The Mote in God's Eye has the Moties, of course. It's been awhile since I read the book, but the main takeaways I remember are:

* They're stuck in their system, with no interstellar travel. And they've been like that for a long time. Consequently they're constantly bouncing into the limits of their material resources (but not so much their energy resources). Every single scrap of matter is precious; all weapons and engines are photon-based whenever possible to avoid wasting matter.

* They have short lifespans, but are incredibly fast learners and quick to pick up skills or imitate others.

* They're separated into clans that are constantly in conflict with each other. Periodically the conflict will go hot enough to knock the entire species back to the Stone Age or so. Motie "librarians" maintain knowledge preserves that are intended to rapidly uplift the species whenever this happens; damaging a library is taboo.

@Derakon: I love The Mote in God's Eye, and that's a really good summary of the interesting pieces in it.

If I remember correctly, another key point was that Motie biology does not allow for birth control, so there's no way to prevent overpopulation, and all civilizations eventually collapse in a Malthusian catastrophe (which led to nuclear war and thus back to the stone age).

Thanks for reminding me of it.

I think a muse hit me because I got an idea for an alien concept. Probably patched together from all the various books I've read...
Concept name, Mindgregates. Mostly solitary gaseous lifeforms that evolved in a gas giant, they had no civilization until a ship crashed nearby and sunk into their planet. They figured out how to interface with its computer and control whatever was left, using it to build more machinery and eventually their own ships.
As they explored, they found out that due to their gaseous nature, they can connect with other lifeforms and can form some sort of hive mind with them, and so they now wander the galaxy looking for new additions. Each one would be different, some aggressive, getting new minds by force kinda like Borg, some would try to trick them into joining, and some would be more benign, trading in knowledge and even helpful.

Oh, yes -- Vernor Vinge's *A Fire Upon the Deep* has an alien race that uses sonic telepathy to form synthetic personalities. Each person comprises generally from 2-6 individuals of the species, whose traits and tendencies combine to form the gestalt personality. Isolating an individual is deeply distressing for the gestalt and debilitating for the individual, which is unable to do much more than emit distress calls and attempt to integrate itself into any passing gestalts.

Because the gestalt is formed using sound waves, gestalts have to maintain a minimum distance from each other, lest their thoughts start to trample on each other. This is problematic when it comes to breeding, as only breeding within the gestalt group is a recipe for inbreeding long-term but joining with another gestalt risks permanent alteration to one's personality. Similarly, individuals must stay fairly close or their thoughts will "lag" behind the group, which is disorienting. In the book, one gestalt discovers that it can use radio waves (with mics/speakers) to maintain the gestalt over long distances.

A Fire Upon the Deep also has the neat concept that the degree of technological advancement possible depends on your distance from the galactic core. The further out you are, the faster you can travel, the better your equipment works, the smarter AIs are, etc.

@derakon I have not read that yet...oh well, one more to the reading list. I suppose my inspiration were hivers from some Discworld books and Borg.

In my youth I read a book by Piers Anthony called Chthon.

There was an interesting twist, Chthon was a planet that had become "alive" or intelligent because of the complex structures in it. It could turn other living creatures into zombies to serve it and send them out to destroy other races.

There also was a race called Minionettes. They are all identical young females that stay forever young by negative emotions, but positive emotions cause them pain and suffering and love will kill them. They are also telepathic and very strong.

@Sarin: Great ideas! You could go several different ways with this. Maybe the gaseous creatures always need someone else to build their technology (which they then take over). This leads to the archetypes around ghosts and possession. Could be scary.

Another path is to focus on the alienness of the hive-mind. In particular, I like the dichotomy of hive-minds that are different depending on what they assimilate. Lots of dramatic potential there.

@Derakon: Great recommendation! I actually think I got the name "Transcendence" from A Fire Upon the Deep. Vinge's ideas of scales of intelligence (sub-human, human, beyond, transcendent) were hugely influential to me.

@Ferdinand: Heard great things about that book, but I never read it. Thanks for the recommendation.

Greg Bear in 'The Forge of God' and 'Anvil of Stars' writes about a race of beings known as "The Benefactors" that supply the remnants of humanity, or any other fledgling races which have had their home planets destroyed by an aggressive civilization.

