It Can Think / Literature

---

• Black Destroyer. Coeurl may seem like an animal, and the crew of the spaceship treats him like one at first, but he is actually incredibly intelligent and cunning. He doesn't start the story this way, though; when he's first introduced, isolation and the daily battle just to survive has regressed him to an animalistic state, but encountering other intelligent beings makes him remember he too is an intelligent creature, and his reasoning returns to him.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): The appearance of even a single monstrous ant is cause for alarm at the best of times, since if not quickly exterminated, ants can multiply until they overrun kingdoms. But the fact that that ant was intelligent enough to run away from the alarms and the onrushing soldiers, instead of fighting them, is even more concerning for Commander Titus, and he quickly organises the Abyssal Legion to search for the nest so they can eradicate it. (The ant in question was actually the story's reincarnated protagonist — and the Legion is no less alarmed when he proceeds to uplift all the other ants to approximately human intelligence.)
• The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. The exact level of intelligence of the genetically-engineered Man-Eating Plants is a subject for debate, with the first-person protagonist (who worked on a Triffid farm) rubbishing the idea that Triffids are intelligent — after all, dissections haven't found anything remotely like a brain. Others are not so sure. One man points out that the Triffids escaped from their farms within hours of everyone going blind. In another scene, a Triffid is waiting outside the very door which a person would run out of if they heard someone driving down the road.
  • One of the protagonist's former friends (he's presumably blinded and then killed like most other people), who also happens to be a worker at the same Triffid farm knows that they're intelligent, and has been trying to decipher their language (rattling stick-like limbs against their hollow stems). He also notes that they always go for the eyes, having figured out that this is humanity's greatest strength, that is intelligence.
  • Later on, once the Cosy Catastrophe (which isn't as cozy as its detractors made out) is in full swing, it rapidly becomes obvious that Triffids are at least as intelligent as some animals: At the very least, they can learn to associate the sound of a generator with an electric fence being turned on and are seen to use some basic pack-hunting tactics.
• In Peter F. Hamilton's short story "Deathday" (found in the A Second Chance at Eden collection), there's a guy who had just buried his wife on an abandoned colony world. He starts having dreams of her turning into a local shapeshifting critter called a "slitherskin", which scientists had speculated was also mildly psychic as a defense mechanism. Scandalized by this invasion of his mind, the guy goes on a crusade to kill the animal snooping around his house, even remarking at the end that "like every cornered animal, it charged". He later goes back to deposit his rifle at his wife's grave. The next day, he finds that the creature had laid eggs (also a bit psychic) disguised as rocks at the gravesite. The last thing he sees is one of the slitherskin hatchlings taking the rifle, and pulling the trigger.
• The Great Zoo of China: The dragons are FAR smarter than their Chinese zookeepers realise, even having a complex language to communicate with.
• At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft. The expedition to Antarctica uncovers some fossils of what they assume are prehistoric plants and begins dissecting them. The narrator later discovers the camp wrecked, and the dogs and scientists all killed except for one missing man, who they assume went insane. It's only when they find his dissected body that they realize the horrible truth — the so-called fossils are actually sentient aliens capable of hibernating for millennia, and once had a civilization superior to man's.
• In The Return of the King, there were the Two Watchers, gargoyles who guarded the entrance to the Tower of Cirith Ungol. While they seemed to be immobile statues, they also seemed at least partially sentient, and could keep trespassers out with an invisible barrier created through force of will alone. Samwise (who felt an evil presence in them, like "some web like Shelob's, only invisible") got into the Tower the first time using the Phial of Galadriel, but the two Watchers were expecting him when he came back after rescuing Frodo, requiring both of them to use the Phial with the power of Elvish words to escape.
• Variation in the Sword of Truth books. We're told early on that short tailed gars are more intelligent than the long tailed variety, and Zedd even has a brief conversation with one (consisting of threatening it, asking its name, and sending it to kill their pursuers), but even then they're mostly treated like animals. In later books, however, it turns out they're quite intelligent, and a whole herd of the buggers pulls a Heel–Face Turn (or at least agrees to stop eating humans). It took them how long to realize the ''talking'' monsters were smart?
