3.90 avg rating — 5,326 ratings

""The Black Cloud is a science fiction novel set in the late 1960s, focusing on the arrival of a vast, intelligent gaseous cloud that threatens Earth"."

4.25 avg rating — 125,133 ratings

""In Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life", the heptapods are an alien species with seven limbs and a non-linear perception of time; they experience their entire lives simultaneously"."

3.98 avg rating — 130,349 ratings

""A sentient ocean planet that communicates through physical manifestations of the crew's memories, a form of non-humanoid alien intelligence.""

4.01 avg rating — 53,873 ratings

""This novel features a non-human intelligence that is genuinely alien in its thought processes and motivations, challenging human understanding of consciousness"."

3.99 avg rating — 385 ratings

""The Calamarain appear in the The Q Continuum novels, where they attempt to prevent the USS Enterprise from breaching the Galactic barrier and allowing the malevolent entity 0 to re-enter the galaxy"."

3.88 avg rating — 3,921 ratings

""Palainians: An amoeba-like species from the Lensman series that is described as being indescribable to those not possessing a "4th dimension extension'"."

3.95 avg rating — 80,326 ratings

""It is discovered that the town was built over the hibernating place of... a creature known as an amoeboid shapeshifter. This Ancient Enemy rarely feeds, but when it does, the effects are devastating. It was theorized that the Enemy either caused or aided in the extinction of the dinosaurs"..."

3.53 avg rating — 59 ratings

"Amorphous alien consumes a town."

3.59 avg rating — 27 ratings

""Featuring the first appearance of Mogo, a major Green Lantern character"... in the form of a living planet."

4.20 avg rating — 25,634 ratings

""Minds are orders of magnitude more intelligent and sophisticated than humans or other organics, as evidenced by their ability to transition from Real to Sublime alone and maintain a rough identity"."

4.12 avg rating — 183,870 ratings

""The AI encountered in the "Rama" series is a control system with a machine-like, non-sentient form of intelligence focused solely on the operation of its structure, rather than a human-like person"."

3.89 avg rating — 6,782 ratings

""The Mi-Go are fundamentally alien with respect to Earthly life, originating from strangely organized abysses beyond our space-time continuum, the human known space-time is described like an atom within theirs." Their crab-like "bodies consist of a form of matter that does not occur naturally on Earth"."

3.78 avg rating — 63,984 ratings

""The Elder Things were the first alien species to come to the Earth, colonizing the planet about one billion years ago. They stood roughly six feet tall and had the appearance of a huge, oval-shaped barrel with starfish-like appendages at both ends"."

4.25 avg rating — 3,368 ratings

""January 25, 1931: an expedition team arrives... in Antarctica...to find its crew of men and sled dogs strewn and dead. But a still more horrific sight is the star-shaped mound of snow nearby...for under its five points is a grave--and what lies beneath is not human!""

4.37 avg rating — 2,505 ratings

""...the Miskatonic University research team take their small plane through the unknown Antarctic mountain range--and land to explore the vast, cyclopean alien city that lies beyond it. Here at last they will discover the hideous secret of all life on Earth..""

4.27 avg rating — 2,519 ratings

""The seaman describes Cthulhu as a "gelatinous green immensity", with "flabby claws" and a "squid-head with writhing feelers". Johansen's phrase "a mountain walked or stumbled" gives a sense of the monster's scale.""

4.02 avg rating — 118,322 ratings

""Thurston (or Johansen) writes that 'The Thing cannot be described,' though the story does call it "the green, sticky spawn of the stars," and refers to its 'flabby claws' and 'awful squid-head with writhing feelers.' Hinting at its scale, the story says, 'A mountain walked or stumbled...'""

4.19 avg rating — 1,750 ratings

""The Colour Out of Space is a fictional extraterrestrial force or entity..." "a 'sucking, burning thing that is not of God's work...'" different from all natural laws."

