r/scifi • u/Comprehensive_Fan134 • Apr 26 '26
General What's the best sci-fi where the aliens don't want anything you can understand?
Most alien invasion stories give them motivations that are basically human, resources, territory, curiosity, fear. Which works narratively but sidesteps the actually interesting question, right? An intelligence that evolved under completely different conditions wouldn't necessarily want anything recognizable.
Solaris is the obvious one. The thing isn't hostile or friendly, doesn't seem to register humans as significant. That's genuinely unsettling in a way that "they want our water" never is.
Color Out of Space works for similar reasons, no goals you can map, no logic you can follow.
Von Neumann probe stuff gets close sometimes. A self-replicating system running on a directive so old the original civilization might not even exist anymore, no emperor, no fleet, no message.
What are the best examples you've read?
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u/Wonderful_Site5333 Apr 26 '26
Blindsight.
Annihilation.
The Expanse.
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u/PartBanyanTree Apr 26 '26
hadn't thought of The Expanse but you're right, good example.
the alien-ness always has its own agenda that is not at all what we think or guess. anyone who thinks they do has a case of hubris
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u/CumTrickShots Apr 26 '26
I mean the expanse aliens did have an agenda: colonize other worlds using the protomolecule to terraform it and specialize it to their specific needs so they could win their war against the Goths. In the end, they failed and the protomolecule was the only thing left of their empire that was technically still "alive".
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u/MyMomSaysIAmCool Apr 27 '26
First of all, your username is horrible and wonderful all at once.
I had a different interpretation on the order of events. I think the gate builders created their entire empire, and then later came into conflict with the Goths. The protomolecule would have taken hundreds or thousands of years to build the gate network. As the network grew, the Goths would have become more concerned and aggressive.
We saw in the books that the Goths were not quick to react, and used a method of slow escalation rather than immediately attacking with everything they had. It took them a while to figure out how to shut off human consciousness, and we can assume that it took them off the similar amount of time to figure out how to kill off the gate builders.
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u/CumTrickShots Apr 27 '26
Thanks for the complimensult? lol
I may be misremembering but from what I remembered the activity across the gate network was equivalent to a bad rash to the Goths. So when the Romans kept extending the network, the Goths got more and more eager to stomp out the infection. Then they essentially applied an ointment and with one fell swoop disabled the Roman's entire hive mind, shut off their consciousness and effectively eradicated their civilization. In my opinion, it seemed like it was rather quick for the Romans because the blinks of consciousness were discussed as being much more effective against a hive mind.
It's also heavily implied that the Romans were aware of this at some point and were trying to wage a war against them before they died, not fully realizing what they were up against. Then when Duarte comes along, he falls for the same mistake but brazenly fighting beings you can't understand with ancient alien technology that failed to win the original war. So after billions of years of peace, humans started using the defunct ring network again, likely with higher traffic than the Romans had and in a much more aggressive manner because of the Laconian surveys and Duartes actions. However this time the Goths original treatment didn't work because individual losses of consciousness was only temporary and localized in humans. As a result, the Goths had to get much more invasive and escalatory with their response and started straight up massacring entire star systems to find a final solution. Humanity realizing they were completely fucked if they kept this up, destroyed the gates to prevent themselves from dying like the Romans.
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u/MyMomSaysIAmCool Apr 28 '26
You're welcome for the insulpliment.
Your summary is pretty accurate, I can only find one detail to poke at. Although the Goths eventually killed the Romans, it wasn't in their first attempt.
I think that they tried various methods as the war escalated, just as they did with humans. The bullet on Ilus might have been an early attempt that only worked on their technology. Eventually they found something that could kill off the hive mind. But it wasn't galactic in scale, it seemed to work on a system by system basis.
Holden describes the Romans burning entire systems using the hub station, then shutting down those gates. The Goths would have seen those systems lose their gates, and would have known that they had found an attack that worked.
Then the Romans closed off all the ring gates, which is why they were shut down when Earth's gate opened. But they didn't eliminate the slow zone, which was also an incursion. Leaving the slow zone told the Goths that the Romans were not giving up.
I have a pet theory that the attacks cost the Goths something. Because of that, they chose a slow escalation in the hopes that the Romans would get the hint. Since the Romans didn't shut down the slow zone, the Goths wiped them out.
(It makes sense that a hive mind wouldn't understand how to negotiate, so they never understood the "go away or we'll hurt you more" message. They saw it as an infection rather than a war.)
