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[MAtgS]

Animorphs was purposely written this way (which later made things more difficult for the TV show)

& those are just the ones there were pictures of.

 

[Toxi]

Animorphs was purposely written this way (which later made things more difficult for the TV show)

& those are just the ones there were pictures of.

Don't forget the depictions of the Yeerks and the Iskoort homeworld.

Oh yeah, and there are several books (Any Ax-narrated book, The Andalite Chronicles, the Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Visser) that are done from the viewpoint of aliens.

For a kid's series about teenagers transforming into animals, Animorphs had some fucking amazing world-building.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Looks a bit like something from a zoo but big and intelligent is a step up from looks like an actor wearing a costume. But it's the same sort of thing.

 

[Vulcano's assistant]

Pacific Rim, expected of course Wayne Barlowe is probably one of the the best designing alien creatures.

 

[Toxi]

Looks a bit like something from a zoo but big and intelligent is a step up from looks like an actor wearing a costume. But it's the same sort of thing.

If you're talking about Animorphs, all I can say is that the most prominent alien in the series is a blue centaur with a bladed tail and stalk eyes that has no mouth so he speaks telepathically and eats through his hooves. When transformed into a human, he is overwhelmed by the sensation of taste and becomes addicted to certain food like cinnamon buns and cigarette butts.

And he's one of the most human aliens.

Pacific Rim, expected of course Wayne Barlowe is probably one of the the best designing alien creatures.

A lot of Pacific Rim monsters take the general shape or features of modern animals.

For example, Leatherback is supposed to resemble a Gorilla and Otachi is supposed to resemble a bat. Of course, they still are really crazy-looking. I love Otachi especially with her split jaw, frog-like poison throat sack, and prehensile grabbing tail.

 

[Platy]

Pacific Rim, expected of course Wayne Barlowe is probably one of the the best designing alien creatures.

I saw an article of them mentioning that they designed with "rubber suit" in mind, so would be somehow doable to make it old school ultraman style

 

[kaiju]

If you can stand the bad acting and cheesy sets, Battle Beyond the Stars might fit the bill. Featuring James Cameron's Boobship!

 

[xenist]

The Nestor were a very cool race. Cooler than that movie deserved.

 

[Experien]

People say Farscape but the image is of a person with skin painted, a guy with skin painted and prosthetic eyebrows, and a muppet.

Are there other creatures not humanoid?

 

[Deified Data]

A seldom-used example...

The alien Atevi in CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series are physically anthropomorphic and vaguely reminiscent of high-fantasy elves, but it's their culture that makes them spring to mind as being truly "alien" and what makes Foreigner such a great series. It's basically the story of a human diplomat who has to navigate the precarious social structures of a race that's obsessed with math, has no concept of love or friendship, and use assassination as an every day tool for settling disputes.

 

[Rodney McKay]

People say Farscape but the image is of a person with skin painted, a guy with skin painted and prosthetic eyebrows, and a muppet.

Are there other creatures not humanoid?

Their spaceship is actually a living creature.

 

[psylah]

Pacific Rim, expected of course Wayne Barlowe is probably one of the the best designing alien creatures.

Had no idea he was behind some of the designs.

 

[Rentahamster]

"Three World Collide" (the baby eating aliens story) has a really good take on aliens that are completely different from us in both form and philosophy. It's written by the guy that does the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfic.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/y5/the_babyeating_aliens_18/

"First of all," Akon said. "First of all. Does anyone have any plausible hypothesis, any reasonable interpretation of what we know, under which the aliens do not eat their own children?"

"There is always the possibility of misunderstanding," said the former Lady Psychologist, who was now, suddenly and abruptly, the lead Xenopsychologist of the ship, and therefore of humankind. "But unless the entire corpus they sent us is a fiction... no."

The alien holos showed tall crystalline insectile creatures, all flat planes and intersecting angles and prismatic refractions, propelling themselves over a field of sharp rocks: the aliens moved like hopping on pogo sticks, bouncing off the ground using projecting limbs that sank into their bodies and then rebounded. There was a cold beauty to the aliens' crystal bodies and their twisting rotating motions, like screensavers taking on sentient form.

