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26 votes
Accepted

Golden Age short story about carnivorous aliens that pay humans a license fee to clone them for meat

Larry Niven's "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!" (ISFDB) from his The Draco Tavern stories as seen on the TV Tropes To Serve Man page. A minor character tells the (...
FuzzyBoots's user avatar
  • 213k
24 votes
Accepted

Short sci-fi story about traders who find an alien life form that absorbs heat

"The Pillows", a short story by Margaret St. Clair, first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1950, available at the Internet Archive. You may have read it in one of these ...
user14111's user avatar
  • 157k
21 votes
Accepted

SF Short Story: Humans are attempting to join the Galactic Federation

I think this is "Conviction" by Brian Aldiss (as similar questions have been answered), available here Humans are attempting to join the Galactic Federation. A small team are sent to ...
Andrew's user avatar
  • 33.6k
18 votes

Looking for SF short story about first contact and humans have to destroy evidence before aliens reach Earth

Sshhh... by David Brin The story opens with 2 Earth Survey vessels escorting Lentili starships to Earth. The Lentili are a race of tall, long-lived aliens who are far more technologically and ...
Andrew's user avatar
  • 33.6k
16 votes

Obscure sci-fi illustration book showing speculative alien life forms on other worlds

I believe this is the 1979 Galactic Encounters series artbook Aliens in Space: An Illustrated Guide to the Inhabited Galaxy by Stewart Cowley (writing as Stephen Caldwell). The cover art actually ...
DavidW's user avatar
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15 votes
Accepted

Movie about aliens that secretly invade earth

I think this might be 2007's The Invasion, starring Nicole Kidman, another retread of the Body Snatchers. The trailer for it, IIRC, showed a black man on a subway car telling Nicole she can fool the ...
Nu'Daq's user avatar
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15 votes
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Book where Earth is flooded and the main character escapes in a spaceship with a sex robot

This is Venus on the Half-Shell (1974) by "Kilgore Trout," one of several pseudonyms used by Philip José Farmer. Farmer wrote Venus on the Half-Shell (1975) under the name Kilgore Trout, a ...
LogicDictates's user avatar
14 votes
Accepted

Which early 90s kids sci-fi TV show, maybe called 'X,' had an alien family fleeing to Earth?

This is Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left (1994–1995). It's an Australian TV show based on a 1985 novel of the same name by Robin Klein. She wrote one sequel, titled Turn Right For Zyrgon (1994)....
LogicDictates's user avatar
9 votes

Can anyone identify this reposted artwork of a Grey alien?

I think I've finally managed to identify this, thanks to the wayback machine crawl that was posted earlier. This is 'Anatomy of a Sky Creature' by British artist Rod Dickinson, but edited to be in ...
Samzer's user avatar
  • 333
9 votes

SF novella or short story: Humans suddenly get the ability to grant their every wish

Blindfold From The Stars by Philip E. High? People suddenly develop mental powers. Turns out they had them in the far past, but they were blocked by aliens. Another alien race sends a virus, which ...
sueelleker's user avatar
  • 11.4k
9 votes

Obscure sci-fi illustration book showing speculative alien life forms on other worlds

I think this may have been the wonderful Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials. It does not contain an alien exactly like what you describe, although it contains two different quadrupeds which, taken ...
Buzz's user avatar
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8 votes
Accepted

A children's novel featuring a race of spider-like aliens

I think this is probably Sweetwater by Laurence Yep. It was published in 1973 so it's old enough for you to have read it 30 years ago. On the planet Harmony, Tyree and his people are fighting to ...
John Rennie's user avatar
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7 votes
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Sci-fi book from 90's-ish about aliens and apathy and weird souls

The book is Alien Influences (1994) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Bountiful is a sun-scorched, inhospitable planet, offering only one comfort to its small band of human colonists: the powerful ...
SomeRando's user avatar
  • 231
7 votes
Accepted

Short story about the last man on a colony planet who dies and is resurrected by aliens, then upgrades himself to understand physics

This sounds like "Understanding Space and Time" by Alastair Reynolds (2005). A plague wipes out all people on Earth and the last surviving person is John Renfrew, who is in a base on Mars. ...
Carfilhiot's user avatar
  • 1,520
5 votes
Accepted

A new movie or series where planes float to the ground. Later we see an alien ship hovering over a city

This is the mini-series Childhood's End (2015). You can see the planes landing in the middle of a crowded city street in the trailer below.
Valorum's user avatar
  • 667k
4 votes

Earth enslaved by aliens. Last sentence of the short story gives added grimness to it

OK, not actually a recent question, but one I ran into recently. "The Certificate" by Avram Davidson (1959), described here as: Fifty years after the arrival of aliens, one of the small ...
FuzzyBoots's user avatar
  • 213k
4 votes

Recent movie/TV series with black alien goop that takes over people

Might this be the 2017 film Life? In the film, a six-member crew of the International Space Station uncovers the first evidence of extraterrestrial life on Mars. When members of the crew conduct ...
FuzzyBoots's user avatar
  • 213k
3 votes

Book I read about 2017 with a society with alien orbs that enhance you

Is this Burning Midnight (2016) by Will McIntosh...? Sully is a sphere dealer at a flea market. It doesn’t pay much—Alex Holliday’s stores have muscled out most of the independent sellers—but it ...
LogicDictates's user avatar
2 votes

What is this film about a group of friends travelling with camcorders who encounter people whose faces were distorted?

Could this be There Are Monsters from 2013? A group of students are on what is essentially a road trip, making a film project. They set up interviews and use camcorders a lot, but as it goes on more ...
moopet's user avatar
  • 3,834
1 vote

What is this film about a group of friends travelling with camcorders who encounter people whose faces were distorted?

Could it be The Phoenix Tapes '97? “The Phoenix Tapes ’97” is a found footage sci-fi/horror film with an anonymous writer, director, and cast. The film follows four friends on a weekend getaway who ...
FuzzyBoots's user avatar
  • 213k
1 vote

Book About Unknown Phenomena/Aliens/Bigfoot/Etc

This is late, but if you're still looking; I read, in about the same time period, a book called There Are Monsters In The Earth. It covered all of the most famous cryptids, with the largest two ...
JohnHunt's user avatar
  • 548
1 vote

Can't remember an old movie and only remember a minor scene

This movie called It Came from Outer Space II (1996) Aliens crashland near a small desert town, strewing odd bluish-glowing rocks throughout the area. Townfolk notice something is amiss when ...
Vladimir Ivanov's user avatar

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