What Is The Strangest Or Most Unique SF/Fantasy That You Have Ever Read?

Here are my choices for the Strangest or Most Unique SF/Fantasy Novel that I've ever read.

1) Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. Bad movie but a great and unique novel. I know it is considered as Literary Fiction but it's a fantasy novel. A thief riding through early 20th Century New York City on a White Horse. Those are fantasy tropes indeed. Beautifully written and an unforgettable novel.

2) Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. While, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are considered the standard bearers of the fantasy genre, Islandia has been the crazy uncle of the genre that people find interesting but never brought out to the public.

This strange and highly imaginative book has developed a cult following over the years and its readers (myself included) are the rebels who prefer this book over Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia.

Those are my choices? What are yours?

Nice highlights - a book I read this year and loved, and a book I've been looking for and haven't found unless I resort to ordering online.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel is an oft-cited oddity. Anything by China Mieville (e.g. Perdido Street Station). I have Little, Big on the TBR pile, looking foward to it. To an extent it's a matter of how far you want to stretch the boundaries and given the two you've cited you're going pretty wide. We could talk about Jorge Borges, or Gabriel Marquez, or ...

>1 Kammbia1: Huh. I've never heard of Islandia. But it has a glowing review by someone I trust. So onto Mount TBR it goes.

Hmmm, I think the first Kushiel's Dart book by Jacqueline Carey is pretty unique. I refer to it as "alternate history fantasy erotica."

I also felt that Patrick Suskind's Perfume was fairly unique. Dark fantasy verging on horror, I guess. Which isn't a unique sub-genre, but I back when I read the book (25-some years ago!) I felt it was uniqued.

Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest's sexually transmitted city comes to mind as fairly unusual.

Bridge of Birds is another oddball that you probably won't discover except through word of mouth, but that word is very long and loud on LT, thank goodness.

Some of Murakami's work probably deserves mention, like The Wind-up Bird Chronicle ... as a general recommendation, pursue the "magical realism" tag to land in some interesting places.

>4 amysisson:, I see where you're going with mentioning the Kushiel series. I take it as pretty conventional in most respects (political intrigue, quests, magic, etc.), where it's only the erotica element that makes it unique. Not to say it isn't well done, I read the first six and enjoyed them all.

I tag such things ' weird SF' and think of them as a subgenre in their own right. ranging from revelation space at the not that weird really, through to quantum thief, Jasper FForde, stross, jeff noon and the much overlooked michael marshal smith, grimwood not all of which I've enjoyed. Then you get the truly bizzare that are a tangent all of their own: maze, the mask game, shopocalypse There have been a few in ER recently, of which domina was the worst.

I'd also include 'classics' like shadow of the torturer hothouse concrete island and others.

And a few items of obscure brilliance - voyager in the night which I still regard as one of the weirdest tales I've ever read, although a few ER titles have pushed the it close on weird, they haven't matched it for brilliance.

Barring the works that are so strange they become unreadable:

The Cornelius Quartet by Michael Moorcock and all JC's many variations. An entire universe of itself.
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, so detailed it has a hallucinatory quality similar to Richard Dadd's "Fairy Fella's Masterstroke".
Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle. Which starts off as a historical romance, until the golems turn up, then morphs into something else again.
Little, Big by John Crowley. Which Ursula K. Le Guin said "calls for a redefinition of fantasy".

I use the tag "deeply weird". It's only on one SF book - Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow. The main character's parents are a mountain and a washing machine. It gets weirder from there.

I found This is The Way The World Ends by James Morrow to be a fascinating and frankly bizarre take on the post-nuclear war genre. It was a random library find and I don't think it's a well-known book, but I'd recommend it.

The Jean le Flambeur series by Hannu Rajaniemi. Truly, science being indistinguishable from magic.

11>

Are the second and third books a lot stranger than the first, then? The first seemed like, as you say, perfectly standard post-singularity SF.

Some people rate Dhalgren as sf "so strange that it becomes unreadable," but I loved it.

Another excellent sf book with experimental form is Wolfe's Fifth Head of Cerberus.

For fantasy, I really like The Physiognomy and its two successor volumes in the Well-Built City Trilogy.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde doesn't fit neatly with any subgenre, in my mind. At least, it doesn't fit any of the genres of adult literature; one could make a case that it is like some children's fantasy/adventure books, but targeted at adults.

>11 Goran:

Can't speak to third, but second is stranger. Almost incomprehensibly so, in points, as Rajaniemi barrels through the story without stopping to explain what any of the science or terms mean. He does have a wonderful ear, though, and many sentences are as perfect as you've ever read in a SF book - even if you do get to the end and realise you have to go back and read them again because you didn't twig to what actually happened.

