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Please. I would like to hear about the cool aliens, or fantasy guys.
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Nov 6, 2022 11:33
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| # ? May 8, 2024 18:12 |
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The hives of the Serpent's Coils. Fairly typical queen/drones/workers/warriors setup. Workers and warriors can "transfer" their personalities through exchange of physical material. The interesting part is their reaction to learning that human beings can't do this and permanently die. They throw out all of the various traders and make a simple demand for reopening communication: One Ship. The book itself... hasn't aged well but the interplay between fairly basic bug aliens and the human society that they cultivate is interesting.
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Nov 6, 2022 19:02
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I don't really understand, why do they want a ship?
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Nov 6, 2022 20:34
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Children of Time is about an experiment to uplift monkeys that goes wrong and gets abandoned for a few millenia; ending up accidentally creating a society of sentient spiders
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Nov 7, 2022 22:53
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habituallyred posted:The hives of the Serpent's Coils. Fairly typical queen/drones/workers/warriors setup. Workers and warriors can "transfer" their personalities through exchange of physical material. The interesting part is their reaction to learning that human beings can't do this and permanently die. They throw out all of the various traders and make a simple demand for reopening communication: One Ship. Which book is that? Googling 'Serpent's Coils' doesn't lead to anything that sounds similar. Who by?
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Nov 8, 2022 03:10
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drat. Its Serpents Reach. I really should have waited until I had more time to write that post. The book opens with two "historical documents." One about the importance of the the hive's exports to human civilization and how little they know about what goes on inside that quarantined nebula. The second one is about the history of the Kontrin family, the descendants of the one ship that answered the hives. The official reason given for the request is that the hives couldn't understand all these different concerns trying to trade with them. So humans of the Kontrin company rules lawyered it with one ship full of human genetic material and growth vats. The crew of the ship became the head of a caste system, and were granted longevity and visible markings by the hive. The middle ranks are made up of relatively normal humans that are almost comically recognizable as contemporary middle class folks. The bottom ranks are "azi," grown humans with artificially shortened lifespans. If you guessed that the main character is part of the ruling Kontrin family and takes a little bit too long to comprehend the azi situation is wrong pat yourself on the back. The reason I specify the "official" version is that multiple competing hives exist by the time the book starts. They seem to do a good job of working with their associated family and against their rivals. If it talked about being bewildered about subordinates having their own agendas that would track. I could also believe that the hives couldn't keep track of which human worked for which company without intrusive markings. Warriors are specifically mentioned as having an excellent "sense of smell" later in the book so it is more of a question of introductions. A more interesting theory involves mad spoilers about the end of the book: The longevity given to the Kontrin family is roughly equal to the length of a queen's life cycle. Someone from the original crew is old and senile by the time 800 or so years have passed between the one ship and the end of the book. The end of the book revolves around the queens of the competing hives getting together and physically exchanging information. This has more in common with warriors physically extracting information from their foes than sex. Between the queens not actively controlling their hives and all the aggressive pheromones going around civilization as it was known is destroyed. My theory is that humans were chased from the planet as part of this natural swarming behavior. Since the queen(s) are sentient they decided to (keep things simple/can't handle more than that until new queens are hatched) in regards to reopening relations. Or maybe the original crew just thought it made for a better founding myth, they certainly set up other customs to their advantage. For screwing up the original post and not just elaborating with "the author wrote the intro, then didn't update it after writing the rest of the book." I'll recommend Oyvind Thorsby's Accidental Space Spy. It gets a little bit too close to human society after the Castration Planet, but until then it certainly has cool cultures/biology.
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Nov 8, 2022 08:31
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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.Look To Windward, by Iain M Banks posted:Gossip amongst Muetenive and Yoleus' assorted populations of slaved organisms, symbiotes, parasites and guests indicated there was a good chance that Muetenive would dawdle for the next two or three days and then make a sudden maximum-speed dash for the air space just above the convection bubble, to see if Yoleus was capable of keeping up. If it was and they both made it, then they would make a splendidly dramatic entrance into Buthulne's presence, where a huge parliament of thousands of their peers would be able to witness their glorious arrival. Look To Windward, by Iain M Banks posted:Airspheres migrated round the galaxy, orbiting once every fifty to a hundred million years, depending on how close they were to the centre. They swept up dust and gas on their forward-facing sides, and from their bases, every few hundred thousand years, they passed the waste that their scavenger flora and fauna had not been able to process any further. Droppings the size of small moons issued from globular impossibilities as big as brown dwarfs, leaving a trail of detritus globes scattered through the spiral arms that dated the bizarre worlds' first appearance in the galaxy to one and a half billion years earlier.
