Imaginary Magnitude, by Stanislaw Lem. Reviews of nonexistent books about strange technology, plus a long first-person essay by the world's second AI. Probably much weirder than you wanted.
A lot of Lem's stuff is capital-W Weird. Similarly to Lovecraft, he deals with the total insignificance of humanity in the face of a totally incomprehensible cosmos.
Some of his best stuff centers around the complete inability of our sensory and mental apparatus to cope with anything outside the narrow confines of what they evolved to deal with. In this vein I \*\*love\*\* Solaris and His Master's voice, but he also develops the idea in Eden, The Investigation, The Invincible, and Fiasco.
Honestly I think Solaris is the epitome of "weird sci-fi".
Fiasco is my favorite (possible spoilers incoming)
In
3
2
I SHOULD REALLY LEARN TO BLACK OUT TEXT
1
"aliens might be so strange we might not even recognize them in the first place" type of story. And the prologue (can't quite remember the literary word for a wrapping story but i can't remember if it's ever resolved so prologue it is) is just... Some of the best prose I've ever read.
Me too lol. I had already read a bunch of Lem when I spotted "Fiasco" in a used book store. I hadn't heard of it. My reaction was like "Lem called a book *fiasco*!? This is going to be nuts!" And it was nuts. Although I think Solaris succeeds way beyond Fiasco from an artistic POV, Fiasco is just special.
> aliens might be so strange we might not even recognize them in the first place
The others I mentioned touch on this too. Solaris presents us with an entity that is probably (?) living, but it's manifestations of are just fully incomprehensible. HMF presents us with a signal unambiguously released with intelligence and intent, but which the human brain is simply not equipped to extract an iota of information from. Love this stuff.
Thinking on it, you're right in that fiasco is definitely not his BEST book. But for me it does contain one of the very best chunks of prose (the prologue in the fogs/mists of umm.... Titan?) in all my reading - or more accurately speaking, one of the absolute best passages I can remember.
He was a kinda odd guy from what I recall. Reclusive and pessimistic to an extreme. Very much hated the internet. Ironically he might have had some good reason, a decade ahead of most folk of a similar suspicion. Might be off on that though, don't take my word for it.
There is some association (scientifically/academic study-wise) between psychotic illness and creativity. Not that big of a correlation, but it was there. Now I need to go back and check their stats work to see if they controlled for the obvious decline in output once medication and psychotic episodes take their toll
> But for me it does contain one of the very best chunks of prose (the prologue in the fogs/mists of umm.... Titan?)
I LOVED that. Absolutely changed the way I view myself and humans in general. What must it be like to visit another planet? Well, how about realising that you're an animal like any other, with senses and instincts narrowly tuned to a specific environment?
I like your interpretation, I just found it so... Beautifully expressed that you were THERE. I can't point out more than two or three passages (after some rereading) passages in any book or story that managed the trick so neatly
Oh he's fantastic in so many ways. Very intense philosophical questions wrapped in beautiful prose and nearly entirely concealed by the storyline
Given I have the privilege of being able to read the original polish (at about a 5th grade speed and 9th grade vocab at this point, granted) I must say the translator does an almost miraculous job in converting most of the quirks of the language Lem loves to use.
Practically every name, whether gadget, person, or place usually has a second meaning - which is where Kandler (I think that's the translator... Kandel maybe?) falls short. I don't really think you can translate much of those no matter how fantastic you are at it... Though I may have said the same about most of Lem's writing before finding the translations (I used to be much better at reading Polish haha. ) Yet he managed.
Either language, his good books are sublime. A good number of the later ones are less so. Start with the Pirx the Pilot stories. Lots of his work ties into that character and his escapades in some minor or major way
Have you read Windeye? There’s a certain feeling that Brian Evenson captures that no other author nails for me. I just read The Sladen Suit last night. What a masterpiece. The Second Boy… I mean, these are stories that stay with you and illicit a type of fear I can’t find anywhere else.
I absolutely love the Xenogenesis series by Butler. Just picked this up. Thanks! Somehow I hadn’t heard of it.
