Adult Sci-Fi. Jellyfish alien searches for planet to colonize for its people, planet without sentient life, for leadership contest. Alien has a human suit on Earth and silver pen cutting tool. Human MC has machine awareness. Spoilers ahead.

[Prometheus]

Hi, I’m trying to remember the name of a book I read many years ago.

The premise was that a small jellyfish style alien (that liked the cold) was searching for a planet to colonise for its people as that’s what their society rewarded them for. They weren’t supposed to select planets with sentient life.

Its ship drew energy from the planet it landed on.

A leadership contest was announced and the alien became desperate to find a planet.

It had an automated human suit construct and went out among the people on Earth. At one stage it found itself in a ‘romantic encounter’ where a woman placed her hands between the suits legs and was horrified to find it as anatomically correct as a ken doll.

The alien had a silver pen like tool that it lost and the main character (who had some form of ‘Machine awareness’ that should have caused the alien to mark the planet as unsuitable for colonisation) found. They ended up cutting a table clean in half as they figured out how it worked.

The alien brought some humans including the main character into its ship, which had the power to create environments to test them and verify they weren’t advanced enough to preclude colonisation. In its ambition to be made a leader it tried to tip the scale.

The humans ended up beating it due to the machine awareness of the main character, then we find out there was no leadership vacancy in the alien species society. It was an ethics test by leadership that the occasionally applied to their scouts and the alien in question failed.

IIRC we find that the humans weren’t actually put through trials. Automatons were created in their image and their consciousness transferred in for the tests, which worked out well as there was maybe some terminal illness?

This is obviously out of chronological order and half-remembered, but if anyone can help me identify this book O would be most grateful.

[Kris]

Prometheus, just to confirm, is the genre: adult science fiction?

Around what year did you read this book? A range of years is fine.

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