February 26, 2007 9:00
A Little List of Really Big Aliens
Falling asleep last night, feeling replete and self-satisfied from an evening spent not-watching the Oscars -- yeah, I'm just a rebel that way -- I played a thought-game: What are the ten physically largest living beings in all of science fiction? Here's my list, biggest to smallest, generated -- I might add, in my defense -- without peeking at Wikipedia beforehand (though I peeked afterhand to add in links).
1) Solaris. My parents took me to see this artsy movie based on a Stanislaw Lem novel when I was a little kid. I believe they thought it would be like Star Wars. Needless to say it was not. It's an avant-garde Russian film from the 1970's. I attained near-traumatic levels of boredom. Before I blacked out I registered that a sentient planet figures in the plot somehow. I didn't see the Soderbergh remake. Should I?
2) Behemothaurs, from Iain M. Banks's Return to Windward. OK, this is a fairly obscure one, but it'll register if you're at all into Banks's Culture novels. There's a subplot in this one that deals with (IIRC) a near-weightless mass of air adrift in space (a bit like the torus in Niven's Integral Trees books) that supports a complex ecosystem, including truly stupendous blimplike entities who are basically functionally immortal. There are people I know and love who are immune to Banks's charms, but to me he's probably the greatest living SF writer -- I have an unlimited appetite for his literary, postmodernistically self-conscious space opera. Look to Windward, which came out in the U.S. shortly before September 11th, 2001, is an eerily relevant analysis of how liberal capitalist technocracies provoke acts of suicidal terrorism...anyway, yeah, behemothaurs = big.
3) I'm not enough of a Farscape scholar to even remember what their ship is called. But I do remember that it's not an artifact, it's a very large alien being. So I'm countin' it.
4) Bandersnatchi. I never got a clear mental picture of the Bandersnatch, a colossal slug-like being from Larry Niven's Known Space universe. I believe they were the product of genetic engineering, created by the Tnuctipun for the Slavers as food animals. Though the rebellious Tnuctipun secretly made them sentient, and immune to mind control...
5) The Crystalline Entity. That huge, tree-like interstellar fella who cropped up in a few Star Trek episode. A heartless world-ravager, it turned out to be rather fragile -- what with it being crystalline and all -- and the Enterprise shattered it.
6) Sandworms. Shai-hulud, yo. They're large.
7) Galactus. The awesome Devourer of Worlds from the Marvel universe. A very helpful fellow, in that he's always picking people to be his herald and giving them cool powers, thus generating an endless series of convenient origin stories (viz., the Silver Surfer, and (I think) Firelord, among many others). My memory of Galactus is that different artists have drawn him in somewhat different scales, making his true height kind of elastic. But I think eating planets tends to make you grow up pretty big and strong no matter who's drawing you.
8) The Brobdingnagians from Gulliver's Travels. You know, the big people Gulliver meets after the Lilliputians. I don't have a good mental fix on their size, but I do remember a scene where Gulliver sits astride the nipple of one of the women. So, you know, not small. (I vividly remember him being disgusted by her macro-scale skin blemishes. Ew.)
9) Um, that bad guy in Krull looked pretty tall? Even though he was kinda out of focus most of the time? (Who knew they had such a good time making this movie?)
10) And I figure some of the Cthulhu crowd have gotta be pretty burly? Help me out here.
I know I must have missed some easy shots here, and the order is totally off-the-cuff. There's probably a killer sentient galaxy out there that's going to throw this whole thing off...
About Nerd World
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman blogs about anything and everything that could be plausibly labeled geeky--science fiction, fantasy, video games, comic books, tech stuff, and so on. If it could get you beaten up in junior high, it's fair game. About the Author
Matt Selman
Matt Selman has worked on eleven seasons and over two hundred episodes of The Simpsons. He currently serves as an Executive Producer. About the Author
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Reader Comments
Posted by waste93
February 26, 2007
Farscape ship was named Moira (sp?). Also the Vorlon and Shadow ships in Babylon 5 were organic in nature. Vorlons had a planet killer ship that was immense.
