Beautiful Aliens?

[ER1CLE]

OMG there's lotsa alien cuties out there like .... Predator (gorgeous smile), the little alien from "MAC and ME", cant forget those little CRITTERS (irresistable -hehe-),and of course the acid spewing ALIENS by Stan Winston --beautiful--

[digitalspector]

I didn't see ET mentioned.


Or how bout Critters....the quill throwing porcupine alien thingies.

[daver]

I didn't see ET mentioned.

I've ranted here on ET before, so i'll leave most of that out. ET is too poorly designed to rate as beautiful in my book. Cute, maybe (sickeningly cute. kawai with a capital WA. Maybe they should have given him cat ears and cleavage). Comparing that waddling klutz to the smooth perfection of Alien is almost blasphemous.

Not that i have particularly strong feelings on the matter, mind you.

[Doodler]

I'll still cast my vote for Sil and Eve in either form.

[mike alexander]

Heinlein's Mother Thing.

Go find an old zinger of a story by FM Busby called "Eye of the Beholder", in Again, Dangerous Visions. Great tale about the objectivity of beauty.

Neils Bohr proposed a theory that there is a distance at which a woman is most beautiful: too far away and you can see no detail, too near and things are distorted. Wonder if it can be generalized...

[Doodler]

Heinlein's Mother Thing.

Go find an old zinger of a story by FM Busby called "Eye of the Beholder", in Again, Dangerous Visions. Great tale about the objectivity of beauty.

Neils Bohr proposed a theory that there is a distance at which a woman is most beautiful: too far away and you can see no detail, too near and things are distorted. Wonder if it can be generalized...

"She looks good from afar, but is far from good."
Walter Winchell, attr.

[The Shade]

Hmm, from the book it was fairly clear that the Alien was a generalized bioweapon. Lifestyle went (1) egg; (2) face hugger; (3) stomach sucker; (4) adult. Adult propagates either through (3) or (1).

I thought it reasonably clear that the stomach sucker that burst from the alien pilot was much larger than the human-sized stomach sucker. So, the phase 2 (face hugger) alien was an analyzer; it would determine the target species' environment and size, and tailor the characteristics of the phase 3 and 4 aliens (obviously an Alien adult the size of the alien pilot couldn't navigate through the Nostromo). Once the aliens had adapted to their targets, there would be no need for the phase 1 or 2 aliens until the target species had been exterminated. At which time it is time to lay eggs to wait for the next host.

However, they cut the scene from the first movie where the captured crew had been infected, and the second movie invalidated this rather elegant life cycle.

I remember the Canadian Discovery Channel runnnin that scene on the old @Discovery.ca show. It was quite horrific to watch, especially with one of them being still alive. I can see why they took it out when the movie was released in 1979. If they had kept the scene in there, it would have made the Aliens a whole lot more frightening (essentially, every Alien could produce an egg, not just a special one).

[informant]

But then there never would have been an alien queen.

[daver]

But then there never would have been an alien queen.

The cycle could have been modified slightly--stomach-sucker to warrior or stomach-sucker to queen. When the host population is nearly depleted, the warriors start planting queens (it wouldn't do to not leave any eggs behind).

[sideways]

Some people might disagree, but I think the Tholians (from the original Trek series) qualifiy as a beautiful non-humanoid race.

[Paul Beardsley]

A fascinating topic. A few points:

I don't think beauty is truly objective, but it is largely consensual. Very few people throw up at the sight of a sunset, and very few people are drawn to garbage. (Though anyone who's played the Silent Hill computer adventure games will know that squalor and images of corruption can assume a beauty of their own.)

A very interesting adjective was used in connection with Niven's Puppeteers - "elegant". The doesn't mean beauty, but it's certainly a part of what is meant by beauty in this context.

Sexual attraction - I don't think that's relevant. People can acknowledge beauty in other people without necessarily fancying them. Come to that, you can fancy someone without thinking they're beautiful.

Apart from the Puppeteers, and the Mulefa in Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, I can't off-hand think of any well-realised aliens that don't resemble humans. (Just for the moment I'm ignoring the way, way-out types like the planet Solaris, swarming gestalt-intelligences, energy fields and Douglas Adams' superintelligent shades of the colour blue.) Aliens do tend to be humans with a few cosmetic differences. (Or sometimes they're other familiar creatures with a few differences - whales, for instance.)

I would suggest, then, that the task of creating a beautiful non-humanoid alien is a very difficult one, given that it's so difficult to create even an average-looking non-humanoid alien. The fictional aliens that we do have are rarely members of varied races. They gesture delicately during first contact, they explain that they abolished war centuries ago, they spend time listening to twee music, and they'll probably explain their concept of honour or agnostic religion. Which is all very nice, but when did you last encounter an alien that had forgotten to renew its aircar insurance, or promised to go on a diet (really this time) as soon as the solstice celebrations are over, or found something inappropriately funny?

