The monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey appears three times and nobody ever says what it is. Clarke, in the 1968 novel, allows himself a few more lines than Kubrick does, and still stops well short of an explanation. The closing sequence, the passage beyond Jupiter, drops out of narrative register altogether and becomes a perceptual event the reader goes through without ever fully grasping it.
That choice is rare. Science fiction tends to explain, because explaining is its trade. The five novels below do the opposite: they put something at the centre of the story and leave it there, intact.
1. Solaris, Stanisław Lem (1961)
The ocean covering the planet Solaris is alive, and for more than a century Earth’s scientists have tried to make contact. They have produced an enormous body of literature, Solaristics, which Lem catalogues with the patience of a librarian, and they have got nowhere.
When Kris Kelvin arrives at the orbital station, the ocean has started answering in a way nobody anticipated: it materialises people drawn from the most painful memories of the men aboard. Kelvin finds himself facing Harey, the wife who killed herself ten years earlier. Lem never says whether this is an attempt at communication, an experiment or an involuntary reflex. The question stays open and the novel ends.
2. Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1972)
Something passed through Earth and left. It left behind six Zones full of objects that work by laws nobody can reconstruct, and traps that kill in ways nobody can predict. Stalkers slip in and carry out whatever they can carry.
The title holds the book’s argument. A scientist compares the Visitation to a picnic at the side of a road: cars stop, people eat, they drive on, and the grass is left with rubbish the local animals examine without understanding. The aliens never appear, nobody saw them, and the novel gives no sign that they are coming back.
Original title Пикник на обочине.
3. Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon (1937)
A man walks out of his house after an argument with his wife, sits down on an English hill, and his consciousness detaches from his body. From there the book crosses billions of years and thousands of civilisations, reaches galaxies that become thinking beings, and finally arrives at the Star Maker of the title.
What Stapledon finds at the end of that journey resembles nothing consolatory. The Maker regards its creations with the interest of someone studying them, and moves on. The narrator sees it, fails to comprehend it, and returns to the hill. The book shaped Borges, Lewis and Clarke himself, and ninety years on it remains more radical than almost everything it inspired.
4. Tau Zero, Poul Anderson (1970)
The Leonora Christine sets out for a star thirty-three light years away with fifty people aboard. An accident damages the deceleration system and the ship can no longer slow down. It keeps accelerating, and relativistic dilation stops being a technical detail and becomes the plot.
Anderson carries the arithmetic all the way through. The crew passes through the lifespan of galaxies, then of the universe, and here the unknown is a question of scale. The physics is laid out with precision; what that physics means for fifty people sealed in a metal tube is something the book shows without domesticating.
5. Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (2014)
Four unnamed women, identified by their role, enter Area X. This is the twelfth expedition. The earlier ones came back changed, or did not come back.
The biologist finds a structure descending into the ground, its walls carrying writing made of living organisms. VanderMeer transcribes it, has it read aloud, and never decodes it. Area X is given no stated origin and no stated purpose, and the novel closes leaving the reader with what they have seen. The trilogy continues and widens the frame without closing it.
And then
H.O.M.S., the space opera trilogy I wrote for Demy Publishing, works the same ground. The novels were written in Italian and are also available in English translation.
In the colonised Solar System of the books there are the Homs, Homo Origenis Mutatae Sapiens, human beings genetically modified with physical or aesthetic capabilities well outside the ordinary range. A social stratification has formed around them, with its own institutions and its own slang: the Inclusive Police, which polices more than it includes, the Freak Side ghetto, and the word “normo”, which the Homs use for unmodified Sapiens.
The second volume, Phase Two: Beyond the Singularity, contains a chapter of four hundred and sixty words in which the typography breaks apart: capitals in the middle of words, spaced-out letters, lines drifting to the right, words fused together without spaces. It describes the crossing of the singularity from the point of view of the people living through it, and I wrote it that way because at that point an explanation would have worked less well. The chapter ends on a single word.
The trilogy is complete and available on Amazon, including Kindle Unlimited: Phase One: Space Conspiracy.
If this list was useful, the blog also has books like Altered Carbon and parallel universes in novels.
Background photo in the featured image: A View of Crescent Jupiter from Juno. Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, image processing by Kevin M. Gill, CC BY
