Enjoy weird fiction overall, sci-fi and “horror” (in a very general sense). I like some Lovecraft, VanderMeers, Ballard, China Miéville, Samanta Schweblin, late William Gibson, Mariana Enríquez… what recent books or writers caught your eye that may loosely fit the term or are similar to works of the above authors? Can be in English, Portuguese or Spanish.
Not weird in its theme but more in its execution, the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.
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DCC is the opposite of weird fiction, it is incredibly formulaic and tropey.
DCC isn’t weird, if it is, every single video game is.
If you just want plain weird, George Saunders was pretty weird, but haven’t read much of his.
I really like Izumi Suzuki’s work, which gets pretty weird also, Gibson-esque I think.
I also love Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, weird in many ways but not sure in the way you mean.
Exordia comes to mind also, though I didn’t enjoy it that much.
I think this is a rather cliche answer but since no one’s mentioned him yet I’ll put in a plug for Phillip K. Dick. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered weirdness done as well as he does it. My favorites are Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but he has a lot of books and as far as I can tell, they’re all weird af.
+1 for Philip K. Dick. My favorites are probably Counter-clock World and A Scanner Darkly
Another one that wasn’t mentioned yet is Stanisław Lem. The Futurological Congress totally blew my mind.
Oh, I actually forgot about A Scanner Darkly! I think that was the first PKD novel I ever read. Gonna have to give it another read. I don’t remember it all that well but I distinctly remember how I felt at the end of it, which was weirded the hell out.
And the movie is very good too!!
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Self-Reference Engine by Toh Enjoe
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The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
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Transfinite Man by Colin Kapp
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Ubik by Philip K. Dick
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Permutation City by Greg Egan
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The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson
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Anathem by Neal Stephenson
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Unflattening by Nick Sousanis
The science in Permutation City is truly mind-warping, if you really try to wrap your head around it. One of my favourite books.
Egan’s short story collection Axiomatic is full of heavy concept scifi in a similar vein to it.
Yeah, knowing a fair bit about the way computers actually work at the hardware level, some of the details of how the virtual world functions are hand-wavy and kind of magic-disguised-as-technology. But Egan makes more of an effort to try to explain how the simulation works than most other fiction that describes similar virtual worlds - and ultimately the crux of the story is how people behave in a world of their own making.
You’re the only other person I’ve ever encountered who believes the emperor’s soul to be Sanderson’s best work. I really do think he thrives with the short story / novella length fiction in general, and it’s a shame he’s always going for the opposite. Emperor’s soul crams so much depth into such a compelling little story, I can’t believe how often it’s overlooked.
I enjoy Sanderson’s writing, his fantasy work is good. I think the brilliance of it is the consistent, expansive world-building that extends across his book series, which he’s really good at. I’m not knocking his other work at all.
But as a single work unto itself, I think The Emperor’s Soul is really a perfect story. The ideas presented at the beginning of the book are masterfully executed by the end.
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Asking around gave me this shortlist of suggestions:
- Agustina Bazterrica (in Spanish)
- Suzan Palumbo’s short fiction collection Skin Thief
- Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin’s Wax & Wane
- Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
- Kev Lambert’s You Will Love What You Have Killed
The Pandora Sequence by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom. Some of the weirdest shit I’ve ever read, especially in The Jesus Incident where -
spoiler:
Jesus throws his enemies in a mutant sex dungeon to teach them a lesson in humility.
Frank Herbert
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Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson.
The story follows Hiro Protagonist—a pizza delivery driver in a fractured, hyper-capitalized future reality and an elite hacker/swordfighter in the virtual “Metaverse”.
If you like that, his other books are fantastic, especially Cryptonomicon, Anathem, and Diamond Age.
It’s a great novel but I wouldn’t call it “weird”?
i read a few from Carlton Mellick III, they’re pretty weird. some are translated to spanish: https://carltonmellick.com/books/
other bizzaro fiction in english: https://www.bizarrocentral.com/bizarro-books/
for weird horror, my favourite that might just be weird enough for the question is The Seven Days of Peter Crumb by Jonny Glynn
House of leaves is my all time favourite mindfuck horror literature. I just recommend going hard copy over ebook as the formatting is super important. I can’t really describe it except to say I can see how Backrooms could be inspired by it.
My all-time favorite novel is Blindness by Jose Saramago. I have only read it in English, but it was originally published in Portuguese as “Ensaio sobre a cegueira”.
From Wikipedia: “It centers on an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in a nonspecific city, and follows multiple unnamed characters as they navigate the social breakdown that swiftly follows.”
I haven’t read those authors so I’m not sure if it’s the same type of weird, but I recently read Hyperion which is both weird and good.
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Ever read Blindsight by Peter Watts?
keep getting references to Watts’s book, but no
It’s a good read. It taught me about the actual real concept of blindsight., seeing without perceiving.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil was a lot of fun.
I haven’t seen it mentioned yet so I’ll throw in my rec: the spear cuts through water. You know how they say you need to know the rules to break the rules? This book is a masterclass in that. It does so many things that novels simply aren’t supposed to… And the execution is flawless. The story is compelling, but I was most engaged with the way it was written. It felt like nothing else I’ve ever encountered - not because the ideas were new (nesting narratives, shifts in perspective, genre twists, etc) but because I’ve never seen so much of it executed so well together.
It’s well-known and well-studied, but also infamous as a book few people ever actually finish because it is so weird: Gravity’s Rainbow.
I finished it. I’m not sure what I gained by reading it, outside of having a better understanding of what an acid trip might feel like. Very weird.
Other mainstream but weird recommendations: Mexican Gothic (highly recommend this) and A Night in the Lonesome October
Hated hated hated this book. Not to discourage others from reading it, just seconding the sentiment that it’s a book few people finish.
