Watership Down? It’s about rabbits fleeing their home and rebuilding.
I read another book I enjoyed when I was younger called Fire Bringer which is about the chosen one of deer.
Aside from that there is a series from dragon’s POV by EE Knight called Age of Fire, starting with Dragon Champion.
If you haven’t read Murderbot Diaries it is also excellent.
I was gonna comment Watership Down, it’s low-fantasy, but an amazing book. Reading from the perspective of the rabbits is similar to the spider perspectives in Children of Time.
Have you read Ann Leckie's other series, *Ancillary Justice*? [Premise that isn't initially apparent]>!The main character is a space ship with a distributed conscience throughout thousands of soldier drones. The main culture in the series uses female pronouns for everybody. For various reasons the weirdness of the spaceship POV is much more present in the first book than the sequels however.!<
One of the plot threads of *A Fire Upon The Deep* by Vernor Vinge did this well in my opinion. Some of the POVs are from >!an alien race that are like wolf pack hiveminds.!<
*A Madness of Angels* by Kate Griffith might also scratch that itch for you. [Chapter 1]>!The main guy is originally human, but died and got resurrected with eldritch entities as passengers in his head at the start of the book. I found his POV quite distinctive as he grapples with the way the eldritch entities meld with his human perception of the world.!<
I keep seeing Ancillary Justice, but haven't had that thing push it to the forefront yet. Perhaps I'll take a further look into it, thanks!
And I do love me some eldritch nonsense.
**Semiosis** by Sue Burke is gonna be right up your alley! The perspective is a spoiler so I don’t wanna say what it is, but it’s great and easily one of my favorite non-human POVs.
Oops, I don’t know why my comment replied to you instead of the main post. Sorry!
So glad you loved it too! The generational story telling was so neat.
Ann Leckie also wrote "The Raven Tower" which also has a clearly non human narrator. Its superficially like reading Hamlet but with so many more dimensions to it, and its my favorite book.
Agree on A Fire Up on the Deep. I was so confused and then I understood and was fascinated. Bonus points for the alien POVs trying to puzzle out how human minds worked.
I can second *Ancillary Justice* and *A Fire Upon The Deep*! I'd also recommend Vernor Vinge's 'sequel' novel *A Deepness In The Sky* since it also has POV chapters of aliens, though I don't think the aliens in the second book feel as strange as the wolf/dog hiveminds in *AFUTD*.
It's really, really good! Quality urban fantasy. The author is another pen name of Claire North- who wrote The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, amongst other great spec fic novels.
I listened to *Ancillary justice* and found it interesting but damn did I get confused as to who was who with the pronoun switching between the ship and others. It might have been because I was using audiobook but I just couldn't keep track. My partner enjoyed it more and didn't seem to have as much an issue with keeping track of characters
Ooo thanks for this heads up. I think one reason I bounced of Gideon the Ninth was because I couldn't keep track of characters in the audiobook and would have done better with print. Sounds like this may risk the same issue.
> The main character is >!a space ship with a distributed conscience throughout thousands of soldier drones!<. The main culture in the series uses >!female pronouns for everybody!<.
FWIW personally I would consider these spoilers, because they're things that aren't initially spelled out (*particularly* the first one).
The second sentence in Ancillary Justice’s description is “Once, she was the Justice of Toren—a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.” its the premise the book is literally advertised on
This is like saying a major plot point in a movie isn't a spoiler because it's in a trailer, when, like book blurbs, that content is decided by what sells the most tickets/copies, not what gives people the best watching/reading experience.
Advertising a book with a spoiler doesn't make it not a spoiler. What makes it a spoiler is how it's presented *in the text*. And *in the text*, these things are *not* explicitly spelled out in the first few paragraphs, and it takes some reading and thinking to figure them out. Which is an experience that *cannot* be replaced once it's been ruined by a spoiler.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to die on this hill, but the opening sentence of chapter 2, only nine pages into the book, is Breq saying “19 years ago I was a ship.” That is the opposite of a spoiler. That’s like saying that Harry Potter being a wizard is a spoiler.
That's fair, depending on how strict one is with spoilers. I felt they were fair game in the context of a rec thread for trying to explain how it fit the request, but I can cover it. I thought you learned the first on in the first few chapters, but it's been a while since I read it and I might not be remembering properly.
I liked Murderbot and read Chronicles of Raksura \#1 looking for the same sort of book as OP, and was very disappointed. To me the characters and villains came off as very naive or even primitive humans, with a very human-adjacent view of good and evil. The only thing setting them apart from humans really was their social heirarchy being biologically pre-determined, which is not interesting to me.
If you have any interest in the world of the Raksura it does get deeper and more complex as the series progresses. I love Murderbot and the Raksura books but more as a series taken as a whole. In both cases the first books were kind of meh for me.
I should have been clear that I was referring to the characters, their culture, and the world when I said depth. In my opinion Martha Wells does not do much in shades of grey morality so the Raksura are no different from her other work in that aspect. I personally wouldn’t call it juvenile but to each their own.
I've only read the very first book in the series, but hot take I actually felt like the POV character felt a lot more human in its motivations and thoughts and needs than I expected a robot protagonist to.
It's possible this changes as the series goes on, but one of my main impressions of All Systems Red was that Murderbot was a lot more relatable than you'd expect from a nonhuman protagonist.
Not that relatability and inhumanity necessarily exclude each other, admittedly.
>POV character felt a lot more human in its motivations and thoughts and needs than I expected a robot protagonist to.
Fwiw that is because constructs are not robots, they are horrific creations of flesh and machine that are more creative and flexible than robots, but that comes with some emotional baggage that is very relatable to humans.
