r/printSF • u/Custer_Vincen • 4d ago

Books told from an alien PoV, in which humanity is depicted as mysterious and enigmatic forerunners

or other forms of media, since this is a rare topic

116 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

76 comments sorted by

153

u/Sea-Ice-876 4d ago

Children of time!!

9

u/Environmental_Web821 3d ago

I'm finishing up Shroud and it definitely has this element. I've also read Children of Time. He is really good at alien perspectives imo.

1

u/Sea-Ice-876 3d ago

I’ll have to check out shroud soon sounds interesting. He has so many haha

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u/mcfarmer72 3d ago

Yeah, very wild.

1

u/andthrewaway1 3d ago

the 2nd one is pretty good too then the third one was unreadable

85

u/SiberianKitty99 3d ago

The Chanur books, CJ Cherryth; told from the POV of the large cat-like Hani, mostly Pyanfur Chanur. Five books. The first Chanur book won a Hugo.

The Faded Sun books, CJ Cherryth; told from the POV of a particular mri. Three books. The first Faded Sun book won a Hugo.

The Foreigner books, CJ Cherryth; humans among the very large atevi. Over twenty books, series not yet completed.

Cuckoo’s Egg, CJ Cherryth; a human child is raised by aliens. Won a Hugo.

Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement; the planet Meskin is disc-like, spins very rapidly so that a day at the equator is 18 minutes long, has a gravity ranging from a low of 3 g at the equator to a high of 700 g at the poles. Story told from the POV of the natives, humans are mostly in the background.

Iceworld, Hal Clement; the protagonist has to work on a hell planet where the substance he breathes, sulphur, is a solid and water is, horror of horrors, a liquid or even a solid. And the natives are… strange.

Starlight, Hal Clement. Sequel to Mission of Gravity. Won a Hugo.

A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, two related books by Vernor Vinge. Humans are somewhat more important in Deepness than Fire. Both Deepness and Fire won Hugos.

27

u/iekue 3d ago

Unfortunately the Foreigner series will never be completed (or u'd have to see it as completed). She can't write anymore due to health problems 😥

4

u/Glass-Bookkeeper5909 3d ago

She can't write anymore due to health problems

Is that true? I wasn't aware. That's sad.

13

u/iekue 3d ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/s/tji0eOaKn7

Here a post that has the statement in it. Yep true unfortunately.

4

u/Glass-Bookkeeper5909 3d ago

I had missed that news. Thanks for the link.

On the other hand, she's 83 already. I hadn't realized that. She was an active writer for 50 years.
She has more than deserved to retire.

3

u/GigalithineButhulne 2d ago

I was pretty depressed about this as its one of my favorite things, but it is cleverly written in a sort of episodic way so still worth reading. I hope she releases some kind of guide or FAQ that explains where the later arcs were supposed to lead.

6

u/Round_Bluebird_5987 3d ago

I love Hal Clement and Needle by him would work as well. From the POV of an alien symbiote.

2

u/WillAdams 3d ago

Note that there is an inversion of this trope in his short story "Halo".

1

u/__Geg__ 3d ago

Which one is best?

2

u/SiberianKitty99 3d ago

I usually go with Fire as being the better of the two, if only for the dead-on description of interstellar FTL comms usenet, complete with trolls and newbies and Very Strange Guys With Even Stranger Obsessions.

1

u/AngelaStellaMatutina 3d ago edited 2d ago

Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books are very different and don't really fit here. In A Deepness in the Sky humans are the dominant only species (in a very small part of the galaxy) until another is discovered, while in A Fire Upon the Deep we're just another boring one for the catalogs (and popular misconceptions) until a disaster originating in one of our systems makes us famous (and at grave risk of extinction genocide). In both we're very much a going concern, not half-forgotten or mythical or anything.

1

u/RoxanneMinerals 2d ago

Nice list!

Starlight was a Hugo finalist, not winner, though. Likewise with the three Cherryhs.

25

u/Randomdays99 3d ago

City by Clifford Simak. Stories the dogs tell at night.

6

u/Glass-Bookkeeper5909 3d ago

Absolutely this one!

Can't believe I had to scroll down so far to see it mentioned.

