ORIONIAN

ORIONIAN

"They were tall and white. I try to see them as men in some kind of white jumpsuits. The one nearest the bank is stretching out a long white arm toward Ruth."

"The arm stretches after her. It stretches and stretches to yards and stays hanging in the air. Small black things are wiggling from its tip." 

"I look where their faces should be and see black hollow dishes with vertical stripes. The stripes were moving slowly."

"'Get in, Althea, we're taking off for Orion.'"

James Tiptree Jr., The Women Men Don't See

EGGIAN

EGGIAN

"His snuffling is partly constitutional — Moa is an amphibian — and partly directed at his current customers, two impossibly cheerful young Comenor."

"Moa Blue's stern reptilian face softens."

"Moa smiles, a toothy effect that would have been intimidating in different context."

"'And' — she takes his scaly hand shyly — 'we'll remember you.'"

"'Well, now, wait till you read this last before too many thanks are in order,' he tells them, showing the glittering array of teeth that had carried his remote ancestors to dominance on his home planet of Hard Eggs."

James Tiptree Jr., The Starry Rift

MURNOO

MURNOO

"It is the embryo of a Murnoo often called a 'sex-animal.' The Murnoo is a very important part of the Ziello race, but it isn't a Ziello."

"The Murnoo grows very fast, and as soon as it releases the teat in the male's pouch it is born — a tiny furry helpless creature who requires care at first, but grows very fast."

"In only about three years it is full grown, but it doesn't look much like its Ziello father and mother. It's much shorter, with a rounded face and ears, rudimentary upper arms, and a short tail."

"Well, as a sex-animal it turned out a strange cream shade, quite lovely, with red ears and paws."

"They look partly like Ziellos and partly like big rabbits."

James Tiptree Jr., Collision

HRATTLI

HRATTLI

"We know it doesn't mean anything — you have Hrattli in top Gal Fed jobs and they look like poached eggs."

James Tiptree Jr., Your Haploid Heart

ESTHAAN

ESTHAAN

"Very human, is my snap reaction. He has the same number of fingers and features, his joints work like ours, and his skin texture — a feature on which i place great hunch reliance — is a cream-yellow version of my own brown. Eyes round, with laugh lines, and his smile shows human teeth with an extra pair of frontals. All quite standard except that his torso looks a trifle thick or blocky."

"'These owl-eyed marshmallows'"

"I rip the pilots clothes, exposing his swollen body. Two great angry scars run from each pubic ligament to above the crest of the pelvis."

"A supreme convulsion sweeps the Esthaan and the two gashes in his flanks swell, pulse, and slowly evert themselves like giant pea pods turning inside out. Amass of wriggling blobs of flesh tumbles down his sides. He screams."

James Tiptree Jr., Your Haploid Heart 

ANGLI

ANGLI

"The color of course you know––sky-blue in the main, with here and there blues lighter or darker from slate to peacock blue, from pale blue foam to deep marine. And the great eyes were quite Human-shaped, though the size of foot-lockers. And the tentacles you have met––each had groups of suckers-discs which were apparently quiescent unless the owner wished to cling."

"To put it bluntly, the aliens looked like gigantic cerulean octopuses."

"Their heads were large and bald and shiny above the single eye, and their mantles began where a chin should be, concealing their noses and mouths, or beaks, or whatever. Also to be glimpsed beneath the mantle's rippling edges was a mass of darker blue fur-like organs among which seemed to be some very small, delicate tentacles of unknown use."

"And their basically radial bodies were obviously in transition to a bilaterally symmetrical form––the four 'back' leg-tentacles were much larger and longer, to free the front four. In face if––as happened later––a small one wore a long robe with a good to conceal the shiny bald dome above the eye, it could pass for a large, somewhat top-heavy human form."

James Tiptree Jr., Second Going

PARADISIAN

PARADISIAN
"Gray rotten little things were humping toward them out of the walls, stopping to stare."

"Three of the lumps were humping closer. All dove-gray like himself, but it was hide, not silk, that bloated at elbows and knees. Gray splayed feet, and between them, under bags of belly, the giant genitals of two of them leaving triple furrows in the mud."

"From their blue-black face holes came gentle glubbering sounds."

James Tiptree Jr., The Milk Of Paradise

DRON

DRON

"'Oh, sure. Well. Big white bodies with fur all over. And six legs, they mostly walk on the back four, the top two are like arms. They have like long bodies, long white cats, big; when they rear up to look, they're over our heads. And they have....' Here the voice stammers, as if finding it hard to speak. 'They have like two, uh, private parts. Two sets, I mean. Some of them. And their faces' --the voice runs on, relieved-- 'their faces are fierce. Some teeth!"

James Tiptree Jr., The Only Neat Thing To Do

JOILANI

JOILANI

"Her huge dark-lashed Joilani gaze implored him mutely; in her terror she forgot the warnings, and her small dove-gray face contorted in that rictus of anguish the Terrans called a 'smile'."

"She tore the jelmah off, exposing her wide-hipped, short-legged little gray form, with its double dugs and bulging pouch."

"Her short twin birth channels."

"Amid the boots and the shouting, her wrist glands leaked scarlet Joilani tears as she foresaw the slow and merciless death that would now be hers."

James Tiptree Jr., We Who Stole the Dream

ZIELLO

ZIELLO

"And their body shapes, as far as we could see, are just what we expected--taller and bigger than us, extra pair of uppper arms, one big single eye, and a long heavy pointed tail they brace on. Their skins are covered with very short fur, like that cloth, velvet. Mostly brownish gold."

James Tiptree Jr.,  Collision

DIVER-IMITATING FISH-LIFE

DIVER-IMITATING FISH-LIFE

"Well, I swam and I swam and I swam. You know how a chase takes you, and somehow being unable to overtake a mere girl made it worse. But I was gaining, age and all, until just as I got close enough to sense something was wrong, she turned sidewise above two automobile tires-and I saw it wasn't a girl at all"

"I had been following a goddamned great fish-a fish with a bright blue-and-orange band around its belly, and a thin white body ending in a black flipperlike tail. Even its head and nape were black, like her hair and mask. It had a repulsive catfishlike mouth, with barbels."

"The thing goggled at me and then swam awkwardly away, just as the light went worse yet. But there was enough for me to see that it was no normal fish, either, but a queer archaic thing that looked more tacked together than grown. This I can't swear to, because I was looking elsewhere by then, but it was my strong impression that as it went out of my line of sight its whole tail broke off." 

James Tiptree Jr., Beyond the Dead Reef

Read Scott's blog-post about this story here.