Blue And Orange Morality / Literature

Blue-and-Orange Morality in Literature.

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By Author:

• Robert A. Heinlein was particularly well known for his ... interesting takes on morality throughout his works.
  • The Martians in Stranger in a Strange Land have an understandable morality, but it's essentially incompatible with how we view it, largely because they know for a boring fact that death is not that big a deal—they talk with their dead all the time, and in fact, the dead appear to make most of their decisions. One of the biggies that is only mentioned in passing is the idea that putting someone in prison is a horrible, horrible thing to do. You should just kill them instead. Also, they're very strongly for cannibalism as a nearly religious rite.
    • That could be why the main character in the story who was raised on Mars breaks into a prison, uses his abilities to end the existence of the worst offenders, and then erases the bars in a similar fashion, thus setting everyone else free. He just eliminates anything that he thinks should not exist, including certain people.
    • A few other tidbits: they can't fathom hate or dislike anyone or thing with more than a "mild distaste," this is because they devote so much time to understanding things that they can never truly hate it. Also, they see no wrong in obliterating planetary civilizations if, after centuries of contemplation, they decide it necessary, as they did with the fifth planet in our solar system. No, not Jupiter, the planet that is now the asteroid belt.
  • Martians in Double Star have a highly complex system of politeness ^note From their physical description, these are different Martians from Stranger in a Strange Land above. The main problem of the book is that a politician may be late to a ceremony that inducts him into a Martian clan. There is a legend on Mars about a young Martian who was late (due to events beyond his control) to something important, and the consequence of this is death. He was given a second chance, on account of being young and having only a partially formed brain. He would have none of it, so he brought a case against himself in court, successfully prosecuted himself for being late, was consequently executed, and is now held in reverence as the patron saint of propriety on Mars.
  • In Magic, Inc., the salamander who helped in the destruction of Archie's business cannot be yelled at or punished as the other fantastical beings can. It has no sense that what it did was wrong, just that the person who asked it to do so provided something entertaining that it was inclined to do. Archie offers it a special fire place in his home to gain its favor and encourage it to do what he wants.
  • Lampshaded in Have Space Suit – Will Travel. Kip is trying to understand what crime humanity is being tried for until the "judge" explains that it isn't a court of justice; because the membership of the Three Galaxies is made up of so many very different species, which all have their own concept of justice or none at all, there can be no one applicable standard. With this in mind, they simply formed an alliance for mutual protection. The trial is, in fact, to determine if humans are a threat to them.
• C. J. Cherryh has a few examples:
  • The Atevi in the Foreigner (1994) series have this. They can't understand the concept of friendship but have their own biologically based, hierarchical system of loyalty called man'chi. This tends to creep out most of the humans who landed on their planet (to be fair, humans generally make Atevi uneasy as well), so they designate a single human ambassador for when they have to deal with each other and keep well apart otherwise. This is, naturally, our protagonist.
  • Cherryh also applies this trope heavily in the Chanur Novels; the methane-breathers are considered unpredictable by Hani for good reason. Especially the Knnn. Not that the other oxygen-breathing species don't give a decent Hani captain trying to figure out what makes them tick their own share of headaches, mind, but at least those can be talked to in a more or less straightforward fashion. The most accessible methane-breathers, the Tc'a, have five brains in one body and a language that's best translated into a word matrix that can be read in multiple directions on a convenient screen.

By Title:

• In Gordon R. Dickson's The Alien Way, there's a race with a strange "honor" code, which considers perfectly honorable to kill your mates, friends, and family members, if it helps you to gain power or opportunities to spread your genes, and the closer you are to the person killed, the more honorable the act. At least, so long as you are completely successful in achieving your goal; if you are not completely successful, you are killed. In the story, the protagonist is revealed to have been captured and released after his recording device had a prepared sequence played into it; because he only returned because he was allowed to believe he had successfully escaped, he was killed as a failure by the tribunal reviewing his actions. And he went to the tribunal knowing that he would almost certainly be killed for revealing the addition to his recording, but recognizing that it was essential that they be made aware of the information.
• The Jan from Alien in a Small Town zigzag the trope. In most respects, their notions of morality are easily relatable to humans (the protagonist even converting to an Earth religion), but they do have a few quirks. They're so compulsively honest that lying isn't just immoral, it's barely comprehensible (though they do grasp that other species may lie to them). As a collectivist "hive" culture, acting against the Hive Caste System is similarly hard to even imagine. Being descended from a prey species, eating meat seems bestial to them. And they have strong taboos against overuse of technological conveniences, essentially making them Space Amish.
• And Then There Were None: Being a Serial-Killer Killer and Sadist, U.N. Owen (a.k.a. Justice Wargrave) operates under a very unusual moral code, which seems to focus around moral responsibility.
  • He keeps the sociopathic moral high ground by keeping his sadism pointed at people who are also evil; he'll never go after anyone if he doesn't have concrete proof that they are guilty of a major crime, even if they could be a Spanner in the Works.
  • Murderers who bear limited responsibility and/or feel guilty for their crimes still die, but their deaths are quick and painless. Ethel Rogers dies in her sleep because her abusive husband pressured her into the murder, and MacArthur gets a simple bludgeon to the head because he knows what he's done wrong and is nigh-suicidally regretful of it.
  • Low-functioning sociopaths who kill out of self-absorption, like Marston, get quick deaths that seem mostly to get them out of the way, as Owen thinks of them as essentially animals who need to be put down.
  • The above examples also show that there's an element of Owen wanting to see his victims squirm, as Marston was too stupid for mind games to work, and MacArthur wouldn't rise to any provocation Owen could provide because he knew and accepted his guilt and wasn't bothered to die because of it. Those victims simply wouldn't allow Owen to take joy in their emotional pain, so they're offed early.
  • Owen considers authority figures who abuse their positions to be the worst criminals, which is why Blore and Dr. Armstrong get particularly nasty deaths.
  • The victim he subjects to the worst psychological torture is the one who he considers to have committed the worst crime (abuse of authority) to the worst victim (a child). Vera killing her charge Cyril by intentionally letting him do something dangerous genuinely disgusts Wargrave, as it's the sort of abuse of power he'd never tolerate from himself.
• The Carmpans in the Berserker stories are essentially benevolent pacifists, but they very deliberately turned humanity into their (highly effective) Berserker-killing weapon, and their thought processes run quite differently to humans.
• Blindsight:
  • Discussed early in the book, where time is spent discussing the potential moral outlook of Rorschach's creators, especially by Isaac Szpindel, a biologist, and the Gang of Four, who are the different personalities of Susan James and each a sociologist and linguist in their own right. They're all using their respective fields to argue for the degrees to which the aliens will, for example, obey human rationality like Game Theory or how belligerent they will be. Ultimately exaggerated, as it turns out that the scramblers don't have a concept of morality, or indeed a concept of anything — they're non-sapient and do everything unconsciously. Being self-aware is inconceivable to them, and thus they interpret humanity as trying to attack them by making them waste their time interpreting statements we've made from a sentient viewpoint.
  • Closer to home, Jukka Sarasti and the rest of the recreated vampires are sociopathic cannibals who operate on a rather different wavelength than the rest of humanity. Which is justified, as Siri points out when considering the fact that vampires are an early offshoot of the homo sapiens, because having to rely on cannibalising your own kind to survive would necessitate developing a different outlook on things, and vampires are predators through and through who can't help seeing humans as meat.
• In Brave New World the word "mother" is obscene, sex is as impersonal and quick as a handshake, and Romeo and Juliet would be considered a comedy. When John the Savage complains to Mond that the world feels so wrong, Mond argues that that's because John uses the old system of "right and wrong" as opposed to the new moral system of "happiness and unhappiness". The society in Brave New World is based entirely around the pursuit of personal happiness, extreme hedonism; to be dissatisfied is to be actually insane. This is presented as a dystopia because while everyone is happy and youthful, their society stifles creativity, productivity, and free will.
• In Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, there is the Csestriim, a race of essentially demigods. During one scene where two armies were facing off, it was thought to be an unwinnable battle, until the Csesstrim strategist showed up. Leading the "good" army for his own alien reasons, he gives confusing commands to various squads in his army, such as "Kill five enemies and then lay down your weapons and surrender." Sure enough, the battle was won.
