Rocky from Project Hail Mary is my all time favorite alien! Tines from Fires upon the Deep close second. Portia and the spiders from Children of Time gets the bronze. 😀
The Vonnegut aliens remind me of how viruses communicate! I just finished Long Way, and have a hold on the next one. Pretty fun. Light on plot but long on friendships
Childhoods End is one of my all-time favourites and Dawn was a surprise hit for me, from the synopsis I didn't know what to expect but the novel was superb and tha aliens were very interesting. The City in the middle of the night sounds interesting.
My favorites have to be the tine packs from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and The Children of the Sky. Similar to dogs in shape and size, they produce and process sound in a far more sophisticated and precise way than any Earth species, and their sense of self emerges at the pack level, with anywhere from three to eight tine bodies being viewed as one collective person. One or two tines are just dumb animals, nine or more and there's too much noise for them to coordinate. These small-scale hive minds are entirely sound-based, with the short-range "mind sound" that binds a pack together being treated as an entirely different form of language from the long-range "interpack speech" that packs use to communicate with other packs. So there are no psychic powers or pheromones or anything like that involved. Their pack-level selfhood has so many interesting implications for their culture that Vinge does a great job of portraying. If two packs get too close, their thought processes can be interrupted by interference from one another's mind sound, so they have a very broad sense of what constitutes their personal space and are very touchy about physical intimacy. Which in turn has an impact on their architecture, resulting in buildings that are much smaller vertically (since they're less than half our height) but much larger horizontally. They only come close to one another to engage in sex or warfare, and the mind sound interference that results means that these activities cause tine packs to temporarily lose their sense of personal identity. There's a whole set of disciplines dedicated to caring for the individual tines leftover when a pack is partially killed, and helping packs that have lost members find suitable replacements. Although tines as a species have short lifespans, tines as people can live for hundreds of years by continuously replacing members that die of old age with young ones, though this can cause their memories and personality traits to drift over the generations. Even the way character arcs are presented has to be looked at differently with tine packs. If someone commits a crime, but later loses two or three of their five members and replaces them with new ones, can the resulting pack really be judged as the same person who committed the crime? What do you do with a soldier who comes back from a war when that pack was forced to piece themself together from the stranded and traumatized remnants of two packs that fought on opposite sides? Encountering humans is a real culture shock. They're a little creeped out that we only have one body each and can think without making any sounds, but this also means that they can have direct physical interactions with us, a level of closeness that packs can't share with one another without loss of identity. And when we teach them about radio technology, they come up with some very interesting uses for it. Also, they do everything with their mouths because they don't have thumbs! These guys are so much fun to read about.
This is an amazing comment! You explained it better than I could have. I loved the tines as well as the skoderiders! Vinge is fantastic at writing aliens!
Neat list, and a fascinating listen; thanks! My favorite movie aliens tend to be those utterly non-human (John Carpenter's thing, the rocks from Monolith Monsters (1957), or the germ from Andromeda Strain (1971; and the book, I suppose)), but my fave SF alien from books is a blast from the past: H.G. Wells' Martians. Tentacled slugs that drink blood, farm red weed, and use tripods (there are no naturally three-legged animals in the world)! Kee-RAY-zee, man! These "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" (and their weird biology) have fascinated me since I was a kid! (And Lordy, I was *so* disappointed by the alien design in Spielberg's WotW, a ripoff of the Independence Day space-monster--meanwhile, I think the Martians from the 1953 WotW are... *okay*, I guess, but I prefer to think of the floating manta-ray death machines as the Martians' true form. But those are my mental gymnastics!) Keep up the good work!
Stephen Fry once said about cheese: "It's the celebration of what happens when milk goes off big time styley." Or along those lines. My favourite explanation ever.
Love that Robin dropped the Animorphs series in her list. For some fun alien sci-fi read Quozl by Alan Dean Foster. It gives a good alien perspective on the 20th century.
