Seeking fiction books with labyrinths and other interminable buildings

February 4, 2024 3:28 AM

I've realised I love fiction where a labyrinth or other extremely complicated and large structure is an integral part of the story. Think the House in Piranesi, the castle of Gormenghast, or the ship in Rendezvous with Rama. What other books might I enjoy?

I like the sense of infinity, both temporal and physical, in Piranesi's House. I like the Gothic twistedness and myriad abandoned wings and rooms of Gormenghast. I like the incomprehensibility of Rama.

More generally, the sense of mystery, immense size, and potential for discovery is what I'm looking for, structures that you could spend a life time exploring and not even get a sense of boundaries, let alone visit every room. Books where the structure is a character in its own right, magnificent, sprawling, unknowable, a vast edifice of history and secrets and mysteries that extends far beyond the eye's ability to see.

A combination of Rama's mystery, Gormenghast's labyrinthine structure, and Piranesi's infinity would be perfect. Perhaps what I really want is a Gothic TARDIS to explore but alas I know of no such story.

I'm not looking for castles in the mind, the sort of story where a character wakes up at the end and realises it was a dream or a hallucination. I want real, concrete places that are being explored, regardless of why or how. Definitely not looking for horror though, although scary things as part of a bigger story are fine.

I'm guessing this is primarily in the realm of sci-fi/fantasy and all recs that way are very welcome. But I'm open to any fiction genre except horror and romance.

So, good people of MeFi, can you send me to a place I might explore forever?

posted by underclocked to Media & Arts (42 answers total)

Best answer: The Library of Babel by Borges fits your request, but is a short story.
posted by Jorus at 3:49 AM on February 4 [5 favorites]

Best answer: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco may qualify, as well as one of its sources of inspiration, “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges.

If you change your mind about horror, House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski is an obvious choice. I only mention it because the horror is the house itself.
posted by eirias at 3:49 AM on February 4 [14 favorites]

Best answer: YA, but the school in A Deadly Education might fit in a way, and maybe more so in the sequel, though the characters are mostly less curious about exploring and more trying to not be killed by it.

If you haven't read Borges's The House of Asterion, which was apparently an inspiration for Piranesi, it definitely fits the bill, apart from being an extremely short story.
posted by trig at 4:17 AM on February 4 [6 favorites]

Best answer: A Short Stay in Hell is a novella about Borges' (previously mentioned) Library of Babel as an afterlife. You could argue it's horror. But I'm also someone who doesn't enjoy horror and I was fine with it.

Report on an unidentified space station by J. G. Ballard is a short story available for free online. It's about a spaceship crew that lands on a space station that turns out to be much larger than they expected.

Blame! is manga rather than a novel, but it's so apposite to what you're looking for that I feel I have to mention it. A man in the future is wandering through an apparently infinite structure, searching for a thing. Minimal dialogue, barebones plot and occasional action, but mostly just quiet exploration of incredible (and absolutely massive) architecture. I've never read anything with such an incredible sense of scale. There's a sampler through the link.
posted by Lorc at 4:49 AM on February 4 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers so far, I'll definitely be checking these out.

Short stories and novellas are fine; I'm looking for large structures, not necessarily large books (although large books are equally welcome).
posted by underclocked at 4:50 AM on February 4

Best answer: Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks. One of his few non-Culture SF novels, some people are quite put off by its liberal use of deliberately janky prose and spelling, but mentioning it in the context of this question has actually made me realise that's almost another kind of maze for the reader to navigate alongside the characters navigating the far-future megastructure weirdness of the physical world he built. I love it, and would put it up there with his best Culture novels.
posted by protorp at 5:03 AM on February 4 [3 favorites]

William Sleator's YA novel House of Stairs I think fits this description.
posted by justkevin at 5:14 AM on February 4 [4 favorites]

In Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, a woman hiding from social unrest discovers a mysterious, labyrinthine space within her own home. It’s one of Lessing’s shorter works, but it’s one of my favorites — haunting, unsettling, and beautiful.
posted by ourobouros at 5:34 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]

