15 KiB
[Q][D] Does scifi with non-human protagonists and antagonists exist?
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Author: u/boomfarmer Trying to be helpful*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2ykbuy/qd_does_scifi_with_nonhuman_protagonists_and/
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Score: 8
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Created: 2015-03-10T15:11:08
Post:
I'm looking for any story/book/film where the lead characters:
- are not human
- have never been human (Looking at you, Avatar)
- are preferably not humanoid
This applies to the protagonists, antagonists, deuteragonists, and really every character you normally see. Humans can be a part of the setting, but their role in the plot is at most minor. POV Aliens responding to a human invasion doesn't count, because the humans are an antagonist. Humans coming to save the day doesn't count. (Bonus paradox points if you find something in /r/hfy that satisfies these criteria.)
I'm asking here because I think /r/rational readers will probably have read a wider selection of stories, or will at least be able to point me to the correct forum.
Comments:
u/deccan2008 [+10] (16 minutes later)
Greg Egan does this. I don't believe that any character in his novel Incandescence would count as a human but it's been a while since I read that one. I haven't read his Orthogonal trilogy yet but I don't think there are any humans in it either. Depending on whether or not conscious beings who are software and have always been software count, many other stories would qualify.
u/throwaway234f32423df [+6] (2 hours later)
Orthogonal definitely qualifies. There's nothing resembling humans. It's not even in a universe remotely like ours.
Incandescence sort of qualifies. The Amalgam civilization (expanded on in a couple of short stories) is at least partially descended from humans, and I recall one of the main characters having some human ancestry. But the chapters from the "aliens'" point of view definitely qualifies.
u/callmebrotherg [+9] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (an hour later)
The Gods Themselves, by Isaac Asimov, is made of three related storylines whose respective characters don't cross over. The second storyline is from the perspective of the aliens, who only interact with the humans one or two times, via remote signals.
u/deccan2008 [+10] (21 minutes later)
And here's another one, Ted Chiang's short story Exhalation.
u/t3tsubo [+7] (39 minutes later)
They're made it of meat (http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html) is a classic one
u/notentirelyrandom [+7] (an hour later)
The novel version of Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov and I think Robert Silverberg, opens with a note that "actually everyone involved looks like a tentacle monster, but we'll narrate as if they're humans for the same reason we translated their speech into English."
And then their body type goes on to be completely irrelevant as promised, but their mind types are suspiciously humanlike.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
The novel version of Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov and I think Robert Silverberg, opens with a note that "actually everyone involved looks like a tentacle monster, but we'll narrate as if they're humans for the same reason we translated their speech into English."
I completely failed to catch that when I read it. Huh.
u/ArmokGoB [+5] (7 hours later)
Watership Down. No, seriously.
u/boomfarmer [+1] Trying to be helpful (7 hours later)
And actually all of Redwall, now that I think about it.
u/Nighzmarquls [+6] (a day later)
Oh I just realized in case you did not notice your asking for this in particular. TVTROPES:Xenofiction
u/abramdemski [+3] (15 hours later)
Most Pixar movies satisfy this... although whether the characters are fish, robots, toys, or monsters, they unfortunately act 100% human.
u/CopperZirconium [+2] (an hour later)
Deep Rise is a forum adventure by /u/Nighzmarquls that I think does a good job at being alien. Warning though, it goes to deep, dark, weird places.
u/Nighzmarquls [+3] (6 hours later)
Oh hey thanks ! and yeah I actually made the species I wrote deeprise about specifically as a 'open species' for anyone else to use for their own fiction in case some one needed an alien species.
u/boomfarmer [+1] Trying to be helpful (9 hours later)
Well. That's certainly non-humanoid.
u/None [+2] (20 hours later)
Greg Egan's Orthogonal trilogy takes place in a universe with different physics where humans are literally impossible.
Greg Egan's sci-fi is almost as hard as Arthur C. Clarke's.
