An example from CS lewis, there is a cosmic Angelic being in one book which is talking to the protagonist who is standing on a mountain. It’s hair seems to be constantly moving around as if in a wind although there is no wind present. The main character realizes that because the figure is like a spirit, it is not subject to the gravity of the planet so it is not actually on the mountain with him but rather soaring through space-time fast enough to remain with the planet. This kind of answers the obvious plot hole of how ghosts or spirits would not technically be affected by Earth’s gravity which would leave them floating in the void of space as the planet moves through space. I’m curious if other authors or science fiction writers have used Concepts that are creative and unique
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**”Blindsight by Peter Watts” – On Vampires**
While “vampires” are nothing new, in this case the author explains the assumed aversions to “crosses” they have. While they were an evolutionary offshoot from humanity they were not the dominant species on the planet solely due to an evolutionary glitch making them averse to Euclidean geometry (right angles). Vampires, because of their unique spatial reasoning (they could see in more than 3 dimensions), get seizures when they see too many right angles. So It gave rise to the myth that they’re vulnerable to crosses, but the truth is they would short out if they see something as simple as a window pane or a building with a square footprint. They largely went extinct after the invention of architecture in early human history. I found that explanation very original.
The Book of the War is full of them. For example, there are Anarchitects: sentient ideas that can reshape buildings or structures. A deadly weapon against a race that live in the corridors of their time-ships.
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall:
>*Eric Sanderson wakes up in a place he doesn’t recognise, unable to remember who he is. All he has left are journal entries recalling Clio, a perfect love now gone. As he begins to piece his memories back together, Eric finds that he is being hunted by a creature that moves in language, that swims through the currents of human interaction.*
Basically, a killer shark that lives within words. It’s mental.
We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ
She turns the genre on its head, avoiding the usual tropes we see in sci fi writing.
The Bobiverse has some pretty cool ideas about AI and cloning.
Isaac Asimov has these high speed moving walkways in some of his novels. The idea is, first walkway is moving at, say, 3 miles/hour. The one next to it is moving 6 miles/hour. And so forth. You walk across to reach the high speed walkway moving at, say, 50 miles per hour. I believe he had windshields on the higher-speed walkways. Just checked Wikipedia and it looks like Asimov may not have been the first to come up with the idea, but I encountered it in his writings. Dunno how well it would actually work, at a minimum I could imagine some horrible injuries if people get their foot stuck between the higher speed walkways.
A couple I really like are Liu Cixin ‘s idea of a dark forest in The Dark Forest. I hadn’t come across that idea before and thought it was a really interesting idea. And sort of terrifying, and it made me glad we hadn’t had any alien contact.
The other one I liked was China Mieville’s idea of an AI in Perdido Street Station. That kind of natural evolution of an AI was compelling to me, especially in light of what I’d read in stuff like Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. It made a lot of sense that that’s how one would be created.
For the amount of people supposedly obsessed with Snow Crash and more or less have directly ripped off Snow Crash at this point, it doesn’t bode well for humanity in general how very few people actually . . . Get Snow Crash.
One of the elements that is so elegant and brilliant about the titular virus itself yet never really got ripped off into obvlivion is (minor spoilers) >!that it’s actually an ancient sumarian language related to the mythology around The Tower of Babble.!< People hail the novel for being one of those strangely prophetic pieces of sci-fi, but a lot of the technology/futuristic social concepts have been directly influenced by Snow Crash itself or attempted to be brute-forced into reality. Though in a much more metaphoric way, this is actually genuinely a piece of internet culture that Snow Crash predicted that sprang up entirely organically in the form of the effects the overabundance of information, social media and meme culture would have on society. You could argue Neal Stephenson likely could already see the effects the interconnectivity of the internet was having on people and as someone who studied language already knew how it could affect the mind so it wasn’t that big of a leap in logic for him, but. Even so. The idea that a form of communication could cause the spread of a mental virus similar to a computer virus and the biblical subtext implying what that could mean for society as a whole, I mean, it is kind of chilling right? Even the legacy of the book itself. No body actually listened to/paid much heed to the exact parts of the novel that contained certain warnings about the effects technology could have on society because Metaverse pizza samari cool.
Not a book, but Gregory Wide, who wrote the original script for the first Highlander movie had an intersection of ideas I’ve never seen anywhere else.
I loved the idea of the Genetic Dynasty in the tv show Foundation. Even though it’s not in the Foundation novels, the idea of clones running an empire such a neat idea that I would love to see explored in other stories!
The Ancillary or Imperial Radch series by Anne Leckie has a lot of neat science fiction technological ideas but probably a bigger deal is the high social concepts.
The Radch has either no concept of gender or only one gender depending on how you look at it, and they use “she/her” for everything. All behaviors, manners, and expressions fall under that. It’s interesting to read.