4.05 avg rating — 20,824 ratings

"It "arrived on Earth via meteorite, and infected a large swath of Arkham, Massachusetts that would subsequently become known as the "Blasted Heath." The colour was said to have "poisoned" the soil around where it had landed..." "The colours come from an area of space or other dimensions where natural laws differ.""

3.77 avg rating — 12,153 ratings

""They're equipped with four tentacular arms, each ending in clusters of seven smaller tentacles like fingers... and their blood is greenish-yellow in color." They have "the ability to absorb, assimilate and imitate other life forms down to the cellular level...""

3.59 avg rating — 135 ratings

"Variations and updates on the alien from the 'Who Goes There?' anthology."

3.69 avg rating — 128,638 ratings

""When Leah's body degrades and she begins taking on a more liquid form... Juna advises Miri on how to process her bereavement: by letting go of Leah. For their final goodbye, Miri carries Leah into the ocean and lets Leah drip through her fingers and into the water..""

4.24 avg rating — 406 ratings

"In "Junkyard," "...this thing we photographed is shaped like a watermelon standing on end. The movement of the hairs all over it suggest vibrations, such as an antenna of an insect. Underneath are wires leading to terminals that seemed to be plugged right into the thing.""

3.56 avg rating — 5,398 ratings

""...a house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every load-bearing beam and fine marble tile with a thinking creature that is not human...""

3.42 avg rating — 120 ratings

""It is accidentally created when some pollutants and chemicals mix with meat particles in a sewer catch basin in Chicago. Beginning as a single-celled organism, the "clone" soon grows into an enormous bloblike creature that fills the sewers under Chicago...""

3.82 avg rating — 4,452 ratings

""...staff has one basic job: kill the plant-like lifeforms that come off space rubble and meteors. Carly discovers a strange lifeform during a routine patrol. The small, fluid creature nestled in the base of a crater doesn't match any of the entries in their database.""

4.15 avg rating — 15,011 ratings

""Rohan and his crew discover a form of life that has apparently evolved from autonomous, self-replicating machines--perhaps the survivors of a "robot war." ...what course of action can humanity take once it has reached the limits of its knowledge?""

3.94 avg rating — 9,436 ratings

""When Cirrocco Jones, captain of the spaceship Ringmaster, and her crew are captured by Gaea, a planet-sized creature that orbits around Saturn, they find themselves inside a bizarre world inhabited by centaurs, harpies, and constantly shifting environments.""

4.06 avg rating — 5,734 ratings

""Human explorers have entered the sprawling mind of Gaea. Now they must fight her will. For she is much too powerful...""

4.04 avg rating — 3,876 ratings

""The satellite-sized alien Gaea has gone completely insane. She has transformed her love of old movies into monstrous realities. She is Marilyn Monroe. She is King Kong. And now she must be destroyed.""

3.83 avg rating — 19,461 ratings

""...the Smog is a sentient, malevolent cloud of pollution, banished from London but thriving in its mirror-city, Un Lun Dun, seeking to consume and take over.""

3.45 avg rating — 117 ratings

""...a literal, sentient misty monster embodies pure hatred, summoned by cultists in Lankhmar to kill or corrupt, eventually finding the heroes as potent vessels for its destructive power..." (comic)"

3.39 avg rating — 44 ratings

""this short story by Fritz Lieber brings together the forces of pure evil, and two very unlikely heroes: a diminuitive thief and a seven-foot-tall barbarian.""

3.83 avg rating — 349,159 ratings

""The main focus of Martian anatomy is their brains. Although they do have a heart and a bulky set of lungs they lack any sort of digestive system and so they feed via blood transfusion from other beings...""

4.19 avg rating — 591,828 ratings

""Mashadar is a being of pure malice, hatred, and suspicion that arose from the collective evil of the inhabitants of Aridhol (now Shadar Logoth) before they all killed each other... It appears as a silvery mist, consuming the souls of anyone still in the city after dark...""

