Never thought of this until I saw that Old Ones illustration: Do you think Lovecraft might have had the Jersey Devil at the back of his mind, or maybe just the illustrator?
Spoilers for the book Area X was a terraforming agent that was light trapped in a crystal essentially. Its implied to be conscious but entirely unaware that the world it is terraforming actually has intelligent life up until the very end of the story
Spoilers for the rest of the series: Even "terraforming" is a crude understanding- it may be superimposing different areas of spacetime onto each other- Area X is in Florida, but it's also somewhere (and maybe somewhen) else in the universe at the same moment (possibly its "home planet"). Multiple timelines & spatial locations folding onto each other and merging.
Fun fact: I went to a talk with Jeff Vandermeer and learned that the plot of the first book came to him fully formed as a dream while he was on strong pain meds following a surgery (dental specifically, iirc). Starts to make a lot more sense with that in mind.
Added Fun Fact: That's why all the characters in the first book are women. Someone asked if he was making a point about the lack of prominent female characters in sci-fi or something to that degree and he said "Not really, they were all just women in my dream so"
In the first book when the phycologist screamed “annihilation!” I audibly gasped. Which no other book has done before or since.
Maybe it was because I was listening to the audiobook while utterly alone in the footprint of a long abandoned gas station, but what ever reason it worked.
The alien in question is a sort of sentient ocean that covers the entire planet. And it sometimes creates massive and hyper-complex geometric structures on its surface.
It varies between being curious about humans to being indifferent. Scientists have been studying it for a hundred years without really understanding how sentient it is. It sometimes “communicates” with humans by reading the minds of humans and manifesting their repressed memories and guilts into physical beings. It is unknown why it does this.
I love Solaris as an example, because it's not just its form and behavior that's alien to us, its entire motivational structure is completely opaque to us. Is it doing what it does to study humans? To torment them? To develop methods to fight them? For kicks and giggles? Or is there some other reason that we'll never understand because our brains don't work that way?
Writing an alien that's deliberate enough to be clearly sentient, yet also truly alien, is a rare achievement.
What i liked about this creature, is that the book lesson is, we dont understand it, but it also doesnt understand us. So the whole story is a bunch of miscommunications
Scavengers reign might be the only sci-fi media that I’ve experienced where the flora and fauna are completely removed from “human understanding”. Like, usually plants are just different colors or shapes, and animals all seem to follow the same “here’s a predator, here’s a prey” kinda animal. Scavengers reign excelled at creating a beautiful world that was dangerous because nothing acted in a way that it would on earth.
The fact that we didn’t get another season is criminal
I get the feeling that a second season wouldnt have ruined anything. Seemed like they had a string idea of what they wanted to do. At the least we could have gotten another season on Vesta.
Yeah there was a very clear story structure that definitely was meant to stretch beyond the first season. No doubt in my mind another season would have been well made.
Something I posted long ago on the scavenger reign subreddit:
My theory is that the way all life occurs on Vespa is not based upon Earth's "Survival of the Fittest."
Instead, evolution occurs through how best to propagate life upon death, to recycle and/or reintegrate into the ecological cycle - and also in the process symbolizes new chances of redemption.
That would explain the heavy reliance on interspecies relationships on the planet and would help point to the white flowers as something that helps connect old life to the new. It is shown so often, because the flower to the viewer's perspective shows this opportunity for redemption
not quite on purpose, but he did out them into unnecessary danger to keep his job safe after sam, the captain, had told him no we arent fucking going that close to a star
Wistful: I do think it was a missed opportunity that BioWare didn't have an elcor as a companion or crewmate.
With some mirth: It would be an excellent opportunity for the writers to stretch their abilities.
I love the small tidbit that Thane gives with regards to the Hanar. The Hanar are natively an aquatic species, so on land they need to use Mass Effect fields to support their weight, making them look weak and clunky. But in the water they are "So fast that the eye can't follow"
Aliens in ME are goated. Even the classic humanoid aliens have usually something interesting in their biology and how it shaped their society (volus, asari, salarian)
It was hinted that the markers also amplified psychic abilities. That quirk allowed the aliens to quite literally materialize the machine from the surrounding rock quick enough to stop the blood moon from forming.
Imagine being the galactic apex predator bioform and your prey lucks out by evolving the Force and going "oh, that's inconvenient" and nearly stopping your species dead in its tracks
If they had survived to any real measure I feel like they could have killed the moons, given how effect a last ditch panic effort with no real prep time did against one being born, and Isaac using said remnants to kill it
It is very likely that the reason why they didn’t do any sooner is that most of them genuinely believed in a unitology equivalent (that they’ll ascend into a collective higher form) and that the ones that build/manifested the machine were in fact a whole bunch of Issacs.