Most books in a series will usually have some recap exposition in later volumes to jog memories of events in earlier books; there's none of that in book two, so I imagine book three is much the same.

So, despite thinking both books are flawed (in different ways), I do really like Rajaniemi's writing and am looking forward to reading more of his work. Perhaps his closest comparator is Charles Stross, and even he admits that Rajaniemi does post-singularity SF far better than he does!

Oh, a wonderfully weird book that is truly sui generis is John Uri Lloyd's Etidorhpa.

I can think of more fantasy than sf. Maybe sf is a more constraining genre?

Here they are:

Fantasy:

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Among Others by Jo Walton

SF (I think)

Lust by Geoff Ryman

Morphidae,

Islandia was written in 1930s by Austin Tappan Wright. He was a lawyer by day and created Islandia in his spare time. He died in a car accident in the 1940s and his daughter got it published later on. He actually had over 2000 pages written and a created world. The editor, Mark Saxton cut it to 1000 plus pages in order to get published and ended up writing three more companion books in the Islandian universe. I've read and reviewed them those as well:

https://kammbia1.wordpress.com/category/book-reviews/islandia-quartet/

I have not read anything like it in the fantasy genre. Actually, I would consider the Islandian books more imaginative than fantastical. Definitely unique.

I just heard about this author today. I have added The Habitation of the Blessed to my TBR pile.

First thing that springs to mind is Quest of the Three Worlds by Cordwainer Smith.

Amanda and the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer is a very odd science fiction book, and Golem 100 is even more so. Both are books that I borrowed from the library when I was much younger and always remembered, and I finally re-read them in the past year.

I read The scar by China Mieville, and I understand his other books are equally strange.
Another set of books I find to be unique are Three parts dead and sequels by Max Gladstone. Odd world with a mixture of technology, religion, magic and law.

I find it interesting that my righthand column is full with touchstones with green checkmarks.

I guess for rather strange SF I would go for Rudy Rucker. Maybe Turing & Burroughs, maybe Mathematicians In Love but there is plenty of weirdness to go round in some of his other books too.

I almost forgot about The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick. I read this a couple of years ago and it was my 1st Dick novel. Definitely unique.

Here's my review:

http://kammbia1.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/book-review-17-the-transmigration-of-ti...

>23 anglemark: I had just been amused by seeing the same (multiple green check marks).

An interesting thing to note is that many books that were about something not encountered before are so part of the common dialog now that you wouldn't even think of them as unusual. I remember reading Neuromancer when it first arrived, and being stunned by it. That was a VERY long time ago. True Names was another (it's been sadly prophetic).

I long ago lost interest in anything Moorcock wrote, because (after a while) it was just the same book, over and over, and it seemed written with an intent to shock, rather than to honestly examine anything in an intellectual manner.

I can remember when Harlan Ellison first showed up. I started seeing him in the magazines of the day. "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman (lack of touchstone deliberate) lives with me still, and I read it when it was new, in Galaxy (circa 1965).

I give you Cordwainer Smith as one who was not only strange, and on the edge, but always will be.

I don't trust the green checkmarks and don't look at them any more. There are often a number of titles I own that aren't checked (maybe because of different editions?)

I second the Gormenghast books, and Gene Wolfe. And very certainly Philip K. Dick; besides being creative, his own crazyness leaks into the books.

I don't remember anyone mentioning The House on the Borderland by Hodgson, truly a bizarre book.

In SF, The Eye of the Queen comes to mind. Mary Gentle's Ancient Light is strange & original in its ending (can't comment more without spoiler). George RR Martin's novella A Song for Lya is pretty strange.

Lastly, the supernatural suspense of Charles Williams is unique and, for those with the right mindset, wonderful. I think my favorites are Shadows of Ecstasy and The Greater Trumps. Like his friend C.S. Lewis, his spirituality is interwoven into his fiction, but in a more mystical and less Christian-doctrine-in-your-face way than Lewis.

Oh, mine's full of green checkmarks too, but I'm trying to avoid the tendency to say "THAT'S not weird!", because 'weird' is a personal thing, and it's just going to make people feel bad. But I'm using it in this thread not to mean "non-cliched" as many people seem to, but to mean "dream-logic rather than real-world logic".

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break might count as unique fantasy.

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

>30 Betelgeuse:, forgot that one since I wasn't thinking of it as sci-fi/fantasy but yeah, weird for sure. Started off so well, and then it went haywire at the end.

>27 rshart3:

I too prefer Williams to Lewis. I think my favorite is Many Dimensions -- certainly over the ones you name, although there are a couple I haven't yet gotten to.