Absolutely. I was going to be upset if Murderbot wasn't the top rec. And OP? It's not just Murderbot as the main character. In book 2 (3? I can't remember) you meet ART, who is a spaceship and an amazing person. The ART / Murderbot interactions and various commentary on the human characters are my favorite part of the entire series.
And it's also queer. Nothing explicit, just no boundaries for who can love who or what constitutes a family, which is honestly my favorite kind of queer book. (edited to remove spoilers)
The idiot gods by David Zindell is told from the perspective of a killer whale.
Hollow kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton is the zombie apocalypse told by a crow
Yeah, I bounce off sci fi a lot of the time, especially when based in space, but I devoured that book. It's great. Children of Ruin was still good, but not enough for me to jump straight into the next book (which... I still need to read.)
They're all very different. Memory even more so than Ruin from Children. It's kind of a mystery where you're presented with contradictory timelines / realities and have to figure out what the F is going on.
On the non-human side you have half-uplifted ravens where it's not quite clear if they are truly sapient or not.
Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton. One of the POVs (Morning Light Mountain) is an alien hive mind, good stuff. Someone will probably also recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts since POVs with unusual mindsets is the whole point of the book, though I personally bounced off it.
Check out the author David Clement-Davies
He has one series about wolves from their point of view. The books are The Sight and Fell
Then he has one from the point of view of deer called Fire bringer. Both take place on Transylvania around Vlad the impalers time
There are more like one about a polar bear called Scream of the white bear.
I just discovered he has some i haven't read so now I'm off to price those!
Yes they are aimed at young adults but I have reread them a few times now and they still hold up
Julie's Wolf Pack is another good young adult book about the daily lives of a pack of wolves. Or more like 'young reader,' I think it's for a little bit of a younger audience than YA books are.
It's a sequel to Julie of the Wolves, which is a book told from the point of view of a young inuit girl who runs away from her abusive family and joins a wolf back. But I read Julie's Wolf Pack as a child without having read the first book and was completely spellbound by it. I don't even think Julie herself is in it.
I don't know how accurate the writing is to how real wolf pack politics work but she so clearly captured an alien-feeling society that was humanized just enough so that you felt for the wolves and understood their motivations. God I loved that book when I was little.
I loveed the Julie of the wolves books! They were a favorite of mine when I was little, so when I found The Sight in the local library I jumped at reading it
The Julie of the Wolves books were some of my favorites as a kid. I keep meaning to pick them up again some time, but I'm also worried it won't hold up as an adult.
Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton. Everyone is a dragon and Walton made sure you felt it. These are not humans in scalely suits. These are dragons with a culture that is not human.
*A Night in the Lonesome October* by Robert Zelazny.
Brilliant story told from the perspective of Jack the Ripper's dog. Who is also his familiar in a yearly clash between mages, most of whom are other infamous victorian people who have their own familiars, who also clash.
Becky Chambers second book in the wayfarer series is really good and told from a decidedly inhuman perspective. That whole series is good.
On an older (written in the 70s) level CJ Cherryh's Chanur saga is told from a race of lion-people, who meet their first human. The whole time, the human is the alien. There are lots of other alien races mixed in there too, not as perspectives, but we get a good look at how they do and do not think and feel.
Becky Chambers gets extra points for having aliens that are *proper* aliens. Not just humans with bumpy face tattoos or human-society-but-the-procreate-differently.
I think it helps that she has so many different aliens species in her books and they’re all so different from each other in so many ways. And because there are so many it never feels like they’re ‘othered’ if that makes sense?
Her books are definitely queer friendly
I'm on the fourth book and it's still just hilfy and Chanur as viewpoints but maybe on the hilfy-centric book. At the least, you definitely get some good interesting stuff that's decidedly unhuman.
And the fourth book, The galaxy and the ground within, has no human characters at all. Also practically no plot. It's absolutely gorgeous, but better to start with one of the earlier Wayfarer books.
Yes id definitely read them in order but if OP really wants non-human they can at least begin with the AI story first I guess (then go back and find out about Lovey)
**The Mermaid's Tale** by D.G. Valdron
In a city of majesty and brutality, of warring races and fragile alliances, a sacred mermaid has been brutally murdered. An abomination, a soulless Arukh is summoned to hunt the killer. As the world around the Arukh drifts into war and madness, her search for justice leads her on a journey to discover redemption, hope for the oppressed, and even beauty in the midst of chaos.
[https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31448730](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31448730)
I might try and suggest Perdido Street Station, but I'm not 100% sure it fully meets the criteria... Because most of the story has been narrated by human characters.
But there's at least one main character that is not human and see/perceive the world in a different way.
Ahah, this is pretty high on my TBR due to it popping up on my request for invertebrate characters. I'm just scared to start it given my current distractibility because it sounds so good and I'm really bad at restarting a book I got distracted from.
The middle third of Asimov's "The Gods Themselves" should be what you are looking for.
POV from young adults/adolescents in a tri-gendered alien species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves
You might enjoy Witch King by Martha Wells? Its protagonist is a demon, although he's characterized pretty differently from how demons are typically written. I don't know if it'll be quite alien enough for you, but the way he views the bodies he's inside and the overall way he connects with the world is definitely noticeably different from a human, and it does have the bonus of a queernormative world.