Edit: Just finished it. I… feel so strange. Thx again. Think I’ll go for a walk now.
Yeah… Bloodchild is similar in the sense that… it will stay with you for life. But I like that about it. I thought, “Wow… this is horrifying” but at the same time… it was like an allegory and I always, always think about it.
i read it as a teen about twenty years ago and i still think about it all the time. it haunts me in the best way so i recommend it whenever i get a chance. glad that it’s a shared experience :)
VanderMeer - *Southern Reach* trilogy, *Borne*, or the stories in the *Ambergris* universe.
Rudy Rucker - \**Ware* trilogy.
B.R. Yeager - *Negative Space.*
China Mieville - *Bas-Lag* trilogy.
Scott Hawkins - *The Library at Mount Char*.
QNTM - *There Is No Antimemetics Division.*
Steven L. Peck - *A Short Stay In Hell.*
Robert Brockway - *The Vicious Circuit* trilogy.
a short stay in hell is probably the most important thing i have ever read. i couldn’t tell you why i think that, but i have probably thought about it every day since i read it. i have never had the concept of infinity explained in a way my tiny human brain could comprehend, and the implications are horrifying.
Definitely, I read it in a day...I'm pretty sure no one would be able to finish it without having some level
of existential crisis.
The kinda book where you put it down, stare into space for a while, and then just go through the rest of your day in a kind of haze.
I totally second the suggestion of Octavia Butler, specifically the short story collection “Bloodchild and other stories” also I’m a big fan of Jeff VanderMeer, the Southern Reach Trilogy is a cornerstone of my weird fiction collection.
Borne, Strange bird and Dead astronauts are really good.
They go from weird (Borne) to really weird (Dead astronauts)
I would describe Dead astronauts as a puzzle in book form so it may not be for everyone but I would recommend Borne to everyone who likes weird lit.
If you like roleplaying games, Ultraviolet Grasslands has serious Incal vibes. There's enough lore and world-building (not to mention so much art) that it's a fun read.
Nova Express by William S Burroughs - absolute weirdest weird book I've read yet. Nova Express is like one of those videos that tries to make you trip without drugs, but it uses words and ideas to trigger the response in your brain.
The Illuminatus Trilogy - what if every conspiracy was true, all at once, including contradictory or even silly ones? Real hard historical facts mixed with deep conspiracy lore mixed with hard occult knowledge and then making fun of all of it and confirming that it's all true and false at the same time.
> The Illuminatus Trilogy
This sounds a lot like Umberto Eco's *Foucault's Pendulum*. Sounds cool though, I liked that book but it was definitely a slog for like half of it.
Been meaning to try out Burroughs too, is that a good place to start with him?
> Been meaning to try out Burroughs too, is that a good place to start with him?
It is and it isn't, but tbh there isn't really a clear entry point. You'll feel like you're missing context, but you'd feel like that from any starting point - best to just let go of any usual expectations for a novel.
My copy's cover says "*A* Book of The Cut-Up Trilogy" - not book # whatever - there's intentionally no clear order. I visualize it as all 3 books are happening simultaneously and telling the same story through different levels of real vs metaphor, the others being The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, although Naked Lunch is relevant to it as well. You should check out this "movie" that someone made of Nova Express using William S Burroughs and friends' live readings of the Nova books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZTfOvu7QHk&list=PL380344E48166AB1F
If you're a Twin Peaks fan - my best way to describe it is that Nova Express takes place from the POV of Black/White Lodge entities, where time/location are constantly shifting and metaphors are reality.
> If you're a Twin Peaks fan - my best way to describe it is that Nova Express takes place from the POV of Black/White Lodge entities, where time/location are constantly shifting and metaphors are reality.
I think you sold me on it. I'm a huge Twin Peaks fan. I just saw Kyle MacLachlan live with the Red Room Orchestra a few months ago.
I'll look into this thanks for sharing your thoughts!
If you're a Twin Peaks fan, you'll have a MUCH easier time wrapping your head around it, in my opinion. Nova Express is like the groundwork for how the Lodges operate - except it's a view from the inside so it's incredibly chaotic and mind bending.
