Aliens and monster races and other fun peeps you only meet in SF/F

Some of my favorites have been centaurid type aliens. The first ones I fell in love with were the Joma, a leocentaurid race featured in the Philip Jose Farmer short story The Blasphemers. They had a feline lower body, a humanoid top one, and four genders. They way they reproduced wasn't gone into, but they did have a lot of sex and laid eggs. This was only a minor story in the PJF canon but one that cast a long shadow, for me. (I like his standalones way more than his pulp-influenced stuff, which struck me as indulgent.)

I'm also fond of John Varley's Titanides, which were, again, centaurs, more traditional horselike ones, that appeared to be based on the multicolored Greek centaurs in Walt Disney's Fantasia. They had the upper bodies of beautiful women, but their horse parts were hermaphroditic, while their human parts were male or female (the human sex organs indicated the Titanide's gender.) They laid eggs too, which had to be fertilized twice, once by the horse part and once by the human part. They were fun if you could ignore the author's depiction of them as more socially socially and ethically advanced than humans in that they had no hangups about sex, were atheists, and after some tinkering, less warlike and aggressive. They were musical to boot.

First cousin to these was the unicorn race in Piers Anthony's Proton/Phaze series, which could shapeshift to human form. Each could play a different musical instrument through his or her horn.

I really like elves. Or actually, any race with pointed ears. I don't really know why. Just ask my friends. XD

In my story I made up all the fantastical races (the best I could). I likely went overboard on the secluded Nyulkith, though. I gave them this complex lifestyle that involves a lot of mating to keep the world alive. Yup. I'm weird.

Personal favorites from fiction include the Hosts from Embassytown, the Scuttlers and Pattern Jugglers from Rev Space (obviously), the terrifying and unsentient Scramblers from Blindsight, and the mysterious but super-chillax Mu'uh from the Orion's Arm setting. If you can find All Tomorrow's Yesterdays by Nemo Ramjet online, there are some effin' weird aliens and even weirder human offshoots, some that go way over the line into body horror. Oh, yeah, and points go to the cartoonishly evil and perverse Incheroi from The Second Apocalypse. I think that counts more as a fantasy, but, come July, we'll see.

I have some of my own space-buddies I've confabulated over the years, mostly for the same universe.

Arcturans- At one point they were your typical grey aliens, actually organic robots, but who's counting? Something happened corrupting their OS, and they were left insane, chaotic monsters only partially existing in our reality. Meant to be disturbing and kind of demonic, less realistic than I usually go for.

Abgallu- Image giant tube worms, but with ten rows of disturbingly human-like arms. Isolated and mysterious, practically immortal, never seem to have any starships or technology but found everywhere and know everything. If you can seek one out, they're entirely capable of interacting of humans and perfectly friendly.

Gog & Magog- Two species with a rather hazy interspecies connected. Gog are short, squat, rubbery humanoids with huge toothy maws in lieu of heads. Cruel and brutal, with a particular love of potty humor. No society to speak of and don't care for any, make good laborers in human society as long as you give their practical jokes a wide berth. Magog are much larger, whale/elephant-like hybrids, barely on the right side of the square-cube law. Uncommunicative and dumb as a bag of hammers, unusually placid except when dangerously and uncontrollably angry, and exceptionally talented when it comes to math and higher physics.

The Nagaraja- In my current setting, the only known species besides (post)humans. Tens, if not hundreds of years old, each Nagaraja is an entity of immense size and intelligence, somewhat resembling a cross between Kaiju and Great Old Ones. All technology is internalized within their massive bodies, which, when necessary, can double as habitats and starships for their semi-sentient servitors. They don't do very much these days, historically their interests have included terraforming (though capable of living just about everywhere, they have a fondness for earthlike atmospheres that is quite lucky for humanity) and squirreling away any all & any knowledge the galaxy can shake loose, they went through a brief Imperial period where they conquered humanity a few millenia ago, their reasons were unclear but sources indicate they were more terrified of us than we were of them.

I've always had a weakness for Jeffrey A. Carver's hyperspace dragons (from Dragons in the Stars and Dragon Rigger), and the whole concept of "star rigging" (from a larger milieu), using lucid dream imagery to navigate ships through the Flux of hyperspace. The "realm" is a patch of hyperspace where sapient life managed to evolve, essentially a magical realm in a sci-fi world; the nature of hyperspace means one can manipulate reality much like magic. Just loved some of his descriptions of that place and some of the dragons, particularly the female dragons. (One of them was described as arcs of light that somehow formed a dragon shape.)

Some alien beasties I have a rather soft spot for, the Old Life. Perhaps related to my previously-mentioned Nagaraja, perhaps something totally different, maybe even in a different universe. The nicest chaps you'll ever meet, and surprisingly easy to relate to.

If you can find All Tomorrow's Yesterdays by Nemo Ramjet online, there are some effin' weird aliens and even weirder human offshoots, some that go way over the line into body horror.

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OMG, Nemo Ramjet is a genius. His stuff was so much better than Dougal Dixon's Man After Man.

