Genuinely alien aliens

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bartholen_v1legacy

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Jan 24, 2009
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This has been on my mind recently. Most of sci-fi deals with, or at least includes, extraterrestrial life forms or some other kind of alien creatures. What often bothers me is that these aliens rarely feel genuinely "alien", as in incomprehensible, strange, mysterious, not playing by our rules and have motives or goals beyond our understanding if they have them at all. Most of the time we just get funny-looking human bodies with maybe an extra pair of eyes or a different shape of body.

Just think for example about Mass Effect, which has been hailed as one of the most intricate sci-fi universes. Very few species IMO feel genuinely alien instead of reskinned humans. All the primary races, i.e. turians, humans, krogans, salarians and asari all walk on two legs, have one head and form mostly human-like societies. In fact the only race I can think of that actually feels alien in the ME universe are the hanar, because they look nothing like humans, speak in no way like humans, behave differently from humans and so on.

So my question is: what aliens do you, fellow Escapists, think are genuinely "alien"? I can think of two at the moment: the aliens from Crysis 1 (not 2), which I don't even think were called "ceph" like in the second one and they might well have been a different race entirely, and [LOVECRAFT SPOILER WARNING] the Old Ones from the Cthulhu Mythos. The aliens in Crysis 1 were never truly explained as to what they exactly were or what they intended to do, and perhaps most importantly, ACTUALLY LOOKED ALIEN. The Old Ones are pretty much the same deal, except they were given even less explanation and were presented more like demigods.
 

Fieldy409_v1legacy

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Oct 9, 2008
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Ridley Scott's Alien is the first one that comes to mind. We never knew how smart they were for instance and how much of the creatures behavior was instinct.
 

Vault101

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Sep 26, 2010
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I imagine in Mass effect alot of that has to do with the fact that they still want to "mo-cap" them and use basic human models

(even the krogan)
 

Axolotl

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Feb 17, 2008
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A totally black cuboid, only capable of interacting with us in ways that we cannot understand.
Now that is alien.
 

Carrotslayer

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Jun 14, 2010
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You bring up ME3 but fail to mention the Elcor, Hanar and Keepers? And what about the Rachni? I'm not particulary happy with this sort of discrimination...

But yeah, as someone pointed out: It saves time doing everyone bipedal. Then you don't have to do weird mo-cap stunts trying to give a weird alien a natural behavior.
 

ChupathingyX

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Jun 8, 2010
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The BETA from Muv-Luv Alternative.

Not only do their various "species" resemble a cross between insects and male/female genitalia, but they don't even consider humans to be "living" creatures.

I can't really say anything else without spoilers.
 

ClockworkSailor

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Aug 29, 2011
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I would mention the Pierson's Puppeteers of Larry Niven's Known Space Universe. As a race they are described as herd mentality and lack almost all of the characteristic trait that human society values. In the books its said the only Puppeteers that have courage are insane and exhibit traits of insanity as we know it in addition to being courageous at times.
 

Viper1265

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Jul 12, 2009
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I'd say the zerg from starcraft are quite alien. A race where there is a highly specialized body type for whatever role an individual is tasked with, (Usually killing in the case of the zerg) where said specializations come from organisms that the zerg have encountered which have been assimilated into the zerg genetic code.
 

ClockworkSailor

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Now that you mention the Zerg the Tyranids of 40k fit the bill as well if a bit more disturbingly consuming all in their path completely relentlessly, but I would say that alien races in fiction that are hive mind tend to much more alien then most other alien races
 

kayisking

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Sep 14, 2010
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The real problem is that if we can't comprehend them, how are we supossed to think them up. Aliens in fiction will always be created by our fantasy (or at least untill/if we ever meet the real deal).
 

RoonMian

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Mar 5, 2011
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The older races from Babylon 5 are truly alien aliens as well in my opinion. They've been around for so long that all they care about is bringing younger races on their paths of respectively absolute order or absolute chaos. Extremes like that are especially alien for humans like us who are in between all extremes.
 

ZeroMachine

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Oct 11, 2008
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(WARNING: The following three are from Halo. Please, refrain from flaming me for bringing them up as examples. Regardless of your opinion on Halo, these ARE good examples.)

The Flood from Halo definitely come to mind.

And although they LOOK somewhat humanoid, I'd say the Forerunner are pretty damn alien because of their technology.

Also, the Lekgolo. They're the strange worms that make up the Hunters. The reason you come across paired Hunters most of the time is because they're both made up of a single colony of the worms.
 

Raijha

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Aug 23, 2010
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HardkorSB said:
How about the thing from "The Thing"?
Or, iunno, the Krites (Crites, however you wanna spell it, I've seen both ways)? Just sayin :)
 

WaReloaded

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Jan 20, 2011
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Chairman Miaow said:
HardkorSB said:
How about the thing from "The Thing"?
Such a good film. Can we pretend the remake doesn't exist?
It isn't a remake, it's a prequel! And I thought it was quite good, definitely one of the better Sci-Fi/Horror films released in the last decade.

OT: Does Predator count? I mean, they don't look overly humanoid...
 

HardkorSB

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Mar 18, 2010
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Chairman Miaow said:
HardkorSB said:
How about the thing from "The Thing"?
Such a good film. Can we pretend the remake doesn't exist?
I actually like the re-quel.
The 1982 version is one of my all time favourites and I think is way betrer and more memorable (especially the thing itself) but the new one was pretty decent.

Funny thing (no pun intended):
When Carpenter's film came out it was hated by film critics and movoe goers, especially fans of the original. It was called "the worst remake of all time".