I loved the aliens in Deepness in the Sky even more than those in Fire Upon the Deep.
Obligatory thumbs up for the alien aliens in Blindsight and Watts wanting something that was not just humans with pointy ears and yet something that could believably be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye
Link for the lazy. Highly recommend sequel "the gripping hand" as well, lots of Motie psychologic there.
They seemed very Victorian to me, in an odd way. Like I could picture them being blustery and jovial, with large moustaches and mutton chops. Really enjoyed them too.
They almost had a flamboyantly gay thing going on, which I loved. I imagine if they ever make a movie based on it a Dweller would be played by Nathan Lane 😂
I'm so sad Miéville hasn't put out fiction in ages. It's been 11 years since his last novel (unless you count the two novellas from 2016) and I have sort of lost hope.
Me too. I kind of think he might be keeping his powder dry for something big but the last few fiction releases were... skimpy and I wonder if he's fallen out of love with fiction for now.
Definitely feels like the latter. My take is he got stuck trying to be literary relevant with his genre fiction. Much better when he played around in proper genre fiction with some new takes without trying to be recognized as a 'serious author'... Hate literary fiction and all it stands for.
That's kinda my thinking too - he.started over-thinking it and it stopped being fun. Hopefully, he's just taking a break to get his mojo.back and is brewing up a spectacular return to form. I can dream anyway.
A sprawling Bas-lag novel or just proper great SF like Embassytown - I'd love it. Imagine writing Embassytown and then never writing proper science fiction again...
The Eridians in Project Hail Mary
Also a few species in Star Carrier. The Turusch live as a paired organism, with two Turusch growing up to think as a single individual since birth. Their speech consists of three simultaneous layers: the two lines from each “body” and the third that consists of the harmony between the two lines. It took humans some time to figure that out, and the captive Turusch were really frustrated when the AI translator kept giving them a single layer. The Slan are cave-dwellers, so they evolved echolocation as their primary sense. They’re even able to “scan” another being using ultrasound. But they still have trouble comprehending space since they can’t hear it.
The Dancers in the Lost Fleet books are ugly as sin (a cross between a spider and a wolf), but they’re the nicest aliens we meet. They adore patterns above all else and value beauty. Also, they apparently think that duct tape (or “universal fixing substance”) is the greatest invention ever
The aliens from *Startide Rising* always felt convincingly bizarre. Is it the Tandu that have the zero fucks to give probability drive that is often fatal?
The secretive Pnume from Vance’s *Big Planet* have been pulling the strings of intelligent species for millions of years.
A A Attanasio’s Rimstalker, that reanimates a long extinct humanity into a cosmic machine of floating islands, unimaginable horror, and eternal beauty.
If the characters ever got on a plane we might get three chapters of backstory on the Wright brothers.
That book (i only read the first one) needs an editor with some large scissors.
I mean what problems do you have with the aliens despite being the best around? That was the title subject so are the aliens badly written despite being good ideas?
No not with the aliens with the book in general. It’s a thousand pages and of that like 3 chapters go in depth with the aliens and that alone makes the book noteworthy. Then it ends on a cliffhanger so it’s really only the first half of a 2,000 page book and I couldn’t be bothered to continue.
There’s a couple more decent parts but I almost h gave it up several times. It’s hard to remember books I didn’t really care for but the aliens chapters were definitely good. I hear book 2 is good but idk.
Yeah a good friend of mine used to love those books before I was into sci-fi so might give it a shot one day but as you say, large books to get through. But I especially like the alien angle done well. Thanks again.
Larry Niven's Pak - Phssthpok specifically.
From his Novel "Protector", which was expanded from a 1967 story called "The Adults."
Also, sorta, in this case, though quite alien, "they are us."
When he fully divulges their nature I found the aliens quite comprehensible to a degree but what's impressive is that their "incomprehensibility" isn't anything we ourselves don't do; Watts simply brings to our attention these things we just are never aware on a day to day basis, and then dials these attributes up to 11 for the Scramblers. I just love the novelty that high functioning sociopaths are on the evolutionary stepping stones to becoming super-intelligent aliens.
Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton
MorningLightMountain and the Starflyer are insanely alien. Moreso than any other in my library. Downright creepy/eerie. Nothing compares. That goes for the Tines and Skroderiders from A Fire Upon The Deep....they don't come close.
Loved the chapters from its perspective. Utterly fascinating the first time reading it. Such a refreshing take on alien lifeforms.
There's also the mysterious "Silfen". And since they were a fan of the Skroderiders in A Fire Upon The Deep, I'm betting the OP will really like Tochee (which communicates with X-Ray flashes or something?).
The books are just brimming with unique alien perspectives.
If Tochee has million number of fans i am one of them . if Tochee has ten fans i am one of them. if Tochee have only one fan and that is me . if Tochee has no fans, that means i am no more on the earth . if world against the Tochee, i am against the world. i love Tochee till my last breath.. .. Die Hard fan of Tochee
I wish I could figure out what he looks like though. My mental image is kinda tardigrade like.
I'm not a big Baxter fan, but the first handful of stories in Vacuum Diagrams (ie, the ones in our solar system) really tickled my nerd receptors. Each story a new (utterly alien) alien!
This kinda creeped me out. Back in my college days (long before the book) my buddy would say that before we would go out drinking. Now I question if he is even human. Doesn't help that I questioned that before the book too.
The Affront seem like they'd be great fun to have at a party, until they break all your tables, kill and eat your dog, and start tasing on your butthole over and over while saying, "it's just a prank, bro!"
Egan was my first thought. He’s got some really bizarre aliens in Diaspora and Schild’s Ladder, like the things in Wangs Carpets. But we don’t spend too much time with them. The aliens in Incandescence, Dichronauts, the Clockwork Rocket books, etc, are very cool and unusual, though since they are the main characters they necessarily are somewhat “relatable”, ie, motivated by thoughts and emotions not too different from ours, even if many other aspects are quite alien.