• In The Cyber Dragons Trilogy by C.T. Phipps, Snake teaches his students that they should have Undying Loyalty to their employers and always focus themselves on self-improvement as well as becoming the best assassins possible. He also believes that only the strongest should survive and honor belongs to those who are victorious through any means possible. It would be a Proud Warrior Race philosophy if not for the fact Fate and Kei note he's a Mexican gangster working for the Yakuza.
• Andrew Vachss's Burke books often go into how the minds of criminals are not just looser in morals but outright Different from those of citizens.
• The AI in "Cat Pictures Please" does not have a morality of "good" or "evil". It has a morality of "cat pictures". It generally does good in service of that, but it feels no compunctions about manipulating people's lives in ways likely to produce more cat pictures.
• The aliens in Childhood's End, both the Overlords and the Overmind.
• In the short story "The Chinago" written by Jack London and set in the early 20th century, the Chinese protagonist Ah Cho can't understand why the French Colonial authorities refrain from simply using torture to solve a murder.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant:
  • The Elohim straddle this and Above Good and Evil; since they are Earthpower incarnate and able to see and understand nearly everything they frequently act in ways that are incomprehensible to us mere mortals. To top it off, they also tend to say that anyone who isn't an Elohim can't even think about judging them and their actions. Bastards.
  • From the same series, the ur-viles. Initially introduced as Always Chaotic Evil, it's revealed that they're an artificial race created by Black Magic and consider their own existences to be abominable. Everything they do is based around attempting to create some purpose for their lives — whether that purpose be good or evil. As of the Last Chronicles, they seem to have chosen good.
• This is the way the Elder Gods and Old Ones of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos work. They seem malicious, but they're simply so far beyond human comprehension that our concepts of good and evil cannot be applied to them. Works based on Lovecraft's universe tend to make an exception for Nyarlathotep, as someone who can operate on a human level and shows clear sadistic tendencies.
  • "The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." ("The Call of Cthulhu")
  • The Mi-Go from "The Whisperer in Darkness" consider it a reward to extract your brain, put it in a jar, and take you on a cosmic sightseeing tour.
  • The Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madness, on the other hand, are a massive subversion. They are by far one of the most bizarre species to come out of Lovecraft's mind, but their interests, desires, and needs are readable enough that a human can piece together their history from the bas-reliefs they used to decorate their houses. One of the people studying their ruins calls them "men of a different kind", despite their vastly different physiology and being long-vanished before the first ape hit another with a sharp rock. He even realized that they're not the murderous monsters he first thought they were, since it's likely from their point of view they were killing in self-defense.
  • The Great Race of Yith from The Shadow Out of Time zig-zags this trope. They are a race of highly advanced aliens from some unknown star cluster that transplanted their minds across the void of space into the bodies of a bizarre species of alien that existed on Earth in its infancy, and also have the ability to send their minds across time, which they use to explore the era of Man, leaving the minds of the humans they transplant temporarily trapped in horrifyingly alien bodies. But the Yith also take care to make the time their prisoners spend among the Yith as pleasant as possible, and eventually erase their memory when they return to their own time so as not to cause further mental distress, and have built a very advanced, intellectually based civilization. Like the Elder Things, their desires and interests are relatable enough for a human being, even if their morality and intellects are vastly alien.
  • W.H. Pugmire, a modern Cthulhu Mythos author, uses Perspective Flip quite a bit so that we see humanity through the eyes of some very inhuman beings. Basically, humans are ultimately insignificant in the face of cosmic magic but nevertheless fun to toy with (especially if you're Simon Gregory Williams).
• Subverted with the Marat, Canim, and Icemen in Codex Alera, who are initially considered too alien to coexist with humanity in-universe, only for a good chunk of the series to involve The Hero finding common ground and building bridges with them. Played completely straight with the Vord.
• The Cosmere:
  • Mistborn: The Original Trilogy:
    • Ruin's viewpoint through Marsh shows that he finds destruction to be beautiful and interactions with Kelsier in Mistborn: Secret History show that he sees destroying everything as a Mercy Kill.
    • Koloss from the series also qualify. They are a giant, hyper-violent, roughly humanoid monster race who are basically always killing one another with little or no justification. Leadership seems to be dictated entirely by size, as a larger Koloss will be stronger. Elend goes into a camp full of Koloss and, in an attempt to figure out how the human warlord is controlling them, attacks and murders one of them. After he succeeds, he notices the others are waiting for him to explain the attack. He says the Koloss he killed had eaten his horse, which the others seem to think was an entirely reasonable justification.
  • Virtually all the Shards (Ruin being one of them) count on some level. Each Shard has an Intent, indicated by its name, which warps its viewpoint to the extent that they literally cannot act against it. Preservation, for example, loved the Lord Ruler despite the horrible things he did, because having a permanent immortal ruler was in line with Preservation's desire to have a perfectly preserved, unchanging world. Honor was literally incapable of breaking his word, and didn't care at all about the purpose of an oath, as long as it was kept. That being said, some Shards (such as Preservation and Honor) do still go out of their way to help humans as much as they can within the limitations of their powers.
  • Warbreaker: Nightblood is a sentient weapon created with the express command to destroy evil. The problem is, a sword has no understanding of what evil actually is. Its ability to Detect Evil compels bad people to use it violently (resulting in "evil" people killing each other with it), while good people get sick and have no interest in using it. The reliability of this system is questionable at best, so it just results in a lot of people dead.
    Nightblood: I'm not evil, I destroy evil. Those people look evil, let's destroy them.
• Creation (1981) shows the ancient clash of morality and ethics between the Persian, Greek, Indian and Chinese systems, with Buddhism in particular shown as being beyond human morality.
• The short science fiction story "The Dance of The Changer and The Three" is about a legend from an alien race of Energy Beings; the narrator, a human, cannot fully understand their motivations very well, in particular why they attacked the humans they had befriended; when asked why, their answer was "because." Moreover, the whole point of the legend/history referenced in the title, and why its protagonists are remembered and revered, is that they failed. Which by the point you find out seems almost comprehensible to the reader.
• Chiun from The Destroyer is from a village that has fed itself through the ages by hiring out as assassins. Because of this, assassins are greatly respected in the village. The only target that is forbidden is children. They revere many of the great tyrants of history because they provided a lot of work and thus helped support the village. Lee Harvey Oswald's killing of President Kennedy is shameful only because he was an amateur: he was not paid for it, and he used a gun instead of bare hands.
• In Dirge for Prester John, John's moral standards are perverse and inexplicable to the people of Pentexore, as are their moral standards to him.
• The dolls of The Dollmaker make very little distinction between sex and murder.
• In Dora Wilk Series, Anubis mummifies his dates so that they may stay with him forever and considers this to be the expression of true love.
• The Draco Tavern: In one story, "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!", a crewman from the first embassy ship to an alien homeworld reveals that when the aliens took DNA samples it wasn't for pure scientific purposes: they grow brainless human clones as a food delicacy. The UN quietly accepts royalties, and some of the crew members later kill themselves.
• The Drenai books have the Sathuli, who have a terrible reputation due to torturing their captives to death; they believe this purifies the soul, and so their most respected adversaries receive the most agonizing deaths. They also have religious objections to breaking bread with "unbelievers", but it's the torture thing that made them and the Drenai enemies.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Specifically invoked in the case of Bob the Skull. As a Spirit of Intellect, essentially a non-corporeal supernatural library with attitude, Dresden describes Bob as being extremely fuzzy on the entire concept of "good" and "bad." So when Bob describes an infamous necromancer as capital-E Evil, it makes Dresden sit up and take notice.
  • The same can be said for a lot of non-human entities. Those that are relatively close to humans (like White Court Vampires) tend to be somewhat close to humans in motivation and perspective, but as you go up the power rankings, prespective tends to shift pretty dramatically. The really powerful ones in particular are often closer to a force of nature than anything else. That said their logic and motivations tend to actually be quite straightforward, they're just clearly not human motivations or logic.
  • The Sidhe seem to fall into this category, though one went mad because she began to comprehend human pain (and this in turn led her alien mind to try and create a global catastrophe to stop the pain). Lea especially falls into this, as she wants to turn Harry into a hound because she genuinely thinks it would be the best way to protect him. She made a promise, in fact.