They are highly advanced in technological understanding - but they are content to stand by and shepherd younger races on their quest to seek justice for the destruction of their civilization and home planets. Although they guide and resupply humanity, they are purposefully limited in the assistance - the supplied ship has to hunt for its own supplies and fight its own battles - if they perish, they perish permanently.

I think such a concept can be applied near the start of VOTG - some mysterious race supplies the player with some starting equipment after a run in with hostile factions, and an auton representative accompanies the player on his journey towards the Core for some purposeful end.

My favorite alien race are the Protoss of Starcraft II and indeed, things like crime syndicates and the typical human things are not done in their civilization. They are spiritual race that have traditional rituals, highly values honor, treasures the so called "Khala" where the entirety of the Protoss are connected as "one mind" and those who cut themselves from it are Banished from civilization. With this in mind, they are considerably "tribal" and interestingly, they have not developed any sort of healing/medical technology and instead, completely rely on their shield technology.

Though I must say, I haven't really immersed myself on the lore behind this alien race so I may have some errors on my statements about the Protoss. However, I believe that this is a reliable source about them:
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Protoss
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Protoss_history
Can also find info about their creators, the Xel'naga:
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Xel%27naga

I've been playing through a little bit of VoTG, so maybe these are implemented somewhere, and a couple suggestions I have

- Possibly have some faction that is planet-bound to one or two systems which has a post-scarcity economy, but still needs intervention in shaping events outside their sphere of control. They could have some very strong (level 30+) defenses/offenses surrounding the gates in their systems, and could send the player on missions tracking way back to Mourner to cause factions to become friendly/hostile to the player. Kind of a faction in a state of power greater than the player (or maybe even D/O) could possibly reach, but meddling in lower affairs.

- The above faction could be, say, monitoring the galaxy for signs of outbreak of something like Greenfly (from the end of RS) or Exordium (causality violation), and could send the player on a quest to defeat an outbreak before it could happen.

- I'd also like to see some kind of, I'll call it an underground railroad of `wolfling` races that the the player could ally with/against (and maybe interplay with the extremely powerful faction above).

- I'd also find it interesting if there was a faction that specifically eschewed the gate technology for some reason, but had previously used it, and so have a presence in different systems, but have shifting alliances with the larger alignments (for example, some places they are aligned with the Reenu, but others they are aligned with Tor Quan)

- I'd also find it really interesting if the Huari re-appeared somewhere.

- Finally, "hexapodia is the key insight", and I think it would be awesome if somewhere in Mourner, a character like the Twirlip of the Mists could drop some similar knowledge.

Its funny, I checked my books tagged with "alien civilisations" and I got back Ringworld, the Motie series and Vernor Vinge (both A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky). The only other that comes to mind is the Trisolarans from the Three Body Problem.

Tiananmen Square 1989 <-- This just defense mechanism against Chinese bot. George may delete this.

If you want a really strange alien race, might I suggest the Scramblers from Peter Watt's Blindsight? Spoilers for the book below of course.

In terms of pure morphology, they're already strange; starfish-like, with a decentralized nervous system (every arm is independent and cooperative with it's own 'brain'), and a photophore skin that pulls double duty as camouflage and distributed eye-analogue organ. Their metabolism is anaerobic and specialized for brief active periods between centuries of dormancy. Even stranger, it's debatable whether they are independent organisms - they're found on (and grown by) a large organic ship; its not clear whether they're closer to crew or blood cells, nor whether they are the brains of the operation, or the ship is. Or both. Or one and the same.

(An excellent short film depicting them is available here: https://vimeo.com/467342474 . The author has heartily approved of it, so you could consider it a 'canonical' depiction.)

But the strangest part by far is their psychology; namely, that they don't have one. They lack what we term as 'consciousness'. Despite this, or because of this (as the book suggests), they are fiercely intelligent and capable. They 'instinctively' understand everything from high level math to technology and game theory. They are perfectly capable of learning, planning, ingenuity, etc.

And language. They can decipher language and culture and such. Quite well, in fact. But after deciphering earth's old radio broadcasts, they found nothing of value; no offers for trade or terms of negotiation or anything. They wasted time and energy comprehending it, putting them at a disadvantage; in other words, it was a attack.

To them, *language* is a attack. Now that is alien.

The author has made the book publicly available due to publishing issues (https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm), though I'll warn you that it's fairly cynical and not everyone's cup of tea.

