Huh, really? I just saw it on Tumblr. It was a post where someone said something like "scifi aliens but instead of the females being humanoid, it's the males" and someone drew it. The females were like 8 feet tall and had spikes and scales and no hair and the like and the men looked like green male models, the elder males looked exactly the same as the youngers except for having grey hair.
Looks like I was misremembering and it was the males who looked super different. (two feet tall with giganto wangs.) I wish I remember what I did with my copies, because it was a pretty hilarious comic.
...for some reason, when you guys started talking about monstrous female aliens with colorswapped humans for male partners, my first thought was "and they reproduce like anglerfish". Because what else would you do with a size difference? Anyway, Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought doesn't technically have uplifted animals, but it does have a species that looks a lot like wolves, with a slight twist: the sentient being is not an individual wolf but a pack, usually between 4 to 6 wolves; in smaller numbers they're usually not quite sentient, in larger numbers they're usually incoherent. Membership in a sentient is not constant; new individuals can join, current individuals can leave. Pertinent questions: how to maintain a persona as membership changes, what to do about puppies, what to do when one or more of your constituents is secretly evil.
Oooh. That's cool. Also not strictly uplifting, but check out Blindsight and Echopraxia, which have hard science vampires. Spoiler (They're a subspecies of humans that doesn't drink blood. Instead they're obligate cannibals; a mutation robbed them of the ability to produce a certain enzyme and they can only get it by eating other humans, so they evolved along the lines of an apex preadator that hunts *us*. They're smarter than us - have to be smarter than your prey to catch it and eat it - and complete sociopaths, because if you're eating people for a living, empathy is a major weakness that evolution will weed out. They have supreme pattern matching abilities and can go dormant for periods of time to let the human population build back up after they've hunted. They're also intensely territorial, because it takes a large human population to feed a single vampire and who wants to share or risk running out? None of the standard vampire defenses work on them except crosses, because due to a sensory glitch that became genetically fixed due to small population size, if a perfect right angle fills up more than 30% of their field of vision they go gran-mal. Not a problem on the savannah where right angles are hard to find, but as soon as baseline humans invented architecture, all the vampires died out.) (So naturally we brought them back from extinction with genetic engineering and used them to run our most important institutions more efficiently. What could go wrong?)
Just make the entire planet look like downtown Detroit in the rain, and also there are talking pomegranates. Boom, done.
I would argue that there are already several species on this planet that don't NEED Uplifting, but just some kind of fancy sci-fi alienese transcoder-translator thingies :)
Tragically (or not given how dickish they are), probably not the dolphins. (Long-finned Pilot Whales though...)
Well, to be fair on the dolphins, they're no more assholish than humans and chimps, and we've got no issues with assigning either of them with personhood XD
Spoiler: NSFW I mean, humans and chimps aren't in the habit of using decapitated animals as masturbatory aids. But then again we have hands, so...
Spoiler: NFSW (especially if you like penguins) well I mean penguins do the necrophilia thing too so they're not alone there XD And chimps will prostitute themselves FOR meat, which I guess is just one step away...