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Nov 8, 2022 13:06
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StashAugustine posted:Children of Time is about an experiment to uplift monkeys that goes wrong and gets abandoned for a few millenia; ending up accidentally creating a society of sentient spiders The sequel is pretty cool too, with the sentient octopuses/octopodes/octopi. (The author uses all three forms interchangeably.) We're going on an adventure!
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Nov 8, 2022 14:48
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Groke posted:The sequel is pretty cool too, with the sentient octopuses/octopodes/octopi. (The author uses all three forms interchangeably.) We're going on an adventure! Neat I'll have to check it out, I was disappointed that they briefly mentioned sentient shrimp near the end but never really expanded on it, plus they never really had the humans interacting with the spiders.
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Nov 8, 2022 21:05
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Read Embassytown OP
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Nov 9, 2022 16:14
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Glen Cook's Starfishers series has the titular starfish, which are space-dwelling critters composed of trace gases and patterns of magnetic fields.
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Nov 10, 2022 00:14
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Mordja posted:Read Embassytown OP Embassytown's great, as an example of aliens where their considerable physical differences are nothing compared to their different mentalities (while still managing to be relatable individuals)
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Nov 10, 2022 03:11
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StashAugustine posted:Neat I'll have to check it out, I was disappointed that they briefly mentioned sentient shrimp near the end but never really expanded on it, plus they never really had the humans interacting with the spiders. The sequel gives you more of what you want. Also you get to go on an adventure! (Also also there seems to be another sequel coming out later this month. Tchaikovsky is not always as good as in Children of Time but when he hits he's on fire.)
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Nov 11, 2022 11:19
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In The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell there are two intelligent species sharing the planet: predator and prey that developed intelligence as part of an evolutionary arms race.
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Nov 11, 2022 20:16
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The moties from Mote in God's Eye They look like... ewoks mixed with gremlins, in that they are fuzzy bear/bat things that goes horrible. They are bi-laterally asymmetrical. One half has a big bat ear, and two spindly arms with many delicate fingers. The other half has no ear, and one huge super strong three fingered arm (the shoulder is so big it connects right to their head to make a curved hump shape). Moties have a hyper-specialized biological caste system and are wicked good in their various fields. Engineers can build like, anything, on the fly, and can actually improve devices and technology they'd never seen before, immediately after being introduced.. Mediators can learn languages and mimic body ticks almost immediately. Warriors... well, they'd compete with any other sci-fi 'super soldier' you can think of. But the big thing about moties is their reproductive cycle. They are hermaphrodites, or like, those frogs from Jurassic Park? I'm not sure of the correct term, nothing that applies to humans. They cycle from male to female, get pregnant and give birth, then back to male, and so on. But the thing is, if they don't get pregnant during the female portion they die. So as you'd imagine they have a huge population control issue. Constantly and rapidly building up to unsustainable amounts, then society breaks down and they blast themselves back into the stone age in resource wars. They've even started building time-capsule museum bunkers for the next go around, or 'crumbling city remains' is a valid ecological environ that wildlife has adapted for.
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Nov 16, 2022 11:51
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StashAugustine posted:Children of Time is about an experiment to uplift monkeys that goes wrong and gets abandoned for a few millenia; ending up accidentally creating a society of sentient spiders Children of Time was really cool but every time it was a human chapter I got really annoyed and just wanted more spiders. Who cares about humans. Give me hyper intelligent space spiders.
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Nov 18, 2022 18:32
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 You are Non-Juffo-Wup, you cannot understand.
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Nov 18, 2022 19:04
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Two more examples: the Flouwen from Robert L. Forward's Rocheworld, and the bots from Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker. And I guess basically every non-human character in the James White "Sector General" books, if you can get past how 1960s-y they are.
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Nov 18, 2022 19:41
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Madurai posted:Two more examples: the Flouwen from Robert L. Forward's Rocheworld, and the bots from Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker. You can't just leave it at that. There is a whole book about a chef taking on the ultimate cooking challenge: making hospital food taste good. Comparatively easy for oxygen breathing carbon based lifeforms. Hard for the Hudlar who absorb nutrients through their skin.
