Oh wow! It's a story that has stuck with me from the moment I heard it on Escape Pod. It changed the way I think around cultural interactions in general. One of my all-time favorite stories. Thank you for working on it, and maybe send on a thank you to David for me if you still chat!
Came here to say this. I also love how all of Leckie’s aliens are so incredibly inhuman—the Rrrrrrr and the ones from Provenance that are like fish kind of? Honestly, alongside the AIs and the gods from The Raven Tower, I can’t think of anyone who writes nonhumans as well as Leckie.
Me too, I was trying to remember what they were called! They tried so hard to make a human translator so they could communicate with humans, only to make her incredibly unsettling and odd. Bless
Essa Hansen's Graven series which is set in a multiverse has some really cool alien critters. There's such a multitude of beings in those books. I also loved those shadow-beings in The Expanse. There are some very unusual hive-mind-ish aliens in Corey's latest The Mercy of Gods too.
I was going to mention the Tines also! (but they start in A Fire in the Deep) A really exceptional exploration of how different biology shapes different modes of thought and interaction.
The Presger from Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series fascinate me. So alien they need proxies to communicate with humans. (Translation State is a new favorite book!)
I really dig that there's a kind of continuum or web of mind-types: us human readers can parse the hani, who can mostly talk with stsho, who can sort of talk with t'ca, who presumably talk with chi & supposedly with knnn
Agreed, it felt very realistic that way, like it's just a patched together game of telephone that they're somehow making into an interstellar economic bloc
The Ariekei in "Embassytown" were a remarkably alien creation. Their language requires an individual to speak two words simultaneously with a single mind.
To this day I'm still struck by several of the aliens in Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1934 story "A Martian Odyssey" (the ostrich-like "Tweel", the canal city-dwelling cart-pushers). While not a great narrative, this study of just how alien aliens could get challenged other writers to do as well or better.
This is such a great question and now I can’t think of a single book I’ve read with aliens. I can’t remember the title of the comic with the tree spaceship and there were people with tv heads. But there aren’t humans?
For me it's MorningLightMountain in Peter F Hamilton's Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained duology. I still get chills thinking about the first chapter from its POV.
I don't think anyone has yet mentioned @matociquala.bsky.social 's extremely cold aliens in "Machine" (lots of great aliens throughout the series, but those were particularly out there)
Hmm! I like the ones in A Desolation Called Peace that the entire book is basically about how to communicate with them (like Arrival, which also fits here).
two recent ones: there are SO MANY aliens in James SA Corey's The Mercy of Gods, and all of them are very, very alien; I also loved the aliens in Yume Kitasei's The Stardust Grail
the "Graveyard Keeper" in Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's Pilgrim Machines, who collects dead and decaying remnants of other civilizations, meditating to understand the nature of death. Creepy, and very alien
Valente's Space Opera had some really great ones, mind-bending descriptions of gasseous beings and vegetal ones. I always feel like I hallucinated that book.
They can put whatever marketing tags they like on the Colfer book, Space Opera is the true heir to the Hitchhikers series and nothing will ever change my mind
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Not necessarily in appearance - but in how they understand language and time.
...still lives rent-free in my head, 10 years later.
I would say also, the Trisolarans in the Three-Body Problem and the Oankali in Lilith's Brood?
I'm sure I can think of more but those came to mind first (apparently I read a lot more fantasy than sci-fi)