• In Dust of Dreams, the ninth book of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, the K'Chain Che'Malle finally get their own narratives and are shown — as could be expected from telepathically communicating intelligent dinosaurs — to have rather different moral perceptions from humans. They believe in the "logic of despair" and that an existence without an opposing force, without tension, untouched by chaos, is also without meaning, and that freedom lies only in never being certain of one thing only, while for much of the series it has been shown that humans prefer certainty, which for the K'Chain Che'Malle is amoral.
• The Aztec people in the Argentinian novel El Conquistador, from Federico Andahazi.
• The eponymous eldrae of the Eldraeverse have one of these arising from their different instinct-set. Sometimes it gets to the same place via different paths. (Example: They would argue that having to fall back on enlightened self-interest to cooperate and build societies is better than instinctual tribalism because it doesn't come bundled with xenophobia and an instinct to punish defectors from the group norm.) Sometimes, on the other hand, it really doesn't. (Example: They find charity, whether giving or receiving, instinctively repulsive because it's an inherently unbalanced exchange.)
• The Elenium: In The Tamuli, the trolls consider the act of killing and eating other creatures (including other trolls, sometimes) perfectly rational and moral, and find the idea of not being allowed to do so upsetting and wrong. On the other hand, they find the idea of deception and taking advantage of uninvolved parties to be completely reprehensible; when Khwaj, the troll god of fire, finds out that the antagonists have kidnapped Ehlana so they can force her husband, Sparhawk, to give them the Bhelliom, he is absolutely furious, denounces them as utterly evil, and vows to burn them forever — because the fight between Sparhawk and the villains should only involve them and their allies, not anyone's mate.
• Ender's Game: Probably the single most important trope in the series.
  • The Buggers/Formics have a morality not dissimilar to our own, but because of the way their society is structured (almost the entire population are mindless drones with only a handful of thinking/feeling "people" at any given time) and their inability to communicate with creatures as psychologically different as humans, it's virtually impossible for humans and Buggers to relate to each other in moral terms, or even grasp what the others' values might be. They eventually learn to cope, but it takes millennia and there's a lot of bloodshed in between.
  • The Formic Queen is another prime example, lacking a real concept of murder or death because of her sole interactions with hive-minded soldiers who are (or have at least been bred and controlled to be) as expendable as a toenail or a strand of hair. She eventually learns to interact with other species without doing anything too monstrous, but in accordance with her alien morality refuses to really intervene for anything but the prevention of genocide and shows no real deference to the safety of individual humans. She also doesn't really care whether or not she herself lives or dies as long as one of her daughters (another Queen) survives, since her memories will be passed on via their hive-mind anyway.
  • In its follow-up, humans encounter even more baffling and incomprehensible creatures, including one species for whom ritual murder is an essential part of their reproductive process and another which is an intelligent (and terrifying) disease.
  • In Speaker for the Dead, several pequeninos are ritually murdered by their peers for providing important conceptual or technological advances. This only gets figured out when humans realize that, due to the piggies' Bizarre Alien Biology, My Death Is Just the Beginning. After a piggy is ritually executed, they turn into a tree. The males can only have children after becoming one, in fact. Unfortunately, disaster strikes when this ritual vivisecting gets done on humans...
• In Evolution there are several instances of infanticide (like when a tribe of hunter-gatherers take a newborn baby and bury it alive as a form of population control), genocide of other tribes, and rape. All explained in detail with the cold logic of survival and passing the genes to the next generation.
• As with many other depictions of The Fair Folk, fairies and similar beings in Fablehaven have very alien concepts of morality. Several of them, for example, don't see anything wrong with killing humans just because they can, because human life is so short anyway. (In-universe, it's likened to a human stepping on a bug.) And that's the least of it. With few exceptions, however, the humans don't treat this as bad—it just means they need to be exceptionally careful around them. One of those exceptions being centaurs, whose obfuscating jerkassery is treated as exactly that.
  • It's even discussed in the third book when a plague is changing creatures of light into creatures of shadow. Grandpa points out that the light creatures are easily corrupted while the humans are largely unaffected because they are not good by nature, they just act on instinct. Warren points out that, while the philosophical implications are all nice to discuss and all, they have a powerful enemy at the moment.
    Warren: If a starving bear ate my family, I would understand why it did it. That doesn't change the fact that I would still shoot it.
• The Faraway Paladin: Gus argues to Will that the conventional religious view of gods as "good" and "evil" presents an incomplete picture. For example, Volt presides over order and judgement where his brother Illtreat is a god of chaos and destruction. Conventionally they're viewed as essentially invokedLawful Good and Chaotic Evil, but Gus notes that Volt also presides over tyrannical and corrupt governments and Illtreat supports revolutions that overthrow them. His conclusion, therefore, is that "good" and "evil" are subjective viewpoints of the gods' followers, and that the truly "good" gods are the ones whose ways of thinking don't pose a threat to society.
• While the book itself only shows relatively minor examples (extreme xenophobia of various strains and problems with comprehending the concept of personal face-to-face relationships, as an example), the possibility of this is a key plot point in Foundation and Earth — the driving question behind the plot is Golan Trevize asking himself why his intuition pointed to Gaia as the most correct option of the three given of First Foundation, Second Foundation, Gaia. At the end of the book, he realizes that the possibility of this trope is the reason — the First Foundation was out at least partly for other reasons, but the Second Foundation was excluded because their entire system is centred around psycho-history — which, among other implicit assumptions, assumes that the populations involved are human populations acting in a human manner, and hence would be incapable of handling truly alien ways of thinking.
• The gods of Matthew Laurence's Freya series often have this trait due to their belief-driven natures. For instance, at one point Freya abuses her magic to essentially steal luxury items. She mentions feeling bad about it, but not because she's taking something that's not hers - she's offended she has to use her powers at all, as it implies she doesn't deserve those things for free to begin with.
• The Fair Folk often are shown as practicing this, especially in modern (or very old) renditions. Good examples are found in the works of Neil Gaiman (such as The Sandman (1989) or The Books of Magic), and in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
• Good Omens: Crowley comments that God's plan must be literally incomprehensible to humans because of their own nature: "It can't be a cosmic chess game, it has to be just a very complicated game of Solitaire. If we could understand we wouldn't be us."
• The Aelfinn and Eelfin ("snakes" and "foxes") in The Wheel of Time series, another variation of The Fair Folk, are described like this: not even really evil, but so alien that they might as well be.
• Holly Black frequently does this for her otherworldly subjects, most notably in her book The Darkest Part of the Forest: The Fair Folk have no qualms about murdering tourists visiting the local town of Fairfold in gruesome ways, or else kidnapping human babies and replacing them with their own, i.e. changelings, for unknown reasons; other nasty habits of theirs throughout the book include cursing locals, or in the case of Ben, being "blessed" with a gift for fairy music that ends up backfiring on him when he grows older. To them, humans are basically ants and as such, they feel they have the liberty to do whatever they like to them, which on a lucky day will mean all the milk in the house spoiling and in some of the worst cases being turned into a pile of rocks with the only way of breaking the curse being another human being recognizing that the "rocks" are actually a person (or people) under a spell.
• Oscar Wilde's short story "The Fisherman and His Soul" has the mermaid. Although she did share in The Power of Love.
• In Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the aliens and humans really don't quite understand each other's psychology, mainly because the aliens have much more of a herd dynamic. Most relevantly, the aliens don't understand how or why you would possibly initiate diplomacy before first fighting to see which party was dominant. Likewise, they don't understand why a battered humanity responds with total war (an unknown notion to them), rather than taking a Defeat Means Friendship-type submissive relationship.
• Marti Steussy's Forest of the Night: For the Lodgeless Ones, building a permanent shelter is a no-no. Calling someone's autobiography "boring," or accusing them of embellishing it, is fighting words. Letting your disabled child starve to death because he can't hunt is unfortunate, but not morally wrong. Eating your child's corpse? At least the scavengers didn't get him.
• Sergey Lukyanenko's Genome trilogy features Brownies, aliens whose behavior is completely insane by human standards.
  • Lukyanenko absolutely loves this trope and uses it whenever possible. For example, in one of his first major works, The Lord from the Planet Earth trilogy, there were Fangs — a race of aliens who judged anything by its ''aesthetics''. So, upon learning the War Is Glorious trope from humans, they thought that humans would be good sports and immediately went to war. When they found (from the main character, incidentally) that humans also think that the War Is Hell, they were utterly dumbfounded by such seemingly schizophrenic (to them) thinking. And that's just the least bizarre example.
