Illusians

The Illusians are a robotic race, inhabitants of many planets in Bill's Universe. They do not communicate by sound waves. They communicate with each other by high frequency radio waves.
The war between the Illusians and the Terrans forms the main plot of the short story Tall Tales In Space.
Named Illusians:
Isaac
Jacob
Quotes :
He didn’t think Illusians could be considered good looking by anyone’s standards. They had a metallic quality to their skin. It seemed to be optional, or was decided by some process unknown to Rewton as to how many eyes and arms they had. This one had three arms, all ending in a clump of long fingers and jointed with probably a dozen elbows each. This one also had eyes to the number of six all clustered at the base of its head underneath a huge horn, or maybe some kind of snorkel. There appeared to be no mouth or ears. Its long low squat body had a stocky leg at each corner.
Over the course of the day he learned a few interesting facts about his alien captors.The Illusians were an escaped robotic race, their masters being long since dead. Certainly it was hard to tell by looking at them, they look more like large beetles than robots.In terms of their own race, they appeared to be very adaptive and fairly peaceful. Any one Illusian could do the job of another one after only a few days training. It was also hard to imagine how one of these great hulks could get angry at another one. There seemed to be so little for them to argue about.There is little crime, in fact they didn’t really understand the concept of crime. Occasionally an Illusian would behave in a manner dangerous to another. The wrong doer was seen as faulty and was ‘dismantled’.They favoured democracy as the main mode of politics, Isaac could only explain the human races politics by their primitive modes of communication. He though Rewton very backward.They communicated with each other via radio waves which had meant that someone had had to design and build a device to communicate with humans. Their large brains were apparently in their torsos.
Space Travel
Illusian ships use anti-matter drives to go at
very nearly the speed of light. We do not bend and crush the same way a human
might under the forces of great gravity. The expansion of our race has been
slow, but up until now it has not seemed to matter as we are very long lived.’
(I think this would have to change by the time of Drummond)
Category:Races
Category:Bill's Universe
Category:Galactic Civilisations