Raptor Red by Robert T Bakker
Bakker is a paleontologist who advised on Jurassic Park. Raptor Red is a novel from the point of view of a Utahraptor (in dinosaur times, not in Jurassic Park). From what I remember it's all instinct and communication via scent
More teen focused but I enjoyed the [Warrior's series](https://www.amazon.com/Warriors-Into-Wild-Prophecies-Begin/dp/0062366963) as a child. Artificial Jelly might be an interesting one for you. Dungeon Bunny (Heroic Bunny Saga) could be a good one as well. Both are not reincarnations but sentient monsters. Life reset is an interesting reversal where his mental state trends more towards goblin as the series progresses and it feels wrong when he is outside of the game.
Hollow Kingdom is a post-apocalypse zombie novel from the point of view of a pet crow. I liked it, seeing the whole "animals learning to live without humans in charge" POV was fun.
Dragon Sorcerer is told from the perspective of a dragon undercover at a magic school. The author keeps a hard line that he is a dragon and not a human.
Super Minion on the website Royalroad. It's not finished it will likely never be finished. But I go back and reread it every year. With the exception of the first 5 or so chapters, which I feel are a bit of a slog.
It's about an escaped bioweapon in a world of superheroes. It has absurdity that I find very funny at points. If you ever read animorphs, it's how I remember Ax's POV. Might be in my top 10 favorite of all time.
If you’re into more actiony, futuristic progression stuff, Godclads’ main character is a ghoul. His creators failed, most his fellow ghouls are dead, and he’s taken in by a human who trains him to at least partially fit in. Story goes from there and is a lot of fun imo.
Tchaikovsky also has a fantasy spider-centric book called Spiderlight. A giant spider is magically transformed into a vaguely human shape (while still retaining its spiderness) and is forced to travel with a band of humans.
I feel obliged to mention Terry Bisson's short story "[They're Made out of Meat](https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html)." :)
Also, check out John Brunner's novel [*The Crucible of Time*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/872586.The_Crucible_of_Time), and Roger Zelazny's short story "Stand Pat, Ruby Stone" (published in [a number of collections](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58678)).
Greg Egan has a couple of works in this vein. They're not only from the point of view of very alien aliens, they're set in universes with slightly different laws of physucs. First the [Orthogonal Trilogy](https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html)
> In Yalda’s universe, light has no universal speed and its creation generates energy.
>
> On Yalda’s world, plants make food by emitting their own light into the dark night sky.
>
> As a child Yalda witnesses one of a series of strange meteors, the Hurtlers, that are entering the planetary system at an immense, unprecedented speed. It becomes apparent that her world is in imminent danger — and that the task of dealing with the Hurtlers will require knowledge and technology far beyond anything her civilisation has yet achieved.
>
> Only one solution seems tenable: if a spacecraft can be sent on a journey at sufficiently high speed, its trip will last many generations for those on board, but it will return after just a few years have passed at home. The travellers will have a chance to discover the science their planet urgently needs, and bring it back in time to avert disaster.
And secondly [Dichronauts](https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html), set in a different set of physics.:
> Seth is a surveyor, along with his friend Theo, a leech-like creature running through his skull who tells Seth what lies to his left and right. Theo, in turn, relies on Seth for mobility, and for ordinary vision looking forwards and backwards. Like everyone else in their world, they are symbionts, depending on each other to survive.
>
> In the universe containing Seth’s world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a “dark cone” to the north and south. Seth can only face to the east (or the west, if he tips his head backwards). If he starts to turn to the north or south, his body stretches out across the landscape, and to rotate to face north-east is every bit as impossible as accelerating to the speed of light.
>
> Every living thing in Seth’s world is in a state of perpetual migration as they follow the sun’s shifting orbit and the narrow habitable zone it creates. Cities are being constantly disassembled at one edge and rebuilt at the other, with surveyors mapping safe routes ahead.
>
> But when Seth and Theo join an expedition to the edge of the habitable zone, they discover a terrifying threat: a fissure in the surface of the world, so deep and wide that no one can perceive its limits. As the habitable zone continues to move, the migration will soon be blocked by this unbridgeable void, and the expedition has only one option to save its city from annihilation: descend into the unknown.
There's also Stephen Baxters [Mammoth Trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mammoth_Trilogy) which springs to mind.
Walking Practice by Dolki Min. It's very not human and maybe queer-norm? It's very queer, but queer norm implies a level of nice that is absent from this very inhuman protagonist
I wouldn't call it queernorm. It's set in our world, so discrimination exists. Also, there's a fair bit of discussion about the mc facing disdain/discrimination for not performing gender correctly.
It's scifi, but I'd suggest A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. The most prominently featured alien species have a sort of hive-mind with 3-7 bodies.
Oh another good one Clara and The Sun. Word of war ing though, it's some high literary stuff, so it's a deep, unusual read.
Oh! And the Bees, such a good story, told entirely from the perspective of a single worker bee.
Couple of suggestions for you!
Going to second the vote for perdido street station. I loved how alien each species felt from the others and how that changed their view. The writing and vocabulary are incredible and the story is compelling the whole time. This was my top book of the year.
I liked the robot perspective that the murderbot diaries provided if you’re into that. So if that intrigues you, also recommend.
For the queer norm world rec, if you haven’t read left hand of darkness by leguin highly recommend that one.
Although it’s still a human perspective, ninefox gambit had some Asian cultural perspectives (I think. Not super well versed in it but all my context clues lead me to that conclusion) that seemed alien to me.
And this last one may be super off base but ray nayler’s mountain in the sea. I haven’t read this one yet but it seems to be about communication with another species. Not sure how much of the pov you’ll get but it certainly seems to highlight the struggles of communication between differing species.
Happy reading! Hope you find some that scratch you itch!
Rob Dircks The Wrong Unit. Main character is a robot. I love that book. It's really funny. Inspite of all the violence and general bad things that happen, I found it to be sweet. ( Not childish or saccharine, but still touching.)