Great video! This is always an interesting topic. Some more aliens that I enjoyed reading about: The Selenites in H G Wells' The First Men in the Moon, an intelligent underground insectoid race. This is a good example of an early first contact story I think. The ocean in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, a vast, amorphous and inscrutable lifeform that covers a whole planet The Trisolarans in Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past. One thing that fascinates me about these is their strange physiology which allows them to dehydrate their bodies and transform into lifeless fibre for centuries as a means of hibernation.
Thanks! I have read some Wells books but not that one, I’ll have to check out it. I recently bought Solaris and plan to read it soon. It sounds unique! And the Trisolarans are awesome, I just wasn’t sure how to talk about them in a spoiler-free way. But I agree, they are fascinating!
I've just finished reading Dragon's Egg by Robert L Forward. Shame the title sounds very fantasy as it is definitely hard sci-fi. At first the book felt a bit slow to me but after finishing it I felt it needed the pacing. It has the alien cheela which develop a million times faster than humans. So interesting. The concepts between the developments and how species overcome obstacles among themselves and between species still has me thinking about the book.
I really enjoy the species that are all in the "Legacy of the Aldenata" series, especially the Posleen, a species described as six-limbed crocodile centaurs with an interesting hierarchical structure with one leader for hundreds of troops, and a leader over hundreds of leaders. And all the other aliens that the Posleen are attacking and eating, which do not have the mental/emotional capacity to wage war, so they recruit humanity right as the Posleen are years away from approaching Earth.
@Words in Time It's Bob Shaw. Very nice environmental imagery, characters and cool concepts involving death and life. In that order. I heard about it from Bookpilled.
Can't believe you missed the Affront from Iain M.Banks' Excession. "Once known as the Issorilians, they were given the "Affront" moniker by the Padressahl in reference to their exceedingly brutal culture. The Issorilians enthusiastically adopted the nickname and have used it ever since." The Culture Wiki.
What a fun video! I will always have a soft spot for the "piggies" from the Ender's Game series. I can't spell their actual name! Lol this was probably the first series I read that had aliens in it and it was a lot of fun learning about them. The Formics/Buggers were the enemy and then even afterwards you don't really learn a whole lot about them, but the piggies on the other hand are very loveable in my opinion.
This was fun! I have different kinds of favorite aliens. My favorite from a science standpoint are those that emphasize how difficult it is to understand alien minds, and to me no one does that better than CJ Cherryh and her first three books of the Foreigner series. It's so very good because if throws a human into an alien culture and shows just how difficult it is to shed all the human assumptions we learn to use in communicating in our society and grasping those of a completely different set of organisms. My favorite just from a fun standpoint are the T'carais from the Liaden universe series by Steve Miller and Sharon Lee. They look a bit like upright giant turtles, and are much slower that we are at doing things because they live so very long. They appreciate patience and courtesy. But if you make them mad, they'll kill you, your family, your species, and wipe your planet out of existence. The book Agent of Change introduces them. It's fun, light-hearted space opera.
Enjoyed the video. Robin is a woman after my own heart. Loved her earrings and I want to get a shirt like hers. Just how I dress! I have 2 suggestions for alien books. Both are older, but not quite classic sci-fi. Both published in 2000. First is The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper. Not a month goes by that I don’t comment to my husband, “we need Chiddy and Vess to show up” while watching the news. We might qualify to join the Galactic community. We just need to be guided through some “housekeeping” to make us ready. There’s more than that, but that’s the basic premise. The second is Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer. A ship with 2 alien species shows up. One alien lands at the Royal Ontario Museum and says, “take me to a paleontologist.” They are looking for proof of God’s existence. I’m not a religious person, but I have a fascination with religion almost like an alien looking at it and not quite getting it. I got my Dad, who claims to hate sci-fi, to read it and he loved it. We were discussing movies recently and he started describing the book as a movie. It made such a vivid impression he swore it was a movie he had seen. Took some convincing and sending the Amazon link to convince him otherwise. I’ve reread both these books several times. I love first contact and alien-centric books. I just figure these 2 were not as new and less well known
I agree with everyone else who loved "Childhood's End". It reminded me of the British movie ""Quatermass and the Pit". Who doesn't love a good story where the appearance of Satan-looking aliens results in the destruction of humanity? Speaking of which, I feel certain you could do an entire video on stories where London is destroyed too. ;-)
Possible SPOILERS for Children of Ruin OK, we’ll allow the spiders from children of time. I really liked the actual aliens, the hive mind aliens, from the sequel, children of ruin. They come across this one way, but as you the book goes on you realize that they didn’t necessarily mean any harm
@@WordsinTime Heads-up: he demands a *lot* of suspension of disbelief from the reader in those books. But there's meaning to the madness and it pays off, but it takes a while!
