SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Hi all,

I'm trying to put together a list of sci-fi or fantasy novels that are in some way unreliable. I mean that as broadly as you want to take it. So, for example, some "classics": (view spoiler)[It could include the classic unreliable narrators like in Fight Club, but it also could include books where the narrator may or may not be describing events as they're actually unfolding (like The Turn of the Screw), books where the protagonist fundamentally misunderstands the events she or he is experiencing and is therefore an unreliable witness for the reader (like Benito Cereno), or books where the protagonist's grasp on the past has been shaken loose by either time or trauma (like A Pale View of Hills). (hide spoiler)]

This is for my own personal reading pleasure, but it's also because I'd like to add some sci-fi and/or fantasy to an introductory lit class I teach on the theme of unreliable narratives.

For many of these books, even providing the recommendation will be a spoiler, so maybe err on the side of using the spoiler tags to hide stuff?

Thanks!

What do you mean by unreliable? I don't want to Flickr the spoiler tag for fear of... spoilers. Lol.

I'm guessing you mean the narrator is unreliable, but I'm not really sure.

(view spoiler)[Too Like the Lightning & the sequel Seven Surrenders (must be read together!)
The Sparrow
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Blackbirds (kind of a stretch, but the MC is a liar who consorts with other liars and psychopaths, so you never doubt what is happening, but you can't really believe them entirely either.)
The Name of the Wind
Fledgling
The Fifth Season
Life of Pi (hide spoiler)]

Hm. It seems unreliable scifi narrators are a theme in my reading lately. Enjoy and good luck with your class!

Here's what I put below the tag without the examples: It could include the classic unreliable narrators, but it also could include books where the narrator may or may not be describing events as they're actually unfolding, books where the protagonist fundamentally misunderstands the events she or he is experiencing, or books where the protagonist's grasp on the past has been shaken loose by either time or trauma.

In all of these, unreliability is typically introduced through either a first-person narrator or close third-person narration. It could stem from active deception, but it could also stem from confusion, self-deception, ignorance, bigotry, mental illness, trauma, etc.

Short stories or novellas would also be very welcome.

Travis wrote: "Here's what I put below the tag without the examples: It could include the classic unreliable narrators, but it also could include books where the narrator may or may not be describing events as th..."

Ahh, got it. I'll have to think on some of these a little.

One book with an actively unreliable narrator is: (view spoiler)[ The Thief (hide spoiler)]

I didn't read through all of Alison's post, but I'd agree with her on (view spoiler)[Too Like the Lightning The narrator never really outright lies, but he is actively misleading or holding back information at times. (hide spoiler)]

(view spoiler)[The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (hide spoiler)] is often cited as such, though I never made it far enough in the series to know why.

Calling this one out, is unfortunately a huge spoiler, so read at your own risk, (view spoiler)[The Memory Agent I guess it would fall under the mental illness/disability/self deception category? (hide spoiler)].

It's an interesting question. Off the cuff, I don't think Sci-fi necessarily lends itself to the unreliable narrator in particular. That is, the genre is in many ways expository and speculative, but that exposition and speculation is presented "as read" if you will. Having a narrator extrapolate unreliably upon a scientific principal—even when fantastic and unreal—is in opposition to the core nature of the genre. "What if..." is in opposition to (or, probably more accurately, at odds with) "Says who?"

Fantasy, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have that same dynamic. I'll mix the two up liberally here:

Even if the unreliable narrator is somehow at odds with the expository nature of sci-fi, any narrative that is in the first person is, to one extent or another, unreliable. So, there's the place to start. And SF specifically has a few dynamics that should probably be seen as facets of unreliability. For instance, there's a whole body of SF that is based upon the nature of perception and how it might be altered, so in that sense, a guy like Philip K. Dick should be a good reference point, particularly in his more druggy narratives.

Certain "amnesia" stories also spring to mind. That is, something like Nine Princes in Amber in which the narrator starts off with no memory whatever and must by necessity doubt the nature of the reality with which he is presented. Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle, and Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist should fit into that sub-subcategory.

