Fiction about humans and giants?

January 6, 2018 6:56 PM

I'm looking for fiction that explores what a human in a land of giants would be like. Do you know of any fiction that deals with this interaction? The trope of giant stairs that are hard to climb is an example - what are other interesting or thoughtful examples of ways that a human would have to interact with giants that are explored in fiction?
posted by and_ham to Media & Arts (18 answers total)

In children’s literature there is the classic The BFG.
posted by tatiana wishbone at 7:11 PM on January 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

Gulliver’s Travels. In the second part, he travels to Brobdingnag, a land of giants. The part that is still the most vivid to me now is how disgusting moles and such on the women’s skin were.
posted by FencingGal at 7:13 PM on January 6, 2018 [6 favorites]

In CS Lewis' Narnia series, in the Silver Chair, part of the action takes place in the house of a Giant.
posted by freethefeet at 7:19 PM on January 6, 2018 [5 favorites]

The film Fantastic Planet deals with the interactions of humans with a gigantic non-human species.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 7:40 PM on January 6, 2018

Iain M. Banks' first Culture novel, "Consider Phlebas," features a bit in which a human character spends time aboard a spaceship manned by the Idiran, an alien species that's somewhere around twice the size of humans. Everything is scaled wrong, every alarm is too loud, and every move they make around him is a physical threat.

Classic TV show from Irwin Allen (the Lost in Space guy), "Land of the Giants," which was an hour-long show about astronauts who landed on a distant planet populated by enormous humans.

In recent if not current hotness is the anime series "Attack on Titan," in which humans cower within walled cities as they are frequently assaulted from outside by the inexplicable giants who appear to be large, skinless humans, hungry for humans.
posted by Sunburnt at 7:45 PM on January 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

Another anime, from the 1980s, is "[Super Dimension Fortress] Macross," which was reworked into the first of three segments of the "Robotech" series. Humans rebuild and launch a massive crashed alien spaceship, and their presence in space induces a war with the Zentradi, a race of humanoids who are roughly 10 times the height of humans. Between the human-built mecha (giant robots, which generally transform into aircraft), and some technological shrinking of Zentradi down to human size for infiltration work, they get to fight on each other's scales. The Zentradi are eventually defeated by the humans, due in no small part to the power of J-Pop music.
posted by Sunburnt at 7:51 PM on January 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

The new film "Downsizing" and the novel "Gulliver's Travels" would probably give you some good sight gag ideas.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 9:55 PM on January 6, 2018

Another Iain Banks novel, Feersum Endjinn, also might be interesting to you. "Much of the story takes place within a giant, decaying structure built to resemble a medieval castle, in which each 'room' spans several kilometers horizontally and vertically, and the king's palace occupies one room's chandelier."
posted by xil at 10:53 PM on January 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

The Borrowers is a much-beloved children's book about a race of tiny humanoids in our world. There's lots in there about how they use bobbins for chairs, negotiate doors etc. The logistics of living in a 'giant's world' are pretty much the focus of the story.
posted by freya_lamb at 4:52 AM on January 7, 2018 [8 favorites]

Trolls, nice animated kids film, explores this discrepancy
posted by glasseyes at 8:36 AM on January 7, 2018

The Magnus Chase series by Rick Riordan has interactions with giants in every book, due to the Norse mythological framework. Interesting problems and interactions all over the place!
posted by Temeraria at 9:05 AM on January 7, 2018

Twist! In Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, particularly the second book, Claw of the Conciliator, there are some ... wait, it's not a spoiler for anything, is it? I can't tell with those books. Anyway, there are some things of possible interest there.
posted by wobh at 1:06 PM on January 7, 2018

One throwaway line from DC's Blue Beetle comic book when the superhero is fighting Giganta is that giant heroes/villains are inherently at least partially magical, to get past the square-cube law without breaking all their bones.
posted by Guy Smiley at 4:55 PM on January 7, 2018

In the Twilight Zone episode "The Invaders", the giant is the one who is terrified for most of the episode. The twist comes when we find out at the end who the little "invaders" are.
posted by merejane at 7:34 PM on January 7, 2018

Terry Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy is very similar in basic concept to The Borrowers, but very different in tone and execution.
posted by Morfil Ffyrnig at 10:04 PM on January 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

In Defy The Grey Kings by Jason Fischer the giants in question are elephants:

Read on Podcastle

Written in Beneath Ceaseless Skies
posted by Julnyes at 8:07 AM on January 8, 2018

You may enjoy the trippy SF novel Every Boy Should Have a Man.
posted by toastedcheese at 10:57 AM on January 8, 2018

In the children's/middle grade book, Searching for Dragons (book 2 of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles) by Patricia C. Wrede, there's a side plot where our two human main characters visit a giant and deal with the oversized environment.
posted by carrioncomfort at 11:10 AM on January 8, 2018