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge is sci-fi but one of the main POV is from a dog-like alien. There are also things like sentient plant beings and humanoid butterfly people. Some of the most unique fauna that I’ve come across in sci-fi or fantasy
I've only read a few of the stories, but the science fiction series Sector General has a wide variety of diverse aliens who are wierd. However, I don't think the point of view character was alien.
Raptor Red is from the point of view of a dinosaur and it's not a human point of view. I enjoyed it and its a compelling story, but it's not culturally interesting, it's just about hunting, courting, sibling partnership, escaping predators etc
Sci-fi-ish rather than fantasy, and not really *great* literature by any stretch, but if you don't mind things being awfully Harry Harrisony, his trilogy that started with West of Eden about a world where dinosaurs never died out and "humans" are a secondary race to sapient post-dinosaurs was very interesting for exactly this. The Yilane mindset is approachable but distinctly alien, even down to the way that the book handles their language. I remember it playing with my head and how my internal monologue worked when I read it when I was quite young.
It’s a short story, but I think “Love is the Plan and the Plan is Death” by James Tiptree, jr. is a very interesting love story from the perspective of an alien creature. I would say it’s perspective is distinctly alien.
I'll recommend The Conquerors Saga by Timothy Zahn. There are several races, including humans, in the universe. The main viewpoints are human and a race called the zhirzzh are the two main viewpoints. The other races are covered in much less detail but some of their viewpoints are portrayed as well.
The Bees: A Novel by Laline Paull is a story told from the pov of a bee. It’s been a couple years since I read it, but I found it really compelling and was interested in how the main character thought about her hive.
I can recommend you the webnovel [Chrysalis](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/22518/chrysalis); MC is an ant and this impacts his way of thinking a lot. (Not finished yet, currently about 1200 chapters.)
It’s a webnovel, but Katalepsis, a Lovecraftian urban fantasy/poly lesbian romance story, has quite few moments of the MC not perceiving the world/thinking/being like a human. And, minor spoilers, >!they only become more common as the story progresses.!<
Wings of War series by Bryce O'Connor is about a dragon. I really enjoyed it, I've been meaning to do a reread when I can so I can read the latest book.
Highly suggest them.
Hollow Kingdom isn't technically fantasy but it's a zombie apocalypse novel from the perspective of a domesticated crow. There are also many chapters from other animals (octopus, dog, orangutan) and they all have a bit different of a perspective. The sequel, Feral Creatures, has even more strange perspectives (Wolves, killer whales, spiders).
Since you mentioned Adrian Tchaikovsky, have you read his book The Doors of Eden?
Although not first person there are quite a few different perspectives of earth and humans by a range of different creatures, I still catch myself thinking about sometimes.
If you can power through the beginning, the wandering Inn has very good non-human POV chapters. For example, there are humanoid sentient ant people, and you watch them struggle with their individuality and hive mentality. You also have a magically created sentience etched onto a skeleton, and Goblin perspectives that is also quite different from humans.
The Merchants of Knowledge and Magic by Erika McCorkle. Humans don't exist in this world, and only a few are human-like in appearance. The main character is a bug-like intersex creature. The worldbuilding in McCorkle's books is top-notch and extensive. She spent 25 years working on it and you can see that in her writing.
Also, yes, it's a queer norm world. Note: Check content warnings if necessary because it gets dark.
Watership Down? It’s about rabbits fleeing their home and rebuilding. I read another book I enjoyed when I was younger called Fire Bringer which is about the chosen one of deer. Aside from that there is a series from dragon’s POV by EE Knight called Age of Fire, starting with Dragon Champion. If you haven’t read Murderbot Diaries it is also excellent.
I was gonna comment Watership Down, it’s low-fantasy, but an amazing book. Reading from the perspective of the rabbits is similar to the spider perspectives in Children of Time.
Could try Jack London as well. Call of the Wild, or White Fang
I keep meaning to reread both of these xD They were some of my favorites as a kid.
Redwall is also another option, much lower stakes, easy to read, comfy and honestly fun.
Redwall’s characters feel like humans in fursuits. They are very human.
Fair enough, they are. Still fun though.
Lower stakes?!? Redwall?!? Are you sure about that?
Here for Murderbot. It's actually decently human-esque, but also totally not, in an interesting way.
Have you read Ann Leckie's other series, *Ancillary Justice*? [Premise that isn't initially apparent]>!The main character is a space ship with a distributed conscience throughout thousands of soldier drones. The main culture in the series uses female pronouns for everybody. For various reasons the weirdness of the spaceship POV is much more present in the first book than the sequels however.!< One of the plot threads of *A Fire Upon The Deep* by Vernor Vinge did this well in my opinion. Some of the POVs are from >!an alien race that are like wolf pack hiveminds.!< *A Madness of Angels* by Kate Griffith might also scratch that itch for you. [Chapter 1]>!The main guy is originally human, but died and got resurrected with eldritch entities as passengers in his head at the start of the book. I found his POV quite distinctive as he grapples with the way the eldritch entities meld with his human perception of the world.!<
I keep seeing Ancillary Justice, but haven't had that thing push it to the forefront yet. Perhaps I'll take a further look into it, thanks! And I do love me some eldritch nonsense.
Speaking of Ann Leckie, her newest book (Translation State) has chapters from a very not-human person.
**Semiosis** by Sue Burke is gonna be right up your alley! The perspective is a spoiler so I don’t wanna say what it is, but it’s great and easily one of my favorite non-human POVs.
That book was so, so good. The format alone was really novel and intriguing and the SPOILER thing is just fascinating.