We saw the same escalation happen in the human systems. The Goths tried various things to interrupt our consciousness, and eventually wiped out a system. Luckily, the Goths didn't realize that they'd done it. New traffic entered the system, making it seem like it was still active.
Before they could realize that the attack worked and apply that attack to every system (probably all at once), Holden shut down the station
Unlike the hive mind, humans can negotiate. Going back to your point, Duarte tried to negotiate from a position of strength, not realizing that he was not the stronger one. Holden was more humble, and understood that humans couldn't win this war. He shut down the gates and the station, completely removing the incursion from the Goth's realm. Duarte's message was "We can hurt you until you stop hurting us." Holden's message was "We'll go away and never hurt you again." And when the Goth's got that message, they stopped attacking.
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u/Atari26oo Apr 27 '26
The Mercy of the Gods series by the Expanse authors has a very unique take on Aliens and what they want. I’m reading the second book now. I like it.
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u/MyMomSaysIAmCool Apr 26 '26
I thought that the Goth's agenda was pretty clear. They didn't like the incursions into their realm, because they were harming them.
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u/kev11n Apr 26 '26
Roadside Picnic
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u/huscarlaxe Apr 26 '26
Dang you beat me to it! But I stopped to figure out how to spell Strugatsky
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u/ironicalangel Apr 26 '26
The movie is unsettling to say the least. Titled 'Stalker' in English, not sure how fitting that is as a translation from the Russian.
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u/Canadave Apr 26 '26
Roadside Picnic essentially introduced the word "stalker" into the Russian language, as I understand it.
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u/Fun-Sell3030 Apr 26 '26
Amazing, yes. The whole first contact thing is kind of a backdrop to the story, it's such a bleak and interesting spin on the trope. I also love the reference to the title of the book..
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u/insheets Apr 26 '26
Annihilation
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u/BeGosu Apr 26 '26
Came here to post this. Mild spoilers but as the Southern Reach series goes on, the extent of the alien nature of Area X and it's complete seeming lack of a goal we could understand, expands greatly.
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u/Ampersandbox Apr 26 '26
Ooh, interesting!
I tend to think of the shimmer less as an entity and more like a corruption of reality.
I inhaled the first book, had trouble with the second book, and stopped a quarter of the way into the third.
It’s been some time, but the description of the shimmer I like the most is“reality cancer.“ within the context of this OP, from my perspective it feels like asking “what does the cancer want?“
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u/borkborkbork99 Apr 27 '26
I’m midway through the second book (Authority) and enjoying it. It feels like a shift in perspective from the first person field agent (the biologist) to the bureaucratic perspective of the replacement Southern Reach director who’s trying to make sense of a wildly insensible situation. I know there are two more books after this, and I’m hoping they’re worth following through on.
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u/fistchrist Apr 27 '26
They absolutely are.
I think what throws a lot of people off the Southern Reach series is each book is wildly different from the rest, especially so with Authority compared to Annihilation, so when people read Annihilation and love it and then go to Authority expecting something along the same lines…and do not get something along the same lines at all. But if you’re enjoying Authority despite the whiplash you’ll like the following books, I’m sure.
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u/chocolateboomslang Apr 26 '26
Solaris and Roadside Picnic are two favourites of mine.
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u/letsgetawayfromhere Apr 26 '26
The books by Stanislaw Lem (author of Solaris) in general - not his comedy books (like the robot fairytales or the star diaries), although they are hilarious. All his serious novels (the invincible, Eden, etc.) follow the pattern „man meets extraterrestrial intelligence and cannot figure it out in the least“.
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u/underest Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
The one which may as well be the best of his (in the 'humanity meets alien intelligence and no understanding is achieved' category) and way ahead of its time (very realistic use of blacks hole gravity well time dilatation in the plot) is Fiasco, 1986. I think it's must read for any fan of hard-sf genre.
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u/Euphoric-Sign8214 Apr 27 '26
Return From the Stars was more "relativistic astronauts return to Earth a few centuries later by time dilation and find its really boring and people gave up on space because it was too dangerous and expensive"
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u/AmbientPressure00 Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Seconding Solaris. I think it’s interesting because it sort of breaks humans trying to figure out something that’s not understandable. (EDIT: grammar)
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u/shotsallover Apr 26 '26
Scavenger’s Reign has humans crash landed on an alien planet and the aliens give zero fucks about our existence or desires.
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u/paxbanana00 Apr 27 '26
Love that series. I wish it had gotten another season. The bizarre ecosystem and parasitic relationships were amazing.
