Xenofiction

Xenofiction is a class of science fiction or fantasy encompassing stories set among species or cultures extremely different from humanity or human society.

Examples

*Richard Adams' Watership Down, set in the warrens of rabbits in the English countryside.

*Kenneth Oppel's Silverwing, telling the story of a colony of silverwing bats.

*Erin Hunter's Warrior Cats series about the fantasty adventures of a wild clan of forest cats.

*Brian Jacques' Redwall, in which is set in the forest and castles of heroic mice, ferrets, badgers and other forest creatures. Redwall is the first of the 19 novels.

* Kathryn Lasky' Guardians of Ga'Hoole, it's the story of an owl and his friends.

*M. I. McAllister's The Mistmantle Chronicles, tell the story of a young squirrel named Urchin.

*Parts of Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land have been called xenofiction.

*The second part of Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves, which describes an alien culture with three sexes, the Rational, the Emotional, and the Parental.

*C. J. Cherryh's Faded Sun Trilogy, comprised of Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath.

*Mercedes Lackey's Gryphon trilogy: The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, and The Silver Griffon. Although these novels contain humans and human interaction, the primary protagonist Skandranon the Black Gryphon and his species are highly intelligent animals who are seen as humanity's equal on many levels.

*The Ecco the Dolphin series, which stars sapient cetaceans and, in the original story line, the Asterite and the Vortex life forms.

*Much of science fiction deals with constructing alien societies. While her aliens are typically humanoid, their cultures are what separates them so completely from humanity as we know it. In the short story collection The Birthday of the World, several such races are discussed. Her stories include a race which only attains a gender when they go into heat, and are otherwise androgynous, as well as a race for which the only form of marriage is a complex system of polygamy.

*Part IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels deals with the Houyhnhnm race of horse people and their society.

*In A. K. Dewdney's The Planiverse, Dewdney and his students communicate with the Nsana, who inhabit a two-dimensional universe.

*Robert T. Bakker's novel Raptor Red follows a year in the life of a female Utahraptor.

*Several of Iain M Banks' Culture novels have xenofictional elements, notably Excession, featuring a subculture of sentient spacecraft, and Look to Windward, which includes chapters set within country-sized creatures and their symbiotic populations inhabiting a gas giant.

*A. Bertram Chandler's novella Giant Killer, a nominee for the 1946 "retroactive Hugo" award, is about a race of rats that have achieved sentience as a result of exposure to radiation. However, it is not until the very last line of the novella that the reader learns that the protagonists are rats, rather than humans. As such, the novella represents xenofiction only upon reflection, and not during the initial reading.

*James Tiptree Jr's short story "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death", recounting the life cycle of an alien.

*LEGO's Bionicle series of toys and novels focuses mainly on the Matoran, a biomechanical race of masked humanoid beings, as well as a few other peoples such as the Xians. All of those peoples have different and exotic cultures. Humans do not exist in the Bionicle universe.

*David Clement-Davies's novels, Fire Bringer, and The Sight, about a deer and a wolf, respectively.

*C.S.Lewis's novel Out of the Silent Planet, which describes the planet of Malacandra (Mars), inhabited by three types of creatures: the hrossa, who seem to resemble human beings most closely, and are fond of water and boats; the pfiftriggi, who dig in the earth and work with precious metals, like dwarves; and the seroni, who live in the high places and are more rational than feeling. A hross tells the human visitor that all of them, including the human, are "hnau", which might mean "rational", or even, according to your interpretation, "ensouled".

*The role-playing game World Tree, which focuses on a complex and detailed non-human civilization of eight "Prime" races, with exotic magical abilities that greatly affect their culture.

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