Here's one that some might find controversial: The Priest Kings of Gor. The Gor series gets a lot of heat and rightly so. I tired of reading it after book 5 with no plans to return. The misogyny in it grew annoying. However the Priest Kings are a good and distinctive alien species and not just "Humans in rubber suits" like we see on Star Trek and such shows. Talked about in books 1 and 2 we don't meet them until book 3, aptly title "The Priest Kings of Gor." They have high technology as they can move planets from solar system to solar system. They've been around in our system for thousands of years quietly observing Humans and kidnapping lots of them over that time. They rule their world keeping Humans at a low technology level, almost pre-iron age. Why? It's never explained but fear of rebellion is probably a part of it. Much of what they do is never explained. Humans almost never see the Priest Kings and yet revere them as near-gods. The Priest Kings are humanoid bugs that communicate via smells, although they have created a machine that can translate scents into Human speech. They have a Queen figure who is old and dying and all is not well within the Priest King society. Plus, a second alien race opposes their plans. While I can't recommend reading many of the Gor books the first three are worth it not just for the stories and action but to see how the Priest Kings are developed.
Haha I’ll take your word for it. I have read The Left Hand of Darkness, which was rather interesting but I haven’t read further into The Hainish Cycle. I’m glad you liked it!
Zog from the planet Margo. From the Kilgore Trout (Kurt Vonnegut) story: 'Dancing Fool' (Breakfast of Champions). Zog comes to Earth to bring an end to all wars & a cure for cancer. The first thing he sees upon landing on Earth is a house on fire - he rushes in to warn the people of the terrible danger. However, Zog looks like a plumber's helper & communicates by farting & tap-dancing - so when he bursts into the house, urgently farting & tap-dancing, the home owner brains him with a golf club.
I really liked the Pierson's Puppeteers from the Ringworld Series. Amazing how they manipulated both Human an Kzin destinies, and how that was uncovered throughout the series. Also the Tri-Solarans from the Three Body Problem Series. It occurs to me that Liu's aliens seem to follow in the footsteps of the Maoist Communist party overlords of the China he grew up in: They're deceitful, totalitarian, grim, devoid of cultural and artistic accomplishments, and given over to militarism-- ultimately desperate and fighting for survival because of their peculiar stellar geography. Somewhat the same predicament as Mainland China, which, for all intents and purposes, is bottled up and constrained from future, further expansion on both land and sea, by its own unfortunate geography.
Ringworld is a book with a great concept (the ringworld) but is a disappointing read. It isn't like Remdevous with Rama, for example, where Rama itself and its mysteries are the real core of the story, and feel truly alien. Instead, in Ringworld, the characters just go to the ringworld and then have a bunch of mediocre adventures that could have happened anywhere. And there's way too much cringey sex stuff, to the point that it's clear the author is a dirty pervert. The puppeteer aliens are interesting though and are probably the best part of the book. But overall the book, I found, is very overrated.
@@edgarclot3905 Actually had an amazing theme. The book revealed how the Pierson's puppeteers bred the Kzin to be more "tame" by accelating the timeline on when they would meet humans, so they could be slaughtered by them in every war with only the tamer males left to breed. Also revealed how they Kzin bred humans for luck, hence Teela Brown, and also how engineered the fall of the Ringworld civilization by introducing the virus that killed the superconductors and hence doomed everyone on the world leading to Louiv Wu's Hobson's choice resulting in the deaths of trillions of ringworld inhabitants in order to stabilize its orbit. It's actually a book about cultural imperialism and how it's furthered by the most heinous gambit of all---the God gambit. Terrific book and an absolute classic of golden age science fiction.
