joe@cvl.UUCP (06/21/83)
I finally got around to reading The Mote in God's Eye. While I enjoyed the book a great deal, after I finished it I was struck by something. The protrayal of the Moties by Niven & Pournelle fails (for me, at least) in one important respect: they are too human. This started me thinking about other portrayals of aliens in sf, and the extent to which the author actually forces on the reader the realization that the creatures being described are completely foreign to our way of thinking. Does anyone have any nominations for especially alien aliens? I'd be interested in what others think about this. joe
leichter@yale-com.UUCP (06/22/83)
For really ALIEN aliens, try C.J. Cherryh's "Serpent's Reach". (The aliens are sort of huge ants; each individual is fairly stupid, the "hive" is very intelligent and essentially immortal - and with a VERY long memory.) A good book. -- Jerry decvax!yale-comix!leichter leichter@yale
cas@cvl.UUCP (06/22/83)
C. J. Cherry's "The Pride of Chanur" has some good aliens. This book
is up for a Hugo Award this year (it is the best one I have read so far -
I will probably vote for it). What makes this book so interesting is
of course the treatment of the different alien spacefaring species and
their interactions. The main characters (a cat-like species called the
'Hani') I found to be too human-like (perhaps that's why they can get
along with humans?) but most of the other species were rather different.
Cliff Shaffer
...{mcnc,we13,seismo}!rlgvax!cvl!casavsdT:deborah@avsdS.UUCP (06/22/83)
My idea of really alien aliens is the trisexual beings in the middle portion of 'The Gods Themselves' by Isaac Asimov. In fact, in his auto- biography, Asimov says he tried hard to make them very non-human.
kalash@ucbcad.UUCP (06/23/83)
#R:cvl:-41100:ucbcad:2700005:000:149 ucbcad!kalash Jun 22 12:12:00 1983 The most alien aliens I know of are in Terry Carr's short story The Dance of the Changer and the Three A highly recomended short story. Joe
mugwump@syteka.UUCP (06/24/83)
Some rather alien aliens are in a story by Terry Carr called 'The Dance of The Changer and the Three.
bstempleton@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (06/27/83)
I talked to Hal Clement once at a worldcon. He said that his formula for making a character alien was to make it logical and rational. Quite different from any homo sapiens you might run into. -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ont. (519) 886-7304
Todd.pasa@Xerox.ARPA (06/12/85)
From: Todd.pasa@Xerox.ARPA From the LA Times Calendar section, June 1st. Reprinted wihout permission. "BELIEVE IT OR NOT - When last seen in "Alien" (1979), chief operating officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) was playing Sleeping Beauty in the Nostromos escape pod. According to the next script, she'll awaken from hibernation some 50 years later, along with Jonesy the cat, in the tentatively titled "Aliens", the long-awaited 20th Century Fox sequel (written and directed by James Cameron) to begin filming this fall in London. But will anyone believe her story? Discovered by the crew of a salvage ship, Ripley's erratic behaviour - and the mysterious deaths of her fellow crew members (in the first film) - leads to her inquisition. The trial, in turn, results in a return visit to the decidedly strange planet that spawned the alien monster. There, the explorers discover a slew of aliens, of various forms, including close look-alikes of the original ravenous fellow. - From Pat H. Broeske"
SBALZAC%YKTVMX.BITNET@Berkeley (08/07/85)
From: Stephen Balzac <SBALZAC%YKTVMX.BITNET@Berkeley> >Remember the classic SF short that theorized that detecting which >stars had habitable planets was such a trick that one extremely >advanced civilization never found it and finally just died out since >there was no point wandering over those vast distances just to find >a habitable world. I believe they actually sent out a few scouts >but gave up when none of them found anything. The plot involves a >less advanced race that had stumbled on the secret trying to figure >out what happened to this dead race by reviving individuals from >their remains and quizzing them. >This seems so likely (except it probably isn't possibile to detect >which systems are worth visiting, not merely hard) that I don't find >it the least bit surprising that we haven't been visited. The story is called Resurrection by A E Van Vogt. The advanced race is humanity, which gets wiped out by a nucleonic storm since they hadn't been able to find any place to go when the storm came (don't worry, I'm not giving away anything important). The other race was the Ganae, and they did resurrect people on Earth, hence the title. The story is excellent and can be found, for those who are interested, in Damon Knight's "Toward Infinity", or Robert Silverberg's "Strangers in the Universe"