Sci-Fi/Fantasy stories without human characters

M. Robert Gibson

M. Robert Gibson

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I've just read The Stone God Awakens by Philip José Farmer in which there is only one human character, the rest of the cast having evolved from other animals, and it got me wondering: Are there any Sci-Fi/Fantasy stories out there that have no human characters at all?

The only one that came to mind is Watership Down with them there bunnies.

So I thought it'd be a good question for the hive mind. Over to you, Chronners ;)
 
Would you count goblins and elves as human in this context? If not, then Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor fits, though they're human in all but name really.

What about The Shadow of the Apt books, by Adrian Tchaikovsky? The characters there all have insect abilities, which are genetic, although they're again humans in all but name. The same for his characters in the Echoes of the Fall series, though there the abilities are non-insectoid-ish.
 
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The Judge said:
Would you count goblins and elves as human in this context? If not, then Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor fits, though they're human in all but name really.
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Yes, anything like that. I mean, the rabbits in WD are humans really. I guess no one 'born of Adam' might be the apt phrase ;)
 
David Brins's The Uplift War , you have mostly aliens and uplifted chimps and Garthlings who are really secretly uplifted earth Gorillas . This book and series whole series lots of fun.:cool:
 
AE35Unit said:
Are they? I thought it wasn't set on Earth
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IIRC, in some of his writings Tolkien implied that Middle Earth was the distant past of our own world. (The landmasses aren't the same, but he was working with archaic ideas about continent-scale geology.)

I've always thought of "humans" as being the default "normal people" species in most fantasy series. Not sure if that's logically correct or not, now.
 
Great question! Thinking while I type:

"The Galaxy and the Ground Within" by Becky Chambers so very nearly manages this, but then it has a human minor character turn up towards the end.

Vintage Star Trek spin-off novel "The Final Reflection" by John Ford is set almost entirely within Klingon society, but according to Wikipedia it has a brief framing narrative about Captain Kirk. I think that similar novels set on Vulcan and in the Romulan Empire have even more human presence, sadly.

"Nightfall" by Asimov- the people are definitely not descended from Earth humans, and I seem to recall Asimov said he was describing them in human terms merely to avoid distracting the reader from the thought-experiment.

"Saturn's Children" by Charles Stross: humans are extinct, and the Solar System is inhabited by our abandoned robots (humanoid and otherwise). THe sequel, "Neptune's Brood", also lacks humans (live ones, anyway), though some of the robots have started thinking of themselves as a new kind of human.

"The Clockwork Rocket" by Greg Egan. Set in another universe with different physical laws. All the characters are intelligent amoeba-like beings. (I haven't read the two sequels yet.)

"Homeland," by R. A. Salvatore. First in the Dark Elf trilogy in the Dungeons and Dragons world. It's set entirely in the underground city of the Drows, and stars the fan-favourite character Drizzt Do'Urden. The later books do have humans.

"The Book of the Dun Cow" by Walter Wangerin Jr. A rather intense and disturbing fable in which talking barnyard animals face a curse that unleashes a plague of zombie weasel/worm things. (I read it as a child, and have never read the sequels so I don't know if they contain humans.)
 
The SF books with utterly no Humans seem to come in two branches ' those where humans once existed and are now extinct, or gone away, or legend, (example City, by Simak, or a number of works where it is robots, mankind's direct creations, that inherit the Earth, or Empire, or whatever. Just occasionally mutated exhumans get a look in, or the stories where humans have no part in creation at all - I'll cite John Brunner's 'The Crucible of Time', which I liked but nobody else seems to have read, or Robert Sawyer's Quintaglio (Far-seer) series.

The books with one or very few humans they are frequently used as comparison references references, making the aliens more alien (except maybe Cherryh's 'Chanur' series where Tully is stranger than his captors or saviours), a little like Lemuel Gulliver and his hominid/equoid contacts).

Most of these unbalanced contrast stories are comparing societies, rather than species.
 
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