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
Uh, Egan's sci-fi is WAY harder than Arthur C. Clarke. I don't even know why Clark gets labeled "hard sci-fi". Have you read Childhood's End? Clarke includes unexplained mystical psychic powers in practically all of his novels.
Not to mention faster-than-light travel!
How can it be hard scifi with FTL travel?
u/None [+1] (5 days later)
And Schild's Ladder has a negative space wedgie which
I liked Rama, for having the thing walk here at sublight. Let me adjust my previous statement, and put Egan and Clarke on roughly equal footing, and say they are hard in different ways.
u/None [+1] (11 days later)
I fear I still must disagree.
many of Egan's books and short stories clearly began with an idea, not about characters or about events, but about physics or engineering or math. permutation city clearly began as thought experiment about Solomonoff induction and Tegmark IV Multiverses, and the plot only exists to explore the implications of these ideas. the orthogonal trilogy is the same way; Egan was reading about how, in our Minkowskian 3+1d universe, if you have a right triangle whose hypotenuse lies on the time dimension, |a^2 - b^2| = c^2 rather than ordinary pythagoras applying, and he wondered what a universe where time was more spacelike in that sense would be like, and he did some math and found out that such a universe might be really cool, containing both time travel and infinite free energy (although, sadly, not free negentropy). from reading it let the plot of the orthogonal trilogy is really just an excuse, a way of padding the book so it isn't just Yalds and Carla and gang having conversations about particle physics that literally require wolfram alpha and some scratch paper to work problems on if you want to understand. That's not to say the plot is bad, but it's just the ordinary subplots Egan uses in all his books: cults who protest Progress, gender politics, rejection of death as the natural order of things and excellent, satisfying refutations any argument it says otherwise, etc. all of these things show up in all of Egan's books. the thing that makes each new book worth reading isn't these rehashed subplots, but the mathematical, physical, or philosophical idea so cool that Egan couldn't help but write a book about it.
This property, to me, is an important membership test for the category "hard scifi".
Another excellent example is John Wright's 'Count to a Trillion' series. Wright had spent a good deal of time thinking about how interstellar and intergalactic civilization would work, without the convenient crutch of faster-than-light travel. Would there be commerce? Would there be war? How could you make trade possible, when taking a contract, gathering the items, and delivering them to the destination, might take so long that when you got there, the species you made the deal with is a distant memory, or perhaps no one even remembers them at all, or perhaps the planet no longer supports life, or was long ago conquered by a poorly programmed AI who has been busy for the past hundred thousand years turning all the matter in the whole system into nanotech.
How do you trade in such an environment?
Wright decided to explore this idea, and the answer he came up with was to create a civilization that worships game theory, contract law, and utilitarianism. To have a civilization which could either remain unchanged over vast geological time scales, or is willing to fulfill obligations of ancestor civilizations and species, when someone shows up and says that 3 million years ago someone ordered some goats in exchange for 3000 grams of antimatter, they have to actually give it over, and also perpetuate this attribute indefinitely into the future.
Indeed, "count to a trillion" refers to the length of time before humanity get an answer from the potentially hostile aliens as to whether they will be admitted into society, or subjugated into slavery. all that is required of them is to have a civilization around that time who remembers the pact, can build a deceleration laser for the incoming craft, and has the will to do it; this will prove humanity is capable of fulfilling long-term contracts. Throughout the book there are two transhumans, the antagonist and the protagonist, who both achieved intelligence augmentation at roughly the same time and quickly fought each other to a stalemate. They spend the next couple tens of thousands of years manipulating society against each other, as per their respective goals of building the ideal slave race so their sentence is as short as possible versus building the ideal human race to resist the incoming aliens long enough until the galactic dominion rules in humanity's favor. And it's a great plot. But underlying it all is this notion of the contract as an inviolable game theoretical tactic, which brings incredible gains from interstellar commerce if and only if you regard contracts as being part of the laws of physic, something you couldn't violate if you tried so you might as well not. It all stems from this idea, specifically reversing the "warp drive" trope and actually trying to answer some of the hard questions.