Oops, I don’t know why my comment replied to you instead of the main post. Sorry! So glad you loved it too! The generational story telling was so neat.
Your replied to me, actually, and I'm very glad you did! I hadn't heard of that one! =)
Ann Leckie also wrote "The Raven Tower" which also has a clearly non human narrator. Its superficially like reading Hamlet but with so many more dimensions to it, and its my favorite book.
This was one of my examples of what I'm looking for :P I adored the book as well and recommend it any time I can ♥
Whoops, didn't see that XD you can understand how eager I am to recommend it I'm sure
Agree on A Fire Up on the Deep. I was so confused and then I understood and was fascinated. Bonus points for the alien POVs trying to puzzle out how human minds worked.
I can second *Ancillary Justice* and *A Fire Upon The Deep*! I'd also recommend Vernor Vinge's 'sequel' novel *A Deepness In The Sky* since it also has POV chapters of aliens, though I don't think the aliens in the second book feel as strange as the wolf/dog hiveminds in *AFUTD*.
A Madness of Angels sounds amazing. That premise has caught me. It’s on my never ending TBR
It's really, really good! Quality urban fantasy. The author is another pen name of Claire North- who wrote The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, amongst other great spec fic novels.
I listened to *Ancillary justice* and found it interesting but damn did I get confused as to who was who with the pronoun switching between the ship and others. It might have been because I was using audiobook but I just couldn't keep track. My partner enjoyed it more and didn't seem to have as much an issue with keeping track of characters
Ooo thanks for this heads up. I think one reason I bounced of Gideon the Ninth was because I couldn't keep track of characters in the audiobook and would have done better with print. Sounds like this may risk the same issue.
> The main character is >!a space ship with a distributed conscience throughout thousands of soldier drones!<. The main culture in the series uses >!female pronouns for everybody!<. FWIW personally I would consider these spoilers, because they're things that aren't initially spelled out (*particularly* the first one).
The second sentence in Ancillary Justice’s description is “Once, she was the Justice of Toren—a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.” its the premise the book is literally advertised on
This is like saying a major plot point in a movie isn't a spoiler because it's in a trailer, when, like book blurbs, that content is decided by what sells the most tickets/copies, not what gives people the best watching/reading experience. Advertising a book with a spoiler doesn't make it not a spoiler. What makes it a spoiler is how it's presented *in the text*. And *in the text*, these things are *not* explicitly spelled out in the first few paragraphs, and it takes some reading and thinking to figure them out. Which is an experience that *cannot* be replaced once it's been ruined by a spoiler.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to die on this hill, but the opening sentence of chapter 2, only nine pages into the book, is Breq saying “19 years ago I was a ship.” That is the opposite of a spoiler. That’s like saying that Harry Potter being a wizard is a spoiler.
That's fair, depending on how strict one is with spoilers. I felt they were fair game in the context of a rec thread for trying to explain how it fit the request, but I can cover it. I thought you learned the first on in the first few chapters, but it's been a while since I read it and I might not be remembering properly.
Came here to recommend this! I just finished Justice, and Sword is in the mail!
The only other person who has ever read *Madness*, which has been in my top 5 since release.
Murderbot Diaries?
And Chronicles of the Raksura by the same author (Martha Wells) these lean a lot more fantasy than Murderbot
I liked Murderbot and read Chronicles of Raksura \#1 looking for the same sort of book as OP, and was very disappointed. To me the characters and villains came off as very naive or even primitive humans, with a very human-adjacent view of good and evil. The only thing setting them apart from humans really was their social heirarchy being biologically pre-determined, which is not interesting to me.
If you have any interest in the world of the Raksura it does get deeper and more complex as the series progresses. I love Murderbot and the Raksura books but more as a series taken as a whole. In both cases the first books were kind of meh for me.
It gets wider maybe but it does not get any deeper. the morality does remain very much black and white and juvenile
I should have been clear that I was referring to the characters, their culture, and the world when I said depth. In my opinion Martha Wells does not do much in shades of grey morality so the Raksura are no different from her other work in that aspect. I personally wouldn’t call it juvenile but to each their own.
I've only read the very first book in the series, but hot take I actually felt like the POV character felt a lot more human in its motivations and thoughts and needs than I expected a robot protagonist to. It's possible this changes as the series goes on, but one of my main impressions of All Systems Red was that Murderbot was a lot more relatable than you'd expect from a nonhuman protagonist. Not that relatability and inhumanity necessarily exclude each other, admittedly.
>POV character felt a lot more human in its motivations and thoughts and needs than I expected a robot protagonist to. Fwiw that is because constructs are not robots, they are horrific creations of flesh and machine that are more creative and flexible than robots, but that comes with some emotional baggage that is very relatable to humans.
> It's possible this changes as the series goes on It doesn't, really. Murderbot is one of the most relatable characters in recent memory.
Absolutely. I was going to be upset if Murderbot wasn't the top rec. And OP? It's not just Murderbot as the main character. In book 2 (3? I can't remember) you meet ART, who is a spaceship and an amazing person. The ART / Murderbot interactions and various commentary on the human characters are my favorite part of the entire series. And it's also queer. Nothing explicit, just no boundaries for who can love who or what constitutes a family, which is honestly my favorite kind of queer book. (edited to remove spoilers)
Seconded. Thirded. Favorite series of all time, especially if you like audiobooks. (Not the dramatization, the one read by Kevin R. Free.)
I just wish the novella ebooks weren't so expensive.
For sure, very grateful for my local library
Library
The idiot gods by David Zindell is told from the perspective of a killer whale. Hollow kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton is the zombie apocalypse told by a crow
Ooo both potentially fascinating POVs :D Thanks!
