Do we know an alien that.......it is actually an Alien in fiction?

[-Ezio-]

Q from star trek. so ancient and powerful that there is no way we'll ever understand them.

 

[CaptainMarvelous]

OT: I remember a book a while back with an alien that was only portrayed as a ray of light. That apparently wasn't his real form, but one those looking upon him could understand.

Yeah, you're pretty much describing Ultraman. He's actually made of light but merged with an astronaut so that he could live and thats why he turns into an 80 foot tall silver guy. Oddly enough, depending on the show, he can be more and more alien.

 

[DoPo]

Since Lovecraft has been mentioned (obviously), here you go Protection [http://arthursclassicnovels.com/sheckley/protect10.html] a short story by Robert Sheckley.

"But what are you?"

"A validusian derg."

"A what?"

"I am -- open your larynx a little wider please. Let me see now. I am the Spirit of Christmas Past. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Bride of Frankenstein. The -- "

"Hold on," I said. "What are you trying to tell me -- that you're a ghost or a creature from another planet?"

"Same thing," the derg replied. "Obviously."

You can sort of grasp stuff about the alien but never actually comprehend it. It also seems to follow some fairytale laws, so that doesn't actually help much. Actually if you go through Sheckleys stories you'll find a lot of other similar aliens. I mean in the sense that you can grasp stuff about them but not really how they operate. A lesser version of eldritch abominations, I suppose - while Lovecraftian creatures would drive one mad with their incomprehensibility, Sheckley's ones would spare your sanity. Well, eventually there is nothing stopping humans from understanding the aliens but at least at first glance they are weird. Here is another one to illustrate it Diplomatic Immunity [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32040/32040-h/32040-h.htm].

Moving on, Mage: the Ascension had the Zigg'raugglurr (erm, in a single instance, but still) called also the Zigg. They are described as yellow floating orbs, sporadically changing size, from a few inches to a few yards across, covered with reptilian scales and pulsating veins. They also exist in a dimension beyond ours and can choose (to an extent) how they interact with our reality, for example they can enter any portion of the timestream, they want, or change what portion of their bodies is in three dimensions and manifested at any one point (hence why they appear "pulsating").

 

[Xpwn3ntial]

OT: I remember a book a while back with an alien that was only portrayed as a ray of light. That apparently wasn't his real form, but one those looking upon him could understand.

Yeah, you're pretty much describing Ultraman. He's actually made of light but merged with an astronaut so that he could live and thats why he turns into an 80 foot tall silver guy. Oddly enough, depending on the show, he can be more and more alien.

Not quite what I was getting at. Ultraman is an 80-foot tall guy made of light and an astronaut, this alien is... something that presents itself as a ray of light.

 

[Marik2]

Reality tends to be stranger than fiction. If you want true alien then look up some of the most bizarre life on the planet. Most aliens tends to come from life, though culture is something we tend to base in reality also. But as I said if you want alien reality is your best bet.

That's a really great point and something that people should be aware of

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

Oh my.

As with ghosts and 'supernatural' inanity, 'aliens' are pretty much fiction, with one little, but significant difference:

Aliens could actually exist. It's elitist and complete bollocks to assume that only our planet brought about 'intelligent' life. Then again, math tells us that it is highly improbable of something like this actually happening, at all.

So... for the best down-to-Earth-approach I can muster right now: Consider the viri, viruses, tiny little machines that are not living or alive per se, but capable of using and abusing living organisms of all sorts to reproduce, duplicate themselves. How's that about truly scary, alien tech?

Heck, even the majority of bacteria and other very small lifeforms on Earth are so alien to us we risk going mad trying to comprehend their nature.

 

[Johnny Impact]

Yes.

So alien that the only way we can interact with them is so bizarre that it was used to fuel LSD trips when the film came out.

There are other works people have mentioned, Lovecraft, Stapledon, most long running Sci-Fi shows like Star Trek or Dr Who have one turn up every so often but overall 2001 still has the most inhuman alien ever.

IIRC the Monolith was a machine. Vastly complex, so advanced as to appear magical, it was nevertheless without consciousness. It qualifies as alien but it is not "an alien." [/nitpick]

OT: Well, there are two definitions that come to mind. We have "foreign to our experience, but comprehensible with study," or, "unknowable by any human means."

The Cthulhu mythos is probably the best representation of both ideas. The lesser horrors are mostly of the first category, taking the form of giant bats, tentacular masses, etc. There are life forms on Earth weirder than that. The grander beings, especially the Elder Gods, fall into the second category, beings who are realer than real, existing in more dimensions than we can perceive or hypothesize, whose mere dreams drive thousands of sensitives to insanity, and whose appearance breaks even the strongest of human minds.

Star Trek, Doctor Who, and most scifi shows have a large number of beings in the first category (Daleks, the Horta), and one or two in the second (Q).

 

[TheMagicIndian]

The only one that I can think of (other than the Lovecraft ones) is the one that "appears" in the Doctor Who episode called "Midnight." It's a being that lives on a planet that nothing can live on and even the Doctor doesn't know what it is, what it looks like, how it thinks, and how it behaves. If you ask me, that fits your bill quite nicely. And to top things off, the people in the episode become terrified at the idea of it.

