6 sci-fi novels where first contact gets stranger the more humanity understands it

Let’s start with a well-known example. The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy is widely celebrated series of books by Liu Cixin, about what happens when Earth is discovered by a faraway species of extraterrestrials called the Trisolarans (or the San Ti, as they’re named in the excellent, ongoing Netflix adaptation). The Trisoarans live on a deeply inhospitable world, so they decide to make Earth their new home. But because space travel takes time, they won’t be here for hundreds of years, so we have time to prepare.

The climate on Trisolaris is unpredictable and dangerous, and the Trisolarans have evolved to deal with it. During eras of apocalyptic weather, they can dehydrate their bodies and become flat, stable, leathery sheets until a stable climate comes along to rehydrate them. They can all read each other’s thoughts instantly. Everyone knows what everyone else is thinking, which means they don’t understand the concept of lying; that’s something we use to our advantage, humans being excellent liars.

The Trisolarans are also capable of folding super-advanced computers down to the size of a proton and using them to disrupt life on Earth. Learning about their unique qualities is one of the pleasures of this series.

Credit: Pocket Books

The Mote in God’s Eye is a 1974 novel set in the year 3017, when humanity has expanded into the stars. We encounter an alien species that come to be called “Moties,” bipedal creatures with two right arms and one giant left arm that also attaches to the head. They have different colored fur based on their function in Motie society: Engineer, Mediator, Warrior, etc.

The whole of The Mote in God’s Eye is concerned with humanity finding out more about the Motie civilization, and not everything we learn is good news. The Moties initially present themselves as being wholly peaceful, but that turns out to be an exaggeration. The Moties switch between male and female as part of their reproductive cycle, which ends up being a hugely important plot point.

Eventually, we see that Moties can be divided against each other and form factions much as humans do. The Mote in God’s Eye and its sequel, The Gripping Hand, present us with a species that becomes stranger the more we learn about them, and then ultimately becomes familiar.

Credit: Chicago Review Press

Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, but no one knows why. The proof they were here are six “Zones” spread throughout the world that are full of impossible phenomena and miraculous objects, including a device that makes a sudden, incapacitating sound; slime that can dissolve bones; and a wish-granting Golden Sphere. Some of the people buried in the Zones come back to life. The theory is that aliens visited Earth on the equivalent of a picnic, and that the items in the Zones are their leftover trash.

The genius of Roadside Picnic is that it leaves us to imply things about the alien species without ever actually meeting them. The main character is a “stalker,” someone who sneaks into the Zones to steal artifacts they can sell for money. It ends up being far more about the human left in the aliens’ wake than the aliens themselves. They are incomprehensible to us, but they sure did leave some weird stuff behind.

Roadside Picnic has been adapted and referenced many times, most famously in the 1979 sci-fi film Stalker.

Credit: Tor Books

The two books in the Teixcalaan series, A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, at first appear to be about an ambassador traveling from the independent republic of Lsel to the heart of the vast Teixcalaanli Empire, which rules over a huge portion of human-occupied space. Priorities shift after the characters learn of an alien invasion on the borders of the empire.

The extraterrestrials in this series are never given a formal name, known merely as the aliens or the Enemy. Despite that moniker, they aren’t necessarily malevolent. They are a hive mind that does not understand the concept of individual personhood, and they communicate in discordant sounds that are difficult to translate and that give humans nausea.

In the end, the Teixcalaan series becomes about whether these two species can communicate and come to an accord despite their vast differences.

Credit: Tor Books

Blindsight is about a crew of human astronauts who are sent to investigate an extraterrestrial signal coming from just outside pour solar system. They eventually make contact with an alien craft that identifies itself as ‘Rorschach,’ plus nine-legged organisms called ‘Scramblers.’ The Scramblers have more brainpower than humans do, but use most of it to operate their complex musculature and sensory organs. They are not “conscious” in the sense that human beings use that word.

But what is consciousness anyway? Much of Blindsight is concerned with that question. The characters discuss questions about identify and the interdependence of intelligence and consciousness amongst themselves, theorizing that human intelligence may be a unique biological offshoot with no real evolutionary function. Blindsight is a novel with a lot on its mind, as is its sister book Echopraxia.

Also, one of the astronauts is a vampire, which is fun.

Credit: Ecco

H.P. Lovecraft is more of a horror writer than a sci-fi writer, but if we’re talking about strange alien species, he deserves a mention. Lovecraft is frequently credited as the creator of cosmic horror, a genre where human characters confront beings beyond their understanding and are often driven mad as a result. Alien beings show up in a lot of Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas.

For instance, in “At the Mountains of Madness,” explorers find ancient, star-faring entities known as the Elder Things in Antarctica, as well as their servants, the Shoggoths. In “The Colour Out of Space,” a meteorite crashes on a farm and releases a strange color that poisons and mutates all life. In “The Shadow Out of Time,” a man swaps consciousness with an alien being and sees things no human was ever meant to see.

Lovecraft never explains the science behind any of these aliens, because the point is that they are utterly behind the ability of our human brains to understand. First contact doesn’t get stranger than in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.