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In 2017/18 I was really into story podcasts, and heard one that I cannot find again, and do not know what podcast I heard it on.

It was a sci-fi/horror short-story about a group of people who went into space and discovered a strange, blob like alien. This alien was not hostile and was able to speak telepathically. One crew member spoke the most with it and gained a sort of kinship with it. This alien kept asking him and the others to eat it. The main character refuses.

At some point, the captain is convinced and eats it. When he does, the alien takes over the body and says something ominous to the main character, some implication of its wider plan to learn more and grow.

My memory is pretty bad, so I did the best I could here.

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    There's a classic short story where the captain of a spaceship cooks and eats an intelligent pig-like alien, which takes him over, but I don't recall the alien asking to be eaten. The name is on the tip of my tongue...
    – DavidW
    Sep 21, 2022 at 7:56
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    That sounds so close to what I’m remembering, if you remember the name let me know!
    – Reba Gene
    Sep 21, 2022 at 7:58
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    Honorable mention for the space bovine in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant At The End of the Universe, which not only wants to be eaten, but is apparently well-versed in how to kill and prepare itself to best effect.
    – Lexible
    Sep 21, 2022 at 14:44
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    @Lexible - AND how to communicate that fact clearly and unambiguously!
    – AJM
    Sep 23, 2022 at 14:12

1 Answer 1

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I'm pretty confident this is the classic Philip K. Dick short story "Beyond Lies the Wub." Quoting from the plot summary on Wikipedia:

Captain Franco, paranoid after an earlier confrontation with the Wub which left him temporarily paralyzed, bursts in and insists on killing and eating the wub. The crew becomes very much opposed to killing the sensitive creature after it makes a plea for understanding, but Franco still makes a meal out of him. At the dinner table, Captain Franco apologises for the "interruption" and resumes the earlier conversation between Peterson and the Wub - which now has apparently taken over the Captain's body.

The only real difference with your recollection is that the wub doesn't ask to be eaten, though it seems mostly indifferent to it.

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  • Thanks to @DavidW, I used his description and found the story! “Beyond Lies the Wub,” published in 1952 by Phillip K. Dick.
    – Reba Gene
    Sep 21, 2022 at 8:05
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    @RebaGene As you are stating DavidW's answer is correct I have converted your answer to a comment on his answer. Also please follow the instructions here to merge your accounts and then you will be able to accept his answer as correct and take ownership of your question again.
    – TheLethalCarrot ♦
    Sep 21, 2022 at 8:24
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    If there’s one thing that really showed me the fallacy of the human memory, it’s these story-identification questions where people mention very specific parts of a story that in hindsight simply weren’t there.
    – Sebastiaan van den Broek
    Sep 22, 2022 at 5:04
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    @SebastiaanvandenBroek: my mother is a retired lawyer and she said that the witnesses at court who had very clear and precise memories either fell in the category of a photographic memory (1%) or in the one you mentioning your comment (the remaining 99%). It was really weird when they were confronted with some tangible evidence (a camera recording fo instance) and what they were describing in such details simply wasn't there.
    – WoJ
    Sep 23, 2022 at 10:35
  • For a story (movie, not book, as far as I know) about an alien that truly wants to be eaten, see Monty Python's Meaning of Life. It's been a while since I watched it, but IIRC the scene is fairly early in the movie.
    – Ben Hocking
    Sep 23, 2022 at 19:14

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