Rocky from Project Hail Mary is my all time favorite alien!
Tines from Fires upon the Deep close second.
Portia and the spiders from Children of Time gets the bronze. 😀
That’s a stacked podium right there!
Can't complain about Rocky. Everybody loves Rocky.
@@colin1818 Could we get Rocky for President? 🤔
The Vonnegut aliens remind me of how viruses communicate! I just finished Long Way, and have a hold on the next one. Pretty fun. Light on plot but long on friendships
That’s cool! I’m looking forward to getting to know the characters in Wayfarers!
Childhoods End is one of my all-time favourites and Dawn was a surprise hit for me, from the synopsis I didn't know what to expect but the novel was superb and tha aliens were very interesting. The City in the middle of the night sounds interesting.
Nice! I’m glad you loved Childhood’s End as well!
The Olyix in the Salvation series (Peter F. Hamilton) were great. Their world view and motivations are very unique. You will love them.
Awesome! Hamilton writes great aliens, I’m looking forward to the Salvation series!
Salvation is in my wishlist. This comment reminded me of it.
LOL! multi-level marketing! That was a great buy this shirt ad. Robin looked genuinely curious and intrigued.
MLM blew my mind!
MLM is very alien-like: Meet, Love-bomb, Manipulate, used by Scamway and cults
My favorites have to be the tine packs from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and The Children of the Sky.
Similar to dogs in shape and size, they produce and process sound in a far more sophisticated and precise way than any Earth species, and their sense of self emerges at the pack level, with anywhere from three to eight tine bodies being viewed as one collective person. One or two tines are just dumb animals, nine or more and there's too much noise for them to coordinate. These small-scale hive minds are entirely sound-based, with the short-range "mind sound" that binds a pack together being treated as an entirely different form of language from the long-range "interpack speech" that packs use to communicate with other packs. So there are no psychic powers or pheromones or anything like that involved.
Their pack-level selfhood has so many interesting implications for their culture that Vinge does a great job of portraying. If two packs get too close, their thought processes can be interrupted by interference from one another's mind sound, so they have a very broad sense of what constitutes their personal space and are very touchy about physical intimacy. Which in turn has an impact on their architecture, resulting in buildings that are much smaller vertically (since they're less than half our height) but much larger horizontally. They only come close to one another to engage in sex or warfare, and the mind sound interference that results means that these activities cause tine packs to temporarily lose their sense of personal identity. There's a whole set of disciplines dedicated to caring for the individual tines leftover when a pack is partially killed, and helping packs that have lost members find suitable replacements. Although tines as a species have short lifespans, tines as people can live for hundreds of years by continuously replacing members that die of old age with young ones, though this can cause their memories and personality traits to drift over the generations. Even the way character arcs are presented has to be looked at differently with tine packs. If someone commits a crime, but later loses two or three of their five members and replaces them with new ones, can the resulting pack really be judged as the same person who committed the crime? What do you do with a soldier who comes back from a war when that pack was forced to piece themself together from the stranded and traumatized remnants of two packs that fought on opposite sides?
Encountering humans is a real culture shock. They're a little creeped out that we only have one body each and can think without making any sounds, but this also means that they can have direct physical interactions with us, a level of closeness that packs can't share with one another without loss of identity. And when we teach them about radio technology, they come up with some very interesting uses for it.
Also, they do everything with their mouths because they don't have thumbs! These guys are so much fun to read about.
This is an amazing comment! You explained it better than I could have. I loved the tines as well as the skoderiders! Vinge is fantastic at writing aliens!
Neat list, and a fascinating listen; thanks!