Mary Renault on the Minotaur? I forget the titles, but I think there’s a whole series set on Crete.
posted by 8603 at 5:44 AM on February 4

You might enjoy reading some of the content associated with Sigil, a city of shifting and perhaps infinite proportions in the Planescape setting for Dungeons and Dragons. The city is home to various doors to other planes, worlds, etc., and it has various topographical features that are mysterious and/or irreconcilable with a fixed reality.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:48 AM on February 4

Ted Chiang's novella "Tower of Babylon" maybe?
posted by less-of-course at 5:55 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I am not necessarily recommending it on its own merits (I didn't particularly like it), but Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea definitely has some labyrinthine and complicated architecture that plays a character-like role.
posted by lysimache at 5:57 AM on February 4 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I want to echo the J. L. Borges recommendation, but to more specifically add his short-story collection Labyrinths. The Library of Babel is absolutely a key addition to 'labyrinth literature' but I'd say The Garden of Forking Paths is even more so. The good news is that both were published in a collection of stories that has a thematic focus on labyrinths.

It's probably worth just getting the volume "Collected Fictions" that includes most of Borges' published fiction. He has other labyrinth stories such as The House of Asterion.

As a side note: Borges may have a reputation as an favorite of academic literary types, but I want to assure you that despite being considered one of the greats of 20th century literature, Borges was also fascinated by simple adventure stories, cowboys (gauchos, actually), and detective stories.

I also want to echo The Name of the Rose as a reccomendation. It is one of those books you can spend a lifetime reading and re-reading. It doesn't really matter that there are nuances and sub-plots that a first-time reader is going to catch. It's still engaging on every read.

For something more current, Susanna Clarke author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has a more recent novel Piranesi, about labyrinths.
posted by Koppenberg at 6:24 AM on February 4 [2 favorites]

Perhaps this will help you.
Its a free eBook site.
posted by LOOKING at 6:37 AM on February 4

Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth is mostly set in a haunted and exceptionally creepy castle/ city/ planet with some Gormenghast vibes. It's a labyrinth that's part of the story.

Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren checks some of these boxes, but the endless & mysterious city isn't (probably!) a single structure constructed as a labyrinth.
posted by miles per flower at 6:38 AM on February 4 [5 favorites]

Ringworld feels like an earlier version of Rendezvous with Rama.
posted by A Blue Moon at 6:45 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]

Sarah Monette (who also writes as Katherine Addison) started with a series called The Doctrine of Labyrinths starting with Mélucine. It deals with a number of vast and sprawling city-buildings and the messed-up wizards who live inside them. The palace in The Goblin Emperor has a bit of that feeling as well, although nowhere near as pronounced.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:02 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]

Diamond Dogs
“The Spire is a series of rooms, each containing a mathematical puzzle. The doors get smaller as the rooms progress, and the rooms proceed in a spiral up the tower, which is about 250 meters high.” (Sci-fi but with a strong horror theme)
posted by soylent00FF00 at 7:07 AM on February 4

The Mary Renault book 8603 is thinking of is The King Must Die, of which the last act takes place in the Labyrinth (which Renault translates as "the House of the Axe.")

It is central and compelling in those chapters, but it's only about a third of the book.
posted by Pallas Athena at 7:53 AM on February 4 [2 favorites]

Also - not a building but Invisible Cities might hit a similar spot. (If you haven't read it I wouldn't look up too much about it before starting - it's a short read in any case.)
posted by trig at 7:59 AM on February 4 [3 favorites]

Best answer: In both Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion and Damon Knight's The World And Thorinn, the protagonist lives on a vast and varied constructed world / spaceship, gets kicked out of their comfort zone, and has to explore a bunch of bizarre habitats to try to find their way home. Caution: there's a lot of body horror in Stars!
posted by moonmilk at 8:23 AM on February 4

Best answer: Mr. gudrun suggests The Man in the Maze by Robert Silverberg.
posted by gudrun at 8:46 AM on February 4

You might like Mieville's The City and The City - not to spoil too much, the architecture and geography of the first city is a large but basically normal metropolis, but things get very interesting in terms of how that geography interlocks with the other city...