• No Gods for Drowning: Glories are monsters that prey on humanity, but it's revealed that they can't communicate with people per se that they're much smarter than what you would think. Glories are intelligent and like to prey on sapient prey, as it's more fun to them than killing non-intelligent animals. They mimic the voices of their victims to lure them in and then mentally destroy them to increase their suffering for sheer fun.

• In Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris-stories many characters express scepticism about the sentience or abilities of the Graycaps, but it's quite clear to the reader that they are quite possibly superhumanly intelligent and extremely dangerous when they want to be. The dual narrators of Shriek: An Afterword make a pretty good case of this being pure denial that the sceptics pursue to protect their own peace of mind.
• Inverted in The War Against the Chtorr, where all the evidence of the Alien Invasion is that there must be some intelligence behind it, yet there's no sign of spaceships or any other means of crossing interstellar distances. The Chtorran gastropedes are assumed to be behind things, yet their intelligence is that of the idiot savant — they're very good at opening locks and can somehow communicate over distances, yet little else. The series appears to be implying that the entire Chtorran ecology is some form of Hive Mind.
• The Museum Beast/Mbwun from the novel and movie The Relic is able to recognize traps, hide bodies, and do what it can to stay out of sight from humans. Justified by the fact that it used to be human itself.
• When the heroes in Codex Alera first come up against the Vord after Tavi awakened them, it seems like it's going to be a case of "send in the army to exterminate the nest of mindless monsters". Unfortunately for them, it turns out that the Vord aren't just intelligent, but brilliant. Heck, the Queen set up all the circumstances for the Alerans' attack herself. And so a Malignant Plot Tumor was born...
  • In fact, the only reason the Aleran villagers survived the second book was because the Queen didn't expect self-sacrifice from humans. She was observing their tactics, recruiting their best fighters, upgrading her troops by researching their magic, etc. She was stunned at a bad moment upon realizing that their smartest tactician was Ax-Crazy (in her eyes).
• At first the Dark Ones who are attacking the realm of Darwath are considered to be simple monsters, no more intelligent than predatory animals. Then they make and execute a complex plan to kill the infant Prince Altir and his mother in a way that looks like an accident. About the same time, Ingold and Gil discover that long ago, the Dark lived on the surface and even built cities. Late in the second book, Ingold and Rudy discover that the Dark Ones have a Hive Mind, and any human wizard who shapechanges into a Dark One loses his or her individuality and becomes part of the mass-mind forever.
• In The Gnome's Engine, the townsfolk of Hob's Church have been trying to wipe out the local burrowing hobgoblins, considering them unintelligent, destructive pests. When a device under construction is sabotaged, one resident speculates that the hobgoblins did it, thinking it to be another hobgoblin-killing booby trap. One of the heroines calls him out on this ("They thought it was?"), and the accuser is horrified to realize that he, himself, isn't as convinced that hobgoblins are dumb animals as he'd believed. In fact, the hobgoblins are intelligent, but it's a human who sabotaged the device.
• Subverted in World War Z, where the mercenary at the Long Island celebrities' fortress hears that their attackers can move quickly, and is frightened by the possibility that the zombies might think, too. It's a subversion because the attackers aren't zombies at all, but desperate civilians who'd seen the fortress's TV broadcasts, and are determined to seize this refuge for their families.
• Non-monster variant: In Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, we see this trope take effect upon Nicodemus in the laboratory as his intellect improves. Later, the sapient rats go to considerable lengths to avert this trope from their human pursuers' perspective, destroying all evidence of their more civilized lifestyle and even leaving a suicide-squad of naked fighters behind, at least some of whom are gassed to death, all to "prove" they're just ordinary rats.
• In the Myth Adventures novels, the main character's pet dragon Gleep seems from his perspective to be roughly on the same intellectual level as a puppy. Later novels show things from the dragon's perspective, and reveal both that it is quite intelligent and that it considers the main character to be its pet.
