Are there any speculative fiction books where the authors create a fundamentally different kind of universe, as opposed to the typical make-up of planets, solar systems, galaxies, etc. Think the absurtity and creativity of the world of Discworld but on a larger scale.
Posted Nov 27, 2021, 4:40 AM UTC
It's sci-fi instead of fantasy, but Greg Egan writes worlds that seem like someone dropped acid during a college mathematics lecture and wrote down whatever came to his mind. Dichronauts, for example, is set in a world where light can only travel in certain directions, things stretch and compress when they rotate, and a pole tipping over sideways at the wrong angle can turn it into a hail of hyper-velocity shrapnel.
Loved Permutation City, gotta check that out.
Wanted to recommend Egan, but was not sure since this is a fantasy subreddit, but since you've said you loved Permutation City then three more recommendations
Orthogonal trilogy. Comparable premise to Dichronauts: he invents new spacetime and tries to deduce what could happen( Dichronauts has two spacelike and two timelike directions, Orthogonal has four spacelike and no timelike, our reality has three spacelike and one timelike). Basic mechanics look similar to our world, so there are planets and starts, and round wheels roll on flat roads (unlike in Dichronauts) but once you try to explore other physcial effects everything is different. Plants radiate the light to create energy, different wavelengths of light travel at different velocities, literally anything can burn (with no air or another oxidizer) if heated high enough - and it will never stop burning.
The earlier Schild's Ladder does not have setup as well-developed as Orthogonal but it still has a world based on entirely different laws than ours. Bonus points for >!explorers from our world transforming themselves and exploring that second world!<
Finally Incandescence happens entirely in our universe, but you wouldn't know it. All the physical peculiarities in the half of the novel are derived from the known physics, but it is so unusual configuration that it defies our preconceptions of how the world works.
This subreddit really is welcoming of all speculative fiction, so if you're thinking a sci-fi book fits I wouldn't hesitate too much about recommending it.
Check out Lifelode by Jo Walton. The farther you go in one direction, the more powerful magic is and Gods can manifest. If you travel in the other direction, magic fades to nothing.
Am I crazy, or does that cover look like Elantris?!
No, that is literally a crop of the Elantris cover art. That's rather questionable on someone's part.
Edit: After an annoying amount of searching, I found the answer. Still a weird occurrence but I'm not about to blame a less well-known author for taking what they're given.
NESFA press is a small fan-run press, but one of the cool things they do is to publish a book each year by the Author Guest of Honor of that year's Boskone Science Fiction convention illustrated, as Ms. Walton said, by the Boskone Artist Guest of Honor. The Artist GOH often re-uses art they've already created. I will say that Stephan Martiniere chose that art with care and attention to the text. That woman in that pose is very evocative of Taveth. (Ms. Walton has since self-published a kindle edition with different cover art which is currently a steal at $2.99 on Amazon.)
NESFA has a bunch of really good books. The Halcyon Fairy Book by Ursula Vernon. Once More With Footnotes by Terry Pratchett (sadly permanently out of print). 24 Frames into the Future by John Scalzi, and tons more. They have also published every piece of Zenna Henderson's writing they could find in two volumes for which I will forever be thankful.
You might enjoy Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. It's basically a series of vignettes, each one exploring a different universe where time functions in a fundamentally different way than it does in our universe. It's very creative and some of the universes feel really alien and fantastical. I don't know if I'd call it speculative fiction, though; it's probably better described as literary fiction. There's not really a plot, but the different settings are the point of the book, and it's a pretty quick read overall.
"Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi
This is a good rec.
What about a world with no space, just an endless planet-surface, like an infinitely generated world.
There's a litrpg like that called Infinite Realms: Monsters and Legends. Despite its somewhat generic name it's quite good. Has two main characters who start on opposing sides of the morality spectrum and slowly go towards the middle.
Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, one of my favorites.
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The Dark Tower?
You might enjoy the popular science books by George Gamow (of the alpha-beta-gamma paper) about Mr Tompkins (1939). Our hero attends scientific lectures and falls asleep in self-defense out of puzzlement, dreaming of different universes where variations in key physical constants produce interesting behavior.
The Universe Between by Alan Nourse also comes to mind, in which intrepid explorers experience dimensional shifts into another universe and attempt to comprehend it.
And the collected works of Hal Clement are explorations of interesting regions in our universe (such as high-surface-gravity environments). Similarly, Dragon’s End by Robert L. Forward is about creatures living in a high-surface-gravity environment on the surface of a neutron star.
Rudy Rucker is a fun one - his books (and stories) are utterly bonkers, and play with the fundamentals of physics as we know them.
Tom Holt's YouSpace 'series' (sort of loosely connected) is also a good, semi-satirical look at it. The Outsourcerer's Apprentice is a pretty unique look at the classic portal fantasy.
qntm's Ra would also fit. It is the most impressive, internally consistent, hard-science-take-on-magic I can could ever possibly imagine. Actually, I couldn't ever have imagined it. But the author sure did.
Never read disc world but Perdido street station is a bit of a unique land with unique characters
I am probably remembering wrong but didn’t Piers Anthony write a world of flat disk shape worlds stacked on top of each other?
"Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884 by Seeley & Co. of London. Written pseudonymously by "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions."
https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
This is a great shout.
Or a Great Shout?