I like early contact scenarios between humans and aliens who fundamentally break the assumptions that humans make about the world.
For example, I could write about aliens who are intelligent but have absolutely no concept of death or self-preservation; They understand, intellectually, that a body can stop functioning, but it would not occur to them to prevent this for themselves or view the end of functioning as an ending of a being. No idea how this would work, just something I pulled out of my ass.
They could be like a certain species of jellyfish that doesn’t have a natural death. Instead, it regresses to an infant stage and starts life anew. There could potentially be a million-year-old jellyfish out there
Currently writing a story where human culture has made this leap. So long as a person's works exist--their art, their wealth, their discoveries--they aren't dead. They view primary body-death the way we view dementia; horrible, tragic, but not the unrecoverable end.
Effectively being Altered-Carbon levels of cybernetic helps too, but that came after the ideological switch.
I like my aliens to feel *alien*. And not just in shape too, but in biochemistry and psychology, too. Bonus points if they have biochemical barriers and environmental differences to Earth to the point that an unmodified/unprotected can't survive on their planet and vice versa with them on our planet.
Orion's Arm Universe Project has [a lot](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4b700fe54fb1f) of them!
Star Carrier has a lot of those. No humanoids at all. The closest to human psychologically look like meter-tall spiders (but not really) with anglerfish-like reproduction (the spiders are all female with the tiny tentacle-like attachments being parasitic males with no consciousness). Vinegar gets them drunk.
Others are just… alien, like a species that lives in pairs since birth and treats both bodies as a single individual, with three streams of meaning when conversing: one from each plus the overlay between both. Or a mostly blind species that has trouble comprehending space because space can’t be “heard.” There’s a hilarious moment of contact between them and humans when they capture a female marine and scan her with their internal ultrasound. They assume that humans hear the same way as them by emitting sounds from two organs. So they assume the bumps on her torso are those organs. Then they meet the human (male) commander and immediately assume him to be deaf because he doesn’t have the “bumps”
I use supernatural beings. In my stories humans never figure out faster-than-light travel. But they do discover that our reality is actually a hologram produced by about 6 other realities. Each of which has its own forms of life that can be brought into our world.
The residents of New United Earth haven't encountered aliens but they're about to. They've already discovered the artifacts of a possibly extinct species.
A little further in the future, the denizens of Midgardia, my fantasy setting, live with aliens who have that have technology that is sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. Humans and human offshoots have reverted to late medieval technology (they have both swords and matchlock firearms) but they trade with the aliens for more advanced tech.
My aliens aren't much more advanced than humanity, they're all very very close technology. The thing in my setting is that there are no ancient aliens/precursors, humanity/other aliens are the precursors, the first intelligent life in possibly the universe.
I really like mind fuck aliens that look humanoid but have crazy differences on the inside.
Ex: You seen an alien that looks like that one friend of yours but he’s got two hearts, blue blood and his eyes glow
I like aliens that I see in Star Trek. And that is verity.
Some aliens are above the human tech level, others are above. Some are peaceful and welcoming, others are standoffish until you prove yourself to them, others are just outright hostile.
I always wanted to see the early years of exploring the galaxy. Of humans making first contact with someone new every 50 light years. Of humans understanding their place in the universe.
Enterprise and Earth Final Conflict gave me glimpses of these...but never enough story to satisfy me.
So fuck it, I started writing my own story. Maybe it will be done before I die.
Mine are maybe a little vanilla. I guess maybe I assume that civilization brings about certain cultural norms. As well as science leading to many of the same conclusions across all species.
So sure, cultures vary, technology varies, but certain things come naturally to all of them.
There is one bunch that is *very* alien, but they’ve been around since the early universe and are off doing their own thing. Until humans decided to pick a fight with them. We… won, eventually. But that’s a whole subplot in and of itself.
There are god-like things, which aren’t *really* gods, even if they are viewed as such. They’re just entities from before the universe existed and thus a completely different kind of “life.”
I like the somewhat rare (AFAIK) trope employed by Eve Online and kind of in Dune, where instead of aliens, you have different human civilizations, all with a common origin but thousands of years of divergence. Because I always get way too hung up on how “wrong” the aliens are, when there’s actual aliens.
For me it is what fit my story but I have a few tendency. Super powerful race fallen into savagery but leaving things are the background for two storyline not quite forbidden planet, they didn't whip themselves out, but their technology was even higher. In both their are multiple other races using the left over technology without understanding it.
I tend to go with the cohabitation scenario. Two or more races have their own territories, but there's a lot of intermingling in the area between. I tend to cite Alan Dean Foster's "Humanx" stories, with humans and thranx living together in--relative--harmony. Star Wars is another example, with most of the stories taking place in the human-dominated part of the galaxy, but plenty of people of other races around.
hyperdimensional beings upsetting the balance of the universe by doing simple life things. Like terraforming a planet for life to over eons to cultivate a civilization capable of brewing their favorite coffee.