Thomas Pynchon might deserve a nod in this thread. I don't generally class him as sf, but I've read critics who consider his work (Gravity's Rainbow in particular) so "strange" that it can't not be sf.

>12 lorax:, >15 HoldenCarver:

The 2nd and third books do get a bit stranger. And you're right, Hannu does not really recap or mention any events of the previous book(s). There were a few points in book three where I found myself re-reading passages more than a few times just to understand what was going on. Despite this, I really love this series.

The City and the City, China Mieville. Took me a bit to get my head around the entire concept. Do the two just ignore each other or do they really not see each other?

H.P. Lovecraft said of the great fantasist Clark Ashton Smith, "In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, {he} is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer dead or living." The acclaimed writer Gene Wolfe (mentioned frequently above) said, "No one imitates Smith. There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him." I am very much inclined to agree with both men. Most of Smith's work can be found on the Eldritch Dark website:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/

The book that really turned me on to SF at age 13 or 14, was Brian Aldiss' Report on Probability A - a strange, plotless novel in which a watcher in one dimension is watching activities in another whilst being themselves watched by a third - and so on, virtually ad infinitum. I'd read some SF before, strictly 'Golden Age' stuff, but reading this was life-changing. I didn't understand a word of it, but it was weird and exciting and I went out looking for more. That was more than fifty years ago and I'm still searching...

I see William Hope Hodgson already has a mention for The House on the Borderland, but I'd like to add The Night Land also by William HopeHodgson. It's truly memorable and weird, for those who aren't put off by the arcane narrative style!

>1 Kammbia1:

Thanks for the recommendation of Islandia. My copy has been sitting on the shelf for 15 years, and I keep 'meaning to read it', I'll do it over Christmas.

My humbler contribution is The Graveyard Book by Gaiman, which I quite enjoyed.

-Shawn

If I missed it, I'm sorry, but I am somewhat surprised not to see Startide Rising by David Brin. This is one of the strangest SF books I have read, but incredibly entertaining. Actually, the whole "Uplift Wars" series was great. The cast of characters is made up entirely by porpoises.

>39 GaryBabb: Startide rising is far from strange or weird compared to the many offerings above. It's a pretty straightforward space opera examining the consequences of a maybe slightly unusual premise. The internal logic remains consistent throughout the geography is fairly standard physics (even in Sundiver which is the first). There's nothing particuarly remarkable about it. Enjoyable yes.

>40 reading_fox: One man's weird is another man's normal.

When I've been travelling, I've sometimes gone to out-of-the-way little places and bumped into some of the locals who I could tell thought themselves pretty off the wall compared to their peers; and I would think of one of Zaphod Beeblebrox's one-liners (from the Hitch-Hikers radio series, at least): "I get weirder things than you free with my breakfast cereal."

In some ways there's an inherent difficulty in this topic of discussion. Even if something has been "done" a hundred times before, if I've only seen one instance of it, it's going to be unique and strange to me.

I thought Startide Rising was fairly unique in the way it tried to convey the ways the uplifted dolphins thought, versus the way humans think.

I thought the series beginning with Kushiel's Dart was unique in that I'd never before thought of the possibility that the fates of empires could rest upon a single person's seriously masochistic sexual tendencies. Nor that those tendencies could have been induced by a literal god, and with a reason.

One reader's everyday is another reader's unique.....

>42 amysisson:

One reader's everyday is another reader's unique.....

Yeah.

And I'm a little uncomfortable with the better-read-than-thou / weirder-than-thou undertone of "How can you think XYZ is strange and unique? I've read a hundred books like that!"

Think of the Lucky 10,000. It's a good thing when someone encounters something strange and new to them. Even FTL and aliens were new to all of us once.

It doesn't even really make sense for anything to be "more unique" or "most unique." Maybe the desired word is distinctive. "Weird" has a particular meaning in terms of literary genre, but that's easily confused by vernacular usage, and doesn't seem to be the aim of this inquiry.

hah!
parsed
thank you

>43 lorax:

It's a good thing when someone encounters something strange and new to them.

Yes indeed. An example: I was reading yesterday that the Bob Marley compilation album Legend still sells approximately 4,000 copies a week in the US alone. I purchased a vinyl copy of it in the mid-80s, so it's a bit played out to me, but it is validating and joyful to me to see that this music is as enduring as I thought it was going to be way back then.

Wave without a shore by C. J. Cherryh

It WAS strange, especially as I had yet to read enough of the Alliance-Union universe to begin connecting the dots, and was quite too young to have had school exposure to the (rather overt) philosophical underpinnings of most characters attitudes and behaviors.

But intriguing enough that I came back to the author years later.