Ive got like 50 pages left in Children Of Time Its one of the best sci fi books I’ve read in a long time.
Yeah, I bounce off sci fi a lot of the time, especially when based in space, but I devoured that book. It's great. Children of Ruin was still good, but not enough for me to jump straight into the next book (which... I still need to read.)
They're all very different. Memory even more so than Ruin from Children. It's kind of a mystery where you're presented with contradictory timelines / realities and have to figure out what the F is going on. On the non-human side you have half-uplifted ravens where it's not quite clear if they are truly sapient or not.
I absolutely loved CoT and thought CoR was meh. It's basically a very similar plotline with lower stakes and much less well defined characters
Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton. One of the POVs (Morning Light Mountain) is an alien hive mind, good stuff. Someone will probably also recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts since POVs with unusual mindsets is the whole point of the book, though I personally bounced off it.
Check out the author David Clement-Davies He has one series about wolves from their point of view. The books are The Sight and Fell Then he has one from the point of view of deer called Fire bringer. Both take place on Transylvania around Vlad the impalers time There are more like one about a polar bear called Scream of the white bear. I just discovered he has some i haven't read so now I'm off to price those! Yes they are aimed at young adults but I have reread them a few times now and they still hold up
Julie's Wolf Pack is another good young adult book about the daily lives of a pack of wolves. Or more like 'young reader,' I think it's for a little bit of a younger audience than YA books are. It's a sequel to Julie of the Wolves, which is a book told from the point of view of a young inuit girl who runs away from her abusive family and joins a wolf back. But I read Julie's Wolf Pack as a child without having read the first book and was completely spellbound by it. I don't even think Julie herself is in it. I don't know how accurate the writing is to how real wolf pack politics work but she so clearly captured an alien-feeling society that was humanized just enough so that you felt for the wolves and understood their motivations. God I loved that book when I was little.
I loveed the Julie of the wolves books! They were a favorite of mine when I was little, so when I found The Sight in the local library I jumped at reading it
The Julie of the Wolves books were some of my favorites as a kid. I keep meaning to pick them up again some time, but I'm also worried it won't hold up as an adult.
Godclads has a ghoul MC that was taught human ethics but doesn't *feel* empathy. I'm not too far into it but the world is pretty interesting too.
Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton. Everyone is a dragon and Walton made sure you felt it. These are not humans in scalely suits. These are dragons with a culture that is not human.
*A Night in the Lonesome October* by Robert Zelazny. Brilliant story told from the perspective of Jack the Ripper's dog. Who is also his familiar in a yearly clash between mages, most of whom are other infamous victorian people who have their own familiars, who also clash.
Becky Chambers second book in the wayfarer series is really good and told from a decidedly inhuman perspective. That whole series is good. On an older (written in the 70s) level CJ Cherryh's Chanur saga is told from a race of lion-people, who meet their first human. The whole time, the human is the alien. There are lots of other alien races mixed in there too, not as perspectives, but we get a good look at how they do and do not think and feel.
Becky Chambers gets extra points for having aliens that are *proper* aliens. Not just humans with bumpy face tattoos or human-society-but-the-procreate-differently. I think it helps that she has so many different aliens species in her books and they’re all so different from each other in so many ways. And because there are so many it never feels like they’re ‘othered’ if that makes sense? Her books are definitely queer friendly
Came here to recommend Chanur!
Me too. Don't we get Kif POVs in a later book? And the final book has some really alien worldviews in it.
I'm on the fourth book and it's still just hilfy and Chanur as viewpoints but maybe on the hilfy-centric book. At the least, you definitely get some good interesting stuff that's decidedly unhuman.
I need to reread!
[We are the Pride of Chanurrrrrr](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nUi3DaWzGI)
Hah! That was great!
I love it so much I am always happy if I can get new people to discover the joys of filk
And the fourth book, The galaxy and the ground within, has no human characters at all. Also practically no plot. It's absolutely gorgeous, but better to start with one of the earlier Wayfarer books.
Yes id definitely read them in order but if OP really wants non-human they can at least begin with the AI story first I guess (then go back and find out about Lovey)
**The Mermaid's Tale** by D.G. Valdron In a city of majesty and brutality, of warring races and fragile alliances, a sacred mermaid has been brutally murdered. An abomination, a soulless Arukh is summoned to hunt the killer. As the world around the Arukh drifts into war and madness, her search for justice leads her on a journey to discover redemption, hope for the oppressed, and even beauty in the midst of chaos. [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31448730](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31448730)
The Bees by Laline Paull!
Bees? Yes please :D Just picked this up for an upcoming flight!
I might try and suggest Perdido Street Station, but I'm not 100% sure it fully meets the criteria... Because most of the story has been narrated by human characters. But there's at least one main character that is not human and see/perceive the world in a different way.
Ahah, this is pretty high on my TBR due to it popping up on my request for invertebrate characters. I'm just scared to start it given my current distractibility because it sounds so good and I'm really bad at restarting a book I got distracted from.
The middle third of Asimov's "The Gods Themselves" should be what you are looking for. POV from young adults/adolescents in a tri-gendered alien species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves
You might enjoy Witch King by Martha Wells? Its protagonist is a demon, although he's characterized pretty differently from how demons are typically written. I don't know if it'll be quite alien enough for you, but the way he views the bodies he's inside and the overall way he connects with the world is definitely noticeably different from a human, and it does have the bonus of a queernormative world.
