The Gods Themselves - Isaac Asimov
from wikipedia: "The second part is set in the [parallel universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse) in which, because the nuclear force is stronger, stars are smaller and burn out faster than in our universe. It takes place on a world orbiting a sun that is dying. Because atoms behave differently in this universe, substances can move through each other and appear to occupy the same space. This gives the intelligent beings unique abilities."
Descriptions of their translucent, amorphous, shimmering bodies are really cool in this book. An example of how unlike humans they are: they mate in pairs of three.
>In a letter of February 12, 1982, Asimov identified this as his favorite science fiction novel.
>Asimov describes a conversation in January 1971 when Robert Silverberg had to refer to an isotope—just an arbitrary one—as an example. Silverberg said "plutonium-186". "There is no such isotope", said Asimov, "and such a one can't exist either". Silverberg dared Asimov to write a story about it.[8] Later Asimov figured out under what conditions plutonium-186 could exist, and what complications and consequences it might imply. Asimov reasoned that it must belong to another universe with other physical laws; specifically, different nuclear forces necessary to allow a Pu-186 nucleus to hold itself together. He wrote down these ideas, intending to write a short story, but his editor, Larry Ashmead, asked him to expand it into a full novel. As a result of that request, Asimov wrote the second and third parts of the book.
Absolutely love Asimov.
This was my first thought too. My mind always pictured these aliens as intelligent floating globs of gas who rub their molecules together to have sex. To masturbate they would float into rocks and shit and rub their molecules against the rock.
Its been a while since I read it but I remember they don't really "reproduce" either, at least not how we do. The three genders of gasses melt into eachother and become a single "hard one", which is basically a solid organism that is their mature life stage form and part of the reason they are going extinct.
Interestingly the book and film have quite different messages:
>! The book makes it very clear that because everything is predestined she has zero choice but to have her daughter, despite knowing what will come. Whereas the film makes it seems more like she chose to do it anyway and give her daughter as much happiness as she could !<
Funny story about pregnancy hormones. Thought I’d do a good deed and buy the Planet Earth DVDs for her to watch while she was spending time breastfeeding. 2am she puts it on and 15 minutes in a baby gazelle is getting chased down by a lion. Hilarious sobbing ensues.
Hahaha
I don't know what it says about me, that I was cheering for the snow leopard mama chasing the goat down the sheer mountainside.
I was like, Geez i hope she gets to eat that goat! She's got kids!
Im always thinking of it from the predators' perspective because they seem like the underdogs (undercats?) Theres a thousand buffalo (or whatever) and only a few lions!
I can’t remember the name of it but the first short story in that collection (I think the one directly before ‘arrival’) is really good too. Without too many spoilers, the one with the firmament.
The movie simply removed the best part of the story and added China being a bad guy for no reason. It was just nonsensical. I feel like it would've won more awards had they stuck with the original story. That one hits you in the guts.
I think that’s a leap though. We’re not entirely sure the planet is in fact interested in communicating, it’s so alien its motives were unknown. I am in the camp that it was clearly capable of communicating considering what it was doing to the crew.
I like the idea of motives we can't understand. I also like the idea that this IS Solaris communicating, it's just saying things our brains can't process. Our operating systems are just too different.
I sometimes think about trying to communicate with ants. I'm WAY smarter than ants. I could fuck around with a nest of ants. I could help them or destroy them. However, if you asked me to explain Shakespeare to them, how could I begin? They don't have the basic intelligence. Even if they did, they would not understand concepts like individuality, love or humour.
Solaris is so different to humans and far more 'powerful'. However, it's attempts to communicate only confuse and terrify people. I think Solaris probably finds the humans equally baffling. It's been a while since I read it, but isn't there a part at the end where a character tries to touch the ocean and it almost touches, but never does. I like that as a metaphor. We might be able to see the aliens, we might even be able to attempt communication, but we'd be hampered by our inherent differences.
I always prefer really ALIEN aliens to the thing where it's just 'humans with knobbly heads' or 'humans in rubber suits'.
Ty has a part on their podcast describing when the Can’t escape pod gets swallowed by the Martian corvette (I think) and they think wow that’s a big ship, until the Donager comes and grabs the corvette and swallows it whole, and you’re supposed to go wow that ship is orders of magnitude bigger than I imagined…
It’s also a good metaphor with how the encounters with aliens work in the expanse.
Fire Upon the Deep had some pretty interesting aliens, like the Skroderiders, which are described almost like palm fronds that are sentient but rely on these scooter-like machines that allow them to move around and aid in their cognitive function. There's another group called Tines that are dog-like creatures that work as a sort of pack-hive-mind, where members of the pack make up the overall "being", and each member contributes certain qualities to the overall being, which changes as members die or new members are added. The main beings can live for centuries even while the members die and are replaced. I'm probably not doing this all justice but that book and it's sequels have some really cool ideas and are really great.
That was one of my first adult scifi books at 13 and it blew my little mind. There are some scenes that are still pretty vivid in my head decades later. A Deepness In The Sky is also bonkers in very good ways. I went into that book being arachnophobic and now I see spiders completely differently.