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Nov 18, 2022 22:31
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Skroderiders (A Fire Upon the Deeps). Picture a sapient potted plant on a robotic shopping cart.
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Jun 15, 2023 00:58
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Parahexavoctal posted:Skroderiders (A Fire Upon the Deeps). How tf are you gonna mention A Fire Upon the Deep and not mention the Tines, one of the coolest alien species ever They are sort of canine-like animals who are individually not much more intelligent than an animal but gain sapience and singular "identities" by forming small packs of 4 to 6 individuals. If they lose or gain members over time it will alter their personality and memories somewhat but they can essentially live for centuries by staggering the ages of their members and replacing older or dead individuals. Highly, highly recommend AFutD in general, its prequel also has some really awesome spider aliens free hubcaps fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Jun 20, 2023 |
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Jun 20, 2023 02:37
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free hubcaps posted:How tf are you gonna mention A Fire Upon the Deep and not mention the Tines, one of the coolest alien species ever To be clear, Tines don't use telepathy or any such bullshit - they're essentially living acoustic modems.
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Jun 20, 2023 03:04
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the dinosaurs from We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story.
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Jun 21, 2023 20:53
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I was thinking of Embassytown and A Fire Upon the Deep as soon as I saw the thread title...
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Jun 22, 2023 10:16
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free hubcaps posted:How tf are you gonna mention A Fire Upon the Deep and not mention the Tines, one of the coolest alien species ever Agreed. The sequel, however, sucks rocks.
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Jun 22, 2023 14:57
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Tree Bucket posted:I was thinking of Embassytown and A Fire Upon the Deep as soon as I saw the thread title... My problem with the Ariekei is that Mieville didn't really tell us what they look like. "Before the humans came, we didn't speak. " Was that really a lie?
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Jun 27, 2023 01:20
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I feel like any dive into any Warhammer/40k species is like settling in to watch "the Entertainment" from Infinite Jest. I have to backtrack so many times to figure out the various references, that I almost never finish the point of why I started in the first place.
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Jun 27, 2023 13:35
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Agreed. Holy poo poo why is it so boring? There are some moments that are genuinely exciting but it's a slog to get through for the most part. When the zones shift and OOBII starts working at full capacity, or when Ravna discovers the Skrode Rider had evolved and wound up in the tropics but overall it was just not very captivating. I like the idea of it all but it just fell flat for me. Seemed like a whole lot of set up without a satisfying payoff.
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Jun 29, 2023 17:30
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I guess I can contribute to the thread instead of commiserating about annoying sci-fi sequels. One of my favorite series to date is the "Inhibitor Sequence" by Alistair Reynolds; with the first book, Revelation Space, being published in 2000. Humans have pushed out into our corner of the galaxy using hulking light-hugger star ships that accelerate up to 95%+ of the speed of light. Relativistic time plays a big part in the stories and I think the author does a fantastic job of building a believable "hard" sci-fi universe in which these space operas play out. There are some aliens but most have gone extinct or are in hiding. We are the main characters of our blip in the (galactic) timeline. One of the coolest (imo) parts of this universe are the Pattern Juggler worlds, and I'll just paste the description from the wiki about said entities: quote:The Pattern Jugglers are a widespread group of alien entities found on many planets and moons. They are colonies of aquatic microorganisms that form distributed consciousnesses, permeating the oceans of the planets they inhabit. Their name arises from their ability to infiltrate the bodies and brains of sentient organisms that swim within their waters, which allows them to store the neural patterns of an individual, impart knowledge from a previously stored entity, or swap the consciousnesses of multiple beings. Sometimes, especially after repeated exposure, a swimmer will be absorbed bodily by the Pattern Jugglers and simply dissolve. They play their part throughout the series and add a nice briny flavor to the mix.
