'Zones' in science and weird fiction
September 21, 2016 5:22 AM   Subscribe

Looking for examples of science/weird fictions that deal with 'zones': intermediate or parallel realms - often forbidden - beyond the normal sphere of law or reason.

...of course there's 'Stalker' or 'Roadside Picnic' & echoes in the 2010 film 'Monsters' and Jeff VanderMeer's recent 'Southern Reach' series. I'm thinking of Samuel Delaney's concept of the 'paraspace' too, though these are always accessed through some technological prosthesis.

Any other ZONES?
posted by 0bvious to Writing & Language (44 answers total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
This exact concept is explored in Vernor Vinge's epic A Fire Upon the Deep
posted by LtRegBarclay at 5:44 AM on September 21, 2016 [10 favorites]


The Cacotopic Stain in China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels comes to mind.
posted by celestine at 5:50 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Also explored in China Mieville’s The City and the City.
posted by pharm at 5:55 AM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Oh my gosh, you MUST read A Fire Upon The Deep!
posted by showbiz_liz at 6:21 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


The excellent podcast Tanis fits this (it's directly inspired by Roadside Picnic).
posted by Itaxpica at 6:23 AM on September 21, 2016


Borges - various, but particularly Tlön in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Male ancestral memory in Dune (especially if you ignore what happens to it in the later books)
The Country of the Mind in Greg Bear's Queen of Angels
The zones in Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos series
Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has a bit of stuff like this in it
In non-literature - various parts of Bloodborne
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 6:25 AM on September 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Horror films are loaded with these. There's Richard Stanley's Hardware, which starts with a memorable sequence in an irradiated zone. Doomsday, by Neil Marshall (best known for his work as a director of the super-sized battle-oriented Game of Thrones and for his film The Descent, is a fun John Carpenteresque film about Scotland quarantined into a restricted zone because of plague. 28 Weeks Later is about the survivors of an apocalypse living in a safe zone. George Romero's Land of the Dead is more or less about the same thing.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:28 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


William Gibson's short story Hinterlands.

Much of M John Harrison's work but particularly Light, whose gender politics are IMO crap, and The Course of the Heart.
posted by Frowner at 6:28 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I also think that the Babylon sequence at the end of Diana Wynne Jones's Deep Secrets meets the definition, despite being YA fantasy - it's a weird part of a surprisingly weird book.
posted by Frowner at 6:30 AM on September 21, 2016


Dhalgren has a whole "zone" vibe.
posted by zadcat at 6:49 AM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Would you include the Interzone in Naked Lunch?
posted by Candleman at 7:01 AM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Liminal world touched on in Child of a Rainless Year.
posted by tilde at 7:06 AM on September 21, 2016


It seems like Netflix's Stranger Things qualifies.

Also, I'd recommend Stephen Baxter's Raft (which is part of a series, but is also a stand alone book), Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, the Mercury Series by Robert Kroese, and the Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey.
posted by OrangeDisk at 7:11 AM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


In games, there's the Iron Republic in Fallen London.
posted by praemunire at 7:41 AM on September 21, 2016


Hinterlands is great and a good companion to Roadside Picnic, but there's also The Gernsback Continuum.

Alice in Wonderland. Vurt.

Coraline. The Dark Tower.

The Blazing World (1666).

The Chronicles of Narnia. His Dark Materials.

Thursday Next. Lazarus Long. (Both travel into fiction).

Escape From New York!
posted by Leon at 7:50 AM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


There are a bunch of Greg Egan SF novels that would fit within this general heading. Schild’s Ladder for a start.
posted by pharm at 7:58 AM on September 21, 2016


Have you read Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock?
posted by lefty lucky cat at 8:00 AM on September 21, 2016


Mythago Wood is phenomenal. You might also consider KJ Bishop's The Etched City, which starts in no-man's-land and ends in a city that could also be qualified as a zone.
posted by WidgetAlley at 8:20 AM on September 21, 2016


The zones in Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos series

The second book is even titled The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five.

(Personal note: the first book in the series is a bit of a dud, but Marriages Between... and beyond are great)
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 8:36 AM on September 21, 2016


Daniel Keys Moran's Continuing Time series has NYC divided into zones.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 8:43 AM on September 21, 2016


Gravity's Rainbow has a Zone that feels like it exists on the border of this idea.
posted by selfnoise at 8:51 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Your question made me think of the computer game "Chronomaster". It was written by Roger Zelazny (his last work; he died during production) and stars Ron Perlman and Brent Spiner.

