I love sci fi, but a lot of it tends to be pretty similar to real world concepts, except in space. I’m looking for the weirdest stuff, whether it’s cultures, the world, or the writing style in general. Difficult and hard-to-follow books welcome.
Things like worldbuildingnote on youtube’s world spindle is an example of the kind of really out-of-the-box thinking I’d love to explore.
This one gets recommended a lot whenever people ask for science fiction recommendations. But just in case you haven’t heard of it, Peter Watts’ Blindsight. It’s pretty hard sci-fi, the writer assumes you’ll do a lot of the work so he doesn’t spoon feed you anything. It has some of the coolest aliens I’ve read about, both in physical appearance and in their minds. This one has a sort of sequel, Echopraxia, which is even more out there. Happens in the same setting and follows some of the events from Blindsight, but the core theme is very different. Where Blindsight is about sentience and the human mind, Echopraxia is about reality itself (which I didn’t find out until I read the author’s blog, because Echopraxia is even more difficult than Blindsight).
On easier reads, Skullcrack City by Jeremy Robert Johnson. This one is more on the Weird side of things. The concepts are not that new, but Johnson executes them very well. Weird science and human experiments.
You surely know about Annihilation and the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. But he has older books which are pretty good. My favorite is Finch, the conclusion to the Ambergris trilogy, which starts with City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: And Afterword. Of the three, I consider only Finch to land on Science Fiction. All three books are about the city of Ambergris in a vaguely defined world, were humans coexist with another people called the Grey Caps. City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of several stories and a novella, Shriek: An Afterword is supposed to be a book written in-universe, expanding on one of the entries from City of Saints and Madmen, and the two are closer to Fantasy and Magical Realism. Finch happens later, after some big events, and is mostly noir, but very unusual on several of it’s concepts, and by the end it’s entirely sci-fi. Think Cronenberg if he was more into fungi than flesh (actually I think there was a fungi pink subgenre going around years ago, and either this trilogy was foundational to that, or some of it’s more important books).