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.
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.