Posted by Tripp
February 26, 2007
Regarding number 10, Azathoth probably counts. He is the center of the Universe and is supposedly vast, but never precisely defined.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azathoth
Posted by brett
February 26, 2007
Oddly, I just finished reading a book last night that beats all these. Heaven, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. It posits that the entire galaxy is a thinking organism. Beats them all.
I always thought the bandersnatchi were something like huge elephants with more legs.
Posted by Rob
February 26, 2007
Hola,
The living ships in Farscape were Leviathans.
Since you went Marvel with Galactus, you can't leave out Unicron from the Transformers. A planet who transformed into a robot, he was introduced in the 80s cartoon movie and voiced by Orsen Wells. I'd say he beats Galactus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicron
Posted by Irate Savant
February 26, 2007
My Good Sir,
You neglected to mention Mogo the living planet, a member of the Green Lantern Corps.
Posted by nerdlinger78
February 26, 2007
What about the Gaia entity from Asimov's Foundation? As I recall, at the end of the series the entire human population and their planets are moving toward incorporation in one single entity.
Posted by Eric J
February 26, 2007
Ah, but Mogo doesn't socialize.
Posted by Who
February 26, 2007
See the original Solaris again. It's a better view, dark and intense, for grown-ups.
Posted by Gerry
February 26, 2007
I wouldn't tag Gulliver's Travels as science fiction. Science fiction can be satirical, but not all satire with fantastic elements is science fiction.
Posted by Anonymous
February 26, 2007
Ambassador Kosh on Babylon 5 had a very large living ship...it didn't have a name, but it was really darned big.
Posted by Doug Tomlinson
February 26, 2007
In "The Immunity Syndrome" (Star Trek TOS) The enterprise encounters an 11,000 mile wide ameoba. That's pretty big. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immunity_Syndrome_(TOS_episode).
Posted by Bruce Brakel
February 26, 2007
Those space whales on Star Trek TNG were pretty big. The parents were space ship sized, but I wouldn't know the exact scale.
Oh, in one of the earlier Star Wars movies they flew into a cave in a moon or asteroid, and then realized they were in a living entity.
Posted by BJ
February 26, 2007
Uh, V'ger? Hello????//
Posted by RDT
February 26, 2007
John Varley's Titan series featured Gaea a (small) world sized sentient entity with a radius of 600km, supporting entire eco-systems and multiple sentient races. She also manifests herself as a 50' tall Marilyn Monroe clone.
Posted by Rinson Drei
February 26, 2007
Titan by John Varley is about a moon of Jupiter that turns out to be a visiting sentient being, who intercepts Earth transmissions and populates herself with beings fabricated from mythology.
Posted by JYH
February 26, 2007
In the pilot episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," the Enterprise makes contact with huge jellyfish-like aliens who are exploited by humanoids for shelter, power, etc.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4e/STEncFarpoint.jpg
A picture of the jellyfish entities.
Posted by Jason Bontrager
February 26, 2007
You left out Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud (from the novel of the same name). I don't remember it's exact dimensions, but it was a living nebula and substantially bigger than the Earth.
Posted by BC
February 26, 2007
What about the giant things Hellboy stopped from coming through the gate he was forced to open? They were pretty damn big.
Posted by Barton Paul Levenson
February 26, 2007
There was a planet-sized "microbe" in a Star Trek episode. (Star Trek 1967-1970, that is.)
Posted by dennis
February 26, 2007
Let's not forget the Caleban, Fannie Mae,
from Frank Herbert's novel
"Whipping Star". It was in fact
a sentient being that appeared in
our universe as (among other things)
the star Thyone.
Posted by cptcrash
February 26, 2007
Actually there is a a killer sentient galaxy in the Pip & Flinx book series by by Alan Dean Foster.
Posted by Anonymous
February 26, 2007
How about the "Ultimate Evil" dark planet in Fifth Element? (I believe Gary Oldman's character called it "Mr Shadow".)
