Standard sci-fi races

Can I address the problem of sexy alien races?

I watched a lot of sci fi and a lot of porn but so far the only alien races I find sexy are the Twi'lek, OP pic and the plant ladies from captain Harlock. Everything else is ugly.

That comic always made me to sad to fap.

She tried so damn hard and got nowhere and everyone took advantage of her condition rather than trying to help her.

>Would you prefer such races to exist?
I don't even want fantasy to have a solid standard.

greys exist only in setting where Earth is invaded/infiltrated by something. Ok I admit they are a stable common occurence.

Even the Swarm is pretty traditional now (even if only Starcraft and 40k use it).

But no else. You have space princess which is 100% human looking but give me one sexy less then 100% babe of the week.

The fantasy genre, as we understand it, like it or not, was in no small part defined by the works of one man: Tolkien. Other men, such as Howard and Lewis may have exerted their own gravity as well, but the great gravitational well around which the solar system that is fantasy has always revolved around Tolkien. Tolkien himself chose to largely write in a single shared universe for his fantasy work, rather than write multiple different works in different universes. As such, the races that he decided to include in his works have become "standard."

In contrast, sci-fi was not defined by a single author, and even those who exerted GREAT influence, either wrote universes that featured only, or mostly, humans, OR placed each new work in a new universe, rather than using a shared universe. As such, there is no "standard" work or universe from which to draw a "standard" set of races.

This is actually one of the reasons I prefer sci-fi to fantasy..... the fact that it was defined by the zeitgeist of many works rather than a single author... not the inconsequential fact that this meant there is no "standard" race gallery.

I think they both have a charm, fantasy has a sense of consistancy where many dreams and ideas meat and blend, why Sci-fi is where they go to branch off like a tree

>But Sci fi, even space opera sci fi never does.

1.) 'Prometheans.' These are usually classic greys or clearly inspired by them. Almost always the oldest race or children of the oldest race. Often actively create life.

2.) 'Space durkas.' Violent savages waging war for religious reasons. Often their technology is stolen or salvaged from a real race.

3.) 'The swarm.' Species living in rapidly reproducing insectile fashion. Often resemble actual insects. Usually militant. Usually expansionist. usually evil. Individuals often have no free will. May have one or many queens. Occasionally the 'twist' is that they merely don't realize we're people.

4.) 'Space babes.' Often closely resemble humans with a handful of cosmetic differences. Skin is usually blue or green. Often look like elves. If their species has males, they're usually rarer and less masculine than humans. Often gregarious and sexually adventurous, sometimes have 'powers' that serve this. Rarely, these are the females of the space durkas. When this happens, they are the brains of the Empire.

5.) 'Honorable warriors.' A race of often-manlike aliens, usually fewer in number, whose culture tends to revolve around war and hunting. Usually stronger than humans with better technology. Almost always hold on to archaic weapons and warfare concepts. They tend to be tactically and strategically myopic but individually capable. While they usually start out as humanity's enemy, we often earn their respect and sometimes friendship through military tenacity.

6.) 'The other.' Aliens squared. Often extragalactic, universal, dimensional, whatever. Usually hyperadvanced, sometimes a creator precursor. They force the other aliens to ally together. Sometimes these guys are 'the swarm,' but often they are space squids. If they wipe anyone out, it's almost invariably the space durkas or some dindu nuffin peaceful race.

This thread is full of people hating on staple races.

I quite like them. If I'm reading a book I am unsure if i want to invest myself into having staple races helps. Or if you want to cut pointless exposion.

I don't want to read 30 pages on how this race is ancient and in tune with nature and have powerful magic. You say elves. I know elves, you can get back to telling what is actually happening.
In sci fi races sterotypes are mostly the same. Might as well as link concrete visuals to those stereotypes.

tl;dr staple races streamlines the narrative

>one sexy less then 100% babe of the week
Extracting a full sexy would mean she's 0% sexy, so you're looking for a disgusting monstrosity

Shit, what was this comic called again?