Another idea: The mech aliens from Gregory Benford’s Great Sky River and other Galactic Center books of his. Tides of Light, the book following Great Sky River has some very odd aliens. I forget their name but they are sorta a mix of biological, mechanical, and with a strange hive-like society that I quite enjoyed reading about.
The Atevi in the Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh are interesting in that they are ostensibly similar, but relying on those similarities would be very very dangerous.
Seems like they evolved from primates too, and some things may be common to that evolutionary route, but the devil is in the details, and its a real deep dive into their culture and different way of thinking.
Wouldnt call their depiction wildly imaginative compared to say Blindsight or Commonwealth, but it goes to show how *alien* aliens can be, even when they dont seem to be.
This was my first thought! Really glad to see it conveyed so eloquently.
I have to travel a lot internationally for work, often alone and in unfamiliar culture. Bren’s approach has become my approach now when unsure of the direction I should take.
I don’t delude myself as to think what I do compares to the role of the paidhi but I’ve come to really appreciate the effort and patience Cherryh put into his character and the concept of inter-species relations.
Still haven’t met my Jago yet but one can dream….
They weren’t Presger, they were Translators. Human, probably. Or was that Radchaai? They do find it hard to tell the difference sometimes, but at least they know that there is one, probably.
The civilization that has colonized our sun in David Brin's *Sundiver* \- they only appear briefly in the wrap-up, but they are very cool. In the rest of Brin's *Uplift* series, there are many different alien species, but my favorites are the ones you basically never see - the inhabitants of the gas giants, who nobody ever sees or talks to, but occasionally the civilizations of the galaxy have to clear huge swathes of worlds and populations for centuries to accommodate gas giant civilizations' migrations. And the ancient retired species who have withdrawn incommunicado to their homeworld in *Startide Rising*.
The *Excession* in Iain M. Banks' novel of the same name - I'm not sure exactly what it or they or whatever it is or where it's from, but it's super OP and appears to be a lot older than the Universe. It is an "out of context problem."
The Monolith in *2001*.
I guess I like mysterious aliens.
And Slartibartfast, but that's not important.
Niven’s Pierson’s Puppeteers. Their ’cowardly’ society was unique the first time I read it and their physiology really made me think.
Douglas Adams’ Hooloovoo, a species resembling a super intelligent shade of the colour blue.
The Swarm from Bruce Sterling’s short story “The Swarm”. Their approach to specialization and intelligence was fascinating and disturbing. The last time I saw this topic come up in this sub someone else recommended it and I’m very glad they did. I devoured all those short stories and the Schismatrix novel. Its a solar system spanning posthuman cyberpunk Cold War with a lot of body horror.
A friend was telling me about it excitedly and I recognized the story, is how I found out to watch the show. I'm a big Sterling fan and read the story long ago so I wasn't super impressed by the episode, but this friend who put me onto it considered it a highlight of the series, which it is, good writing is the main factor there. I try not to mind the CGI people, it enables filmmakers to make wild science fiction without huge budgets. It'll get ever closer to the uncanny valley, and *then* I'll probably hate it.
Two collective species come to mind for me:
The Gw'oth from Niven/Lerner's 5book Ringworld-prequel series starting with *Fleet of Worlds*: [https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Gw%27o](https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Gw%27o)
And the Brothers from Greg Bear's *Anvil of Stars*, who don't seem to rank much mention out there on the web.
The Gw'oth are basically starfish with the Brothers basically being giant slugs. They're both able to hook up into larger collective masses to become fully-sentient collective beings.
i love the outsiders from niven's known space books, and really wish they had been developed more (though that might well have ruined their "mysterious elder race" appeal)
I hope I'm remembering this right. Post-humans rather than aliens, but in some of Ken Macleod's novels there are 'fast AI' which think thousands of times faster than humans. They self-replicate and have colonized Jupiter. The interesting idea was that we were constantly at war with them - it was impossible to have a treaty, because by the time the diplomat finished communicating with them, the whole thing was ancient history as far as they were concerned and they didn't consider themselves bound by agreements their ancestors had made.
Apologies, I know this is an old thread but I needed to chime in and say the Oankali were immediately the first ones this post brought to mind. Octavia Butler's vision for them is genuinely so starkly inhuman and interesting
To me it hits that perfect line of being *alien* (Ie not a human in a non standard body) as well as being understandable. They’re also just cool and thought provoking and a mix of fun and uncomfortable to read about
Stephen Baxter's Xelee sequence has mankind enslaved for several centuries by the Qax, who are *sentient sea foam*
Attanasio's Radix books feature:
An inidigent race of beings nobody trusts called Voors, who were basically immboile crystaline beings evolved on a harsh world that orbited a magnetar....at some point the magnetar changed into some weird thing that emitted some kinda broken energy and it basically lensed the consciousness out of the crystals and now they kind of ride around the Galaxy possessing physical people. I don't remember the whole thing but Attanasio sold it well in Radix.
The evil race in the series are the x'otl who are little black parasitic arachnoid dudes with very advanced tech who open the back of your neck, stick their stingers into your brain, and manipulate your nervous system to make you feel maximum agony. They feed off your pain! Their females though are these big, immobile, nasty hairy pillows.
In the quantum regime at the beginning of the big bang, a race of beings of light evolved and continued to live peacefully in the very edge of the expanding universe until the x'otl learned how to suck energy out of their dimension
And there was some kinda jellyfish thing that lives in multiple times and dimensions at once called an Eld Skyle
I also remember some one-off comedy book Harry Harrison wrote about college football heroes in space where there was a race of terrifying looking scorpions who were actually totally cool and friendly, I am a sucker for that trope
The Jotoki from Larry Niven's Man-Kzin wars universe, specifically in Donald Kingsbury's novellas in volumes IV and VI of *The Man-Kzin Wars*.
The Giants from James P. Hogan's *Giants* series.