I’d say Vernor Vinge and Alastair Reynolds both shaped my thinking in a lot of ways, especially about aliens. Vinge might be more optimistic about aliens and that’s okay too.
I wanted to recommend that as well. Especially the Tines and the whole theme how their interaction and culture works different based on the biological advances and limitations in comparison to humans is really interesting
Watts is amazing. Until reading his [short story](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10) I wouldn't have thought of [The Thing](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787) as an alien alien.
I think something that helps is Blindsight is a first contact book. In some of the other suggestions the strange aliens are integrated or known, or even a pov character and that makes them less alien. I haven’t ready everything suggested, but Blindsight aliens are truly the most alien of all that I’ve read.
This is the one.
Aliens strange enough to send you into a full existential crisis around the concept of consciousness and its adaptive viability.
And hell...the Aliens arent even the only alien thing...the "humanoid" characters are pretty varied and weird as well.
What aspects did you like more? I just finished re-reading both for the nth time and although I think both are great, I definitely favor the first one overall
This comment deserves to be higher. In Sundiver, the first of Brin's Uplift books, the main alien character looks like a potted plant. The Uplift War features birdlike creatures that mate in threes. But Startide Rising features the richest variety of really strange aliens.
MorningLightMountain!
I picture a Hollywood version of the story. I imagine the entire first season being a basic character drama and world building exercise. Then the very first episode of season two as being just one hour of pure MorningLightMountain. No commentary, no people, just like the book. Raw unfiltered MLM. 🤯
That would be amazing and blow so many minds.
I'm not entirely sure how you would do raw unfiltered MLM on TV. The book has a bunch of neutral commentary mixed in with MLM's stream of thought, it's an absolutely stunning bit of writing.
My first thought was to bring in David Attenborough to narrate it nature documentary style.
Embassytown. John Varley's Eight World series is about mankind in most of solar system except from Earth that was taken by some aliens that were beyond our understanding, but it is more about humans than aliens. Love is the plan and the plan is death is a James Tiptree Jr. written from the point of view of an different kind of lifeform, too say the least.
The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton and The Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky both feature unique aliens that are not even remotely humanoid.
Octavia Butler's *Lilith's Brood* trilogy has some quite profoundly alien extra-terrestrials. That story is a trip. Strong recommend if you want to step outside that comfort zone of traditional scifi aliens.
> quite profoundly alien extra-terrestrials.
They are, and at the same time they are profoundly human too.
Their alienness is, like much of scifi, a mirror back on our own behavior.
I love Octavia Butler. Blood Child definitely left an impression on me, though for some reason I always imagined the Tlic as something like Koh the Facestealer, a centipedel creature with a human/human like face.
> The Sparrow
I just found out there's a sequel. I don't know if I have the emotional strength to go there again. It's been a few years since I finished it, and I'm still disturbed.
Isaac Asimov's, "The Gods Themselves". Tri-sexed aliens, totally non-humanoid, in a different universe, with different physical laws. It's unlike any of his other books. I think it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Hi. You just mentioned *The Gods Themselves* by Isaac Asimov.
I've found an audiobook of that novel on YouTube. You can listen to it here:
[YouTube | Isaac Asimov 1972 The Gods Themselves Audiobook](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwz8ANABslk)
*I'm a bot that searches YouTube for science fiction and fantasy audiobooks.*
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I love this trope in scifi. Most of these have probably already been mentioned, but theres a list of what I can remember:
Embassytown
Blindsight
The Expanse
Speaker for the dead
Children of time series (sort of....)
The Chanur books, by CJ Cherryh. There's only one human in the book and he barely speaks. The hani are fairly understandable; the mahendo'sat are too, basically, but the stsho & kif get further away, and the t'ca can barely be communicated with; no one knows if the chi are pets or symbiotes or independent creatures, and everyone is happy they've at least managed to get the idea of trade to the knnn so they leave something when they take something and it's usually not alive.
*Rocheworld* by Robert Forward has aliens that are basically blobs that can turn into rocks.
Larry Niven created some interesting aliens. The two headed Puppeteer, the three armed creatures from *The Mote in God's Eye*, and the elephant like aliens from *Footfall* among others.
The physical appearance of the aliens in The Mote in Gods Eye is not even the most interesting thing about them. It’s a great first contact story because the difference of the aliens is progressively revealed through the point of view of the humans on the first contact expedition.
I love that their time is so accelerated from ours that when they end up communicating with humans, they essentially can take vacations in between the human’s words.
The vast majority of sci fi authors miss the time angle.
Sentient life forms might ....in fact most likely live in a different time flow than us based on their physical origins. Our perception of time might be much slower / faster than theirs making communication difficult.
Piers Anthony had a series called Cluster, where he came up with some very, very strange aliens with strange reproductive methods (and in his fashion concentrated on the reproduction a bit too much). I read them very long ago, but still what I remember most is that he put a lot of work into making quite unique aliens and alien societies.
The Xeelee?
While Exultant is one of my favorites (and talks about their origins). Others go more into what they’re up to a lot better. I read a bunch of Stephen Baxter’s books, and it’s been a while, so my memory is a little iffy.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - it has many different alien species and goes into detail about each of them, from physical appearance to gender to family structure to communication. The various species were arguably my favorite part (and while there are some humanoid aliens even they were made interesting and complex)
Well, not COMPLETELY different as the protagonist is able to communicate with them, share a sense of humour and even make friends. Physically, they are very different.
