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[Criptfeind]

I don't know, there were are a lot of "humans" that were questionable so. It sorta bothered me a bit how silly it was.

Fair enough. Things did get more than a little odd after the first two books. I still say the first two are a good example of sci-fi working without any true aliens. It was just the first example that came to mind.

Actually, I was talking about the first and second books, being as they is the only two I have read.

[mainiac]

One of the most popular type of alien life in science fiction is the ravenous carnivore intent on eating people.  It's not usually meant to be an exaggeration of human qualities and is usually not humanoid.  Space opera is full of space elves and space jews, but the ravenous carnivore seems even more common IMHO.

[Duke 2.0]

 Still part of the human fear of being killed and eaten by a wild animal.

 I think the closest we ever get to actual aliens is from horror novels that unnerve us with foreign concepts and bizarre creatures. Their motivations and wants are unknown, they represent nothing but madness. One could make a point that they represent the human fear of madness and losing ones own mind, but they do this through the tool of incredibly alien designs and motivations.

 Cthulhu is the best alien we are gonna get.

[Armok]

kinda tangential, but here are some links with better aliens:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/y5/the_babyeating_aliens_18/

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

[MonkeyHead]

Iain M Banks comes out with some great aliens... The Morthanveld, The Affront, The Idirans, The Homomda, The Chelgrain, The Oct... damn loads of them that are truly alien. On the downside there is a cop out regarding a Pan-Human species type which I dont like all that much. Of course, its easy to pull off in a novel. Slightly trickier to get a hyper intelligent shade of the colour blue on film isnt it?

[Virex]

They aren't necessary for all sci-fi. Dune gets by pretty well.

The Benne Tleilax, the Sardaukar and and the Fremmen could, when placed in a fantasy setting, be considered different races though.

As an ~aspiring fantasy author~ I'll just throw out my own take on it. I like to explore truly alien concepts mixed in with human concepts in some parts. In other ways, I like getting into the thought patterns of an entirely different being than myself. The key is not to make a fantasy race that wears a hat. The key is to define where they came from biologically, and then layer on top of that a culture that they came from, and then layer on top of that a personality that is distinct and individual to them. I don't usually make fantasy races that are just human-but-different, but I do have to work within the bounds that they can communicate in some way. Sometimes.

Example;

A race that is sort-of like an upjumped branch of mosquitoes. They have a bit of divine protection which has kept them alive through the ages, but they can't usually get their numbers up high enough to really be a majority population wherever they are. They live among other cultures, and generally take the one that they are in as their own. People find them useful because they are adept at learning lots of forms of communication, even if they find it hard to pronounce anything exactly correct due to the way they make communicative sound.

Biological element: They are more fragile than most species, but generally find protection in symbiosis. They require blood from other species after mating to stimulate their birthing process. Females are larger than the males, and generally have more personality to them and an extended lifespan due to dimorphic genders.

Cultural element: They tend to fit in best in human cities, actually, in this particular world, and so they try to emulate the people around them to make sure they don't appear too alien. This doesn't work very well, but they are useful, which tends to keep them at peace with their neighbors. Kind of.

Personal element: A female who is passing her sexual prime gets a job working for a man who is not adept whatsoever at magic. She is adept at magic. They talk about their failing relationships, and begin to confide in each other about the peculiarities of their own situations. You see, she's feeling bad because two of her mates have left her for a more viable partner, and -- like an idiot -- she hadn't put them under contract like she had with her other three. Oh, and his marriage is slowly falling apart because his wife only married him to spite her mother in the first place. ... It's complicated.

The best comment I have gotten on this is when a beta reader told me I made him feel bad for a mosquito, and that he was very conflicted on this point.

Unfortunately, I never got to the good parts of this story, this is just an outline of where it was going, but yeah.

If I may be so blunt, the idea of a mosquito, a being that doesn't even have proper lungs or a brain, achieving something resembling speech and sentience is even more unlikely than a rubber forehead alien.

[Lectorog]

They aren't necessary for all sci-fi. Dune gets by pretty well.

The Benne Tleilax, the Sardaukar and and the Fremmen could, when placed in a fantasy setting, be considered different races though.

Yes; but they're not humanoid aliens, they're just different people. They're all very similar, more so than general "aliens."

[Willfor]

As an ~aspiring fantasy author~ I'll just throw out my own take on it. I like to explore truly alien concepts mixed in with human concepts in some parts. In other ways, I like getting into the thought patterns of an entirely different being than myself. The key is not to make a fantasy race that wears a hat. The key is to define where they came from biologically, and then layer on top of that a culture that they came from, and then layer on top of that a personality that is distinct and individual to them. I don't usually make fantasy races that are just human-but-different, but I do have to work within the bounds that they can communicate in some way. Sometimes.

