Xenofiction

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Xenofiction is a class of science fiction or fantasy encompassing stories set among species or cultures extremely different from humanity or human society.

[edit] Examples

Richard Adams' Watership Down, set in the warrens of rabbits in the English countryside.

Kenneth Oppel's Silverwing, telling the story of a colony of silverwing bats.

Brian Jacques' Redwall, in which is set in the forest and castles of heroic mice, ferrets, badgers and other forest creatures. Redwall is the first of the 18 novels.

M. I. McAllister's The Mistmantle Chronicles, tell the story of a young squirrel named Urchin.

Parts of Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land have been called xenofiction.

The second part of Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves, which describes an alien culture with three sexes, the Rational, the Emotional, and the Parental.

C. J. Cherryh's Faded Sun Trilogy, comprised of Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath.

Mercedes Lackey's Gryphon trilogy: The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, and The Silver Griffon. Although these novels contain humans and human interaction, the primary protagonist Skandranon the Black Gryphon and his species are highly intelligent animals who are seen as humanity's equal on many levels.

The Ecco the Dolphin series, which stars sapient cetaceans and, in the original story line, the Asterite and the Vortex life forms.

Much of Ursula K. LeGuin's science fiction deals with constructing alien societies. While her aliens are typically humanoid, their cultures are what separates them so completely from humanity as we know it. In the short story collection The Birthday of the World, several such races are discussed. Her stories include a race which only attains a gender when they go into heat, and are otherwise androgynous, as well as a race for which the only form of marriage is a complex system of polygamy.

Part IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels deals with the Houyhnhnm race of horse people and their society.

In A. K. Dewdney's The Planiverse, Dewdney and his students communicate with the Nsana, who inhabit a two-dimensional universe.

Robert T. Bakker's novel Raptor Red follows a year in the life of a female Utahraptor.

A. Bertram Chandler's novella Giant Killer, a nominee for the 1946 "retroactive Hugo" award, is about a race of rats that have achieved sentience as a result of exposure to radiation. However, it is not until the very last line of the novella that the reader learns that the protagonists are rats, rather than humans. As such, the novella represents xenofiction only upon reflection, and not during the initial reading.