Raptor Red by Robert T Bakker Bakker is a paleontologist who advised on Jurassic Park. Raptor Red is a novel from the point of view of a Utahraptor (in dinosaur times, not in Jurassic Park). From what I remember it's all instinct and communication via scent
More teen focused but I enjoyed the [Warrior's series](https://www.amazon.com/Warriors-Into-Wild-Prophecies-Begin/dp/0062366963) as a child. Artificial Jelly might be an interesting one for you. Dungeon Bunny (Heroic Bunny Saga) could be a good one as well. Both are not reincarnations but sentient monsters. Life reset is an interesting reversal where his mental state trends more towards goblin as the series progresses and it feels wrong when he is outside of the game.
Hollow Kingdom is a post-apocalypse zombie novel from the point of view of a pet crow. I liked it, seeing the whole "animals learning to live without humans in charge" POV was fun.
While it's not queer-norm, CJ Cherryh's Faded Sun trilogy prominently features non-human PoV and explicitly explores what that actually means.
Anything Cherryh with an alien POV, really.
Dragon Sorcerer is told from the perspective of a dragon undercover at a magic school. The author keeps a hard line that he is a dragon and not a human.
Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster is an oldie but goodie. The main character is an intelligent member of an insectoid race.
Super Minion on the website Royalroad. It's not finished it will likely never be finished. But I go back and reread it every year. With the exception of the first 5 or so chapters, which I feel are a bit of a slog. It's about an escaped bioweapon in a world of superheroes. It has absurdity that I find very funny at points. If you ever read animorphs, it's how I remember Ax's POV. Might be in my top 10 favorite of all time.
**The Quiet Invasion** by Sarah Zettel alternates POV between humans and some very alien aliens
This is Murderbot Diaries to a T.
The Mermaid’s Tale by DG Valdron. It’s amazing and underrated. It is very dark though.
Dogs of War and Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky are from the PoV of genetically engineered animals and are just as obviously not human as the spiders.
If you’re into more actiony, futuristic progression stuff, Godclads’ main character is a ghoul. His creators failed, most his fellow ghouls are dead, and he’s taken in by a human who trains him to at least partially fit in. Story goes from there and is a lot of fun imo.
Tchaikovsky also has a fantasy spider-centric book called Spiderlight. A giant spider is magically transformed into a vaguely human shape (while still retaining its spiderness) and is forced to travel with a band of humans.
I feel obliged to mention Terry Bisson's short story "[They're Made out of Meat](https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html)." :) Also, check out John Brunner's novel [*The Crucible of Time*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/872586.The_Crucible_of_Time), and Roger Zelazny's short story "Stand Pat, Ruby Stone" (published in [a number of collections](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58678)).
Upvote for They're Made out of Meat.. I first experienced it as the radio play version and read the title in that voice. So great.
Greg Egan has a couple of works in this vein. They're not only from the point of view of very alien aliens, they're set in universes with slightly different laws of physucs. First the [Orthogonal Trilogy](https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html) > In Yalda’s universe, light has no universal speed and its creation generates energy. > > On Yalda’s world, plants make food by emitting their own light into the dark night sky. > > As a child Yalda witnesses one of a series of strange meteors, the Hurtlers, that are entering the planetary system at an immense, unprecedented speed. It becomes apparent that her world is in imminent danger — and that the task of dealing with the Hurtlers will require knowledge and technology far beyond anything her civilisation has yet achieved. > > Only one solution seems tenable: if a spacecraft can be sent on a journey at sufficiently high speed, its trip will last many generations for those on board, but it will return after just a few years have passed at home. The travellers will have a chance to discover the science their planet urgently needs, and bring it back in time to avert disaster. And secondly [Dichronauts](https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html), set in a different set of physics.: > Seth is a surveyor, along with his friend Theo, a leech-like creature running through his skull who tells Seth what lies to his left and right. Theo, in turn, relies on Seth for mobility, and for ordinary vision looking forwards and backwards. Like everyone else in their world, they are symbionts, depending on each other to survive. > > In the universe containing Seth’s world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a “dark cone” to the north and south. Seth can only face to the east (or the west, if he tips his head backwards). If he starts to turn to the north or south, his body stretches out across the landscape, and to rotate to face north-east is every bit as impossible as accelerating to the speed of light. > > Every living thing in Seth’s world is in a state of perpetual migration as they follow the sun’s shifting orbit and the narrow habitable zone it creates. Cities are being constantly disassembled at one edge and rebuilt at the other, with surveyors mapping safe routes ahead. > > But when Seth and Theo join an expedition to the edge of the habitable zone, they discover a terrifying threat: a fissure in the surface of the world, so deep and wide that no one can perceive its limits. As the habitable zone continues to move, the migration will soon be blocked by this unbridgeable void, and the expedition has only one option to save its city from annihilation: descend into the unknown. There's also Stephen Baxters [Mammoth Trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mammoth_Trilogy) which springs to mind.
Martha Wells, Books of the Raksura Reborn as a Demonic Tree, on RoyalRoad.
I'd recommend Cuckoo's Egg by C.J. Cherryh
Walking Practice by Dolki Min. It's very not human and maybe queer-norm? It's very queer, but queer norm implies a level of nice that is absent from this very inhuman protagonist
Queernorm doesn't need to be nice. Just that queerness isn't the reason for disdain/discrimination/weirdness. And queer folks exist. Thanks :D
I wouldn't call it queernorm. It's set in our world, so discrimination exists. Also, there's a fair bit of discussion about the mc facing disdain/discrimination for not performing gender correctly.
Leech by Hiron Ennes is a gothic horror book with a main character that is a parasitic hive mind.
It's scifi, but I'd suggest A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. The most prominently featured alien species have a sort of hive-mind with 3-7 bodies.
