: What makes something feel truly alien and incomprehensible? It's the experience of trying to figure it out and failing. In his masterwork, Dhalgren, Samuel Delany poses a number of puzzles

@Moriarity138

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What makes something feel truly alien and incomprehensible? It's the experience of trying to figure it out and failing. In his masterwork, Dhalgren, Samuel Delany poses a number of puzzles for his main character to figure out --mysteries that defy explanation. Throughout the book, the protagonist works his way towards the answers, but just when he thinks he's on the verge of a rational explanation, he learns something new that completely invalidates his theories (the same experience awaits the reader who tries to fit all the book's events into a single, linear, consistent narrative). Other authors that productively mine similar territory include Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Lewis Carroll (Sylvie and Bruno) and Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicles).

People try to figure things out, it's what we do, and if you can conceive of something, so can the reader. So how do you write about something you can't conceive of? Lean into the mystery. Give your characters a puzzle to solve, and just when they think they have it figured out, throw in some incompatible data.

However, it's clearly a dangerous game to play. If you do it poorly, the story feels either poorly cobbled together, or like a blatant cheat. I think the reason it works for each of the authors above is that what they are really interested in is the characters, and how they respond to the stress of uncertainty. So the mystery is the means to explore the characters, not the other way around.

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