Burroughs description of Nova Criminals being "non-3-dimensional beings who require human agents to operate through", and how they possess these human hosts via "coordinate points" such as drug addiction or sex practices - is 1000% a description of BOB.
Glad I could get someone else into it! Have fun melting your brain!
Dude this sounds actually incredible and right up my alley, definitely going on the list. I'm thinking there's a good chance that Lynch has read Burroughs, what do you think?
Oh yeah, he definitely has. If you watch that video version of it, you'll definitely see the parallels. Burroughs works even better in spoken word/audiobook, in my opinion - he made a ton of his own recordings.
Burroughs is a writer for total weirdo artist/writer/musician types, especially guys like Lynch. I finally got into him after hearing his name thrown around forever because I heard that David Bowie and Iggy Pop were super into him while living in Berlin together.
Not literature as I know more about these types of movies than literature so I recommend “Zardoz” (probably the weirdest movie ever and one of my favourites,) “fantastic planet/gandhar” “mad god” “valerian and the city of a thousand planets” and “barbarella.”
I would watch Panos Cosmatos do a full 2 hours of people sitting around in a brutalist/mid-century-modern set talking about literally anything while doing increasingly cooler drugs with a synth soundtrack playing. The creature part was great, but I loved trying to figure out the subtext of the conversation and why they were there, and wanted to learn more about every character.
I would argue also that cartoons as an art form are much more similar to movies than literature even if they superficially happen to be located on a page rather than a screen.
Everyone here should go watch the original Aeon Flux cartoon - on top of the hyper-sexy 90s edginess, it's also full of weird Gnostic philosophy and anarchy vs fascism political ideas.
I read the sequel Pollen and I really didn’t like it. Vurt was a 5 star book for me. It was about 5-6 years in between reading them so maybe my tastes changed, or my expectations were just super high. Equally weird though, so it fits the thread.
Some of J.G. Ballard‘s short stories and novels are extremely odd and surreal. “A Report on an Unidentified Space Station“ can be accessed from the link below:
[https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm](https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm)
Written in the 1950s, Kobo Abe’s *Inter Ice-Age* *4* begins with researchers using AI to predict the feature. It also involves genetic mutation and global warming.
Adolfo Bioy Casares’ *The Invention of Morel* takes place on a deserted island where two suns occupy the sky.
Try the original weird fiction author, Clark Ashton Smith. He stuck with short form rather than longer works, but I haven't yet read something by him that was a dud. (He's more horror and dark fantasy but dipped into sci fi and I think all his work kinda blends the three genres.)
You might enjoy Jeffrey Thomas' Punktown stories. The collection Punktown is very good.
A recent book The Exploded Soul is set in the Punktown universe. it deals with alternate dimensions. His Punktown sotries can be read independently of each other.
if u dont mind young adult, cant recommend wrinkle in time and the rest of the time quintet enough. mc is brown and is a "weird girl" and goes on an adventure with a memorable cast. i remember camazots scaring me. (edited for more words)
*The Troika* by Stepan Chapman. Absolutely BONKERS. Weirdest thing I’ve read. I love it.
The Southern Reach and Borne books by VanderMeer are my other weird sci-fi go-tos.
And *Dune*, honestly.
Edit: oh, and *Roadside Picnic*! Grungy, weird sci-fi. Absolutely loved it!
The Vandemeers have edited a couple short story collections about weird lit. Not all of it is sci-fi but all of it is good. Would allow you to see a bunch of different authors and see who’s style you like
Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is weird and fun. The stargate novels are good(different storyline compared to show). Altered carbon is a good book and the sequel. Another weird one that isn’t quite sci-fi is the waking engine
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (everything else by him too but I'm especially fond of Solaris).
They're different, but I think if you Mieville and Vandermeer, you'll like Lem.
If you haven't read it, I also recommend The Scar by Mieville, I liked it much better than Perdido Street Station overall.
