There Are Walls

Joe Haldeman’s _Forever_War_
The Terran defensive dome is opaque and impermeable. Once it’s activated, those inside have no information about what’s happening outside the perimeter of their dome.

Gene Wolfe’s “There are Doors.” C. L. Moore’s “The Black God’s Kiss” has Jirel pulling out bricks from a wall in order to enter Hell.

I start thinking about this and more titles come to mind: Hodgson’s “House on the Borderland;” Heinlein’s “Door into Summer” are well known. “The Blind Spot” by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint is less well known (with many critics thinking deservedly so) but is certainly an early example of the type, originally serialized in Argosy magazine in 1921.

The invisible barrier in Time Bandits.

Vernor Vinge’s Bobbles, from The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. Perfect indestructible reflective spheres, with the contents frozen in time for arbitrary periods up to billions of years. They’re great for interstellar travel – bobble up and set off a nuke nearby to push you. And of course you never really care how fast you’re going.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God” built a miniworld with tiny, fast-living creatures, and made them unable to breath our atmosphere so they’d never escape. When he was threatened, he had them create an impenetrable force field around his whole island. Nobody knows what happened inside the force field after that.

James Morrow, The Wine of Violence

Won’t even attempt to summarize but I think I will reread it myself if I can find it.

Often these don’t come equipped with attendant walls – they’re wormholes or black holes or transporters or whatever.

Every door has a wall attached, but sometimes you have to look hard in order to see it. In the case of wormholes and stargates, the wall is time. Yes, it’s possible to get to wherever the stargate leads, but it would take literally millenia to get there, with ordinary methods of propulsion. The investment of time acts as a wall higher and stronger than any physical barrier.

The SF version of the walled city is the domed city and the first of those (influential on the many later enclosed future-cities from We to Logan’s Run, Mega City One etc) is H G Wells’s The Sleeper Wakes (1899). In that novel as in many of its textual descendants there’s a wall (with a door in it) in two senses: an actual wall separating the city from the world (Wells’s future Britain is all collectivised farmland and the whole population lives inside four giant domed cities) and a metaphorical wall separating the p.o.v. character from a proper understanding of the world he wakes into. At first Wells’s Graham thinks this future London an utopia; but in the course of the story he experiences a conceptual breakthrough and understands that for the 99% it’s a horrible dystopia.

ABC: Always Be Consider-H-G-Wells-ing.

From there it’s a short hop to all those generation starship stories, where the wall around the world literally defines habitable space by separating it from the vacuum of space.

Doris Lessing makes much of a magic wall in Memoirs Of A Survivor.

The city and the city, by China Mieville. The cities have an invisible ‘berlin wall’ between them, that the inhabitants can’t pass except through checkpoints. The wall seems imaginary, emperor’s clothes style, though IIRC the book never quite admits that.

FTL/nterstellar travel really is a fairy wall with doors, isn’t it? The author gets to define the rules of the door. Time dilation makes everyone back home old (very fairy that), or the spaceships are special (say, Pohl’s Gateway, where you don’t know where the ship will go or if you will return). Or you have to find the magic wormhole before you go somewhere. How many stories are there about wormhole maps, or lost planets that are returned to the Network after Isolation? Very wally, that.

Two more “weird wall” themed novels I forgot to mention —

From SF: Algis Budrys’s novel “Rogue Moon” features a homicidal maze that may well be the original inspiration for the labyrinth in Silverberg’s “Man in the Maze,” along with an intriguing human cloning method used to explore it.

From fantasy: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s epic treatment of the Camelot legend, “Mists of Avalon,” revolves around the daunting but permeable wall of mist separating the realm of Avalon from mundane Arthurian Britain

Thank you, John, for these always interesting portals that you open between the two domains of philosophy and of science fiction.
My example, which I first came across a few months ago, is Yoon Ha Lee, with his Machineries of Empire series. He describes a phenomenon that he names calendrical heresy. In his universe, presumably far in our future, calendars are used to maintain doctrines and discipline. People who for whatever reason do not agree with the government must flee to an empire which is governed by another calendar, or are forced to adapt or be murdered. The fascinating thing in Yoon ha Lee’s universe is that certain techniques work in certain calendars and others simply do not function. Some devices, aircraft, weapons, stop functioning when they travel from one calendar to another. It almost seems in his description that natural laws change when they traverse from one calendar to another. Of course he plays with the old SF concept in which technology is like magic if it is developed far enough.

