Which fictional works have realities most disparate from our own? Most fantasy or sci-fi has some amount of reality bending, tweaking, or distorting, but the vast majority limit it to ‘our world, except X’ or ‘people with rubber foreheads’ or ‘extended metaphor (planets instead of islands)’.
What works make aliens… really alien. Physics truly upside down. Geometry definitively non Euclidian. Languages made of light. Cultures totally non recognizable.
Rules:
Cannot be weird solely due to the nature of the medium. So abstract paintings are out, unless they genuinely convey a sense of an alternate reality. Characters in a comic strip don’t count merely for the fact that they are in a comic strip, unless they are aware of the fact, or the reality of the comic strip changes the nature of it’s internal reality.
There should be some sort of concept or rules. It may be hard to comprehend for us, but still internally consistent in some way. Just random nonsensical abstractness doesn’t really count, unless it truly conveys a sense of a cohesive reality of some kind.
I’m hoping for better examples than my own:
The works of Greg Egan such as Diaspora often far future visions of post-human society, in which he explores a particular physics theory, and the implications of it. We get to see what life is like as a simulated being, or what would happen if a physical state more stable than our current vacuum started taking over space and we had to create versions of ourselves compatible with and capable of exploring this area of altered physical laws.
There was some graphic short story I read once, where some facilitates deals between different worlds or realities. A human gets some sort of payment in return for riding on the back of some four legged alien intelligent creature. Afterwards, the facilitator explains that these creatures get enormous pleasure from, and suffer horrible withdrawal from the act of carrying their young on their back, but this particular one had lost it’s young and needed a creature to ride it’s back.
The most alien “world” I’ve ever read was in a hard science fiction story, no bending of the rules needed: Niven’s Smoke Ring (The Integral Trees and its sequel The Smoke Ring). It’s a gas torus around a neutron star, with a main sequence companion providing sunlight. Most humans live at the ends of integral trees (immense trees with foliage on both ends, shaped like integral signs) with a small fraction of a gee from tidal forces, but in between trees, it’s all free-fall… But still with a human-breathable atmosphere.
The world shown in the third part of Isaac Asimov’s “The Gods Themselves”. It’s an alternate Earth with two coexisting intelligent species, and one of those is divide in three very different “sexes”.
I can’t recall the title, but I recall a novel set in a world where physics worked according to the ideas of the ancient Greeks. I recall that they had spaceships with life support systems that worked by spontaneous generation, the “solar system” was centered on Earth, etc.
I think I read that book, but I’m not sure. Was the Greek spaceship trying to get to the moon or something? And there was a rival ship from China (? can’t remember), where physics worked according to their traditional beliefs?
The apprentice adept series by Piers Anthony is pretty out there. Two planets that occupy the same space in two different dimensions, where each person has a counterpart on the other world, except for people from off-planet, who can travel between the dimensions. There are a lot of off-worlders on Protonserfs are brought in to works the mines. But the serfs can compete in the Game, where you can become a Citizen if you win. Anyway, the other planet, Phaze, is a magic realm with medieval serfdom and a lot of what you may expect from fantasy.
There is no shortage of other weirdness - androids, forced nudity, alien invasions, unicorns, and the like.
In “The Practice Effect” by David Brin instead of objects deteriorating with use, they’d get better instead. So the more you used a sword, the sharper it would get. A decoration would become more beautiful the more you looked at it.
Garfinkle’s other novel, “All of an Instant” (he also has a self-published novel somewhere out there; I guess he was a bit too weird for a mass audience) is probably even stranger than Celestial Matters.
AOAI is a time-travel story more or less in the vein of Asimov’s THE END OF ETERNITY, but with everything turned up to 11 or 12.
The great-granddaddy of this sort of thing has to be Flatland - a story about an inquisitive square living in a two-dimensional universe who becomes an apsotle of the 3rd dimension. It was published in 1884.
The granddaddy of this sort of thing is Olaf Stapelton’s Star Maker, which describes multiple civilizations and, in the end, the creation of multiple universes. It was published in 1938.
Neither has ever really been surpassed. Interestingly, both were, at least in part, intended to be social allegories, commenting in fictional form about issues of the day (in Flatland, such matters as religion, social class, feminism and eugenics; in Star Maker, the already-foreseen European confligration).
H.P. Lovecraft would probably win this thread. His stories, after all, are all about hideously alien monstrosities from beyond our time and space, ruling empires of nightmarishly non-Euclidean geometry.
If we’re talking change-the-course-of-history AH, the strangest resultant scenario I’ve ever read was in “The Brooklyn Project,” by William Tenn (Philip Klass) (1948).
“A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum. The story that created alien aliens. Not really a plot as much as a travelogue of a fictional Mars, the aliens are all unique and are non human in their appearance and behavior. Weirdest is probably the pyramid creature. Despite being written in 1934, it still works today and I don’t think anyone ever did a better job of it.
“The Dance of the Changer and the Three” by Terry Carr. The aliens are energy creatures – not an unusual concept – but it’s their thinking that’s completely alien to human experience. The aliens have destroyed a human colony. They can’t explain why – they like humans and had no reason for it, other than it’s connected with the story of the dance mentioned in the title. They tell the story, but it makes no sense to the humans.
Transfigurations by Michael Bishop. The aliens have some sort of rite that cannot be understood.
“Stranger Station” by Damon Knight Human and alien meet, but they are so different that their very presence in the same station drives both of them insane.
Larry Niven’s Known Space stories and novels feature some great aliens. The Kzin are best known, but the Puppeteers are even better defined (and are non-humanoid).
Physics:
“Traveller’s Rest” by David I. Masson. Set in a world where time moves at different rates depending on how close you are to the north pole.
They’ve been extended, though. Dionys Burger’s Sphereland extends it to cover the Expanding Universe and other topics, and I know there have been other sequels.
For my money, although inspired by Flatland, A.K. Dewdney’s the Planiverse is much better at describing a 2-dimensional universe. The outcome of many years of a collaborative effort via newsletter (in those pre-internet days), it convincingly describes a 2-D universe with real organic lifeforms and physical laws, rather than Abbot’s idealized geometrical forms. Worth digging up!
There have been many SF works set on very non-human-friendly worlds. Hal Clement made a career of this, with novels like Iceworld and mission of Gravity, but there have been plenty of others, like Robert Forward’s Dragon’s egg and its sequel Starquake, and life on a neutron star (governed by nuclear, rather than chemical reactions), or his Camelot 37K about an ultra-low temperature civilization.
I remember this from the Scientific American articles - interesting stuff. Yeah, Flatland has inspired reams of successors, but it is still essential alternative-universe reading - all the more so for that.
As far as I know, Star Maker hasn’t had the same effect, but I think it is just as odd.
I was gonna mention Hal Clement. One thing that stopped me was that his aliens, though they could not be more alien in location and form, are often awfully human-seeming in personality.
It’s always bothered me that, despite living in completely alien environments, Clement’s aliens have downright human points of view and psychologies. it’s the only really unconvincing thing about his books (think of how Dr. Manhattan’s way of perceiving the world has made him practically incomprehensible to other people). But i suspect that Clement did this to keep things from getting too weird. As a number of authors have pointed out, in several novels and stories, if you make your aliens too alien, it’s hard for people to relate to them, or even to understand them.
The real point of rubber-forehead aliens is not just that an actor in latex is cheaper than elaborate puppetry or CGI, but that an actor in latex still has two eyes situated above one mouth.
One thing that stopped me was that his aliens, though they could not be more alien in location and form, are often awfully human-seeming in personality.