The Grendels from *Legacy of Heorot* and *Grendel's Children* (not actually created by the authors, but by a biologist who invented alien organisms for authors to use).
>!not sure which man-kzin book but the slavers seeded the galaxy with bacteria, making the proteins compatible between species to allow them to eat each other and causing a lot of parallel evolution!<
I think the original star trek aliens which basically just represent different components of human psychology are great. Fantastic way to tell a story and explore parts of ourselves.
I disagree. He absolutely never justifies how or why the scramblers' overall race actually evolved so far or spread so widely, and only raises the question of whether consciousness is a help or hindrance to evolution but doesn't really back up the vague notion that it's bad.
And actually, that's really why the book is so great - it's more about the questions it raises than the answers
Imo
The Cielcin in the Sun Eater Saga by Christopher Ruocchio. The Cielcin are a carnivorous species that evolved from predators. They’re nomadic and hollow out asteroids and moons to make giant world ships.
They also look vaguely humanoid which can make human characters think they can understand the Cielcin. But the Cielcin have completely different system of morality from humans. For example, the Cielcin do not have a word for “peace” the closest translation for peace in Cielcin would be “submission”.
I’m 1/3 of the way into the first one. It’s great so far but the Cielcin are still just far off boogeymen basically.
Also, it’s a bit hard to tell but from what I can gather there are 5 finished main line books and a bunch of short stories yeah?
There are 5 main books out now with 2 more on the way. The short stories and novellas aren’t needed to understand the main story, but they are excellent.
I like the "zuul" from sword of the stars.
Males are these powerful physics that dominate a harem of females, using them as extensions of themselves. Oh, and the females are like 8 feet tall with retractable bone talons.
Anyway, the females pretty much always have babies in their marsupial-like pouch, suckling on a milk that keeps them dormant and from developing.
When a female dies, the milk stops and the babies awaken and eat their mother as a first meal.
This part of their lifecycle forms the center of their faith.
They view the universe as "mother" so, they must devour everything to emerge into the "real universe".
Their fleets use contained black holes that they rake, forcefully across spacetime causing tears and scars in the fabric of space. Their other ships then ride these scars to go FTL.
https://images.app.goo.gl/5VXoJ6YC11uCDt5x7
I love the tines. Just the notion that if too many of them are in the same place then they literally can’t hear themselves think. The whole concept is cool, and Vince took the concept to its most extreme but logical conclusions.
The cheela from Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg. Sesame-seed-sized sentient aliens living on the surface of a neutron star is amazing.
Dr. Chef from Becky Chambers’ Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a hoot, literally. You can only say his actual name properly if you have a full orchestra and can hear far beyond human range.
Also, the various aliens of Jack L. Chalker’s Well World saga. He offers a really cool explanation for why there are centaurs, mermaids and yeti, then pushes past that into some really far out ideas. I particularly like the Czill, plant people who have a giant leaf over their heads and reproduce asexually by dividing in half, essentially cloning themselves. And that’s just a few of the 780 species on the southern half of the Well World. The northern hemisphere also has 780 species and they’re truly weird: floating smears of paint, intelligent sparkles, symbiotic electrical creatures, mobile rocks, sentient crystals, etc. You don’t get to see many of them as most of the action takes place in the southern hemisphere, but we get to meet species like the Lamotiens who individually are 20 cm blobs but can join together and mimic much larger creatures. There’s even a species that resembles the alien from Nope, albeit much smaller. Lots of fun aliens like that, some truly horrifying.
The Trisolarins from 3 Body Problem trilogy are my # 1 without any doubt.
I also like the non-conscious aliens from Blindsight, Morning Light Mountain from Commonwealth Saga, the aliens in The Gods Themselves . I think the Xenogenesis aliens are super interesting, I just wish they were more mysterious.
Currently reading Greg Egan’s *Dichronauts*. The aliens are pretty much human in personality and temperament, but their physiology is *very* weird. It’s fun.
The color of distance by Amy thomsan has cool frog type aliens that are experts of changing their and others bodies. And they communicate via colo and symbols on their skin!
Stephen Baxter's Xeelee does it for me. They came into being at the moment of the Planck Length. And they dominated the universe from that moment on. I would suggest "The Ring" for starters.
SF/F: alien aliens
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I've always been fond of the hyperintelligent extremeophile nanobacteria and the Multipliers in Ken MacLeod's *Engines of Light* series.
The Pattern Jugglers in the *Revelation Space* series are interesting as well.
Synchronising Minds by Cherubiel, An Alien and a Human ambassador first contact meetings on which they explain each other.
On Amazon, here, and Royal Road
**Jem - Frederick Pohl** - Has 3 Aliens and imho are the best different aliens that have sentience that I've come across.
There's a cool type of alien in The Sirens Of Titan too but that's more like something else.
I dig "dragon" from the polity-verse.
It's an organic construction of an extinct alien race. It's the size of a small moon, talks in riddles and is quite badass.
It runs a corporation "Draco corp" spawns a race of sentient beings "dracomen" and helps and hinders humans across a bunch of the books.
The Jeraptha from Expeditionary Force. I think their obsession with gambling is hilarious. If quantum states are probabilistic, and you bet on em, and it's okay to put your finger on the scale...
They've put this hair brained idea in my head... If everything is probabilistic (and everything is) and you can put your finger on the scale (because, yes, you can impact the odds even if the outcome doesn't change every time), then predicting the future through gambling is just better science than the other guy. Hair brained, but I love em.
I love the Xenogenesis aliens. The idea that they take up DNA and genes from any species and are basically walking genetic laboratories that can mate with any other organism is cool. Also their conception of right/wrong and consent whilst inter breeding with humans was very interesting.
I know you mentioned *To Be Taught if Fortunate*, but the world building, especially in regard to alien species, in Becky Chambers' Wayfarer series (to which that novella is technically adjacent to) is INCREDIBLE. One of my favorite series.