I think the Tiptree walls might be completely metaphorical – a long time since I read it.
William Tenn _The Men in the Walls_ (became _Of Men and Monsters_)
Back to Lovecraft, those weird walls and ceilings in the Witch House.

The wall, with the Gate of Dis, separating the 5th and 6th circles of Hell. The Furies and Medusa prevent the passage of Dante and Virgil, until a powerful angel from Heaven sweeps in like Mercury to open the gate with a wand, while chastising those monsters. (Inferno IX)

The wall separates the upper levels of torment for the various sins of self-indulgence or incontinence, from the deeper sins of violence and fraud. Virgil is the “Helper” in the typologies of actants in both Propp and Greimas*, but here he only helps to shield Dante’s eyes from looking at Medusa until the angel comes. The angel is not named, is brief and rather detached as if he has more important things to do, and does not speak to Virgil or Dante.

*Gerald Prince’s Dictionary of Narratology is a quick and easy guide to these typologies.

The hyperspace trope, beloved of many SF authors, is basically a higher-dimensional wall whose 3 dimensional (+ time) surface is everywhere.

The one that jumped to my mind before reaching the end of your post was ‘The Wall Around the World’ – the title of which I couldn’t remember, but which I read in (I think) one of those Isaac Asimov-edited collections on different themes that came out starting in the later 80s. The story was obviously good enough to stick in my mind, even though the book is long gone from my collection.

Beyond that, my brain jumped to Jack Chalker’s Well World series. It’s all about Walls and Doors. There are the Markovian gates that take the characters from their own milieu to the Well World (one way doors, for most), and that allow travel to and from the hexes on the planet and the diplomatic/government area of the polar Zones (restricted two-way doors). Then you’ve got the equatorial Wall that separates the southern hemisphere with its carbon-based life forms from the northern hemisphere with its very alien non-carbon-based life forms. And the ultimate goal in all the books (at least the original five, which are all I’ve read) is to get to the wall at the right time and with the right people to have it open and let you in to the control centre for the computer that controls and maintains the whole universe – the Well of Souls itself.

– a wall somebody wants to build and there is no money for it?

It’s far from a great book, but the example of an SF wall I’ve most recently encountered is in Jeremy Robinson’s Infinite in which the protagonist (thinks he has) reached the end of the universe, in a way that seems to prove he’s living in a simulation. In fact, the novel is full of such walls (and that initial one turns out not to be what it appears).

PS Oh, yes, Pohl’s Heechee series is about doors.

Is there a important difference between a wall and a moat/gap/chasm/abyss?

And as long as we’re on doors, there was a (what is now referred to as) Young Adult novel which I read several times as a — um — ‘young adult’, called The Forgotten Door, in which a strange boy, named by those who find him ‘John’, suddenly appears from nowhere. It seems he can read minds and speak to animals …

Archytas of Tarentum seems to have written a very brief SF story about walls,

http://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Science/en/Archytas.html

which was then copied up by Lucretius (I.968 et seq.).

I’d say James Blish’s Surface Tension is a story about walls, and breaking through them. I haven’t thought about that story in years, but this post brought it back to me. Thanks for that. Also, I was certain that Surface Tension was included in the Hugo Winners anthology, but I’m wrong about that. I dimly recall another Asimov-edited anthology of earlier science fiction, but I remember the name. All too long ago.

Theodore Sturgeon has a story–and, of course, I’m blanking on the title–in which there’s a window that is so dense that light moves through it very, very slowly…so that what you see happening outside the window took place decades ago. (Where there are walls, there can be windows).

ED – THIS IS PROBABLY BOB SHAW’S “LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS.”

A grisly wall: Jonathan Lethem wrote of a prison wall made from the solidified bodies of convicts. One inmate’s cell has a brick with the face of his father.

The story is called ‘The Hardened Criminals’.

Others beat me to a number of these (though I’m still not sure about “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”), but there’s also Kafka’s “Before the Law” (“Vor den Gesetz”) – strictly another door, but it never opens.

Odd that nobody has mentioned the film of the moment, “Annihilation” which is all about a magical border and a magical door (which possibly have different origins).

A (sort of) non-fictional example: many members of the flat earth conspiracy movement believe that the poles are really gigantic walls of ice surrounding the known continents and separating us from the rest of the (flat) universe.