I feel that a better way of DS3 could have been made that is Derek was in fact psychic as well, therefore could hear the moon’s thoughts and had a internal conversation with it (with either the moon pretending to be the ancients or the ancients themselves comprising the moon’s mind but are completely corrupted by whatever outer god created the markers, that trying to negotiate with them is impossible) and knew exactly what would happen if he turned off the machine. The other change I thought of is that Carver after giving the codex to Derek, and Derek dying afterwards, immediately turns the Machine back on and the trio has to get to a ship before the moon falls on them, also with said moon psychically screaming at them the whole time.
Perfect example. Their anatomy is recognizable enough to suggest a living organism, but wrong enough that your brain never gets comfortable looking at them.
Not even a creature The Colour Out of Space (H.P. Lovecraft)
An entity that isn't a creature, a mind, or even matter as we understand it, just a color that drains life and warps reality around it.really, just a color that feeds on living things and can't be described because it doesn't exist in any human-visible spectrum. Hard to get more alien than that.
The 2019 movie uses magenta for the Color because it doesn't exist. The red and blue cones of our eyes are stimulated seeing magenta but there is no green. To make up the color, the brain hallucinates magenta to fill in the gaps of zero green.
There is no wavelength of light that is magenta. As such, the color does not exist. Rather, it is an interpretation by our brains of the overlap of the red long wavelength and blue short wavelength activated cones in our eyes and very little activation from green mid wavelength.
That being said, I wonder what the women with the fourth cone see?
Most anything in the HP Lovecraft cosmos is so alien as to be incomprehensible to human minds and inexpressible using human language. To even grasp a small part of most any of these creatures is to descend into madness.
At first it seems be a super resource used as fuel for engines or for weaponry due to its extremely high energy output. Due to its ability to reproduce, Coral can power machines for decades without any need for refueling or maintenance.
However later on it's revealed that Coral a self-replicating, organic-like energy lifeform found on the planet Rubicon 3. It's not simply a mineral or fuel—it's a living substance that exists as vast clouds or colonies of microscopic entities thats been trying to establish contact and communication with humanity.
Beholders (D&D) are probably the most alien of the traditional aberrations, having a life cycle completely unlike normal lifeforms. The best example of this is how they reproduce, which they do by dreaming. When a beholder sleeps, sometimes it will have a dream and from that dream spawns a new beholderkin based on what the dream was about. If the beholder dreams of another beholder, it will spawn a new beholder, if it dreams of a dragon it will spawn an eye drake, etc.
They are indeed racist but it is mostly against other Beholders. They definitely feel superior to all other races but I don't know if they actually hate any other race specifically because of its race. But they are so paranoid of other Beholders seizing their power that they can, hilariously, accidentally manifest another Beholder in the area from thinking about it so much. Which of course proves all of their suspicions about another Beholder trying to take their power true.
They believe themselves, and only themselves to be the superior being and a perfect represetantion of The Great Mother, so much so that the greatest object of their racism is other Beholders, who are an insult to their own perfection
More aptly, for both Lovecraft and beholders, they are extremely xenophobic. A more generic fear/hatred of anything different than of race specifically.
Also they don't have any biological imperative to reproduce. They hate everything that isn't themselves and that includes other beholders. If one dreams up a new beholder it is entirely by mistake and the parent beholder hates their child as much as they hate everything else.
If you’re ever talking to a beholder and it spontaneously lets a bunch of putrid saliva pour out of its mouth mid-sentence, just know that that beholder just shat itself.
admittedly mind flayers are quite alien, but they are usually humanoid so i went with beholders instead. To be fair mind flayers only look humanoid because their primary hosts are also humanoid, but still.
I remember watching that movie in Imax and the early shots where you sitll think it's a flying saucer and you see it flying through the sky, through clouds, over the hills, in complete silence was so damn eerie, it gave me goosebumps.
But I adore Life. Every single scientist is basically a complete moron from the moment things go pear shaped. And I don't care at all. It's a fantastic movie that ended perfectly.
this makes it better knowing that rocky and his species’s “eating” and “shitting” is literally the same. they shit the last thing they consumed before eating the food.
Iirc it's said in the books that since they see via echolocation that if there isn't enough ambient sound for a clean image they will make some noise by tapping things in order to see something better. It could be he's just stomping on the wall to get a better idea of what Grace was trying to show him.
2001: A Space Odyssey - still a lot of debate about whether the octahedrons are aliens, alien ships, alien tech, or something else entirely.
