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Morning! I have a question for the gang: what books feature an alien or nonhuman as the Point of View "hero" for the bulk of the piece? I can conjure a bazillion short stories that do this, and a few books with a "50-50" sort of arrangement, but am coming up pretty empty where the entire novel pretty much stays in the alien head.

Any suggestions?

How about the whole Robots and Foundations series from Asimov. The hero is an android, R. Daneel Olivaw. The series includes Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, Robots in the Dawn, and others.

I'm assuming you're excluding the semi-human, such as the hobbits, elves, goblins, etc. of sword and sorcery and the vampires, werewolves, zombies of urban fantasy?

I think you're right there are a lot more short stories that deal with truly alien critters, probably because the PoV is so hard to maintain for long time and isn't likely to provoke sustained attachment in the reader.

Daneel is never a POV character, though.

What about a "human" alien?

Valentine Michael Smith from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

Born on Mars and raised by Martians, he travels to an alien world ... Earth!

Don't know about aliens, I can think plenty of titles in the "magical animals" subgenre. Redwall comes to mind.

Lindsay wrote: "Don't know about aliens, I can think plenty of titles in the "magical animals" subgenre. Redwall comes to mind."

Oh, yeah. And Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and other such.

Plus Watership Down. Rabbits! (This one is actually for adults; or 60s college students, at least.)

A couple of alien PoVs I thought of by meditating in front of my bookshelf awhile:

Clement's Mission of Gravity is from the PoV of creatures living on the surface of a neutron star who have made contact with a human exploration ship. Really excellent book with a lot of hard scfi on living under extreme gravity.

Part of Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is from the PoV of the distributed intelligence alien race called tines. About half the book, if I remember correctly, belongs to the tines. Excellent, unusual alien; good read, too.

Alan Dean Foster's Midworld is a story of a arboreal alien in a forest planet.

CJ Cherryh's Chanur centers on the leonid Chanur aliens (they even meet a human; the hairless ape is nothing but trouble.)

Also, about half of David Weber's honorverse YA A Beautiful Friendship is from the PoV of a treecat.

The Saga graphic novels don't include any human characters, only aliens.

Robots PoVs:

Stross's Saturn's Children is from the PoV of a humanoid robot set after humanity has died out from the solar system.

vN features a "von Neumann machine self-repairing humanoid robot"

Thanks! Some of those provoked a "d'oh" in my memory. Other titles I'm not so familiar with. I'll have to search them out.

I now recall "Their Majestys' Bucketeers" by L. Neil Smith. Not a success, in my opinion, but fully involved with nothing but aliens (technically)

On the fantasy side, Martha Wells' Raksura books (i.e., The Cloud Roads) often come up in discussions of books with nonhuman protagonists; I haven't yet read any Wells.

I was sure somebody would mention The Left Hand of Darkness but nobody did, so here it is.

I think all stories are told from a human point of view. Alien protagonists concentrate human behavior to question a specific aspect of humanity. Using an alien as a conduit is a good way of telling a very human story in a more honest way. The writer can hold up the mirror and leave some of the political correct stuff behind. It is one of the advantages of Sci/Fi and Fantasy.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer pretty much does this, although it's from the point of view of an alien inhabiting a human body which she kind of ends up co-habiting with the human who owned the body. It's an interesting take on what an alien might think of becoming a human.

"Ancillary Justice" by Anne Leckie, followed by "Ancillary Sword." Decidedly non-human protagonist that frequently operates with a shared consciousness. They're good books too!

There's also "Mirror Empire" by Kameron Hurley. While humanoid, these peoples make use of more than the standard polarity of gender - there are frequently 3 or even 5 genders - so that may fall outside the scope of "human."

I saw "Watership Down" mentioned above. If that fits the criteria than I suppose this odd little book would as well: Mort e

The Vang: The Military Form has a lot of the story told from the alien POV, which is very inhuman indeed. A great book of alien invasion too.

Just wanted to add to the discussion the fact that this type of fiction is called I think "Xenofiction" (xeno in greek means foreign, as in alien).