For me, a big quibble with much science fiction is that many aliens are too close to human—i.e. are of the Star Trek ‘bumpy-forehead’ kind, and otherwise nigh indistinguishable from humans: they not only look almost the same, but do the same kind of things, eat the same food, laugh about the same jokes, often have the same customs, and even are sexually compatible to humans (even the odds that another species evolving completely separately developes the same primary and secondary sexual characteristics must be astronomical). Sometimes, the real-life within-human variation seems to be greater than the variation between different species in some sci-fi universes.
So this is a thread to help me find the notable exceptions to this rule, those works of fiction in which the aliens aren’t just big blue hippies or man-sized cats. I’m talking about things like the sentient ocean in Solaris, the neutron-star dwelling cheela from Dragon’s Egg, the unconscious alien beings from Blindsight—basically anything that challenges our received notions of what it means to be a person, or even a lifeform, things that push the boundaries of our comfort zone when it comes to these notions.
So, what other examples are there? Which are your favourite? Who has the most creative ideas, who wrote the best stories exploring the variability of life?
In literature there is an abundance, I’m trying to remember a novel I read a few years back especially. Humanity is fighting off an invasion or something, desperate to communicate with the aliens only to discover…they aren’t even sentient and are the equivalent of virus or bacteria. A real downer ending.
The Gorn are lizard-people, and even the Tholians are something that, if you were presented with them for the first time, you’d pretty much immediately peg as some sort of life, just based on the things you know. The Horta (I don’t remember it too well) may be a better example.
And I’m not saying that there aren’t examples of alien aliens in Star Trek, in case that offends anybody’s sensitivities. But still, most of the aliens there—Klingons, Vulkans, Bajorans, Ferengi, Romulans, Cardassians etc., etc.—follow the same mold very closely. There’ve been exeptions which are closer to what I’m looking for—I recall one episode where a supposedly uninhabited planet was going to be terraformed, but they found a small, crystalline (I think) being they at first couldn’t even classify as life, but which eventually turned out to even be intelligent. That’s more like it. On a larger scale, there’s also the crystalline entity—I think here, too, there initially was controversy about whether it was properly considered alive, and it turned out to even be intelligent (?). A fairly prominent example would also perhaps be the Founders, Odo’s race, in their gooey state; but for all intents and purposes, they were also treated as humanoid shapeshifters, without much real exploration of their distinctive other-ness (and yes, you can probably find counterexamples to that).
What I’m looking for in this thread are really examples that are not ‘more of the same’, that is, which, if you look at them, don’t just make you think ‘bumpy forehead person’ or ‘cat person’ or ‘lizard person’ or ‘spider person’, but rather, ‘what in the heck is that?’, or maybe even not recognizing that it’s something out of the ordinary at all—like the ocean on Solaris seemed initially to merely be an ocean, or those small crystall beings on Star Trek seemed for all intents and purposes to just be small crystals.
That is because starting with TNG the aliens aren’t really alien at all, they are aspects of humanity. This becomes startlingly clear during DS9 with the Bajoran occupation arc, this is a story of humanity told through sci fi and bumpy foreheads.
You really have to strive for even aliens with “totally incompatible with humanity thought patterns” in scifi because consumers apparently don’t find it compelling. Taking that further into “WTF is that?! Is it even alive?” territory moves away from compelling even more and is mostly novelty short stories.
I’m not trying to lecture you, just I had the same desire you have to see WTF aliens but I realize now why they rarely appear.
Rendezvous With Rama has totally inscrutable possibly alive aliens, possibly not alive.(the sequels provide an answer and are dreadful).
Well, those are bug people. If you first laid eyes on them, without ever having seen anything but life on Earth, the first thing you’d probably think is ‘those are bug people’.
I’m looking for something more like Greg Egan’s ‘Wang Carpets’, carpet-like aquatic lifeforms whose growth pattern follows that of Wang tiles, which are capable of universal computation—even more alien, what they (by pure chance) happen to compute is basically a whole simulated universe, in which there again is life! That’s not something you’d look at and go, ‘those are Wang-tile based universally computing carpet people’.
Trying to remember names of books, maybe others can help:
-A physicist’s experiment in far-flung space creates a bubble of space that expands nearly at the speed of light. Within the bubble, the rules of physics are changed from those of our universe, which means that the expanding bubble absolutely destroys everything it touches. The aliens inside don’t even consist of matter as we know it.
-Something like “The Long Road” or “The Gate Road” or something contains a few aliens species. One of them threatens colonized planets by opening gates over them and dropping crystals or jam or something (I forget exactly what) onto the planets. The dropped substance eventually takes over the entire planetary surface, killing anyone there. Nobody has any idea whether the substance is intelligent in any way, or is a weapon of an intelligent species, or what’s going on.
Kind of like ‘Rendevous with Rama’ above, ‘The Roadside Picnic’ doesn’t show the aliens, but humanity can’t understand even the trash they leave behind. Book and movie, though I can’t find the movie dubbed or subtitled, though it’s supposed to be very good. (Stalker).
Stories written for humans tend to have characters that humans can relate with. An alien whose motives are incomprehensible can be fun for a one-shot story (as a puzzle story about the humans trying to work out a way to deal with the aliens) but visually, the aliens look human in shows because they are traditionally played by humans.
In a story the writer can say “The gnordbort’s signal-patch glowed amber with contentment, tinged with an emotion that cannot be translated into any human language” but for a film or TV show it is much easier to have the actor smile wistfully.
Another example is the thing from The Thing, particularly viewed through its own eyes as it comes to realize the horrors of fragmented human existence, so misadapted to the universe, what little sentience they have confined to tumorous, cystic growths in bony cavities… (I just stumbled on Peter Watts’ excellent short story The Things, where he inverts the trope and details the strangeness of humanity as viewed from something profoundly alien to us, namely the shapeshifter from John Carpenter’s 1982 film; it’s most excellent.)
There are two types of alienness: alien in form and alien in thinking. The first is easier to deal with, the latter much more difficult and I really can’t think of an example from films or TV.
Hal Clement’s Mesklins from Mission of Gravity, for instance, are quite alien in form, but act like American research scientists of the 1940s.
Probably the aliens who are most alien on both scales are the Loarra in Terry Carr’s “The Dance of the Changer and the Three.” Not only are they physically alien – the story is unclear, but they may be some sort of energy creature – but the story told – a recounting of a Loarra legend that gives the story the title – is not what humans would call a story. The Loarra use it to explain their actions, but, to human thinking, it’s no explanation at all. Their reasoning cannot be divined, one of the few alien races in all of science fiction for which that’s true.
Damon Knight’s “Stranger Station” also focuses on aliens that are mentally alien.
Going back, the various creatures in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Marian Odyssey” are all convincinginly alien on both counts. Few writers have topped his portrayals of Tweel, the pyramid crature, and the “We are vreeeendds.”
Moving toward media, some of the more alien creatures (in form) include the Daleks (when they’re not inside their metal containers) and Rutans (protoplasmic blobs) in Doctor Who.
There are also the aliens in the film Fantastic Planet – the aliens are just weird looking giant humanoids, but the wildlife is extremely strange.