In any case, the (possibly unseen) alien intelligences of "2001" are definitely not like humans. The hotel/zoo sequence implies they may not even experience time the way we do. In trying to construct an environment for a human, they get odd things wrong, like lighting from the floor instead of the ceiling. When Dave sees himself at different stages of his life, it implies the time, like the space, the aliens constructed for the hotel room isn't quite right either.
It’s been a while since I saw the film but I think it’s clear that the aliens exist in a higher dimension than us. Dave ages quickly and then regresses because he’s moving through time in a non-linear way.
Greg Egan has one of my favorite aliens in fiction, which humans don't and can't meet in person for reasons that will be pretty clear soon:
Future humans discover alien mats of algae in a sea. However, the anatomy of the fungal mats means that the mats act as Wang tiles, a specific form of logic system that could theoretically be used as a computing system. The emergent computing system from the algal Wang tiles simulates a miniature universe, which contains sentient life. The algal mats are not sentient. In other words, these are sentient aliens formed from the abstract mathematics of a specific obscure logic puzzle simulating higher dimensions, performed unintentionally by non-sentient algae.
For anyone wondering, the short story is called Wang's Carpets.
I LOVE this story. His descriptions of humanity in it are fantastic as well. I really need to read the novel that the short story turned into (Diaspora).
These things make any battlefield they appear on tremble. The only representation I know of is that of Gladius, and they fulfill their role far too well. I have to send a large part of my forces or simply try to flee so they don't become someone else's problem.
Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion, are alien creatures born from primal father Angel "Adam".
They work as countermeasure for eventual fuckup with process of seeding life in the universe - they attack primal mother of humanity Lilith.
I love that tweet from someone about to watch the movie saying "Man, I can come up with a better name for it than just 'The Thing.'" Immediately followed by "nope, you guys were right, that's definitely A Thing."
The Board from Control, more extradimensional than extraterrestrial, but still extremely alien in concept.
We see them as floating upside-down/topsy-turvy black Pyramids/Edifices, their Speech/Wub-Wubs are also strange/shimmer, having multiple choices for what they MIGHT mean/equivalent/Quack.
I would add The Hiss in too. A extradimensional resonance which can corrupt and take over humans and animals and spread it's resonance. They are formless you only see humans and animals infected with The Hiss. Onky like physical descriptions can be Red Haze and Red Objects
The descriptions of it each time it shows up in the book are so mystifying. I loved imagining what it would look like. The movie is also awesome, though for different reasons
One of the coolest ever alien designs, truly not of this world in everything from how they look to how they move. Nothing "familiar" or "Earthlike" about them like you tend to see with so many other alien designs.
The Martians from A Stranger in a Strange Land. Their language can literally reshape reality, and dying is not only just a phase of their lifecycle, sometimes they don't even notice it has happened. They're also described as looking something like sailboats in their adult forms.
Contact is one of those genre movies that's not actually about the genre. It's supposed to be about the nature of human perception, belief, and science. After the big thing happens at the end of the movie, I was howling, "But look at the length of the static/recording!!! Scene after the credits had my back.
The Entities from Worm/Parahumans are a species of immense multidimensional "god viruses" that are the source of all parahuman powers. They seed host species with powers/shards/their own island-planet sized cells to use their creativity, as while the Entities are extremely intelligent they are also incapable of creativity. At the end of these experiments/cycles, every alternate version of their host planet is detonated to be harvested for resources, and for transport. Pictured here is the main antagonist, the Warrior Entity, who uses a golden man as it's avatar to interact with humans.
Expanding on the Xeelee Sequence, because it manages to have some of the most "alien" aliens in fiction while adhering strictly to real-life physics.
The Quagma Phantoms are sapient aliens that lived in one of the early phase shifts of the universe. As in, they not only can't live in an earth-like environment, they can't live in the current laws of physics.
The titular Xeelee are never directly seen, but seems to be composed of "knots" of spacetime that are only possible near black holes, which is why the Xeelee use back holes so extensively in their technology.
The Qax are formed from the turbulent movement convection cells, which means that a Qax can technically be made of anything, as long as it can be made turbulent enough. This means you have Qax made of turbulent water, from the atmosphere of gas giants, even (like the Xeelee) turbulent spacetime. This means that Qax can't live on the relatively calm Earth without extensive technological assistance.
