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* While ''[[Star Wars]]'' has its share of [[Humanoid Aliens]], they seem to be vastly outnumbered by the really weird ones, especially after George Lucas got his hands on [[Conspicuous CG|CGI]]. And the [[Expanded Universe]] has quite a few, which are listed under Literature below.
** The Starfish Alien to get the most screen time would be, arguably, the Hutts, specifically the famous Jabba the Hutt, a slug with a face and arms.
* The aliens from ''<nowiki>~[[2001: A Space Odyssey~]]</nowiki>'' are so alien that they can't even be shown on screen. The novels imply that they started as [[Starfish Aliens]], but later transformed themselves into [[Mechanical Lifeforms]], and eventually into [[Energy Beings]]. The author felt like showing the aliens would inevitably diminish their impact; in a supplementary book called ''Lost Worlds of 2001'', the author records failed experiments with writing about both [[Human Aliens]] and worlds filled with Starfish Aliens, before he finally decided to have the monoliths be the last relics of an unseen, [[Precursors|long ago vanished civilization]].
* The classic [[Tokusatsu]] sci-fi schlockfest ''Warning From Space'' had LITERAL [[Starfish Aliens]]. They're [[Genre Savvy|quite aware of this too]], so they [[Voluntary Shapeshifting|transform themselves]] into humans in order to [[A Form You Are Comfortable With|communicate with Earthlings]]. May be a borderline case of this, as they speak Japanese/English from the onset.
* The aliens in ''[[District 9]]'' have [[Humanoid Aliens|two functional arms, two legs and a central head]], but that's about where their resemblance to humans ends. They're all 'worker drones' who, without a queen, have little initiative of their own, with digitigrade limbs, an additional pair of tiny arms on their stomach, chitinous exoskeletons, antennae, claws, mandibles, tentacles, and all number of other insect- or crustacean-like attributes. The human residents of Johannesburg even call them "[[Fantastic Racism|prawns]]". In a deleted scene, it is explained that the prawns have one gender and reproduce asexually. In that scene the humans claim that prawns have no attachment to their offspring, but this is shown to be a lie in the film, one of the many human attributes posessed by Christopher Johnson.
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== Literature ==
* [[H. G. Wells]]' ''[[War of the Worlds]]:''
{{quote| "A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather. Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air. Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread."}}
** Wells designed his Martians by starting out with a humanoid, then eliminating all organs (limbs, digestive tract, etc) that he felt advanced technology would render useless and/or inefficient. The blood-donor "livestock" the Martians brought along as provisions -- having eschewed a digestive tract, the Martians have to feed by direct blood transfusion -- had a human-like anatomy.
** This is actually the basis of how Martians (ka-sejin, meaning Mars alien) are usually depicted in Japan. [http://www.bogleech.com/scrapbook/scrapmars.html Some examples here.]
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* The Creapii in Terry Pratchett's ''[[The Dark Side of the Sun]]'', which are "sexless, octopoid", need a lot of heat to survive, and travel around in small egg-shaped exoskeletons when they want to interact with humans. They're good at that. And a [[Genius Loci|rather hospitable]] [[That's No Moon|planetoid-sized]] semiconductor-based brain, with proportional intellect, multitasking ability and energy supply. {{spoiler|And of course, there are the Jokers.}}
** Near the end of the book, Ig hints that there are stranger things still in the depths of interspace:
{{quote| "How blithely you use the word alien; you have no idea how alien a thing can be."}}
** ''Strata'' by the same author references this - though the protagonist's alien friends are civilized, and can speak English, they are still ''alien'' no matter how familiar they look.
* The [[All Trolls Are Different|Trolls]] in Pratchett's [[Discworld]] kind of fit, because while they 'look' like [[Humanoid Aliens]] their physiology is mineralogical (is that the word?) rather than biological.
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** The Sarlacc is further elaborated on. Scientists argued on it being an animal or a plant, eventually settling on crustacean. It colonizes alien planets with spores launched into outer space. The Tatooine one is a titanic sessile predator that manages to survive the sparse ecosystem of a desert environment by digesting prey unbelievably slowly. It keeps its swallowed prey on messy biological life-support while it digests them, so it can literally feed upon their psychic and physical torment and pick out the choicest neurological morsels to absorb into its consciousness, which it generates from the collective minds of its captive nourishment. It has a nightmare digestive system that rather neatly encapsulates the concept of [[Bloody Bowels of Hell|hell as a living organism]].
** That giant space slug that ate the Millenium Falcon in "The Empire Strikes Back?" Xenobiologists believe the [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Exogorth Exogorth] was once the dominant life form in the galaxy and that the ones they see today are the last remnants of this once-great race. No one has any clue where they came from or what happened to cause them to fall. To quote Arkoh Adasca:
{{quote| "They're the last remnant of a species that predates history--an unlikely being, if ever there was one. No one knows how or why they evolved—just that we have found a number of them in the galaxy, going about their business... Time has no meaning for such a creature... We thought for a time that they might have once been plentiful in the galaxy—and the ones we find now are the only ones left." }}
** Another notable ''Star Wars'' example would be the Shard, a race of sentient, luminescent, immobile crystals that communicate exclusively via some kind of electromagnetic resonance. They grow in clusters and share a kind of group mind, spending their unmoving existence immersed in deep contemplation. However, it's possible for a single Shard to be cut free from its "siblings" and live as an independent organism with a droid body, after which they begin to rapidly develop individuality and more "human"-like personalities.
* The Cheela in ''[[Dragon's Egg|Dragons Egg]],'' by Robert L. Forward: small sentient slugs with twelve eyes on stalks, living on the surface of a neutron star. Their bodies are made of degenerate matter, so despite having about the same mass and physical complexity as a human, they are only about as large as a sesame seed. Because nuclear reactions happen much more quickly than chemical, time passes for them much, much faster than for humans. For all of that, their history and psychology have many similarities to humanity's.
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