>38 sdawson:

You are welcome. Make sure you check out the other Islandian novels by Mark Saxton. Saxton was the editor on Islandia and he wrote 3 more novels in the same universe. Actually, I prefer those just as much as I did Islandia.

I reviewed them on my blog. Here's the link:

http://kammbia1.wordpress.com/category/book-reviews/islandia-quartet/

Havoc in Islandia is my favorite of those 3 books.

kammbia1

>42 amysisson:

You make a fair point if something has been done a lot before than it is not unique. I just wanted to get a sense for readers in their reading experience for a book or books that were unique to them. Unlike anything that had read before.

Islandia and Winter's Tale were like that for me after I read them. I hope that explains in a little more detail what I was looking in the original post.

kammbia1

I think maybe "Timeline" by Michael Crichton

Moonwise by Greer Gilman - like nothing else I have ever read. More poetry than prose, and utterly magical.

Not science fiction, not fantasy The Malacia Tapestry by Brian Aldiss is indefinable and very unique.

The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon.

Brothers of the Head which was so weird, strange, and alternately fascinating and disgusting, that I finally got rid of it at a used book store. I see that LT only has two members with the original book, with all the illustrations. *shudder*

Dance of the Goblins by Jaq D. Hawkins would definitely be most unique. I loved the way she tied up the series too.

Rubicon Beach by Steven Erickson.

What about How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu ? Obviously time travel's been done a gazillion times but I found Yu's approach refreshingly different and absurd.

I agree that Jasper Fforde has written some books that are very strange and totally unique.

Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. It had me totally bewildered. I tried it for about 50 pages and then just gave up.

>57 EnidaV:

Personally, I don't really count Yu's book as science fiction, but as a mainstream novel set in a science fictional universe (which itself is a rather unusual approach).

To quote from my review:

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe isn't really science fiction; it's more of a modern literary novel in a science fictional setting. While the trappings of SF are present, from time machines (the protagonist is a time machine repairman) to artificial pocket universes, the concerns of the novel are the hoariest of mainstream cliches - the relationship between father and son, regret and introspection.

That's not to say the time travel is metaphorical or symbolic - it's there, and it's real in the book, even if it's not at all rigorous and if the sorts of questions and setup that would characterize an SF novel are absent. Rather, the real-in-universe time travel is used to explore the questions that interest the author - memory, the nature of consciousness, and of course the protagonists' relationship with his missing father, who he spends much of the book searching for. When Charles (the character shares the author's name, which is a rather large pointer to the self-referential nature of the novel) is trapped in a time loop, an SF reader would expect the novel to be concerned with whether and how he gets out, which would depend on something he does - instead, he spends his time thinking about the loop and what it means for - you guessed it - his relationship with his father.

I liked it (a lot more than the other book I've read recently that does the same sort of thing, A Highly Unlikely Scenario), but it just didn't feel like SF to me, despite the time travel.

>59 lorax:

Sounds like the inverse of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which I think of as a science fiction novel set in a (more or less) mainstream universe (or mimetic fiction told from a SFnal point of view, if you prefer).

>60 artturnerjr:

That's an excellent way of describing it.

Jo Walton talks about SF reading protocols, and to some extent I think that's what's going on here. Cryptonomicon is a book without SF trappings of setting (with the exception of Enoch Root, but that's not at all obvious), written by an SF writer, for SF readers, to be read using SF reading protocols. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe to an extent, and Unlikely Scenario to a greater extent, is a book with SF trappings of setting, written by a non-SF writer, for non-SF readers, to be read using mainstream reading protocols.

Yu's book is still interesting and worth reading, and "non-SF in an SFnal world" is certainly unusual enough to warrant being discussed in this thread, so I hope EnidaV doesn't feel picked on!

I'm reading The Leaning Girl graphic novel, just arrived in translation in the U.S., and it certainly is bizarre.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Jeff Noon's Vurt.

Because after all this time, it's still in the TBR pile.

>64 RobertDay:. Good answer! LOL.

>36 RobertDay: re: report on Probability A

I too read that when I was a similar age (but only about 40 years ago) and it had a similar effect on me. The SF(ish) book that has come closest in the intervening years would be Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources by David Mamet I've read it several times and still have no idea what it's about but know that it is very funny - but I couldn't tell you why.

The Warrior Who Carried Life.

Killer premise.

unique YA fantasy -

Gossamer
by Lois Lowry

The Illuminatus Trilogy was very bizarre - I just couldn't get through it. Metaphors within metaphors within allusions and inside jokes. fnord!

Blindsight by Peter Watts is so strange, so different than any other book I read. The multiple personality person and vampire. Fantastic book though. In my Top 5 favs.

And it's sequel, Echopraxia is strange and thought-provoking also.