  • Their morality was a mystery to most humans for the longest time. It was only the protagonist who finally figured it out. It's likely that the first human ships that discovered the Fangs had videos and pictures aboard that resulted in the Fangs assuming that war and torture are beautiful by human standards (after all, why would anyone put something into an art form if they didn't think it was beautiful?). They proceed to mutilate and kill most of the crew. At the end, the protagonist is engaged in a duel to the death with a Fang soldier, who's much better than him. Just as the Fang is about to strike him down, the protagonist notices that he left himself open to a cowardly attack. Why? Because no Fang would take advantage of this. Being a Combat Pragmatist, the protagonist deals a mortal blow to the Fang using this method with all the other Fangs monitoring the combat. Thus, this cowardly (i.e. ugly) strike finally teaches them that they were wrong.
  • That Fang soldier was actually much smarter. He understood the problem perfectly and left himself open on purpose, hoping that the protagonist would use the opportunity and thus convince other Fangs.
• Hannibal Lecter: The titular character's personal ethics are bizarre. Murder, torture, cannibalism, and mutilation are fine, but sexual assault and rudeness are punishable by death. What Lecter considers to be rude behavior is unclear as he himself insults, ignores, and talks down to people. And murder could be seen as being pretty rude as well. Furthermore, his definition of evil is to defy the rules of society and he made the deliberate choice to be evil by rejecting societal norms.
• In Harahpin, Thrym is unique among Pairetorians as he actually wants to feel pain and suffering. He believes that being denied this is a treacherous thing and means he's not really free. He tells this straight in Xepysa's face.
• The various magical creatures of the Harry Potter universe tend towards this.
  • The house-elves are the most obvious, being extremely powerful magical creatures who just want to care for humans, which leads to many of the elves being abused, but most of the others also have values humans don't understand. Because of this, house elves consider being freed to be the lowest of dishonours (with Winky being driven to drinking after Barty Crouch Sr. sacks her). They also consider hard work and appreciation for it to be its own reward, and most of them are uninterested in extrinsic forms of compensation like money. Even Dobby, considered a weirdo among his house-elven kin and who absolutely loves being free, also enjoys working; when he initially asked Dumbledore for a paid work, he offered to give him a salary of ten galleons and free weekends, which Dobby actually haggled to have it lowered to 1 galleon and one free day a month.
  • Centaurs are skilled in predicting the future but disinclined to interfere with it.
  • Goblins' law holds that an item belongs to the goblin who made it — anything purchased from a goblin is in their view a lifelong rental, and should be returned after the buyer's death; this view plays a role in the plot of Deathly Hallows with Godric Gryffindor's Goblin-made sword.
• In Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart (which eventually became the basis for Hellraiser) the Cenobites are examples of this trope: they have explored pain and pleasure to such an extent that their understanding of either is almost incompatible with that of most human beings, which leads to trouble when people try to contact them in order to take advantage of the "pleasures" they can offer. All in all, the Cenobites do not appear to understand or care that their charges are in agony most of the time—after all, they did ask for it, and if they aren't enjoying themselves, they'll just have to learn how to do so.
  • Frank even reflects at one point on how stupid it was of him to summon them without first finding out if their definition of pleasure coincided with his own.
• The Vogons in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy don't understand why humans are horrified by them casually destroying the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass, especially when they'd written up a document clearly explaining their plans on Alpha Centauri fifty years beforehand.
• Human morality is very strange to treecats in the Honor Harrington series. For one thing, the 'cats consider a desire for physical privacy to be just plain weird. They're telepaths, so it makes sense. Also, they have a code for dealing with anyone who actually manages to make an enemy of them that goes as follows: There are two types of enemies; those that have been properly dealt with, and those that are still alive. Fortunately, they're a laid-back species.
  • At least, they were laid-back until a Colony Drop wiped out an entire treecat clan. The rest of the species has strong views about what should happen to the humans responsible for that little incident.
• In The Host (2008), it's Utopia Justifies the Means and Humans Are the Real Monsters vs. Aliens Are Bastards and Humans Are Special. Both sides are shown to have their good and bad points, and the aliens and the humans genuinely don't know the other side's motivations and think they are in the right.
• In The Immortal Journey, Death only cares about preserving what he calls the "balance". He doesn't mind a lot of people dying (obviously, he's Death), but he can't accept death being replaced by "undeath" — in the form of zombies or vampires — since he can no longer reap those lives even if they are "killed".
• The Presger in Imperial Radch. They have an odd view that any species they deem "significant" is inviolate and force all significant species to sign treaties to enforce their view, and they have the technology and military might to ensure those treaties aren't violated without serious consequence. The treaties leave justifiable reasons to kill members of a significant species, but they are so complex and unintuitive to a human mind that most people are unwilling to deal with aliens for fear of violating some seemingly minor rule. It's also implied that the Presger are psychologically incapable of understanding what humans consider natural divisions within a species (e.g., race and culture). One of the Presger translators, humans made by the Presger to communicate with humanity for them, recalls being admonished not to eat her siblings. She did eat people, but no one she wasn't supposed to eat, so it's okay.
• In In The Cube, multiple alien species with this mindset interact with humans, often with confusing results. The beaver-like Phner, for example, don't consider anything to be aesthetically fulfilled until it is destroyed, hence quickly demolish any artwork that comes into their possession. They dissect their dead in a funerary celebration, to better appreciate every last iota of the dead Phner's identity and experiences. In Future Boston, which is set in the same universe, there's an alien called Bishop 24 who puts everything in three categories: sapient, food, and inedible by reasons of insanity (anything not yet proven sapient). He casually mentions how he will eat his children if they fail a test. Just to keep things unpredictable, Bishop 24's criteria for whether something qualifies as "food" are partially dependent on how hungry he is at the moment.
• In The Invisible Library, there are The Fair Folk, who seem to have no morality whatsoever, but if they have any it is probably of the blue and orange variety, and the dragons, who clearly do have morals, and are counted as allies, but whose reasoning does not always make sense to humans. (Irene met a dragon while trying to steal a book from him — he complimented her on her taste in literature and let her go.) The librarians themselves have unusual moral priorities, as their only goal seems to be to collect books, sometimes saving them from dying parallel universes, without using their supernatural powers to change the world for the better.
• A constant theme in the works of Jack Vance.
  • In the short story "The Moon Moth", musical virtuosity and swordsmanship are the basic virtues, money is meaningless, and everyone must wear a mask at all times. Protagonist Edwer Thissell uses this against antagonist Haxo Angmark in a beautifully absurd, yet appropriate, conclusion; when Angmark desperately accuses Thissell of having kidnapped, murdered, and sold children into slavery, an angry onlooker replies: "Your religious differences are of no importance. We can vouch however for your present crimes!", and the crowd kills Angmark for alleged violations of local morality: trying to remove someone's mask, insolent behavior, and the like.
  • Or as frequent Vance protagonist Magnus Ridolph wrote: "In all the many-colored worlds of the universe no single ethical code shows a universal force. The good citizen on Almanatz would be executed on Judith IV. Commonplace conduct of Medellin excites the wildest revulsion on Earth and on Moritaba a deft thief commands the highest respect. I am convinced that virtue is but a reflection of good intent."
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: So, to recap for Ethel Cox from "The Dangers of Candy Canes", divorce is a sin, but framing your husband for a murder you committed is A-OK.
• A relatively mild example is P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves; he has no problem with his employer Bertie Wooster drinking heavily or committing blackmail and burglary, but no mustaches or frilled shirts will be tolerated.
• In Harry Harrison's The Jupiter Plague (AKA Plague from Space), a strike team breaks into the quarantined spaceship and finds the recordings of the mission on Jupiter. They find out that the crew discovered an alien race living on the solid core of the planet. Unlike humans, the "Jovians" use biotechnology. They initially offer to talk to the humans but then proceed to slaughter most of the crew in increasingly gruesome ways. Their latest act is sending the human ship back to Earth with a genetically-engineered virus that easily jumps species and is 100% fatal. It doesn't take long for the protagonist to figure out why they behave this way. Apparently, the Jovians are a Hive Mind species, where each being is but a cell in a larger organism. As such, they consider humans to be the same way, and all their murders are merely studies. After all, what's killing a few cells to a giant organism? It is not revealed if the Jovians finally realize the error of their ways or not. They do provide humanity with a cure after they complete their study, though.
