I think it has been a while since I have read a alien threat so convincingly terrifying in purpose and beliefs, that they would give me chills just reading about what they had done to countless worlds or universes depending on the Sci Fi book.
A good example of this for me personally at a young age was the Daleks from Doctor Who and the Time War. Like the TV shows, the Daleks reasons and purpose to EXTERMINATE everyone that isn’t Dalek made me feel like these aliens were an imposing enemy. Some might laugh at how they looked, but that’s just what added on how scary they really were.
But, what do you guys think? Should they be terrifying, conical or humanoid to add even more scariness to their species?
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/emerging-dalek-christopher-lane.html
by HumbleKnight14
11 Comments
MorningLightMoutain
Blindsight
Planet Hitler from “Space Opera” by catheryne m valente
Different things scare different people so there should be a range of aliens. For me it’s the high concepts around aliens that are frightening, not what they look like. The capabilities in Liu Cixin’s Death’s End was the last time I was like, okay this is really freaking me out.
Do you mean stuff like Vogon poetry?
What makes the Daleks scary for me is that they *hate* so much.
Cybermen, Borg, Terminators and so on don’t hate. They’re implacable, but cold.
Daleks are driven by hatred and xenophobia. They’re the farthest point down the line of the very worst humanity has to offer.
A race which has made its hatred into its guiding star, and apply every iota of their genius minds to its application.
They’re not blinded by this hatred either. They think, and reason, and constantly strategise better ways to apply themselves to the task of destroying everything that isn’t a Dalek.
Their best stories often have them as puppet-masters behind the scenes, working through proxies to start wars amongst their enemies.
Compare them with the Toclafane, a similarly faceless cyborg race which stripped away most of what makes us human to turn themselves into gleefully psychotic monsters.
Make your (evil) aliens beautiful and disarming and all equally so, as if they came off a construction line made to design perfection
Make your (good) aliens disturbing and varied, some unrecognizable as people at all.
It adds to the existential horror of this juxtaposition between our expectations and the reality, wherein those humans who would subjugate all of mankind would wear the visage of angels, and wherein those who would liberate mankind to their own freedoms and desires to live alongside one another are abjectly weird, wearing all manner of visage.
It is in many ways a metaphor for the idea that someone who will not show you who they are, someone who hides behind a faceless group identity, is not to be trusted more than someone who values individuality and self-expression.
The most terrifying aliens are always going to be of the trope “but I thought they were the good guys.”
Another example of terrifying enemies from a similar series to Doctor Who are the Enemy of Faction Paradox. We have no idea what they are, but the idea of them is terrifying if you compare them to what they’re fighting: in short the creators of history. Something has gone very wrong for this War to have happened in the first place.
The Great Houses have been so changed by this War, that they would be unrecognisable as Time Lords. Countless worlds have been fractured by the shrapnel of the weaponry and the Faction Paradox book range only captures snippets of the crossfire, it’s never shown a single battle.
Maybe this is a hot take but the Daleks were never scary to me except for the first episode of New Who they appeared in, “Dalek”. I agree that their appearance isn’t what makes them (or rather, “it”, since in that episode there’s only one) scary. In that episode what’s scary is what the Daleks turned the Doctor into.
Same with the Cybermen. The scary part of the Cybermen is the body horror of being surgically transformed against your will. Afterwards they became generic robot cannon fodder.
And the rules behind the Weeping Angels just got more confusing with each appearance, so I don’t even want to bother with them anymore.
For me it’s Lovecraft’s aliens races. The Elder Things, the Outer God, Cthulhu etc. Azathoth being the most powerful one of course. The being so terrible that human brain can’t comprehend it. Being that created multiverse in its dream and everything in the multiverse exists as Azathoth’s dream. Should it wake, everything is destroyed. So we exist just as a dream. I love the idea of aliens being so “other” and horrifying that our tiny minds can’t even comprehend them and we go mad! Love that stuff
Perhaps this would be a bit of an unexpected example, but I liked the take on aliens in the Second Apocalypse series.
It’s a dark fantasy series set in a “fantasy medieval” world reminiscent of the Crusades, and based on the premise that objective morality, eschatology, and afterlife are all real, and examines its consequences in the most direct manner. The only problem is, the afterlife consists of eternal torment in hell, and you have three options: eternal torment in hell, oblivion (if you managed to live a life of virtue – good luck with that, given the way morality is set up in this world), or maybe being so infernally evil in life that you’ll enter the eternal hell as one of the devils. At least you’ll be on the winning side, right? It features various cultures, religions, schools of philosophy and other trappings of civilization that try to wrestle with the inevitable, but eventually all roads lead to one place, with slightly different scenery along the way perhaps.
This bleak and dystopian landscape is spiced up by Inchoroi, literal aliens who crash landed on the planet. And their primary goal is deicide: destroying the metaphysical system of the afterlife and every last parasite who feeds human souls into that infernal machine. Unfortunately, their methods of accomplishing it involve genetic warfare, mind and bodily rape, grotesque human experimentation, genocide, and pretty much every other act of depravity that comes to mind (and the author must have a good imagination, because a lot of it came to his mind).
All of it is presented in a what we could label period-appropriate way, as seen through the eyes of characters who could have belonged in the 13th century and wrapped in a very peculiar style of prose that can be best described as “biblical”. The questions of their morality, motivations, and eventual success of their crusade are examined but left fairly open to interpretation by the end of the series.
Mandatory mention of The Southern Reach trilogy.
Area X is so weird and foreign, that it is hard to call it alien or even alive.