Additionally, the concept of the Ancillary, which is a person who’s had implants put in them to link them with a ship mind and body, to the point that they stop being who they were before and essentially just become an extension of the ship, their memories and personality erased.
I loved the way the Archives were described in The Name of the Wind. The idea of a massive archive of books and scrolls which had been amassed for centuries and which had inevitably become too large to organize. The idea of them having a history of different organization structures and whatnot – it was a cool thing to read about.
Maybe I liked it so much because I work with databases and it made me appreciate them lol.
Oh do I have one!
**The Gone World** by Tim Sweterlitsch
Fantastic use of time travel. The rules were extremely creative, straightforward, and contributed to a completely riveting story. In The Gone World time travelers can only move forward, never back (except for returning from whence they came). The point from which travelers embark is called “Terra Firma” – this is the present. When time travelers go forward, they get a glimpse into *a* possible future, and terra firma stands still. Terra firma only continues to progress when the time traveler returns to the present (Terra Firma), at which point any new decision could change the course of history and alter the future that was glimpsed during the time traveling expedition.
The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman have unusual world designs that I’ve never seen elsewhere in literature. The floating islands section I’ve come across in a couple of computer games but that’s it.
I don’t think I’d be able to describe it in a way that did it justice, but in *Permutation City* by Greg Egan, the nature and construction of the titular city is bizarre and fascinating.
The idea of a magic-induced nuclear explosion in the Inheritance Cycle. Having such fine-tuned and powerful control over your magical abilities that you can split atoms with it sounds amazing
The full page ‘blacked out’ representing/commemorating a death in Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Maybe it has been used since but I’ve not personally come across any other examples.
The wishsong from Shannara (post-Elfstones) is my personal favorite magic tool in all of fantasy.
Probably the one ware a zombie is able to go without eating people because he just makes smoothies using all of the chemicals that are found in a human body- (they used the recipe from full metal alchemist)
Anti-memetics in There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm from the SCP website.
Lots of stuff in China Mieville’s books, mosquito people, cactus people, scabmettlers.
I thought the “Ansible” communication concept in the Ender’s series was clever. Instant communication across light years of distance. I don’t remember the explanation, or if there was one, of how it worked, it just worked.
I’ve always loved Paolini’s use of the Ancient Language in Eragon. The language acts as natural law and can be interpreted in ways that are favorable to you, but you can’t outright say something untrue simply because it isn’t. The world operating on this source code that is in all things is something that I love, and that adept users are able to alter reality to their whim is neat.
I dunno but I often think of Solaris
I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to explain this right but Phillip K Dick has some really unique and far out ideas of blending science, tech, and religion. VALIS is one that comes to mind.
Not sci-fi but China Mievilles “The City and the City” I found to be incredible and the world he made was fascinating. Basically there is are two cities that instead of divided geologically are divided by conceptual traditions. Your neighbor could be considered a different city but engaging with him would be a crime unless you went to customs. I found it a really interesting concept and one that, to me, challenges the notions of borders.
The Steerswoman books are basically “what if a member of an order of itinerant philosopher-monks in a vaguely medieval-fantasy world accidentally stumbled on the smallest possible clue that the world was not as she knew it, and set about applying not-quite-Holmesian deduction to solve it.” Fair warning, the series isn’t complete (and at this point probably won’t be).
A Fire Upon the Deep has a totally unique setting: the laws of physics are *not uniform*- the further you get to the edge of the galaxy, the more science-fictional things are possible (AI, FTL travel). Outside the galaxy lurk hyperintelligences that want to eat us, though. There are also doglike creatures who are sort of hive minds. An absolute top tier book for clever concepts.
Your example sounds exactly like the angelic appearances in the bible.
The idea of having a house with rooms on different planets connected by warp gates as seen in Hyperion by Dan Simmons has stuck with me since I first read it. Having a room on the beach which is connected to a beautiful mountain chalet which leads to a room on an asteroid viewing a nebula. Not earth shattering or even very plot relevant but such an incredible idea.
Contact by Carl Sagan was pretty fuckin awesome.
I never seen the movie, to this day, but the book felt like a movie in a real simple way. Felt hella authentic and real (though I know little bout the science behind it). The ending is truly dope.
There were a couple that I encountered for the first timez at least, in *A Fire Upon the Deep*, which is one of my favorite books for that reason.
The first is that the laws of physics change as you get further from or closer to a supermassive black hole. This is how the book explains FTL travel in its universe. Earth is in the “slow zone” radius around the milky way’s central black hole, which is subject to our current understanding of the laws of physics, including the hard speed of light limit. But as humans moved up out of that radius, they discovered that higher speeds became possible. These higher speeds also allow much more advanced computing, including true AI. Accidentally plunging into a slow zone is a death sentence for an AI.
