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gwern comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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It's too bad; a book on what plants might think or what their views might look like - a look which took the project seriously in extrapolating a possible plant civilization and its views and ethics, a colossally ambitious and scientificly-grounded work of SF - could be pretty awesome. But from the sound of that review, it's exactly where Marder falls down.
After contemplating how odd it is that people have a revulsion against weapons which use disease and poison that they don't seem to have against weapons which use momentum and in fact are apt to consider momentum weapons high status, I wondered if there could be sentients with a reversed preference.
I think sentient trees could fill the requirement. IIRC, plants modulate their poisons according to threat level.
Olaf Stapledon's 'Star Maker'. The whole thing is filtered through semi-communist theology, but its a fascinating trek through the author's far-flung ideas about all kinds of creatures and what they could hold in common versus major differences that come from their natures. One of the dozens of races he describes is a race of plant-men on an airless world that locked up all its volatiles in living soup in the deep valleys, they stand at the shore and soak up energy from their star in a meditative trance during the day and do more animal-style activity at night... his writing style is NOT for everyone nor is his philosophy but I heartily enjoyed it.
Yes! Star Maker is one of the very few books that I'd place up there with Blindsight and a few others in depicting truly alien aliens; and he doesn't do it once but repeatedly throughout the book. It's really impressive how Stapledon just casually scatters around handfuls of jewels that lesser authors might belabor singly throughout an entire book.
That book and Last and First Men and possibly Last and First Men in London are amazing. He's got paragraphs that a normal science fiction writer would flesh out into novels.
Literally in this case: the events of Last and First Men get mentioned in one paragraph of Star Maker as one race that didn't pan out and wind up becoming part of wider happenings after only lasting 2 billion years.
Speaker for the Dead?
It's been a very long time since I read that, but I don't remember thinking 'how alien!'
Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing is a fun book, if you don't mind the mushy philosophy. He calls for philosophers to stop focusing on humans and to make artifacts that explore the subjective experiences of objects. Sometimes he starts sketching out how something like that might be done or interprets an existing work along those lines (e.g. the deconstructulator), but there don't seem to be any meaty examples out there.