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Humans have always looked up at the stars and wondered if there is life beyond this world, and science fiction writers have spent years exploring this idea. In the earliest works, such as Kepler’s Somnium and Voltaire’s Micromégas, the aliens are giants, but humanoids.
When we get to HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds, we have Martians the size of a bear with a bulbous head approximately four feet in diameter, the first non-humanoid alien from popular literature, but still humanoid enough to be familiar.
By 1959, we have Heinlein’s Starship Troopers where some of the aliens are insects, described as “arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider.” Not humanoid but still a familiar shape. Ten years later, Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain has aliens as crystalline micro-organisms with no DNA, moving us a step closer to something completely unrecognisable from the lifeforms we share our own planet with.
As time has gone on – and particularly as special effects have improved – we’ve had aliens that don’t look much like us and take on other forms, possibly multilimbed, or gaseous.
But while the aliens that humans encounter in fiction have been varied, what we haven’t seen so much of are novels where the main character is not only an alien, but also one that has no human form or anatomy. Just how do you get a human reader to understand the lifestyle and culture of an entity that is effectively a single celled organism? And what about when your alien meets the human race for the first time?
Here to talk us through such questions is Annalee Newitz. Their book, A Wall Is Also A Road, is published October 2026 and takes us on a journey through the eyes of Gardenpath, a very definite non-humanoid alien. Listen on for a robust critique of academia, a visit to ancient Pompei, and the startling particulars of alien sex…
Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of four novels: Automatic Noodle, The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. They are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Scientific American, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and Technology Review, among others. They were the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and have contributed to the public radio shows Science Friday, On the Media, KQED Forum, and Here and Now. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.