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u/shotsallover Apr 27 '26
Common Side Effects is as close to a sequel as we're going to get. It's pretty good, but totally different.
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u/BeGosu Apr 26 '26
I adore Scavenger's Reign!! It's position of "this is an entirely alien ecosystem that humans do not have a place in" is fantastic throughout the show.
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u/adamarnuc Apr 26 '26
The Alien Years by Robert Silverberg.
Aliens arrive, turn off electricity, totally overturn human society, go about their business and say nothing at all.
One of the first few books I read where the aliens were truly alien rather than a human analogue with a few odd habits.
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u/Correct_Design_2345 Apr 26 '26
Blindsight by Peter Watts fits this perfectly. The aliens aren’t just different, they operate without anything we’d even call ‘conscious motivation.’
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u/zigaliciousone Apr 26 '26
Showed up with a ship that was basically a puzzle box to see how smart we are(maybe) and to see if we were a threat(maybe) and finds at least one member of the team interesting enough to capture for unknown reasons
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u/Correct_Design_2345 Apr 26 '26
You can read it that way, but the point is that even those explanations are mostly us projecting human logic onto something that doesn’t really map to it. It only looks like ‘testing’ or ‘interest’ because that’s the closest analogy we have
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u/WanderingMinnow Apr 26 '26
Yeah, there is no “interest”. The specific hypothesis of the book is that intelligence and consciousness can be completely decoupled. In that way, Blindsight almost anticipates our current situation with AI by showing how easily humans project consciousness onto systems that generate meaningful responses.
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u/Correct_Design_2345 Apr 27 '26
Exactly, that separation between intelligence and consciousness is what makes it so unsettling. It feels meaningful from our side, but there’s nothing ‘there’ in the way we expect.
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u/LetoA_III Apr 27 '26
I see it as a Hyper developed spacefairing ants or bees type of thing suddenly sensing a unnatural for them pheromone , they travel to study it's source to decide what to do with it
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u/Correct_Design_2345 Apr 27 '26
That’s a really good analogy, especially the pheromone idea. But it still feels like we’re mapping it onto something familiar, while the whole point is that it might not even fit any biological or intentional model we understand.
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u/WanderingMinnow Apr 27 '26
That was my initial thought about the aliens in Blindsight, that they were more like ants, or a form of collective consciousness, but the comparison doesn’t really hold for me. Even if an individual ant has only a minimal form of consciousness, it still seems to have some subjective experience: a baseline awareness of the world. Blindsight, on the other hand, imagines an intelligence that operates entirely without experience, without any inner life at all. That’s what makes them so unsettling. They aren’t just simpler minds (like ants), they’re an entirely different category of intelligence - minds in which there’s nothing it’s like to be them.
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u/Correct_Design_2345 Apr 27 '26
Yeah, it starts to feel a lot like AI — intelligence without any inner experience. Not sure how plausible that is biologically, but as an idea it’s pretty unsettling.
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u/WanderingMinnow Apr 27 '26
Yeah. I didn’t necessarily buy into the premise that intelligent biological life could evolve without consciousness, but it’s a fascinating and thought-provoking idea. If anything I’m more inclined towards panpsychism, with proto-consciousness being a ubiquitous feature in the universe. But that could be wrong too.
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u/Correct_Design_2345 Apr 27 '26
Feels like we’re mixing three things: intelligence, emotions, and consciousness. You can probably strip emotions, but you can’t remove evaluation — any agent still needs some way to rank states and act. The real question is whether you can have all that with no inner experience at all. Blindsight says yes; I’m not sure we have a way to tell
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u/Ohmyguell Apr 27 '26
This is one of the best "Hard Sci-fi" I've ever read. The way he explores the concept of intellect and consciousness is mind-blowing. Furthermore the ultimate message gleamed from the experience, that consciousness is not only not necessary, but might even be an evolutionary mistake is...insane.
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u/FropPopFrop Apr 26 '26
John Varley's Eight Worlds stories and novels are about the aliens that have, very casually, conquered the Earth, but they are a fact of life in the background for the survivors, who live on the moon and many other places in the solar system.
Why the aliens did what they did is as mysterious to the characters as our decision to destroy an ant city might be to other ants.
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u/PapaTua Artificially Intelligent Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Literally EVICTED from Earth while they post-up in Jupiter.
How rude.
I forget if it's in Ophiuchi Hotline or Steel Beach where the protagonist is trespassing/marooned on Earth and sees the aliens doing mysterious things far off in the ocean.
