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Finger Prince posted:So, aliens right? Like Xenomorphs, from the Ridley Scott franchise. They have a queen, which lays a bunch of eggs. Then the thing that hatches from an egg is sort of an in-between development step, like a caterpillar or something. That thing then inserts the next development stage into an appropriate host via some orifice (the mouth, in the case of humans, but this doesn't preclude other orifices, if it had turned out differently they might have been called rear end-huggers, but I digress). That creature, called the Xenomorph, breaks free of the host body and skittles off, rapidly growing to human size or larger over the course of several hours. One of those creatures might be another queen, and so the cycle continues. Think of the thing the facehugger implants in the prey as the egg, fertilized by the prey. The queen lays unfertilized eggs along with an organ which goes and and forcibly fertilises the egg. (Really, the hosed up lifecycle they've ended up with at this point is so different that traditional concepts of egg and fertilisation probably don't apply. Remember they're bioengineered weapons, not natural creatures) MikeJF fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Jul 23, 2023 |
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Jul 23, 2023 10:47
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You want alien no I mean REALLY alien lifeforms, try for example Greg Egan's "Wang's Carpets". TLDR: extremely simple effectively monocellular but macroscale lifeforms cover much of a planet; but as an emergent side effect of their biology they simulate a virtual 16-dimensional space which in turn is inhabited by a whole complex ecology including sapient species.
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Jul 23, 2023 21:43
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OK so I think I get it. The queen lays "eggs" that hatch and intermidiate vector creature, which deposits a new "egg" into the host. That "egg" combines with the genetics of the host (this is my understanding of kind of how it works from the last two movies, as far as is possible, and Alien: Resurrection) to create a Xenomorph that is engineered to eradicate all of the host species. The queen is just a bridgehead that uses a parthenogenic "egg laying" analog to spread the infection of Xenomorphs.
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Jul 23, 2023 21:49
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CaptainCrunch posted:A Surface of Fine Azure-Tinted Reflection With Pyroxin Dendritic Inclusions and its compatriots on the planet of Prism in Alan Dean Foster's "Sentenced to Prism." I've already read at least half of the series mentioned here but I'm open to more suggestions!
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Jul 24, 2023 21:33
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Quaint Quail Quilt posted:This was very good thanks for suggesting, are their other books decent?
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Jul 25, 2023 00:00
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Groke posted:You want alien no I mean REALLY alien lifeforms, try for example Greg Egan's "Wang's Carpets". TLDR: extremely simple effectively monocellular but macroscale lifeforms cover much of a planet; but as an emergent side effect of their biology they simulate a virtual 16-dimensional space which in turn is inhabited by a whole complex ecology including sapient species. I can't even think how to explain the creatures in Schild's Ladder but they sure were cool
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Jul 25, 2023 01:07
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Finger Prince posted:So, aliens right? Like Xenomorphs, from the Ridley Scott franchise. They have a queen, which lays a bunch of eggs. Then the thing that hatches from an egg is sort of an in-between development step, like a caterpillar or something. That thing then inserts the next development stage into an appropriate host via some orifice (the mouth, in the case of humans, but this doesn't preclude other orifices, if it had turned out differently they might have been called rear end-huggers, but I digress). That creature, called the Xenomorph, breaks free of the host body and skittles off, rapidly growing to human size or larger over the course of several hours. One of those creatures might be another queen, and so the cycle continues. This is based on the expanded universe books I read a couple decades ago, but the eggs the queen lays aren't eggs as such, just storage devices for the face huggers. The face huggers carry the actual eggs that they jam into people/critters. The eggs absorb the dna they need from the host, fertilising themselves that way, which is why the chest bursters end up having the same body design as the host. One from a human has two arms and legs, one from a dog is mostly quadrapedal, stuff like that. A chestburster can be fed royal jelly to force it to mature into a queen, and it'll sometimes just mature into a queen randomly too. Royal jelly has fun effects on humans, in that mostly it works like mega steroids, apart from a tiny group of people with the right genetic markers where it works like ULTRA SUPER MEGA STEROIDS.They can also be forced to mature by being around enough creatures that can be used as hosts. If a queen is around enough critters that could be hosts it'll evolve into a Queen Mother, a giant queen that only ever lays eggs that hatch new queens. There are male xenomorphs, called hierophants. They tend to be bigger, spikey xenomorphs. A bunch of chestbursters will sometimes mature into hierophants, they'll kill each other, the survivor will mate with a queen and then get eaten. There doesn't appear to be any benefit or reason for this, and it isn't neccessary. The only xenomorph king I remember was built via genetic manipulation. It was very, very big, incredibly dumb and extremely hostile to the nearest xenomorph queen.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:17
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Groke posted:The sequel gives you more of what you want. His Final Architecture trilogy is a big space opera with a whole bunch of different alien cultures. There's female space marines who, considering Tchaikovsky is a 40k guy, are deliberately derivative, crab guys who's drive in life is to build up a literal nest egg for their children and hive-mind cockroach colonies that go around in robot bodies. My personal favourites are the big weird clam dudes who have established a culty empire where other species serve them, despite the fact that they communicate by waving tentacles around and shrieking in a way that nobody can translate properly.