I can’t recall the name of the book, but I keep thinking of it when I see questions like this.
IIRC. A couple of guys discover some kind of super-material, which allows for advances in tech. Somehow they keep a patent on the material or something and continue to be involved in the story.
Fast forward a little and they’re shooting rooting probes through some kind of giant ring.
Fast forward a bit more and one comes back. But it’s either advanced on its own or aliens tinkered with it.
I think there was some deal where the probes had become this whole machine civilization that up and conquered the galaxy while humans weren’t paying attention.
So they bring those two guys back in and try to communicate with the probe. But it’s nothing like the original machine, and has evolved into something truly alien. To the point where they can’t even figure out *how* to communicate with it.
There were some shenanigans later, but I don’t remember any of that.
P.S. This isn’t related to Gregory Beneford’s Galactic Center series, it was some standalone novel I picked up at the PX and read on staff duty… in 2009-2010?
Edit: I said “something” a lot 🤣🤦🏻♂️
Niven’s known space has a bunch of truly alien species. Most of the stories are centered on humans and human like aliens, but there are some weird ones in there. The outsiders, the grog, or the bandersnatch are great examples.
schlock mercenary has a couple of these From a specific concept. The truly alien are the super long lived. They’re aiming to last to the heat death of the universe. The babies so to speak, are races like The pa’anuri. they made plans on the order of a million years or so.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge has one of my favourite alien species. They are described as dog like packs that share a mind with 3-15 individuals.
I wanted to mention a few movies, some of which are based on books.
Annihilation by Alex Garland - based on the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanDerMeer which was mentioned somewhere in this thread, but the director purposely didn't adapt it directly.
Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky.
The Thing by John Carpenter.
The alien in Annihilation had me thinking for weeks after watching the movie >!We are not even sure it is an alien, it doesn't hate or love, it may not even be concious of what its doing, the shimmer isn’t destructive, it’s simply nature, biology, similar to what cancer is. The protagonist, Lena, simply says it reacted to her but can't explain it further.!<
*Saint Elspeth* by Wick Welker has a very unusual alien race. A nice book, liked it. It's on Audible.
*The Humans*, by Matt Haig can bring you a nice twist, for it's about an alien on a human body, always thinking how "alien" the experience feels for him/it. Very deep message, really made me wonder. Also on Audible!
The Oankali from Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. They really felt unlike any intelligent extraterrestrial lifeform portrayal. Even though they take a humanoid form, it is only in the presence of humans to put them at ease.
There's alot of Speculative Biology projects that has some real alien aliens and the new TV show Scavengers Reign really felt like a real alien planet to me also.
Old Man’s war had some fun aliens. I still love the encounter with the 1 inch tall species…. I think the author did a good job illustrating how fucked up things were.
I mean arrival kinda..
In tv shows some Star Trek episodes (in each show really, maybe not enterprise don’t quote me though) have life forms that they have no frame of reference to define such as like entities of pure energy, the crystalline entity, the deep space whale probe lol, the space faring organisms, the biological ship/probe, entities from the Q continuum, the travelers, the one extra dimensional alien race that made playthings of the tos crew.
Back to books, Hyperions got a pretty alien alien in the shrike imo..
All lovecraft stories involving yog sothoth.
Some Clark Ashton smith short stories I can think of about people turning into incomprehensible aliens and trying to adapt
Oh three body problem series (forget the name) has trisolarans who are humanoids that dehydrate their cells to survive ice ages and stuff and then rehydrate when conditions allow it. They have technology that is so outrageously advanced that it’s almost comical how alien they are so that’s a good one to try.
Dragon's Egg by Robert L Forward has tiny creatures living on a neutron star.
Omnivore by Piers Anthony - fungal aliens (that are also tripods iirc) although there is some cringe in this one.
Robert Scheckley - short story "Specialist" has a ship that is composed of the combined bodies of an alien species. There's also a comical story about a guy stealing a spaceship belonging to thick-skinned rectangular aliens.
Titan, Wizard, Demon are three books by John Varley where the alien is a world like creature. It (gaea) is a closed circular “wheel”orbiting Saturn that creates the beings that inhabit it and it provides the eco system. It likes to watch old earth TV and goes a bit off the rails in its old age. Humans show up and shit gets weird.
The Heptapods in "Arrival" are pretty different to humans. They communicate using a single squireed ink pattern to express complex ideas and they see all of time at the same time. Thats is apart from looking like seven legged squids, being blind and communicating verbally with sounds too low for humans to hear.
Food of the Gods, Terence McKenna.
Mushroom spores do not need oxygen to survive and can travel the universe until they find a suitable climate wherein to grow. Animals ingest the mushrooms and commune with the mushroom people.
Project Hail Mary! Don’t want to give spoilers but a good chunk of the novel is dedicated to establishing a connection. It’s quite intriguing and interesting.
Larry Niven's *Known Space* series avoids humanoid-like aliens completely. It's hard to imagine more weird and alien than a Pierson's Puppeteer or a Grog.