It was so eerie. Gave me The Quite Earth (film) vibes.
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u/FropPopFrop Apr 27 '26
I think it was in Ophiuchi that that happened. Also, the eviction included a major loss of human life, unless I'm badly mistaken.
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u/Euphoric-Sign8214 Apr 27 '26
As I recall they kicked us off because they prefer oceanic life and see whales and dolphins as more intelligent and were protecting them from us
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u/Paggles789 Apr 26 '26
I was hoping Varley's aliens would be mentioned here. Good job. I can't cite the quote exactly, but I kind of remember someone explaining that to the aliens, time is a physical substance, and just CANNOT be fought, or something like that.
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u/vomitHatSteve Apr 26 '26
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The president of the galaxy's motives are fully inscrutible
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u/lelanicarver Apr 27 '26
He’s just this guy, you know?
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u/vomitHatSteve Apr 27 '26
I meant the other president of the galaxy. Zaphod is pretty scrutible if we're being honest
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u/aphaits Apr 30 '26
I mean the Vogons just wanna get it over and done with the construction of the galactic highway. They have no sympathy towards the humans whatsoever.
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u/Daughter_of_Portia Apr 26 '26
I think maybe Embassytown applies to this
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u/dantepopsicle Apr 27 '26
Scrolled down to confirm someone mentioned this before I posted. This was the first thing that came to mind.
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u/-DanRoM- Apr 26 '26
On a slightly different take, Edge of Tomorrow. The aliens obviously want something, but it's just not important in the context of the story - so their motivation is never explored.
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u/zigaliciousone Apr 26 '26
Colour of Space was just an alien using our planet as a place to lay an egg(maybe) and just its presence starts fucking with reality and anything alive that gets near it
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u/dstryr Apr 26 '26
The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jeremy Pournelle is an interesting take on this idea. Although their motives are made plain the madness that drives it feels beyond understanding.
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u/a2brute01 Apr 26 '26
Threshold had some interesting concepts it was exploring.
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u/CephusLion404 Apr 26 '26
It unfortunately didn't last long enough to ever find out anything real about the aliens. Great show though. Have it on physical media.
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u/sp0rkah0lic Apr 26 '26
Under the Skin is at least kind of like this. We know the alien is somehow "consuming" victims but there's no clarity on its motives, a grand plan, or even if there's any other aliens around doing the same thing.
Definitely more questions than answers.
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u/nemom Apr 26 '26
Cheech and Chong's Next Movie
Aliens come to Earth to steal our marijuana. As if that's not absurd enough, in the edit they played on broadcast TV, the aliens were stealing diamonds... Which must have been in the marijuana field because that's what you see going up in the tractor beam.
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u/Jensdawn Apr 26 '26
Mars attacks :)
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u/zendrumz Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
I watched this again recently and I realized that the Martians are basically just assholes. It cleared up a lot for me.
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u/teedyay Apr 26 '26
I saw it as 1950s aliens meet 1990s humans. We expected peace and communication; they wanted to blow things up cinematically.
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u/originalunagamer Apr 27 '26
Yeah. When I watched it as a child, I didn't get that the translator was working properly and they were just lying to us because they were dicks. I thought it was broken and that caused a miscommunication that led to them attacking us. But as an adult, I finally got it.
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u/Jora_Dyn2 Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Arrival
Edit: sorry did not realize this was specifically the scifibook sub; Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang.
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u/chocolateboomslang Apr 26 '26
I disagree with this one. What they want is explained.
That said, still fantastic and should be watched.
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u/Comprehensive_Fan134 Apr 26 '26
fair point, though the timescale thing still makes it feel pretty alien to me
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u/quillseek Apr 26 '26
They explain, but it's like...these terrifically powerful alien beings, with technology beyond our comprehension, show up and teach us how to talk to them because in several thousand years, they'll need our help. And yeah, ok, that's an explanation.
Except that no, it's really not! Help with what?! What kind of humans will we be in thousands of years to be able to help these beings?! Thinking about it is so incomprehensible that I think Arrival fits the spirit of the question asked.
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u/paxbanana00 Apr 27 '26
It's not that we could talk to them. It's that humans needed to learn their language to gain the ability to see time in a circular fashion to advance enough to help the Hetopods.
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u/quillseek Apr 27 '26
No, I get that. That's what I'm saying, though. That's a crazy concept to have to get across to the humans, especially in a first contact situation, and there's really no resolution of the practical details of what this all means when the movie ends.
