The other thread is almost all movies. What is the scariest alien in a book?

"Colour Out of Space" was a good choice, but nothing IMO beats The Thing from "Who Goes There?" Movie versions, especially the first one, were too lame for words.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

The Thing in "Who Goes There" is opposed by organized '50s heroes, and is defeated. The humans in "The Colour Out of Space" don't manage to affect the colour at all, except as a source of nourishment. It leaves of its own accord, but might have left something behind.
That's why I think the colour is scarier.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

I found the paramental in Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness to be very scary, especially with the carefully crafted buildup to the climax. The idea of megapolisomancy, where cities create their own alien presences, was very well done.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

IT from A Wrinkle in Time.

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Defeated mostly by accident, and most of them died in the process. The scene where survivors are trying to sort out which of them are aliens in disguise is chilling to me.

Also, it was 30s heroes, not 50s -- the story was published in 1938.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Well I DID write movie/literary but people tend to take it for movies

Anyway, I'm staying with my Body Snatchers theme. Bloody scary, the idea.

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The Vang

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"Probably the last sound heard before the universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying 'What happens if I do this?'"

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Thankfully, there's more than one definition for literary.

I'm going with Ambassador Kosh, and only because I don't know if his apprentice, Ambassador Ulkesh, was well read or not.

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I don't know about Kosh, but that Mr. Morden definitely is creepy.
Didn't you mean literate?

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"See? Definition five." "Three Sah!" "Er... Three".

Yup, Morden is definitely creepy, but I don't think he reads much.

I dunno. I've "met" a lot of aliens in books, but I've never found them all that scary. None come immediately to mind, anyway. But if I can't easily identify the scariest literary alien (def 3), I can definitely identify the most literary scary alien: G'Kar while he was still Ambassador to Babylon 5.

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Hopes and dreams are shattering apart____With hope you can do your part
And crashing to the ground_______________To turn a life around

I don't know that I've ever read a book with an alien that was truly terrifying in the sense of viscerally scary. Certainly some attributed motives are rather stomach churning, but scary for the sake of being scary, nah, haven't read one yet that you could say is truly just scary.

The species that the Airlia are at war with in the Area 51 series certainly came close, though, especially the last book with the rather vivid description of what happened to the other human world they found.

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But I have to agree that IT had a certain amount of visceral terror attached to it that Lovecraft could never achieve.

mmm. . .might there be a bit of a poll here. . . never mind, I know that a lot of people are tired of them. Maybe in a year or two.

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I dunno about scary exactly, but the Llaralans in "Sleeping Planet" have always been by far and away my favorite space bad guys. The book is a forgotten classic, IMO.

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The "mist monsters" from Michael [Creepy] Crichton's Eaters of the Dead.

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The creatures in Rama II.

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Time cube is evil.

Which ones--the scary but benign octospiders?

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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

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Rereading "The War of the Worlds", Wells' journalistic description of the Martians really comes across as quite scary. Like the old McDonald's ads said, "We are all meat." Or blood, in this case.

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The Thrint from Larry Niven's Known Space series.

Painting by Wayne Barlowe.

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"Time travel gives me a headache." - Capt. Kathryn Janeway

Not exactly aliens, but the scariest species in any sci fi book I've read have been ....... Humans! Totally ruthless, totally unpredictable, happy to kill their own kind to get their way; every one has different morals, standards (often double standards), values. Absolutely determined to control the galaxy and subjugate all other life (what life it does kill, that is). Totally unstoppable. And at times the very embodiment of evil

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