Example;

A race that is sort-of like an upjumped branch of mosquitoes. They have a bit of divine protection which has kept them alive through the ages, but they can't usually get their numbers up high enough to really be a majority population wherever they are. They live among other cultures, and generally take the one that they are in as their own. People find them useful because they are adept at learning lots of forms of communication, even if they find it hard to pronounce anything exactly correct due to the way they make communicative sound.

Biological element: They are more fragile than most species, but generally find protection in symbiosis. They require blood from other species after mating to stimulate their birthing process. Females are larger than the males, and generally have more personality to them and an extended lifespan due to dimorphic genders.

Cultural element: They tend to fit in best in human cities, actually, in this particular world, and so they try to emulate the people around them to make sure they don't appear too alien. This doesn't work very well, but they are useful, which tends to keep them at peace with their neighbors. Kind of.

Personal element: A female who is passing her sexual prime gets a job working for a man who is not adept whatsoever at magic. She is adept at magic. They talk about their failing relationships, and begin to confide in each other about the peculiarities of their own situations. You see, she's feeling bad because two of her mates have left her for a more viable partner, and -- like an idiot -- she hadn't put them under contract like she had with her other three. Oh, and his marriage is slowly falling apart because his wife only married him to spite her mother in the first place. ... It's complicated.

The best comment I have gotten on this is when a beta reader told me I made him feel bad for a mosquito, and that he was very conflicted on this point.

Unfortunately, I never got to the good parts of this story, this is just an outline of where it was going, but yeah.

If I may be so blunt, the idea of a mosquito, a being that doesn't even have proper lungs or a brain, achieving something resembling speech and sentience is even more unlikely than a rubber forehead alien.

I've underlined the places where you seem to have misunderstood the context of how they came to be, even in the grossly underexplained example I gave. Mostly because I didn't want to keep writing for seven pages to give the proper context for the world they live in. There's not exactly mosquitoes, the world they are in is not exactly running on the same physics as ours, and their world has not quite existed for longer than 20,000 years. This is why it is fantasy and not sci-fi.

[Virex]

They aren't necessary for all sci-fi. Dune gets by pretty well.

The Benne Tleilax, the Sardaukar and and the Fremmen could, when placed in a fantasy setting, be considered different races though.

Yes; but they're not humanoid aliens, they're just different people. They're all very similar, more so than general "aliens."

Meh, if they'd have given the Fremmen a rubber forehead nobody would have blinked at it. I mean, people that have blood that clot almost instantly, supernatural reaction speed, use far less water, are deeply religious and have fully blue eyes and a bit of prescience due to consuming large quantities of a native drug? Hell, there are plenty of aliens that differ less from humans.

[Criptfeind]

I think the fremmen were handled somewhat poorly. The superiority shown by them really does not make very much sense at all in many ways.

[Virex]

It has to do with Herbert's ecological focus. It's not without reason that the Sardaukar, the elite troops of the Emperor, are from another hellish world. Hell, Leto Atreides even points this out early in the book, saying that the Fremmen, by the nature of living on Dune should at the very least rival the Sardaukar. Couple that with the fact that they're led by a friggin psychic and may themselves have some limited prescience due to the amount of spice they use (similar to what happens to navigators)...

[Il Palazzo]

Indeed, one of the running themes in Dune was the ability of humans to expand on their hidden potentials and change. It did go way too far, in my opinion, as Herbert kept "upgrading" people in each of the subsequent novels, to the point where it became almost silly. It is a leap of faith to accept the premise of mankind's heightened adaptibility, and when stretched too far, it might force you out of the suspension of disbelief zone.

An interesting take on the non-alien aliens was presented in Battlestar Galactica(the reimagined series. I don't know anything about the '70s one). I'd say that by intentionally blurring the line between what is and what isn't an alien(think "everybody is Pathos") lent itself rather well to conveying the messages about human condition that it endeavoured to tackle. The result was much better, as far as I can speculate, that it would have been should the aliens be given rubber foreheads, and pushed back towards and beyond the uncanny valley, as it is common with many other s-f works.

edit: man, the grammar...

[Africa]

Still part of the human fear of being killed and eaten by a wild animal.

Or the human desire to have stories where it's OK to kill things en masse without any moral ambiguity mucking things up.

[Il Palazzo]

Still part of the human fear of being killed and eaten by a wild animal.

Or the human desire to have stories where it's OK to kill things en masse without any moral ambiguity mucking things up.

Or an apologetic expression of guilt for killing and eating all those living, thinking beings that just so happen to taste so good.

[lemon10]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/y5/the_babyeating_aliens_18/

"Anyway," said the Master.  "If we don't fire on the alien ship - I mean, if this work is ever carried back to their civilization - I suspect the aliens will consider this one of their great historical works of literature, like Hamlet or Fate/stay night -"

So hillarious.