It also made me think of "Something Wicked This Way Comes" by Ray Bradbury.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:51 AM on September 21, 2016


I'm not sure if these are quite what you're looking for, but there's Heinlein's Coventry, or the Larry Niven story "Cloak of Anarchy".
posted by sevenyearlurk at 1:43 PM on September 21, 2016


This may not be exactly what you're after, I found the artificial Hell in Iain M. Banks' Surface Detail to be a really interesting take on that sort of parallel realm.
posted by curiousgene at 1:56 PM on September 21, 2016


Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction has a whole chapter that discusses ontologically "other" or unstable zones in SF, drawing on Delany's idea of paraspaces and the work of Brian McHale (who first talked about such zones in his book Postmodernist Fiction but was mainly looking at non-SF texts). Bukatman extends the concept to include stuff like Gibson's cyberspace and the urban landscape of cyberpunk. He names a lot of different examples, including some already mentioned here -- Stalker, Dhalgren, Gravity's Rainbow, Burroughs's Interzone.

It's a pretty common trope in fantasy: the Dreaming in Sandman, Tel'aran'rhiod in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books, the Paths of the Dead in Steven Brust's Dragaera novels...

London in Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius quartet.
M. John Harrison's Viriconium.

John Clute's concept of the polder is a kind of reverse Zone, an area deliberately protected from the thinning or wrongness of the rest of reality. Possibly of interest?
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:02 PM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Leon mentioned above Vurt by Jeff Noon, it's a strong contender for this concept.

Rudy Rucker's work also often has a trippy vibe with odd alternate dimensions popping up, with Postsingular & Hylozoic being good examples.
posted by ovvl at 4:57 PM on September 21, 2016


Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series has some forays into the otherworld, which become quite explicit in the later books. (The first book was published as "Midnight Riot" in North America.)
posted by heatherlogan at 5:06 PM on September 21, 2016


MeFi's own Charles "cstross" Stross plays with this a few different ways. His "Merchant Princes" novels are set across a number of parallel universes, so that's probably not what you're after, but there's "Missile Gap," a novella (found in "Wireless") in which the Earth's surface has been teleported or copied to an endless flat plane in the middle of the cold war, which alters the nature of the gravitational field enough to negate the prospect of ballistic missiles, and those unbalancing the powers. There's also A Colder War in which the opposing powers unleash Lovecraftian weapons on Earth, and the US power structure retreats to a pocket universe in an attempt to escape the inevitable unraveling of their minds and bodies.

Walter Jon Williams' book "Implied Spaces" is set on a very futuriffic Earth in which, aside from our own universe, a number of populated pocket-universes have been created by human-built AIs which orbit the sun, and which are accessible by wormholes. The pocket universes have different physics- and technology-restrictions, as I recall.

Kurt Schroeder's "Ventus" is a planet possessed by angels that attack advanced technology, and so it remains medieval despite being in the midst (minor spoiler) of an interstellar human civilization.

Richard Morgan's book "Woken Furies," the third book in the Takeshi Kovacs series (which begins with "Altered Carbon") is set on Kovacs' homeworld, Harlan's World. Aside from the powerful alien weapons that orbit the planet and vaporize anything that flies higher than 400m, there is an entire continent which is off-limits because of a runaway human-made weapons program which has populated the continent with high-tech semi-sentient machines with various levels of military capability, and Kovacs spends some part of the novel on a "decommissioning crew," mercenaries who travel to the continent and destroy the machines that are evolving there, in the hopes that one day, the continent will be human-habitable again.
posted by Sunburnt at 5:09 PM on September 21, 2016


Much of M John Harrison's work but particularly Light, whose gender politics are IMO crap, and The Course of the Heart.


The Course of the Heart is brutally sad. M John Harrison's Nova Swing has EXACTLY what you described in the question. There's a zone, people live around it, characters enter or leave it or get revelations from it, and it's described in great details.

Micheal Moorcock's books also deal with it a bunch: 'Blood' talks about a 'zone' that he later develops in his Doctor Who tie-in novel and another early novel with a name I have forgotten.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:28 PM on September 21, 2016


There's also something that I'm not quite able to rememeber - it was linked from Something Awful's massive Transformers exegisis thread and it involves unstable zones or liminal spaces that are somehow linked with Marxist thought and/or Georges Bataille and Nick Land. The author is Isreali or Middle Eastern, I think, and there's something about black holes or unstable zones opening up?
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:42 PM on September 21, 2016


Cynosure from the GrimJack comics.
posted by bongo_x at 9:04 PM on September 21, 2016


I think the clear predecessor to this concept is fairyland, right? Like in a lot of these zones, there are inhuman or unclear powers in control, time moves differently inside, there's an element of danger, and nature is often wilder or more unspoiled than in the outside world, like in Stalker or The Southern Reach trilogy. All that's classic fairyland tropes, right? There's a ton to explore if you go down that path.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell has a very interesting and sinister take on fairyland, and recent favorite City of Stairs explores some similar stuff. I think there's a good argument that even, like, A Midsummer Night's Dream qualifies. At its heart, this is a very old idea.

