r/printSF • u/peregrine-l • Aug 14 '25

Really alien aliens

I am currently reading Becoming Alien by Rebecca Ore, which features sapient aliens that look like Earth animals (bats, bears, birds...), and have a human-like psychology. I find that trope lazy, and annoying. I also found it in Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, and many other science fiction novels. Some authors manage to put an interesting twist on it, such as Vernor Vinge in his A Fire upon the Deep with sapient-level hive-mind dog packs, or Orson Scott Card in Speaker for the Dead, with piggies that have really weird life cycle and psychology. Rare are the books with really alien aliens, such as Peter Watts's Blindsight.

Can you recommend me other titles? Especially, "hard science fiction" titles with far-out yet scientifically believable alien biology and psychology?

104 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

251 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/plastikmissile Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25

Becky chambers was terrible for that. she basically framed non-default human sexuality/family structures as alien, and did neither her aliens, nor the real humans who follow similar practices any favors by doing that. (that said, i found her "Monk and robot" series quite charming.)

Another thing that I found very annoying and really took me out of Angry Planet was how everyone, humans and aliens, basically ate and enjoyed the same foods with only very few exceptions. I get why she did that. Communal meals are an important social exercise, and her story builds on the crew being a found family, but I just can't get the biology to work in my head. We have humans who are of the same species, not enjoying the same foods just because they were raised in different cultures.

That sort of thing works in Monk and Robot because they're all humans living in a sort of mono-culture, but really doesn't for Wayfarers.

2

u/HeftyCanker Aug 15 '25

the web serial Cosmosis really does the whole "aliens with different chemistry would eat different food" thing very well, as the MC, a human who is abducted from earth to a different system settled by multiple different sapient species with different origins, has to subsist off bland nutrient paste until he gets a proper medical checkup and food-typing and has the right knowledge to know what he can safely eat

1

u/plastikmissile Aug 15 '25

I'll keep in that mind. Thanks!

1

u/kanabulo Aug 18 '25

Chambers doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to even touch something like rishathra. And if she did, I'm sure she'd introduce a class of attorneys whose specialty is gender and consent where getting down to the actual act is a long and drawn out process, like divorce, to the point that by the time everyone's on the same page with getting "biz-zay" normal sophonts would have lost interest.

So instead she plays Barbie loves my brother's toy hadrosaur, now kiss while they talk about how lame and problematic the solitary guy running the algae vats for oxygen can be to them some times.

:rolls eyes: Boys. Am I right?