How can I write creative alien races?

I'd say have them either be very like humans or very unlike humans. If very like humans, they can be a stand in for a human racial type without invoking nasty racism.
If very unlike humans, we can see ourselves more objectively, from outside ourselves, in their viewpoint.

 

Provided they're as beautiful as Klingons.

 

If y

If you haven't read The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, I recommend it. Larry Niven is one of the greatest inventors of alien races I have read.

 

Examples please.

 

Since I agree with @Vince Higgins, I'll mention one that he didn't: Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The aliens in that book are herd animals and herbivores (multi-trunked "baby elephants") who fight, not to the death, but to domination. Once one herd has shown itself dominant, the other herd is peacefully absorbed into it. Without the predator impulse, their motivations are quite different than humanity's, and they are shocked and confused by some of the tactics that people are willing to use in war.

 

"Mote" is the only title that comes to mind right now. I read most of those years ago, so if you want a description, I have to start by saying Spoiler Alert!

In that particular universe interstellar travel is limited to "wormholes" near certain stars. Interstellar voyages can still take months to years from the jump points to the habitable planets. A civilization is discovered to inhabit the system around a star with no nearby jump point. A point is found to exist just inside the surface of a red giant. These aliens (Moties) found the jump point in their system eons ago, but thought it was a bottomless pit, not knowing ships they sent burned up inside a star.

Humans, knowing their end was in a star could make the trip in shielded ships and make first contact.

Upon entering the motie system, they see signs of a mature interplanetary civilization. Soon one small nearby native vessel alters course to intercept them. The Alien is small, vaguely mammalian, and asymmetrical. Two slender arms with nimble fingered hands on the right and a massive arm on the left with a powerful three fingered hand. The creature is uncommunicative and is brought aboard. It brings with it two smaller creatures the humans assume to pets, or food. The resemble the larger creature, as monkeys resemble us.

Without going into further detail, the civilization is made up of several species atf different levels of evolutionary development. The master of the vessel that meets them is an "engineer", a savant tinker that possesses only rudimentary communication skills. The mini's are "watchmakers" with surprising talents. They eventually meet the higher "casts". with some twisted surprises in store at the climax.

 

Bowl of Heaven is another good one. He takes some familiar ideas about aliens and really tilts them sideways.

 

My favorite truly alien aliens are from Anvil of Stars, by Greg Bear. It's been probably twenty years since I read it and I'm working from memory, so the details are likely to be off, but the critters in that book were not quite a hive mind, but a species of small-scale group minds.

Spoiler

They were made up of basically snakes, but each "individual" was composed of something like twelve or fifteen snakes that fastened themselves together [I forgot how, sorry]. The thing is, the individual snakes within the group weren't stuck there, they could move to another group, so the species was able to literally share their thoughts and ideas with each other. Individual snakes could die without the group dying, but if a group dropped below eight (maybe) it would be unable to maintain its mind and would die.

That's some non-rubber forehead, not starfish stuff.

 

I was going to say the Tines, but they seem exactly like your species. And Fire seems to have been released in the same year, so it's not a clear case of derivation.

Others I could mention: the Phites from Crystal Nights (who aren't technically aliens but are close enough), the Lambertians from Permutation City (for whom syntactical and logical errors are the same thing - they discover advanced physics and chemistry while having no technology whatsoever), the Scramblers from Blindsight (too spoiler-y to describe), and... that's it, I think. Honorable mention of the heptapods in Story of Your Life.

 

Basically, everybody here should read this He put the whole thing on his website after a mess with his publisher, and I personally read the Notes and Acknowledgements before I read the story itself, and I thought that his explanations of the science (vampire biology, human psychology, Scrambler psychology) were an entertaining read on their own Also, to address Mouthwash's concern, I went into the book essentially understanding the Scramblers' psychology, but the final revelation of how their psychology led to the plot still caught me off guard in the best way possible

 

Discovery channel showed a type of short-range telekinesis under controlled conditions in `Stan Lee's superhumans` where the man could draw heavy items to his head like a magnet and there is nothing paranormal about it. We just cannot explain it yet

Having a radio in your pocket is nothing magical and a creature without lungs might find a more energy efficient way to communicate which we would perceive as telepathy. Hammerhead sharks and electric eels show that electricity does not even require technology, it is just another mutation that anyone can have.

 

My go-to dictionary (learnersdictionary.com) disagrees:

"very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world"

 

What is the mechanism that causes photons to take a curved path around a magnet?

Are magnets magical?

Spooky action at a distance.

 

Uhm... they don't. Photons travel perfectly straight in spacetime. Photons are the EM gauge boson, and they do not self-interact.

Did you mean to ask why an electron curves around it? It's because it's exchanging photons with the magnetic material in the magnet. It's not mysterious, EM isn't even that complicated compared to some of the other QM fields.

 

The Discovery Channel is entertainment. Such a claim would not pass real peer review. Throughout history, lots of people have claimed to have magical powers. They've all be frauds, and have never been able to demonstrate anything in a lab setting. The first to show otherwise has a Nobel Prize waiting for them.

 

I don't like this definition. That would imply that dark energy is paranormal, which it certainly is not.

Paranormal things both can't be explained and are not repeatable. There are tons of things out there that we can't explain: why does the charge radius of a proton differ depending on if you measure with an electron or a muon? Standard Model quantum mechanics has no answer for that (they should be identical,) but the difference is always there. It's discoverable eventually, paranormal things by definition can not be discoverable.

 

You could say the same for the "History" Channel. When I first started watching in in the 1990's it consisted mostly of promotional videos by aerospace companies of warplanes from the fifties and sixties.

"Freedom of the press is reserved for those who own one." A.J.Liebling.

The media in this country, in a broad sense, could be said to be owned by "The Military Industrial Complex." On one hand, all commercial media serves Wall Street, whether they are Fox and HLN, or the so called Liberal Media like MSNBC and CNN who implicitly endorsed the pro corporate Clinton/DNC faction over the populist "Berner" faction, which I support.

I digressed in the above. Magic is magic. Science is science. both have a place in literature. Magic is the realm of fantasy and I do not accept it as real.

 

@Vince Higgins I talk about politics on this site too, but it's always in terms of how my writing draws from the state of the world around me.

Does politics influence your writing? Would you like to start a thread about it somewhere else?

 

Actually photon travel a curved path if space time itself is curved, as Einstein described in his special theory of relativity.

 

... That's exactly what New Jersey Runner said.

 

Sort of. They travel a curved path in space. In spacetime, their path is perfectly straight. It's called a geodesic. That's general relativity btw, not special.