  • On the one hand, the human strike team threatens the Jovian they find in the ship into giving up the cure^note by saying they'll cut the communications link to Jupiter - the individual Jovian isn't important to the Hive Mind, but the experiment is. On the other hand, the cure turns out to do more than just cure the Jupiter Plague.
• Journey to Chaos: For the trickster god Remho, provoking city-wide panic and confusion is not evil but Enforced Method Acting because it engages the production's extras (i.e. Innocent Bystanders) like nothing else can. Regardless of danger, it draws out that true emotion that leads to excellent performances.
• In Paul! Lang's The Kingdom's Disdain series, Clokkens have a moral code that champions caring for their kind and general politeness, but sees no use for ideas about honor, pride, or shame. Therefore, Zavieeur can be a ruthless assassin and feel no guilt for his actions, as he's just doing an honest job.
• In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, the moral code of the Puppeteer species is based on cowardice, manipulation, and paranoia to such an extent that blackmail isn't considered immoral — but bravery is considered insanity. In addition, they are capable of manipulating whole other species to promote their own interests and don't think twice about doing it because they wouldn't think twice about doing it to another Puppeteer. They are called Puppeteers for a reason, after all.
• Kroniki Drugiego Kręgu has numerous differences between human and dragon cultures:
  • Human telepaths see entering minds without permission as a violation. Dragons, which use telepathy on a daily basis, don’t have such limitations, generally Cannot Tell a Lie and speak their mind even if what they think is rude or offensive. One human character who adapts these rules is seen as rude and antisocial by her fellow humans.
  • Dragons see gold as pretty but useless and cow in a pasture as prey waiting to be killed, not someone else's property (when killed, it becomes the killer's).
  • Humans tend to burn or bury their dead and see dragon custom of eating their loved ones as barbaric. Dragons see human burial ceremonies as wasteful. One dragon character cannot wrap his mind around this until he finally decides human use fire to make their dead more tasty.
  • Dragons have a different concept of time because of their longevity.
• The Third Men in Last and First Men are essentially a species of esthetes. At one point their world was dominated by an empire based on music. Their final civilization was obsessed with biological manipulation: one faction used to breed ever more powerful diseases and parasites on the grounds that when a "higher" lifeform is slain by a virus, it has a certain ironic beauty.
  • This also applies to the aliens in the book. The Martians have no qualms about eliminating the Second Men because they are a collective intelligence with no idea that an individual can even be sentient. The Venusians on the other hand are so mindlessly aggressive that the Fifth Men reach the conclusion that sharing the planet with them is impossible.
• The Twins in the League of Magi are completely baffled by the idea of using their nigh-godlike power to save some people they've unknowingly endangered. They are weirdly motherly toward their wendigo, though.
• The Eddorians from Lensman. Eddorians originated from a parallel timeline where they reduced the entire universe to a lifeless husk by way of Planet Looting it into oblivion. In point of fact, the Eddorians don't consider themselves to be pirates (despite the fact everyone calls them that, and even their minions consider themselves pirates) because their civilization, top to bottom, is built on it. They view planets, galaxies, and entire universes/timelines as nothing more than a finite resource to be devoured. They consider other races slaves at best and obstructions to their piracy at worst, and they actually cannot conceive of the notion of peaceful co-existence with other species. They basically either want to take everything you have, kill you, enslave you, or all three, and even their minions make the Reavers from Firefly look like they were Care Bears raised by Fluttershy. One of these minions thinks nothing of casually committing galactic genocide to fulfill the Eddorians' plans...and he's probably the closest to Affably Evil the Boskonian Pirate Cartel gets. Oh and did I mention, the Eddorians themselves are Eldritch Abominations that resemble immense, living tumors who reproduce via cell division and are so long-lived they literally outlived their universe?
• In the Liaden Universe books by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller:
  • The Liaden abide by a strict, voluminous honor code that governs all aspects of their life and can seem cryptic and impenetrable to outsiders. Prominent features of this code include the concepts of Balance, which holds that any action (whether harmful or beneficial) must be met with an equivalent response, and melant'i, which crosses "face"-like social status with separation of multiple roles held by a single person. This code also incorporates different dialects of the Liaden tongue (which are spoken in different social situations) and bows of varying depth and associated gestures that convey relationships. On Liad, a social faux pas can have lethal consequences.
  • The Yxtrang also have a very codified caste and honor system—to Nelirikk's sorrow.
  • In fact, most planets and cultures in the Liaden Universe have their own cultural mores and honor codes that visiting characters find strange (and vice versa). One of the themes of the series is the difficulty outsiders can have in dealing with "local custom."
• In the Little Fur series, owls consider all fallen hatchlings to be dead...even when outright shown one that isn't. Apparently, hatchlings dying in that way is so common that it's become psychologically difficult- if not impossible — for them to acknowledge that a hatchling might survive, or put it back in its nest. The fear of false hope is just too great.
• The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil is considered to be something of a mystery by the people of Middle Earth. No one really knows who or what he really is, while Treebeard (who was around before the First Age) has stated that Tom was on Middle-Earth long before anyone else. He ultimately comes across as something of a neutral party who exists outside of the conflict between good and evil: though this makes him the only character in the original story who could outright ignore the power of the One Ring, it also meant that he was incapable of possessing it as well. At the Council of Elrond in Rivendell, the possibility of giving the One Ring to Tom Bombadil for safekeeping is rejected by Gandalf, on grounds that he was incapable of understanding this responsibility, and would end up either losing or even discarding the Ring out of carelessness.
• The three known alien species in The Lost Fleet demonstrate this in some way.
  • The enigmas are obsessed with secrecy. Trying to learn about their territory and culture is an act of war against them, and they invariably self-destruct their ships rather than allow them (and their crew) to be captured and inspected. They're also the only aliens known to have mutually hostile internal nations.
  • The bear-cows are Absolute Xenophobes, who divide other species into two categories: creatures that pose absolutely no threat to them, and monsters to be exterminated. All creatures that are not pure herbivores are automatically placed in the latter category.
  • The Dancers think in terms of patterns and symmetry, which is part of the reason their ships and formations are so beautiful. They appreciate humans as true strangers who are not hostile, and therefore an opportunity to create grand new patterns. Even so, they expect their own odd form of politeness when spoken to, and lapse into flat monosyllables if they don't get it.
• In one of S. P. Somtow's Mallworld stories, an alien race hosts a banquet for their human hosts, featuring one of the race's prized delicacies. The primary ingredient for this delicacy was roasted alien baby (the children of this alien race were considered vermin until they reached a certain age). The aliens couldn't quite understand why the humans were so horrified.
• A central plot point in Mark Twain's unsettling final novel The Mysterious Stranger is that angels have no concept of morality since, unlike humans, they never ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Also, they can see multiple possible futures as well as the eternal consequences of them, and consider it a nice thing to do to make sure someone dies before they fall from Grace and are doomed to Hell. (Which, as much as the characters don't want to accept it, makes perfect logical sense.)
• Comes up in works by M.C.A. Hogarth, who describes herself as "an anthropologist to aliens". Examples include the caste system and community-orientedness in Kherishdar, or the fact that the Tales of the Jokka's Jokka completely separate procreation and love (which is taboo if it is between different genders).
• Annie Wilkes of Misery thinks nothing of murder and torture, but profanity is one of her Berserk Buttons.
• The Neverending Story:
  • The sphinxes who guard the first gate are inexplicable. Most people who attempt to pass them are instantly paralyzed and no one has been able to discern any pattern concerning who gets to pass. In the film, the gnome states that the sphinxes strike those who do not feel their own worth. Although it later turns out that it's more "those who fail to dodge".
  • The Childlike Empress is described as being something above and beyond any creature of Fantastica; for her, all of her creatures good or evil are equal, and she doesn't hesitate to send Atreyu to a life-threatening adventure without telling him its true purpose.
• In None But Man this is the very heart of conflict between the humans and Moldaug. While humanity judges every action based on whether it is Right or Wrong, the Moldaug judge their decisions based on whether it is Respectable or Not Respectable. Earth's government is willing to capitulate completely to avoid a war, but the sheer lack of Respectability and hints of even worse acts to come from such an action would compel the Moldaug to destroy humanity.
