RecommendationFilter: Dueling powers beyond comprehension

July 5, 2023 3:59 PM

Hello! I've discovered a narrative theme that I think is interesting and produces situations I like reading through. Basically when there are two or more powers (cosmic, mystical, fantastical, alien, illuminati-esque, etc) beyond our ability to destroy or even understand and our heroes are stuck in the middle. Some spoilers for examples below!

This is a theme in the Worm web fiction series, in the game Bloodborne (to some extent the other Souls games as well), and of course in LOTR the ages-old conflict between godlike beings devolves upon a handful of mortals. In the Culture series there are ascended or mysterious meta-species (as in Excession), in The Expanse there are the builders of the gates, and there are many shades of this in Lovecraft and other cosmic horror. Tim Powers does this a bit as well - plenty of examples to choose from.

I enjoy when conflicts of this scale play out at a smaller one, though of course it can be done badly (in Marvel, "keep the glowy thing away from the bad guy" for instance). Bonus points for cleverly manipulating these powers beyond reckoning for a better outcome.

posted by BlackLeotardFront to Media & Arts (20 answers total)

I don't read a lot of horror, but this seems to be a recurring trope there. You already mentioned Tim Powers; it's been a long time since I've read any Clive Barker, but I recall this being part of his playbook. I recently read Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, which pretty much had this structure—it seemed like "horror without the horror" to me.

This was a big part of Babylon 5: the conflict between the Shadows and the Vorlons playing out as a proxy war among the younger races (uh, spoiler alert, I guess).
posted by adamrice at 4:21 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Cool question! The first thing that comes to mind is A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. It's set in a universe where galaxies are divided into "Zones of Thought", and where truly superhuman intelligences can only exist in the farthest outer reaches. Usually those entities have their own inscrutable goals and don't involve themselves in the affairs of mere mortals, but when they do, it can turn real ugly.

The Animorphs series also used this trope, with the entire conflict of the series turning out to be part of a game between two near-godlike extradimensional beings.

The web-serialized novel Fine Structure (by MeFi's own qntm) is another example.

As far as video games go, there's Control, which is heavily inspired by the SCP Foundation (a collaborative fiction project). The "Federal Bureau of Control" is ostensibly a secret government organization that protects humanity by keeping weird eldritch artifacts under lock and key. But the FBC itself is just a front for another entity ("the Board") with unknown motives.
posted by teraflop at 4:53 PM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is How You Lose the Time War is an amazing recent experimental sci-fi novella that fits the bill nicely. It's dense and arty and exciting and pretty and fun all at once!
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:08 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you want more examples of a trope, start at the TVTropes page for an exemplar and work backwards.

For Worm, you might be looking at Crapsack World or Cosmic Horror Reveal.
posted by zamboni at 5:13 PM on July 5, 2023

There's some of that in the Mass Effect video game series, in a way that is similar to the Expanse.
posted by sacrifix at 5:38 PM on July 5, 2023

Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy might fit this. His "Dark Forest" view of stellar civilization reaches cosmic horror levels. But in the end, it's up to humanity to figure out if it can survive in this universe.
posted by SPrintF at 5:57 PM on July 5, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers so far. I should have mentioned Vernor Vinge, that's a good example I've ready too. Haven't done Fine Structure yet though I greatly enjoyed Ra. And I'm partly familiar with some of these other recommendations so good to know they're up my alley. Please keep them coming!

I would prefer to avoid spoilers by the way (not that anyone has to any real extent) but if some light spoiling is necessary to recommend a work that's OK. I'm more interested in how it plays out than the bare fact that greater powers are at play. That by itself is present in numerous works.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 6:20 PM on July 5, 2023

Greg Bear's novel "Anvil of Stars" is about an alien spacecraft crewed by human teenagers, who are survivors of the destruction of Earth. The aliens who built the spaceship -- and who rescued a few humans from Earth just before its destruction -- are part of an alliance devoted to hunting down the planet-destroying aliens who killed the Earth. The true motives of both groups of aliens are never entirely clear to the young people tasked with avenging the death of their planet.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 6:28 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Another novel I like a lot is "The Last Legends of Earth" by A.A. Attanasio. The setup: An alien from another dimension has come upon the dust of Earth, 5 billion years in the future, well after the sun has exploded. In that dust, she finds the DNA of humans, and brings a bunch of them back to life, then settles them on the planets of an artificial solar system she's created. The humans are meant only to serve as bait, to lure in another alien race who feed on the pain of sentient beings, so that the first alien can destroy them. It's a grim setup, but a beautiful, poetic, even spiritual book.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 6:32 PM on July 5, 2023

Blindsight by Peter Watts.
Seconding This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
posted by lloquat at 6:41 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

For fantasy there is The Belgariad and The Mallorean.

The original sci-fi version is the Lensmen series

As a genre it has been around for millennia. The Greek gods, for example, were forever involving humans in their games.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:35 PM on July 5, 2023

The Amber series by Roger Zelazny.
posted by rjs at 10:05 PM on July 5, 2023

The JLA/Avengers miniseries ends up working along these lines, as do many cosmic comic storylines.
posted by one for the books at 10:07 PM on July 5, 2023

You might have some luck searching in terms of the Irrestistible Force Paradox, "what happens when an irresistible force meets an unmovable object?" This idea goes back to at least 3BC, so I'm sure it's percolated into the creative arts over the millenia. :)
posted by rhizome at 1:15 AM on July 6, 2023

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth and sequels deal with the Architects, giant creatures/ships which literally reshape planets, and are not alone in their unfathomable technology and psychology.
posted by mark k at 7:11 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower features people coexisting with and working with and through gods of many different scales and motivations, from small local gods that are content to keep your hearth fire from burning out in exchange for a minor offering now and then to ancient gods pulling the strings of human conflict behind the scenes.
posted by egregious theorem at 9:17 AM on July 6, 2023

The JLA/Avengers miniseries ends up working along these lines, as do many cosmic comic storylines.

Yes, also Grant Hickman's 2015 storylines in Avengers centered on The Beyonder (a cosmic being who had debuted in the early 80s to kickstart Secret War) being revealed to be only a child of a reality warping species who were competing in causing timeline-variant Earths to crash into each other as an amusement.

In the 1996, this was actually the premise of DC vs. Marvel, where both comics universes were represented as two "Brothers", who used the heroes in proxy battles to determine which universe would survive, and temporarily resulted in the "Amalgam Universe", with composite characters of the two companies.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:19 AM on July 7, 2023

Stephen King’s IT has this general shape, though the movies and limited series excised this aspect.
posted by ejs at 10:04 PM on July 8, 2023

Babylon 5. You want Babylon 5.
posted by Mournful Bagel Song at 5:22 AM on July 9, 2023

The latter parts of Charles Stross (mefi's own) Laundry Files series has this as a large component. You don't see it upfront ..... Until you get much do.
posted by lalochezia at 4:12 PM on August 18, 2023