Not a particular alien individual, like Yoda or ET. What fictional alien race / species do you find most interesting, and why?
I’m currently re-reading Larry Niven’s Ringworld, which has rekindled my fascination with Pierson’s Puppeteers. Niven gave them an intriguing combination of traits:
Highly intelligent and advanced herbivores
Genetically predisposed to “cowardice” as a survival mechanism
Two-headed and three-limbed, making them seem very non-human, but not in the campy way many fictional aliens are portrayed
An obscure sense of humor, usually opaque to humans, yet they are very comical
Niven also avoided giving too much exposition about Puppeteers (at least in what I’ve read so far), leaving them a bit mysterious. I’d so love to meet one.
So what fictional alien would you most want to have a carrot juice with?
I really like the society of the aliens from the World War series. Very slow changing reptilian aliens who send off a slower than light fleet to invade Earth sometime in the middle ages, but arrive during world war 2, where they are shocked by the rapid advance of the human technology.
From books — H Beam’s “Little Fuzzies”
From movies Alien ------- how did they get into space? Are they actually technological or did they just travel by infesting others? Neither the books or movies made it totally clear although there was evidence they were just parasites.
I tend to subscribe to the theory that the xenomorphs of Alien were genetically engineered. It solves all the evolutionary questions. My only unanswered question is, were they originally created as “super soldiers” under command and control (who later got loose), or just meant to be an “area weapon”, as it were, denying access to regions.
I like the puppeteers, and recommend most if the “…of Worlds” series. It really adds to their character.
I’m fond of the Gil’Dan/Gil’Dishpan from DC comics.
Slug-like or brain-like aquatic aliens who get around in non-aquatic environments in water-filled floating globes.
Who spent their first few centuries of interacting with humans with a humiliating name due to a mistranslation…they tend to get annoyed when it’s mentioned after they figure it out.
The **Traeki **from Brin’s *Uplift *series. Each one a consensus organism consisting of a stack of toruses, as tall as a human, each one with their own skills and abilities, arranged around a shared memory core. New rings may be found living wild, or specially bred.
In hiding from their own “descendants”, who has been Uplifted with dictatorial “master rings” that, through shock torture, control the other rings and turned the peaceful, gentle, indecisive Traeki into the monomaniacal, genocidal, religious fanatic Jophur, who are one of the most feared species in five galaxies. I would not want to share a drink with the latter - like Daleks made out of inner tubes, basically…
I never thought that at all. C&C? I just figured they were indeed “bugs”. That whole instinct to build Geiger nests and chest bursting seems very biological to me. I figure that home planet was one hostile sumbitch.
The most dangerous non-sapient monster in science fiction, for my money, is the grendels, from Niven’s The Legacy of Heorot. They basically have rocket-fuel blood, which enables them to move faster than anything else on their planet, and basically all parts of their body are weaponized. Their weakness is that when they use their super-speed, they tend to overheat, so they need to very quickly get back to water, before they cook themselves.
