Different time scale.

[Omeganian]

I remember seeing a thread here about aliens which had drastically different size from humans. But what about something like the Great Slow Kings, aliens who have different perception of time? Do any of you remember other such races?

[Junghalli]

There's the Scalosians in Star Trek (TOS). Of course, that was because of something in their water.

[The Nomad]

The original Xeelee built their civilization before the original superforce broke down into the four fundamental ones IIRC, long before the first atomic nuclei. Talk about fast time

[Nyrath]

The classic is Robert Forward's DRAGON'S EGG, where the Cheela are composed of neutron star matter. One of their years is about 30 seconds.

[Darmalus]

There was a collection of Larry Niven short stories about a place called the Draco Tavern, I think. Whatever it was called, there was a race that ran off of hydrogen reduction, and they saw us as colorful blurs zipping about. I think he arrived just in time to crawl from the spaceport to the tavern as it was constructed. A fair number of years to move several hundred feet.

[Patrick Degan]

In James Blish's Star Trek novel Spock Must Die, there is a scene in which Koloth is in pursuit of the Enterprise and is receiving data on his target but neither he nor his crew are in the least aware that somehow, someway (it is not explained how this occurred), their ship fell into an asymptotic timecurve, so that in the time he looked at his screen to the time he asked for a report from Korax, his first officer, the galaxy had made a full revolution on its axis, that during his entire conversation with Korax whole galaxies had burnt out and died, and that the chase he was engaged in was an illusory one which would never end since time was slowing down aboard his ship. Blish did this to illustrate the concept of people trapped in a physical situation in which their universe was shrinking and all their measuring rods shrinking at the same rate.

A rather spooky scene to say the least.

[tim31]

Voyager episode Blink Of An Eye in which the crew comes across a crazy planet that exists in a different timeframe; a rate of just over a second per day. The locals go from tribal to warp in a day or so.

[Batman]

The Druuf from the Perryverse. Technically it's not the race as such that's got a different time perception, but the universe they're from, but in their realm time passes some 72,000 times slower than it does in our world (ignoring time dilation for high fractional c velocities on both sides).

[Swindle1984]

Voyager episode Blink Of An Eye in which the crew comes across a crazy planet that exists in a different timeframe; a rate of just over a second per day. The locals go from tribal to warp in a day or so.

Which begs the question of why Voyager didn't just stick around for another week or so until they had the tech to send them home within seconds.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

There's the Dwellers on Nasqueron in Iain Bank's the Algebraist. I haven't yet finished the book, so I haven't really gotten a true sense of their slowness, just their egocentric idiosyncracy.

[Patrick Degan]

Obvious example: the Krikketers, locked in their Slo-Time envelope, from Life, The Universe, And Everything. The entire Universe would go through its remaining 15 billion year lifetime and the Slo-Time field was designed to vanish afterward so the Krikketers could have an empty universe to themselves. For them, only a few months would have passed, and only a month or two had passed for them since they were locked into the forcefield a billion years in the past (objective) after losing the war they fought against the rest of the galaxy.

[tim31]

Which begs the question of why Voyager didn't just stick around for another week or so until they had the tech to send them home within seconds.

Their arrival in orbit caused seismic events from the get go. The natives went through stages of worship, to arguing over who worshipped it more, to developing tech to shoot it out of the sky. They almost succeeded, dammit.

[Lord of the Abyss]

In James Blish's Star Trek novel Spock Must Die, there is a scene in which Koloth is in pursuit of the Enterprise and is receiving data on his target but neither he nor his crew are in the least aware that somehow, someway (it is not explained how this occurred), their ship fell into an asymptotic timecurve,

It's been a loooong time, but I think it was because he aggravated the Organians.

In Brin's The River of Time, for no apparent reason different people begin experiencing different time rates, eventually reaching the point where the fast ones are invisible to the slow.

n Charles Sheffield's Between the Strokes of Night a group of humans discover how to drastically slow their metabolism and perception of time. They use this to travel between the stars is what subjectively seems to them faster than light ships. The ships have quite low acceleration, which to it's slow passengers seems like one gravity. They are served by robots, which move faster than they can perceive in the slow state, so things like food just appears when they ask for it. And as a side effect, they subjectively live longer, as well as objectively.

In Heinlein's Time for the Stars, a pair of telepathic twins are used for communication between Earth and a relativistic starship. Time naturally moves slower for the travelling twin; at max velocity, they can't understand each other. And when the travelling twin returns, the homebound twin is an old man, while he's still young.

