If I’d thought of it while typing the OP, I would have written “stories not set on the surface of a spherical world.” Though then some wiseass would have mentioned Namor the Sub-Mariner and I’d have had to threaten something typically immature, unlikely, and violent.
I’m not sure how important the word “planet” is, above. Sometimes whether it’s on a planet is undetermined, but so is the rest of the geography, to the extent that describing its existence as spherical is not likely to be correct. The best example might be Neverland:
Then there’s Matter, by Iaian Banks, which also doesn’t qualify, but only on a technicality: it’s a “shell world”, constructed by a long-dead alien race, consisting of many difference concentric spheres, with whole civilizations living on each level of the construction.
Mesklin from Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity. The planet is extremely oblate – twice as wide at the equator than it is at the poles.
It is inhabited.
I wrote “planet” because I wanted to exclude spaceships and space stations. And, honestly, things like asteroids.
You are misremembering. Gaia is a hollow wagon wheel shape, including hollow spokes that connect the hub to the rim.
Not sure if you’re looking for books to read or just possible examples, but Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series is set on a conjoined world separated by a ‘curtain’ which divides a technological society from a magical one.
I read it in my early teens and enjoyed the first three books, but I wouldn’t recommend them to an adult.
Because of the nature of the curtain, there is not only a North and South Pole, but also an East and West Pole. Beyond that, the setting is more of an inter-dimensional device rather than one that is specific to the nature of the world itself.
I was just cleaningout some old books, and I chanced across Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series, most of which I own in hardback. God, but they’re horrid. Not all of – the first three, centering on Stile, are at least readable, if something less than poetic – but the latter four are so awesomely wretched that it beggars description.
And, yes, I do recall that Phaze was, in addition to being magic (of the very worse sort, but that’s another issue), a flat world.
I live about 10 miles from their old commune. It’s a state historical site and they have some really cool items on display, including an “inside out” globe of the earth.
Well, it’s a little bit of a spoiler even identifying the book in this case, so:
Christopher Priest’s Inverted World is a book you’d want to read if you’re looking for books of the type described in your OP.
At the time, I thought the first book was actually interesting and read the next two somewhat perfunctorily.
I was going to say that I wouldn’t necessarily even recommend them to tweeners, but considering the success of the Twilight series…
As I think on it, I remember enjoying the first three Adept books, and even the first seven Incarnations books, at the time. But the latter four of the Adept series and all the fricking Modes were so bad that they ruined the others by association (and their charms were always minimal anyway). It was the combination of too many puzzles and way too much pedophilia justification.
Some of Larry Niven’s Known Space stories take place on Jinx which is somewhat egg-shaped (the east and west poles stick out of the atmosphere).
This is one of those phrases in which the first three words are redundant.
Richard A. Lupoff’s Circumpolar! takes place on (well, mostly above) a torus-shaped world, and features, IIRC, Lothar von Richthofen (the Red Baron’s brother) and maybe Amelia Earhart (there was a chick pilot; I remember that much) trying to be the first aviators to fly through the hole.
There’s also Stross’s “Missile Gap” about an Alderson disk.
Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky is set in a great flat world the size of a galaxy, bordered by immense walls, an endless river, and illuminated by a sky of fire (the titular Bright).
In Vernor Vinge’s Fire on the Deep, there is a solar system where so many habitats, inhabited asterioids, etc., were present that the solar system viewed from above looked like disk … think Saturn’s rings around the sun, only MUCH larger, with the objects in the ring MUCH closer totether, often physically connnected, and inhabited throughout, by a variety of spacegoing species and civilizations.
Quite obscure, but David Lake’s Ring of Truth is set on a “world” that is the inside of a spherical void within infinite solid matter.
Also, the Lavalite World from that series (world whose topology is based on that oozy stuff inside a lava lamp),
In John the Balladeer, a collection of the Silver John stories by Manley Wade Wellman, there is a story, “Further Down the Trail”, IIRC, in which the Earth is definitely not spherical, presumably flat. (To clarify, “Further Down the Trail” is really a collection of ultra-short fantasy stories.)