In search of metaphyctions

[radiantfracture]

Hullo, do you know any books.

I've been listening to too much true crime and it isn't helping me plot this novel. I keep thinking what I need are murderers and spies, and they are not what I need.

On the last day of my Crave subscription I watched Tenet, which I enjoyed, even though sometimes it was more like a Bond film than a metaphysical thriller. Because it invoked time and entropy, it stirred many ideas for my novel project, including a possible ending.

So this is the sort of mindset I want to be in. A Tenet, Primer, Upstream Colour, Inception, Arrival kind of mood. More with space, dimensions, and/or perception than time, though. For preference. Although I hadn't really given that much thought to the time element of my own story, so maybe.

Therefore, I am in search of what I sometimes call metaphyctions or metaphysical novels (or stories, films, series, podcasts, poems):

speculative fiction in which the process of discovering and negotiating the laws of a given reality is the engine of the plot, or an important part of the action. These can be physical or metaphysical laws.
 

Eccentric nonfiction also welcome.

I have read and loved Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll, and G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday -- Cosmicomics is probably the closest to what I'm thinking of, since it cheerfully and poetically takes up all sorts of scientific ideas with such absolute ludicrous confidence.

David Eagleman's Sum might be in a similar category, though I didn't connect as much to that, and Ted Chiang's work maybe -- kind of bounced off of it, but willing to try again.

I have some Borges but could use some direction with him.

{rf}

N.B. Of course "Metaphyction" is in practice (or at least in speech) a useless word, since it would sound exactly the same as "metafiction," but I can't help that.

Comments

[larryhammer]

Hmmm. Some of the more introspective wuxia/xianxia novels can be driven by this, initially. Once the hero (it seems almost always to be a he) has achieved understanding of the Dao of the fictional world and harmonized himself to it, the story typically devolves into an adventure plot. Lemme see if I can find a good example ...

[radiantfracture]

That sounds just excellent.

[larryhammer]

Oh, here's a good example: 择天记, officially translated as Way of Choices, by Mao Ni (猫腻). The adventure plot is braided throughout, but every level-up involves further insights into the hidden mysteries of the Dao and how it manifests within and without. The official translation is slightly paywalled but copies of dubious legality can be found hither and yon.

[mdlbear]

I love The Man Who Was Thursday -- part of my comfort reading collection.

Take a look at Stanislaw Lem. In particular, A Perfect Vacuum, which is a collection of reviews of non-existent books.

For Borges, try "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "The Garden of Forking Paths".

[radiantfracture]

Thank you!

[jazzfish]

Ha, as soon as I read your list of movies my first thought was The Third Policeman.

Very maybe the Illuminatus! trilogy by Shea & Wilson? I am not sure I would actually recommend it to anyone without an interest in / tolerance for 70s counterculture.

John M. Ford's stories "Preflash" and "Chromatic Aberration" (both in Heat Of Fusion & Other Stories, which is an excellent collection in general) may fit the bill.

For Borges, in addition to mdlbear's excellent suggestions, try "Death and the Compass." "The Library of Babel" is less a process of discovery and more "here are the rules of this reality" but it's also quite good.

[radiantfracture]

"The Library of Babel" is less a process of discovery and more "here are the rules of this reality" but it's also quite good.

I think I would like that, too -- I'm not sure which approach I'll end up
with.

Very maybe the Illuminatus! trilogy by Shea & Wilson

Ahhhhh you take me back to university radicalism at an obscure West-Coast institution where we did all of our 70s reading 15 years too late.

[ursula]

Maybe Hannu Rajaniemi? The Jean le Flambeur books are a post-Singularity heist trilogy and Summerland is a spy story where half the characters are ghosts.

I suppose Anathem also fits your definition, though it seems less likely to be congenial in style.

[radiantfracture]

Those are masterpieces of very short synopses.

I did like earlier of Neal Stephenson's books.

[cupcake_goth]

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. Multiple realities with overlapping timelines.

[radiantfracture]

Ah you know I've never read any of Morgenstern's books. They sound like my sort of thing, though.

[kenjari]

Ubik by Philip K. Dick. It plays with reality and time in cool ways.