In fact, anything with sanity as a theme should make one doubt the reliability of the narrator. To me, that means H.P. Lovecraft has to top the list. For the most part, I think Lovey was going for a presentation that was more real than the world we perceive, meaning he wasn't exploring the unreliable narrator as a technique in particular, but some of this narratives are from the POV of the insane, those teetering on the edge of insanity, or those who will be driven insane. So, "The Shadow Out of Time" could make a nice intro to the topic in a intro lit class.

With sanity in mind, I think it's worth mentioning 1984 since the book is definitively about the sanity of the narrator in the face of the manipulations of the culture he lives in. Dystopic tales told in the first person have all got to be doubted at one level or another. The Handmaid's Tale expressly plays with the reliability of the narrator. She calls herself out as unreliable a few times in the book. She'll flat out say, "It didn't really happen like that..." or words to that effect after relating some particular sequence or another, and the end chapter of the novel is all about a bunch of academics speculating on the truthfulness and veracity of her story.

There are a couple of interesting comments in the narration of Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind in which Kvothe/Kote specifically describes himself as having studied memory techniques that would allow him to relate so detailed (and long...) a narrative as he does. Meanwhile, Bast specifically interjects into this narrative from time to time, inserting details or contradicting those presented by K/K.

I have a personal theory that much of the narrative of Frankenstein is part of a wild, insane rambling of the narrator. There really is no monster. There is just Doctor F gone mad and fleeing off to the North where he is rescued, half-dead and raving, by a trapped ship. I have to say that that interpretation does require more than a little massaging to make in fit when it comes to the final chapter of that book, but the reliability of Frankenstein in telling his tale without the "there is no monster" extreme is still a sensible way to read it.

There are a lot of Horror novels that I think are meant to be unreliable. So, who do you think is being more forthright? Louis in Interview with a Vampire or Lestat in The Vampire Lestat or neither one of them? Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is definitively about perception and sanity, and while I wouldn't say that makes the narrative itself unreliable, there is an awful lot of perspective narrative that might fit the bill.

Certain aspects of The Hobbit should stand out as well. That is, the story is presented as Bilbo's tale of adventure, but since that blends into the Lord of the Rings series, we have to take his narration related to the One Ring with a bit of skepticism. After all, that's the power symbol of Sauron the Deceiver, and it works its magic on the little hobbit brains from the get-go, driving Smeagol to kill, Bilbo to lie by omission and eventually even getting Frodo to do a whole mental breakdown bit.

A good example of unreliable narrator in SF (one of Iain M Banks's best Culture novels): (view spoiler)[ Use of Weapons (hide spoiler)]

And in short stories, Philip K. Dick: (view spoiler)[ We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, the novelette that inspired Total Recall (hide spoiler)]

Gary wrote: "It's an interesting question. Off the cuff, I don't think Sci-fi necessarily lends itself to the unreliable narrator in particular. That is, the genre is in many ways expository and speculative, bu..."

I have to disagree with this, because there are too many examples to the contrary. Just because authors don't do it very often doesn't mean the genre is naturally resistant to it. I do agree that SF tends to be more earnest than other genres, but a tendency is not natural law.

Some books that I'll put behind the spoiler tag, because just knowing that the story or narrator is unreliable is like telling people there's a twist in the movie: it ruins the surprise.

(view spoiler)[
Two of the better examples of unreliable narrators come from Connie Willis. One is Uncharted Territory, where she withholds some information which later has an impact on the characters. The other is Remake, where she plays honestly with the reader by giving all the necessary information to solve the mystery, but she uses clever misdirection to get you to fall for the red herring.

An especially heartbreaking one is the brilliant Flowers for Algernon, where Charly is completely clueless about the world because his IQ is so low. Once he undergoes the procedure that remakes him into a supergenius, he realizes just how unreliable his experiences were. When he loses his intelligence again, he doesn't regain his innocence.