On the other hand, since we've never ever encountered real aliens, I think the SF writers should be praised for what success they've had in trying to imagine aliens. Even Daleks hold a certain fascination.

[digitalspector]

the blue opera woman from "the fifth element"

also the doctor from "Deep Space Nine"

(if any of the above were mentioned previously I apologize....I perused the thread)

*edit

and the woman in Jaba the Hutt's palace...in "return of the jedi"

the bikini clad dancer......

[SpaceTrekkie]

What about the crystalline entity from TNG? i thought that was a pretty non-humaniod.

[AstroSmurf]

The "angel" form of the Vorlons in B5 was pretty ok, but then, it was rather humanoid...

[Zamboni]

also the doctor from "Deep Space Nine"

Err? The doctor was human.

[Wingnut Ninja]

Tribbles. Awwwwww.... *coochycoochycoo*

[luvtinayothers]

[NeptuneRise]

Sorry to revive 9 year old topic guys

I just found the discussion interesting, and thought I could contribute visually with some awesome (in my opinion) alien designs:


Attachment 16777


Attachment 16778 Attachment 16779 Attachment 16780

[Paul Beardsley]

Wow, I didn't know I'd been on Bad Astronomy/BAUT so long! (Of course that was the original me, the one that got executed following the Hayling Island prison riots that was instigated by nervous tennis players, and then the user name was borrowed by a series of celebrities until the current me - who has the same name - eventually took over.)

I've not really come across any beautiful aliens that I recall since then. Although I quite like the Menoptra in the very early Doctor Who story, The Web Planet. It's best to just look at stills rather than watch the episodes as they are extremely slow-moving, clumsy, and not well written.

I like some of the pictures from post 48 - and the acknowledged semiconductor inspiration. Number 6 looks a bit too much like the Closer* from Silent Hill 3 though.

*Not to be confused with the women's magazine or the Joy Division album of the same name.

[Swift]

I like your aliens NeptuneRise, but I'm not sure I would call them beautiful. Fascinating, but not beautiful.

Reading through this thread, I don't agree with a lot of the suggestions because the OP specifically said non-humanoid and I'd even call ET humanoid.

Some of the aliens in Avatar were beautiful, and I don't mean the Na'vi (humanoids). But the horse-like creatures were beautiful, as were some of the other critters.

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and not the D&D creature).

[Solfe]

Anne McCaffrey's friendly aliens in The Planet Pirates series are pretty nice looking. There were shapeshifters that tended to look like the beautiful/handsome humans without actually copying a real person. There are a species of star fish aliens that aren't horrifying and a blue, hippo-horse like alien that is cute and fuzzy.

David Brinn's Tymbrimi are pretty human looking. Glaver's are cute.

Since I keep mentioning cute aliens as opposed to beautiful aliens I might as throw in ewoks and tribbles.

[JustAFriend]

Zhaan from Farscape...

http://www.farscapecast.com/images/zhaan.jpg

[swampyankee]

Vaguely humanoid: CJ Cherryh's Atevi and Chanur. For non-humanoid, the Alan Dean Foster's Thranx. CS Lewis' Tinidril from Perelandra. Lots of them from David Brin's Uplift Universe.

[eburacum45]

Nice zombie thread!
Paul's mention of the Menoptera reminds me of an alien race briefly mentioned in Vernor Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep. (I forget their name for the moment). They were beautiful butterfly-like aliens that were nasty little space-nazis, which demonstrates that beauty need have no correlation with character.

[tnjrp]

I'm not sure if aliens should even be conventionally beautiful - whatever that means exactly. Aliens in art should look different from Earth life and I do hope that if we ever discover any IRL, they also will appear so - am not going to be too happy intellectually with Orion slave girl look-alikes...

Anyways. Alex Ries' aliens are indeed alien so they fit the bill in that sence but they are rarely very beautiful. Link to his art plus a lot more here - take your pick of the exotic pretty, bad and ugly:
http://barbarpappa.livejournal.com/51459.html
http://barbarpappa.livejournal.com/61527.html

[Solfe]

Ugly, beautiful, cute, I don't care. But please don't make them sparkle.

[Jim]

... As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder ..

(Getting here late, so if this has been covered... tough.)

I don't mind the "beautiful aliens" so much. What gets me is that in many, many cases the aliens - no matter how much they differ from us - always find human women attractive. Sometimes obsessively so.

The male mammary fixation seems to be universal.

[Paul Beardsley]

(Getting here late, so if this has been covered... tough.)

I don't mind the "beautiful aliens" so much. What gets me is that in many, many cases the aliens - no matter how much they differ from us - always find human women attractive. Sometimes obsessively so.

The male mammary fixation seems to be universal.

Can you think of any recent examples of this?

[HenrikOlsen]

Can you think of any recent examples of this?

Avatar?

[Paul Beardsley]

Avatar?

Can you name a specific instance in Avatar where an alien who differed greatly from humans was attracted to a human woman?