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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 4516802" data-attributes="member: 41584">For games, it seems that 'men in funny suits' work better.  Throw some Klingon style 'aliens' that are little more than humans with bumps on their foreheads and exemplarize one human trait taken to an extreme, and that seems easy to identify with.  Ferengi - short people, obsessed with money!  Vulcans - pointy-eared people, super-logical! 'Bending' the concept, it can be fun to play a completely human looking alien, who is *vastly* alien in temperament, 'vast, cool and unsympathetic,' (or just some guinea-pig-swallowing horrorshow) or a squiggly terrifying-looking freak who is capable of mimicing in all aspects a human personality (a 'mental shapeshifter' able to emulate / model the psyche and personality traits of others), and chooses to do so to 'get along with humans.'  For my sci-fi reading, I prefer extremes. David Brins Startide Rising / Uplift Wars aliens are, if anything, a little too 'mundane' for me, although I do love the fact that while every other sci-fi setting out there promotes humanity as 'the adaptable ones,' Brin blew even that out of the water by having the Tymbrimi be a species entirely built around the concept of adaptability. Jack Chalkers Demons of Rainbow Bridge books (Quintara Marathon trilogy) also have some really amazing and unique aliens (although his writing takes some getting used to, and he doesn't quite go so far as to have a hyperintelligent shade of the color blue...). Charles Sheffields 'The Mind Pool' has some incredibly 'alien' aliens.  One is a hive-mind swarm of beetles, for instance, while another is a strange fusion of vegetable and mineral. Peter Hamilton, in the Reality Dysfunction, manages to introduce a human society of biotechnicians that are as alien, if not more so, than the aliens introduced later in the book.  That's a pretty neat bit.  Dave Wolverton in On My Way to Paradise, does a similar trick, again using humans who have embraced biotechnology and begun rampantly modifying themselves.</blockquote>

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