• The Northern Caves: Leonard Salby, and later Paul, believe in a philosophy called Mundum, which places a massive emphasis on performing actions and arranging things "correctly" in accordance with the sky. It isn't clear what constitutes "correct" in the eyes of the sky; its followers just "get it."
  Paul's narration: That producing the correct arrangements would not necessarily ensure worldly gain. In fact, there was an immediate sense (similar in its vividness and persistence to the "perceptions" previously described) that the "correctly arranged" world might be much more unpleasant than the world I was accustomed to. This, however, did not seem especially important, relative to the abject, transcendental horror I felt regarding the possibility of "displeasing the sky."
• Nowhere Stars: The Messenger are the setting's Mentor Mascots to the Magical Girl-esque Keepers, and are believed to have been sent by the goddess Claiasya to save humanity from the Harbingers. However, it rapidly becomes apparent that for the Messengers, actually saving lives is rather low on their list of priorities. Vyuji, for instance, is primarily concerned with helping her Keepers "reach their full potential" in whatever way the Keeper in question thinks that means. Liadain is an Immortality Seeker, so any action she takes that advances that goal is a good one in Vyuji's eyes, even if it puts innocent people at risk.
• The Origin of Laughing Jack: Implied, since Laughing Jack is engineered to take after Isaac's changes in personality, the clown might not have had a say against turning into a Psychopathic Manchild after Isaac becomes a sadistic Serial Killer. Even prior to then, he doesn't contest to Isaac laughing at the corpse of the cat that the clown accidentally killed either. He's initially surprised at how hysterical he is before chuckling himself.
• In The Otherworld, werewolf Clay was changed at age five instead of late puberty like almost everyone else, and then left on his own for two years. As a result, his thought processes are much more wolflike. His morality centers around what's best for his pack, with an afterthought of what will make his mate happy. Clay brutally tortured and murdered one werewolf threatening his pack and distributed the photographs freely to discourage others from trying, but the thought of killing people needlessly or for fun revolts him. He wouldn't stop to help an injured stranger — unless his mate was watching — but he has laid down his life multiple times without hesitation for his packmates.
• For the Shongairi from Out of the Dark, refusing to submit to an obvious superior, especially after that superior has demonstrated unquestioned strength, is horrific. They also don't see why humans get pissed when Shongairi eat the corpses of those they killed, including children; to the Shongairi, eating the corpses is the only way to honor them and not let the soul go to waste. Humanity's refusal to back down and fight viciously out of a need to protect their families or to seek vengeance for the deaths of loved ones is utterly alien to the Shongairi. Similarly, for the herbivores dominating the galaxy, observing the Battle of Agincourt convinced them that humanity is utterly insane and cannot be allowed to expand beyond their planet.
• Perdido Street Station: The Weavers don't have a sense of morality as we would understand it, but rather a sense of beauty. That which is aesthetically pleasing or poetically appropriate to the Worldweave is "good" whereas that which is ugly or discordant is "bad." They can also disagree with one another and their aesthetic sense is incomprehensible to people. The humanlike races are deeply uncomfortable dealing with them because Weavers are so utterly unpredictable; they might help you, but they're just as likely to messily shred you and arrange your guts in a pattern that pleases them.
• The Perfect Run: The creatures from the higher dimensions are universally compassionate, but also completely alien and unable to understand humanity. They operate entirely within their color, and have a great deal of difficulty understanding anything outside of it. Even the creatures specifically designed to understand humanity have a lot of trouble with it, and many problems in the series are caused by the fact that the elixirs which give people superpowers are intelligent enough to understand desires, but too alien to understand the reasons behind those desires.
• In Karl Schroeder's Permanence this is the case with all known alien races past and present both in relation to humanity and in relation to each other as well, making inter-species communication and cooperation impossible. Thus the story is kicked off by the discovery of a derelict alien ship in which several species seem to have cohabited.
• Quantum Gravity: The premise is that humans are dealing with The Fair Folk ("Yes, I'm probably going to try to trick you. You weren't expecting that?"), Demons ("Everything is an art.") and Elves ("Allegiances are not simple." + incredible patience), and some beings which may or may not have a traditional consciousness. This is par for the course.
  • One fairy comments that she prefers working in adult films with demons because their hearts are pure.
  • Dar tortured Lila for information he and those surrounding knew she did not have. This makes perfect sense to most elves.
  • In an example of etiquette, rather than morality: Elves live for a very long time, and so are patient. They will just wait for you to finish or do otherwise. Humans see this as infuriating because it looks like the elves don't care about anything. Elves find the human way of conversation annoying to a little childish, though they usually understand.
  • The author has a segment where the readers are allowed in Zal's head, and see why he got together with Lila—he didn't want to fall in love with anyone he could lose, but Lila was lacking enough in self-confidence to not want to leave him, and tough enough that it'd be hard to take her from him. The author presents this sympathetically ... and it works.
• The ancient race in "Queen of the Black Coast" are said to have existed on a level of good incomprehensible to human morality before sinking to a level of evil likewise.
• In Rikki Simon's Ranklechick and his Three Legged Cat, the ghouls living aboard a space-bound zoo make decisions based on social awkwardness and individual instinct. Some are obsessively curious, some invent things for no reason, some live for the sole purpose of stopping the living space-station from killing itself. DaiLuvMoo, one of the ghoul-generals, seems to judge things based solely on how unreal he feels life is that day.
• Philip K. Dick's short story "Rautvaara's Case" is about trying to blend the religious beliefs of a human with that of a race of plasma lifeforms. The results are pretty Squicky, as the aliens believe that immortality is gained through their savior consuming them (depicted as being the opposite of the Christian belief of Communion), which ends up with the eponymous character watching in horror as Jesus eats her crew members.
• The dragons in the Realm of the Elderlings series perceive the world completely different than humans do. For dragons, they are the kings and queens of the world, and the world and everything in it exists only to make sure the dragons are doing well. It is impossible to make a dragon understand that humans have different priorities so that the humans have to resort to offering the dragons bargains which benefit the latter to get them to do something not of their immediate concern.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: The general moral system of mage society is that anything that pushes the boundaries of magic is positive, no matter the cost. This attitude is not without its detractors In-Universe, and in fact underpins the entire Myth Arc: Chloe Halford was murdered by her fellow Gnostic Hunters after she had a Heel Realization that Even Evil Has Loved Ones and started wanting to change the mage world to be less abusive and neglectful to non-mages, prompting her son Oliver Horn to come to Kimberly Magic Academy to avenge her.
• The Reluctant King: In Xylar, after five years the king is beheaded, at which point they throw his head into the crowd, with whoever catches this becoming the king afterward. Escaping from this is a felony, and considered as blasphemy too. Judge Grallon thinks Jorian grossly immoral as he refuses to willingly submit for this.
• While the Otherness in the Repairman Jack novels is a fairly standard Eldritch Abomination or group thereof, what exactly motivates the Ally to oppose it is very uncertain.
• Some of the acts depicted in the Reynard the Fox fables are pretty horrific by today's standards. For example, Reynard is about to be put to death for committing numerous crimes against the other animals. But Reynard convinces the royals to let him go by playing to their greed and promising treasure. Reynard requests that two of his rivals, Isengrim and Bruin be partially skinned alive so that the fox could wear their pelts for the trip. King Noble, who is supposed to be a figure of benevolence, actually grants Reynard's request. This also contains a heaping amount of Carnivore Confusion. Though the animals are supposed to be sentient, they are depicted as being still wild and retaining their animal instincts. This makes Reynard, who kills and eats several young chicks, the animal equivalent of a baby eating anti-Christ among the other animals.
• In The Rise of Kyoshi, the titular heroine gets a Trickster Mentor by the name of Lao Ge. He has some odd views about how authority figures, especially the Avatar, should act. When Kyoshi runs afoul of a gang leader, he asks her why she's challenging him to a duel rather than killing him when he least expects it because it's "not the way of the predator".
• In Schooled, Capricorn's New-Age Retro Hippie lifestyle has left with zero concept of things like private property, licenses, and finance. And he has an unusual amount of patience.
• Science-Fiction 101: In "The Monsters" by Robert Sheckley, a disastrous first contact scenario is described that stems from a lack of understanding each species' morality. The native species practices gendercide, giving a wife twenty-five days to live before killing her, and treats debates as Serious Business, killing anyone who uses faulty logic or contradicts their partner. It turns out that this is their mechanism to curb overpopulation, as their species has eight females born for every male birth. The visiting astronauts find this practice horrifying, especially when the natives try to "help" by killing the alien females. And then disaster breaks loose.