There’s even a map:

https://www.reddit.com/r/flatearth/comments/7hcuas/amazingly_detailed_flat_earth_map/

There’s something about walls as concrete representations of social relations, innit? So much of what’s going on we can’t see. Social processes are opaque. But you can’t miss giant towers in the middle of Dubai, border walls, etc. Going off of Frederic Jameson’s love of Neromancer for providing substantive visual metaphors for capital flows.

– Lots of walls / doors in Kafka. A Little Fable, Before the Law, etc.

– Some walls in Dune: giant stone wall guards the capital city, shields govern most of the technique of battle (of which there’s a fair amount). The end has the messianic boy sorcerer breaching the giant stone wall with atomic weapons and riding huge worms into the capital city under cover of an enormous sandstorm, static electricity sparking everywhere. Find a more badass image of a wall coming down spoiler you can’t

– Not SF but Daniel Plainview’s burning oil derrick is a hell of a tower

– Charlie Stross has a bunch of weird wall / door things. Palimpsest has doors through time, the bad guys “repair the wall of time”, and (one timeline of the) protagonist fights to blow that wall up. Maybe he also builds a giant castle at the end of time as a base? I forget. Accelerando has capitalism 2.0 (post-singularity) build a wall around the economy that ordinary humans can’t breach. Wall eventually manifests as a dyson sphere around the sun, pushing humans out to Jupiter. Also charachters get held in / escape VR sense prisons. All the stories about The Laundry, leaks through the walls of dimensions.

– How about resources space travel requires: fuel, oxygen. The Cold Equations is basically “physics built this wall with one door and it won’t let both of us through”.

I probably should have made clear that my title was a bit of a Wolfe nod!

His short story, “A Solar Labyrinth” is a _perfect_ example of weird walls.

@MisterMr 47

In Snow White, isn’t the queen (or witch) actually Propp’s Villain?

According to Prince’s dictionary, Greimas coined “actant”.

Ps: Cogswell ain’t that obscure.

@ Lee A. Arnold

No, she is an unfriendly donor.

If you read Propp’s second book, he links the first part of the structure of the fairy tale to initiation rituals of hunter gatherers, so you have:

1) young S reaches maturity and is kicked out from her parent’s house (rationalized with the stepmother once these traditions ceased and people didn’t understand what they were speaking about anymore) ;

2) S spends some time in the longhouse, rationalized with the dwarves (faeries) once people couldn’t conceive girls spending time in a house full of boys anymore;

3) S goes to the female shaman and undergoes an initiation ritual of death and rebirth, rationalized as the witch poisoning S

4) After the ritual S marries.

Propp wrote in the Soviet Union and was clearly a dialectic materialist (he often writes against other theorists of fairy tales that they have “burgoise” preconception) and he believed that fairy tales were originally sacred stories that were later distorted and amended when they didn’t correspond anymore to the living conditions, generally changing the rationale for the characters actions.

Specifically, according to Propp the initiation ritual often consisted in getting the power of the totemic animal (like learning to speak with birds) and this was often rationalized with gaining the help of a magic animal, hence the “magic helper”.

This of course is a totally different logic than Greimas, and in particular implies that in Propp’s structure motivations are quite irrelevant,
because it is assumed that we are speaking of an ethnic tale were motivations change for every reteller, since hundreds or thousands of years, not of any story as in Greimas.

Going back to the OP, if fantasy stories ultimately come from initiation rituals, and the ritual consists in a passage in the otherworld, then walls and doors make a lot of sense: the door of Baba Yaga’s house has a very strong symbolical meaning (a teriomorphic house, as in many shamanic traditions).

I know it doesn’t match the genre, but for some reason I thought of “The Cask of Amontillado”, I guess that’s more of a creepy wall than a weird one.

Are walls good or bad? There are lots of creepy/ imprisoning /need to get through them to get somewhere else walls. What about walls that protect something and that we don’t want others getting through? Space walls like in Last Starfighter. Legal walls like the Prime Directive in Star Trek (and its many derivatives) that protect them from us. The disease barrier that saves Earth from the Martians in War of the Worlds. Or for that matter the hull of your spaceship that keeps the air here and the vacuum out there.
Lovecraft people seem to think that going through these barriers is a good idea, but I suppose you might argue that they are wrong about that, at least in a practical sense, if not in a making a good story sense.