And the aliens bounded over the sharp rocks toward tiny fleeing figures like delicate spherical snowflakes, and grabbed them with pincers, and put them in their mouths. It was a central theme in holo after holo.

The alien brain was much smaller and denser than a human's. The alien children, though their bodies were tiny, had full-sized brains. They could talk. They protested as they were eaten, in the flickering internal lights that the aliens used to communicate. They screamed as they vanished into the adult aliens' maws.

Babies, then, had been a mistranslation: Preteens would have been more accurate.

Still, everyone was calling the aliens Babyeaters.

The children were sentient at the age they were consumed. The text portions of the corpus were very clear about that. It was part of the great, the noble, the most holy sacrifice. And the children were loved: this was part of the central truth of life, that parents could overcome their love and engage in the terrible winnowing. A parent might spawn a hundred children, and only one in a hundred could survive - for otherwise they would die later, of starvation...

When the Babyeaters had come into their power as a technological species, they could have chosen to modify themselves - to prevent all births but one.

But this they did not choose to do.

For that terrible winnowing was the central truth of life, after all.

"We, um, have to do something," said the Ship's Engineer, speaking up for the first time. "I've been, um, looking into what Babyeater science knows about their brain mechanisms. It's really quite fascinating, they mix electrical and mechanical interactions, not the same way our own brain pumps ions, but -"

"Get to the point," said Akon. "Immediately."

"The children don't die right away," said the Engineer. "The brain is this nugget of hard crystal, that's really resistant to, um, the digestive mechanisms, much more so than the rest of the body. So the child's brain is in, um, probably quite a lot of pain, since the whole body has been amputated, and in a state of sensory deprivation, and then the processing slowly gets degraded, and I think the whole process gets completed about a month after -"

The Lady Sensory threw up. A few seconds later, so did the Xenopsychologist and the Master.

"If human society permits this to go on," said the Lord Pilot, his voice very soft, "I will resign from human society, and I will have friends, and we will visit the Babyeater starline network with an army. You'll have to kill me to stop me."

 

[Cryxo93]

Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa, the film and manga.

 

[Shrike_Priest]

I loved the way Dan Simmons described the Night Howlers from his Timequake treatment which never ended up being filmed. Brief, not conceptual, but it worked. In my head they looked awesome. It's a shame the movie never happened.

http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2011_09.htm


"In 1967, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke had to abandon their original ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey because the “aliens” that the SF writer Clarke had envisioned simply weren’t doable or convincing by the level of special effects of the day. So Kubrick went with an unseen alien presence – represented again by the black monolith – and the last reel of the film became a pseudo-religious metaphor (especially for those who dropped a lid or so of acid before coming in for the last reel.)

Since then, we’ve seen a lot of interesting extraterrestrials ranging from the rubber masks of the original Star Wars cantina scenes to the completely digital. They’ve been amusing and they’ve been horrific but very few, if any, have been convincing.

The Night Howlers as they shuffle in from landing balconies through deep shadows into this echoing sanctuary simply have to be the most convincing alien creatures in the history of imaginative cinema.

Usually our SFX imaginations for aliens extrapolate from insects or reptiles and enlarge proportions to disturbing size, but the Night Howlers are creatures of a totally alien ecology. Our shock of encounter with them has to be equal to that of the eight Tiger Team members.

The Night Howlers are a species – we shall learn – that evolved from six-armed and web-winged flying creatures (technically animals that soared from tree to tree like some of the earliest mammals on Earth) to a sentient and spacefaring species with an advanced culture for tens of thousands of years, but who then chose to abandon technology and to return to the trees and continue their evolution in the wild. They should be disturbing and large enough to be threatening and their movements in their former temple should be clumsy – one thinks of the bat-winged pteranodon’s shuffling, awkward movements in Jurassic Park III where we see how the ancient flying reptiles must have literally had to walk on their taloned knuckles – and there should be a hint of their former advanced social intelligence in however many eyes they have.

Also, the Night Howlers have been greeting their galaxy-rise and God with their incredible hooting calls for so many thousands of generations that their probosci and cranial structure should have evolved like some complicated musical instrument, all resonating bone chambers and living-tissue woodwind reeds and membranes.