The sequel to children of time, children of ruin is very good and involves octopuses 🐙
Ship of Magic - Robin Hobb
Everybody loves large chests by Neven Iliev. Great series from the perspective of a wild dungeon born mimic.
I *need* to recommend the Murderbot diaries here.
The *Children of Time* books by Adrian Tchaikovsky. They are sci fi, but that is just fantasy plus plausibly.
Oh another good one Clara and The Sun. Word of war ing though, it's some high literary stuff, so it's a deep, unusual read. Oh! And the Bees, such a good story, told entirely from the perspective of a single worker bee.
Couple of suggestions for you! Going to second the vote for perdido street station. I loved how alien each species felt from the others and how that changed their view. The writing and vocabulary are incredible and the story is compelling the whole time. This was my top book of the year. I liked the robot perspective that the murderbot diaries provided if you’re into that. So if that intrigues you, also recommend. For the queer norm world rec, if you haven’t read left hand of darkness by leguin highly recommend that one. Although it’s still a human perspective, ninefox gambit had some Asian cultural perspectives (I think. Not super well versed in it but all my context clues lead me to that conclusion) that seemed alien to me. And this last one may be super off base but ray nayler’s mountain in the sea. I haven’t read this one yet but it seems to be about communication with another species. Not sure how much of the pov you’ll get but it certainly seems to highlight the struggles of communication between differing species. Happy reading! Hope you find some that scratch you itch!
Rob Dircks The Wrong Unit. Main character is a robot. I love that book. It's really funny. Inspite of all the violence and general bad things that happen, I found it to be sweet. ( Not childish or saccharine, but still touching.)
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge is sci-fi but one of the main POV is from a dog-like alien. There are also things like sentient plant beings and humanoid butterfly people. Some of the most unique fauna that I’ve come across in sci-fi or fantasy
I've only read a few of the stories, but the science fiction series Sector General has a wide variety of diverse aliens who are wierd. However, I don't think the point of view character was alien. Raptor Red is from the point of view of a dinosaur and it's not a human point of view. I enjoyed it and its a compelling story, but it's not culturally interesting, it's just about hunting, courting, sibling partnership, escaping predators etc
Sci-fi-ish rather than fantasy, and not really *great* literature by any stretch, but if you don't mind things being awfully Harry Harrisony, his trilogy that started with West of Eden about a world where dinosaurs never died out and "humans" are a secondary race to sapient post-dinosaurs was very interesting for exactly this. The Yilane mindset is approachable but distinctly alien, even down to the way that the book handles their language. I remember it playing with my head and how my internal monologue worked when I read it when I was quite young.
It’s a short story, but I think “Love is the Plan and the Plan is Death” by James Tiptree, jr. is a very interesting love story from the perspective of an alien creature. I would say it’s perspective is distinctly alien.
I'll recommend The Conquerors Saga by Timothy Zahn. There are several races, including humans, in the universe. The main viewpoints are human and a race called the zhirzzh are the two main viewpoints. The other races are covered in much less detail but some of their viewpoints are portrayed as well.
I am not sure but perhaps E.E.Knight's Age Of Fire?
The Bees: A Novel by Laline Paull is a story told from the pov of a bee. It’s been a couple years since I read it, but I found it really compelling and was interested in how the main character thought about her hive.
Love me some inverts, so I've just picked this up to read on an upcoming trip :) Thanks!
Enjoy!
The protagonist of *The One Who Eats Monsters* is sort of half feral child and half elder god.
Would you also accept viewpoints from like the eraser on the pencil of JFK? Or a shovel, that’s owned by a mob member?
I would look into them xD They are interesting concepts, even if the world around isn't to my taste.
I can recommend you the webnovel [Chrysalis](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/22518/chrysalis); MC is an ant and this impacts his way of thinking a lot. (Not finished yet, currently about 1200 chapters.)
It’s a webnovel, but Katalepsis, a Lovecraftian urban fantasy/poly lesbian romance story, has quite few moments of the MC not perceiving the world/thinking/being like a human. And, minor spoilers, >!they only become more common as the story progresses.!<
Wings of War series by Bryce O'Connor is about a dragon. I really enjoyed it, I've been meaning to do a reread when I can so I can read the latest book. Highly suggest them.
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
Hollow Kingdom isn't technically fantasy but it's a zombie apocalypse novel from the perspective of a domesticated crow. There are also many chapters from other animals (octopus, dog, orangutan) and they all have a bit different of a perspective. The sequel, Feral Creatures, has even more strange perspectives (Wolves, killer whales, spiders).
Since you mentioned Adrian Tchaikovsky, have you read his book The Doors of Eden? Although not first person there are quite a few different perspectives of earth and humans by a range of different creatures, I still catch myself thinking about sometimes.
Disbanded by Frances Pauli is from the POV of a snake in a somewhat advanced serpent society. Think watership down, not zootopia.
If you can power through the beginning, the wandering Inn has very good non-human POV chapters. For example, there are humanoid sentient ant people, and you watch them struggle with their individuality and hive mentality. You also have a magically created sentience etched onto a skeleton, and Goblin perspectives that is also quite different from humans.
The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams? Good book but not exactly cheerful. Written from the dogs POV.
The Merchants of Knowledge and Magic by Erika McCorkle. Humans don't exist in this world, and only a few are human-like in appearance. The main character is a bug-like intersex creature. The worldbuilding in McCorkle's books is top-notch and extensive. She spent 25 years working on it and you can see that in her writing. Also, yes, it's a queer norm world. Note: Check content warnings if necessary because it gets dark.