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Aug 1, 2023 08:46
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The Reverand Me posted:My personal favourites are the big weird clam dudes who have established a culty empire where other species serve them, despite the fact that they communicate by waving tentacles around and shrieking in a way that nobody can translate properly. I enjoyed this mental image very much, thankyou
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Aug 25, 2023 08:38
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smarxist posted:I can't even think how to explain the creatures in Schild's Ladder but they sure were cool How about the ones in Wang's Carpets? Twenty-five-thousand-ton living carpets that float deep below the surface of the world-ocean and consume organic molecules that fall from the surface, slowly adding to themselves and splitting off fragments when they get too big. Each carpet has a surface that functions as a Turing machine, and encodes a simulated universe which is so complex that it's developed intelligent life. You can observe the molecular shifts in a carpet and translate that into the activities of the sophonts in the simulated universe. And you can never interact with them. They probably have no idea there's an outside universe, even.
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Jan 18, 2024 20:41
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Parahexavoctal posted:How about the ones in Wang's Carpets? Those fuckers were so weird, that we had to mention them twice on the same page.
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Feb 2, 2024 22:04
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Groke posted:Those fuckers were so weird, that we had to mention them twice on the same page. They recurred. edit: okay, something new: the Cheela, from Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg. They live on the surface of a neutron star. Each Cheela is about the mass of an adult human, and about the volume of a sesame seed. Parahexavoctal fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Feb 3, 2024 |
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Feb 3, 2024 06:20
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smarxist posted:I can't even think how to explain the creatures in Schild's Ladder but they sure were cool Those creatures had their cellular(molecular?/atomic?) analogues made up of discreet bit of reality with different laws of physics that behaved in predictable ways. So think of the different realms of LoP rotating around each other and exchanging energy as, say, cracking sucrose into glucose with an enzyme. The different human cultures in that book were wild too. My favorite bit players were the Archaeonauts. Baseline humans as we are now from, in the setting, 20,000 years ago slowly relivistically cruising the galaxy on sleeper ships while modern humans zip around at light speed as digitized minds into custom bodies with all the transhumanist options one could want. Despite all that when the Archaeonauts reached their first modern planet it wasn't the technological wonders they wanted to learn from their descendants but what new permutations the "Battle of the Sexes" had taken. Well we didn't have innate sexual dimorpism anymore. Instead when people were mutually attracted to each other they would grow compatible genitalia over the course of the week and "our designs were so much more imaginative than nature's could ever be." But these people had decided to make a planetwide celebration of the ancestors' arrival and they didn't want to disappoint so they made up some sci-fi gender essentialist bs like you'd find in Niven or Pournelle. This was a big hit and the Archaeonauts happily went on their way. That was such good fun so messages were sent to the next planets in line and the Archaeos get to see a parade of all sorts of parodies of sci-fi gender speculations. Heinlein, an inverted Gor, mandatory polyamory, you name it. The only scenario they didn't believe was the planet where there was true and complete equality of the sexes and were convinced there was a hidden conspiracy that they weren't able to uncover before they left to continue their journey.
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Feb 11, 2024 14:44
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Yadoppsi posted:Those creatures had their cellular(molecular?/atomic?) analogues made up of discreet bit of reality with different laws of physics that behaved in predictable ways. So think of the different realms of LoP rotating around each other and exchanging energy as, say, cracking sucrose into glucose with an enzyme. Hahahahahaha good god I need to read this book.
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Feb 13, 2024 04:34
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Lawman 0 posted:Hahahahahaha good god I need to read this book. Greg Egan is cool. Other "hard SF" authors will take an idea and run fast and loose with it. Egan will bloody well show you his math.