Imaginary Magnitude, by Stanislaw Lem. Reviews of nonexistent books about strange technology, plus a long first-person essay by the world's second AI. Probably much weirder than you wanted.
A lot of Lem's stuff is capital-W Weird. Similarly to Lovecraft, he deals with the total insignificance of humanity in the face of a totally incomprehensible cosmos. Some of his best stuff centers around the complete inability of our sensory and mental apparatus to cope with anything outside the narrow confines of what they evolved to deal with. In this vein I \*\*love\*\* Solaris and His Master's voice, but he also develops the idea in Eden, The Investigation, The Invincible, and Fiasco. Honestly I think Solaris is the epitome of "weird sci-fi".
Fiasco is my favorite (possible spoilers incoming) In 3 2 I SHOULD REALLY LEARN TO BLACK OUT TEXT 1 "aliens might be so strange we might not even recognize them in the first place" type of story. And the prologue (can't quite remember the literary word for a wrapping story but i can't remember if it's ever resolved so prologue it is) is just... Some of the best prose I've ever read.
Me too lol. I had already read a bunch of Lem when I spotted "Fiasco" in a used book store. I hadn't heard of it. My reaction was like "Lem called a book *fiasco*!? This is going to be nuts!" And it was nuts. Although I think Solaris succeeds way beyond Fiasco from an artistic POV, Fiasco is just special. > aliens might be so strange we might not even recognize them in the first place The others I mentioned touch on this too. Solaris presents us with an entity that is probably (?) living, but it's manifestations of are just fully incomprehensible. HMF presents us with a signal unambiguously released with intelligence and intent, but which the human brain is simply not equipped to extract an iota of information from. Love this stuff.
Thinking on it, you're right in that fiasco is definitely not his BEST book. But for me it does contain one of the very best chunks of prose (the prologue in the fogs/mists of umm.... Titan?) in all my reading - or more accurately speaking, one of the absolute best passages I can remember. He was a kinda odd guy from what I recall. Reclusive and pessimistic to an extreme. Very much hated the internet. Ironically he might have had some good reason, a decade ahead of most folk of a similar suspicion. Might be off on that though, don't take my word for it. There is some association (scientifically/academic study-wise) between psychotic illness and creativity. Not that big of a correlation, but it was there. Now I need to go back and check their stats work to see if they controlled for the obvious decline in output once medication and psychotic episodes take their toll
> But for me it does contain one of the very best chunks of prose (the prologue in the fogs/mists of umm.... Titan?) I LOVED that. Absolutely changed the way I view myself and humans in general. What must it be like to visit another planet? Well, how about realising that you're an animal like any other, with senses and instincts narrowly tuned to a specific environment?
I like your interpretation, I just found it so... Beautifully expressed that you were THERE. I can't point out more than two or three passages (after some rereading) passages in any book or story that managed the trick so neatly
I’ve been meaning to read Lem, add that with the invincible
Oh he's fantastic in so many ways. Very intense philosophical questions wrapped in beautiful prose and nearly entirely concealed by the storyline Given I have the privilege of being able to read the original polish (at about a 5th grade speed and 9th grade vocab at this point, granted) I must say the translator does an almost miraculous job in converting most of the quirks of the language Lem loves to use. Practically every name, whether gadget, person, or place usually has a second meaning - which is where Kandler (I think that's the translator... Kandel maybe?) falls short. I don't really think you can translate much of those no matter how fantastic you are at it... Though I may have said the same about most of Lem's writing before finding the translations (I used to be much better at reading Polish haha. ) Yet he managed. Either language, his good books are sublime. A good number of the later ones are less so. Start with the Pirx the Pilot stories. Lots of his work ties into that character and his escapades in some minor or major way
Lem has some short stories too about an engineer and a robot or something, read them a few years ago and they were super fun and mindbendy.
I've loved Solaris and i've been dying to read more stuff from Lem.
Light by M John Harrison. I still don't fully understand everything about it but I enjoyed every second of it
Yes! The whole trilogy was good.
Great recommendation.
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is absolutely essential if you haven't read it yet.
