alien n.

I am like a being thrown from another planet on this dark terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its possessors.

Your position is a peculiar one…you are a prisoner and yet you give commands which must be obeyed; you are an alien and yet you are a Tharkian chieftain; you are a midget and yet you can kill a mighty warrior with one blow of your fist.

Arnim and Britt watched the ten-foot tall aliens stride across the short stretch of deck to the entrance lock of their own vessel. Around the waist of each a studded belt was clamped, its excresences showing where the individual gravity coils were inserted. Were it not for these the Martians would have been rising a hundred feet with each step, so small was the asteroid’s attraction.

Nearby, a group of intelligent aliens were cutting small growth and testing them with many forms of apparatus.

Both aliens had seen him before, but only at a considerable distance. Talker’s chief surprise at the human form was that a being should support a mass about four times his own, against the relatively enormous gravity of Earth, on but two legs—though the legs, it is true, resembled tree trunks when compared to the stalklike limbs of the visitors.

When an alien arrives on an inhabited planet, there is usually only one way he can pass among the intelligent beings on that planet without being recognized for what he is.

The trouble is…that you have a word, ‘alien,’ and no concept to go with it. You persist in reducing me to non-alien terms, and I assure you that I will not reduce. I am, by definition, not human.

Every science-fiction magazine contains stories about visiting other stars and the confrontations between Earthmen and aliens.

They stared at each other—Earthman and alien.

If the problem was aliens from another world, Father Castelli would not be protected.

The aliens I was dealing with had complicated, irritable, niggling minds.

There we were, the damned alien and I, me with my ouzi [sic] and he with his alien zapper, taking aim on a particularly slimy and fat slug.

It took off real fast, just like that…. Didn’t land. Wouldn’t that have been a hoot, a bunch of fucking aliens coming down for pie? But they didn’t. I always wanted to see an alien.

‘Do you believe in aliens?’ he asked. Fatima shook her head. ‘Me, neither,’ he said. ‘But the LifeGen Corporation does and they can locate and track things using satellite and radar. Things like that odd meteor shower two years ago. [...]’