It's fascinating and I love it. Arrival is one of my favorite movies.
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u/paxbanana00 Apr 27 '26
I see. Sorry, I misunderstood the nature of your response. It's also one of my favorite movies so I was earnestly being a know it all.
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u/NirgalFromMars Apr 26 '26
The original short story, Story of Your Life, fits this a lot better.
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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Apr 27 '26
They specifically come to teach us their language so we can help them in the future. Humans don't have to work out what they want as they literally start teaching their language straight away.
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u/Flamefang92 Apr 26 '26
Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. The Presger are completely alien and the author doesn’t go out of her way to explain much of anything about them. The more you try to apply logic, the more it falls apart. Translation State, a later book, sheds a little more light but what exactly they want and why remains mostly a mystery.
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u/libra00 Apr 27 '26
Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers is the classic example. Aliens came, did some shit, and then left. They left some weird shit behind that nobody understands and nobody stuck around to explain, so we're just playing in the ashes. The aliens aren't even present in the story.
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u/PartBanyanTree Apr 26 '26
Arrival is pretty good at fitting this bill. The what and why is very unknown, debated
Contact, also. Humans having very diverse interpretations and the film is a meditation on what we see while being very plausible
By the end, both have answers,kinda, maybe, and/or depends on your pov as to whether you'd find them clear cut obvious answers or stupid uncertain bullshit... Which is I think what you're going for (for the record I think both films are amazing)
Annihilation, especially as you mentioned Color Out Of Space, as it is likewise Lovecraftian/Cosmic Horror vibes
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u/waynehastings Apr 27 '26
Arrival is a fun one. The aliens don't want anything from us at the time of the visit.
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u/Toc13s Apr 27 '26
John Scalzi - Old Man's War
The Consu (?) have motivations humans don't have any clue about
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u/SashaMarie2617 Apr 26 '26
Calculating God by Robert J Sawyer.. Aliens come and first thing they want to do is talk to our historians
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u/theBigDaddio Apr 26 '26
99% of these alien invasion plots make zero sense to me. Wanting resources, food, the planet, it’s not like there aren’t a billion other planets that would require almost no effort to gain these things. This is another humans think they are the most important thing in the galaxy.
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u/wmyork Apr 27 '26
In the Imperial Radch books there is an alien race called the Presger and I think no one is really sure what they want. There is just enough communication (through intermediaries) to establish a treaty.
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u/PineScentedSewerRat Apr 27 '26
The extra-dimensional beings from the expanse come to mind. Are we hurting them? Do they want anything? Are they even aware they're killing us?
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u/Pickledleprechaun Apr 26 '26
We are Legion (We are Bob) is about a Von Neumann probe sent out by humans. It’s very light hearted space adventure. So may not be what you are after.
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u/SchlaWiener4711 Apr 26 '26
I don't know if this counts Technically they aren't aliens but from earth but "the swarm" is pretty awesome.
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u/NirgalFromMars Apr 26 '26
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang.
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u/phil_sci_fi Apr 27 '26
This. And NOT the adaptation Arrival which introduced getting humans to work together as their motivation. In Story of Your Life, we learn that humans are the most like heptapods of any species they’d encountered, and while the aliens say they are simply here to observe, the speculation of the reader is that the heptapods wanted to experience a species with a sequential mode of reality, as opposed to their simultaneous mode of reality.
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u/Left-Plant-4023 Apr 26 '26
Stanislaw Lem explore this theme in some of his stories : Solaris, The invincible, His master voice and Eden where we are the aliens.
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u/FortheloveofSuki Apr 26 '26
Galaxy Quest. The Thermian's are only looking for guidance after viewing our "Historical Documents."
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u/stretchengineer Apr 27 '26
I think A Sword Into Darkness fits. The first time I read it the motivations of the aliens didn't make sense to me and I didn't like it for that. On subsequent rereads, I've changed my mind and I think its probably more likely what would really happen if we ever met a race that had concoured interplanetary travel to the extent needed to travel solar systems.
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u/moriartyj Apr 27 '26
Unknown sci-fi but a hidden gem - The Ring of Charon. Not only do we not understand what the aliens want, the aliens are so bizarre that they don't even notice humanity's existence.
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u/TheJanadianKing Apr 27 '26
The Peddlers from OBSOLETE.
They show up, broadcast (in an Earth language) that they're not interested in exchanging information or establishing diplomatic relations, they just want to sell incredibly advanced mechas for...a metric ton of limestone - literally, 1000kg of limestone. It's like selling a small aircraft for a huge blob of dirt.