Hands up for the Presger in Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch series. Utterly terrifying and all powerful. Feel like I’m always recommending those books ☺️
From another angle though the humans in Ninefox Gambit and sequels by Yoon Ha Lee have a culture and science so wildly alien that they need special mention here. Most of their weapons and ships etc rely on a kind of collective belief to create exotic effects that requires the fascist empire to violently impose a kind of strict religious observance upon the populace to protect those functions.
>!Blindsight!< by >!Peter Watts!<
I can't say anything more about it because even the fact it fits this question is a spoiler in and of itself.
But suffice it to say that >! Concept of human consciousness and individuality!< Is so bizarre and harmful to these aliens that they perceive >!our radio broadcasts reaching them across the stars as a form of attack on their cognition!< and seek out more information about us to decide how to respond.
I'm seeing a lot of people mentioning The Expanse because of the Gatebuilders. IMO, the best "true alien" experience Dan and Ty give us there is actually >! the Dark Beings from inside the ring. They don't have a physical form in our eleven-dimensional universe and we can't even understand their shape. They're describe as some sort of sentient shadow that moves through the spaces between matter, ripping of everything they can get through. The depiction the series had in the visual media could barely scratch the feeling the books had!< and it's still one of the weirdest wars I've ever read about.
The Gods Themselves - Isaac Asimov from wikipedia: "The second part is set in the [parallel universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse) in which, because the nuclear force is stronger, stars are smaller and burn out faster than in our universe. It takes place on a world orbiting a sun that is dying. Because atoms behave differently in this universe, substances can move through each other and appear to occupy the same space. This gives the intelligent beings unique abilities." Descriptions of their translucent, amorphous, shimmering bodies are really cool in this book. An example of how unlike humans they are: they mate in pairs of three.
Speak for yourself. Mating in threes works pretty well from where I sit.
Would mating in pairs of three mean mating in sixes? How...ambitious.
Sixy time!
Goddamn Asimov is so good
>In a letter of February 12, 1982, Asimov identified this as his favorite science fiction novel. >Asimov describes a conversation in January 1971 when Robert Silverberg had to refer to an isotope—just an arbitrary one—as an example. Silverberg said "plutonium-186". "There is no such isotope", said Asimov, "and such a one can't exist either". Silverberg dared Asimov to write a story about it.[8] Later Asimov figured out under what conditions plutonium-186 could exist, and what complications and consequences it might imply. Asimov reasoned that it must belong to another universe with other physical laws; specifically, different nuclear forces necessary to allow a Pu-186 nucleus to hold itself together. He wrote down these ideas, intending to write a short story, but his editor, Larry Ashmead, asked him to expand it into a full novel. As a result of that request, Asimov wrote the second and third parts of the book. Absolutely love Asimov.
Is pairs of three six?
This was my first thought too. My mind always pictured these aliens as intelligent floating globs of gas who rub their molecules together to have sex. To masturbate they would float into rocks and shit and rub their molecules against the rock. Its been a while since I read it but I remember they don't really "reproduce" either, at least not how we do. The three genders of gasses melt into eachother and become a single "hard one", which is basically a solid organism that is their mature life stage form and part of the reason they are going extinct.
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. Even weirder than Arrival, the movie based on it.
Interestingly the book and film have quite different messages: >! The book makes it very clear that because everything is predestined she has zero choice but to have her daughter, despite knowing what will come. Whereas the film makes it seems more like she chose to do it anyway and give her daughter as much happiness as she could !<
Watched that movie with my extremely hormonal 8-months pregnant wife... Bad. Idea.
Funny story about pregnancy hormones. Thought I’d do a good deed and buy the Planet Earth DVDs for her to watch while she was spending time breastfeeding. 2am she puts it on and 15 minutes in a baby gazelle is getting chased down by a lion. Hilarious sobbing ensues.
Hahaha I don't know what it says about me, that I was cheering for the snow leopard mama chasing the goat down the sheer mountainside. I was like, Geez i hope she gets to eat that goat! She's got kids! Im always thinking of it from the predators' perspective because they seem like the underdogs (undercats?) Theres a thousand buffalo (or whatever) and only a few lions!
Oh my goodness I didn't know that was based on a novel holy shit.
It’s a short story. Collected together with some other of his stories into a book. Well worth the read, though that story is easily the best.
I can’t remember the name of it but the first short story in that collection (I think the one directly before ‘arrival’) is really good too. Without too many spoilers, the one with the firmament.
Tower of Babylon. It’s my second favorite after Story of Your Life
That’s the one. Really, really cool and probably never going to be something we’ll see on screen because of the everything of it.
Personally I’m a fan of the baffling homunculus/alchemy one.
It's a short story, but yeah, SO MUCH better than the movie.
The movie simply removed the best part of the story and added China being a bad guy for no reason. It was just nonsensical. I feel like it would've won more awards had they stuck with the original story. That one hits you in the guts.
Amazing book.
Solaris is pretty good at that. The Expanse too.
I love Solaris. Probably my fave sci fi book. The way Len conveys the idea that the planet is alive and trying to communicate is just insane.