I sort of like mass effects take on it, the races they usee are staples, but then given a splash of nuance, so their klingons don't say nothing but "combat combat honor" and their Vulcans are more then "logic logic" etc.

Should we put durkas and honorfags in different categories? They sound sort of like the two most common flavors of orc in bad fantasy.

Personally I think "standard" races are a fucking awful concept and I don't think we should be trying to spread the practice.

xenobiology by incase

Or maybe the writer can include a civilization they haven't lifted wholesale from an external library of ideas.

Except the Batarians. Fuck the Batarians.

I unironically like cliche science fiction races, old school TNG Klingons are still my favorite space race.

I disagree, all you need is a womanly hips area and resemblance of boobs and you can have any monster looks somewhat sexy

Are humans the orcs of sci-fi?

Honorfags usually have actual honor and will stick to it literally to death.

Space durkas only pretend to have honor, or don't treat outsiders to its tenants. Space durkas are basically 'fake' honorfags.

You must not indulge in many sci-fi works if you think there aren't some staples. True that no one race/species is included in ALL works apart from humans, but there are still some tropes that get used pretty often. Take cat people for example:
>Caitian
>Mrrshan
>Cathar
>Haccan
>Rakshasa (Savage Worlds sci-fi settings)
Just a few off the top of my head. Space cats are a pretty standard one.

TNG/DS9 Klingons/Cardassians
Star Wars Wookies
Mass Effect Krogan/Volus/Elcors
Ringworld Kzinti
40k Dark Eldar/Orks
Star Control Orz

Best science fiction races coming through. Though I have a soft spot for the Sheliak; but they don't count since they were only in one episode of TNG and never fleshed out

Not always.

and when was the last time it was a good addition to a book?

>no ur-quan masters anywhere
I am dissapointed.

Name of that comic. I need it for research porpuaes

xenobiology, by incase.

Orz are superior conceptually in every way.

Oh, I wasn't saying the spathi were the best, I was using them as a mascott.

How do I make a science fiction race that's physiologically and culturally semi-unique?

It's too bad Thor and Odin were the only cool examples of their race, the Asgard from Star Gate had potential

*is

>But no else.
Space orcs/space barbarians. Klingons, orks, krogan. The big, meaty warrior race.

Scifi is less about specific races and more about approximate archetypes.

>archetypes
Wouldn't you agree that it would be ebtter if archetypes were tied to race with a stable look?

You don't. If it's unique, it's unrelatable, and thus trash. If it's not unique, it's copied, and thus trash.

The only winning move is not to play.

A galactic trade empire of giant sapient space slugs who communicate through spitting a non-newtonian bioluminescent slime that also acts as a contact psychedelic to other races.

Space conquerors, usually barbaric and love fighting.

This is soon to be released Starfinders version. Lizard people who tried to conquer the Pact Worlds and were eventually stopped. They signed a peace treaty and now can be found being guards, mercs, and pirates (and mechanics and others who don't go for the races focus on elite warriors) throughout known space.

fuck races. just make stories about humans, and maybe robots and pets...things people can actually relate to right away instead of having any type of expectation that there need to be 5 races or some stupid garbage.

Seriously, everyone has their handcrafted mary sue races that need a week to explain and people aren't spending time making compelling stories worth telling. For fuck's sake.

Nah.

they comunicate by giving psychedelic vision to other races.

Silicon-based life forms that wear space suits which look like massive obsidian cubes that float due to highly advanced tech. They speak through a mix of telepathic link and color shifting their cubes to convey emotion. They wear their cubes because the potential pathogens or diseases silicon life forms could transmit to non-silicon life could be hazardous and they are thoughtful of that. their cubes also double as their ships and can shape-shift to become aerodynamic in atmospheres or spherical in ocean environs to compensate for pressure. They are not outwardly hostile but are secretive and very dangerous if antagonized as they specialize in germ warfare.

