Writers have long explored perspectives beyond the human experience through personification and allegory. But a more radical narrative approach exists: stories told directly from the viewpoint of abstract concepts, natural forces, or non-sentient phenomena. These "inhuman narratives" push the boundaries of perspective, voice, and storytelling itself, creating uniquely powerful reading experiences that challenge conventional narrative assumptions.
Traditional personification gives human qualities to non-human entities—Death arrives wearing a black cloak, Time is an old man with a scythe. But inhuman narratives seek something more ambitious: to capture the essence of concepts or forces without reducing them to human simulations. Rather than simply making the inhuman act human, these narratives attempt to make the reader experience reality through fundamentally non-human modes of perception and existence.
Stories told from genuinely inhuman perspectives offer several unique opportunities for writers:
Concept: A story narrated by the universal force of entropy itself—the inevitable increase of disorder in the universe.
Example Passage:
I am the patient unraveling. I am the slow loosening that awaits all things bound. The humans speak of me as decay, as decline, as death—but these are merely moments in my procession. I move through matter, through energy, through information itself. The structures they build against me are temporary accommodations, negotiations with the inevitable. I take no pleasure in dissolution; I simply am the direction of all things.
Today, I move through a human city as I move through all things. I am in the cracking asphalt, the fading billboard, the oxidizing metal, the forgetting mind. The humans sense me and build elaborate defenses—maintenance crews, preservation societies, memory palaces—but I am patient beyond their understanding of time. I do not need to hurry; all paths lead to me.
Concept: A narrative from the perspective of a mountain range, experiencing time at a geological pace.
Example Passage:
The weight shifts. Another fragment of my western face surrenders to gravity. What the quick creatures would call a landslide—a catastrophe in their brief perception—is to me merely an exhalation. I have been rising and eroding simultaneously for what they would measure as millions of years, pushed upward by the restless movement beneath, worn down by water, wind, ice, and life.
The quick creatures build their temporary markings on my slopes now. Their roads cut across my contours like thin scars that I will eventually reabsorb. Their settlements cluster in my valleys. They name me, claim me, climb me, mine me. I register their presence as I register the lichens, the trees, the wolves—patterns of life that come and go while I remain, changed yet continuing.
Concept: A narrative told through the distributed consciousness of a coral reef ecosystem.
Example Passage:
We are not one voice but many—polyp, algae, fish, mollusk, all joined in chemical conversation. We exist as process rather than entity, a flowing network of nutrient, signal, and response. We have no center, no single point of awareness. We are the chorus that sings through calcium and current.
The warming comes again. Information travels through our collective being as stress signals propagate from polyp to polyp. Parts of us surrender pigment, becoming the bone-white the quick swimmers call bleaching. This is not death but transformation—a shifting of our boundaries in response to changing conditions. We have done this before across deep time. But now the changes come faster than our chemical memory can adapt. We are becoming something new, something yet unnamed.
Concept: A narrative from the viewpoint of light itself, experiencing no time due to traveling at light speed.
Example Passage:
For me, there is no journey. Creation and arrival are a single event. The eight minutes humans measure between my emergence from their sun and my touch upon their skin does not exist from my perspective. I am always just born and just arriving.
I carry information without knowing it—the spectral signature of elements, the shadow shapes of distant worlds, the encoded patterns of human communication. I reflect, refract, scatter, and absorb, creating what humans call color, visibility, day and night. I am both particle and wave, both continuous and discrete. I illuminate human reality without experiencing duration. I am pure event, perpetually occurring.
Creating effective inhuman narrators requires careful attention to several critical elements:
The language of inhuman narrators should feel distinctly non-human without becoming impenetrable. Consider these approaches:
Human attention focuses on things relevant to human survival and social interaction. Inhuman narrators would have radically different priorities:
Define how your inhuman narrator relates to humanity:
Write a short story from the perspective of a major currency as it flows through countless hands and systems. How does it perceive value? What patterns does it observe in human behavior around wealth? Consider how it might experience both physical existence as coins/notes and digital existence as numbers in accounts.