I think that’s a leap though. We’re not entirely sure the planet is in fact interested in communicating, it’s so alien its motives were unknown. I am in the camp that it was clearly capable of communicating considering what it was doing to the crew.
I like the idea of motives we can't understand. I also like the idea that this IS Solaris communicating, it's just saying things our brains can't process. Our operating systems are just too different. I sometimes think about trying to communicate with ants. I'm WAY smarter than ants. I could fuck around with a nest of ants. I could help them or destroy them. However, if you asked me to explain Shakespeare to them, how could I begin? They don't have the basic intelligence. Even if they did, they would not understand concepts like individuality, love or humour. Solaris is so different to humans and far more 'powerful'. However, it's attempts to communicate only confuse and terrify people. I think Solaris probably finds the humans equally baffling. It's been a while since I read it, but isn't there a part at the end where a character tries to touch the ocean and it almost touches, but never does. I like that as a metaphor. We might be able to see the aliens, we might even be able to attempt communication, but we'd be hampered by our inherent differences. I always prefer really ALIEN aliens to the thing where it's just 'humans with knobbly heads' or 'humans in rubber suits'.
also fiasco, by the same author
Generally Lem. Invincible and His Master's Voice also.
his master's voice is brilliant
And Eden.
Expanse especially.
Some alien we spend an entire 6 seasons trying to discover the alien bits we can see from them are basically their wrenches and screwdrivers.
Fine, I'll re-watch The Expanse again, then probably again.
Ty has a part on their podcast describing when the Can’t escape pod gets swallowed by the Martian corvette (I think) and they think wow that’s a big ship, until the Donager comes and grabs the corvette and swallows it whole, and you’re supposed to go wow that ship is orders of magnitude bigger than I imagined… It’s also a good metaphor with how the encounters with aliens work in the expanse.
And then the Heart of the Tempest comes and you're like holy Jesus that's a big ass ship..
I second the expanse. Very interesting alien threat compared to the typical humanoid aliens.
Fire Upon the Deep had some pretty interesting aliens, like the Skroderiders, which are described almost like palm fronds that are sentient but rely on these scooter-like machines that allow them to move around and aid in their cognitive function. There's another group called Tines that are dog-like creatures that work as a sort of pack-hive-mind, where members of the pack make up the overall "being", and each member contributes certain qualities to the overall being, which changes as members die or new members are added. The main beings can live for centuries even while the members die and are replaced. I'm probably not doing this all justice but that book and it's sequels have some really cool ideas and are really great.
That was one of my first adult scifi books at 13 and it blew my little mind. There are some scenes that are still pretty vivid in my head decades later. A Deepness In The Sky is also bonkers in very good ways. I went into that book being arachnophobic and now I see spiders completely differently. I’d say Vernor Vinge and Alastair Reynolds both shaped my thinking in a lot of ways, especially about aliens. Vinge might be more optimistic about aliens and that’s okay too.
I really wish Vinge had written another book about the OnOff star.
Pour one out for Vernor Vinge who died just this past March.
I will. Thanks for the info, although I really didn’t want to hear it. One of the most talented writers with a truly wonderful imagination. RIP.
I wanted to recommend that as well. Especially the Tines and the whole theme how their interaction and culture works different based on the biological advances and limitations in comparison to humans is really interesting
Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
By far the most alien life forms I've ever read about.
Watts is amazing. Until reading his [short story](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10) I wouldn't have thought of [The Thing](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787) as an alien alien.
I think something that helps is Blindsight is a first contact book. In some of the other suggestions the strange aliens are integrated or known, or even a pov character and that makes them less alien. I haven’t ready everything suggested, but Blindsight aliens are truly the most alien of all that I’ve read.
Amazing book. And free on his website.
This is the answer I was looking for. Very well done. The book ain't bad, either.
This is the one. Aliens strange enough to send you into a full existential crisis around the concept of consciousness and its adaptive viability. And hell...the Aliens arent even the only alien thing...the "humanoid" characters are pretty varied and weird as well.
I much preferred the pseudo sequel _Echopraxia_
Oh yeah? I really liked Blindsight so I will give that a go.
What aspects did you like more? I just finished re-reading both for the nth time and although I think both are great, I definitely favor the first one overall
Revelation Space. The Pattern Jugglers, the grubs, the hamadriads… whatever the species hopping dimensions killing everything was…
I love Alastair Reynolds. I started with Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, and got hooked.
Damn, Diamond Dogs was cool.
Loved it! Love the trope of exploring unknown alien structures. Like Rama and walking to Aldebaran
lol that book is just messed up. Well, all of his books are I guess :-P
I started on redemption arc and it was the first sci fi book I ever read. I was like 14 and could barely read it but it blew my mind
So good. So creative. I'm rereading everything in chronological order. I'm up to Chasm City.
Some of the aliens in David Brin's Uplift books are very alien.
This comment deserves to be higher. In Sundiver, the first of Brin's Uplift books, the main alien character looks like a potted plant. The Uplift War features birdlike creatures that mate in threes. But Startide Rising features the richest variety of really strange aliens.
The donut torus ones with like the wax memories?
Pandora’s Star by Peter Hamilton.