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Feb 13, 2024 18:02
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Dirigible Behemothaurs are island-sized floating creatures/ecosystems that live within artificial worldlets of unknown origin called "Airspheres", gigantic orbs of atmosphere lit by small central suns. The Behemothaurs can live for aeons, and communicate via symbiotic messenger creatures they grow within themselves. It's unclear how they reproduce, but they are known to "mate" with other Behemothaurs, a process which involves the two merging to create a new, composite conciousness inside a now much larger form. I found The Affront in Excession pretty interesting. A species that enjoys inflicting pain to such an extent that they genetically engineered themselves and their subjects so that victims experience as much as possible pain, fear and anxiety. https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Affront
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Feb 13, 2024 20:05
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Votskomit posted:I found The Affront in Excession pretty interesting. A species that enjoys inflicting pain to such an extent that they genetically engineered themselves and their subjects so that victims experience as much as possible pain, fear and anxiety. the Affront are just the British upper-class
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Feb 14, 2024 11:15
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Are there any aliens where the larvae/juvenile forms are people but their adult forms are not
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Feb 14, 2024 21:16
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:Are there any aliens where the larvae/juvenile forms are people but their adult forms are not Isn't that literally people in the ring world universe?
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Feb 14, 2024 22:30
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:Are there any aliens where the larvae/juvenile forms are people but their adult forms are not There was one of these guys in the early Han Solo books, I think? It's been a while so I can't really remember.
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Feb 15, 2024 08:30
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:Are there any aliens where the larvae/juvenile forms are people but their adult forms are not Yeah but the one I can think of right now is a spoiler.
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Feb 15, 2024 15:06
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Armacham posted:Isn't that literally people in the ring world universe? Pak Protectors, the final adult form, are still sapient and more intelligent than humans, they're just basically enslaved to certain protective instinctive duties. And in the original unmutated species, the 'breeder' phase, which adult humans never advance beyond, was about on the level of a chimpanzee in terms of sapience and intelligence. A bunch got stuck on earth, the elements to trigger a shift of individuals into the final Protector phase later in life didn't exist, so they evolved to become more intelligent and capable in the breeder phase instead. We're basically axalotls. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 19:49
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Icedude posted:There was one of these guys in the early Han Solo books, I think? It's been a while so I can't really remember. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ruurian
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Feb 15, 2024 20:15
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The sequel to Ender's game. It focuses on these aliens who in their natural life cycle undergo a ritual where they get disemboweled and sprout into trees. This led to problems when they did the ritual on humans who do not turn into trees when they get disemboweled. Humanity in Childhood's End. Kif's species on Futurama, who the ''person" phase is actually the penultimate phase after a bunch of weird earlier larval forms, and then after they become mature adults they explode and turn into a sentient swarm of flies. The Neti in the Tales of the Jedi, who become trees in their old age, although a force-sensitive Neti could be reawakened by other powerful force users and wiggle around, like the famous jedi, Ood Bnar. I think there might be a lot of species that have a similar end life cycle where they just kinda slow down and become something that maybe is still alive but doesn't do anything to assert their sentience, like I think that happens to Ents. I wanna say there's some kinda stone creature out there that just slows down with age until like it may still be alive but it's not moving around anymore. But maybe it could reawaken again.
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Feb 15, 2024 21:35
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:Are there any aliens where the larvae/juvenile forms are people but their adult forms are not "Protectors of the Unborn", from James White's Sector General stories. The fetuses are telepathic and sapient, but the planet is so dangerous that sapience is survival-negative and thus the process of being born involves hormones that destroy the sapience and leave the newborn a savage (and parthenogenetic) monster.
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Feb 16, 2024 07:44
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:Are there any aliens where the larvae/juvenile forms are people but their adult forms are not I read a book that had these gigantic sapient caterpillars that eventually entered metamorphosis and emerged as like, non-sapient lemurs it was among the worst books I've ever read and the most shocking part was when it finally hit me what the author's barely disguised fetish was
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Mar 8, 2024 19:25
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Was it loving caterpillars?
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Mar 9, 2024 04:02
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drilldo squirt posted:Was it loving caterpillars? Lemurs sticking caterpillars up their whosits?
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Mar 9, 2024 07:17
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Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_ has aliens with a multi-body mind called the Tines. They have bodies that are shaped sort of like a wolf crossed with an otter with large tympanic membranes on their head. The bodies are about as smart as a really smart dog, but they use the tympanic membranes to network their mind with other bodies, and a pack of 4-8 individuals makes a single human intelligent individual. They can integrate new single bodies, usually this is how babies become part of an adult, but they can integrate an adult, though that's a lot harder. Packs can't stand very close to each other without the mind sounds interfering and making them no longer a pack, so this usually only happens for sex and violence. They have paws and very agile mouths, and use their mouths much like we do hands for complicated work, though militant packs mount metal claws on their paws for fighting. When a pack member dies, the living parts still have some memories from the dead member, and a new member who joins in will share some of his memories and personality. Unless something kills most or all of the pack members, they're effectively immortal but with a personality that shifts over time as new members come into the pack. Completely new packs made entirely of puppies are rare and considered a bit strange, it's much more common for packs to split or add new members. Some packs don't want the personality change that comes from bringing in outsiders, so will have puppies only between their pack members, but after a few generations this leads to inbreeding problems and is considered aberrant behavior. There's also gender assigned to whole packs, but it's not really explained what 'male' and 'female' mean in that context, as the packs usually have members of both sexes.
