Aliens in Scifi

[Wik]

The video game Mass Effect had a lot of cool aliens, too - my favourite were the "gas bags" or whatever they were called - floating jellyfish-like creatures that changed colours depending upon their emotions, and were exceedingly polite.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Another interesting race from Vernon Vinge "A fire upon the deep" are the 'tines'.

dog-like creatures (the Tines) who exist as small packs of individuals. Each individual consciousness is generated by the pack compilation of several Tines, who coordinate their thoughts via high-frequency sound. A single Tine is about as smart as a clever dog; two to three can think as well as a young human child; four to six is the standard and possess human or greater intelligence and self-awareness and personalities; under normal circumstances packs that are much larger degrade into barely-coherent mobs, though a rational pack of eight is not unheard of and one such pack plays a large role.

Also the skroderiders - kind of bionic plants on trolleys. fairly interesting, but nowhere near as fascinating as the distributed intelligence of the Tine packs.

Cheers

 

[Aran Thule]

If you want a varied selection of aliens then look no further then the best computer game of all time.. Star Control 2
List of Star Control races - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Deset Gled]

I guess there's plant people, and of course, human-looking aliens. Shapechangers. PLus the aliens in the Alien movies don't fit into the above list.

I would add a category for "Horrors" to fill in the void of Gigeresque, Lovecraftian, Zeiram, or floating eyeball style monsters. These type of monsters typically exhibit aspects of multiple types you list, and those aspects are generally overshadowed by the overall package.

Other categories to consider (that may or may not be well covered by other options):

Barbarians - devolved humans
Diseases and/or symbiots - aliens without bodies of their own that take over a host
Colonial organisms/swarms - intelligent masses of small things, like Carpenter's version of the Thing or (shudder) Gort in the Day the Earth Stood Still remake.
Really Big Things - Aliens so huge that they are never fully seen, or act as buildings. This would cover the living ships in Farscape and Lexx, or things like Big Julie in the My Teacher is an Alien books.

Also, I would retitle "Humans with Odd Head Features" as just "Humans with Odd Features" to cover things like 12 fingered people, resized humans, or other mutants.

 

[Andor]

There are pretty sharp limits to how alien an alien can be and still interact with us in a meaningful way. That is in fact the thesis of Stanislaw Lem's novel "Solaris."

Read that, and then complain about funny forehead aliens.

 

[Umbran]

There are pretty sharp limits to how alien an alien can be and still interact with us in a meaningful way. That is in fact the thesis of Stanislaw Lem's novel "Solaris."

The concept is also explored in the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card as the "Hierarchy of Exclusion". He doesn't strongly correlate that to the physical body, however.

 

[Dragonbait]

The video game Mass Effect had a lot of cool aliens, too - my favourite were the "gas bags" or whatever they were called - floating jellyfish-like creatures that changed colours depending upon their emotions, and were exceedingly polite.

This one approves of such a recommendation.

Gas Bags were a different species (animals, really) in the game than the Hanar which I assume you are referring

It's surprising how quickly one can adapt to talking to a levitating jellyfish: If you can communicate with each other and can recognize emotions and share ideas then it can work.

There are pretty sharp limits to how alien an alien can be and still interact with us in a meaningful way. That is in fact the thesis of Stanislaw Lem's novel "Solaris."

True.

I think many of the aliens listed here, even the ones with bizarre anatomy like the hanar of Mass Effect would fall into a more anthropomorphic/humanoid category rather than the truly alien like the alien

Spoiler

ocean

of Solaris or things from the Cthulhu mythos. They do not need to look like a human for us to communicate with them, but they would need to think relatively similar to a human.

Edit: Ah, the Hierarchy of Exclusion states just that.

 

[Dioltach]

There's also the Extremely Hot Chick category. My Stepmother Is an Alien, for example.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Other great aliens:

1. Greg Bear's Jarts
2. Greg Bear's Cords/Braids
3. Stephen Donaldson's Amnion

 

[Plane Sailing]

I don't know if you would call them aliens, but the Minds from Ian M. Banks' Culture novels are an interesting example of an intelligence with which we can only have tangential communication with.