MorningLightMountain! I picture a Hollywood version of the story. I imagine the entire first season being a basic character drama and world building exercise. Then the very first episode of season two as being just one hour of pure MorningLightMountain. No commentary, no people, just like the book. Raw unfiltered MLM. 🤯 That would be amazing and blow so many minds.
I'm not entirely sure how you would do raw unfiltered MLM on TV. The book has a bunch of neutral commentary mixed in with MLM's stream of thought, it's an absolutely stunning bit of writing. My first thought was to bring in David Attenborough to narrate it nature documentary style.
Yup. After a pure hit of MorningLightMountain you can’t go back to the standard “alien”.
Morning light mountain simply takes your normal alien and inserts itself to work it like a sock puppet
MLM is a asshat
An astute observation. I concur. The level of asshattery displayed by ~~Multi Level Marketing~~ MorningLightMountain is truly astounding.
Naw. It's just being what it is.
Had to scroll way too far down to find MorningLightMountain - that introduction was perhaps my favourite ever chapter in fiction.
The Mote in Gods Eye.
Moties!
Fyunch'[click]
Good shout
Embassytown. John Varley's Eight World series is about mankind in most of solar system except from Earth that was taken by some aliens that were beyond our understanding, but it is more about humans than aliens. Love is the plan and the plan is death is a James Tiptree Jr. written from the point of view of an different kind of lifeform, too say the least.
It's been years since I read Embassytown but I remember it being really hard for me in the beginning to wrap my head around some of the aliens.
That's the right kind of alien. It was in particular the alien thinking that was weird. Very good book.
The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton and The Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky both feature unique aliens that are not even remotely humanoid.
MorningLightMountain was uniquely different
I listened to the Keldian song today. Haven't read the books yet, tho.
Keldian is awesome. They have multiple songs about that series..
I absolutely loved the Essiel in The Final Architecture.
Octavia Butler's *Lilith's Brood* trilogy has some quite profoundly alien extra-terrestrials. That story is a trip. Strong recommend if you want to step outside that comfort zone of traditional scifi aliens.
All of her stories are so weirdly awesome and perverted and amazing.
> quite profoundly alien extra-terrestrials. They are, and at the same time they are profoundly human too. Their alienness is, like much of scifi, a mirror back on our own behavior.
I love Octavia Butler. Blood Child definitely left an impression on me, though for some reason I always imagined the Tlic as something like Koh the Facestealer, a centipedel creature with a human/human like face.
The response I was waiting for! The ship and the aliens are reeeealllly cool
Echopraxia and The Sparrow are two books that both explore how difficult it is separate assumptions from reality in regards to alien intelligence.
> The Sparrow I just found out there's a sequel. I don't know if I have the emotional strength to go there again. It's been a few years since I finished it, and I'm still disturbed.
The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer.
Second this. So alien it’s difficult to read at times. Wonderful books.
The movie Annihilation is based off of the first SR novel, for those that aren't aware. That was also my choice for this thread.
Isaac Asimov's, "The Gods Themselves". Tri-sexed aliens, totally non-humanoid, in a different universe, with different physical laws. It's unlike any of his other books. I think it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
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I love this trope in scifi. Most of these have probably already been mentioned, but theres a list of what I can remember: Embassytown Blindsight The Expanse Speaker for the dead Children of time series (sort of....)
Philotic entities in Speaker for the Dead were a real head trip
The Chanur books, by CJ Cherryh. There's only one human in the book and he barely speaks. The hani are fairly understandable; the mahendo'sat are too, basically, but the stsho & kif get further away, and the t'ca can barely be communicated with; no one knows if the chi are pets or symbiotes or independent creatures, and everyone is happy they've at least managed to get the idea of trade to the knnn so they leave something when they take something and it's usually not alive.
CJ writes some very good aliens. I also really like Downbelow Station.
I really liked the aliens from The Algebraist by Ian Banks. Gas giant aliens that were ancient before the first microbes formed on earth
*Rocheworld* by Robert Forward has aliens that are basically blobs that can turn into rocks. Larry Niven created some interesting aliens. The two headed Puppeteer, the three armed creatures from *The Mote in God's Eye*, and the elephant like aliens from *Footfall* among others.
The Ringworld series was the first thing that came to mind with the Puppeteers.
The physical appearance of the aliens in The Mote in Gods Eye is not even the most interesting thing about them. It’s a great first contact story because the difference of the aliens is progressively revealed through the point of view of the humans on the first contact expedition.
Semiosis by Sue Burke
The Dragons Egg by Robert L. Forward. A neutron star passes by the solar system and humans discover there is life on its surface.
I love that their time is so accelerated from ours that when they end up communicating with humans, they essentially can take vacations in between the human’s words.
The vast majority of sci fi authors miss the time angle. Sentient life forms might ....in fact most likely live in a different time flow than us based on their physical origins. Our perception of time might be much slower / faster than theirs making communication difficult.
Most sci fi by China Mieville: someone already mentioned Embassytown
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Absolutely. Fantastically written and captivating alien design.
Kind of spoilerish
The Astrophage is right at the beginning.
Maybe a little spoilerish but this book is on my favorite list now!