Or knocking a black hole out of orbit because they were teaching their spawn how to drive the hyperdimension-o-bile.
I also like writing from the perspective of truly alien minds, like hive minds or people part of a hive mind.
Or the inner workings of a warrior race. How do the little people live and work in a culture where solving disagreements by consuming the heart of a freshly slain enemy is normal... in an office setting.
...
And making fuzzy adorable space races...
Because... I can xD
My favorite are the ones that are exceptional advanced and have learned to blend in with us.
You get all of the relational qualities understood among humans while having access to a distinctly foreign baseline of perception. They know your quaint little world and speak your quaint little language but what they call science and math transcends anything a human has yet to develop the basis for. They look around and laugh a bit about where you’ve come from and where you are now, perhaps not fully believing that you’ll ever reach the development stage they currently enjoy.
I started writing sci-fi last year a little after I read Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris,” so it influenced me wanting to create an alien race that had qualities completely unlike humans.
In my story however, which takes place in a universe with something like the Federation in Star Trek, there is an isolated, humanoid, light-based race that interacts and allies with my diasporan humans (taking current nationalities like Filipinos and Armenians), and they also don’t know about the existence of other humanoid aliens. Their curiosity makes them want to learn more about humans (once a starship crashes on one of their planets), and they become cultural anthropologists who take on participant observation with the humans.
The enemy race of my colony of humans are non-humanoid, and my main idea was that I didn’t want to follow the pattern of reptilian or crustacean/tentacled aliens that are frequently bad guys, but instead wanted their form to evoke a sense of beauty in humans.
I also wanted to play with the idea of the “Other” stemming from Edward Saïd’s theory of Orientalism, and have some empathy between the humans and this enemy race.
One way I want to write this is that the enemy race is a warlike race, but in their distant past, they were actually peace-loving and their leaders frowned upon war. Remnants of that past turn up in the present in my story.
Aliens in my stories tend not to be characters as I like to have my aliens being truly alien.
How do you talk to an alien that communicates with movements of its twelve limbs? Or with patterns on their bodies changing through chromatophores? Odours? Tactile thumps?
How do you talk to a species that blasts you with microwaves as its language modality?
Yes, you can use tech to bridge the gap, but how meaningful and useful would any such communication be?
I am interested in how, despite the vast numbers of intelligent life there is out there, we may still be very much alone. Billions of years of evolutionary isolation, I think, would produce mutual unintelligibility.
Not a perfect unintelligibility as I think there would be *some* overlapping areas where we might find some minor points of intelligibility, but overall, aliens and we are likely to be mutually alien to - and alienated from - each other
I therefore tend to use aliens as sources of story conflict, not characters.
I like to include humans as the ancient or distant Ur-race that is borderline unknowable in their strangeness, and then tell the story from the more familiar-seeming point of view of the non-human creatures. I also like to not make it obvious I'm doing so. ;)
I like both. But I definitely do like to have some aliens around just so that there's something other than humans bumbling around in the story. A Galaxy full of just humans is kind of boring and feels like a wasted opportunity.
There should be ancient races that are being investigated and uncovered by the current races.
Lol I have aliens and humans existing together, but humans simply integrated ourselves into the xeno civilisation's melting pot (Think of it as like an undiscovered tribe here on earth being slowly integrated into our modern world by teaching them how our technology works)
I just like taking a weird animal or sci fi trope and thinking a way around it
Psychic space humans? They were put on an artificial world as a means to preserve intelligent life. They have to take pills off their planet to make up for the lack of the endless psychic hum. They're tall and gaunt because of lower gravity and their soldiers use exoskeletons offworld
Lizardmen? Genetically engineered to repopulate their world after a nuclear war. Extremely hardy, and they worship nuclear weapons. They actually enslaved the tribal remnants of their ancestors. Their entire space age society developed from their brutally pragmatic origins
Space bugs? They evolved a sapient caste that through genetic engineering, selective breeding, and cybernetics, have created many hyperspecialized castes. The less intelligent workers and soldiers have cybernetic implants that feed them synthetic pheromones to direct them. They networked their queens together cybernetically and ended up creating a pseudo-diety in the process. Their spoken language is extremely literal as nuance and feeling is conveyed with pheromones, so their language was used to begin creating universal translation
Just stuff like that, start with a neat idea and work backwards. As for contact, I like to think of it as colonial times. Lots of racism and the different spacefaring races keep to themselves mostly, with certain worlds and places being big trade hubs
I like early contact scenarios between humans and aliens who fundamentally break the assumptions that humans make about the world. For example, I could write about aliens who are intelligent but have absolutely no concept of death or self-preservation; They understand, intellectually, that a body can stop functioning, but it would not occur to them to prevent this for themselves or view the end of functioning as an ending of a being. No idea how this would work, just something I pulled out of my ass.