3.62 avg rating — 11,603 ratings

""When an animal familiar dies, the [attached] person disappears into a black cloud referred to as “the Undertow.” No one knows what the Undertow is or what happens to people consumed by it, but it elicits fear in even the bravest heart.""

3.99 avg rating — 278 ratings

""The fog covering Xebico is actively consuming the town's inhabitants..." "The fog is not simply vapor–it lives!""

3.29 avg rating — 11,941 ratings

""A hilarious and moving debut novel about a young woman who decides to turn a sentient blob into her perfect boyfriend.""

4.02 avg rating — 165 ratings

""The Autopsy," "The parasite within Allen speaks through his vocal cords, explaining that the sphere he found was [its] own spaceship, which [it] had to destroy to avoid discovery. The parasite, a network of nerve endings that can take over a body and its sense receptors, believes itself a superior race, since it survives by finding hosts and colonizing their bodies.""

3.41 avg rating — 71 ratings

""People of the Pit," "...described as grotesque sluglike creatures who glow and whose form seems too much for the human eye to take in at once. Both are sublime monsters because they surpass our senses’ ability to see and our brains’ ability to make understand them.""

4.04 avg rating — 29,753 ratings

""A...folk horror novel about a mysterious, sentient fog (the "haar") that engulfs a Scottish fishing village, Witchaven, The eerie fog brings... grotesque body horror... offering residents either madness/death or a strange redemption through a sea-born creature.""

3.92 avg rating — 113 ratings

""Smoke Ghost," "...introduces a modern, urban ghost born from industrial smog, pollution, and the anxieties of city life—a revolutionary concept moving horror from folklore to contemporary, gritty reality... Catesby Wran... becomes obsessed with a shifting, smoky entity on city rooftops...""

3.97 avg rating — 137,600 ratings

""Beachworld," "...two astronauts, Shapiro and Rand, stranded on a planet made entirely of sand, where the dunes themselves are a sentient, hostile entity that lures victims with hypnotic memories of sunny beaches before absorbing them...""

3.30 avg rating — 1,613 ratings

""During one of her investigations Catherine is grabbed by a hand-like substance and begins to believe The Wet is sentient.""

3.56 avg rating — 331 ratings

""...on the frozen ammonia shore of Pluto's methane sea, Shanna has discovered intelligent creatures thriving in the -300 degree temperatures. But even as their findings shift from the amazing to the inconceivable, the two crews must overcome their own intense rivavlry to work together.""

3.88 avg rating — 35,995 ratings

""Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture...""

3.69 avg rating — 484 ratings

""Paige is recruited for a mission to find the Manifest Destiny, a legendary colony ship, but finds herself on a planet-sized organism infested with lamprey-like parasites that possess their victims.""

3.79 avg rating — 185,966 ratings

""The plot follows a group of researchers, including protagonist Jack Forman, as they try to stop the rapidly evolving, predatory swarm that has become a new, deadly life form. ""

3.84 avg rating — 17,025 ratings

""The novel explores themes of genetic engineering, consciousness, and the future of humanity as the cells develop a collective intelligence, leading to a new form of existence that challenges the definition of life itself.""

3.58 avg rating — 11,334 ratings

""The Institute is here to help humanity, to cure and to cut, to cradle and protect the species from the apocalyptic horrors their ancestors unleashed. In the frozen north, the Institute's body will discover a competitor for its rung at the top of the evolutionary ladder.""

4.32 avg rating — 146 ratings

""After the humans tried to colonize her, Turr was forced to resort to mass violence to reclaim her skin. But in fleeing the planet, the humans left behind a chemical disaster—the dead zone.
To bring peace and life back to herself, Turr sends out a desperate plea to two shroom people...""

4.09 avg rating — 3,567 ratings

""...children who are the sole survivors on a colony ship after a mutiny kills the adult crew, forcing the ship's AI, Valarie, to evolve and protect them as they are hunted by dangerous forces.""

