My Favorite Aliens

I'm a big fan of science fiction - movies, TV shows, novels - and I've been a fan for a very long time.  I was watching Battlestar Galactica when it first aired in 1978, and I was a fan of Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor on Doctor Who several years before that (thanks to PBS).  I saw the original Star Wars at the theater when it was released in 1977, followed a few years later by Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and then many more after that.  Some of my favorite TV shows were Alien Nation (the movie was awesome too) and Babylon 5 (lots of aliens there).  There have been too many aliens to count over the years, and this post is about some of my favorites, and why I like them.  Here we go!

Davros - Doctor Who

We'll start off with a villain from one of my favorite TV series of all time - I've been watching it most of my life.  Davros is the evil genius who is responsible for creating the Daleks.  The Daleks have been around on Doctor Who since the very beginning, in the second story to air in Season One, way back in 1963.  They appeared in stories for the first, second, and third incarnations of The Doctor, but Davros did not make an appearance until Season 12, in the story Genesis of the Daleks - as it turns out, the fourth story for the fourth incarnation of The Doctor, Tom Baker (my favorite of all the actors to play the role).  While he is certainly a genius, he is also a twisted, megalomaniac, prone to wild, ranting outbursts, and willing to go to great lengths to achieve his goals - including the destruction of his own race, the Kaleds (note that Dalek is an anagram of Kaled).  To reveal the depths of his desire for power, The Doctor asked him that if he created a contagious and infectious disease that killed on contact, which would destroy all other forms of life, would he allow its use?  After imagining himself, holding a tiny glass capsule that held such power, that his act of crushing it would end everything in the universe, he realizes he would do it, as the power would make him more powerful than the gods. Ultimately, he sees himself achieving that power through his Daleks, as they exterminate all other forms of life, and become the dominant life form in the universe.  You wouldn't want to be in the same room with this guy!  Davros continues to appear in different times throughout the history of Doctor Who, right up to the Twelfth Doctor, Peter Capaldi, in 2017.

Kosh Naranek - The Vorlon Ambassador on Babylon 5

The  Vorlons are among the most cryptic aliens I've come across.  The Heechee from Frederik Pohl's Heechee Saga, are deemed somewhat mysterious, they they take second place when compared to the Vorlons.  Kosh is the one we get to know the best (if you can really call it that) throughout the series.  They are a mysterious race - not only to viewers, but also to the other races on the show.  They have been around for millions of years, and speak in vague riddles most of the time.  Some of their statements eventually come to make some sort of sense at some point in the series, and others...not so much.  Well, nobody said that an alien mind needed to work the same way as ours.  Kosh has some great quotes throughout the series and, IMO, we gradually learn some of the reasons why they appear so cryptic.  One of the greatest things about Kosh is that he is not what he appears to be, in more ways than one.  Overall, my favorite alien.

The Vorlons also have really cool ships, which are made with organic technology.  Each ship is mentally/psychically paired with an individual Vorlon.  Yes - the ships are alive.  Very neat concept, and while Babylon 5 was one of the first series to use it extensively, the idea isn't new to science fiction.  A few past examples of organic/living technology include:

• The novel Sentenced to Prism, by Alan Dean Foster
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy, by Peter Hamilton
• Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Tin Man"

I'm sure there are many other examples that I'm either forgetting or have not yet encountered.

The Shadows - from Babylon 5

The Shadows are the mysterious bad boys on Babylon 5.  They mostly, well, hide in the shadows...metaphorically.  They mostly work behind the scenes through intermediaries.  It is a rare occurrence to see one on the show, and it is a major event when this happens.  The shadows are even older than the Vorlons, and have equivalent, or even superior technology in some ways.

The Shadows also have very cool organic spaceships, which work a bit differently from the Vorlon ships in how they are piloted.  They also have some superior abilities.  I won't reveal details - you should watch the show and see for yourself.  Ultimately, there isn't much to write about the Shadows - even after several seasons of the show, we still know very little of them.

The Xenomorph, from the Alien franchise

Since the film Alien came out in 1979, you might say that the Xenomorph is the original bad boy of modern science fiction.  As the film unfolds, we encounter it in three forms:  the facehugger, the chestburster, and the adult form.  All three forms are horrifying.  Ash, the Science Officer of the Nostromo, states his opinion of this creature in very cold words:  "A perfect organism.  It's perfection is matched only by its hostility."  These words are backed up byXenomorph behavior in the 1986 sequel, Aliens.  This alien was a truly original concept.

