What is your fave alien race?

Pierson's Puppeteers from Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories are interesting. They are odd-looking - a body something like that of a camel, three legs (one in back, two in front) and two necks topped with an eye and a mouth. They are descended from herd animals, and have become a race of cowards, essentially. Very powerful, clever cowards. Theie ingrained fear of predators makes them avoid any contact with aliens, so only Puppeteers who are considered insane by their own kind become merchants or diplomats. The Puppeteers have manipulated the history and genetics of races they considered potential threats. They are so concerned with safety that the bulk of them never leave their home planer. But, they have used astounding technology to actually move their entire planet, along with others they use for resources, into a "Rosette" which they currently using to leave the galaxy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye" features the Moties. These aliens are somewhat humanoid - in D&D we might call them "goblinoid" - with three arms, two on the right (usually) that are slender and dextrous, and a large, strong left arm. They are generally smaller than humans. Moties are divided up into several castes, which are all very different from each other physically and mentally - leaders, warriors, engineers, etc. They breed at an extremely fast rate, and can overwhelm local populations of other species very quickly. They are very territorial, which makes them even more dangerous. Here's a good wikipedia article about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moties

Puppeteer pic:

From D&D, the Neogi, Illithids, and Ethergaunts. From other settings, Weren (Alternity Star*Drive), the Predator, Xenomorphs (Alien), and the Go'auld (Stargate, because who doesn't love body snatching aliens?).

Daleks!

Spelljammer has many aliens:

Aartuk are plants with a warrior society that look for honorable fights. They release the weak and only enslave those who can pilot ships.

Clockwork horrors- the virii of the universe.

Jammer leaches (which drain magic) and mortiss (which eat wood) are both barnacles of space.

Hurwaet are space trolls (or actually space scrags) that were a power back in the day. When their civilization collapsed, many colonies degenerated into barbarism.

Fal and gonn are sources of information. The former are giant worms that enjoy owning libraries and answering questions and the latter look like gas giants (but are only a few hundred feet in diameter) that use sound in communication and combat.

Xixchil are mantid people that are expert surgeons who enjoy "improving" others for a fee. If you use the mutation rules from Future, these could be a source.

For another "Epic" alien race of incredibly ancient origin and vast technological power, you can't do much better than the Xeelee in Stephen Baxter's books. The Xeelee (that's the name other races call them, their name for themselves- assuming they have such- is unknown) are a race with complete mastery of spacetime, such that they can fold it and manipulate it to create actual objects, and they invented the first workable faster-than-light drive (a "hyperdrive" which works via instantaneous translation across long distances).

They are known to have mastered time travel, and have directly interfered in their own evolution more than once.

After fighting a losing war over the span of eons with a race of beings made of dark matter, who are slowly but surely adapting the universe to suit themselves, the Xeelee created an "escape hatch" from the universe called the Ring, which is an artifact made of carefully knitted-together cosmic strings which form a spinning circle ten million light-years across, the gravity of which creates the phenomenon known to Earth astronomers as the Great Attractor. The purpose of the Ring is to create a spinning, naked singularity 300 light-years across at its center, which is essentially a portal into another spacetime- another universe.

The Xeelee are a "species" of creature that are essentially several different types of lifeforms living in symbiosis; the base of the lifeform is made of shaped spacetime defects which resemble vast birds made of pure blackness. In the novel Exultant, he actually defines these beings as leftovers from a much earlier era of the universe, before the "inflationary period" that happened within a miniscule fraction of a second after the Big Bang. In fact, it's stated in the backstory that the beings who inhabited that vanishingly brief (by our standards) epoch were all spacetime-defect creatures. And a war between them led to the inflationary period which increased the size of the universe at speeds much faster than light itself can travel. The Xeelee are leftovers from that ancient time who somehow learned to survive in the new era which was, to them, incredibly cold and dark, much like the universe would seem to us once all the stars burn out.

The Fuzzies by H. Beam Piper


Jack

I've always liked the idea of the Hutts from Star Wars.

There's a lot of alien species in Star Wars that I like.

But the Hutts, and the Star Dragons, are the top for me.

Vulcans, borg, Moties, dralasites, that guy who co-piloted the Falcon in Return of the Jedi... and "the swarm" from Bruce Sterling's short story of the same name. Not sure I completely buy his premise, but it's an interesting one.

Mustrum_Ridcully said:

I think you used this description somewhere else, and I had one question ever since.

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Okay.

Does declaring a war really fit this philosophy:

Essentially, the slowly "assimilation" of humans (human population slowly changing into the alien race) seemed to be the only type of reasonable warfare they would try, but not outright attacking humans. Unless open warfare is their type of "adapting to the enviroment" - but aren't the humans not also a part of the enviroment?

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The aliens and humans were so different that the aliens weren't even aware of the existence of humans - it's a little odd how they didn't notice their existence when co-opting them, but then again they are very different. When the aliens discovered humans through contact, they declared war on humans because of their differing philosohpies. The aliens simply couldn't stand the thought of a species that alter the environment in a large scale way. Humans do that all the time and can't stop. That's why the humans had to evac and nuke.

And to answer any other questions, the Alien theory was two-fold:

One, aliens can't get along with other aliens. The Chixchulub (named after the crater in Mexico) tried to wipe out all life using von Neumann machines. This was used to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. (They would create asteroids and attack any life-bearing planets. Over time, random radiation damage causes programming changes, basically neutering the von Neumann machines. Also, the machines didn't read a lot of planets properly, because they allowed Earth to still have life after the attack. Of course, it delayed the evolution of intelligent life, or so the Chixchulub probably thought.)

Two, aliens eventually lose their sentience (the reasoning was a bit contrived, IMO) or they split into subspecies which drift apart and then go to war because of #1 and usually wipe each other out. That is slowly happening to humans in the novel. Effectively, every sentient species will go extinct. The humans are attempting to apply "Permanence" to their own species, preventing speciation, but it's doomed to failure.

Humans discovered that dark dwarf stars can host light, although any humans living in such an environment (frequently a space station) would be light-sensitive. They travelled through slower than light vehicles.

Later, humanity discovered FTL travel... but it requires heavy stars, not dark dwarf stars. As a result, there were now two human subspecies, since contact is so limited. The FTL society is obviously more powerful, but suffers from rebellion against it's ultra-capitalism, and they're not going to wipe out the other subspecies.

the "perditor" from AVP. both highly advanced and tough as nails