And they should look dangerous, lethal, but not in the slavering Alien tradition. The Night Howlers are, like the eight homo sapiens standing there staring at them, evolved from a predatory killer species made even more lethal by the evolution of a cunning intelligence. But there is also something reflective in their alien gazes. These are creatures who – for hundreds of thousands of their years – have had a daily and intimate relationship with some force they believe to be God."

 

[Kurdel]

Love this thread, always fascinated with this kind of scifi!

 

[irfaanator]

Farscape

I agree

 

[mcz117chief]

Shivans from Freespace. They are what Reapers from Mass Effect wanted to be all along. They never explained what Shivans are, what are their motives or anything at all actually. They are just this mysterious force that refuses to communicate (well they actually do but it is complicated) and they just attack for what appears to be no reason and then vanish for no reason too.

Check out this boss video where they get a reveal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcWhhsRGsAI

 

[kaiju]

People say Farscape but the image is of a person with skin painted, a guy with skin painted and prosthetic eyebrows, and a muppet.

Are there other creatures not humanoid?

Tons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_in_Farscape

 

[forgeforsaken]

People say Farscape but the image is of a person with skin painted, a guy with skin painted and prosthetic eyebrows, and a muppet.

Are there other creatures not humanoid?

Well the muppet is certainly not humanoid.

The ship is a living bio-mechanical organism, it even gets pregnant.

and the pilot

And random other aliens.

 

[raindoc]

Thread title: "... truly alien..."

OP: "non-humanoid"



So racist. I bet OP is an imperial.

 

[Toa TAK]

Animorphs is a wonderful example. Some of the craziest and most diverse aliens out there. You got the mouthless centaur-like Andalites that communicate through telepathy and eat through their hooves, the genetically engineered Hork-Bajir that are arboreal herbivorous reptiles covered in blades, the multi-legged worm-like Taxxons that are so voracious they cannot even be fully mind-controlled, the blind photosynthetic parasitic mind-controlling Yeerks that went from longing for something greater to power-hungry overlords, the android Chee with their extremely restricting pacifist programming, the nightmarish Howlers that are living weapons too playful and innocent to realize how horrible their actions really are...

And those are just the most prominent alien species.

Just look at this fan illustration of the Iskoort.
Or the Mortrons.
Or the Helmacrons.
Or the Arn.

I've wanted to spec out an Animorphs RPG featuring a bunch of different races from the book for YEARS.

Animorphs was purposely written this way (which later made things more difficult for the TV show)

& those are just the ones there were pictures of.

All these photos but not one of.. The One!

 

[still]

Blindsight's race of aliens has a creative, non-humanoid design. Actually it's less how they look (a bit like a giant starfish) but their psychology and biology which makes them truly alien. It's also overall a cool novel.

There is actually a fitting trope for what you seek: Starfish Aliens

 

[Matty77]

There's a good one!

This thread has had some terrible suggestions. Dragonball, Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Farscape? Human like. Come on. It's not like it's impossible to imagine something truly alien. Here's an idea I just came up with:

Basic body shape is a disk. It holds itself perpendicular to the ground. It is ringed by about a dozen appendages that stick out from the edges of the disk. Each appendage is identical. It's like a piston, and the creature moves by pumping the rear piston touching the ground, rolling it forward. The pistons have limited side to side movement - they basically just go in and out. Each appendage has an opening at the end. When it unfurls, it reveals three finger like protrusions, like those at the end of an elephant's trunk. At the center of the opening is a circular lamprey like mouth. That mouth is ringed by small photoreceptors. It constructs a composite picture from these individually simple receptors, which are revealed and exposed in a sequence as it rotates. It has limited side to side movement, but is extremely quick on the open plains where it evolved. Now imagine how different this creature's brain would be to manage such a strange physiology. There's your alien.

Sounds like something out of Lovecraft.

 

[forgeforsaken]

Doctor Who frequently has weird non-humanoid aliens too.