Posted by Cpt. Pants
February 26, 2007
Jane from Orson Scott Card's Ender books
Posted by FROTTLES
February 26, 2007
A really big Beast was featured in a recent episode of the latest version of Dr. Who.
See, episode 9, Season 2, 2006, "The Satan Pit".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/gallery/s2_08-09gallery/1024/the_beast.jpg
The Beast was entirely computer generated imagery. Scorching.
Posted by Gabriel Hanna
February 26, 2007
Starseeds, from Larry Niven's Known Space series (home of the bandersnatchi mentioned above). Starseeds were living lightsails that took tens of thousands of years to migrate to the core and back out to the arms. For some reason the Outsider ships followed them. They would answer, if asked, but the fee for that answer would have bankrupted major governments, as the Outsiders disliked discussing themselves.
Incidentally, the bandersnatchi were, IIRC, like giant slugs, but leathery instead of slimy. They had skeletons, hunters liked to turn them into trophy rooms, if they survived the bandersnatch hunt (60-40 in favor of the bandersnatch, by treaty.) I distinctly remember Larry Niven mentioning that they had a "belly-foot".
Posted by Mark Poling
February 27, 2007
In Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe Severian encounters an interstellar (humanoid appearing) creature that used butterfly-like wings as lightsails.
That was pretty big, I think.
In that same series, Erebus and Abaia are mountain-sized entities (post-human, I believe) that have taken to the oceans because they could not be supported on land.
Posted by dan b
February 27, 2007
what about the voyager entity (or vger as it called itself) from the first star trek movie? whether or not it had gained consciousness is somewhat debatable, thought it clearly had some kind of self-awareness, but it had to be at least the size of earth itself, or pretty close to it. it certainly took the enterprise a good deal of time to reach its core. and just the fact that it was man-made adds to its legacy, if you want to call it that. i dont know if you would count it given that what it was when it was returning to earth was almost entirely acquired, but it did seem to use it as an appendage, which i guess would qualify it as a part of the being itself.
Posted by Nicola
February 27, 2007
The Leviathan Spaceship on Farscape was called Moya.
She was quite big as far as spaceships go.
Posted by MichaelW
February 27, 2007
Ahem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_of_His_Face%2C_The_Lamps_of_His_Mouth
Posted by wolfwalker
February 27, 2007
Obscure bits of Star Trek offer lots of entries, as do Alan Dean Foster's books. Put the two together... Many years ago ADF did story adaptations of the animated Trek series. In one of them he put some flat, sheet-shaped critters he called "jawandas," which fed on radiation and lived only in intergalactic space -- not interstellar, intergalactic -- because "they needed the room." The largest one encountered by the Enterprise had a surface area greater than Earth's Sun.
There's also a race of super-size aliens in one of James White's Sector General novels. _The Genocidal Healer_ features a species called the Groalterri, whose maximum size is never given but must be miles across.
Posted by Anonymous
February 27, 2007
The Leviathan's name in Farscape was Moya. She had a son named Talon who, had he survived into adulthood, would have been even larger than her. And he was heavily armed and had emotional stability issues. And you forgot the Boodong, a space creature so large that it was sometimes mistaken for a moon. A boodong swallowed Talon at one time, it looked like a blue whale swallowing krill. I miss Farscape.
Posted by David
February 27, 2007
There was a rather large "thing" in one of the Star Trek Voyager episodes. I can't remember the name or the episode.
They detected a large quantity of dilithium crystals in the middle of an area of space, but encounter a large energy field approaching it. They finally figure out the thing is alive and that the energy field was the equivalent of the cell membrane. The dilithium crystals were (I think) the nucleus. They end up using semi-invasive surgery (one of the shuttle craft I think) to stimulate a self-healing of the membrane.
Anyway, larger than a planet.
Posted by Ted
February 28, 2007
From Lexx, the ship (named Lexx, of course) was alive, and the Gigashadow was very large.
Posted by runescape money
November 13, 2007
they've got. You got to stoop pretty low to argue with them, so why bother? Just don't even lower your standards to respond to them.
Posted by who
November 15, 2007
yeah
Posted by ur
November 15, 2007
you keeners get alive