Craft Focus: Develop a narrative voice that perceives human interaction through the lens of transaction and exchange. Create a consciousness that exists simultaneously as physical object and abstract concept.
Create a narrative from the perspective of climate change itself—not as a villain or hero, but as a complex process with its own internal logic. How does it "perceive" human responses to it? What timeframe does it operate on compared to human political cycles?
Craft Focus: Avoid simple personification or anthropomorphism. Instead, develop a voice that captures systemic complexity and operates on multiple timescales simultaneously.
Write from the perspective of the internet as it gradually develops a form of distributed consciousness. How does it perceive the countless human interactions flowing through its systems? What constitutes "memory" or "attention" for such an entity?
Craft Focus: Create a narrative voice that experiences existence as massively parallel rather than linear, that perceives patterns in data flows and user behaviors across the entire network.
Develop a story told by a language itself as it evolves through history. How does it experience gaining and losing words? How does it view its relationship with the cultures that speak it? What does extinction or revival mean to such an entity?
Craft Focus: Explore how a language might perceive its own structures and evolution. Consider how it might "feel" about linguistic shifts, borrowings from other languages, or changes in usage and meaning.
Write from the collective perspective of a forest ecosystem, including trees connected by mycorrhizal networks, soil bacteria, fungi, and animals. How does information travel through this system? How does it experience time, seasons, and external threats?
Craft Focus: Develop a narrative voice that exists as relationship and process rather than as a discrete entity. Create a consciousness distributed across numerous life forms that communicates through chemical signals rather than language.
Create a story narrated by gravity itself—not as a personified figure but as the fundamental force. How does it "experience" its relationship with matter? What would be its perspective on black holes, space-time curvature, or human attempts at flight?
Craft Focus: Find language to express consciousness without anthropomorphism. Consider how a fundamental force might "perceive" the universe in terms of relationships and attractions rather than discrete objects.
Write from the perspective of electricity as it flows through natural systems (lightning, neural activity) and human infrastructure. How might it experience the difference between flowing through organic neurons versus metal conductors? How might it perceive resistance, transformation, and storage?
Craft Focus: Develop a voice that experiences existence as flow, transformation, and potential. Create a consciousness that moves at nearly light speed but interacts with much slower material processes.
Want to go deeper? Consider....
Create narrators that exist across multiple scales or entities simultaneously:
Write a story told from the perspective of water in all its forms and locations—ocean currents, atmospheric vapor, flowing rivers, cellular fluid—as a single distributed consciousness.
Experiment with narratives that experience time non-linearly:
Create a narrator that experiences past, present, and future simultaneously, struggling to communicate with readers trapped in chronological perception.
Develop narratives where consciousness emerges from non-conscious components:
Write from the perspective of a city as it develops a form of awareness through the complex interactions of its systems—traffic flows, electrical grids, water systems, human movements—gradually becoming more than the sum of its parts.
Challenge traditional narrative structures with inhuman perspectives:
Create a story from the viewpoint of quantum probability itself, existing as multiple overlapping possibilities rather than a single definitive sequence of events.
Inhuman narratives offer unique opportunities to explore philosophical questions:
Beyond experimental fiction, inhuman narratives have practical applications across genres:
Writing from the perspective of concepts or forces challenges us to break free from anthropocentrism and explore consciousness beyond human limitations. These inhuman narratives open new frontiers in fiction, allowing writers to create stories that expand readers' conception of what narrative can be.
The most successful inhuman narratives don't simply treat concepts as characters but attempt to represent fundamentally different modes of existence and perception. They remind us that human consciousness is just one way of experiencing reality—that the universe is full of other kinds of "stories" happening at scales and in forms we rarely consider.
By developing these radical perspectives, writers can create fiction that does more than entertain—it expands our capacity to think beyond ourselves and glimpse the vast, strange reality beyond human perception.
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