My favorite movie aliens tend to be those utterly non-human (John Carpenter's thing, the rocks from Monolith Monsters (1957), or the germ from Andromeda Strain (1971; and the book, I suppose)), but my fave SF alien from books is a blast from the past: H.G. Wells' Martians. Tentacled slugs that drink blood, farm red weed, and use tripods (there are no naturally three-legged animals in the world)! Kee-RAY-zee, man! These "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" (and their weird biology) have fascinated me since I was a kid! (And Lordy, I was *so* disappointed by the alien design in Spielberg's WotW, a ripoff of the Independence Day space-monster--meanwhile, I think the Martians from the 1953 WotW are... *okay*, I guess, but I prefer to think of the floating manta-ray death machines as the Martians' true form. But those are my mental gymnastics!)
Keep up the good work!
Yes, I love unique non-human aliens! Those all sound pretty cool!
Stephen Fry once said about cheese: "It's the celebration of what happens when milk goes off big time styley." Or along those lines. My favourite explanation ever.
Haha Fry is a legend!
The Heechee from the Gateway/Heechee novels by Fred Pohl.
Ooohh, good pick!
The Tines from A Fire Upon The Deep
The Hivers from the Traveller TTRPG
The Kzin from Larry Niven's Known Space series
The Horta from Star Trek
The tines are great! I’ll have to check out the others!
Love that Robin dropped the Animorphs series in her list. For some fun alien sci-fi read Quozl by Alan Dean Foster. It gives a good alien perspective on the 20th century.
I didn’t read it as a kid but it sounds fun! And thanks for the recommendation!
Great video! This is always an interesting topic. Some more aliens that I enjoyed reading about:
The Selenites in H G Wells' The First Men in the Moon, an intelligent underground insectoid race. This is a good example of an early first contact story I think.
The ocean in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, a vast, amorphous and inscrutable lifeform that covers a whole planet
The Trisolarans in Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past. One thing that fascinates me about these is their strange physiology which allows them to dehydrate their bodies and transform into lifeless fibre for centuries as a means of hibernation.
Thanks! I have read some Wells books but not that one, I’ll have to check out it. I recently bought Solaris and plan to read it soon. It sounds unique! And the Trisolarans are awesome, I just wasn’t sure how to talk about them in a spoiler-free way. But I agree, they are fascinating!
I've just finished reading Dragon's Egg by Robert L Forward. Shame the title sounds very fantasy as it is definitely hard sci-fi. At first the book felt a bit slow to me but after finishing it I felt it needed the pacing. It has the alien cheela which develop a million times faster than humans. So interesting. The concepts between the developments and how species overcome obstacles among themselves and between species still has me thinking about the book.
Yes, the cheela are super interesting! This book reminded me of Children of Time but with harder sci-fi!
I really enjoy the species that are all in the "Legacy of the Aldenata" series, especially the Posleen, a species described as six-limbed crocodile centaurs with an interesting hierarchical structure with one leader for hundreds of troops, and a leader over hundreds of leaders. And all the other aliens that the Posleen are attacking and eating, which do not have the mental/emotional capacity to wage war, so they recruit humanity right as the Posleen are years away from approaching Earth.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll have to look it up!
Palace of Eternity had really cool aliens but I've never seen anything better than the variety of aliens in A Fire Upon the Deep.
A Fire Upon the Deep had great aliens. I’ll have to check out Palace of Eternity!
@Words in Time It's Bob Shaw. Very nice environmental imagery, characters and cool concepts involving death and life. In that order. I heard about it from Bookpilled.
the Borg are hands down the greatest and best aliens ever
I need to watch more Star Trek!
@@WordsinTime yes you do!
Can't believe you missed the Affront from Iain M.Banks' Excession. "Once known as the Issorilians, they were given the "Affront" moniker by the Padressahl in reference to their exceedingly brutal culture. The Issorilians enthusiastically adopted the nickname and have used it ever since." The Culture Wiki.
I own a copy of Excession and plan to read it later this year!
What a fun video! I will always have a soft spot for the "piggies" from the Ender's Game series. I can't spell their actual name! Lol this was probably the first series I read that had aliens in it and it was a lot of fun learning about them. The Formics/Buggers were the enemy and then even afterwards you don't really learn a whole lot about them, but the piggies on the other hand are very loveable in my opinion.