@MisterMr

Who is the villain in Snow White?

In Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World the town at the end of the word is surrounded by a wall. (maybe without doors if I recall correctly).

Pyramus and Thisbe and their Wall, and what it did for the rude mechanicals.

I like the walls (usually hedges, sometimes walls) and doors (or occasionally mirrors or noises) in Dean’s _The Hidden Country_ &seq.

Cherryh’s _Wave Without a Shore_ walls up some doors of perception. So does _Lud-in-the-Mist_, but in neither case are the walls literal.

Also the Inhumans and the force barrier over their city. Forcefield domes are a dime a dozen in the comics, but this one had real dramatic heft. Created by a madman, only he knew how it worked. Reed couldn’t unlock it, Johnny couldn’t get around it. Could the Inhumans be trapped inside forever? The tension went on for months. It took Black Bolt at full volume to break it down, and that just about levelled the city.

Surprised that no one has mentioned The Door in the Wall by HG Wells. It’s a template for a certain kind of wall story.

Thanks to Lawrence at 61 for mentioning Arena. I read SF obsessively in my youth but now I frequently forget the title and author. That story is one that really stuck in my mind. I have a vague recollection that it was an episode of The Outer Limits or something like that, but it may be just my recollection of my own visualization of it.

Another story I remember vividly was about this place where time moved more slowly the further north you went. Way up north they were fighting a war with the people who lived the other side of the zero point. It was a war consisting only of projectile weapons since people couldn’t cross the barrier. Up near the battle front a couple of days would be equivalent to 20 years down in the south. Does anyone recognize this?

Another example is Gormenghast. Mervyn Peake spent a fair bit of his childhood in China and would have been familiar with walled cities such as Tianjin, where he lived, and Beijing.

The concept of the dome appears in The Midwich Cuckoos, where the world is outside of the dome, and It’s a Good Life, which is inside the dome.

The idea of doors also appears in Howl’s Moving Castle. (I’ve only seen the movie.) If I couldn’t have a Tardis, I’d like to have a house where every door opens to a different place.

In my childhood I was a fan of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels about Roman Britain, which frequently mentioned Hadrian’s Wall. Not fantasy/SF, I suppose. My wife has similar tastes and we went to Hadrian’s Wall on our honeymoon. Great place to visit. Along with the Great Wall in China it’s a real-world example of the wall concept at its utmost.

There’s another related concept where there’s a place you can peek through to see the other world. I don’t know that this has been used that much in literature. In Gleann Cholm Cille, Co. Donegal, there’s a standing stone with a hole in it. There’s a tradition that certain people could look through the hole and see … Paradise? Faerie? I’m not one of those people, because when I looked through it I just saw what was on the other side.

Again on Propp :

First, Perrault and others started a fashion of writing down and editing popular stories, publishing them as stories for entertainment and therefore rewriting them in good style (I think the first of those collections was from Naples, the “cunto de li cunti” “tale of tales”, there was a movie based on it a pair of years ago, gorey but cool).

Then, with romanticism, intellectuals become fascinated with ancient mysterious tales, and went on a spree recording them (the Grimm brothers), but still published them heavily edited and embellished. This is more or less contemporary with Frazer and the idea that there was an “original mith”.

Later on, after the soviet revolution, Afanasev went to interview all the peasant Russian grannies he could, with the purpose of recording Russian popular culture, but he didn’t edit the tales that therefore are often boring, stupid, illogical or apparently incomplete.

Propp worked on Afanasev ‘s collection, and was critical of previous authors because he believed that, with the editing, they mixed unconsciously their “burgoise” way of thinking in the tales they were supposed to record, thus making a mess. Propp also used a few recordings of Native American tales in his second book.

Thus he came with his comparative table and the famous structure, and later in his second book to an analysis of the “motifs” of fairy tales, that he mostly connected to magic rituals of Hunter gatherers. He was also critical of western theorists who worked on motifs because he thought they had an ahistorical conception, cause they were burgoises.

Later, French structuralists went in search of an abstract structure to which all stories could be referred, at least at a very abstract level, they stumbled on the soviet theorist and used his structure as a base from which they got their much more abstract one. Since there was the cold war, they didn’t read Propp’s subsequent work until much later, when Propp read their work and was quite displeased with Levy Strauss (this is what I was told during my semiotics course at university).