Is this a reference to something? Because it's actually a pretty neat idea

What's the source

Yous asked for it

Having to relate to things to make them paleteable is a autist meme, autists only want highly relateable shit because they love simplicity in everything because they can't deal with things outside their toolbox. Everything has to be as understandable as possible for them.

Not really. I guess there's an element of Alice In Wonderland in there or Futurama, if I look at it like I'm pulling teeth, but I just shat it out on the fly.

A short story by InCase about horny aliens that integrated into human culture.

I can't remember her name since it was long ago, but the Asgard that helps install Asgard tech in one of the BC was pretty cool.

If this were old Veeky Forums there would be lewd posters aplenty on this.

You'll never earn your Captain Kirk merit badge with that attitude, Billy.

Well, there's the red humans, the yellow humans, the bald white humans, and the black humans. Also the 6-limbed green aliens. And assorted wildlife.

And a southern gentleman from Virginia.

Take a bunch of things that could be cool and throw them at the proverbial wall, if what you get is interesting to you refine it. writing for an audience is a meme like trying to please science fiction nerds, the ones that make things like aliens work write those aliens for themselves and if other people like it, that's a bonus.

>I don't want fucking normies reading my nerd books
>Popular fiction is for autists
>REEEEEEE

Tolkin never wrote a Space Opera.

And Martians, Jovians and Venusians got cliched.

If you remove "religious" and add "stupid" you can get an even broader coverage (e.g. Krogan).

Just make it elves, dwarves and orks in space. They serve the same purposes.

Can we talk about aliens that are at least somewhat interesting instead of whining about latex-faced Star Trek expies?

... Welp, that's my next Stellaris concept sorted.

>volus/elcor
Literal seat fillers, they don't matter

No, the beSt fantasy works tend, to break out of that look while keeping to the archetypes, look at the "blins" from legend of zelda

>filthy plantigrade legs

Nah, humans are boring, wish we had more stories with no humans in them at all

Humans
Robot/Cyborg race
Xenophobic conqueror race
Assimilation race
Scientist Race
Ancient, mostly extinct Race

There OP.

Why would I care about animals?

Why does stellaris punish not being an asshole?

has anyone other then 40k tried doing it?

Yeah, and the list is usually:
>The Big Race
>The Smart Race
>The Bug/Non-humanoid race
>The Sexy Race
>Robots
And
>Tons of humans

>Can I address the problem of sexy alien races?

Humans humanize everything given the chance, it's why we give cars and space ships genders, we will fuck anything if it appeals to us, there really is no reason to address an issue that is ingrained into how our biochemistry works.

Small shrimp-like creatures that work as a mass of decentralized hive-minds, they evolved on a chlorine magnesium world and can merge together to form much larger variants of themselves with many shapes through a polyandrous mating system like angler fish where the male attaches itself and then literally melts into the female over time. Though this system, which they call the Great Congress, they can form structures of living weapons, buildings, ships and cities each with a hive-mind collective of their own, big or small. The bigger they are, the smarter they are and usually older and more independent, and the smaller they are, the more they propagate as tools to be used by their collective society until they themselves eventually petition to become large bioforms. A sacred part of their culture is when two large decentralized hive-minds decide to merge to become one or particularly large individuals in the collective decide to deorganize so that their biomatter can be used for something better.

You never want to go to war with these little guys, but thankfully, they're mostly passive and just want to collectively fuck themselves creating more and more impressive things out of their biomass.

They'd be more interesting if they were human shaped.

A really cool star race are nova kids. Sentient balls of plasma they basically miniature living suns.

>>The Sexy Race
tell me one time ti was done good. As you actually masturbated to said race.

well at least the babes are really hot.

No science fiction author worth his salt goes into alien race conception with their foremost thought being "how human can I make my aliens?" That is asinine. The only reason overtly human aliens exist is because of either television budget constraints, lazyness or intentional irony.

