Blobs, Orbs, and Starfish: Really Alien Aliens

Book blogger Shruti Ramanujam recently published a  list of “oddly specific storylines” she loves in books, that made me laugh out loud. And it made me think about what storylines or tropes attract me in a book. 

One of those tropes, for me, is “really alien aliens.” I find them fascinating, and I’m always checking my inner alien-o-meter: Are they convincing? What is their alien-ness telling me? I love that sense of looking out through unfamiliar eyes, and feeling the expansion that comes with considering other ways of being. 

I remember the first really alien aliens I encountered: the disembodied energy beings that appeared as strange spheres of blue fire in Ray Bradbury’s classic short story, “The Fire Balloons.” The priests who traveled to Mars to convert them are themselves converted by the sphere-beings to a more open view of religion, sin, and humanity. On TV, I accepted the humanoid aliens of Star Trek—Klingons, Ferengi, Cardassians. But my antennae always buzzed for aliens so strange they couldn’t be seen, like the beings trapped in the ship’s innards in “Emergence,” an episode of Star Trek TNG. They sent distress calls in the form of Holodeck characters, embodying metaphors for the help they needed. 

There are many, many such aliens in science fiction, going back to H.G. Wells’ leather-skinned blobs in War of the Worlds. As a trope, they’re recognized as Starfish Aliens—a term first used by H.P. Lovecraft (in At the Mountains of Madness, 1936). I’m less interested in them as dangerous space-opera foes or dread-inspiring monsters, and more interested in aliens that give us new ways to think about social structure, emotions, and the self. My interest goes even higher when these things are revealed from the aliens’ point of view. 

Two recent books delivered this for me: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and Ann Leckie’s Provenance, both refreshing takes on the space-opera sub-genre. If you haven’t read them: some spoilers ahead. Chambers’ small, angry planet is indeed occupied by fierce aliens whose way of thinking is hard to decode and puts the Galactic Commons at risk. On the spaceship traveling there, the human crew members work alongside a variety of aliens. 

One character, Sissix, is an Aandrisk, a reptilian species. Sissix is friendly and naturally demonstrative, and Aandrisk culture features a complex, inclusive family structure that evolves over an individual’s lifespan—a nice departure from that of the usual cold-hearted Reptilian alien. On a supply mission, Sissix encounters an Aandrisk shopkeeper in the marketplace who’s old and alone, bereft of any kind of family. Feeling sorry for the shopkeeper, pulls her aside and they have a snuggle/make-out session The scene is weird, funny, and affecting, and leaves us with a more nuanced sense of Aandrisk culture. 

In Ann Leckie’s Provenance, we hear about the Geck long before we meet one of them in the flesh. They’re water-dwellers and hate leaving their world, so they usually interact with other species remotely, through robot-like mechs. The single scene in which the main character, Ingray, meets the Geck ambassador floating in a pool is, for me, the strange heart of the book. The ambassador is a blob-creature whose skin telegraphs emotion by changing color. Her language is filled with poetic repetitions that suggest the lapping of waves: “I will tell you a thing. I will tell you. When humans first appeared, many things died. So much died…” 

The story she tells Ingray reveals much about patterns of affection among the Geck, and how those patterns have been forced to shift by the humans among them. For that one scene, we see the world through her eyes. Her motives become clear, and the plot turns inside out. 

This got me thinking about how hard it is to imaginatively get inside beings so different from us—especially when they have motives beyond simply wiping out humans. Is that why these very alien aliens make such brief appearances? I don’t know. One such very brief appearance has stuck with me. It’s from Octavia Butler’s Dawn, the first book in her series Lilith’s Brood.

Lilith, a survivor of the near-destruction of Earth, has been taken aboard a ship belonging to the Oankali. She needs a lot of time to get used to the Oankalis’ appearance, although they’re humanoid in shape, since their faces and bodies are covered in wiggling sensory tentacles. At one point, her Oankali teacher offers Lilith a glancing vision of his species’ deep past, before many generations of biological mixing with beings from other planets:

“Six divisions ago, on a white-sun water world, we lived in great shallow oceans,” it said. “We were many-bodied and spoke with body lights and color patterns among ourself and among ourselves…” 

That’s all. But this short description—not even a scene—conveys a strange, Edenic world with haiku-like compactness, giving Lilith and the reader insights into the Oankali’s origins, how they understand themselves and each other. 

Have I left out your favorite book, scene, or pet peeve about really alien aliens? Any thoughts are welcome.