Yes! The Ender series has some great aliens!
I do like the Moties, but they are also in The Mote in Murchison's Eye - the second half of the story.
I haven’t read that one so that’s good to know!
The Alea "Eternal Light"
The Silver Ghosts by Stephen Baxter
The Jain by Neal Asher
Thanks for the recommendations, I’ll have to check those out!
Still waiting on the movie of The Mote in God's Eye. CGI should be on par right now, so a movie should be feasible...
Interesting, it could make an intriguing movie!
This was fun! I have different kinds of favorite aliens. My favorite from a science standpoint are those that emphasize how difficult it is to understand alien minds, and to me no one does that better than CJ Cherryh and her first three books of the Foreigner series. It's so very good because if throws a human into an alien culture and shows just how difficult it is to shed all the human assumptions we learn to use in communicating in our society and grasping those of a completely different set of organisms.
My favorite just from a fun standpoint are the T'carais from the Liaden universe series by Steve Miller and Sharon Lee. They look a bit like upright giant turtles, and are much slower that we are at doing things because they live so very long. They appreciate patience and courtesy. But if you make them mad, they'll kill you, your family, your species, and wipe your planet out of existence. The book Agent of Change introduces them. It's fun, light-hearted space opera.
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I’ve heard good things about the Foreigner series. I’ll have to look up the Liaden universe series. They sound cool!
Enjoyed the video. Robin is a woman after my own heart. Loved her earrings and I want to get a shirt like hers. Just how I dress! I have 2 suggestions for alien books. Both are older, but not quite classic sci-fi. Both published in 2000. First is The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper. Not a month goes by that I don’t comment to my husband, “we need Chiddy and Vess to show up” while watching the news. We might qualify to join the Galactic community. We just need to be guided through some “housekeeping” to make us ready. There’s more than that, but that’s the basic premise. The second is Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer. A ship with 2 alien species shows up. One alien lands at the Royal Ontario Museum and says, “take me to a paleontologist.” They are looking for proof of God’s existence. I’m not a religious person, but I have a fascination with religion almost like an alien looking at it and not quite getting it. I got my Dad, who claims to hate sci-fi, to read it and he loved it. We were discussing movies recently and he started describing the book as a movie. It made such a vivid impression he swore it was a movie he had seen. Took some convincing and sending the Amazon link to convince him otherwise. I’ve reread both these books several times. I love first contact and alien-centric books. I just figure these 2 were not as new and less well known
That’s awesome! I will check those two books out. I like the premise of aliens looking for proof of God. Very interesting!
Rocky from project hail Mary
This is an excellent choice! I didn’t know how to talk about this one without spoilers but I love Rocky! 🎶
I agree with everyone else who loved "Childhood's End". It reminded me of the British movie ""Quatermass and the Pit". Who doesn't love a good story where the appearance of Satan-looking aliens results in the destruction of humanity? Speaking of which, I feel certain you could do an entire video on stories where London is destroyed too. ;-)
That sounds cool, I’ll have to look up that movie!
Possible SPOILERS for Children of Ruin
OK, we’ll allow the spiders from children of time. I really liked the actual aliens, the hive mind aliens, from the sequel, children of ruin. They come across this one way, but as you the book goes on you realize that they didn’t necessarily mean any harm
I’ve only read Children of Time. I need to get to Children of Ruin at some point!
1. The Tines of A Fire Upon The Deep
2. The Gods and the Spider-Monkeys from Ken Macleod's Engines Of Light trilogy.
The Tines are awesome! I'll have to check out the Engines of Light trilogy, thanks!
@@WordsinTime Heads-up: he demands a *lot* of suspension of disbelief from the reader in those books. But there's meaning to the madness and it pays off, but it takes a while!
Here's one that some might find controversial: The Priest Kings of Gor. The Gor series gets a lot of heat and rightly so. I tired of reading it after book 5 with no plans to return. The misogyny in it grew annoying. However the Priest Kings are a good and distinctive alien species and not just "Humans in rubber suits" like we see on Star Trek and such shows.