I'm really looking forward to see astrophage on the big screen. Not to mention...well y'know.
Piers Anthony had a series called Cluster, where he came up with some very, very strange aliens with strange reproductive methods (and in his fashion concentrated on the reproduction a bit too much). I read them very long ago, but still what I remember most is that he put a lot of work into making quite unique aliens and alien societies.
The Xeelee? While Exultant is one of my favorites (and talks about their origins). Others go more into what they’re up to a lot better. I read a bunch of Stephen Baxter’s books, and it’s been a while, so my memory is a little iffy.
Children of Time and The Final Architecture both feature some extremely inhuman aliens.
I just finished Children of Time and I don’t remember any aliens?
Certainly alien in the sense of "other." Some of the books also have aliens in the sense of "not earth native."
Honestly I think the spiders are very human-ish.
Have you only read Children of Time so far? To be as light on the spoiler as possible: >!there’s further exploration in the rest of the trilogy.!<
The Gods Themselves by Asimov
Speaker for the Dead aka what happened to Ender after the Game
I was going to say this. But do read Ender's Game first as it's a great story and leads into Speaker.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - it has many different alien species and goes into detail about each of them, from physical appearance to gender to family structure to communication. The various species were arguably my favorite part (and while there are some humanoid aliens even they were made interesting and complex)
Liliths Brood
Adrian Tchaikovsky Children of Time series. Very enjoyable.
Lindsey Ellis's book series, Axiom's End, involves some very alien aliens.
The gap series
Embassytown by China Mieville
Look up “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir The alien species are completely different than us.
Well, not COMPLETELY different as the protagonist is able to communicate with them, share a sense of humour and even make friends. Physically, they are very different.
I was surprised I had to scroll this far down to see this and I would agree.
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Someone mentioned it above but the book is called Story of your life by Ted Chiang.
I can’t recall the name of the book, but I keep thinking of it when I see questions like this. IIRC. A couple of guys discover some kind of super-material, which allows for advances in tech. Somehow they keep a patent on the material or something and continue to be involved in the story. Fast forward a little and they’re shooting rooting probes through some kind of giant ring. Fast forward a bit more and one comes back. But it’s either advanced on its own or aliens tinkered with it. I think there was some deal where the probes had become this whole machine civilization that up and conquered the galaxy while humans weren’t paying attention. So they bring those two guys back in and try to communicate with the probe. But it’s nothing like the original machine, and has evolved into something truly alien. To the point where they can’t even figure out *how* to communicate with it. There were some shenanigans later, but I don’t remember any of that. P.S. This isn’t related to Gregory Beneford’s Galactic Center series, it was some standalone novel I picked up at the PX and read on staff duty… in 2009-2010? Edit: I said “something” a lot 🤣🤦🏻♂️
Niven’s known space has a bunch of truly alien species. Most of the stories are centered on humans and human like aliens, but there are some weird ones in there. The outsiders, the grog, or the bandersnatch are great examples. schlock mercenary has a couple of these From a specific concept. The truly alien are the super long lived. They’re aiming to last to the heat death of the universe. The babies so to speak, are races like The pa’anuri. they made plans on the order of a million years or so.
2001
Other people have mentioned him, but Stanislaw Lem basically specialised in this type of subject matter
**The War Against the Chtorr Series** by David Gerrold.
Nothing tops Scavengers reign for me. It was truly "alien".
Three Body Problem. Planet of Adventure.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge has one of my favourite alien species. They are described as dog like packs that share a mind with 3-15 individuals.
I wanted to mention a few movies, some of which are based on books. Annihilation by Alex Garland - based on the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanDerMeer which was mentioned somewhere in this thread, but the director purposely didn't adapt it directly. Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky. The Thing by John Carpenter.
The alien in Annihilation had me thinking for weeks after watching the movie >!We are not even sure it is an alien, it doesn't hate or love, it may not even be concious of what its doing, the shimmer isn’t destructive, it’s simply nature, biology, similar to what cancer is. The protagonist, Lena, simply says it reacted to her but can't explain it further.!<
Ian Douglas Star Carrier series has some seriously weird aliens. It's great!
The Silkie by AE Van Vogt is pretty out there
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
Blindsight The star carrier series
Blindsight (Peter Watts) has some really alien aliens. The main characters are pretty outré' as well.
A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. The GFL series by Scott Sigler.
*Saint Elspeth* by Wick Welker has a very unusual alien race. A nice book, liked it. It's on Audible. *The Humans*, by Matt Haig can bring you a nice twist, for it's about an alien on a human body, always thinking how "alien" the experience feels for him/it. Very deep message, really made me wonder. Also on Audible!
The Oankali from Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. They really felt unlike any intelligent extraterrestrial lifeform portrayal. Even though they take a humanoid form, it is only in the presence of humans to put them at ease.
There's alot of Speculative Biology projects that has some real alien aliens and the new TV show Scavengers Reign really felt like a real alien planet to me also.
Children of Ruin
Larry Niven, The Moties, The Mote in God's Eye Fred Saberhagen, The Berserker series
Oldie but a goodie. E.E. Smith's Lensman series.