The second is a unique concept of group consciousness. There’s a race of aliens who become sentient via communication in small groups of typically 3-7 individuals. Individually, they are little more than animals, and desperately seek out a collective intelligence to become part of. Because of this, the sentient collectives are functionally immortal, but also constantly changing, because as old individuals in the group die or leave, their contributions to the intelligence are lost. New individuals bring new contributions. The collectives can’t get too physically close to each other, because their communication starts to overlap, and their individualities start merging. Too many individuals is too discordant to form a single collective. I found this concept echoed somewhat by the Geth in the Mass Effect videogames, except that they’re AI and have no upper limit on individuals in a collective.
*Small Gods* by Terry Pratchett and *American Gods* by Neil Gaiman both have the concept that gods are created and sustained by people’s belief in them, rather than the other way around.
The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde has a throwaway time travel joke that’s both funny and clever. The secret government agency of time travellers concerned with preserving the true timeline discover that nobody, anywhere, any when, either backwards or forwards in time, ever discovered time travel. This forces them to close up shop and lay off all of their employees.
I see Space Trilogy reference, I upvote. Love those books.
Enders Game then Enders Shadow covering events is first book from another character’s perspective.
surprised to see no mention of House of Leaves, but i suppose that’s well covered territory
Some of the concepts in the three body problem felt unique to me (spoilers)
>! Maybe I just haven’t come across it before, but I really enjoyed the emphasis on the fact that just knowing about the existence of aliens would have huge fundamental impacts on society. I haven’t read the rest of the series yet, but the concept of having 400 years to prepare for an alien invasion by a society that is currently more advanced than you scientifically but will be stuck at that same spot or so in 400 years due to limited resources is super interesting. The characters from the first book won’t even be alive for the arrival of the aliens, so I do wonder how much rally and focus there will be on actually doing something about the coming problems. I’m also curious if that’s an intentional global warming parallel and if it’ll come up that way in the next book !<
From the same series you mentioned, OP, but I love the depiction of the devil in Perelandra. The idea of something using intelligence as mask for unthinking evil nature stuck with me.
Hugh Howie’s *Halfway Home* presents a unique concept of how humanity might possibly pioneer itself onto foreign worlds.
I believe it involves an AI-controlled ship full of frozen embryos that searches the galaxy for exoplanets and assesses their worthiness before growing the humans that will start a colony.
It focuses more on the experiences of those seed humans than how the AI works, of course, but you do learn more about it by the end.
In The Infinite Eye by Ophelia Rue, there’s an alien species who’s appearance is so terrifying that when humans meet with them they have to blur the air in front of them because most of the humans go into cardiac arrest if they glimpse one. There is a scene where one of them attempts to save a human from an attack on their ship but the human sees it’s form coming through the smoke and reacts by running into a fire.
In the runelords by David farland there exists the ability to use magical metal brands to have one person transfer their attributes to another. An example would be strength, the giver would lose their strength to the pointbthey may not be able to stand up and the receiver would gain all that strength lost. This also applies to things like beauty, sight, smell, endurance and so on. If the giver dies then the connection is lost and the receiver loses what they gained. This made for a great way to have extremely powerful characters that would always have a weakness instead of being defeated by some deus ex or a macguffin.
Brandon Sanderson talks about the necessary mix of the familiar and the strange to make an interesting story. It’s a bit like salt, you need a little, but too much is terrible, and within the range between too little and too much there are a lot of different preferences. But every *good* story will have some unique elements to it. Those might be the kinds of things that appeal to you, or not. And there might not be the right mix for your taste. But it’s a key element of storytelling for there to be that mix.
The different levels of death in the Abhorsen series.
Super man v Aliens
Jasper Fford had a few excellent ones:
Thursday Next books: the protagonist can go ‘inside’ books. Some fictional characters come out also. Brilliantly done
Nursery Rhime books: Oral tradition characters are made real additionally
He had a book where the color that you can see determines your standing and matrimonial options
In Terry Pratchet books on Discworld, which are brilliant for many reasons, there are 2 wildly interesting concepts:
– the world is on a turtle moving through space. Scientists speculate whether it is moving from or moving towards something. And if that towards is another turtle, then which one is the female. Given that their world is on top of a turtle, this is a pertinent point
– the concept that all libraries are joined via L-space, which is infinite. Therefor all books that exist in potential are joined there, which means that you can travel to other places via the Library
The devil apocrypha, the take on how gods and angels are created is a beautiful concept I use for every DND game.
To spoil the beginning of the book. Angels are formed when a civilisation achieves universal consciousness, they form a singular formless being. That being inhabits the personality traits that those people used to achieve universal consciousness. God is 3 angels that achieved universal consciousness together and is therefore feared by the others.
So when their universe is dying and our universe is being born they push through and become what we know as angels/devils and the divine Trinity.
Super fun read if you like weird takes on religious concepts.