There’s a magic to the kind of book that teaches a reader to see the world through another person’s eyes. There’s a double-magic when books take us out of human seeing altogether. It’s a trick that transcends genres: both literary and speculative writers love the challenge of reaching for a foreign understanding.
My novel The Sea-Glass Shore is about a family of selkies: seal-people who take off their skins to live a human life on land. To write it, I immersed myself in remarkable facts about seals. Their eyes change shape to focus both above and below the water. They have whiskers so sensitive to vibration, they can track a small fish in a murky current. I imagined how a person accustomed to the sensory world of a sea-dwelling hunter would transition to life on land. The selkie people in my story pick up currents in the wind instead of water. They read nearby people through the give-and-take of their breathing.
On the days when I was trying to think like a seal, I became more conscious not only of what people said to me, but how they sighed when they said it. Reaching for non-human perspectives has helped me understand the powers and limits of human thinking, and maybe even push those limits. Here are eight more books that do the same.
Woolf adapts the letters and poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write the life of Elizabeth’s cocker spaniel, Flush. A highlight of this biography, told mainly from its subject’s perspective, is Flush’s envious, scent-bedeviled take on his mistress’s courtship. If you’ve ever watched a dog attempt to alert a clueless human to a threat, you’ll smile to see Flush maddened by Elizabeth’s father, who will not notice the lingering reek of Robert’s secret visits. It’s easy to sympathize when Flush gives way to frustration at last, and sinks his teeth “in the immaculate cloth of Mr. Browning’s trousers!”
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
One of the best of the fantasy plots fueled by faery-human cross-cultural misunderstanding. If you live forever, it’s easy to overlook the restrictions and hopes of mortal life. When a “gentleman with thistle-down hair” compels his human favorites to dance each night away at a faery ball, he means it as benevolent patronage. He doesn’t realize he’s sentencing them to a day-life of helpless exhaustion. “You intended nothing but kindness, I know,” says one of these favorites to the gentleman, at a pivotal point in the novel. And, caught up in the story’s side-by-side world and otherworld, we know it too.
Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang
A linguist is summoned to master the language of alien visitors to Earth, but in order to do it, she must also understand their sense of time. The marvel of this novella is its deft translation of that alien sense to the linguist’s English. By the end of the story she tells us, the sequence of events we thought we’d started with has been steadily revealed as something very different.
I Sing the Salmon Home edited by Rena Priest
Most of the time, it’s not so much that the poems in this anthology take the perspective of a salmon. It’s more that the poets consider salmon as a model for their own lives. What if we lived like these fish, who fight their way upstream to the river beds where they were born, only to die so their bodies will nourish future generations? What might it mean to see ourselves not as individuals, but as generous ancestors? What if we embraced collective sacrifice?
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
When this sci-fi volume first came out in 2013, it caught attention for an AI narrator who found human gender hard to follow, and defaulted to calling people “she.” But equally noteworthy is the story’s “I,” used for a single AI consciousness spread over multiple invaded human bodies. Normally these bodies are integrated in their thinking, but under a surprise attack the integration fails. The narrator becomes “twenty different people with twenty different sets of observations and memories.” It’s a dizzying kaleidoscopic vision, as bewildering to the narrator as it is to readers accustomed to one body at a time.
Half of this novel is told from the perspective of a human detective investigating a death. The other half is narrated by a fox wife: “[n]ot a god, but not quite human.” Foxes, as she tells us, “are naturally drawn to trouble. Some say that’s because we are the cause of it, but the truth is that chaos is always interesting and often profitable.” The fox wife can pass for human in the story, and her narration almost does as well. But her fox-curiosity gives her journey the slightest tilt against her better judgment, and inevitably her story collides with the tale of the unsolved crime.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
This novel rarely strays far from one wildly comic Adams-sounding narrative voice, and that voice is of course the great appeal of the Hitchhiker books. But the Guide wins mention here for its swift detour into the life-thoughts of a sperm whale, complete from start to finish. The whale, generated by a spaceship’s improbability drive, comes into being high above the surface of a planet, fully subject to the force of gravity. Its story is surprisingly sweet. And unsurprisingly short.
Who but the inventive Jones would tell the story of the young daughter of an IRA prisoner through the eyes of her dog, who is actually a star? The dog-star Sirius, convicted on a false charge of murder, is sentenced to life in an animal body—unless he can find the Zoi, a magical weapon gone missing on Earth. Jones plays the juxtaposed perspectives of the flame-raging, arrogant star and the kindly, hapless dog to tragicomic effect. You try looking for a missing Zoi while planted in a clumsy puppy body. You try staying on task against the distractions of a cat in your house, or a neighbor dog in heat, or the grief of a girl you come to love with both doglike and starlike devotion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Julie Salmon Kelleher grew up in five different towns in Washington State. She holds a B.A. from Reed College and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and currently teaches courses on humanities, nature literature, and fantasy writing in the Honors College at Western Washington University. Her publications include scholarship in Mythlore and Victorian Studies, and creative nonfiction on the folklore of Irish saints in LETTERS and Relief. Granddaughter to an Irish lawyer, an English teacher, a farm wife, and a logger turned dairyman, she lives with her family in a Cascadian college town, midway between the mountains and the sea.