Sci-fi with alien ecologies [recommendations]

[Vultur]

I've been looking for science fiction with well-thought-out or at least interesting alien ecologies. (In the vein of Midworld, the Chtorr series, etc.)

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[chaoschristian]

The Crucible of Time by John Brunner may interest you.

[Ender]

A fire upon the deep by vernor vinge

Blindsight by Peter Watts

[Maxentius]

The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, although that's a little more biology than ecology.

[Companion Cube]

A fire upon the deep by vernor vinge

Blindsight by Peter Watts

That whole book (and a bunch of his others) are available online here. To give you an idea of Peter Watts' aliens, here's a section from his footnotes (you can find the rest if you follow the link). This doesn't have to do with alien ecology per se, but there is an element of that in the book, in how the aliens interact with their environment. Also, the human crew depicted in the book is fairly exotic, itself.

Spoilers for "Blindsight", but not devastating ones Spoiler

Scrambler Anatomy and Physiology


Like many others, I am weary of humanoid aliens with bumpy foreheads, and of giant CGI insectoids that may look alien but who act like rabid dogs in chitin suits. Of course, difference for its own arbitrary sake is scarcely better than your average saggital-crested Roddennoid; natural selection is as ubiquitous as life itself, and the same basic processes will end up shaping life wherever it evolves. The challenge is thus to create an "alien" that truly lives up to the word, while remaining biologically plausible.

Scramblers are my first shot at meeting that challenge— and given how much they resemble the brittle stars found in earthly seas, I may have crapped out on the whole unlike-anything-you've-ever-seen front, at least in terms of gross morphology. It turns out that brittle stars even have something akin to the scrambler's distributed eyespot array. Similarly, scrambler reproduction— the budding of stacked newborns off a common stalk— takes its lead from jellyfish. You can take the marine biologist out of the ocean, but...

Fortunately, scramblers become more alien the closer you look at them. Cunningham remarks that nothing like their time-sharing motor/sensory pathways exists on Earth. He's right as far as he goes, but I can cite a precursor that might conceivably evolve into such an arrangement. Our own "mirror neurons" fire not only when we perform an action, but when we observe someone else performing the same action79; this characteristic has been cited in the evolution of both language and of consciousness80, 81, 82.

Things look even more alien on the metabolic level. Here on Earth anything that relied solely on anaerobic ATP production never got past the single-cell stage. Even though it's more efficient than our own oxygen-burning pathways, anaerobic metabolism is just too damn slow for advanced multicellularity83. Cunningham's proposed solution is simplicity itself. The catch is, you have to sleep for a few thousand years between shifts.

The idea of quantum-mechanical metabolic processes may sound even wonkier, but it's not. Wave-particle duality can exert significant impacts on biochemical reactions under physiological conditions at room temperature84; heavy-atom carbon tunnelling has been reported to speed up the rate of such reactions by as much as 152 orders of magnitude85.

And how's this for alien: no genes. The honeycomb example I used by way of analogy originally appeared in Darwin's little-known treatise86 (damn but I've always wanted to cite that guy); more recently, a small but growing group of biologists have begun spreading the word that nucleic acids (in particular) and genes (in general) have been seriously overrated as prerequisites to life87, 88. A great deal of biological complexity arises not because of genetic programming, but through the sheer physical and chemical interaction of its components89, 90, 91, 92. Of course, you still need something to set up the initial conditions for those processes to emerge; that's where the magnetic fields come in. No candy-ass string of nucleotides would survive in Rorschach's environment anyway.

The curious nitpicker might be saying "Yeah, but without genes how do these guys evolve? How to they adapt to novel environments? How, as a species, do they cope with the unexpected?" And if Robert Cunningham were here today, he might say, "I'd swear half the immune system is actively targetting the other half. It's not just the immune system, either. Parts of the nervous system seem to be trying to, well, hack each other. I think they evolve intraorganismally, as insane as that sounds. The whole organism's at war with itself on the tissue level, it's got some kind of cellular Red Queen thing happening. Like setting up a colony of interacting tumors, and counting on fierce competition to keep any one of them from getting out of hand. Seems to serve the same role as sex and mutation does for us." And if you rolled your eyes at all that doubletalk, he might just blow smoke in your face and refer to one immunologist's interpretation of exactly those concepts, as exemplified in (of all things) The Matrix Revolutions93 . He might also point out that that the synaptic connections of your own brain are shaped by a similar kind of intraorganismal natural selection94, one catalysed by bits of parasitic DNA called retrotransposons.

Cunningham actually did say something like that in an earlier draft of this book, but the damn thing was getting so weighed down with theorising that I just cut it. After all, Rorschach is the proximate architect of these things, so it could handle all that stuff even if individual scramblers couldn't. And one of Blindsight's take-home messages is that life is a matter of degree—the distinction between living and non-living systems has always been an iffy one95, 96, 97, never more so than in the bowels of that pain-in-the-ass artefact out in the Oort.