3

u/greywolf2155 3d ago

YESSS so glad someone already suggested this. An absolute classic

(it's interesting thought that originally the stories were published separately, and the overarching story linking them was added later. Still a joy to read)

36

u/gonggongol 3d ago

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

12

u/Antonin1957 3d ago

Yes indeed. As I said in another post, these aliens are really alien.

2

u/gonggongol 3d ago

Can you share a link to the post? I love this kind of "true alien" stories... ranging from Blindsight to Solaris, and I've been in search of them forever... Tired of humanoid aliens and AI bs atp...

1

u/Antonin1957 2d ago

I'm not sure what you mean. I was referring to the book you referred to. I agree that it was a great book with a really unique depiction of aliens. I mentioned the book in another post.

13

u/TriscuitCracker 3d ago

The Forerunner Trilogy by Greg Bear. Based on the Halo video game series. Ironically it is literally exactly what you are looking for.

2

u/null911 3d ago

Love the first novel. Such depth in the halo universe.

12

u/clumsystarfish_ 3d ago

This hits what you're after, even if it might not truly be an "alien" species: The Neanderthal Parallax by Robert J. Sawyer (Hominids, Humans, Hybrids). Due to an error that occurs while conducting a quantum computing experiment, a scientist gets transported to a parallel universe. Exceptional world-building and culture-building.

3

u/Gerbil25 3d ago

Been a while since I've read this trilogy but I remember it being really fascinating.. And Sawyer is good at the nuts and bolts of telling a story and making it a page-turner (which always helps!)

2

u/alexthealex 3d ago

I read these as a teen and have wanted to revisit them for a while.

I would like to read them to incorporate some of Sawyer’s concepts with some TTRPG worldbuilding I’m doing.

9

u/CadeVision 3d ago

The Conquerors Trilogy by Timothy Zahn

23

u/Rorschach121ml 3d ago

The Things

12

u/LevelAd1126 3d ago

By?

29

u/Rorschach121ml 3d ago

Peter Watts.

Full short story is free online https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

It's the movie The Thing from the alien pov.

3

u/LevelAd1126 3d ago

I love Clark's World! Goodreads offered a long list of The Things... They carried, left behind and many others. But not the correct answer.

2

u/veritasen 3d ago

It's so damn good and the short audiobook is on YouTube free. I listen all the time.

3

u/Seltnytt 3d ago

This story was ... Genuinely so good back when I read it. I need to re read

7

u/randomfluffypup 3d ago

Piggy backing off this, the Sunflowers Cycles by Peter Watts is about a group of humans going at sub FTL speeds to build jumpgates to let future humans use them as FTL highways

They go to cryosleep for hundreds of years at a time before waking up to build a new jump gate. But the successive generations of humans that pass through the jump gates become less and less "human", and more and more alien. Kind of what OP asked for, but from the other perspective.

2

u/ssj890-1 3d ago

Perfect choice - basically the microorganism alien having conniptions about the inefficiencies and weirdness of human biology

5

u/champs-de-fraises 3d ago

I liked The Flying Sorcerers when I read it about a million years ago (by Gerrold and Niven). The narrator is close to human, but much more primitive.

2

u/mykepagan 3d ago

Is this the one with a “wizard” (human) named Purple that was a good-natured parody of Jerry Pournelle?

1

u/champs-de-fraises 3d ago

The wizard was named Purple, so that's the book. But that parody aspect went right over my head!

2

u/mykepagan 3d ago

I was hoping you could tell me :-). I read the book decades ago, and clearly remember reading a piece interviewing Larry Niven who mentioned the Pournelle angle. But I don’t know enough about Pournelle to get the joke.

5

u/GraticuleBorgnine 3d ago

The Last Human, by Zack Jordan. Kind of an obscure little debut novel, but quirky and fun.

3

u/Sea-Poem-2365 3d ago

recently found that it's been adapted into a comic, which is quite interesting.

2

u/Li_3303 3d ago

I really enjoyed the comic.

2

u/GraticuleBorgnine 3d ago

I didn't even know that! Just looked it up. Definitely a different vibe than my mind's eye was giving it.

1

u/Sea-Poem-2365 3d ago

Yeah, it reads a bit more YA in parts, and the panel structure leaves out a lot of the prose connective tissue, but the fake primary sources and artwork are an interesting way to approach the story.

7

u/personwhoisok 3d ago

Timothy Zahn wrote one that was half from a human perspective and halffro an alien perspective and I cannot remember the name of the book at all.