• Subverted in Stephen Baxter's Evolution, in the first flashback. There's mention of a dinosaur that's smarter than the others, but all this means is that it's "smart enough to go insane" - it submerges its survival instincts in order to hold a grudge against one of humanity's ancestors for eating its eggs.
• In Brains: A Zombie Memoir, some of the human antagonists react this way to the protagonists, who are among the few zombies capable of intelligent thought.
• Non-monster example: the ending of Jingo suggests that the Curious Squid are somewhat civilized and either built for themselves or adapted to living in the buildings on Leshp. They can't figure out why their city disappears above the sea every once in a while, though.
• In Phantoms, there's a very nasty Oh, Crap! moment when the characters figure out the Eldritch Abomination has human-level intelligence and awareness, and is terrorizing them For the Evulz.
• In The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul, Dirk Gently has a crazed eagle trapped in his house, and is squinting through the keyhole trying to see where it is. He gets a nasty shock when he realises it's on the other side of the door, looking back through the keyhole at him. This is because it's actually a jet fighter transformed into an eagle with the mind of the pilot, for getting in Thor's way.
• Three-quarters through Blindsight, the crew of the Theseus suddenly make the startling discovery that the "scramblers" they have been fighting, capturing, torturing and experimenting on are intelligent beings: They're intelligent without being sentient, a concept that was entirely alien to the crew up to that point and makes the "scramblers" so alien that trying to communicate with them meaningfully is impossible. At this point they also realise their "captives" let themselves get captured intentionally and have been spying on them. Things rapidly take a turn for the worse.
• Basically the entire plot of the book Warm Bodies, where an encounter with a human survivor causes a zombie to not only start coming back to life, but also to fall in love with her.
• Nemesis Saga
  • Nemesis' human DNA gives her a conscience that constantly clashes with her Kaiju side's urge to kill. She can focus her vengeance on specific targets and responds to her human name, Maigo.
  • Typhon not only looks mostly human, he thinks like one too.
• The Terror. After the monster first attacks a scouting party, the Franklin Expedition sets up a camouflaged hunting blind to ambush what they assume is a large and aggressive species of polar bear. Instead the monster sneaks up on them via a hole they'd cut in the ice for a Burial at Sea, attacks the blind from the side and kills the expedition commander. It's later suggested that the monster is a living weapon of war created by Ancient Astronauts.
• Death of Integrity goes to great length to establish that Genestealers aren't just a random packs of feral beasts. They can study, ambush, use adaptive tactics, find practical uses for their own corpses, identify and destroy your communication lines...
• Prey by Michael Crichton features a swarm of nanites that has artificial intelligence and algorithms programmed into its features so effectively that these things eventually enable it to think. It learns how to hunt like a predator, kill to eat, and even reproduce way out in the desert where it escaped to, close to the facility it was created in. The scientists who created it eventually decide science went too far and know they need to destroy the nanites, but not before it learns to mimic its prey in form and features. Eventually, the scientists struggling to survive learn that the swarm was intentionally released so that it may learn to do all this and more.
• In Worm the Endbringers are treated as monsters or natural disasters. Underestimating their intelligence based on this is a mistake. Armsmaster learned this the hard way, thinking he could perfectly predict Leviathan in a combat situation only for it to play along before using a previously unseen move.
• Twig: Rev. Mauer realizes this when talking in front of a Primordial lifeform (life capable of learning and altering its own body however it wants). He'd instructed his people growing the Primordial to stop it from developing intelligence, but he soon realizes by its reactions to overhearing his orders that they've failed.
  Mauer: Do you know? When I said that, you relaxed your muscles at your shoulder, your mouth sagged, and your wings dropped. You subconsciously prepared yourself to wait... and you just tensed. That took you about twenty seconds. You damn well understand me, don't you? And not just my tone of voice.
• The "Phoners" in Stephen King's Cell start out as mindless and vicious zombies, attacking each other and unaffected people alike, but gradually begin to form flocks, then a Hive Mind, and eventually a collective with an elaborate plan to turn all the unaffected humans into Phoners.