[Omega18]

First of all, if for some reason you haven't done so, you should check out other books by Alan Dean Foster since many of them create interesting alien ecologies. (Particularly the Flinx and Commonwealth books in general.) The title of the latest basically stand alone book to be alien ecology centric is Quofum.

Another standalone novel option which is striking for its ecology is Adiamante by L. E. Modesitt J. R. Its actually a distant future Earth after an ecological collapse a long time ago, but it has some interesting new species along with explanations of how this new ecology system is understood to work.

One Sci-fi series with interesting ecological components which is pretty completely thought out is Anne McCaffrey's Pern Series. If you want a book that particularly has an emphasis on ecological aspects of the world, I would suggest Dragonsdawn although you should be aware its basically a prequel for the rest of the series set way before most of it.

A final option I would suggest right now is the Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh starting with the book Foreigner. The emphasis is more humanity's and one man in particular's struggles to understand and effectively communicate with a similar looking but in key respects substantially alien thinking race, but the ecology of the world also ends up fitting into this plot in some interesting ways. The second trilogy in the series doesn't deal with alien ecology the same way, but you might like the series enough to read it anyways at that point. The third trilogy does cover the ecological component to some degree again, but since the series is written in order you really should avoid skipping around.

[Vendetta]

One Sci-fi series with interesting ecological components which is pretty completely thought out is Anne McCaffrey's Pern Series. If you want a book that particularly has an emphasis on ecological aspects of the world, I would suggest Dragonsdawn although you should be aware its basically a prequel for the rest of the series set way before most of it.

Also, McCaffrey goes increasingly batty as the series progresses, and it's probably not worth reading much of anything she wrote after about '85 or so.

[Vultur]

Also, McCaffrey goes increasingly batty as the series progresses, and it's probably not worth reading much of anything she wrote after about '85 or so.

I know very little about Anne McCaffrey's books; the only one I ever read was called "Dinosaur Planet: The Mystery of Ireta" or something of the sort, and that was years ago. There were some really bizarre things about that book (primarily the fact that the thought of eating meat was so shocking to the people in the Shiny League of Galactic Puppies Kittens n' Niceness*, but it was also weird that none of the biologists had ever heard of dinosaurs). Is the Pern battiness the same way, or something different?

*not the actual name, but I can't remember what it was called.

[Omega18]

Also, McCaffrey goes increasingly batty as the series progresses, and it's probably not worth reading much of anything she wrote after about '85 or so.

I know very little about Anne McCaffrey's books; the only one I ever read was called "Dinosaur Planet: The Mystery of Ireta" or something of the sort, and that was years ago. There were some really bizarre things about that book (primarily the fact that the thought of eating meat was so shocking to the people in the Shiny League of Galactic Puppies Kittens n' Niceness*, but it was also weird that none of the biologists had ever heard of dinosaurs). Is the Pern battiness the same way, or something different?

*not the actual name, but I can't remember what it was called.

Basically I specifically decided to avoid mentioning the series you're talking because I don't view it as Anne McCaffrey's best work, in spite of biology obviously being part of the plot. (In fact as far as I remember it I recall it being pretty poor by her standards particularly if we exclude her most recent stuff.)

Comparatively I'd say the Pern world makes way more sense in how its set up biologically, and tends to seem more inherently sensible internally in general. I'd agree with the point that Anne McCaffrey's most recent books have clearly gone downhill. In my view this appears to be particularly because she has gotten old and no longer is really willing to challenge her characters or have bad things potentially happen to them in the way she was in her earlier books, and this really hurts the overall plot line.

I'd disagree on the timeline given though and say the Pern series remains pretty strong up to All the Weyrs of Pern in 1991. Basically this book is the climax to the series and a key problem with anything that ended up being written after this is it basically ended up being anticlimactic given the key things solved in this particular book. Because its a climax I would suggest reading most of the earlier published things set in the world of Pern first. The one thing you might consider reading published after this is the 1993 Chronicles of Pern short story collection, particularly for the short story "Rescue Run" which provides an explanation for a key question about the Pernverse you likely will be wondering about, particularly if you have read Dragonsdawn along with a fair number of other Pern books by that point.

I'd also say that in my view McCaffrey's books set outside of Pern remained pretty strong in many cases for several more years, with the real glaring dropoff occurring somewhere after 1993 or 1994. (A number of books were published between around 1991 to 1994 so this distinction does matter.) One point to remember is we're talking about the original date of publication as being what really matters here, so don't get confused by something being a reprint and having a newer date for that reason. Wikipedia is actually a pretty good research tool for figuring out the dates and what publication wise is during the right period.

[Vehrec]

It's batty in it's own way. Which isn't necessarily a good thing, but some people can stand it. The most interesting biology, the truly alien Thread is never really examined in depth. Everything else is terribly earth-like. The name of the planet even stands for Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible, so it never had very interesting alien ecology. There are basically no sympathetic antagonists, or protagonists with significantly different viewpoints. There is in Dragonsdawn, a geneticist who creates the titular dragons and Spoiler

effectively makes the females brood mares. The geneticist is herself female.

It's been a while, I've probably forgotten something important.