...

Hide the humans from those gross motherfuckers. My ass there isn't an alien market for doped up earth slaves.

Humans are elves/Protoss in the game Grey Goo.

Altarians from galactic civilizations are space elves that treat humanity as their long lost cousins. Humans (and other races) are creeped out by it.
I do profess to having a seething hatred for one biome planets.

Space dragons are always a welcome concept.

What the fuck.
They just looked like normal humans with face tatoos in 1 and 2.

>They'd be more interesting if they were human shaped.

Only because you want to fuck them without it being as awkward for you to rationalize.

Convergent evolution

Their actually just lizard people.
This is what their females look like. She likes revelaz dance-pop, "dragons breath" nose hookahs, and the mildly hallucinogenic brain snails of Vesk-2.

Is usually an excuse when fans ask why all the aliens all look the same. See Star Trek, Star Gate and even Star Wars in the old EU.

No, but they may well go in with the intentional desire to make their aliens parallel some human society or culture in order to wax philosophical about it. The Arachnids in Starship Troopers are space Socailists, for example.

Also, a LOT of science fiction is focused on "humanizing" aliens, with major themes being finding some way to understand the aliens in human terms in order to foster true communication.

Meanwhile, humanoid dragons in fantasy cause quite a few people on Veeky Forums to REEEE

>Alien races

Needs more birdmen in here.

I never said it was effective.

The autism between fantasy and science fiction is basically a competition at this point with fantasy winning.

You're ugly but you're beautiful!

I just can't remember any of the overblown phrases from the books

The humanoid form is the most likely form for an alien civilization from a rocky planet to take. Evolution is a minimalist process and rarely keeps adding needless complexity.

Take the head, for example: A separate head on a swiveling neck is necessary in order for you look around. Two eyes is the minimum needed for depth perception, while two ears are needed for directional hearing. While you might be able to do without a separate mouth and nasal passage, you'll need some sort of orifice to ingest food/air with sensory organs able to discern between edible and poisonous/spoiled foods. And how about the body shape? An upright stance lets you have dedicated manipulating appendages separate from motive appendages, which is necessary for a creature to have the dexterity in its manipulating appendages to create complex tools (and thus civilization) while having the durability in its motive appendages to be able to walk long distances on foot (so as not to be confined to the trees like monkeys). Similarly, four limbs is the minimum needed to be able to have two legs for walking while simultaneously having two arms for using tools. Any less limbs and you'd have to sit still while using tools (meaning no spear/bow hunting and agriculture would be difficult or impossible, and thus no emergence of civilization). Any more limbs is just a waste of calories. In order to support a large and active brain, you'll need to be pretty big, meaning a heart and lungs will also be needed (so bugs probably aren't going to become civilized). Warm blooded physiology is probably also necessary to support a complex brain (so fish and reptiles aren't likely to make it to civilization either).

So what you're left with is variation in superficial things like coloration, the presence/absence of hair or feathers, etc. Otherwise known as Star Trek "rubber forehead" aliens.

Xeno micro-organisms that possess larger biologics though litigious contracts and control broker guilds galaxy wide therein where said contracts are drawn, this possession is deliberated with the biologic and rarely forceful unless negotiating a "slave contract". If agreed to, the micro-organism houses itself and propagates within the larger host body causing a number of befits which include but are not limited to manual control over endorphin limits, regenerative cells, limited, though painful, shape-shifting and the like. The downside being, the host, having agreed to terms, is obligated to help the mic-organisms in their endeavors just as much as they help the host and these endeavors are just as many and varied as any other races desires.

A highly viscous sapient white-celluloid glue, it is charmingly malevolent, intelligent and can exist in space without difficultly. Its goals are largely unknown but has become very desired within certain daring circles of the galactic black markets as it can integrate itself into space ships acting as a liquid super computer system.