I've posted above about my love for centaurid aliens. As a result of my early infatuation with that Phil Farmer story, I created my own aliens, a winged lion-like race with wolflike and reptilian features, about whom I wrote an SF opus when I was 11 years old. Many years later, I began posting it on my family's website for a lark, while continuing the story in an 11-year-old voice. But I couldn't help updating my creatures: they now have four genders, many different coat variations, a plausible life cycle, and unique ways of artistic expression. Aerial dancing, for one.

Cobalt Jade, speaking of centaurids, I assume you remember the Ishtarians from Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials?

My favorites would be;

Mieville's alien's in Embassytown who need two mouths to speak their language (and can't recognise humans as intelligent until they learn to talk that way). Shame the rest of the book doesn't quite work!

Gene Wolfe's alzabo stood out to me as well for sheer creepiness factor.

And finally, for nostalgia, the Darmok from Star trek. I have so much in common with those dudes and their inability to communicate properly >.>

Harlequin said:

Gene Wolfe's alzabo stood out to me as well for sheer creepiness factor.

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Absolutely!

My favourite aliens are the phagor in Brian Aldiss' masterpiece Helliconia. He managed to make them relate-able and alien all in one.

Your dromo-birds are cool, but I would love to see a movie or novel about a civilization of sapient budgies.

LOVE the practicality of Space Budgie. I hope they are toilet-trained, though!

Co-worker of mine (and proud pink princess owner) loves the Budgies as well, her only request is they are non-expendable.

Haha. This thread was an interesting read. I never heard of the creatures y'all are talking about. There is definitely a wide divide between plain ol' fantasy and science fiction.

Albedo said:

It's a movie, but I loved the Prawns from District 9, ...

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District Nine was genius.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Dan Simmon's Shrike from the Hyperion Cantos.

The Shrike derives its moniker from the family of Old Earth birds of the same name, which are known for impaling their prey on the thorns of trees. Much like its namesake, the Shrike has a special "tree" for its victims: a vast, artificial tree-like armature made of a substance resembling chrome steel and studded with three-meter-long thorns, known as The Tree of Pain. When the Shrike chose to impale victims on the thorns, they would not die, but rather continue living while experiencing the full physical pain of impalement. Countless individuals - possibly numbering in the thousands or millions - have been taken by the Shrike and impaled on this tree, including Martin Silenus and his patron, Sad King Billy.

The Shrike itself is a roughly humanoid entity three meters in height, with a carapace made entirely of a metal resembling chrome steel. It has four arms, with the lower pair being slightly shorter than the upper pair, and four hands tipped with scalpel-like fingerblades. Its body is covered with an array of blades and thorns, including a large curved thorn on its chest, a curving blade on its forehead, another higher up on its head, and rosettes of thorns around its limb joints. Its eyes are multi-faceted and give off a vivid red glow, and its mouth contains multiple rows of sharp metal teeth. The creature was feared among the citizens of Hyperion, where it lived during the time of the Hegemony.

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The species I can't get out of my head are the Oankali from Octavia Butler's, Lilith's Brood.

Unlike the vast majority of alien abduction tales, Dawn actually presents a biologically plausible explanation for why the Oankali need to interbreed with humans--despite their own abhorrence for the human race, which to them appears monstrous for its combination of high intelligence and self-destructive violence, the "human contradiction." The Oankali have evolved specialized organs and subcellular structures which manipulate their own genes to maximize fitness in their environment, a self-sustaining starship which is itself a living organism. Paradoxically, because the Oankali are such successful genetic engineers, they tend to engineer themselves into an evolutionary dead end; losing all genetic diversity, they lose the ability to adapt to change. The only way they can recover genetic diversity is to interbreed with an entirely new species, which contributes new genetic strengths--and weaknesses.

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Butler developed fascinating biology with her species but the thing that stuck in my head was their appearance with sensory tentacles on their bodies. As we might look in a particular direction, they turn groups of tentacles toward what they are perceiving.

For fantasy creatures, I have a soft spot for the fenghuang.

I want sapient ones in my MS.

When it comes to sci-fi races, my go to is the robots and the sqid from Freefall. It's largely a comedy webcomic, but it makes some really interesting social commentary while (mostly) avoiding politics. It also avoids one of my pet peeves: Making their fictional species/robots think like humans. They genuinely have unique trains of thought. The robots approach things from an inherently mathematical standpoint, leading to them being skilled at abstract sciences, but lacking in more practical areas. This creates an amusing moment where a robot requests to be taught how to use stairs.
The robots deal more in the territory of creation then destruction, leading them to run around randomly creating useful building and repairing/improving infrastructure when society falls into chaos for a brief period. (Feeling very refreshed afterward, pleased that they could release all their pent up rage.)
The best part about the robots though, is that they use the three laws. As in, the three laws are built into their code, even though they're sentient. This not only has profound impact on their personalities/culture, but also becomes the leading source of conflict.
The sqid are also amusing, since they have an entire culture built around the concept of "honor among thieves." They even mark their possessions with symbols that tell looters how valuable they are. They die upon mating, but give birth to extremely large broods. As such, if a sqid wants to raise a child, they simply look for a recent batch of children and kidnap/adopt one. Sqid are also known for having sky high risk tolerance. In fact, their risk tolerance is so high, that no one has lived long enough to die of old age. So their lifespan is a mystery.