[radiantfracture]

Oh yeah. Philip K. Dick for sure -- exactly that kind of wild intellectual play.

[sovay]

Therefore, I am in search of what I sometimes call metaphyctions or metaphysical novels (or stories, films, series, podcasts, poems)

If you have not already, you want to watch the director's cut of Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998) stat.

[radiantfracture]

I saw the original a very long time ago, but not the director's cut (I don't think).

I liked it, and was of course startled by the pre-Matrix Matrixness of it all.

-- what do you value about the director's cut?

[sovay]

-- what do you value about the director's cut?

It deletes the narration, which had been added at the insistence of the studio, thus permitting the audience to discover the world at the same pace as the characters, and it adds a lot of small moments throughout the story that change nothing about the overall plot but make everyone feel more textured and the whole thing feel more coherent without handholding. They underscore the humanity of its metafiction, without which I would feel the film was just a visually beautiful, narratively clever exercise.

I had been putting together this edit before you replied, so:

The Adjustment Bureau (2011) is nowhere near as good as good as its predecessors, but it is an existential fantasy in the tradition of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and a key part of all three plots is the discovery—and then the rules-lawyering if not outright breaking—of the metaphysical laws of the world. Angel on My Shoulder (1946) really isn't the same kind of story in that it doesn't deal in revelations of the numinous world, but I still class it with the earlier two on grounds of afterlife. Cocteau's Orphée (1950) is much closer in that one day you're reading your poetry at the café and the next you're learning to navigate the corridors of Death.

(It is difficult for me not to recommend a laundry list of film noir even when unsupernatural beacuse so much of it is about this terrifying plunge through the surface of things: the world that is real beyond your construction of it. Hence my classification of noir as an existential genre and the readiness with which it overlaps with weird fiction, which focuses on a similar drop-out of the known in favor of the oh shit. Or sometimes the beauty which we are just able to bear, since that happens and is important, too. It's the reason that after years of thinking of it as appropriating the style without the philosophical substance, I finally acknowleged Blade Runner (1982) as a legitimate neo-noir, because it's the right genre in which to realize that even you might not be what you have always believed. And for that reason my brain seems to want me to add the barely sfnal The Mind Benders (1963), which I wouldn't call a neo-noir, either.)

Oh, right, have you read Susanna Clarke's Piranesi (2020)? If not, it fits your bill. A lot of Gene Wolfe's fiction might also.

[elusis]

OMG Piranesi, yes.

Also I think perhaps Catherynne Valente's "Radiance: A Novel" might work here? The jigsaw puzzle mystery plot and the noir elements, plus the mysteries-within-the-mystery that both character and readers are figuring out, seems like the right idea.

[radiantfracture]

V excited about these film recs.

(It is difficult for me not to recommend a laundry list of film noir even when unsupernatural beacuse so much of it is about this terrifying plunge through the surface of things: the world that is real beyond your construction of it.

Yes, exactly this -- perfectly & elegantly put. Maybe that's part of why I keep gravitating to crime tropes -- I'd quite like to undermine reality in every possible way at the same time.

I liked Piranesi very much. Do you know anything that reads like more of that? (I've read the other two books of Clarke's that I know about).

Cocteau's Orphée (1950)

Okay, that's a miraculous suggestion.

[sovay]

V excited about these film recs.

Hooray!

Yes, exactly this -- perfectly & elegantly put.

Thank you. I will file it away for future use.

Maybe that's part of why I keep gravitating to crime tropes -- I'd quite like to undermine reality in every possible way at the same time.

I can think of much worse things to do with them. (Do you want a laundry list of film noir?)

I liked Piranesi very much. Do you know anything that reads like more of that?

Nothing that I didn't name-check, I'm afraid. I am sure it has other kindred; it might be worth asking your friendlist.

Okay, that's a miraculous suggestion.

If you have not seen it, I think you really should.

Oh, right

[larryhammer]

The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirsten.

Re: Oh, right

[elusis]

YESSSSSSS

(join us in suffering as we await books 5 and 6. JOIN USSSSSSS)

Re: Oh, right

[radiantfracture]

Your call is hypnotic.

Re: Oh, right

[elusis]

EXCELLENT.