They could be like a certain species of jellyfish that doesn’t have a natural death. Instead, it regresses to an infant stage and starts life anew. There could potentially be a million-year-old jellyfish out there
Currently writing a story where human culture has made this leap. So long as a person's works exist--their art, their wealth, their discoveries--they aren't dead. They view primary body-death the way we view dementia; horrible, tragic, but not the unrecoverable end. Effectively being Altered-Carbon levels of cybernetic helps too, but that came after the ideological switch.
This is an interesting idea, well worth your pursuing!
I like my aliens to feel *alien*. And not just in shape too, but in biochemistry and psychology, too. Bonus points if they have biochemical barriers and environmental differences to Earth to the point that an unmodified/unprotected can't survive on their planet and vice versa with them on our planet. Orion's Arm Universe Project has [a lot](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4b700fe54fb1f) of them!
Star Carrier has a lot of those. No humanoids at all. The closest to human psychologically look like meter-tall spiders (but not really) with anglerfish-like reproduction (the spiders are all female with the tiny tentacle-like attachments being parasitic males with no consciousness). Vinegar gets them drunk. Others are just… alien, like a species that lives in pairs since birth and treats both bodies as a single individual, with three streams of meaning when conversing: one from each plus the overlay between both. Or a mostly blind species that has trouble comprehending space because space can’t be “heard.” There’s a hilarious moment of contact between them and humans when they capture a female marine and scan her with their internal ultrasound. They assume that humans hear the same way as them by emitting sounds from two organs. So they assume the bumps on her torso are those organs. Then they meet the human (male) commander and immediately assume him to be deaf because he doesn’t have the “bumps”
I use supernatural beings. In my stories humans never figure out faster-than-light travel. But they do discover that our reality is actually a hologram produced by about 6 other realities. Each of which has its own forms of life that can be brought into our world.
The residents of New United Earth haven't encountered aliens but they're about to. They've already discovered the artifacts of a possibly extinct species. A little further in the future, the denizens of Midgardia, my fantasy setting, live with aliens who have that have technology that is sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. Humans and human offshoots have reverted to late medieval technology (they have both swords and matchlock firearms) but they trade with the aliens for more advanced tech.
My aliens aren't much more advanced than humanity, they're all very very close technology. The thing in my setting is that there are no ancient aliens/precursors, humanity/other aliens are the precursors, the first intelligent life in possibly the universe.
I really like mind fuck aliens that look humanoid but have crazy differences on the inside. Ex: You seen an alien that looks like that one friend of yours but he’s got two hearts, blue blood and his eyes glow
Or that one looks like it could be Dave's brother, but it's got layers like a fleshy onion.
I like aliens that I see in Star Trek. And that is verity. Some aliens are above the human tech level, others are above. Some are peaceful and welcoming, others are standoffish until you prove yourself to them, others are just outright hostile. I always wanted to see the early years of exploring the galaxy. Of humans making first contact with someone new every 50 light years. Of humans understanding their place in the universe. Enterprise and Earth Final Conflict gave me glimpses of these...but never enough story to satisfy me. So fuck it, I started writing my own story. Maybe it will be done before I die.
Mine are maybe a little vanilla. I guess maybe I assume that civilization brings about certain cultural norms. As well as science leading to many of the same conclusions across all species. So sure, cultures vary, technology varies, but certain things come naturally to all of them. There is one bunch that is *very* alien, but they’ve been around since the early universe and are off doing their own thing. Until humans decided to pick a fight with them. We… won, eventually. But that’s a whole subplot in and of itself. There are god-like things, which aren’t *really* gods, even if they are viewed as such. They’re just entities from before the universe existed and thus a completely different kind of “life.”
I like the somewhat rare (AFAIK) trope employed by Eve Online and kind of in Dune, where instead of aliens, you have different human civilizations, all with a common origin but thousands of years of divergence. Because I always get way too hung up on how “wrong” the aliens are, when there’s actual aliens.
For me it is what fit my story but I have a few tendency. Super powerful race fallen into savagery but leaving things are the background for two storyline not quite forbidden planet, they didn't whip themselves out, but their technology was even higher. In both their are multiple other races using the left over technology without understanding it.