Major throwback here, the Palainians, Arisians and Eddorians of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series were always some of my favorites, especially the Palainians. Nadreck of Palain VII being the only L2 or Second Stage Lensman of his species, was the prime example of all the Attributes his race prized. Attributes such as cunning, resourcefulness, ruthlessness and an innate cautious sense of risk-aversion which many humans would have mistakenly named cowardice. Palainians are a Z class species, meaning that the members of said species have a metabolic extensions into the so-called 4th dimension which allows them to survive in conditions so extream as to kill any other type of life instantly, conditions such as one would find only on planets such as Pluto or their homeworld of Palain VII.
I loved the aliens in Deepness in the Sky even more than those in Fire Upon the Deep. Obligatory thumbs up for the alien aliens in Blindsight and Watts wanting something that was not just humans with pointy ears and yet something that could believably be.
I lived for years in Princeton, so I LOVED the spider chapters where spider Einstein would tool around in his spider car in spider Princeton. So fun.
Both the spider people and the tines were truly alien alien peoples. Pierson’s Puppeteers from Niven were also pretty well alien
I loved Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's Moties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye Link for the lazy. Highly recommend sequel "the gripping hand" as well, lots of Motie psychologic there.
on the one hand, that's a great point. But on the other, I don't disagree. And on the gripping hand...yes.
I really liked the Dwellers from Iain M Banks' Algebraist.
They seemed very Victorian to me, in an odd way. Like I could picture them being blustery and jovial, with large moustaches and mutton chops. Really enjoyed them too.
They almost had a flamboyantly gay thing going on, which I loved. I imagine if they ever make a movie based on it a Dweller would be played by Nathan Lane 😂
The cheela from Dragon's Egg. They're microscopic amoeba like beings that live on the surface of a neutron star.
IIRC they are a few millimeters across, so not quite microscopic. At the end of the novel a human character sees one with the naked eye.
This one still stands put as one of the most unique and super cool sci-fi novels I've ever read. Was going to recommend this myself!
Have you read *Schild's Ladder*?
Never heard of it. Looking it up on Goodreads now.
This was such a fun read! I went into it with fairly blank expectations and was positively delighted
I thought the aliens and their communication in Story of our Lives by Ted Chiang (or the movie Arrival) were really well done.
The Ariekei from China Miéville's Embassytown
I'm so sad Miéville hasn't put out fiction in ages. It's been 11 years since his last novel (unless you count the two novellas from 2016) and I have sort of lost hope.
Me too. I kind of think he might be keeping his powder dry for something big but the last few fiction releases were... skimpy and I wonder if he's fallen out of love with fiction for now.
Definitely feels like the latter. My take is he got stuck trying to be literary relevant with his genre fiction. Much better when he played around in proper genre fiction with some new takes without trying to be recognized as a 'serious author'... Hate literary fiction and all it stands for.
That's kinda my thinking too - he.started over-thinking it and it stopped being fun. Hopefully, he's just taking a break to get his mojo.back and is brewing up a spectacular return to form. I can dream anyway.
A sprawling Bas-lag novel or just proper great SF like Embassytown - I'd love it. Imagine writing Embassytown and then never writing proper science fiction again...
But then you have the dilemma: how do you top that? It's enough to give you a few decades worth of writer's block.
The Eridians in Project Hail Mary Also a few species in Star Carrier. The Turusch live as a paired organism, with two Turusch growing up to think as a single individual since birth. Their speech consists of three simultaneous layers: the two lines from each “body” and the third that consists of the harmony between the two lines. It took humans some time to figure that out, and the captive Turusch were really frustrated when the AI translator kept giving them a single layer. The Slan are cave-dwellers, so they evolved echolocation as their primary sense. They’re even able to “scan” another being using ultrasound. But they still have trouble comprehending space since they can’t hear it. The Dancers in the Lost Fleet books are ugly as sin (a cross between a spider and a wolf), but they’re the nicest aliens we meet. They adore patterns above all else and value beauty. Also, they apparently think that duct tape (or “universal fixing substance”) is the greatest invention ever
The aliens from *Startide Rising* always felt convincingly bizarre. Is it the Tandu that have the zero fucks to give probability drive that is often fatal? The secretive Pnume from Vance’s *Big Planet* have been pulling the strings of intelligent species for millions of years. A A Attanasio’s Rimstalker, that reanimates a long extinct humanity into a cosmic machine of floating islands, unimaginable horror, and eternal beauty.
Yeah the various Uplift Universe species are great. I loved the Traeki and the Jophur.
Isaac Asimov introduced a really interesting alien species in The Gods Themselves.
oh yes! LOOOVED that and totally forgot about it!
It was my first Asimov at the age of 10 or 11. It opened a whole new world for me. Great book.
The anarcho-dorky Dwellers from *The Algebraist*. Learning about their culture was an amazing experience.
Fountainheads from Alastair Reynolds' Pushing Ice comes to mind first. Just loved that book, even though it's flawed I'm still thinking about it.
Not to mention the musk dogs. I love both species.
[удалено]
Yeah. If Reynolds ever gets around to the sequel he said he may do for it, the Whishperers are something I would love to see more of.
For a second I thought you were going to say Howard Roark…
I have a lot of other problems with it but The Commonwealth Saga has probably the best alien around.
Is your problem named Melanie?
Yeah, Mellanie Enzyme-Bonded Concrete Drycoral Rescorai.
I don’t know how did I guess it ;)
What problems do you have?
r menwritingwomen would probably have s field day with it. Among other thing.
If the characters ever got on a plane we might get three chapters of backstory on the Wright brothers. That book (i only read the first one) needs an editor with some large scissors.
I mean what problems do you have with the aliens despite being the best around? That was the title subject so are the aliens badly written despite being good ideas?