• Second Apocalypse: The Dunyain monks have a very alien concept of morality. The goal of their order is to create a "self-moving soul", a being with absolute free will. In the meantime, they consider everyone else to not be autonomous beings but rather slaves to circumstance. Therefore, the Dunyain have no compunctions about manipulating people however they like and genuinely see nothing wrong with it.
• Shade's Children: The Overlords turn out to view all humans as animals whom they can do as they wish with, although rules exist for conduct between their kind. It turns out they are obsessed with a game which uses real soldiers (human children they made into horrific creatures) and has an annual prize they compete over. They are sadistic generally in regards to humans' suffering, and view this treatment as how life should be.
• One of the short stories in Skulduggery Pleasant: Armageddon Out of Here describes a clan of cannibals who have come to see cannibalism as a perfectly natural part of life for both the prey and the predator - one of the cannibals who appears to be a Token Heroic Orc offers to help Valkyrie when she is caught and being prepared to be cooked. When she gratefully accepts his offer, expecting him to untie her, he begins singing. When she finally manages to make him stop, he explains that he's trying to make her stop thinking about the fact that they're going to eat her, and is horrified when she asks him to untie her instead. He then claims she is not a good friend, because she yells at him, while he is a good friend, because he sings to her.
• The Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse-Five have the ability to see in all four dimensions and thus already know everything that's ever going to happen to them from the moment they're born. Because of this, they're a species of placid fatalists and simply accept events for what they are. They're fully aware that an experimental rocket test of theirs will lead to the destruction of the universe, but they're powerless to prevent since it's happened, is happening, will happen, and always has happened. So it goes. In fact, one of the Tralfamadorians says that out of thirty-one inhabited planets they've visited, Earth is the only one with any talk of free will. And they pity humans for their inability to see beyond three dimensions since it causes them so much distress.
• Though it causes distress to the human characters, the ocean in Solaris is not actively malevolent. The reasons for its actions are completely unknowable.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: The Faceless Men are a cult of assassins based in the Free City of Braavos. They worship the God of Death — a syncretic figure made up of existing deities from religions around the world - and their killings are done in His name. Their reasoning is that since death comes for everyone eventually (the organization’s motto is the High Valyrian phrase "Valar Morghulis", or "All Men Must Die"), they believe they are serving their god by delivering His "gift" of death. This also makes the services of the Faceless Men available to any who desire them, regardless of motive or allegiance.
• In The Sparrow, breeding rights are a huge deal because it would be immoral to just let people breed wantonly and possibly over-consume resources. This strict focus on population control and the human misunderstanding as to the levels the Jana'ata will go to maintain it ultimately causes the catastrophe at the end of the book.
• The Staryk of Spinning Silver, a race of terrifying ice elves, operate under this. Humans fear their winter raids, but Miryem finds it is possible to bargain with them. The Staryk regard the spoken word as utterly binding and will hold up their end of the bargain no matter what, even if neither party wants it upheld. Thus, when the Staryk King promises Miryem his hand if she turns his silver to gold three times in the human world, he goes through with it even though Miryem only did it because he would have killed her otherwise. She has to hastily bargain away her "right" to his bed in order to avoid a consummation that neither of them wants to go through. Complicating matters is that the King refuses to treat her as someone who was raised in a society that is not radically focused on holding up your end of an agreement and giving people what they're owed. Once Miryem figures out the nuances, she's able to strike a deal with the King that ends the threat to both their people. The Staryk, for their part, find the notion of gift and thanks to be alien and insulting and are horrified at the ease with which humans share their names with each other.
• The Lord of Storms in The Spirit Thief, being created for the purpose of hunting demons, prioritizes this over anything else, including world-shattering events, wars, and massive collateral damage. It actually takes his (human) deputy several hours to persuade him not to trigger a demon in the middle of a heavily-populated city.
• Star Trek Expanded Universe:
  • The Final Reflection depicts the Klingons' expansionist and conquest-driven culture as based on their belief that all life is divided into komerex (literally "the structure that grows") or khesterex ("the structure that declines"); any culture that doesn't continue to grow and develop is regarded as a failure and fit only to serve its betters. Underlining this, their own name for their society, though usually translated as "Klingon Empire", is Komerex Klingon. They have some difficulty figuring out which of these the Federation is.
  • The Star Trek quadrilogy series Invasion! pits the crews of the Enterprise, the Enterprise-D, Deep Space 9 and Voyager against the Furies, a race of beings who apparently once inhabited the Alpha Quadrant millennia in the past before they were banished by the race known as 'the Unclean' (Kirk stopped the Furies' first invasion of the Alpha Quadrant, Picard repelled the second, Sisko prevented the return of the Unclean and Janeway was able to banish the Furies from this galaxy for good). According to the Furies' culture, they are entitled to reclaim their territory in the Alpha Quadrant as it was once their place, to the extent that they believe all races currently living here should basically "pack up and leave" because their ancestors once did the same to the Furies' ancestors, whereas Kirk in particular has compared this philosophy to the idea of him attempting to claim a particular part of Britain because his distant ancestors ruled there before they were driven out by the Romans. The Furies also consider murder a much lesser sin than mutilating a Fury's "soul," the small poppet of themselves that they keep tied to their belt. Destroying a "soul," even if you have no idea of its significance, is punishable by being burned alive in a wicker man.
  • Star Trek Novel 'Verse:
    • Star Trek: The Lost Era:
    • The Manraloth, whose hat is skilled communication and manipulation, and who use these skills to aid in bringing peace to the galaxy. Their methods of doing so conflict with those of the Federation, and they are very, very sneaky and manipulative. Always, though, their intentions are good and noble.
    • The Regnancy of the Carnelian Throne, whose citizens are metaphorically slaves to the Carnelian Throne itself. They ritualistically "play along" with subjugation as part of their "enslavement" to the values it represents.
    • In The Sundered, Sulu acknowledges this trope when agreeing to honor the Tholian warrior caste's legal determinations of truth, which are arrived at through combat.
    • Introduced in Star Trek: Ex Machina are the Shesshran, who operate somewhat differently from Humans, and most other races. They are unashamedly belligerent without apparent motive and like shooting at things to say hello. They fantasize about killing their own children and generally behave in a bloodthirsty fashion. They're actually quite reasonable and honorable beings — it's just that they are naturally highly individualistic predators, with strong hunting instincts. They reject all hierarchies and authority, and view the universe through the eyes of a lone predator.
    • The Pahkwa-thanh have always considered their prey animals sapient. They don't eat humanoids and "civilized" beings, not because they have an objection to it as such, but because it would be rude. Humanoids don't consider themselves part of nature; to eat them would be impolite, which Pahkwa-thanh are not. If you think you're prey, though, they'll happily eat you. The Frills are another more-or-less-friendly race that is happy to eat sapient prey. Both Frills and Pahkwa-thanh are Federation members.
  • In Star Trek: Destiny, the Caeliar's system of absolute pacifism is oft decried by other humanoids as 'imponderable moral calculus.'
  • The Glant in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch novel Gamma: Original Sin are perhaps the first race to be so blue-and-orange that the Federation cannot come to any agreement with them at all, even to stay out of each other's way. A race of extremely unique cyborgs, they "reproduce" by kidnapping humanoid children (which they call the Grist; they don't understand the concept of "children" and refuse to learn it) and designing cyborg bodies for them. They are utterly incapable of accepting that humanoids have any reason to care about this; all humanoids are basically the same, so why would they miss any specific ones? And they genuinely believe they're helping the Grist by releasing them from the sameness of humanoid form. When Sisko and crew rescue the kids that were kidnapped from the Robinson, the Glant are exactly as horrified as the Starfleet crew were when they lost their children and learned what the Glant were going to do to them, and for much the same reason.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Aing-Tii fit this trope to a T. Their technology is quite unlike that of the rest of the galaxy. They are intensely reclusive and xenophobic to the point that they actively try to keep other races from knowing about them, yet they detest slavery to the point that they will attack slave transports and liberate the captives. Not only that, they look a little like arthropodic Starfish Aliens. However, what really makes them fit this trope is that see the Force as not just divided between a Dark and Light but many additional colors along the spectrum. This perspective has given their monks access to unique Force powers. They are essentially the Mantis Shrimp of Force users and the squid to the Jedi's angels and the Sith's devils.