Plot-wise, it's a detective mystery in which these interlocking spaces play a key role!
posted by heyforfour at 9:25 AM on February 4 [7 favorites]

Best answer: Several of Martha Wells' books have this dimension -- particularly the lost city in The Edge of Worlds in the Raksura series. Not sure how well it will flow if you haven't read at least some of the earlier books -- but in fact the mountain-trees that play a major role in all of the Raksura books would also likely meet your requirement of being "extremely complicated and large structures" that are an integral part of the story, so it might be worth starting with The Cloud Roads and seeing what you think.
posted by Not A Thing at 10:05 AM on February 4

The Book of Babel trilogy by Josiah Bancroft. The first is Senlin Ascends: "The Tower of Babel is the greatest marvel of the Silk Age. Immense as a mountain, the ancient Tower holds unnumbered ringdoms, warring and peaceful, stacked one on the other like the layers of a cake."
posted by lizard music at 10:13 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Garon Whited's Nightlord series is a conglomeration of fantasy, sci-fi, and exploration fiction. These books are looong and a great deal of the protagonist's time is spent being thrust though portals in time and space to discover new worlds, societies and technology. Not very plot driven, more wandering around, figuring out, and adapting to new times/places. He stays in each place long enough to live a good portion of a live in discovery. He is immortal so his time is endless. I am listening to these on audiobook and each book has been 35-40 hours long. The Nightlord starts as a physics professor on Earth and is turned into a vampire, goes to a dimension where magic is the main technology, wanders far and wide, learns magic and becomes a wizard and a king.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 10:28 AM on February 4

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula LeGuin is part of the Wizard of Earthsea series, but for sone reason I only had that one, and yet I reread it a lot when I was a kid, for the dark creepy mystery of the tomb labyrinth.
posted by The otter lady at 11:01 AM on February 4 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks to everyone for all your suggestions. I've marked as best answer those that seem to fit the bill based on the brief synopsises I could find, but I'll be looking at all of them and will probably mark others as well.

ourobouros I've read Memoirs of a Survivor and it doesn't quite fit the bill as the labyrinth in question seemed (IMO) to have a dreamlike quality and was towards the end of the book rather than an integral part. But you're right that Lessing is a fabulous author and her work is always worth reading. I may well revisit Memoirs just for the joy of it.
posted by underclocked at 12:49 PM on February 4

Best answer: If you don't mind some comics, Schuiten & Peeters' The Tower is amazing. The protag lives for decades maintaining a small part of the titular tower and ends up exploring to find the mythical Founders. The art is phenomenal. Samaris by the same authors might scratch your itch too; the title city is definitely a character of its own, and a mysterious one.
posted by zompist at 2:12 PM on February 4

Maybe The Bone Clocks? I remember that the idea of the maze became a physical thing in the story and it was thrilling.
posted by SomethinsWrong at 9:33 PM on February 4

Best answer: Labyrinthine cities rather than houses:
Patricia McKillip: Ombria in Shadow;
Neil Gaiman: Neverwhere
+1 to Gideon the Ninth and the Doctrine of Labyrinths Quartet for actual labyrinths.
posted by Coaticass at 10:14 PM on February 4

Best answer: Come to think of it, you may get some mileage out of the tags on TV Tropes, for example Big Labyrinthine Building. Then look for the literature category.
posted by Coaticass at 10:22 PM on February 4

Best answer: The protagonist of Stanisław Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub spends the book wandering an immense labyrinthine military complex.
posted by dfan at 5:29 AM on February 5

It's not a structure, but it's got a lot of the same feel (a self-contained but possibly infinite and strange space with unnatural rules, a group of people exploring, peril, some horror) - Into the Broken Lands by Tanya Huff. I did not entirely love it as a novel but I think as an example of the kind of thing you're looking for, it might work very well.
posted by restless_nomad at 6:15 AM on February 5

