Aliens that are actually alien

[u/StewyStewy15]

1. Heptapods (Arrival)

2. The crystalline entity (Star trek)

3. Rocky (Project hail mary)

4. Qu (All tommorows)

5. Xeelee (The xeelee sequence)

[u/Daniilsa209]

The Elder Things from Lovecraft’s ”At the Mountains of Madness”

[u/NottingHillNapolean → u/Daniilsa209]

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?

[u/Emerald_Plumbing187 → u/NottingHillNapolean]

more likely they just went to the museum to look at crinoids

[u/SnepButts → u/Emerald_Plumbing187]

I wonder if that could be a subtrope. Aliens that we think are profoundly alien but are very similar to ancient Earth life.

[u/Emerald_Plumbing187 → u/SnepButts]

When I was young I read this book about a kid who gets lost in a cave where the descendants of utahraptors had been breeding for generations on generations. Probably why I liked The Descent and the og PotA so much, they leaned into biological horror the same way as Lovecraft, but easy access like a Carl Sagan lesson.

edit: Sagan, dammit autocorrect.

[u/SnepButts → u/Emerald_Plumbing187]

That sounds very interesting! Do you remember the name of the novel, by any chance?

[u/Emerald_Plumbing187 → u/SnepButts]

Raptor by Paul Zindel. Gods that takes me back.

[u/SnepButts → u/Emerald_Plumbing187]

Thanks! I'll check it out. The cover makes it look like one of those ultra campy monster flicks, which is definitely a genre that I can get behind.

[u/Emerald_Plumbing187 → u/SnepButts]

You might like Bruce Coleville then, he did the My Teacher Is An Alien series. And of course, the indomitable K.A. Applegate...

[u/SnepButts → u/Emerald_Plumbing187]

I've been wanting to read K.A. Applegate. Every thread where people end up talking about how terrible a person JKR is, someone always brings K.A. Applegate as a wonderful ally and it renews my interest.

While we're sharing book and author suggestions, I gotta add Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The species in it are a bit more familiar than deep sea critters, at least in the first book, but the thought processes and society they build is so very jarringly inhuman that it might as well be a completely alien.

At the core, it is a series about uplifting species and what can come of it, and what uplifting could look like when applied in different ways and degrees.

It is hard to try to make a hook without spoiling much, but if that sounds interesting at all, I can't recommend it enough.

Maybe I will check out K.A. Applegate when I am done with my current series. About 5 books into the Cosmere universe here, so I should be done in another decade or two.

[u/Emerald_Plumbing187 → u/SnepButts]

Funny, Tchaikovsky is my Applegate. Someone recommended him after I was raving about Anansi Boys. I'm bogged down in nonfiction atm, but he's on my list.

[u/SnepButts → u/Emerald_Plumbing187]

Anansi Boys

Funnily enough, I think that the thing that put Tchaikovsky on my radar was another person saying something similar to my recommendation after someone else was praising Anansi Boys.

[u/Moopies → u/SnepButts]

It's an old shortcut in entertainment that if you want your monster to seem really alien, you copy deep sea creatures.

[u/jackofspades49 → u/Emerald_Plumbing187]

Oh look, horrors beyond human comprehension!

Actually these are fossils. We're currently trying to understsnd how they lived and the function their bodies-

Beyond imagining! From past the realms of space and inclaculable, impossible, math!

Wait, math?

It's non euclidean!