Markup View

Author: marcoasalazarm

Feb 15th 2014 at 9:25:48 PM

Couple of possible examples:

One of the twists of Peter Watts' "Blindsight" is the discovery by the human explorers that humanity is pretty much the only race out there with a concept of self, reason and such things as art... which the aliens see as an abomination of infection and have decided to eliminate humanity because it hurts them.

Another may be from one of the BOLO books. The villains of the story are a bunch of reptilian matriarchal BloodKnight aliens that are all about killing anything that have "Kill and Eat!" as a battle cry and will not accept any surrender... especially because apparently they have a very different way of thinking of people surrendering than humans. When the female main character of the book decides to be DefiantToTheEnd and keep on staring into the eyes of a taller alien when she approaches to kill her, the alien is puzzled because ''that'' pose (on your knees, raising your head) means "please kill me" in her language... and sees it even odder for the alien that a female did such a thing.
This keeps the girl alive long enough for the hero (and the titular robot tanks) to pull a StormingTheCastle.