Are you makin' funna mee?

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Banazir

OK...
See my reply to crypthanatopsis below!

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Banazir

All right, let's consider that. I am not a cultural anthropologist, nor have I any semblance of a background in mythology, psychology and other social sciences, etc.

But let's take a layperson's crack at it: xenomorphs (alien races) require an aspect of the "other", what Orson Scott Card refers to as varelse. Taking the proper deduction here gives us that people alienate properties that remind them strongly of aspects different from their own race: many legs, exoskeletons, etc. But it wouldn't be interesting to have lots of carniferns for enemies (well, it would to me, but put that aside for now). But there are plenty of weird-looking hominid creatures in SF: the Catteni, Kzin, and that cat race in Wing Commander I can't remember now; the quijillion races of the Star Wars universe; etc. What makes us gravitate towards the hive mind as varelse? Inference: We must think of ourselves as individualistic.

Also, as someone else pointed out, bugs are icky. They're about the most alien-looking thing we have here on land visible to the naked eye.
I don't entirely agree, but let's chalk it up to the diversity of Arthropoda compared to Mammalia. One thing I was expecting people to say is that there aren't that many other phyla to which we could impute fictional sentience easily. Me, I love sentient plants cf. the Supox in Star Control or the Neti of Myrkr in the Star Wars EU, but maybe I'm alone in that.

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Banazir

That's it! Thanks. I still think of them as akin to Kzin cf. Niven.

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Banazir

... and discussed in the last massforge meeting. Synopsis to follow.

(See also the catalogs of aliens above and below in this thread.)

Thanks!

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Banazir

Well, yes, that's a good point, too (LGM comprising Grays, Roswell/Area 51 hominids, etc.). There are some "story-internal" explanations for them in Stargate, Dark Skies, and Julian May's Intervention and Galactic Milieu series, even Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, when the Roswell incident was revealed to be Quark, Rom, and Nog crash landing in a Federation shuttle (meh).

I understand that Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Taken also deal with grays, though I don't remember whether they are actually shown in Taken. I suppose Independence Day, which features Area 51, could be considered part of this "flying saucer" genre.

Cultural conceptions and taxa of xenomorphs fascinate me - particularly the parasites, particularly the serpentine Goa'uld of Stargate, the arthropods of First Wave, the ganglia of Dark Skies, and the larger "retro-parasites" of War of the Worlds (the TV series). Notice that even there, a large percentage of the parasites are arthropods (though that's a natural consequence of so many of our real parasites being arthropods). I believe the Borg of Star Trek could be considered to be infested with a cybernetic parasite, though as reformulated in First Contact and Voyager from the original hive mind notion, they would profess this to be a symbiosis. The "voluntary symbioses" such as the Trill and Tok'ra are even more interesting, as are the ones in Roswell, The Visitor, and Starman.

40% is rather a significant minority. I agree with you and darana that there are many other interesting xenomorphic archetypes, but I posed the question mainly because so many creative works (my own included) seem to get stuck in the rut of alienating the terrestrially strange.

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Banazir