Peter Watts has a story in Clarkesworld Magazine which revisits The Thing from the Thing’s viewpoint. It’s rather unsettling, particularly given the alien’s belief that assimilating humans is doing them a favor.

I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.

Link (via Wil Wheaton)