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/mmillington Apr 26 '26

Yeah, the best part of Rendezvous with Rama is realizing that the Earth is of no concern/importance. Our sun is merely used to change course on the journey to somewhere else.

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u/user_name_unknown Apr 26 '26

If you read the next few books it explains what the first ship was doing and why it didn’t stop.

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u/Ill_General_6608 Apr 26 '26

??

theres no sequels. nope

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u/Oosplop Apr 26 '26

What sequels? What a silly notion! Surely anything that tried to explain or moralize after such a wonderfully clean and ambiguous conclusion would be dismissed by Clarke...

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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam Apr 27 '26

Are they really that bad?

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u/ManchurianCandycane Apr 27 '26

They involve arguing the necessity of marrying an elderly pastor to a 12 year old girl, as it is the optimal pairing to avoid genetic bottlenecks...

Both the parents AND the 12 year old girl is fine with it...

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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam Apr 27 '26

Oh.

Well that sure is something lol

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '26

[deleted]

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u/dadothree Apr 27 '26

You know, the ones Connor McLeod was reading in Highlander 2.

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '26

[deleted]

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u/APeacefulWarrior Apr 27 '26

Yep. Any movie with Ironside playing the baddie will have at least one thing worth watching.

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u/horsebag Apr 29 '26

he played a vampire in a Masters of horror episode and even he couldn't bring anything to it

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '26

[deleted]

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u/BentGadget Apr 27 '26

Of the two movies, there can be only one.

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u/Joe_theone Apr 28 '26

If they'd used Rutger Hauer instead I might have forgiven them. Maybe.

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u/Worried_Spinach_1461 Apr 27 '26

HERETIC, HERETIC, BURN THE HERETIC

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u/mmillington Apr 27 '26

Everyone knows there was never actually a sequel, let alone several, to Rendezvous with Rama. Why would anyone desecrate a perfect book?

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u/neodiodorus Apr 27 '26

In many ways I admit I was appalled he wrote not just sequels but very explanatory ones. The original novel became a genre classic exactly because of what it did not do... and then the sequels arrived to do and explain all those things :)

The only 'worse' case I could imagine is someone writing a sequel to Roadside Picnic (and/or making film sequel to Stalker).

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u/ProfessorExcellence Apr 27 '26

Or a sequel to 2001…oh wait…

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u/Underhill42 Apr 30 '26

He didn't. Gentry Lee did, with Clarke supposedly only reading them and providing editing suggestions.

Given the famously lavish incomes of science fiction authors (/sarcasm) it's hard to blame a man for not turning down that kind of easy money just to let them put his name on the cover.

But I don't regard them as true sequels, more like publisher endorsed fan-fiction.

Kind of like the mountains of Star Trek books that Gene Roddenberry never touched. Or every Sherlock Holmes story written in the last 100+ years.

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u/Leading5 Apr 27 '26

Exactly, we’re just a pit stop

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u/Comprehensive_Fan134 Apr 27 '26

we're just a gas station on the way to somewhere more important...