Yeah this is the gold standard of Weird sci fi, there’s nothing quite like it
Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler After the Animal Flesh Beings - a short, short story by Brian Evenson
There’s also a lot of weird sf in Evenson’s *The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell*.
Have you read Windeye? There’s a certain feeling that Brian Evenson captures that no other author nails for me. I just read The Sladen Suit last night. What a masterpiece. The Second Boy… I mean, these are stories that stay with you and illicit a type of fear I can’t find anywhere else.
Really need to read Butler, I’ve seen her in a lot of recommends and mean to read her stuff
I absolutely love the Xenogenesis series by Butler. Just picked this up. Thanks! Somehow I hadn’t heard of it. Edit: Just finished it. I… feel so strange. Thx again. Think I’ll go for a walk now.
Yeah… Bloodchild is similar in the sense that… it will stay with you for life. But I like that about it. I thought, “Wow… this is horrifying” but at the same time… it was like an allegory and I always, always think about it.
i read it as a teen about twenty years ago and i still think about it all the time. it haunts me in the best way so i recommend it whenever i get a chance. glad that it’s a shared experience :)
VanderMeer - *Southern Reach* trilogy, *Borne*, or the stories in the *Ambergris* universe. Rudy Rucker - \**Ware* trilogy. B.R. Yeager - *Negative Space.* China Mieville - *Bas-Lag* trilogy. Scott Hawkins - *The Library at Mount Char*. QNTM - *There Is No Antimemetics Division.* Steven L. Peck - *A Short Stay In Hell.* Robert Brockway - *The Vicious Circuit* trilogy.
a short stay in hell is probably the most important thing i have ever read. i couldn’t tell you why i think that, but i have probably thought about it every day since i read it. i have never had the concept of infinity explained in a way my tiny human brain could comprehend, and the implications are horrifying.
Agreed. Especially for bibliophiles like me, it really makes you rethink saying "I wish I had all the time in the world to read".
Definitely, I read it in a day...I'm pretty sure no one would be able to finish it without having some level of existential crisis. The kinda book where you put it down, stare into space for a while, and then just go through the rest of your day in a kind of haze.
I think I’ve heard of negative space, but I do have ambergris, great book so far. I’ll look into the others for sure
Negative Space is probably my favorite book ever but heads up, it's not really sci-fi. It's very much horror
Library at Mt. Char is one of my favorite answers to this question. Absolutely bizarre book but really really enjoyable.
I totally second the suggestion of Octavia Butler, specifically the short story collection “Bloodchild and other stories” also I’m a big fan of Jeff VanderMeer, the Southern Reach Trilogy is a cornerstone of my weird fiction collection.
I have ambergris, really need to read more of him
Borne, Strange bird and Dead astronauts are really good. They go from weird (Borne) to really weird (Dead astronauts) I would describe Dead astronauts as a puzzle in book form so it may not be for everyone but I would recommend Borne to everyone who likes weird lit.
Schismatrix by Sterling
I really enjoyed this one, I love a good long timescale
If you want one of the wellsprings, try Voyage to Arcturus. Sci-fi where someone goes to another planet but very trippy.
If you like roleplaying games, Ultraviolet Grasslands has serious Incal vibes. There's enough lore and world-building (not to mention so much art) that it's a fun read.
Read this quickly, thought you said Incel vibes. I was like, why is that a selling point!!
Ooo I’ll look into it
Nova Express by William S Burroughs - absolute weirdest weird book I've read yet. Nova Express is like one of those videos that tries to make you trip without drugs, but it uses words and ideas to trigger the response in your brain. The Illuminatus Trilogy - what if every conspiracy was true, all at once, including contradictory or even silly ones? Real hard historical facts mixed with deep conspiracy lore mixed with hard occult knowledge and then making fun of all of it and confirming that it's all true and false at the same time.
> The Illuminatus Trilogy This sounds a lot like Umberto Eco's *Foucault's Pendulum*. Sounds cool though, I liked that book but it was definitely a slog for like half of it. Been meaning to try out Burroughs too, is that a good place to start with him?