Now, admittedly, Egan doesn't always get this right. Quarantine was based on the collapse interpretation lol. The physics in it, is just plain wrong. It's a great book, but because of this mistake, it doesn't give me the same sense of sharpness that I feel is what warrants the word "hard" in "hard science fiction". [Quarantine](#s "although, I liked how sometimes, when he would abuse quantum uncertainty to, say, guess a combination lock on the first try, he would guess like 364818, then later say 'I can't believe you picked the combination '999999'!' It made me realize that the events of the book could happen even if all the science is wrong; some set of Everett branches would experience "success" just by chance, and once it had happened a bunch of times in a row, those branches would think they could successfully manipulate the eigenvalues. every time they tried it, the vast majority of them would fail, but some vanishingly tiny proportion would experience success, with things like security cameras spontaneously malfunctioning so as to render them invisible... yeah, VANISHINGLY small proportion... but nonzero. And at the end when we got to see several branches, including failed branches, it strongly implied that there is no collapse. So perhaps the book was okay... but only if the scientists were totally 100% wrong.")
Maybe the real membership test for the category "hard scifi" for me is whether or not the world depicted is actually physically, mathematically, and technologically plausible. Stories where the author had a non-scientifically-possible idea and then used science to implement the idea in the story, as a way of pumping in implausibility disguised as technobabble, that the result is more properly labeled "fantasy . so, Star Trek has scifi elements like space travel and xenodiplomacy and spandex, and also fantasy elements like faster-than-light travel and psi powers. Similar to Asimov's foundation; how did foundation and empire Also similar to some of Clark's novels. Admittedly Rama was better than most of Clark's novels, but I feel like it still had rather more fantasy elements than I usually like in my hard scifi.
u/Escapement [+1] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (32 minutes later)
A few ideas (none of which are really rational/rationalist, but all of which are entertaining nonetheless):
Steven Brust's Khaavren romances, which follow essentially (sadly humanoid) sort-of-elves throughout and has only very minor human parts. These elves have a fairly interesting nonhuman polity and outlook and society. The novels themselves are based loosely on the D'Artagnan Romances (The Three Musketeers and sequels). They are written in a unique comic ornate Dumas Imitation style, so I'd heavily recommend trying the first (The Phoenix Guards) before buying them - some people hate the style and basically can't read the books, while others, myself included, love the books specifically because of the style.
Asimov's The Gods Themselves has a large middle section in an extremely nonhuman, very sparsely described section with no human characters whatsoever. It's pretty neat.
Ted Chiang's short story Exhalation is about an extremely nonhuman society and scientist.
Depending on how you count humans... Sean McMullen's fantasy series Moonworlds has technically got two humans/former humans in the first book as a central characters, one who then recurrs in minor roles, but all characters are at least mostly humanoid-ish barring extra arms and have extremely recognizably human societies and outlooks, and 3 of 4 of these books have these humanish-characters with no main character a human or descent of humans.
u/2-4601 [+1] (49 minutes later)
Try reading the Pandora's Legions series. It's, well, half of what you want - each story switches between a human helping an alien, more-or-less benevolent (though not terribly smart) empire integrate more alien species into itself, and an alien officer trying to cope with the frankly disastrous effects of humans' own integration because of the dangerous but seemingly beneficial ideas they have (such as capitalism with legally mandated consumption).
u/Stop_Sign [+1] (an hour later)
Halo from the arbiters perspective is close
u/buckykat [+1] (3 hours later)
Asimov's The Gods Themselves centers on really alien aliens.
Alan Dean Foster's Nor Crystal Tears follows an insectoid alien in a first-contact scenario.
u/FreelanceJake [+1] (2 days later)
Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death by James Tiptree.
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
The Culture series by Iain M Banks does not involve humans, though most of the characters are humanoid.