io9 has two posts on ultra-weird sci-fi, which is just my kind of thing. Why? Well, first, it’s not boring, and second, weird sci-fi is where you find authors discovering new means of expression, which makes the reading the book a more powerful, or at least trippy experience. Below are my 10 choices for best ultra-weird sci-fi, and I’m always looking for new book recommendations, so what are your picks?
In no particular order:
1. Blueprints of the Afterlife, Ryan Boudinot:By the end of this book, you still won’t know what’s going on, but it’s a time-beinding, post-apocalyptic trip. Boudinot’s world is Philip Dick meets Snow Crash meets The Simpsons. Some time after a catastrophic, corporate-sponsored civil war, Manhattan is now being recreated in the Pacific Northwest, down to the last detail. Just who is doing this recreating isn’t clear, nor is it clear why or how a pre-war architect was able to draw up the blueprints out of the, uh, blue. That the narrative is non-linear is putting it mildly, and the book has an appropriately weird cast including a world-champion dishwasher, government-sponsored, genetically engineered humans who are farmed for tissues, a celebrity whose legal name is Neeman Fucking Jordan, and of course, a Last Dude.
2. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon: Maybe you consider this tangential sci-fi. It was a Nebula Award finalist, contains some of the most remarkable prose written in the 20th century, and it can out-weird just about any other book on this list…
3. … with perhaps the exception of Cities of the Red Night, William Burroughs. I thought this was even more non-linear than Naked Lunch. It’s a Burroughs version of the post-apocalyptic story, with pirates, revolutionaries, a genetically engineered, sexually transmitted plague, and lots and lots of sexual variation. The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express are two Burroughs works that are frequently cited as sci-fi greats, but I’ve haven’t read them yet.
4 Dhalgren, Samuel Delany: another weird book in a post-apocalyptish world, a twilight city that seems to be coming apart, whose social order is up for grabs. In this new social order, anything can happen, in bed or out. I had a hard time figuring out what was going on, and I can’t really remember much of the plot on this one, but Delany’s writing was compelling enough to keep me going through this monster of a book. I’m sure there is a bunch of mythological symbolism that I missed.
5 Image of the Beast and Blown, by Philip José Farmer. If you have a dirty mind, then you know exactly what ‘blown’ means here. It’s a not quite successful book that starts out with S&M vampires and werewolves and turns into a story about stranded aliens who have figured out how to harness the energy of orgies to travel through the universe. It’s Philip José Farmer – ’nuff said.
6 Deus Irae, by Philip Dick and Roger Zelazny: This one takes the classic Southwestern US post-apocalyptic quest story, and gives it a Philip Dick twist. It features, in typical Dick style, a cyborg phocomelus, who slowly works his way across a ruined desert landscape, encountering various mutants on his way to find the weapons scientist who was ultimately responsible for the war. There isn’t much of a plot – as they say, the journey is the destination. Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon features a similar weird post-apocalyptic story.
7)… I’m actually out of ideas for weird sci-fi books that don’t suck. There is plenty of vintage sci-fi featuring weird plots, but those books are usually developed in a fairly conventional way, and thus fails to qualify as ultra-weird by io9’s standards. Let me hear your suggestions!
The Finch and Pea 
Some of the latter-day Van Vogt novels can get weird. In fact, some are outright “bonkers”. I would recommend: “The Battle Of Forever”, “The Anarchistic Colossus” and “The Silkie”.
Thanks for the recommendations! I’m on the lookout for some Van Vogt I might like. I hated The Weapons Makers, but, given his big reputation among authors I like, I want to give Van Vogt another try.