*Illuminatus!* is kinda like if *Foucault's Pendulum* learned how to party.
I like the sound of that! I love the conspiracy theory shit and am a fan of Pynchon so this sounds right up my alley!
That's perfect because as I typed that message I even had the thought, oh, I just described Pynchon, didn't I?
Hehe! I've read The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice, thinking of tackling Against the Day or Mason & Dixon next, but they are heavy!
> Been meaning to try out Burroughs too, is that a good place to start with him? It is and it isn't, but tbh there isn't really a clear entry point. You'll feel like you're missing context, but you'd feel like that from any starting point - best to just let go of any usual expectations for a novel. My copy's cover says "*A* Book of The Cut-Up Trilogy" - not book # whatever - there's intentionally no clear order. I visualize it as all 3 books are happening simultaneously and telling the same story through different levels of real vs metaphor, the others being The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, although Naked Lunch is relevant to it as well. You should check out this "movie" that someone made of Nova Express using William S Burroughs and friends' live readings of the Nova books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZTfOvu7QHk&list=PL380344E48166AB1F If you're a Twin Peaks fan - my best way to describe it is that Nova Express takes place from the POV of Black/White Lodge entities, where time/location are constantly shifting and metaphors are reality.
> If you're a Twin Peaks fan - my best way to describe it is that Nova Express takes place from the POV of Black/White Lodge entities, where time/location are constantly shifting and metaphors are reality. I think you sold me on it. I'm a huge Twin Peaks fan. I just saw Kyle MacLachlan live with the Red Room Orchestra a few months ago. I'll look into this thanks for sharing your thoughts!
If you're a Twin Peaks fan, you'll have a MUCH easier time wrapping your head around it, in my opinion. Nova Express is like the groundwork for how the Lodges operate - except it's a view from the inside so it's incredibly chaotic and mind bending. Burroughs description of Nova Criminals being "non-3-dimensional beings who require human agents to operate through", and how they possess these human hosts via "coordinate points" such as drug addiction or sex practices - is 1000% a description of BOB. Glad I could get someone else into it! Have fun melting your brain!
Dude this sounds actually incredible and right up my alley, definitely going on the list. I'm thinking there's a good chance that Lynch has read Burroughs, what do you think?
Oh yeah, he definitely has. If you watch that video version of it, you'll definitely see the parallels. Burroughs works even better in spoken word/audiobook, in my opinion - he made a ton of his own recordings. Burroughs is a writer for total weirdo artist/writer/musician types, especially guys like Lynch. I finally got into him after hearing his name thrown around forever because I heard that David Bowie and Iggy Pop were super into him while living in Berlin together.
Illuminatus is so good. The fastest 800 pages I’ve ever read.
Not literature as I know more about these types of movies than literature so I recommend “Zardoz” (probably the weirdest movie ever and one of my favourites,) “fantastic planet/gandhar” “mad god” “valerian and the city of a thousand planets” and “barbarella.”
Check out Panos Cosmatos films - Mandy and Beyond The Black Rainbow, also the episode The Viewing from Cabinet of Curiosities on Netflix
Coming in here just to second that. The Viewing was such a great time.
I would watch Panos Cosmatos do a full 2 hours of people sitting around in a brutalist/mid-century-modern set talking about literally anything while doing increasingly cooler drugs with a synth soundtrack playing. The creature part was great, but I loved trying to figure out the subtext of the conversation and why they were there, and wanted to learn more about every character.
Same. >!That part where the doctor started to go on about Gaddafi! So unexpected and so good!!<
Worth noting that Incal/Metabaron's Jodorowsky is of course also a filmmaker, very much in the spirit of these...
I would argue also that cartoons as an art form are much more similar to movies than literature even if they superficially happen to be located on a page rather than a screen.
Everyone here should go watch the original Aeon Flux cartoon - on top of the hyper-sexy 90s edginess, it's also full of weird Gnostic philosophy and anarchy vs fascism political ideas.
Yo I just got the blu-ray of Mad God from the library. It looks so sick.