Finally, a crew of creative writing guys got hold of both theories and used them as “how to” manual, although neither Propp’s structure nor Greimas ‘s one are supposed to be recipes for good stories.

On this comes Tolkien’ s criticism, that these structuralists are taking the cool fairy out of the fairy tales, that is based on a complete misunderstanding of what these people were doing (or, to say it with Propp, on the fact that Tolkien was a burgoise thinker, lol).

In M John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, thete’s a sort-of wall where the laws of physics cease to be good-enough approximations. (In a universe where different civilisations have arrived at different formulations of physics). It’s possibly a one-way wall: it’s referered to in a way that alludes to the event horizon in general relativity.

@MisterMr

Which edition of the “morphology of the fairy tale” also contains the (much longer) second book?

J.F. McCullers, @29

I wonder if the magnificence of the walls of the New Jerusalem are not emphasized as a counter to Babylon, whose destruction also gets a whole chapter, 18. It is true that Babylon’s walls are not mentioned, but, as I reviewed briefly @49, Babylon’s walls were famously impregnable, in both the Greek and Judaic traditions. It’s sort of what Babylon is known for.

There are all sorts of other parallels drawn between Babylon and the New Jerusalem, which fits into the overall theme of the book, which is to rather obsessively and in detail parallel the putative forces of Good and those of Evil. This characteristic has made the book a great resource for confessional polemicists down through the ages, as it facilitates branding the opposing confession as the Anti-Christ, no matter how close to your own brand of Christianity its beliefs and practices might be.

The Gatefather novels by Orson Scott Card start out pretty interesting, if you can bring yourself to read Card. Unfortunately they degenerate eventually into a theological screed.

Somebody mentioned Door into Summer: add Tunnel in the Sky and The Unpleasant Profession of Johnathan Hoag for more from Heinlein. Also By His Bootstraps, and there might be others I’m not thinking of.

Not exactly recent, I know, but Campanella’s The City of the Sun has some interesting walls — seven concentric circles, painted with encyclopedic murals illustrating all of knowledge. Children learn by wandering around, looking at the walls. Its a fortress, but also a giant book.

@Lee A. Arnold

following my previous comment, french wikipedia gives me this title (both in russian and in french), in case you are interested:

Les Racines historiques du conte merveilleux (Исторические корни волшебных сказок), Leningrad 1946

although the french edition seems old and quite expensive (68€ on amazon), contrary to the cheaper and more recent italian edition.

@Mister Mr

Perhaps you can tell me where Propp allows the good/evil polarity to be reversed for the donor. In his 31 plot functions, the donor is good, not evil (although the donor might be deceived).

Propp also writes that his third basic thesis is that the sequence of functions is always identical. But Propp’s donor does not start the story, like the evil queen in Snow White. The donor is a new character who enters in step 11: The hero leaves home, and the donor provides some agent usually magical which “permits the eventual liquidation of misfortune”. I.e. the magical agent is good too, not poison.

I can find chapters of the second book where Propp writes that the elements of his structure may be transformed or substituted, but this pertains to a discussion of retellings and derived forms of the same story. If instead it applies to the choice of good/evil polarities in his basic structure to begin with, then we could construe other interpretations of Snow White.

We could argue that the evil queen is the Hero, her talking mirror is the magical agent, Snow White is the Villain, the poisoned apple is simply a weapon (it isn’t magical) — and we are watching an evil protagonist’s tragedy, a bit like Richard III. And we aren’t told whether the mirror was given to the queen by a Donor. So that’s a good story for someone yet to write. Maybe Cocteau already did: “Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes.” (Orpheus) — Doors!

There´s the terminator, the dawn-sunset line between the permanent day and night sides of the tidally-locked planet of Roger Zelazny´s “Jack of Shadows,” in which your car will begin to miss, backfire and finally quit altogether if you try to drive from the sunlight into darkness, and your magic spells will grow weaker and finally fail if you are traveling in the opposite direction. If it hasn´t been done already, there is a Ph.D. awaiting whoever convincingly examines boundaries in Zelazny´s work, for example the endless road with its periodic exits, each accessing a different time and place in “Roadmarks,” the gates in “Madwand” and “A Night in the Lonesome October,” and the extradimensional world of his “Amber” potboilers, which is reached through “shadows” (which I seem to recall can include mists, a house of mirrors, a maze, or a bus ride). “Eye of Cat,” as much as it is about anything, is about traversing the psychological distance between modern Native American and Anglo societies.