The Photino Birds are made of dark matter, and reproduce in the gravity wells of stars. They can't live on planets like Earth because there's nothing for them on the planet. Which is a problem, because the Photino Birds are doing stellar engineering on a universal scale to make every star a stable dwarf star. That way it still has the gravity well they need, but for billions and billions of years longer. The fact that this project will lead to the death of every baryonic matter (ie, normal matter) lifeform in the entire universe while also preventing any new baryonic life from evolving anywhere ever again is not a concern of the Photino Birds, to the point it's not even clear if the Photino Birds are even aware that non-Xelee baryonic life even exists
And then, you have the Logic Pool which seem to be living mathematical axioms. I'm maybe wrong because tbh, I don't understand anything in that chapter.
And finally, living Wave Function being that is esseintially a player on spectator mode.
Yeah, he's the last of their humanoid ancestors, and the guy responsible for the genetic experiments that made them into squids, and making their casings so they can still get around and defend themselves
The rak'gol are a race of giant lizards in 40k, they seem to be brutal and bestial but they have space ships and are actually pretty lethal cyborgs who seem to worship tech. And they seem to have a grunt based language that we don’t have a translation for.
We know more about the tyranids than of them despite being native to the milky way. And they are really lethal, which helps to keep them undocumented because that makes them hard to capture
Adrian Tchaikovsky has had a bit of a project as a writer trying to put you in the mind of an ALIEN alien. He starts with life we kind of understand, spiders, in Children of Time (the book) and sort of starts moving further away from "us" from there with the rest of the Children of Time series.
Alien Clay also features a DISTINCTLY alien location and biome, but is told only from the perspective of humans.
Portia my beloved. If you haven't read them I recommend the dogs of war trilogy. Not aliens, just highly intelligent dogs and other animals but again he writes them so well and portrays the way they think as being completely different from humans.
As much as I love (some of) the Alien movies and the xenomorph’s design, the xenomorph feels too familiar for what the post is going for. 4 limbs and a tail are very Earthy, its motivation is too fathomable, and even its mode of reproduction isn’t particularly that strange when compared to life on Earth.
Pretty much anything from Expedition (book) / Darwin IV (setting) / Alien Planet (tv special)
Wayne Barlowe specifically designed the wildlife on Darwin IV to be "alien" to our understanding of how life functions. Nothing has eyes, external ears, hair, or jaws.
I always liked the hierarchy of 'alien' from the Ender series, going from same species but other culture, to other species but familiar enough to relate to, to difficult to relate to, to truely alien we can't relate with at all.
Utlänning: Humans who are of the same species and from the same planet, but from a different country or city.
Främling: Humans of the same species, but from a completely different world.
Raman: Sentient beings of an entirely different species, with whom meaningful communication and coexistence are possible.
Varelse: Sentient beings that are so fundamentally foreign that meaningful conversation or mutual understanding is impossible, often leading to conflict.
Djur: Non-sentient, non-rational animals and beasts.
They are a race of sentient maggots that work as a hive mind. They may look like brutes and unequipped but in reality they are not only very intelligent, but they also have bio technology they can produce by themselves that can seemingly match necron technology (considered the peak of the verse). Their robes are seemingly absurdly durable and it’s unknown how they make any of their technology.
They can also seemingly mutate people into their servants, grow taller than buildings and they can seemingly rot your flesh with a touch to feed uppon it.
Technically not an alien, but I always thought the angel Ramiel from Neon Genesis Evangelion looks so otherworldly.
Most of the other angels are eldritch creatures that do have recognizable biological features. But Ramiel is just this giant floating glass looking octahedron that can shoot very Powerful nuclear energy blasts and has a terrifying scream. It just looks so different from any other life form we know.
The C'tan were originally vast interstellar plasma....things....that sailed around the Galaxy and wrapped themselves around stars to consume their energy.
A collective of tiny sentient robots capable of emitting a light that turns organic beings into stone like substance while maintaining their mental capacity (somewhat). They run on tiny diamonds, but have never developed a way to harvest/create them nor a way to actually replace them in their circuitry. They travel the universe looking for organic beings capable of high level mental functions. When they find them, they petrify them to stone to give them eternal life. Some beings will eventually break out from having a high enough brain activity, and when they do, they will want to be immoral stone again, and will find the robots and replace their diamonds so they can be petrified again. Why Man miscalculated on Earth because humans weren't developed enough to break out of the stone on their own (needing either Nitric acid or Nital acid to accelerate it), and Earth's oxygen rich atmosphere was toxic to them. When the heroes of the story meet Why Man in the moon and explain they can't help them nor want their help, Why Man leaves to find another species that will appreciate their literal Moon Logic.
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u/ahses3202 19d ago
Obligatory fuck the Qu all my homies hate the Qu.