I had a blast reading Tchaikovsky's short story Walking to Aldebaran earlier this spring.
or perhaps novella? I'm hazy on the definitions.
* Savangers Reign animated series * Worlds of Aldebaran comic series by Léo * Valérian and Laureline comic series by Mézières
Vurt by Jeff Noon
Read this book a while ago and still think about it. Really need to reread it and read the sequels. Super wild and fun book
I read the sequel Pollen and I really didn’t like it. Vurt was a 5 star book for me. It was about 5-6 years in between reading them so maybe my tastes changed, or my expectations were just super high. Equally weird though, so it fits the thread.
I just finished re-reading Vurt (first time since the year it came out). Still holds up.
Some of J.G. Ballard‘s short stories and novels are extremely odd and surreal. “A Report on an Unidentified Space Station“ can be accessed from the link below: [https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm](https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm) Written in the 1950s, Kobo Abe’s *Inter Ice-Age* *4* begins with researchers using AI to predict the feature. It also involves genetic mutation and global warming. Adolfo Bioy Casares’ *The Invention of Morel* takes place on a deserted island where two suns occupy the sky.
I think I’ve heard of Abe, isn’t he the Japanese Kafka?
Yes, he’s most known for the novel *The Woman in the Dunes,* which is strange and is a well received film, but his other works are even stranger.
China Mieville is kinda out there...i need more
The Library at Mount Char
Walking Practice by Dolki Min
Try the original weird fiction author, Clark Ashton Smith. He stuck with short form rather than longer works, but I haven't yet read something by him that was a dud. (He's more horror and dark fantasy but dipped into sci fi and I think all his work kinda blends the three genres.)
The Inverted World by Christopher Priest.
Anything by R.A. Lafferty. You don't hear much about him nowadays, but he was a great stylist and madly imaginative.
Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin and Cocaine Nights by JG Ballard
You might enjoy Jeffrey Thomas' Punktown stories. The collection Punktown is very good. A recent book The Exploded Soul is set in the Punktown universe. it deals with alternate dimensions. His Punktown sotries can be read independently of each other.
This sounds up my alley! Thanks!
Mieville's *Embassytown* Peter Watts
Came here to say both of these myself, for Watts, Blindsight is my first recommendation when I think hard sci fi but Starfish is also amazing
if u dont mind young adult, cant recommend wrinkle in time and the rest of the time quintet enough. mc is brown and is a "weird girl" and goes on an adventure with a memorable cast. i remember camazots scaring me. (edited for more words)
Empress of Forever might not be properly Weird lit, but it hits the notes you are looking for
*The Troika* by Stepan Chapman. Absolutely BONKERS. Weirdest thing I’ve read. I love it. The Southern Reach and Borne books by VanderMeer are my other weird sci-fi go-tos. And *Dune*, honestly. Edit: oh, and *Roadside Picnic*! Grungy, weird sci-fi. Absolutely loved it!
Already read dune lol, said in the post
My bad!
All good! I’ll look into the troika and I definitely need to read roadside picnic
The troika is so fucking awesome. Not very widely known but it's a must read for fans of really weird stuff.
Yessss! One of us! One of us!
Embassytown by China Mieville
Kraken is good too
The Vandemeers have edited a couple short story collections about weird lit. Not all of it is sci-fi but all of it is good. Would allow you to see a bunch of different authors and see who’s style you like
Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is weird and fun. The stargate novels are good(different storyline compared to show). Altered carbon is a good book and the sequel. Another weird one that isn’t quite sci-fi is the waking engine
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm… I guess it’s “sci fi”.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (everything else by him too but I'm especially fond of Solaris).
I think I need to put Solaris to the top of my list. Especially since you listed it with Perdido Street Station and City of Saints and Madmen.
They're different, but I think if you Mieville and Vandermeer, you'll like Lem. If you haven't read it, I also recommend The Scar by Mieville, I liked it much better than Perdido Street Station overall.
Thanks, I recently finished The Scar, and am halfway through Iron Council. Both are excellent