[pie]

Greg Egan's whole oeuvre is this, done with various clever & fairly rigorous physics conceits. Although if you bounced off of Ted Chiang... this is kind of that, but less literary.

[radiantfracture]

I liked Greg Egan quite a lot in the early '00s, but haven't danced with him in a long time.

I feel like I ought to like Ted Chiang -- maybe it was just the wrong day.

[princessofgeeks]

Did you read that SF novel The Ninefox Gambit?

[juushika]

This request got me out of bed this morning, which is pretty impressive given the cat who was lying on my tummy and also, like, depression or whatever; but I love super specific book recommendations and this is such a good one.

I'm pretty loose with spoilers re: the premise of the plot because it's so fundamental to this request. If you're sensitive to them & would prefer a lower-spoiler reply, let me know and I can edit.


Seconding:

Philip K. Dick. (A Scanner Darkly is my favorite and 100% about this: an undercover cop becomes to addicted and so a part of drug culture that he begins to separate from his identity-as-cop, and that play on identity, social role, and social/physical experience is deeply baked in; here's the money quote about "seeing" self and world "darkly.") But as stated, most all Dick is all about this theme.

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, which is about an impossible, endless house, a man who lives there, and the discovery of why he lives there.

The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirsten is such a joyful take on this! Scientific method as primary form of exploring a world where lost technology masquerades as magic. Love these books to death; love what they do with the specific thing you're after.


Also adding:

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, or the film adaptation I suppose ("I suppose" isn't a dismissal, I like the film a lot! and it has great visuals! but the book is a little better), is about entering the impossible reality of Area X, where discovering how/why it functions means becoming a part of its transformative reality. FWIW I didn't love the book sequels as much.

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck is a floaty, subdued mystery about a world where physical objects much be willed into permanence by the repeated effort of naming or else they literally dissolve into mush—and why things are that way, and what it might mean to have a different relationship with that mush-substance.

Mortal Fire by Elizabeth Knox is about a math-oriented 16-year-old girl who has a propensity for seeing patterns that no one else can see ... and while on vacation, that pattern-finding uncovers a hidden magical community. Her way of seeing the world combined with a really great magic system is so joyful and clever and transcendent.

Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series is about political revolt (from within) in a massive intergalactic empire ... which uses the social/cultural control of empire to establish a calendar which is literally used to alter physics. Among a lot of other speculative elements! But the calendar, both the impossible, trippy descriptions of its effects and the commentary on imperialism in its worldbuilding, are captivating.

Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko is a strange beast of a book: a girl is forced/compelled into a magical school where the class memorizes meaningless text, studies unreadable books—because magic is such a fundamentally altered reality as to be incomprehensible, thus it's learned without comprehension. This book is very much engaging magical school tropes, but it's a unique take on what it means to discover or negotiate a reality—and what makes a reality unknown/"incomprehensible."

[sovay]

Also adding

Seconding VanderMeer's Annihilation (I did like the sequels) and Lee's Machineries of Empire.

[elusis]

Mieville's "The City and the City," I think?

[elusis]

Oh, and one more: "The Traitor Baru Cormorant," first of a trilogy - young woman from a rural upbringing is forced to try and understand how the politics of the world around her really work. Trust no one.

I lied: "Gideon the Ninth," which begins with a dirtbag lesbian slave warrior training and eating gruel on a world full of the living dead, drops her into an intergalactic power struggle masquerading as a locked room mystery masquerading as a tournament of champions, and then as if "lesbian necromancers in spaaaaaaace" weren't enough, it gets really weird.

[marycatelli]

Tower of Dreams by Jamil Nasir

Lewis Carroll's Alice books

[marycatelli]

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke Definitely

[radiantfracture]

Do not know Tower of Dreams!

[radiantfracture]

I mean, Alice is such a great suggestion because those books are full of math and logic. Thank you!

[marycatelli]

Glad I could help!

[yarrowkat]

have you read Ninefox Gambit? it's a trilogy, and i think it does what you are looking for here. certianly it is a universe whose laws work very differently, and the navigation of that is part of what drives the story.

[yarrowkat]

heh, i see i am at least the third person to reccomend it. they are very odd and very beautiful, and also oddly haunting. the story has stuck with me far longer than most do.