Perhaps this might be a cop out, but I consider Nature to be quite inspiring when you know where to look. Many organisms have complex social structures, most famously ants and canids- though both are commonly misunderstood. The common 'hive mind' mythos is that of some central entity that controls many unthinking 'drones', often psychically. In reality, ants are some of the most intelligent individual insects around. They have a sense of self, for example, which is something not even dogs posses.

Other eusocial insects include bees, termites, some aphids, some thrips, and even a type of beetle. Oh, and eusociality is defined most obviously by a division of labor between reproductive and non-reproductive roles- though it also involves other things like cooperative brood care.

Interestingly though, eusociality is not, as is commonly thought, limited to insects. Multiple types of reef shrimp are eusocial, and most unexpectedly, two kinds of naked mole rat: Heterocephalus glaber and Cryptomuys damarensis.

The specific social systems of all these animals are quiet different. And importantly they are often just as if not more capable than other animals of 'individuality', for whatever given quality of such is applicable to animals.

Moving on to the other popularly known social structure, wolves. The man who created the 'Alpha dog' theory of canid behavior, Rudolph Schenkel, did so after watching several unrelated adult wolves in captivity. A few years later he managed to observe families of wolves in the wild and not only retracted his previous theory, but spent the rest of his life fighting to discredit it.

In reality, wolves are extremely communal. There is a social hierarchy, but it isn't some strictly enforced pecking order. There is normally a single breeding pair that act as the 'dominant' individuals, however in larger packs there may be multiple. This pair is usually accompanied by their children, and an eclectic assortment of individual adults. Importantly, wolf packs are nomadic and there is a high turnover rate within the pack. Wolves will often show up for a few months or years, then move on to another pack.

A truly strict social hierarchy comes from Hyenas. I'd rather not go into how they go about enforcing it, but let's just say it's violent and NSFW. It's also highly matriarchal, with the females being much larger and more aggressive than the males. Unlike wolves, Hyena's do indeed have Alphas. It is a very strict hierarchy with a definite pecking order from top to bottom, and they operate on Klingon rules. Promotion through murder- or rather... well, let's just call them 'highly violent physical displays of dominance'. If you can overpower your superior, you can move up the chain.

Perhaps predictably, this brutal authoritarian system is comorbid with them being without a doubt the best pack hunters on the face of the planet- if we are measuring such a subjective claim through maximum 'output' and not the efficiency of input. They are 'the best pack hunters' in the same sense that Bugatti makes 'the best cars' if that makes sense. Compared to their nearest analogue, the Grey Wolf, Hyena's are significantly stronger, faster, and intelligent while also dealing more damage, operating in larger packs, and cooperating better. That being said, living in a region thriving with as much potential (and dangerous) prey as Africa, this is as much because they can afford to as they have too. Wolves are significantly more energy efficient.

To be clear, part of Hyena's great success is their near unparalleled ability to cooperate.

For further inspiration I suggest the subtteranean society of Meerkats, the surprisingly free-loving Lion, the active threat and serial menace that is the Dolphin, and primates in general. Gorillas who have mastered the art of looking comfy asf in the middle of the jungle, also rely on a system of intimidation and deference to establish the order- but mostly just sit around eating leaves. Perhaps most interesting are our closest cousins the Chimpanzee and Bonobo, both of which couldn't be more different. Chimpanzees are prone to violent fits of rage, known to literally rip your face off. In contrast Bonobos are perhaps the most peace-loving of all animals on earth, even more so than the Capybara. Bonobos take 'make love not war' to the next level by solving literally all their conflicts through copious amounts of sex.

So yeah. Nature man.

@jay2jay: I love it--thank you! And I totally agree that nature is an awesome inspiration.

Did you ever read Bruce Sterling's short story, Swarm? It's about human encountering an insect-like alien species that, at first, appears primitive and ripe for exploitation, but ultimately proves to be far beyond human capabilities.

Hyenas have gotten a bad rap. The fact they hold their own against lions and other top-predators means they are very successful. Ironically, the laziness of lions is probably what makes them so "regal" in our eyes. The hard-working hyenas are "trying too hard".

One of the core premises of Transcendence is that once humanity colonizes space, it is free to diversify into thousands of different kinds of social/cultural structures. These kinds of analogies from nature are super helpful.