Talked about in books 1 and 2 we don't meet them until book 3, aptly title "The Priest Kings of Gor." They have high technology as they can move planets from solar system to solar system. They've been around in our system for thousands of years quietly observing Humans and kidnapping lots of them over that time. They rule their world keeping Humans at a low technology level, almost pre-iron age. Why? It's never explained but fear of rebellion is probably a part of it. Much of what they do is never explained. Humans almost never see the Priest Kings and yet revere them as near-gods. The Priest Kings are humanoid bugs that communicate via smells, although they have created a machine that can translate scents into Human speech. They have a Queen figure who is old and dying and all is not well within the Priest King society. Plus, a second alien race opposes their plans.
While I can't recommend reading many of the Gor books the first three are worth it not just for the stories and action but to see how the Priest Kings are developed.
Thanks for all the info, they sound like unique aliens! I’m not familiar with the series but I’ll look it up!
Fermented bovine baby food is excellent with bees' puke!
edit: my fav are the Terrans from the Hainish cycle :P
Haha I’ll take your word for it. I have read The Left Hand of Darkness, which was rather interesting but I haven’t read further into The Hainish Cycle. I’m glad you liked it!
Zog from the planet Margo. From the Kilgore Trout (Kurt Vonnegut) story: 'Dancing Fool' (Breakfast of Champions).
Zog comes to Earth to bring an end to all wars & a cure for cancer. The first thing he sees upon landing on Earth is a house on fire - he rushes in to warn the people of the terrible danger. However, Zog looks like a plumber's helper & communicates by farting & tap-dancing - so when he bursts into the house, urgently farting & tap-dancing, the home owner brains him with a golf club.
Haha Breakfast of Champions is tragically funny
I really liked the Pierson's Puppeteers from the Ringworld Series. Amazing how they manipulated both Human an Kzin destinies, and how that was uncovered throughout the series.
Also the Tri-Solarans from the Three Body Problem Series. It occurs to me that Liu's aliens seem to follow in the footsteps of the Maoist Communist party overlords of the China he grew up in: They're deceitful, totalitarian, grim, devoid of cultural and artistic accomplishments, and given over to militarism-- ultimately desperate and fighting for survival because of their peculiar stellar geography. Somewhat the same predicament as Mainland China, which, for all intents and purposes, is bottled up and constrained from future, further expansion on both land and sea, by its own unfortunate geography.
Interesting points! Ringworld has been on my TBR for a while!
Ringworld is a book with a great concept (the ringworld) but is a disappointing read. It isn't like Remdevous with Rama, for example, where Rama itself and its mysteries are the real core of the story, and feel truly alien. Instead, in Ringworld, the characters just go to the ringworld and then have a bunch of mediocre adventures that could have happened anywhere. And there's way too much cringey sex stuff, to the point that it's clear the author is a dirty pervert.
The puppeteer aliens are interesting though and are probably the best part of the book. But overall the book, I found, is very overrated.
@@edgarclot3905 Actually had an amazing theme. The book revealed how the Pierson's puppeteers bred the Kzin to be more "tame" by accelating the timeline on when they would meet humans, so they could be slaughtered by them in every war with only the tamer males left to breed. Also revealed how they Kzin bred humans for luck, hence Teela Brown, and also how engineered the fall of the Ringworld civilization by introducing the virus that killed the superconductors and hence doomed everyone on the world leading to Louiv Wu's Hobson's choice resulting in the deaths of trillions of ringworld inhabitants in order to stabilize its orbit. It's actually a book about cultural imperialism and how it's furthered by the most heinous gambit of all---the God gambit. Terrific book and an absolute classic of golden age science fiction.
What a fun video!! I cant get over the edible earwax comment…. Bleh
Haha my apologies!
I wasn't a huge fan of the ending of Childhood's End. It wasn't all bad by any means, but I didn't love it.
My friend Josh from redfurybooks was mixed on it too, but I loved it.
Id say the best would be friendly but with political interspecies drama, that have to band together to fight a common cause.
Love it!