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Jun 29, 2023 17:42
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The Martian Oubliette culture in The Quantum Thief was always a really interesting concept to me. Mars was (I think) colonized, but then destroyed by weaponized nanomachines that evolved and got out of control. The last surviving colony on the planet is a giant walking platter city called the Oubliette. Half the population (or so) lives in the city, while the other half does a length of servitude fighting back nanomachine horrors and maintaining the forward city base so it can forever walk Mars ahead of the worst of the nano machine armies. The people who live in the city have two interesting aspects to their culture. Since it's a transhuman galaxy, people's minds can be preserved, and bodies rebuilt so that people are essentially "immortal" (sort of in a Takeshi Kovachs sense). Also resources are precious, and the need for sapient minds battling the nanomachines a priority, instead of a culture of money for exchange, the Oubliette city has a relationship with time. Time can be invested, used to buy goods, services, etc. There are time wealthy people, and beggars in the street begging for time before they wink out of existence to go spend 50-60 years on the frontlines again. You can be fined time for malbehaviors, or have your sentence extended for service, and the population (aside from the time wealthy) is constantly fluxing back and forth. The other aspect is that the Oubliette citizens have a large and powerful database of sapient human minds that's very valuable, and the creator of the city embedded powerful encryption protocols and personal data protections for the minds, memories, personalities, etc. The "digitized" minds of the people eventually grew a 6th sensory organ to access and manipulate mind data and privacy protocols called "gevulot". Gevulot allows people to share memories or branches of memories with others, like sharing data on Facebook, names, private info, etc. It also allows them to interact with the world in interesting ways and manipulate the gevulot of others (to the extent people allow it to be manipulated) like throwing up a "privacy screen", or blurring someone's appearance because they don't want to be seen at the time, most people would respect the request or allow it to alter their other senses because it's reasonable, etc. Anyway, a lot of wild poo poo happens on Mars in the first book especially, and again later in the series, worth a read.
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Jul 3, 2023 09:30
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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." Highly specialized, silicon based, organisms who help the fleshy human protagonist survive in the incredibly hostile planetary environment. One of them, a "surgeon," takes a look at human anatomy and says something like "oh, no. This is all wrong." And proceed to revamp the protag's guts to include a metabolic energy storage organ, replace the lenses in his eyes with (internally fabricated by the surgeon) replacements that will help him perceive the fractal geometry of the local flora/fauna, and discover an unused and nearly atrophied "universal" communication socket in the human brain.
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Jul 8, 2023 06:42
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CaptainCrunch posted:And proceed to revamp the protag's guts to include a metabolic energy storage organ Isn't that what fat is for?
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Jul 9, 2023 03:18
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OutsideAngel posted:Isn't that what fat is for? Sure? But this was like, “you don’t need to eat for a couple months” level efficiency. Part of the fun of the Prism critters was just how aghast they were at how random and unorganized human anatomy was. “Why is no one fixing all of this?” CaptainCrunch fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Jul 9, 2023 |
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Jul 9, 2023 08:11
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Alan Dean Foster's aliens are cool in general, the tran are pretty goofy but fun nonetheless
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Jul 9, 2023 13:27
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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." Along similar lines are the Multipliers of Ken McLeod's Engine City, furry eight legged monkey-spiders with mouths on the tops of their heads. They flick out spores from their fractal limbs which are small enough to inhale. From there they develop into tiny symbiotic organisms which take one look at their new home and start doing some renovations. The host gets bonus memories and thoughts from the countless predecessors of the parent Multiplier.
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Jul 9, 2023 22:16
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One of the coolest races I have heard of are the "Soft Ones" and "Hard Ones" from the book The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. I don't want to spoil much about it, but they are a kind of symbiotic entity which can't exist without the others, and knows and embodies the role required of it. Really fun read, quick too.
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Jul 11, 2023 22:05
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The Starfish from Glen Cook's Starfishers trilogy
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Jul 12, 2023 03:52
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The Starfish from Peter Watt's Blindsight. And yeah the aliens in The Gods Themselves are great.
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Jul 12, 2023 21:06
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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. But, what fertilizes the eggs for the queen? Or are they a purely parthenogenetic species?
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Jul 23, 2023 04:10
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| # ? May 8, 2024 18:12 |
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The Queen is really an ex post facto explanation for how Xenomorphs reproduce. The original screenplay for Alien has one of the crewmembers turning into an egg. Pretty sure there is even cut footage of that scene online. The studio was being sued by Van Vogt on the basis that the movie was clearly based on part of his novel, The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The original beast implanted the eggs, parasitoid wasp style. The case was settled out of court.
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Jul 23, 2023 09:32
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