Maybe you'll like the puzzle book Maze. It's kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure proto-video game from before computers could handle that level of detail. I wouldn't say that the puzzle aspect really holds up all that well, but it's a wonderful place to wander through.
posted by rivenwanderer at 9:08 AM on February 5 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Mark Lawrence recently wrote a book about an almost never-ending library called The Book that Wouldn't Burn.
posted by bove at 12:20 PM on February 5

Eon, by Greg Bear: a Rama-like object arrives in Earth orbit, and turns out to be much bigger on the inside than the outside, with a tunnel that loops back on itself in both space and time.
posted by Phssthpok at 2:08 PM on February 5

You might enjoy Starling House by Alix E. Harrow. It'd say it's horror-ish but more YA than anything. The titular House has an expansive feel to it, imo.
posted by gemmy at 9:41 PM on February 5

House of Leaves, by Mark Z Danielowski is about a labyrinth that’s bigger than the House it’s in. Sort of.
posted by my-username at 6:13 PM on February 11 [2 favorites]

I think you'd like "Watson's Boy" by Brian Evenson, a surreal short I found in the Vandermeer-edited New Weird anthology. It's set in the kind of labyrinth you describe and goes into both the practicalities of exploring such a space and the psychological effect living in it has. I wouldn't describe it as "horror" but it's certainly disquieting.

Also, this is a real out-of-left-field suggestion, but your question reminded me of the short web original "Sivad's Question". The space being explored is largely outdoors, which feels like a non-central example of what you're looking for, but I think it still qualifies for other reasons. I hate to spoil any more because I loved how surprising this story was (and it's online and only 6,000-ish words! go read it!), but it may be worth noting that there is indirectly some weird sex stuff in the premise -- it's about the topic at this link, if you wanna spoil that aspect, but if you don't have any objection to some gross but fairly internet-standard weird sex discourse, I absolutely recommend getting blindsided by the story itself.

You specifically ask for books in the OP, but I do have to wonder if you've given any thought to scratching this itch with video games? I bring it up just because the last sentence made me think quite specifically of a, not even a game really, but a tech demo posted on the blue like a decade or more ago where you could walk around a (monochrome and empty) city that would be indefinitely procedurally generated as you walked. In hindsight it feels almost like a direct answer to that part of your question. Unfortunately I can't find the post or tech demo again, but if the medium appeals to you at all there's definitely lots of content in this field (e.g. the entire roguelike genre), and it's obviously made progress since that tech demo as well.
posted by dick dale the vampire at 11:58 PM on February 20

Oh, boy. I'm so late to this, but I get to rec the best book I read last year: The Will of the Many by James Islington.

It's a fantasy with a setting loosely based on the Roman Empire (But With Magic), it has a magic system literally based on exploitation and a protagonist who's mad about it, and one of the central aspects of the story is a labyrinth game which students at an elite academy have to run as part of their exams. The labyrinth has a much greater significance that the protag discovers over time. I cannot guarantee that everyone will love this (and, you know, it's neither Borges nor Piranesi), but it's very strongly reviewed and has kind of a jaw-dropping ending. I thought it was worth the time I spent on it and can't wait for the second book.
posted by verbminx at 3:24 AM on March 10

Ursula K. LeGuin's short story "The Building" (borrowable on Archive.org), a strangely beautiful anthropological tale about two related species on a post-collapse world, one of which instinctively works to construct an endless expansive palace.

I've also always loved Douglas Adams's incredible description of the interior of a factory for building planets:

The wall defied the imagination --- seduced it and defeated it. The wall was so paralysingly vast and sheer that its top, bottom and sides passed away beyond the reach of sight. The mere shock of vertigo could kill a man. The wall appeared perfectly flat. It would take the finest laser measuring equipment to detect that as it climbed, apparently to infinity, as it dropped dizzily away, as it planed out to either side, it also curved. It met itself again thirteen light seconds away. In other words the wall formed the inside of a hollow sphere, a sphere over three million miles across and flooded with unimaginable light.

Also, some quick game recs that scratch this itch, good for a watch on YouTube even if you don't wish to play them: Manifold Garden - NaissanceE - The Complex: Found Footage - ECHO
posted by Rhaomi at 1:15 AM on March 15