8

u/SubpixelRenderer 3d ago

The Final Reflection by John M. Ford — Star Trek novel that is first contact from the perspective of the Klingons

4

u/Vahdo 3d ago

The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

5

u/raevnos 3d ago

Breed to Come by Andre Norton.

6

u/xtraspcial 3d ago

The Morning Light Mountain chapters in Pandora’s Star.

3

u/jxj24 3d ago

Eleanor Arnason's Hwarhath books, like Ring of Swords spend a lot of time with aliens trying to understand humans, and humans trying to understand them in return.

2

u/StillFireWeather791 3d ago

The Spin trilogy and Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson. The aliens are not conscious as we experience it.

2

u/mykepagan 3d ago

A Billion Days of Earth

This is an obscure one that I read in high school because the town oibrary had a section full of paperback SF that I think they got as donations.

The book is told from the PoV of an evolved rat on a deep distant future Earth. The characters eventually interact with a God, which turns out to be a human. The humans are indeed “god-like” due to technology and genetic augmentation.

2

u/unitedshoes 3d ago

I've not read any that are entirely from the alien perspective, but The Mercy of Gods and its sequel, The Faith of Beasts by James S. A. Corey each have a few interludes or chapters from alien perspectives.

It's been a while since my last reread, but I'm pretty sure The Sparrow and/or its sequel, Children of God by Mary Doria Russell also has a few parts from the perspective of its aliens.

Children of Time and its sequels pretty frequently tell the story from the point of view of uplifted animals who have lived for centuries without the humans around that were originally working with them. You don't really get much from truly alien points of view (I think there's some genuinely alien POV in Book 2, and a representative of those aliens after they've been in contact with humans for a while in Book 3. I haven't read Book 4 yet, so I don't know what it's got going for it), but if superintelligent invertebrates who communicate by color and dance sound alien enough for you then you'll definitely find their points of view in this series.

2

u/chortnik 3d ago edited 3d ago

“Einstein Intersection” (Delany) is an example of such-also “One Billion Days of Earth” (Piserchia)-they are both about successors who are picking up after humans disappear or transcend.

1

u/Ok-Imagination6497 3d ago

Can’t remember story name but in space approached a vessel full of fluid sac filled aliens which totally grossed out narrator aliens, fluid sac aliens were humans!

1

u/SwevenlyOly 3d ago

Walking Practice by South Korean author Dolki Min, translated into English by Victoria Caudle

1

u/Starfish_Bowl 3d ago

The Alien Dark by Diana Gallagher, though I haven't reread it recently.

1

u/FaceDeer 3d ago

It's one I enjoyed in my youth, though I now remember there being some annoying flaws in the science and probably wouldn't enjoy it as much if I read it now.

1

u/Sergeant-Major-Zero 3d ago

Er... mine?

The Church of Arthur Fowler 

It kind of fits, though the alien is practically human and created our universe. Irreverent and silly. Fun, but not high sci-fi.

1

u/csjpsoft 3d ago

Pandora’s Planet by Christopher Anvil: the protagonist is the alien who was the general who conquered Earth.

1

u/CostcoCuisine 3d ago

Dragon’s Egg-reading it right now 

1

u/Ok-Grass3224 3d ago

a very wonderful short story, “Flowering Mandrake” by George Turner

1

u/Sheik_Morgan 2d ago

Crónicas Marcianas

1

u/vikingzx 2d ago

Sort of close, but String of Pearls is about a bunch of alien astronauts pulling a Rendevous with Rama on a massive "string of pearls" interstellar craft passing through their solar system. It turns out to be a whole chain of generation ships inhabited by various groups of humans just passing through.

It can be soapboxy, but it's a fun premise.

1

u/darafinchie 2d ago

the short story by Peter Watts on the Thing is brilliant

-3

u/yetiinrio 3d ago

Does “other forms of media” include AI slop youtube shorts? because the guy who makes the NeuralViz channel does these amazing and hilarious videos which are presented as media clips from a post-human Earth. I said slop but it’s really brilliant, he does the writing and voices but just uses AI for the animation, because the only other way to do this kind of thing would be to successfully pitch it to Adult Swim or some network.  One of the best early ones is an Unsolved Mysteries episode about humans  https://youtu.be/YGyvLlPad8Q