History StarfishAliens / Literature

** Other Asimov books include: horse descended aliens which need hydrogen cyanide in the air they breathe, and who cannot understand marriage ("Hostess"); sulfur based life forms which cannot understand how humans can have more than one government ("In a Good Cause--"); chlorine based creatures which evolved from something like insects, who cannot understand how a group of humans found together can be anything but a social group connected more deeply than a family ("C-Chute"); tentacle horrors from a dying planet who are seriously disturbed by the fact that humans can feel emotional connection to their children ("The Deep"); bug eyed monsters who cannot understand the idea of sexual reproduction ("What is This Thing Called Love?").

* Various alien species in Creator/EEDocSmith's ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' series, including but not limited to the Palainians, who lived on Pluto-like planets and had metabolic mechanisms which extended into the fourth dimension in order to work, the Rigellians, who looked like large barrels on legs with 4 multiply-subdivided tentacles equally spaced around them, and the [[OurDragonsAreDifferent Eastern dragon-like]] (to an extent - they have an undetermined number of eyes (but more than eight), each of which is on a stalk, among other oddness) Velantians.

* The first book of ''Literature/{{Eisenhorn}}'' series, ''Xenos'', features the Saruthi - starfish-like creatures utterly devoid of any kind of symmetry. Their main sense appears to be smell, and they have an incredible mastery of space and time - enough to perform interstellar teleportation. They can communicate with humans, when they want to, by steepling their fingers into a rather good imitation of human face, then speaking through it. It's unclear how much of their weirdness was always present, and how much is the result of Chaos corruption.
* The Sol Collective from ''Literature/EmperorMolluskVersusTheSinisterBrain'' are a race of sentient helium gas that are native to the Earth's Sun. They lack any understanding of the concept of sound and [[StarfishLanguage communicate by flashing various colors]]. [[WeComeInPeaceShootToKill They nearly went to war with Jupiter]] when its ambassador wore a uniform with an assortment of colors that told them "[[MyHovercraftIsFullOfEels Your mothercloud has a high melting point]]."
* The latter books of ''[[Literature/EndersGame Ender saga]]'' (once you get past the ChildSoldiers part) are pretty much all about the intricate moral distinctions between incomprehensible starfish aliens and HumanAliens - so much so that the series uses its own terms for the two: ''varelse'' and ''ramen'' respectively. The first species humanity [[BugWar encounters]], the "Buggers", seem like clear-cut HiveMind evil ''varlese'' - until it turns out that they only genocided half of humanity because they didn't realize mankind was sentient. In ''Literature/SpeakerForTheDead'' the "piggies" have such an alien biology, it starts an interplanetary incident before the xenozoologist protagonists figure out what's going on. In ''Literature/{{Xenocide}}'' it is revealed that the piggies, after dying, ''become father-trees'', and in order to do that, they absolutely require the "descolada" virus, which is lethal to humans ([[spoiler:although the "recolada", the crippled version, works just as fine]]). At the conclusion of ''Literature/ChildrenOfTheMind'' [[spoiler:it seems the protagonists may ''really'' have found some ''varlese''-class starfish aliens; the ones who made the "descolada" virus, and [[StarfishLanguage communicate exclusively through chemical signals]]]].

* The Leviathans living on Jupiter in the [[Literature/{{Jupiter}} novel of the same name]] by Creator/BenBova are giant (as in ''kilometers-wide'') conglomerations of independent parts, living in an ocean of liquid water suspended several thousand kilometers deep in Jupiter's atmosphere, feeding on organic molecules formed higher up in the atmosphere. They reproduce by going off on their own, away from the pack and 'disassociating' - splitting into their individual cells, which then split themselves and reform into two new conglomerations, each with identical memories to the original. And they're ''intelligent''.

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* ''Literature/KnownSpace'': The Puppeteers, the Outsiders, Bandersnatchi, and especially the Jotoki and Gw'oth, which actually resemble starfish.
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