I recall another story with telepathic twins. Most of it escapes me, but I recall that after the male is trapped in a forming black hole, it's pointed out that time for him has nearly stopped, so he'll never quite reach his death. "Telepathy has no distance limit. He will always be with her."

[The Yosemite Bear]

chow yun fat, everything's always in slow motion, and doves explode from everywhere...

[Patrick Degan]

In James Blish's Star Trek novel Spock Must Die, there is a scene in which Koloth is in pursuit of the Enterprise and is receiving data on his target but neither he nor his crew are in the least aware that somehow, someway (it is not explained how this occurred), their ship fell into an asymptotic timecurve,

It's been a loooong time, but I think it was because he aggravated the Organians.

Nope. Not even a hint as to the cause. It was extraneous to the actual plot but still an interesting and spooky scene and served in part to segue into a scene with Admiral Kor —who is the only main Klingon character to have any contact with the Organians at all in the book.

[The Yosemite Bear]

On a more serious Sci-Fi note I recall a bad movie or a twilight zone episode where astronaughts landed on a planet full of life like statues, and then over the course of staying a long while discovered that time was slowing down on the planet, and that the Statues were people who had been caught in the intiall accident, and while the new commers were starting to notice them moving when they left a room for an hour or so, the movement was actually noticeable to the astronaughts only because they were starting to slow down as well.

[Nyrath]

In James Blish's Star Trek novel Spock Must Die, there is a scene in which Koloth is in pursuit of the Enterprise and is receiving data on his target but neither he nor his crew are in the least aware that somehow, someway (it is not explained how this occurred), their ship fell into an asymptotic timecurve,

It was just one example of the many punishments the angry Organians inflicted on the Klingons once they were released from the tachyon barrier.

From SPOCK MUST DIE:

I do not suppose anyone will ever piece together exactly what happened on all the battlefronts at the moment the Organians were let loose from their planet-wide prison. Some of the myriads of incidents, however, are reflected in reports which reached the Enterprise officially, or were intercepted, and were duly entered by Sulu as Captain pro fern. Even most of these, of course, are virtually incomprehensible, but in some cases we had previously encountered the Klingon officers who were involved and can guess how they might have behaved or what they were confronted with; and in others we can reconstruct approximately what happened with the aid of the computer. But the total picture must be left to the imagination, and the computer has none-perhaps fortunately for us.

...followed by an approximate computer reconstruction of Commander Koloth trapped in the asymptotic time curve.

[FA Xerrik]

Didn't the giant aliens in SG-1 operate on a somewhat different timescale. You know, the crystal skull ones? I don't remember specifically if there was a line about them having a different time scale, or just a size scale.

[andrewgpaul]

One of Stephen Baxter's Destiny's Children novels has a race of 'humans' who have modified themselves to be silicon-based lifeforms, and have slowed their metabolism down so that they look like stone statues.

There's also a novel, the title of which I can't remember, about a ship travelling at a relativistic velocity which suffers damage so it can't decelerate. They have to wait for the universe to decompose sufficiently for it to be safe to turn off the drive.

[Patrick Degan]

In James Blish's Star Trek novel Spock Must Die, there is a scene in which Koloth is in pursuit of the Enterprise and is receiving data on his target but neither he nor his crew are in the least aware that somehow, someway (it is not explained how this occurred), their ship fell into an asymptotic timecurve,

It was just one example of the many punishments the angry Organians inflicted on the Klingons once they were released from the tachyon barrier.

From SPOCK MUST DIE:

I do not suppose anyone will ever piece together exactly what happened on all the battlefronts at the moment the Organians were let loose from their planet-wide prison. Some of the myriads of incidents, however, are reflected in reports which reached the Enterprise officially, or were intercepted, and were duly entered by Sulu as Captain pro fern. Even most of these, of course, are virtually incomprehensible, but in some cases we had previously encountered the Klingon officers who were involved and can guess how they might have behaved or what they were confronted with; and in others we can reconstruct approximately what happened with the aid of the computer. But the total picture must be left to the imagination, and the computer has none-perhaps fortunately for us.

...followed by an approximate computer reconstruction of Commander Koloth trapped in the asymptotic time curve.

Hmm... I'll have to read the book again, as soon as I can get a copy to replace the one I lost in the New Orleans flood.

[Nyrath]

There's also a novel, the title of which I can't remember, about a ship travelling at a relativistic velocity which suffers damage so it can't decelerate. They have to wait for the universe to decompose sufficiently for it to be safe to turn off the drive.

TAU ZERO by Poul Anderson. An absolute classic. Anybody who wants a painless introduction to relativistic flight should run, not walk, and get a copy.