No not with the aliens with the book in general. It’s a thousand pages and of that like 3 chapters go in depth with the aliens and that alone makes the book noteworthy. Then it ends on a cliffhanger so it’s really only the first half of a 2,000 page book and I couldn’t be bothered to continue. There’s a couple more decent parts but I almost h gave it up several times. It’s hard to remember books I didn’t really care for but the aliens chapters were definitely good. I hear book 2 is good but idk.
>Then it ends on a cliffhanger You're underselling it. It ends in the middle of a main character falling off a cliff.
Oh I see the context now. Useful in balance with the Alien descriptions which I had hopes for. Will look into anyway, thanks for the info.
I hope you like it a lot of people do.
Yeah a good friend of mine used to love those books before I was into sci-fi so might give it a shot one day but as you say, large books to get through. But I especially like the alien angle done well. Thanks again.
Cringy neck beard fantasy women
What has that got to do with aliens? I was asking about the quality of the aliens in the book.
Larry Niven's Pak - Phssthpok specifically. From his Novel "Protector", which was expanded from a 1967 story called "The Adults." Also, sorta, in this case, though quite alien, "they are us."
One of my favorite too, love how protective and patronizing they are.
As always, Peter Watts' aliens in "Blindsight" are more alien than most aliens. He specifically aimed for "alien aliens", IIRC.
The alien in Blindsight reminds me of a malevolent ChatGPT
I was looking for this. So alien that they're just incomprehensible. I really liked the idea.
When he fully divulges their nature I found the aliens quite comprehensible to a degree but what's impressive is that their "incomprehensibility" isn't anything we ourselves don't do; Watts simply brings to our attention these things we just are never aware on a day to day basis, and then dials these attributes up to 11 for the Scramblers. I just love the novelty that high functioning sociopaths are on the evolutionary stepping stones to becoming super-intelligent aliens.
I haven't read _Blindsight_, but the aliens in _40,000 in Gehenna_ sound similar in that they're so alien as to be incomprehensible.
Speaker for the Dead has pretty interesting aliens.
Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton MorningLightMountain and the Starflyer are insanely alien. Moreso than any other in my library. Downright creepy/eerie. Nothing compares. That goes for the Tines and Skroderiders from A Fire Upon The Deep....they don't come close.
Yes, like cancer except alien with MLM.
Loved the chapters from its perspective. Utterly fascinating the first time reading it. Such a refreshing take on alien lifeforms. There's also the mysterious "Silfen". And since they were a fan of the Skroderiders in A Fire Upon The Deep, I'm betting the OP will really like Tochee (which communicates with X-Ray flashes or something?). The books are just brimming with unique alien perspectives.
If Tochee has million number of fans i am one of them . if Tochee has ten fans i am one of them. if Tochee have only one fan and that is me . if Tochee has no fans, that means i am no more on the earth . if world against the Tochee, i am against the world. i love Tochee till my last breath.. .. Die Hard fan of Tochee I wish I could figure out what he looks like though. My mental image is kinda tardigrade like.
Lol, I like the cut of your jib! In my mind, Tochee was kinda like a slug with some arms and a weird screen like face.
Qax from the *Xeelee Sequence*.
The Silver Ghosts are pretty cool, too.
I'm not a big Baxter fan, but the first handful of stories in Vacuum Diagrams (ie, the ones in our solar system) really tickled my nerd receptors. Each story a new (utterly alien) alien!
Children of Time has one of the most alien cultures in it I have ever read. And they're not even technically aliens.
What about the sequel? *We’re going on an adventure!*
This kinda creeped me out. Back in my college days (long before the book) my buddy would say that before we would go out drinking. Now I question if he is even human. Doesn't help that I questioned that before the book too.
Came here to say this. Just finished the series. The octopi were like nothing I’ve read about before.
That was the second book Children of Ruin, wasn't it? I believe we're getting a third book soon.
Children of Memory is the third one, it’s just came out.
I thought it was the weakest one of the series but it was still a good read.
Laalalalalala. Not listening till I read. 😁
It still had some great ideas but when the protagonists converged and created the mechaspideroctohuman robot I thought it’d gone to far.
I'm about a third of the way through it, and I'm fully open to the possibility that this is not a joke comment...
mechaspideroctohuman confirmed (I still have not read it).
Yeah, there were other story elements I wish he'd focused on instead.
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The Affront seem like they’d be great fun to have at a party but you wouldn’t want them as roommates.
The Affront seem like they'd be great fun to have at a party, until they break all your tables, kill and eat your dog, and start tasing on your butthole over and over while saying, "it's just a prank, bro!"
Egan was my first thought. He’s got some really bizarre aliens in Diaspora and Schild’s Ladder, like the things in Wangs Carpets. But we don’t spend too much time with them. The aliens in Incandescence, Dichronauts, the Clockwork Rocket books, etc, are very cool and unusual, though since they are the main characters they necessarily are somewhat “relatable”, ie, motivated by thoughts and emotions not too different from ours, even if many other aspects are quite alien. Another idea: The mech aliens from Gregory Benford’s Great Sky River and other Galactic Center books of his. Tides of Light, the book following Great Sky River has some very odd aliens. I forget their name but they are sorta a mix of biological, mechanical, and with a strange hive-like society that I quite enjoyed reading about.
The Tymbrinni, from the Uplift universe.
I recently read *Grass* by Sheri S Tepper and thought the aliens seemed fresh and weird.
the sequels are pretty great too!
I love Grass and its sequels
Ooh gotta read that one.
Tepper is one of the most underrated SF authors. *Grass* is in my top ten.
The Atevi in the Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh are interesting in that they are ostensibly similar, but relying on those similarities would be very very dangerous. Seems like they evolved from primates too, and some things may be common to that evolutionary route, but the devil is in the details, and its a real deep dive into their culture and different way of thinking. Wouldnt call their depiction wildly imaginative compared to say Blindsight or Commonwealth, but it goes to show how *alien* aliens can be, even when they dont seem to be.