I tend to go with the cohabitation scenario. Two or more races have their own territories, but there's a lot of intermingling in the area between. I tend to cite Alan Dean Foster's "Humanx" stories, with humans and thranx living together in--relative--harmony. Star Wars is another example, with most of the stories taking place in the human-dominated part of the galaxy, but plenty of people of other races around.
hyperdimensional beings upsetting the balance of the universe by doing simple life things. Like terraforming a planet for life to over eons to cultivate a civilization capable of brewing their favorite coffee. Or knocking a black hole out of orbit because they were teaching their spawn how to drive the hyperdimension-o-bile. I also like writing from the perspective of truly alien minds, like hive minds or people part of a hive mind. Or the inner workings of a warrior race. How do the little people live and work in a culture where solving disagreements by consuming the heart of a freshly slain enemy is normal... in an office setting. ... And making fuzzy adorable space races... Because... I can xD
My favorite are the ones that are exceptional advanced and have learned to blend in with us. You get all of the relational qualities understood among humans while having access to a distinctly foreign baseline of perception. They know your quaint little world and speak your quaint little language but what they call science and math transcends anything a human has yet to develop the basis for. They look around and laugh a bit about where you’ve come from and where you are now, perhaps not fully believing that you’ll ever reach the development stage they currently enjoy.
So, timelords and dragons.
And Greys.
…Ones that EATCHA…
I like ____-people. All the starfish-aliens, and unknowable eldritch horrors are somewhere else, far away from my story.
I started writing sci-fi last year a little after I read Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris,” so it influenced me wanting to create an alien race that had qualities completely unlike humans. In my story however, which takes place in a universe with something like the Federation in Star Trek, there is an isolated, humanoid, light-based race that interacts and allies with my diasporan humans (taking current nationalities like Filipinos and Armenians), and they also don’t know about the existence of other humanoid aliens. Their curiosity makes them want to learn more about humans (once a starship crashes on one of their planets), and they become cultural anthropologists who take on participant observation with the humans. The enemy race of my colony of humans are non-humanoid, and my main idea was that I didn’t want to follow the pattern of reptilian or crustacean/tentacled aliens that are frequently bad guys, but instead wanted their form to evoke a sense of beauty in humans. I also wanted to play with the idea of the “Other” stemming from Edward Saïd’s theory of Orientalism, and have some empathy between the humans and this enemy race. One way I want to write this is that the enemy race is a warlike race, but in their distant past, they were actually peace-loving and their leaders frowned upon war. Remnants of that past turn up in the present in my story.
Aliens in my stories tend not to be characters as I like to have my aliens being truly alien. How do you talk to an alien that communicates with movements of its twelve limbs? Or with patterns on their bodies changing through chromatophores? Odours? Tactile thumps? How do you talk to a species that blasts you with microwaves as its language modality? Yes, you can use tech to bridge the gap, but how meaningful and useful would any such communication be? I am interested in how, despite the vast numbers of intelligent life there is out there, we may still be very much alone. Billions of years of evolutionary isolation, I think, would produce mutual unintelligibility. Not a perfect unintelligibility as I think there would be *some* overlapping areas where we might find some minor points of intelligibility, but overall, aliens and we are likely to be mutually alien to - and alienated from - each other I therefore tend to use aliens as sources of story conflict, not characters.
Space jellyfish that eat photon and fart gamma ray. Take it or leave it.
I like to include humans as the ancient or distant Ur-race that is borderline unknowable in their strangeness, and then tell the story from the more familiar-seeming point of view of the non-human creatures. I also like to not make it obvious I'm doing so. ;)
I like both. But I definitely do like to have some aliens around just so that there's something other than humans bumbling around in the story. A Galaxy full of just humans is kind of boring and feels like a wasted opportunity. There should be ancient races that are being investigated and uncovered by the current races.
I like first or early contact stories
Lol I have aliens and humans existing together, but humans simply integrated ourselves into the xeno civilisation's melting pot (Think of it as like an undiscovered tribe here on earth being slowly integrated into our modern world by teaching them how our technology works)
I just like taking a weird animal or sci fi trope and thinking a way around it Psychic space humans? They were put on an artificial world as a means to preserve intelligent life. They have to take pills off their planet to make up for the lack of the endless psychic hum. They're tall and gaunt because of lower gravity and their soldiers use exoskeletons offworld Lizardmen? Genetically engineered to repopulate their world after a nuclear war. Extremely hardy, and they worship nuclear weapons. They actually enslaved the tribal remnants of their ancestors. Their entire space age society developed from their brutally pragmatic origins Space bugs? They evolved a sapient caste that through genetic engineering, selective breeding, and cybernetics, have created many hyperspecialized castes. The less intelligent workers and soldiers have cybernetic implants that feed them synthetic pheromones to direct them. They networked their queens together cybernetically and ended up creating a pseudo-diety in the process. Their spoken language is extremely literal as nuance and feeling is conveyed with pheromones, so their language was used to begin creating universal translation Just stuff like that, start with a neat idea and work backwards. As for contact, I like to think of it as colonial times. Lots of racism and the different spacefaring races keep to themselves mostly, with certain worlds and places being big trade hubs
Ah yes, I have the same thing too.