 

[Renegade Yeti]

Any of the Ian banks novels , pretty much all the culture novels have baffling creature descriptions , for example the dwellers from the algebraist

 

[Tuck]

My biggest pet peeve with science fiction has to be the humanoid alien races. I mean it isn't enough to make me dislike the work, but it just seems lazy from the creator when they make aliens basically a skin variation of human.

Recent example, even though I loved the movie, is Guardians of the Galaxy. Nothing felt truly alien. Even Groot has a human-like face and a body with arms/legs that resembled humans.

Lol I remember mentioning this same complaint in the GotG thread after I saw the movie and a bunch of people jumping down my throat for it.

 

[chuckddd]

 

[Green Wiggly]

Prophet (Image Comics)

Is that a different thing than this?

 

[Rodney McKay]

The Ringworld books are both good at this and bad at this. They have some really interesting non-human stuff, like the Puppeteer race of aliens with their insanely advance technological advancements and really weird homeworld.

But at the same time, the only other primary alien race is a race of aggressive cat people and the Ringworld itself is an Earth environment filled with humanoid races. The details of the Ringworld itself are interesting (like just how massive its scope is), but the race that built it is about as cliche as it gets these days (I know the book 45 years old so it was probably fresh at the time).

 

[jason10mm]

Robert Forwards "Dragons Egg" is a great alien perspective book. Peter Watts' "Blindsight" has an EXTREMELY inhuman alien, heck even the humans are barely human.

 

[gdt]

Asimov's The Gods Themselves is amazing with this.

It's a complete picture of an alien society and it's amazing. Blew my mind in high school.

 

[Dan]

Is that a different thing than this?

No, it actually picked up with the same issue numbering, but you can more or less consider it a complete and total reboot spearheaded by Brandon Graham (King City). I don't know shit about what Liefeld was up to, but I love Graham and company's Prophet run. It's a little like Conan the Barbarian in space.

 

[Platy]

Does short fiction counts ?

TRULY ALIEN aliens is one of the reasons why I always had THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT as one of my favorite short fictions

 

[Mr_Appleby]

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep has a pretty different non-human race in it. The Tines are pretty unique. Iain Banks typically had some weird aliens in his Culture books, especially Consider Phlebas and Excession. Niven as well in Ringworld. Basically happens a lot more in books.

The Mote in God's Eye features alien aliens, psychologically as well as physically and is a fantastically well realised first contact book.

Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker is a novel that features something of what you're after.

Read Solaris. A lot of Lem's stuff is pretty cool too.

These are fantastic mentions, jump on them.

All of The Culture books are on Amazon for at most $12 each, get that shit now.

Get all of these too. And the non-culture ones, particularly The Algebraist for this topic.

For my two cents, since a lot of what I was going to add had been said, I recommend Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud which features an intelligent gas cloud, and Peter Watt's Firefall which is partially a meditation on what defines intelligence or sapience.

I'm sure there's others too just not coming to mind right now.

 

[Blizzard]

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep has a pretty different non-human race in it. The Tines are pretty unique. Iain Banks typically had some weird aliens in his Culture books, especially Consider Phlebas and Excession. Niven as well in Ringworld. Basically happens a lot more in books.

I was going to say, Vernor Vinge seems to really like doing this. I think each book I've read by him features at least one very unusual alien species.

Examples, spoilered in case someone wants to find out for themselves:

Spoiler

Intelligent plants with no longterm memory. Some random alien race found them and added little carts with longterm storage, enabling them to drive around and become a successful and spacefaring species.

Doglike creatures with pack intelligence. The different personalities and skills of each individual animal blends into the pack intelligence. The parts of the individual communicate by sound.

Spiderlike creatures that aren't too unusual besides having having to rebuild their society every so often because their sun goes out periodically. The spiders go into ultra deep freeze hibernation underground when this happens, and when the sun comes back their buildings get destroyed.

Vinge also likes treating such alien species as normal perspective chapters. So, you'll be reading a book about various named characters, and you will have to figure out as you go that they are actually some sort of strange alien lifeform, since they'll be talking normally and then suddenly mention mandibles or front legs or pack members or whatever.

 

[RatskyWatsky]

Definitely. There's nothing else quite like it. Publication history is a little weird, but don't let that put you off.