Sticking with SF, though, I think Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is totally critical. I'm not surprised it's not been mentioned, because the planet isn't presented precisely this way, and the whole novel takes place on one station so there's no typical "threshold crossing" scene. Aside from that, it totally counts, and the interruption of reality in Solaris is really interesting and well done, because the intelligence (?) behind it feels so strange and inhuman. Adapted to film by Andrei Tarkovsky, who also made Stalker, so there's a clear connection there somewhere.
posted by Rinku at 12:47 AM on September 22, 2016


"Mostly Harmless", the fifth book in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" series features parallel zones fairly heavily (without being particularly heavy).
posted by h00py at 5:22 AM on September 22, 2016


There's also something that I'm not quite able to rememeber - it was linked from Something Awful's massive Transformers exegisis thread and it involves unstable zones or liminal spaces that are somehow linked with Marxist thought and/or Georges Bataille and Nick Land. The author is Isreali or Middle Eastern, I think, and there's something about black holes or unstable zones opening up?

Sounds like Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 9:27 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think Michael Marshall Smith's novel Only Forward meets this in a couple ways. Most of the action takes place in a "City" which is more of a future ecumenopolis with various Neighborhoods, each with their own quirks, rules, and dangers. Also, there's another more traditionally fantasy realm introduced about halfway through which adds an extra level to what is basically a Philip Marlowe of the Future story.
posted by Pangloss at 2:48 PM on September 22, 2016


Terry Bisson's short story, "Dead Man's Curve" involves some sort of zone hat is definitely beyond the normal sphere of law or reason. It's available in In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories. I recommend it.
posted by notbuddha at 7:26 PM on September 22, 2016


Sounds like Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani.


That's exactly the one.

This sort of thing shows up a lot in what I want to call 'Marxist science fiction' - not just China Mieville but weird Something Awful posts and Sam Kriss essays.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 8:38 PM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


Alan Moore and Grant Morrison play with this a bunch. Moore has an amazing one in League of Extrodinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier - 'ideaspace'. Morrison usually does some kind of '5th dimensional time' or 'hypertime' thing. It shows up in The Invisibles and Doom Patrol and his recent Batman work.

There's always the Upside Down from Stranger Things.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:42 PM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


And The Filth
posted by grobstein at 2:40 AM on September 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Dark City
posted by grobstein at 2:41 AM on September 23, 2016


The Shining
posted by grobstein at 2:46 AM on September 23, 2016


Ted Chiang's novelette "Hell is the Absense of God" is about a world like our own, except that real life angels from Heaven will visit Earth, causing everything from miraculous healing to death and destruction, and odd things in between, like taking away the legs of a young woman. The angelic visits alter people's lives in various ways, and there are also support groups for the survivors/victims/victims' next-of-kin of the visitations.

The zones I thought might fit here are basically the times and places of the visitations, where people are altered by the experience. There are, in this book, holy sites which are the sites of frequent visitations, and where people go in order to seek Heavenly Light, or even just ascend right up to Heaven.

The story can be found in Chiang's "Stories of your Life and Others," a collection which also includes "The Story of your Life," on which the upcoming movie "Arrival" is based. If the movie is as good as the story, sign me up.
posted by Sunburnt at 11:57 AM on September 25, 2016


I just watched Silent Hill, a 2006 movie based on the survival-horror video game. In the movie (I haven't played the game), a woman follows her young (9yo-ish) daughter who is mysteriously drawn to the abandoned ghost town of Silent Hill, which was evacuated following a mine fire that continues to burn. By accounts, this is one of the better movies based on video/computer games, and though it's a low bar, I have to agree.

As the woman searches the town, she occasionally enters an unreal, parallel copy of the town which is haunted by forces of darkness. The town is still occupied by a cult of people, and they have developed an alert system for the arrival of "the darkness" so they can seek refuge-- the darkness is a zone that can just swoop in with a rain of ash and a carpet of large, bizarre insects.

At times, the woman will be in the unreal side of town while her husband searches for her in the same part of the real town, and they can sense each other. "Stranger Things" is very similar to this, in its differently colored, disturbingly-textured unreality that seems to change places with an otherwise identical real world. The creatures of the Darkness are no less disturbing than the denizens of the Underneath.
posted by Sunburnt at 11:16 AM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yes, the Silent Hill games are all about this.
posted by bongo_x at 2:03 PM on September 29, 2016


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