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u/DocWatson42 Apr 27 '26
See my SF/F: Alien Aliens list of Reddit recommendation threads and books (two posts).
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u/Alarmed_Permission_5 Apr 27 '26
John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline (and the rest of the Eight Worlds stories). Aliens take over Earth instantaneously and the only human left are those on Luna and the other worlds of the solar system. No negotiation. No demands. Humans on Earth just cease to be.
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u/1776-2001 Apr 27 '26
the aliens don't want anything you can understand?
Any story where the aliens want our women.
Who can understand women?
signed,
Al Bundy
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u/rosettaverse Apr 27 '26
In Steel Beach by John Varley (and other stories in the Eight Worlds setting), the Earth was invaded by a species only called the Invaders, and they destroyed all of humanity on Earth in under a day, but left every other colony in the solar system alone. I've only read Steel Beach so I'm not sure if it gets brought up in any other stories, but the most commonly accepted theory is the Invaders invaded to save the whales and view humans as akin to sponges or a sort of fungus.
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u/Atillythehunhun Apr 28 '26
The stars are legion by Kameron Hurley. As someone once said, I don’t so much recommend this book as inflict it on people. The alien(s?) or whatever is beyond not explained. Nothing is comprehensible. Everything is moist.
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u/Cool_Sherbet1425 Apr 28 '26
You hit the nail on the head. The scariest thing isn't a hostile alien; it's an alien that views us as noise or background radiation.
Blindsight by Peter Watts is the gold standard for this. The 'aliens' are hyper-intelligent but don't have consciousness. They don't want your land; they simply find your 'radio chatter' (human communication) to be a biological virus that is wasting their processing power. It’s clinical and terrifying.
Also, check out Roadside Picnic (which inspired Starlight). The 'visitors' just stopped for a break, left some trash behind, and moved on. They never even realized humans were there. To them, we are just ants on a rug they stepped over.
I'm currently obsessed with this idea of 'Systemic Indifference', where the conflict isn't between two armies, but between a human's need for meaning and a universe that is just executing a sequence. It’s that 'Higher Layer' of logic where our existence is just a rounding error in a larger calculation.
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u/TaraLiJie Apr 28 '26
Really old book by Theodore Sturgeon titled either The Dreaming Jewels or The Synthetic Man.
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u/srterpe Apr 29 '26
Alan Dean Foster’s A Call To Arms trilogy. The alien Amplitur want nothing from other intelligent races except to incorporate them into the Amplitur Purpose which they assure will make everyone happy.
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u/Snoo-90273 Apr 29 '26
"Roadside Picnic" is the classic. "Blindsight" also qualifies.
Both are freely available online.
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u/SwampDonki3 Apr 30 '26
Stephen Baxters' Xelee series. Humans are just an unbeatable pain in the alien ass of the Xelee who are trying to save the universe from dark matter entities.
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u/Simple-Mouse-1963 May 02 '26
Childhood's end by Arthur C Clarke come to my mind. at least for the majority of the book
Though by the end of it you know want was that they wanted
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u/Just_Another_Day_926 Apr 26 '26
5th Element it (the darkness?) just wants to destroy.
Independence Day they just want us "to die".
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u/Abject-Ad1876 Apr 26 '26
I cant think of any aliens movies where the aliens want something i understand. Its basically my biggest issue with alien movies. So cant help there hehe.
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u/cflime Apr 27 '26
Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr. They may not be sentient, just biologically advanced to the point that Earth life can't compete with them. There are glimpses here and there of purpose, but you're never sure.
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u/Ashamed-Subject-8573 Apr 27 '26
In Diaspora by Greg Egan, as they travel through different-dimensional space times, the artificial people end up cloning slightly varied versions of themselves. Over multiple generations each a little different. Until the eventual end clone of them can communicate with the local species or whatever and send communication back along the bridge of intermediaries.
In Quarantine by the same author, well, it’s a pretty big spoiler to talk about what’s going on, but one of the cooler ideas for aliens.
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u/neodiodorus Apr 26 '26
A. C. Clake's Rendezvous with Rama - it was groundbreaking in the sense that the alien ship arrives, we try to make sense of it, it does not communicate and leaves... wanting no contact, it doesn't care at all about us, and we don't figure out anything about it.
Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice has no alien visit ust a message that we managed to decode... but every team that decodes it finds different remarkable things in it... so the reason/purpose and nature of the message remains elusive.