[Zor]

Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the AD 2358 Voyage to Darwin IV by Wayne Douglas Barlowe. Nemo Ramjet's Snaiad is also interesting in this regard

Also, check out After Man by Dougal Dixon. Its not alien ecology, but it is interesting none the less

Zor

[Omega18]

It's batty in it's own way. Which isn't necessarily a good thing, but some people can stand it. The most interesting biology, the truly alien Thread is never really examined in depth. Everything else is terribly earth-like. The name of the planet even stands for Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible, so it never had very interesting alien ecology. There are basically no sympathetic antagonists, or protagonists with significantly different viewpoints. There is in Dragonsdawn, a geneticist who creates the titular dragons and Spoiler

effectively makes the females brood mares. The geneticist is herself female.

It's been a while, I've probably forgotten something important.

I do agree to the extent that in general the biology is not really necessarily that bizarre or that glaringly exotic, although the dragons and their "cousins" can be viewed as pretty interesting, and there are a few other notable biological twists come out during the course of the series. The key though is its NOT purely a copy of earth though and there are a variety of species described which are clearly alien ones and sometimes they have properties that known earth plants for instance clearly don't. The key is they fit together pretty well and its not like some sci-fi series where they throw in a few exotic plans or animals in a way where they never really make much sense or seem to be anything but simply thrown in there to try to make the book more interesting. Its an earthlike planet, which made it attractive for colonization in the first place, but the course of the series does end up establishing a variety of differences with regards to its own species.

The series does not always focus on the biological components in many of the books, but during the course of them you do get plenty of development of the biological development of Pern.

While its true there may not be as sympathetic antagonists as some series out there, you do for instance have the "oldtimer" dragon riders who you at least can potentially feel pretty sympathetic with regards to their grievances and current problems. You also do have for instance a "holder" who does cause concerns for awhile although he never become an outright villain, and his motives generally come across as fairly understandable and not that unreasonable, so you can remain pretty sympathetic to him. It should also be noted that some of the challenges presented in the books are not from people at all, but other things about the world in question, so this reduces the role antagonists necessarily play in the first place. I'd say there is some degree of variation on protagonist viewpoints if you read enough books in the series. Its to be sure not as great variability as some series, but it never was anything that particularly bothered me.

Ultimately I'd say some people are going to like the series and clearly there are people who don't as well. As far as the thread starter is concerned I'd say the one positive sign is we both like Alan Dean Foster, (this is assuming Midworld is not all he has read by him) which suggests we may have a degree of similarly on what kind of sci-fi books we tend to like in general.

[Vultur]

Thank you, I'll go look these up in the library.

Ultimately I'd say some people are going to like the series and clearly there are people who don't as well. As far as the thread starter is concerned I'd say the one positive sign is we both like Alan Dean Foster, (this is assuming Midworld is not all he has read by him) which suggests we may have a degree of similarly on what kind of sci-fi books we tend to like in general.

Oh, no, I've read a lot of his stuff: the Tran-ky-ky trilogy, pretty much all the non-series Commonwealth novels, a couple of Flinx books, Interlopers, and Life Form.

[Styphon]

Regarding the Pern novels, specifically Anne McCaffrey getting old: I'm actually reading All the Weyrs of Pern right now (cause I've got a bunch of overdue fees at the library and the Pern books were about all I had on hand except Star Wars novels)... I'm only six chapters in and I've already noticed at least one major continuity gaffe completely independent of the rest of the series: Spoiler

first Sharra's pregnant and thus unsafe to go Between, then she shows up at Landing during the experiment with the liquid helium, then she's back at Ruatha frustrated that she can't go to Landing and take lessons from AIVAS! You'd think an editor at least would have caught this.

[Gullible Jones]

Legacy by Greg Bear has a rather interesting, if dubious, alien ecology...

[K. A. Pital]

Stanislav Lem, Fiasko and Solaris

[Junghalli]

here were some really bizarre things about that book (primarily the fact that the thought of eating meat was so shocking to the people in the Shiny League of Galactic Puppies Kittens n' Niceness*

Assuming we found a substitute that tasted as good, like vat-grown meat or something, and everybody eventually switched to that, I wouldn't be surprised if people eventually came to consider eating actual meat really gross. Most people today would already be pretty grossed out by having to actually kill an animal or thinking about what happens in a slaughterhouse. It's not really a huge leap to finding the idea of eating authentic dead critter gross.

[Vendetta]

I'd disagree on the timeline given though and say the Pern series remains pretty strong up to All the Weyrs of Pern in 1991. Basically this book is the climax to the series and a key problem with anything that ended up being written after this is it basically ended up being anticlimactic given the key things solved in this particular book. Because its a climax I would suggest reading most of the earlier published things set in the world of Pern first. The one thing you might consider reading published after this is the 1993 Chronicles of Pern short story collection, particularly for the short story "Rescue Run" which provides an explanation for a key question about the Pernverse you likely will be wondering about, particularly if you have read Dragonsdawn along with a fair number of other Pern books by that point.

All The Weyrs was already getting a bit wobbly.

You could as happily stop with The White Dragon and not really lose much.