Prophet is amazing and a great suggestion

Sweet! I'll check it out then. The infrequent publication history is actually a + for me since I won't have to buy a new issue every few months.

 

[Mineshaft_Gap]

The two legs two arms and a head body style is very earth centric.

 

[Wag]

DC Comics have had a long history of some pretty interesting sci-fi stuff, including the GL Corps and The Legion of Super Heroes. Some of the Green Lanterns come from planets that aren't carbon based life forms.

 

[ChubbyHuggs]

Prophet (Image Comics)

Wait... Is that an alien shit eating chain?

 

[Zeyphersan]

Sweet! I'll check it out then. The infrequent publication history is actually a + for me since I won't have to buy a new issue every few months.

It's kind of hard to keep track, but I think the main Prophet series just ended, and an epilogue one is beginning? I only hit the second trade on Prophet though, but man it was a ride.

A tangentially related series but still super great is Glory, also published under Image. I read the two in tandem and it introduced me to non-superhero comics and Image comics at the same time

 

[jackissocool]

Sounds like something out of Lovecraft.

I could see that. Wasn't intentional but I've read everything by him so I'm not sure how alien I could do without having any influence from him. I think it's a pretty alien sort of design, though. No flexible joints, no tentacles, no eyes, no arms/legs, no distinct body segmentation. There's nothing remotely like it on earth.

 

[kess]

It's a weak post hoc rationalisation. The real reason is because there are very few non human members of the screen actors guild and tv budgets suck.

Funny how the first season of Trek has a better track record than the later series on this, before humanoids got enshrined as canon:

 

[Platy]

DC Comics have had a long history of some pretty interesting sci-fi stuff, including the GL Corps and The Legion of Super Heroes. Some of the Green Lanterns come from planets that aren't carbon based life forms.

My favorite for this thread is the Green Lantern that is basicaly a math equation. That is Douglas Adams levels of genious

 

[RatskyWatsky]

It's kind of hard to keep track, but I think the main Prophet series just ended, and an epilogue one is beginning? I only hit the second trade on Prophet though, but man it was a ride.

A tangentially related series but still super great is Glory, also published under Image. I read the two in tandem and it introduced me to non-superhero comics and Image comics at the same time

Oh, hmm. Something to look into, I guess!

 

[way more]

I think you mean The Angry Red Planet right? Classic Sid Pink movie. It's shot in this red hue once they reach the planet that gives off a nice effect. Couple of unique alien creatures await. It's a 50's movie, nothing spectacular, but very neat for it's time.

That looks cool but I meant Red Planet with Val Kilmer.

Alien to actual size.


They were just mindless little bugs that found a niche. There was probably more life on the planet in the evolutionary line but those were the ones visible. It was just nice for a movie to be set in space and the aliens are ants or bacteria that don't do much of anything.

 

[HK-47]

The alien chapters in Startide Rising are secretly the second best thing about the book. The best is the uplifted dolphins.

 

[googleplex]

The God's Themselves by Isaac Asimov. Imagines a parallel universe with beings about as far from us as you can imagine...but with similar problems.

Is that the one with the triple sexed aliens?

 

[nitewulf]

The alien chapters in Startide Rising are secretly the second best thing about the book. The best is the uplifted dolphins.

I've been reading this, if you like this, The Gods Themselves by Asimov or Excession by Ian M. Banks will blow your brain.

The introductory chapter of Excession, with a robot drone trying to escape an attack is literally one of the best action/non human thought processes i have ever experienced in my life.

Banks in general was great at this abstraction of non human minds...his star ships are all very very trippy and super intelligent.

Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space series is great at odd aliens and cultures.

Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained - the main antagonist species in this series....just fantastic. very, very innovative.

 

[Green Wiggly]

No, it actually picked up with the same issue numbering, but you can more or less consider it a complete and total reboot spearheaded by Brandon Graham (King City). I don't know shit about what Liefeld was up to, but I love Graham and company's Prophet run. It's a little like Conan the Barbarian in space.

Interesting. It's so strange to hear that something good ended up being based on Liefeld's Image work, when he was cranking out stuff like Troll and Blood Wulf.