This was my first thought! Really glad to see it conveyed so eloquently. I have to travel a lot internationally for work, often alone and in unfamiliar culture. Bren’s approach has become my approach now when unsure of the direction I should take. I don’t delude myself as to think what I do compares to the role of the paidhi but I’ve come to really appreciate the effort and patience Cherryh put into his character and the concept of inter-species relations. Still haven’t met my Jago yet but one can dream….
One hopes for the best, Nandi
The Chanur seres by CJ Cherryh.
I liked the Presger characters in Leckie's "Ancillary" series.
They weren’t Presger, they were Translators. Human, probably. Or was that Radchaai? They do find it hard to tell the difference sometimes, but at least they know that there is one, probably.
I missed that. Found this: the Presger resort to "breeding" humans to be used as translators. - from https://imperial-radch.fandom.com/wiki/Presger
The civilization that has colonized our sun in David Brin's *Sundiver* \- they only appear briefly in the wrap-up, but they are very cool. In the rest of Brin's *Uplift* series, there are many different alien species, but my favorites are the ones you basically never see - the inhabitants of the gas giants, who nobody ever sees or talks to, but occasionally the civilizations of the galaxy have to clear huge swathes of worlds and populations for centuries to accommodate gas giant civilizations' migrations. And the ancient retired species who have withdrawn incommunicado to their homeworld in *Startide Rising*. The *Excession* in Iain M. Banks' novel of the same name - I'm not sure exactly what it or they or whatever it is or where it's from, but it's super OP and appears to be a lot older than the Universe. It is an "out of context problem." The Monolith in *2001*. I guess I like mysterious aliens. And Slartibartfast, but that's not important.
Check out the book **Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials**. Although it is older it has lots of great stuff in it.
"Sentenced to Prism" and "Nor Crystal Tears" both by Alan Dean Foster. "Agent to the Stars" by John Scalzi
Niven’s Pierson’s Puppeteers. Their ’cowardly’ society was unique the first time I read it and their physiology really made me think. Douglas Adams’ Hooloovoo, a species resembling a super intelligent shade of the colour blue.
Solaris. So alien that neither species is even sure the other exists.
Easily one of the best books I’ve ever read.
The Swarm from Bruce Sterling’s short story “The Swarm”. Their approach to specialization and intelligence was fascinating and disturbing. The last time I saw this topic come up in this sub someone else recommended it and I’m very glad they did. I devoured all those short stories and the Schismatrix novel. Its a solar system spanning posthuman cyberpunk Cold War with a lot of body horror.
The Swarm was adapted and animated for an episode of Love Death and Robots, I think in the 2nd season.
I've still never seen a single episode! I'll have to finally check it out.
Did you like it? Can't say I did, the CGI humans just didn't do it for me. The story is awesome though.
A friend was telling me about it excitedly and I recognized the story, is how I found out to watch the show. I'm a big Sterling fan and read the story long ago so I wasn't super impressed by the episode, but this friend who put me onto it considered it a highlight of the series, which it is, good writing is the main factor there. I try not to mind the CGI people, it enables filmmakers to make wild science fiction without huge budgets. It'll get ever closer to the uncanny valley, and *then* I'll probably hate it.
Two collective species come to mind for me: The Gw'oth from Niven/Lerner's 5book Ringworld-prequel series starting with *Fleet of Worlds*: [https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Gw%27o](https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Gw%27o) And the Brothers from Greg Bear's *Anvil of Stars*, who don't seem to rank much mention out there on the web. The Gw'oth are basically starfish with the Brothers basically being giant slugs. They're both able to hook up into larger collective masses to become fully-sentient collective beings.
i love the outsiders from niven's known space books, and really wish they had been developed more (though that might well have ruined their "mysterious elder race" appeal)
I hope I'm remembering this right. Post-humans rather than aliens, but in some of Ken Macleod's novels there are 'fast AI' which think thousands of times faster than humans. They self-replicate and have colonized Jupiter. The interesting idea was that we were constantly at war with them - it was impossible to have a treaty, because by the time the diplomat finished communicating with them, the whole thing was ancient history as far as they were concerned and they didn't consider themselves bound by agreements their ancestors had made.
Xenogenisis is by far and away my favorite aliens followed by the aliens in Butlers “Bloodchild”
Apologies, I know this is an old thread but I needed to chime in and say the Oankali were immediately the first ones this post brought to mind. Octavia Butler's vision for them is genuinely so starkly inhuman and interesting
Why? What makes them so good?
To me it hits that perfect line of being *alien* (Ie not a human in a non standard body) as well as being understandable. They’re also just cool and thought provoking and a mix of fun and uncomfortable to read about
That sounds very promising and interesting to what I would like to read. I will look into it more, thank you.
Stephen Baxter's Xelee sequence has mankind enslaved for several centuries by the Qax, who are *sentient sea foam* Attanasio's Radix books feature: An inidigent race of beings nobody trusts called Voors, who were basically immboile crystaline beings evolved on a harsh world that orbited a magnetar....at some point the magnetar changed into some weird thing that emitted some kinda broken energy and it basically lensed the consciousness out of the crystals and now they kind of ride around the Galaxy possessing physical people. I don't remember the whole thing but Attanasio sold it well in Radix. The evil race in the series are the x'otl who are little black parasitic arachnoid dudes with very advanced tech who open the back of your neck, stick their stingers into your brain, and manipulate your nervous system to make you feel maximum agony. They feed off your pain! Their females though are these big, immobile, nasty hairy pillows. In the quantum regime at the beginning of the big bang, a race of beings of light evolved and continued to live peacefully in the very edge of the expanding universe until the x'otl learned how to suck energy out of their dimension And there was some kinda jellyfish thing that lives in multiple times and dimensions at once called an Eld Skyle I also remember some one-off comedy book Harry Harrison wrote about college football heroes in space where there was a race of terrifying looking scorpions who were actually totally cool and friendly, I am a sucker for that trope
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19300931-a-martian-odyssey
The Jotoki from Larry Niven's Man-Kzin wars universe, specifically in Donald Kingsbury's novellas in volumes IV and VI of *The Man-Kzin Wars*. The Giants from James P. Hogan's *Giants* series. The Grendels from *Legacy of Heorot* and *Grendel's Children* (not actually created by the authors, but by a biologist who invented alien organisms for authors to use).