 

[Gormech]

Any and everything is possible, but it doesn't have to be.
Now give that an identification of life (also a variable term) and perhaps a few random rules of its existance and you get to start limiting down on just how out-there some of the unknowns are.

Think of existance in itself as a frequency, with things tuning in and out to relative normalities and then start adding layers of all these things to widen the variables.

Finally, we have to start adding different senses. I found this best done by thinking of life as a computer program. You can have things that can't be seen/heard/felt for any reason, basically no-clipping through everything or just certain things. You also have selective variables that exist only under certain circumstances, causing things like fake versions of things replacing the origional and then doing so again without any noticable effect even to the thing that is being changed itself.

Good luck all of you.

[edit- also for fiction and being on topic, I'd say the origin of the weeping angels is a start.]

 

[Euryalus]

The most "alien" thing that I could think of would be a hive mind. I mean along the lines of like ants acting as individual brain cells even though there are in fact separate creatures. Get enough of these hive mind ants together and they form a high functioning intelligence. That would be weird to interact with.

Kinda like the Geth from mass effect actually, rather hard to mentally visualize even though I get the basic concept.

That's basically the flood from halo... except without the zombie horror schtick.

 

[MammothBlade]

The Lovecraft-inspired abominations of Saya No Uta. To see them is madness and absolute terror. For a normal meatbag human anyway. Hehehehehe!

Reality tends to be stranger than fiction. If you want true alien then look up some of the most bizarre life on the planet. Most aliens tends to come from life, though culture is something we tend to base in reality also. But as I said if you want alien reality is your best bet.

As "reality is stranger than fiction" is my escapist motto, I have to say yes, but reality[sup]TM[/sup] is even stranger than that! Fiction is reality and reality is fiction and both are Schrodinger's cat howling as it mutates into a ravenous bearded tentacle monster with no eyes.

 

[SweetShark]

Yes.

So alien that the only way we can interact with them is so bizarre that it was used to fuel LSD trips when the film came out.

There are other works people have mentioned, Lovecraft, Stapledon, most long running Sci-Fi shows like Star Trek or Dr Who have one turn up every so often but overall 2001 still has the most inhuman alien ever.

Actually, this is very close I must say about the "behaviour" of this.

 

[Warachia]

yup hp lovecraft. the aliens in that are so alien they are beyond human comprehension

I was going to say this, and also Eternal Darkness, that is a great example of Aliens being truly Alien, especially when you play as the doctor who tries dissection to see how they work and he discovers they have no organs.

 

[Seanfall]

Sometimes what's alien about something isn't so much it's appearance as it's culture. Lets take the Asari for example. They are monogendered. They reproduce not so much threw Biology as threw a psudeo physic link. Their culture is also very different from human culture. They look like us yes...but that's were the similarities end. They have different values, morals, codes of conduct. The Justicars are about as Alien as the Asari can get imo. Yes we have parallels, but the roots of these beleifs are very different. That's just my two cents though.

And if you want 'alien beyond human understanding' H.P. Lovecraft. Their's a whole bevy of stories with this idea in them. But...At The Mountains of madness is probably your best bet for this sorta thing. Shoggath anyone?

 

[Terrible Opinions]

Hitchhiker's Guide had a species of alien that took the form of the colour blue...

 

[Krogent]

How about The Andromeda Strain? It may seem similar to other things on our planet in a few superficial ways, but while it's totally comprehensible, it's also completely alien and unlike anything we have on earth.

 

[Random berk]

Not being into Lovecraft myself, I would say my favourite answer to this is the Tyranid Hive Mind. Not the race, but the Hive Mind itself. We know nothing about it except its desire to consume, and the slave organisms it creates to achieve that end. We don't know where it came from, or why it does what it does. We don't even know its nature. It has a direct link to the more powerful beasts and controls them, but as far as we can tell it doesn't come from them, since the destruction of even an entire hive fleet doesn't diminish it in any way. Its intelligence and cunning continues to reveal new extents, and we can never seem to learn what its true nature is.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

I don't quite remember properly, but aren't the Tralmalfodorians (spelling?) from Slaughterhouse 5 rather bizarre and hard to comprehend? I'll have to read it again.

I guess they're not extraterrestrial, but triffids are supposedly incomprehensible to humans, I'd say they were about as alien as it really gets.

 

[Nekron_X]

the type of beings you're looking for are labeled at tvtropes under starfish aliens;
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarfishAliens
beings that look either completely inhuman, or have a culture completely different from ours. they have completely different morals then us(see the link within the link covering morals for blue and orange morality.)They exist, just not in popular culture, since, at least the people i've met, want to be able to see creatures that they can somewhat relate to, rather than being completely terrified of something that can't immediately understand. is everyone like that? no, but that's just my personal experience with them. Honestly...i'd like to meet them,but i just know that i couldn't actually understand them no matter what, and would more than likely be scared shitless for a long time before i worked up the courage to try and accept them as they are.