• In The Expanse novels the Protomolecule pulls this surprise and then more, not only can it think, but it can move an asteroid out of the way of an oncoming starship, and communicate across the solar system. Most notably the "failsafe" bombs in the Protomolecule-super soldiers of Caliban's War only work the first time, later ones rip them out before they detonate.
• Animorphs: During the David trilogy, the team are investigating a problem at sea near some boats when a killer whale moves in on them. They move closer to the boats, thinking the noise of the propellers will drive it off, before it reveals itself to be David in morph. Fortunately, Cassie gets away and morphs a humpback whale before looming up behind him (because he doesn't know enough about whales to know she wouldn't be able to eat him, he backs off).
• In the Fighting Fantasy gamebook Creature of Havoc, the protagonist is a hulking, scaly, spiny, clawed, man-eating monster. When it wanders into the town of Coven, people take one look and run for cover. It can then go shopping, to the utter bewilderment of the storekeeper who accepts its coin.
• Said sarcastically by Sherlock Holmes when he first meets Mary Russell, who literally trips over him in a field and works out very quickly that he is trying to track bees to find a new hive. She understandably takes offense and quickly becomes his apprentice.
• In the Tuf Voyaging story "Guardians" it's not the monsters emerging from Namor's oceans to attack the colonists that are intelligent, but rather a small mollusc that the colonists thought was nothing but good with butter, with no idea of their psionic abilities.
• Temeraire is set in an Alternate History where sapient dragons exist across the globe. Britain's are either paired with Dragon Riders in the Aerial Corps or kept in isolated breeding grounds, so few Britons know that they're intelligent, and many are quite surprised when a dragon starts talking to them — or, in Temeraire's case, quizzing them on their mathematical and literary knowledge.
  • The same setting features bunyips as burrowing dragon-like ambush predators. After Temeraire and Iskierka wreck a few burrows for the bunyips picking off some of their human crew, the bunyips retaliate with frightening intelligence: first by diverting water underground to trap a sleeping Temeraire in quicksand and attacking his crew while they’re occupied with pulling him out, and then by draining billabongs across their projected flight path, in the process demonstrating that bunyip colonies can plan and communicate with each other over long distances. To avoid dying of thirst, Temeraire is forced to placate the bunyips by hunting food for them.
• In Solar Defenders: The Role of a Shield, after a Monster of the Week displays signs of intelligence, Jenny expresses remorse afterwards for killing it. Kawena counters that if it was sentient, then the damage it caused was a result of choosing to cause harm rather than simply acting on instinct.
• In Space Glass, Nicora is thrown off guard by the realization that the Marauder can speak.
• Children of Time (2015): Inverted by the partially-uplifted ants. Despite developing sophisticated behaviors such as glassmaking and metallurgy, they don’t think. Each individual ant is just a bundle of dumb reflexes, and the intelligence they display as a collective superorganism is pure computation, using trial and error to discover more efficient means of expanding the colony and then improving on those means without consciously understanding why or how they work.
• In The Finder's Stone Trilogy, the ancient god Moander seems like a mindless, man-eating Muck Monster when he first appears. But when he speaks to Alias through a possessed Akabar, it becomes clear that the god is both intelligent and evil. He tells Alias how he plans to visit the abandoned capital of his ancient enemies and dance on the rubble, and tries to break her spirit by revealing the terrible truth about her origins as an Artificial Human.
• The Perfect Run: Ryan encounters a Black elixir, which ends up outside its bottle and unable to die due to unique circumstances. He is very surprised that it can talk. As it turns out, this is not unique to the Black. All elixirs are intelligent, though they usually don't have an ability to speak human language. They are agents sent from the higher realms to uplift humanity. The Alchemist taught them a few specific ways to bond with humans that she thought would be advantageous in the long run. On the plus side, this means that curing the Psycho condition turns out to be as simple as explaining to the elixirs which are fighting over the body what they're doing wrong.

---