@Lee A. Arnold

In the “morphology”, chapter 6, ripartition of functions by characters, Propp says that it is possible that the same character has functions of more spheres. He gives this example (I’m translating from italian) :
“In the witch who kidnaps the boy and puts him in the oven, but then is robbed by him (the boy steals her magic handkerchief) there is a coincidence of the function of the villain and the donor (involuntary, hostile) ”
That is the same of Snowwhite (I amend what I wrote before : when the witch is punished at the end of the story she is effectively in the role of the villain).

In the” historical roots”, chapter 4, the big house (that I previously translated as longhouse), Propp specifically speaks of the case of girls who lived for a while in male confraternity houses in historic customs linked to Hunter gatherer initiation institutions, in particular chapter 4, part 10, “the beauty in the coffin”, speaks of girls in Cristal coffins, as is the case of S. The girl lives in the confraternity house for a while but, when she exits and gets married (often because of pregnancy) she has to undergo a temporary death initiation because for normal women the confraternity house is forbidden (with death penalty). This initiation is made with needles, poisoned fruit, or death dresses of sorts.

The “historical roots” is about the history of fairy tale motifs, so we are speaking of retellings of the same story in some sense, but not in the sense of parallel versions but of historical evolution.

I’m lucky that our discussion prompted me to reread the book yesterday and I got to that chapter!

My other half and I were struck by “hedge funds” and “hedge witches” while reading different books over breakfast, and so read the OED entry for hedge*. Lots of uses! Lots of metaphors! Hedges were a good thing to think with.

This is also an excuse to recommend The Great Hedge of India, even though it isn’t fantasy.

Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway, and the rest of the Wayward Children series. Don’t be fooled by the tweeness of the title, these are anything but.

clew : In Ireland there were “hedge schools” and “hedge scholars”. Because education was forbidden to Catholics, these schools had to take place outdoors.

Look at Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland (1924). The hedge schools taught mostly classical learning, so you might find people dressed in rags and living in hovels but reading ancient Greek and Roman authors. I guess you could find similar situations in other places like India or Vietnam but it is interesting.

Someone above mentioned the strugatsky brothers, but didn’t mention the fascinating novel The Doomed City, with at least six or seven barriers striating space and time and ideology and government.
The television show counterpart just finished off an excellent first season with a constant engagement with the images of walls and borders and how they are sustained or undermined by the passage through them.

A few enjoyable possibles:

City and the Stars – Arthur C Clarke
Way Station – Clifford Simak
The Watchtowers – JG Ballard (short story)
Europe in Autumn – Dave Hutchinson

The Lost Room (TV Series – with oodles of doors/walls!)

I’m glad someone mentioned, up-comments, the marvellous “Tract Trilogy” by M John Harrison.

And. Big thanks for these OPs and comments. I’m strolling up, in short order, to my seventies. For as long as I could make sense of stuff, SF, in the form of comics, radio, picture books (as a kid) and even more in adulthood, has given me a lifetime of real pleasure and delight. And. Yay! It’s still there, with new and interesting discoveries, even after taking, sometimes lengthy, breaks!

I’d vote for Pohl’s . The walls start out physical – a strange metallic basement that wasn’t there the day before? – but by the story’s end have become more abstract and more daunting.

Remembrance of Earth’s Past: The Three Body Trilogy. By Cixin Liu seems to be a great example. Walls everywhere and on many levels – physical, cultural, and psychological. It is a very odd set of books and requires some serious suspension of disbelief- but in the is quite memorable and thought provoking.

I’m really surprised that SPIN by Robert Wilson hasn’t been mentioned yet. A barrier around the Earth where time in the rest of the universe is moving 100 million times slower.

Fantasy rather than SF the Veil from Dragon age RPG. Separating the Fade containing demons, magic, the gods, memories of ancient times and ruins of ancient civilisations from the normal world.

Another nice and neat one by Ted Chiang: Exhalation.

A scientist from a race of mechanical beings describes how he comes to discover the inevitability of his people’s demise and his own mortality. The world is contained by an impenetrable chromium wall – no doors, and no knowledge of what lies beyond.

David Mitchell, Slade House. Lots of walls which flicker in and out of existence. As seen originally on Twitter.

(apologies if has been mentioned earlier, did a quick ctrl-F for ‘Mitchell’ and didn’t find anything).