3.96 avg rating — 688 ratings

""The stories revolve around the staff of Sector General, particularly Dr. Conway, as they deal with bizarre alien physiology and medical mysteries, including an alien presence and a strange spinning ship near the planet "Meatball".""

3.17 avg rating — 76 ratings

""The Magnetosphere," "...explorers discover a planet's magnetic field might be a living, communicative entity,""

4.07 avg rating — 18,095 ratings

""...revolves around humanity's desperate search for alien intelligence on the planet St Libra, where strange, crystalline "quantum blossoms" appear to be the source of deadly attacks that killed a powerful North family clone years prior, leading to a massive expedition to discover if these entities are truly sentient...""

4.26 avg rating — 738 ratings

""The Island of Doctor Death," "A teenage boy, Nicholas, institutionalized after a lobotomy, discovers the island facility he's on is a sentient being called "Doctor Island".""

3.77 avg rating — 3,799 ratings

""Lamarckia's dominant life consists of massive, genetically unified "ecos" that can morph into various forms, essentially acting as a single, continent-spanning intelligent entity, making them profoundly different from human-centric life.""

3.81 avg rating — 19,252 ratings

""...the bacterial inhabitants of the planet Erythro (orbiting the star Nemesis) form a vast, collective, telepathic, sentient organism that becomes central to the plot, posing a galactic crisis for humanity...""

4.04 avg rating — 2,853 ratings

""They confront something “that looks like a pineapple with sixteen legs”, the vast “silverslith” that pursues them all the way down to the surface, and seemingly infinite armies of ant-like predators, the “akadi”. There are even floating predators that camouflage to disguise themselves as the sky...""

3.98 avg rating — 1,904 ratings

""Two telepaths investigate the newly discovered world of Shkea, where every native inhabitant, and an increasing number of human colonists, worships a mysterious and deadly parasite.""

3.90 avg rating — 15,155 ratings

""Colonists arrive on the planet Pax, expecting a new Eden, but find themselves in a complex ecosystem where plants are the dominant intelligent life. They must learn to coexist with the sentient flora, particularly Stevland...""

3.98 avg rating — 4,239 ratings

""Over two hundred years after the first colonists landed on Pax, a new set of explorers arrives from Earth... misunderstand the nature of the Pax settlement and its real leader. Even as Stevland attempts to protect his human tools, a more insidious enemy than the Earthlings makes itself known.""

3.69 avg rating — 806 ratings

""Stevland's children work in the background, in an attempt to control human behavior and perhaps, bring peace to the planet. Stevland took control of Pax. Earth shouldn’t be too difficult...""

4.07 avg rating — 1,078 ratings

""...World 4470, which appears to be a forest world with no animal life. The story explores themes of first contact, empathy, and consciousness through the crew's interactions, particularly with Osden, a difficult empath, and the planet's singular, plant-based intelligence...""

4.12 avg rating — 609 ratings

""Humans, along with other beings like gnomes, robots, and zombies, fight for survival in a system of 15 planets and two sentient suns.""

4.71 avg rating — 7 ratings

""The planet Ardulum has died and taken with it every last andal tree, and piece of andal cellulose tech—dissolving the Alpha Plane down to lightspeed travel and archaic communication.""

3.94 avg rating — 9,351 ratings

""The planet was called Pyrrus...a strange place where all the beasts, plants and natural elements were designed for one specific purpose: to destroy man.""

4.05 avg rating — 17,409 ratings

""Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which 'moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible.'""

3.38 avg rating — 4,209 ratings

""In 1912, history was changed by the Miracle, when the old world of Europe was replaced by Darwinia, a strange land of nightmarish jungle and antedeluvian monsters.""

4.06 avg rating — 2,057 ratings

""The Island," "...we join the eternal Sunday Ahzmundin as she is awoken to investigate an unexplained signal emanating from the area of the ship’s next construction site. When the source is determined to be a sentient life form unlike anything conceived of before, Sun and Chimp have a profound disagreement over their obligation to avoid harming it.""

0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings

"Character from movie series."