
Btw loved the line about women inflicted with inhuman hypermammary devopment going from tribe to tribe for a fee.
Stranger in a Strange Land is about a man who was raised by Martians, coming to live on Earth. While technically human, his thinking is Martian.
Robert Asprin’s The Bug Wars is a story told from the point of view of a lizard man who was raised to be a sociopathic warmachine, to fight for the good of the empire. He doesn’t meet humans, but he does interact some with the non-warriors of his race and thinks a bit about how strange non-sociopathic non-warriors are. The book is definitely written from a foreign perspective to our own.
There is a short story that is kind of like professional fan fiction where we get to see the point of view of the alien from The Thing 1982 film.
It thinks nothing like a human and doesn’t even understand the concept of individual organisms, it can’t figure out why the humans are fighting bio-communion.
This is a ripe field for filmmakers, at least. I recall a critic’s TV show looking at a l;ot of movies about aliens on earth (which were sometimes people from the past or future) commenting on our lives here. There are a LOT of them.
In print, I think the classic is Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, which is available online:
It’s mostly letters from an angel visiting earth back to those in heaven, telling about the incredible things he’s seen and the things people believe.
Then there’s Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet, which started out as a teleplay, was expanded to a full-length stage play. It was eventually utterly ruined as a Jerry Lewis vehicle, but even that form of it commented on Life on Earth. The Star Trek Original Series episode The Squire of Gothos borrowed (stole?) from it pretty heavily, right down to the Space Visitor dressing in out-of-date military uniform, because he found wars exciting.
(Mork and Mindy borrowed its premise from Twain, as Robin Williams admitted.)
Heck, there’s always the letters that Traveling Matt sent back to Fraggle Rock about the “silly creatures”, i.e. humans, he encountered in his explorations.
I found The Speed of Dark and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to be two of the better books which explore alien minds, even if the brains involved are biologically human.
Incidentally “The Thing” was based on a short story called “Who Goes There” and the 1982 movie was closer to the short story than the original movie version from the 1950s.
The Iain M. Banks novella The State Of The Art , which takes up most of the short story collection that shares its name, details a visit to Earth in the 1970s from the Culture. The visitors are written as pretty much human, though.
I remember a story in my grandmother’s old SF magazines that had some aliens hide on the moon a little bit before the first moon probe (where they hide themselves). They marvel at how different humans are, having much shorter lives but also winding up accomplishing a lot more in a shorter time period. (They had come by once before and we were still at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
For those trying to help me find it but don’t mind a huge spoiler, they find out
that the entire thing is their fault. They screwed something in the planet up that decreased our life spans and also cut off some sort of telepathic or empathic link, which is the cause of a lot of our strife.
There are some aspects of this in Harry Turtledove’s Invasion series, where a race of lizardmen invade Earth.
Then there’s a story about a benevolent alien who crash-lands some time before WW2, and survives and meets another alien who’s been around a very long time indeed and is pretty nasty. Both are shapechangers. Perhaps by Haldeman?
Joan Vinge wrote a novelette called “To Bell the Cat” about different-thinking aliens reacting to the humans who view them as little more than laboratory animals. It took several readings for me to grasp what she was going for - something about disembodied consciousnesses occasionally interacting with lizard-like corporeal forms - and I’m not sure I ever fully understood it.