Most... alternate... of fictional alternate realities.

[Tom_Scud]

@Andy_L

The physics term. It’s a brilliant story.

Everything Ted Chiang writes is fucking awesome.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

The Motie aliens in the The Mote in God’s Eye by Niven and Pournelle have a fascinating, extremely detailed, internally consistent culture that is very, very different from ours. Great book.

[Mr.Excellent]

@Wendell_Wagner

There’s the novels of China Miéville set in his Bas-Lag universe - Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. The universe contains ideas from numerous other science fiction and fantasy universes thrown together willy-nilly. Despite this, the plots aren’t at all light-hearted and optimistic. They’re gritty and pessimistic.

Mieville’s brilliant, but you’re quite right about his stuff being dark. Rather too dark for my tastes, actually - his stuff is so unrelentingly grim that I find it difficult to read. Gorgeously written, though.

[YogSothoth]

Fluidic Space from Star Trek, where Species 8472 comes from. It’s a dimension where space is filled with an organic liquid, and there exists no planets, stars, or nebulae

[Lethal_Babydoll]

@Tom_Scud

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.

**“All of an Instant” **is my all-time favorite sf novel. and i read a lot of sf.

if anyone cares or just likes to read lists, here my 5 favorites.

1. “All of an Instant” by Garfinkle
2. “Farnham’s Freehold” by Heinlein
3. “Memories” by Mike McQuay
4. “Far-Seer” Robert J. Sawyer
5. “The Eyes of the Overworld” by Jack Vance or “The Golden Globe” by John Varley