John Ringo’s ‘Legacy of the Aldenata’. It deliberately embraces the alienness, even to the point that the characters anthropomorphize the alien motives, make predictions based on those motives, and are sometimes wrong. In other words, the aliens appear to have behaviors which are explained by human reasoning, and the human characters describe them in terms of human characteristics, but modeling them as being like humans who would have taken their prior actions is wrong.
They are still humanlike enough to communicate, because that is a prerequisite to being known to be radically different: An alien that cannot communicate with me either resembles an animal that cannot communicate with me or a rock.
Legacy of the Aldenata is really JR’s best series. It wavered for a bit around Cally’s War, but picked up with Honor of the Clan. I find the conservative politics a bit heavy-handed in most of his books, but it’s not so bad in LotA.
John Ringo’s ‘Legacy of the Aldenata’. It deliberately embraces the alienness, even to the point that the characters anthropomorphize the alien motives, make predictions based on those motives, and are sometimes wrong. In other words, the aliens appear to have behaviors which are explained by human reasoning, and the human characters describe them in terms of human characteristics, but modeling them as being like humans who would have taken their prior actions is wrong.
They are still humanlike enough to communicate, because that is a prerequisite to being known to be radically different: An alien that cannot communicate with me either resembles an animal that cannot communicate with me or a rock.
Legacy of the Aldenata is really JR’s best series. It wavered for a bit around Cally’s War, but picked up with Honor of the Clan. I find the conservative politics a bit heavy-handed in most of his books, but it’s not so bad in LotA.