The Player of Games by Iain Banks does this, but you don't really realize it until the end when the narrator admits he made a lot of it up, which makes you wonder if any of it is true.

Unreliability is the entire point of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Adams took it to such a degree that every version of the story is different. The original radio play, the first incarnation of the novel, the TV series... all written by Adams, all slightly different retellings of the same tale. Except he did this after the fact, Meta unreliability!
(hide spoiler)]

Gary wrote: "It's an interesting question. Off the cuff, I don't think Sci-fi necessarily lends itself to the unreliable narrator in particular. That is, the genre is in many ways expository and speculative, bu..."

I also disagree. It might be harder to think of unreliable narrators in military sci fi, or maybe hard sci-fi, but even then, I can think of a few off hand! But dystopians and soft scifi are replete with very human narrators, which means they're susceptible to unreliability.

Unreliable narratives do seem to be rare in sci-fi and fantasy. I think this is an extension of the world building aspect, which lends to matter-of-fact narratives to get the picture solidly in the readers' heads. But I think it can be pretty fun. You can build the world while simultaneously weaving an unreliable POV. Dan Simmons's Hyperion did this pretty well, being written from multiple POV's with inherent biases and personal histories that effected their interpretation of events. GRR Martin's a Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) is written in tight 3rd person POV through certain characters that can only interpret events as they know them. Large scale stories being told from very limited points of view, without the complete picture, can create an interesting arc that keeps the readers on their toes as much as the characters. Alas, I don't have many examples. I wish there were more.

Matthew wrote: "Large scale stories being told from very limited points of view, without the complete picture, can create an interesting arc that keeps the readers on their toes as much as the characters. Alas, I don't have many examples. I wish there were more. "

I haven't read them, but I'm told Patrick Rothfuss' books feature an unreliable narrator who seems to embellish his tales.

Certainly a lot of the Weird West and New Weird and whatever else we're calling "weird" this month has a built-in unreliability to it. I read the first of the Southern Reach books by Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, which features this type of storytelling. I didn't particularly care for it because I think it's a little easy to do weird while simply hinting at things, but unreliability is at the heart of that.

And I think it depends on how far one is willing to stretch the definition of unreliability, but books like Darwinia, The Chronoliths and Spin by Robert Charles Wilson never really give answers to the massive, humanity-altering events which happen in those books. Lots of characters do plenty of speculating, but we never really get a definitive authorial resolution to the mystery. (Maybe in the Spin sequels, which I haven't read, but not in the first one.)

How about the narrator in Philip K Dick's Ubik? He has no idea what's going on for most of the book.

AndrewP wrote: "How about the narrator in Philip K Dick's Ubik? He has no idea what's going on for most of the book."

Dick has been mentioned a couple times already, but yes, Ubik is particularly unreliable.

From my review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Like many of his books, it's often impossible to know what's real and what isn't, so if you're uncomfortable with that sort of intentional vagueness, his books aren't going to be satisfying. But if you can inhabit the mindspace of not being absolutely sure of everything -- or, at times, anything -- then Dick's trippy examinations of existence are great fun.

It becomes evident fairly quickly that the protagonist in (view spoiler)[ The Last One (hide spoiler)] doesn't have a full connection to the reality around her.

Trike wrote: "Matthew wrote: "Large scale stories being told from very limited points of view, without the complete picture, can create an interesting arc that keeps the readers on their toes as much as the char..."

With the Narrator, also being the Main Character, it isn't all that surprising that embellishment would come in, it is however also less easy to spot the embellishments that way.

Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren comes to mind as a book with a particularly unreliable narrator. Or maybe the book is just really confusing... I'm not sure.

Just going over all of these suggestions again. Such a rich and useful list of texts. Thank you!

Steve wrote: "Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren comes to mind as a book with a particularly unreliable narrator. Or maybe the book is just really confusing... I'm not sure."

Both

We Have Always Lived in the Castle
The Catcher in the Rye
Gone Girl

Admittedly, those are not particularly fantasy or scifi.

The Wasp Factory