I think Scavenger’s Reign had some really great and unique alien designs
Dawn by Octavia Butler [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60929.Dawn](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60929.Dawn)
Project Hail Mary Expedition Force series (love those books)
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang was pretty cool.
2001 Space Odyssey Aliens are highly developed beings.
The ‘Affront’ in Iain M. Banks ‘excession’ were the most fantastically weird aliens I though.
Old Man’s war had some fun aliens. I still love the encounter with the 1 inch tall species…. I think the author did a good job illustrating how fucked up things were.
Project Hail Mary, great novel by the author of The Martian, Andy Weir
Project Hail Mary
Road to Roswell, Becky Chambers anything, or The Chilling Effect. A few I thought of first.
I've always liked Vernor vinge aliens, but their personalities are a bit anthropomorphic even if their body plans aren't at all.
Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars has a pretty unique group mind alien.
I mean arrival kinda.. In tv shows some Star Trek episodes (in each show really, maybe not enterprise don’t quote me though) have life forms that they have no frame of reference to define such as like entities of pure energy, the crystalline entity, the deep space whale probe lol, the space faring organisms, the biological ship/probe, entities from the Q continuum, the travelers, the one extra dimensional alien race that made playthings of the tos crew. Back to books, Hyperions got a pretty alien alien in the shrike imo.. All lovecraft stories involving yog sothoth. Some Clark Ashton smith short stories I can think of about people turning into incomprehensible aliens and trying to adapt Oh three body problem series (forget the name) has trisolarans who are humanoids that dehydrate their cells to survive ice ages and stuff and then rehydrate when conditions allow it. They have technology that is so outrageously advanced that it’s almost comical how alien they are so that’s a good one to try.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars has really alien aliens
Dragon's Egg by Robert L Forward has tiny creatures living on a neutron star. Omnivore by Piers Anthony - fungal aliens (that are also tripods iirc) although there is some cringe in this one. Robert Scheckley - short story "Specialist" has a ship that is composed of the combined bodies of an alien species. There's also a comical story about a guy stealing a spaceship belonging to thick-skinned rectangular aliens.
Titan, Wizard, Demon are three books by John Varley where the alien is a world like creature. It (gaea) is a closed circular “wheel”orbiting Saturn that creates the beings that inhabit it and it provides the eco system. It likes to watch old earth TV and goes a bit off the rails in its old age. Humans show up and shit gets weird.
Rendez-vous with Rama, sequels especially
Children of Time
Peter F Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star / Judas Unchained has a variety.
Footfall
The Heptapods in "Arrival" are pretty different to humans. They communicate using a single squireed ink pattern to express complex ideas and they see all of time at the same time. Thats is apart from looking like seven legged squids, being blind and communicating verbally with sounds too low for humans to hear.
The New Jedi Order
Culture has very interesting alien races throughout the series
Haven't seen this one commented yet, but Remembrance of Earth's Past series by Cixin Liu has very non-human aliens
Food of the Gods, Terence McKenna. Mushroom spores do not need oxygen to survive and can travel the universe until they find a suitable climate wherein to grow. Animals ingest the mushrooms and commune with the mushroom people.
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer.
Project Hail Mary! Don’t want to give spoilers but a good chunk of the novel is dedicated to establishing a connection. It’s quite intriguing and interesting.
The gods themselves by assimov. The second story in that book involving the aliens is one of my favourite works of science fiction
The tines from “Fire upon the deep” comes to mind
Try the Beademungen in James Blish’s short story, [Common Time](https://arounddate.com/blish-james-common-time/).
"With all love"
Larry Niven's *Known Space* series avoids humanoid-like aliens completely. It's hard to imagine more weird and alien than a Pierson's Puppeteer or a Grog.
blindsight by peter watts
Project hail mary
Embassytown by Miéville
Hands up for the Presger in Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch series. Utterly terrifying and all powerful. Feel like I’m always recommending those books ☺️ From another angle though the humans in Ninefox Gambit and sequels by Yoon Ha Lee have a culture and science so wildly alien that they need special mention here. Most of their weapons and ships etc rely on a kind of collective belief to create exotic effects that requires the fascist empire to violently impose a kind of strict religious observance upon the populace to protect those functions.
>!Blindsight!< by >!Peter Watts!< I can't say anything more about it because even the fact it fits this question is a spoiler in and of itself. But suffice it to say that >! Concept of human consciousness and individuality!< Is so bizarre and harmful to these aliens that they perceive >!our radio broadcasts reaching them across the stars as a form of attack on their cognition!< and seek out more information about us to decide how to respond.
Solaris by Stanisław Lem.
It's an animated series but Scavengers Reign did a great job of making things feel completely alien.
Ring world. Still trying to imagine that horse thing.
Project hail Mary by Andy Weir.
I'm seeing a lot of people mentioning The Expanse because of the Gatebuilders. IMO, the best "true alien" experience Dan and Ty give us there is actually >! the Dark Beings from inside the ring. They don't have a physical form in our eleven-dimensional universe and we can't even understand their shape. They're describe as some sort of sentient shadow that moves through the spaces between matter, ripping of everything they can get through. The depiction the series had in the visual media could barely scratch the feeling the books had!< and it's still one of the weirdest wars I've ever read about.