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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3420 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I'm so, so tired of stories that follow human narrative sensibilities. Are there any books that ask the reader to fall in love with a well crafted structure that completely defies human narrative convention? That aims to map the reader to the alien rather than mapping the alien to the reader?

Stenislaw Lem's Solaris might be worth a read if you haven't already. It doesn't play with a narrative convention at all though, but conveys a sense of something truly alien.

I'd say there are, but the more you do this the more avant garde / surreal things become, and the more skilled a writer you have to be to make things work. I guess Flatland is probably one of the most famous examples.

Flatland was good. I was also a fan of the aliens in slaughterhouse five, though they weren't central. I like nature documentaries- but I don't think they go far enough. Ant youtubers who get really passionate about morphology and behavioral analysis are ok. Sometimes I get my jollies just by reading ML whitepapers. Animorphs had a lot going for it, though I read it all as a kid and don't know if I would again.

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