  • In Tales of the Bounty Hunters and The Han Solo Trilogy Boba Fett has a strict moral code that's also very strange to others. He's against the Rebellion because it's disrupting order, which he greatly values, but also acknowledges slavery is evil and the Empire is immoral for practicing it. Further, he feels the obligation to repay his debts and keep promises, but has no problem with hunting people for basically anything (including fighting slavery). It would be fair to say that this probably only makes sense in his own mind. His portrayal in Solo (which came out later) is milder and less dogmatic about this.
• Tofu from Super Minion is driven by self-interest. This wouldn't be bizarre, if not for the utter devotion he shows to the cause, and the bizarre perspective he has. Because of specific life experiences he also has a few strange priorities with regard to how he tries to ensure his own survival, such as protecting people who give him free food and demonstrating that he shares humanity's obsession with rectangles.
• That Hideous Strength: Merlin provides Deliberate Values Dissonance to the post-Roman Christians with his at-times alien morality system. In one scene, Merlin believes Jane should be executed because she has unknowingly prevented the birth of a saint — by using birth control. Not abortion, you understand: birth control. He says outright that she is worse than Balinus, the hot-tempered Knight of the Round Table, who accidentally killed his brother in the heat of battle and so started a feud that played into the downfall of Camelot. In his essay "Religion and Rocketry", C. S. Lewis touched on this trope by discussing the theological problems that would crop up if we found aliens. Their system of morality might be so incomprehensible to us that we would mistake them for evil. Note that this is actually a key plot point. In order to wield their powers against Belbury without unmaking the Earth in the process, the planetary angels must channel their power through the medium of a human magician. But magic is forbidden for Christians in the modern era, and obviously holy power cannot be channeled through the mind of a black mage. But Merlin practiced magic at a time when magic was still permissible to Christians, making him the only vessel through which the planetary angels could work their power.
• The Things views the events of the 1982 sci-fi horror movie The Thing (1982) from the alien's POV. Every species the Thing has encountered thus far is capable of shapeshifting and merging with other cells just like the Thing, which cannot understand why this strange new 'world' violently resists its attempts to 'commune' and adapt its offshoots (people). On eventually realizing the nature of humanity — each offshoot an individual 'thing', isolated and doomed to decay and death — the horrified alien realizes that it has a duty to infiltrate humanity and bring about its 'evolution' by force.
• In The Three-Body Problem, the Trisolarans are a species that evolved on a planet thrown around in chaotic and unpredictable orbits by the stars of Alpha Centauri. This resulted in their culture becoming largely Darwinian, driven to survive by any means necessary, which is what drives them on a 400-year-long quest to take Earth for themselves. They're perplexed by humanity's indecisiveness when it comes to shooting the dog, but come to respect them for their efforts to survive. When they're about to enter the Solar System, they give humanity an offer: rather than being wiped out, Australia and one-third of Mars will be made into reservations where they'll be allowed to stay, and when the Trisolarans take over, new space habitats will be built to allow both species to live in peace. The caveat is that humanity won't be allowed any more weapons or heavy industry, which will lead to a massive Depopulation Bomb and people on Earth turning to cannibalism. This isn't intended as a punishment or Cruel Mercy, it's a genuine attempt by them for a humanitarian solution to their conflict.
• Tortall and Other Lands includes the short story Elder Brother, which is about a tree that was transformed into a human man when a human was turned into a tree in The Immortals. Qiom, as the new man is known, has No Sympathy for humans, in large part because they were so cruel to him when he was newly changed, and is distressed by them making trees into material for buildings and fires. His companion Fadal is sad seeing the bodies of men nailed to posts, and Qiom agrees because this was a waste of living trees and of fertilizer, which is what human lives are to him. However, because Fadal was the one person who was kind to him and has tried to help, he does care about her.
• In The Traitor Son Cycle, one of the main reasons for the conflict between Men and Wild is this trope. A creature of the Wild believes that once they've beaten something, it's only natural to eat it, even if it was sentient and/or a member of their species. They also have no law beyond "the most powerful of us dictates what we can do", and believe that the only owner of the land is the one who's originally lived there, which is why humans see them as dangerous animals, while the Wild sees humans as greedy and byzantine.
• The city in Redfern Barrett's sci-fi short story "Transaction" has a strange set of moral principles, unsurprising considering every possible interaction involves a transfer of money.
• In The Tripods, the eponymous race, while evil from the human heroes' perspective, has its own alien motivations. During his enslavement, Will learns that using human slaves is a thorny political issue among the Masters and that some of his master's friends disapprove. However, this is not because of a moral objection to slavery or any concern for the dignity of the enslaved (they have neither). Instead it's merely an economic concern about over-dependence on cheap alien labor.
• Les Voyageurs Sans Souci: Séraphine Alavolette may look human, but she is really a magical creature who rules over all flying creatures, simultaneously cherising all birds and loathing humans. When the pigeon Mirliflore tells Sébastien and Agathe that Alavolette has kidnapped thirty-six children -and counting- to punish humans for her dear friend Golden Eagle's disappearance, both kids become aghast at the queen being a child-kidnapper; to which Mirliflore angrily retorts humans kill, rob and capture birds and eggs, sometimes just for fun, and he has opinions regarding bird traps and cages which he will not voice aloud for the sake of a civil conversation. Rather than deeming her evil, both kids decide that judging the queen of birds according to human morals is pointless, so they focus on searching for Golden Eagle so that Alavolette sets her hostages free.
• The Wayfarers novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is largely based around this: Humans are just one of several space-faring species out in the galaxy, and every species has its quirks. For specific examples:
  • Aandrisk have three families, all as important as each other: the family they're born into, the family they choose and the family they settle down and create, by adopting other Aandrisks' children, when they're old. They bond through casual sex and don't consider their young to be people until they're fully-grown adults. Even then, an Aandrisk doesn't have children until they get old and start an adopted family: if they happen to give birth to children before then, they just treat them as friends.
  • The Akarak, a race of bird-like aliens, believe strongly in only taking what they need. They didn't even have a concept of taking more than that before a different species, the Harmagians, colonised their homeworld and introduced it to them. The Akarak pirates who attack the Wayfarer end up negotiating what they will and won't take despite having the entire crew at their mercy because that's how Akarak culture works (and human Rosemary figuring this out is what defuses the whole situation).
  • The Harmagians are mostly similar to Humans, except for their species' emphasis on manners, especially when it comes to the relationship between hosts and guests. Guests who do not behave properly are considered as bad as criminals.
  • The Sianat live in Pairs and are referred to by plural pronouns at all times. One member of the Pair is the physical Sianat creature, the other is a virus that affects the creature's brain (called the Whisper). The virus gives them the ability to see through space-time, making them the best navigators of wormholes in the galaxy, but it slowly kills them. Sharing this navigational skill with other species (even through software) is considered heresy by the Sianat, and to actually attempt to cure the virus is murder.
  • The most notable case, however, is the Toremi, who no one else in the galaxy can figure out. They process the entire universe in terms of patterns and view conformity as so intrinsically good that when Toremi dispute their particular subgroup's orthodoxy, they will swiftly form a new subgroup, hostile to their former one, in which to insist upon their new orthodoxy, an approach that has left them with many factions engaged in a constant war with every other faction. They find galactic civilization with its tolerance for a variety of different opinions...distasteful.
• The Wess'har in Karen Traviss' Wess'har War series who have no concept of a "grey area," have no interest in the concept of motivation and have two different concepts of sex, sex and ouran, both of which to human eyes look like...sex. Also no concept of embarrassment. They are also natural "small c" communists with no need for a compelling authority.
• Lady Lilith of Witches Abroad thinks that bringing about fairy tale plots is a good act regardless of what the other people involved want.
• In the Zones of Thought book A Deepness in the Sky, Spiders normally conceive children in the Waning years before hibernation and give birth soon after it's over. Reproducing "out-of-phase" is considered a perversion, and those born out-of-phase (identifiable by their age) are the subject of a deep-seated stigma. Conservative groups see them as an abomination, and even liberal spiders may have to overcome a knee-jerk aversion to the sight of an out-of-phase child.

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