Are there any Sci-Fi novels that...

[Tinker Gnome]

Portray the universe, and its inhabitants as being utterly alien to humankind? I know there is Lovecrafts stuff, which i have read a good amount of. But are there any Sci-fi novels out there thast portray the universe like this?

 

[DMScott]

C. J. Cherryh had an early novel, "The Pride of Chanur", where a spaceship crew rescued a previously unknown alien and had to figure out what that had to do with the political situation among the known starfaring races. The alien turned out to be a human. Cherryh has written a bunch of novels in the same setting, the first three were re-released relatively recently as "The Chanur Saga".

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

In a way, 2001: A Space Odyssey fits that 'alien' universe.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.

 

[Capellan]

David Brin's Uplift books. You don't get much more unhuman than his aliens ...

 

[Umbran]

Gregory Benford's "Galactic Center" series also has some aspects that you seem to be looking for. In this case, "the rest of the universe" is a galaxy filled with a machine culture.

 

[WizarDru]

David Brin's Uplift books. You don't get much more unhuman than his aliens ...

I'll second that. Most of the alien races are very alien. Uplifted dolphins and chimps are relatively easy to understand...but some of the alien races are just downright weird and inscrutable....at least as much as can be and still be described. Lovecraft was able to get away with the mythos creatures being so indescribable by being vague...and by preventing his characters from interacting with them much, except to be slaughtered or driven insane.

 

[Dingleberry]

Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon the Deep".

 

[Mallus]

I'd argue just about all SF races aren't alien at all [and that's not a problem at all]. How could they be? How could you write about something [or a compex system of somethings] that by definition has no connection, no common points of reference with human perception/experience/cognition? How coud you write about whats completely outside human conception while living inside human conceptual space?

When SF writers create the alien, all they're really doing its mixing up very human traits/elements/methods of organzing information/etc. in a new way. Instead of making a wholly new dish, they make a stew out of leftovers. Put another way, if all you have is wood to build a house out of, then no matter what oddball shape you build, you still end up with a wooden house.

So that leaves me asking: who uses the idea of the alien well? I think Solaris is a fascinating novel. A pretty compact argument about how we absolutely cannot understand the Other.