A few interesting notes on this alien.  The idea for the chestburster was a shocking idea - nothing like it had been done in film before.  Where this idea came from is a matter of some debate.  First, the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle, by A.E. Van Vogt, has been suggested by critics to be a source for the idea.  In fact, two chapters of the book are attributed as source material for the movie Alien.  The chapter called "Black Destroyer", involves an alien creature which gets aboard the ship and hunts the crew members.  Another chapter, called "Discord in Scarlet", is attributed to the chestburster.  A creature called an Ixtl, which lays its eggs inside crew members; when the eggs hatch, the young eat their way out of the host.  It appears that while there are similarities here, it may be mere speculation.  According to other sources, the screenwriter came up with the chestburster from his own experience with Crohn's disease.  These days, who knows where the truth lies.

As it turns out, there is at least one on Earth that has a similar reproductive cycle.  The ichneumon wasp, which was the inspiration for the Wirrn in the 1975 Doctor Who story The Ark In Space, has a similar parasitic life cycle.  You can't make this up - it is terrifyingly real.  Kind of reminds me of a Sherlock Holmes quote:  "Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent".

Calvin, the life form from the film Life

The life form which is discovered by the crew of the International Space Station is quickly named "Calvin" by schoolchildren, which unknown to them is an appropriate name.  Just like Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, he is a handful - literally a TON of trouble.  Calvin gives the Xenomorph from Alien a run for its money - especially in the horror department.  Calvin starts off as a single cell, which quickly becomes a multi-celled organism, and continues to grow at an alarming rate.  This is very similar to the plot of Alien, but unlike the Xenomorph, Calvin does more than put in a handful of appearances - he is ever present, and the horror of its nature grows as the story progresses.  The tension in the plot reminds me of the growing feeling of uneasiness in John Carpenter's The Thing, where a scientific team in Antarctica slowly realizes that they can no longer instinctively trust any other member of the group.  You feel the same feeling of desperation with the ISS crew, and the dread they feel wondering what might happen if Calvin ever makes it to Earth.  Easily one of the most terrifying aliens I've seen in the last few years.

Arachnid, from the film version of Starship Troopers

 
I've never read Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, but I was really excited about the movie when it came out.  Unlike many purist fans of the novel, I enjoyed the film immensely.  The Arachnid soldiers were nasty, capable of dismembering a human in a matter of seconds.  Facing one is bad enough, but facing hordes of them is a completely different level of insanity.  The fact that they are more than 75% combat effective after losing a limb is a dire statistic.  I would not want to encounter a swarm of these things.  In the film, they were capable of dismembering soldiers in a matter of seconds.

The Thing, from John Carpenter's The Thing

Barlowe

"So, how do we know who's human?  If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation, how would you know if it was really me?" This is the question asked by Childs, one of the twelve members of an Antarctic research team which encounters a form-changing alien that can perfectly imitate any living organism.  This is an alien which can imitate your best friend perfectly, and you would have no idea.  When this movie came out, there was no way my parents would let me see it, so my first experience was the novelization by Alan Dean Foster, and it was excellent.  In fact, I think it portrayed the tension and desperation better than the movie at times.  Several years later, I came across the original short story by John W. Campbell Jr.  The depiction to the left is by Wayne Douglas Barlowe, from his book Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials.  It is based on the description in the story.  The appearance of the Thing in Carpenter's film is far more disgusting and frightening.  Even when the men realize that the alien is very likely standing among them, it's motive is unclear.  It wants to stay hidden.  Is it out of fear?  Does it want to take over the Earth?  Does it simply want to escape?  We learn almost nothing about the ship it arrived in, which stayed buried in the permafrost for at least 10,000 years.  Did its race build the craft?  Was it a prisoner on the ship?  All these unknowns add up to a chilling encounter that keeps you guessing who is the Thing until the very end.  What is really chilling about this alien is that it was imagined way back in 1938.  I have also included a picture of the original hardcover of the story.  In 2011 a prequel film was made, which was also called The Thing.  This was a prequel to the Carpenter film, and deals with the Norwegians from the beginning of the 1982 film - the original discoverers of The Thing.  In this film, we actually get to see inside the ship, but we don't learn much else - the alien pretty much remains an enigma.  Author Peter Watts wrote a short story called The Things, which tells the story of the 1982 film from the perspective of the alien. This is a very interesting story, and the thoughts and motivations of the alien are surprising, as are its history and perspective on the universe.  Worth your attention - if you can find it.  I also recently learned that there is a novel-length version of the original story, which is called Frozen Hell.  This is definitely one I'll be checking out.

There are many other aliens that I like, but this is still my main list of favorites.

What are your favorite aliens?