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Mar 19, 2024 00:07
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It was fantastic to read about the Tines as a kid-- although it kind of ruined a lot of less-adventurous sci fi for me afterwards!
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Apr 9, 2024 03:02
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SlothfulCobra posted:I wanna say there's some kinda stone creature out there that just slows down with age until like it may still be alive but it's not moving around anymore. But maybe it could reawaken again.
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Apr 17, 2024 23:05
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Presto posted:This is what happens to trolls on Pratchett's Discworld. They are basically living rocks and get bigger and bigger as they age (really old trolls are the size of mountains) That, and their silicon-based brains conduct better when colder. The stereotype of the "dumb troll" is due to them coming down from the icy mountains (where they are of "normal human" intelligence) to the sea-level cities where their brains slow down. The Insussklik or "Toolies" from Steeldriver by Don DeBrandt. Amorphous, vaguely transparent blobs of muscle who use rigid structures to basically make any body type they need for their purpose. In the wild the mothers would eat the soft bits off prey (absorb + digest) and give their children the bones to play with and learn to form limbs and such. In the 'civilised' world they are used by megacorps as the ultimate slave labour. Give a Toolie a few hydraulic limbs and a jackhammer and you have an intelligent and perfectly adaptable excavator to exploit in the mines, for example.
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Apr 28, 2024 16:06
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Meningism posted:
Oh wow. I didn't expect to see the storysmith series referenced here. I loved those books. Skinshifter and his race were really cool.
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Apr 28, 2024 17:12
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FIX SIGNS posted:Oh wow. I didn't expect to see the storysmith series referenced here. I don't know what the Storysmith series is! Is it Don Debrandt EU? I've only read Steeldriver as a random pick up in a bargain bin at the supermarket as a young teen, and I also haven't heard of anyone else who's read it. I didn't realise it was meant to be a riff on John Henry until quite recently. I really want to read Timberjak but it's a hard find. Content: I'll edit it out if reddit links are frowned upon but occasionally there're good nuggets in the expanse of dross that is HFY. https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/5m4jdf/alien_minds/ This little concept, of a species that has no autonomic control and has to consciously micromanage each bodily function, I'd never seen before so really stuck with me. I love a good alien race that's actually fundamentally different from humans.
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Apr 29, 2024 14:45
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Meningism posted:I don't know what the Storysmith series is! Is it Don Debrandt EU? Timberjak is the second in the series followed by V.I. (viral intelligence) both feature storysmith, skinshifter and other characters who's names I currently forget. I originally randomly happened upon V.I. And really liked it so I tracked down the others on ebay, I think? That was almost twenty years ago, now. Edit: Storysmith himself is a reoccurring character, traveling partner of Skinshifter (the toolie) and the main narrator. Though, I'm now unsure if they were identified in the first book. They show up as a main character in Timberjak. It's been awhile. I should revisit thevseries! FIX SIGNS fucked around with this message at 16:16 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 10:37
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Meningism posted:I don't know what the Storysmith series is! Is it Don Debrandt EU? The problem with coming up with "truly alien" cultures is devising a gulf of identity that can still be meaningfully understood by your human readers, while also not crashing headlong into grotesque monkeycheese absurdities like equating vile sex crimes with precision timekeeping. Which is probably why the authors who can navigate those turbulent whitewaters get published, and the ones who can't post on reddit. McSpanky fucked around with this message at 14:53 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 14:50
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Would it even be possible to develop space travel without some sort of timekeeping? And wouldn't literally breathing manually be a huge evolutionary disadvantage? As for cool alien (actually modified human) species, All Tomorrows features many of them, with illustrations. Warning for body horror, though.
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May 4, 2024 15:57
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ScienceSeagull posted:Would it even be possible to develop space travel without some sort of timekeeping? Depends on what kind of cheat you're using for FTL (assuming any). I'm thinking particularly of Harry Turtledove's short "The Road Not Taken", in which hyperdrive and artificial gravity are so ridiculously simple that most species discover them very early on, with the result that the aliens who invade Earth are armed with muskets and black powder. There are species that have hyperdrive that don't know how to smelt iron.
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May 4, 2024 20:06
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