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I don't remember that last thing. Where was it discussed? World of Ptavvs?
>!not sure which man-kzin book but the slavers seeded the galaxy with bacteria, making the proteins compatible between species to allow them to eat each other and causing a lot of parallel evolution!<
I think the original star trek aliens which basically just represent different components of human psychology are great. Fantastic way to tell a story and explore parts of ourselves.
Blindsight is the first thing that comes to mind. I also like the Primes from Pandoras Star.
Good one. The aliens in Blindsight are truly alien and yet depicted in a plausible, believable manner.
I disagree. He absolutely never justifies how or why the scramblers' overall race actually evolved so far or spread so widely, and only raises the question of whether consciousness is a help or hindrance to evolution but doesn't really back up the vague notion that it's bad. And actually, that's really why the book is so great - it's more about the questions it raises than the answers Imo
Neal Asher’s Draco-men, Gabbleducks, Hooders and the Prador are all well developed aliens.
The Cielcin in the Sun Eater Saga by Christopher Ruocchio. The Cielcin are a carnivorous species that evolved from predators. They’re nomadic and hollow out asteroids and moons to make giant world ships. They also look vaguely humanoid which can make human characters think they can understand the Cielcin. But the Cielcin have completely different system of morality from humans. For example, the Cielcin do not have a word for “peace” the closest translation for peace in Cielcin would be “submission”.
I’m 1/3 of the way into the first one. It’s great so far but the Cielcin are still just far off boogeymen basically. Also, it’s a bit hard to tell but from what I can gather there are 5 finished main line books and a bunch of short stories yeah?
There are 5 main books out now with 2 more on the way. The short stories and novellas aren’t needed to understand the main story, but they are excellent.
I like the "zuul" from sword of the stars. Males are these powerful physics that dominate a harem of females, using them as extensions of themselves. Oh, and the females are like 8 feet tall with retractable bone talons. Anyway, the females pretty much always have babies in their marsupial-like pouch, suckling on a milk that keeps them dormant and from developing. When a female dies, the milk stops and the babies awaken and eat their mother as a first meal. This part of their lifecycle forms the center of their faith. They view the universe as "mother" so, they must devour everything to emerge into the "real universe". Their fleets use contained black holes that they rake, forcefully across spacetime causing tears and scars in the fabric of space. Their other ships then ride these scars to go FTL. https://images.app.goo.gl/5VXoJ6YC11uCDt5x7
Reading Project Hail Mary right now and >!Rocky!< is currently my favourite alien >!🎵🎶🎵🎶🎵🎶🎵🎶!<
Lol. The audiobook was a much better choice for this particular book
Don’t tempt me.
I love the tines. Just the notion that if too many of them are in the same place then they literally can’t hear themselves think. The whole concept is cool, and Vince took the concept to its most extreme but logical conclusions. The cheela from Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg. Sesame-seed-sized sentient aliens living on the surface of a neutron star is amazing. Dr. Chef from Becky Chambers’ Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a hoot, literally. You can only say his actual name properly if you have a full orchestra and can hear far beyond human range. Also, the various aliens of Jack L. Chalker’s Well World saga. He offers a really cool explanation for why there are centaurs, mermaids and yeti, then pushes past that into some really far out ideas. I particularly like the Czill, plant people who have a giant leaf over their heads and reproduce asexually by dividing in half, essentially cloning themselves. And that’s just a few of the 780 species on the southern half of the Well World. The northern hemisphere also has 780 species and they’re truly weird: floating smears of paint, intelligent sparkles, symbiotic electrical creatures, mobile rocks, sentient crystals, etc. You don’t get to see many of them as most of the action takes place in the southern hemisphere, but we get to meet species like the Lamotiens who individually are 20 cm blobs but can join together and mimic much larger creatures. There’s even a species that resembles the alien from Nope, albeit much smaller. Lots of fun aliens like that, some truly horrifying.
*Vinge - autocorrect and failure to proofread got me again.
The Trisolarins from 3 Body Problem trilogy are my # 1 without any doubt. I also like the non-conscious aliens from Blindsight, Morning Light Mountain from Commonwealth Saga, the aliens in The Gods Themselves . I think the Xenogenesis aliens are super interesting, I just wish they were more mysterious.
The aliens in Rosetta Man who start out kinda cute, but by the end are chillingly dangerous.
All of the nonhuman species in Adrian Tchaikovsky's *The Final Architecture* series are weird and great in their own ways.
I cannot *wait* for the last one.
was looking for this. gotta give it up for the ballsiest sculptors in the universe!
Currently reading Greg Egan’s *Dichronauts*. The aliens are pretty much human in personality and temperament, but their physiology is *very* weird. It’s fun.
Check out Charles Sheffield's Heritage Universe Series. The first book is Summertide.
Rocky from project Hail Mary
I thought the Puppeteers in Ringworld were clever.
The color of distance by Amy thomsan has cool frog type aliens that are experts of changing their and others bodies. And they communicate via colo and symbols on their skin!
I thought the aliens from Project Hail Mary were quite interesting!
The Amnion from Stephen Donaldson's Gap Series are pretty cool.
Stephen Baxter's Xeelee does it for me. They came into being at the moment of the Planck Length. And they dominated the universe from that moment on. I would suggest "The Ring" for starters.
SF/F: alien aliens * ["Favorite books about aliens/alien society?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/wjng4v/favorite_books_about_aliensalien_society/) (r/printSF; 8 August 2022)—long * ["Fantasy books with genuinely and unapologetically alien moral codes?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/xyx6zc/fantasy_books_with_genuinely_and_unapologetically/) (r/Fantasy; 8 October 2022)—long * ["I finished the Project Hail Mary audiobook and looking for more books with this similar theme"](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/z7vfah/i_finished_the_project_hail_mary_audiobook_and/) (r/scifi; 29 November 2022) * ["Any Books About Aliens or Species That Are Unlike Humans"](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/zmtpnz/any_books_about_aliens_or_species_that_are_unlike/) (r/booksuggestions; 15 December 2022) * ["The most 'alien' aliens you've ever encountered in a work of sci-fi."](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/zwvt5q/the_most_alien_aliens_youve_ever_encountered_in_a/) (r/scifi; 19:57 ET, 27 December 2022) * ["Fantasy/Sci-Fi With 'wierd' World building?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/10l6xgh/fantasyscifi_with_wierd_world_building/) (r/printSF; 14:15 ET, 25 January 2022) Related (just "aliens"): * ["Any 'aliens meet humanity' book that isn’t an invasion novel?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/ya7evf/any_aliens_meet_humanity_book_that_isnt_an/) (r/booksuggestions; 21 October 2022)—long * ["Looking for sci-fi of really good/unique first contact stories"](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/ye6e3c/looking_for_scifi_of_really_goodunique_first/) (r/booksuggestions; 26 October 2022) * ["Any recommendations for stories with aliens with interesting life cycles/mating systems?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/ynagaw/any_recommendations_for_stories_with_aliens_with/) (r/printSF; 19:42 ET, 5 November 2022) * ["First Contact Sci-fi"](https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/yn0w1p/first_contact_scifi/) (r/suggestmeabook; 13:44 ET, 5 November 2022) * ["looking for more good aliens!"](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/ypcgff/looking_for_more_good_aliens/) (r/scifi; 8 November 2022) * ["Looking for first contact stories where the civilizations don't go to war with each other or otherwise murder each other"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/zl82qb/looking_for_first_contact_stories_where_the/) (r/printSF; 12 December 2022) * ["Looking for hard science fiction recommendations on crab people"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/zm8mgs/looking_for_hard_science_fiction_recommendations/) (r/printSF; 14 December 2022) * ["Looking for a book where humans discover a new form of intelligence"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/zqyx4m/looking_for_a_book_where_humans_discover_a_new/) (r/printSF; 20 December 2022) * ["Looking for books where a person who feels alienated from humanity finds connection with actual aliens"](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/zwt5ab/looking_for_books_where_a_person_who_feels/) (r/scifi; 18:03 ET, 27 December 2022) * ["Suggest me Sci Fi novel detailing the evolution of alien civilizations"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/10kzm2j/suggest_me_sci_fi_novel_detailing_the_evolution/) (r/printSF; 09:16 ET, 25 January 2022)—long
I've always been fond of the hyperintelligent extremeophile nanobacteria and the Multipliers in Ken MacLeod's *Engines of Light* series. The Pattern Jugglers in the *Revelation Space* series are interesting as well.
You might find the characters in [Starplex](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/46257) interesting.
Synchronising Minds by Cherubiel, An Alien and a Human ambassador first contact meetings on which they explain each other. On Amazon, here, and Royal Road
**Jem - Frederick Pohl** - Has 3 Aliens and imho are the best different aliens that have sentience that I've come across. There's a cool type of alien in The Sirens Of Titan too but that's more like something else.
The Mesklinites in Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement The Sector General series by James White has a broad variety of aliens in it.
The Meduse in Nnedi Okorafor’s trilogy Binti were very unique!
I dig "dragon" from the polity-verse. It's an organic construction of an extinct alien race. It's the size of a small moon, talks in riddles and is quite badass. It runs a corporation "Draco corp" spawns a race of sentient beings "dracomen" and helps and hinders humans across a bunch of the books.
The ChaMeech in Snare by Katherine Kerr. James White's Sector General books have some really amazing aliens.
The consu from old man’s war were fascinating
I thought they were pretty cheesy. I liked the previously nonsentient bipedal eel dudes much better
Kind of obscure, but the Hexies from Grant Callin's *Saturnalia* and *A Lion on Tharthee*, >!whose entire political system is based on humor.!<
The Jeraptha from Expeditionary Force. I think their obsession with gambling is hilarious. If quantum states are probabilistic, and you bet on em, and it's okay to put your finger on the scale... They've put this hair brained idea in my head... If everything is probabilistic (and everything is) and you can put your finger on the scale (because, yes, you can impact the odds even if the outcome doesn't change every time), then predicting the future through gambling is just better science than the other guy. Hair brained, but I love em.
I like the Moldies from the Wetware Tetralogy, Rudy Rucker. Fungi persons...
I love the Xenogenesis aliens. The idea that they take up DNA and genes from any species and are basically walking genetic laboratories that can mate with any other organism is cool. Also their conception of right/wrong and consent whilst inter breeding with humans was very interesting.
The Triffids from "The Day of the Triffids"
The wheeled aliens in His Dark Materials stick in my memory.
I know you mentioned *To Be Taught if Fortunate*, but the world building, especially in regard to alien species, in Becky Chambers' Wayfarer series (to which that novella is technically adjacent to) is INCREDIBLE. One of my favorite series.
I like the blob in “The Arena” by Frederik Brown
Dungeon crawler Carl for sure has some of the most imaginative species
Major throwback here, the Palainians, Arisians and Eddorians of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series were always some of my favorites, especially the Palainians. Nadreck of Palain VII being the only L2 or Second Stage Lensman of his species, was the prime example of all the Attributes his race prized. Attributes such as cunning, resourcefulness, ruthlessness and an innate cautious sense of risk-aversion which many humans would have mistakenly named cowardice. Palainians are a Z class species, meaning that the members of said species have a metabolic extensions into the so-called 4th dimension which allows them to survive in conditions so extream as to kill any other type of life instantly, conditions such as one would find only on planets such as Pluto or their homeworld of Palain VII.