Maybe people naming works could include a sentence saying what is weirdtopian about them? Priors for any given thing being worth reading are low.
Borges's short story "The Lottery of Babylon" (full text here) is a weirdtopia par excellence. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (full text here) can be read as involving a weirdtopia in the domains of causality and the ontology of objects.
(I extremely highly recommend both of these, if you've never read Borges, and also the rest of the stories in The Garden of Forking Paths and to a lesser extent his other collections of stories from the 1940s. A nice one-volume translation by Andrew Hurley of Borges's complete fiction was put out by Penguin a few years ago.)
Geoff Ryman's Air is about a near-future handwavium Internet that is transmitted directly into peoples' brains. But the novel takes place in rural central Asia, where tractors and televisions are considered high tech, so the people aren't exactly on the same page with the Air net being beamed to their heads. Things don't go as expected, but neither does the thing devolve into a lazy dystopia at any point.
"No Direction Home" by Norman Spinrad-- there's very precise knowledge about psychoactive drugs, and people are high on calibrated doses of one thing or another all the time, starting in early childhood.
More Spinrad: Child of Fortune-- this might be a utopia, but it's a fairly loose one. Everyone spends a year wandering around selling bad jewelry to adults who remember their own wanderjahr while having adventures and finding out what they want to do.
incomplete at google books
publicly linking to google books tends to cause things to become incomplete.
publicly linking to google books tends to cause things to become incomplete.
Thanks. Do you have a source for that?
No, I just see it happening. For example, Steve Sailer linked a page in google books yesterday, and the page is not available to me. I doubt that there's anything special about links; it might be about the number of times people who read the page. The second page of your link into google books is not available to me. I imagine it was available five months ago when I made my comment.
R.A. Lafferty's Slow Tuesday Night is a weirdtopia, and so is his Primary Education of the Camiroi. Unfortunately, his "Polity and Custom among the Camiroi" is incomplete at google books, but I recommend getting a paper copy of Nine Hundred Grandmothers-- the collection has some of his best work.
I believe http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/polity-and-custom-of-the-camiroi.txt to be a complete copy.
(And kudos for the Lafferty mentions; he's my favorite obscure author.)
Jeff Noon's stuff might qualify, though I've only read Automated Alice, which sticks more to weird fancy than speculating on the actual reality. Should read Vurt and Pollen.
The Third Policeman is a bit more on the "your favorite surreal novel here" side than something that'd make sense as an actual future, though on retrospect it does kind of look like what getting forcibly uploaded by Clippy's sibling with a thing for bicycles might be like.
I've just finished rereading Galapagos, and I'm not sure I can agree with that.
On the other hand, anything written by Kilgore Trout... (Venus on the Half Shell being an interesting "example".)
I don't think Snow Crash is an intentional weirdtopia, although it plays up some of the weirder consequences of its future for the sake of comedy or perhaps satire. (Douglas Adams does the same thing in places, although with a much more clearly comedic focus.)
Anathem is definitely a weirdtopia, though (it even shares a lot of elements with the scientific weirdtopia Eliezer presented in "Building Weirdtopia"), and The Diamond Age is getting there.
There's "Day Million" and The Age of the Pussyfoot, both by Frederik Pohl, and even they might be more like utopias rather than adequately weird.
"Day Million" is a very short story, with a narration which puts emphasis on how much people like living in that world even though it would make little sense to a contemporary reader. Unfortunately, the most vivid detail is a spoiler. N pbhcyr (obgu bs jubz jbhyq frrz bqq, gubhtu bar'f pyrneyl znyr naq gur bgure'f pyrneyl srznyr ner nggenpgrq gb rnpu bgure-- gurl unir n tbbq gvzr bapr, naq gura qb jung'f abezny va gung phygher-- rkpunatr vqragvgl gncrf
Silverberg's The World Inside might count.
It a description of how people might be pretty happy living in a maximum population world.
R.A. Lafferty's Slow Tuesday Night is a weirdtopia, and so is his Primary Education of the Camiroi. Unfortunately, his "Polity and Custom among the Camiroi" is incomplete at google books, but I recommend getting a paper copy of Nine Hundred Grandmothers-- the collection has some of his best work.
gwern supplied the link for Polity and Custom:
No assembly on Camiroi for purposes of entertainment may exceed thirty-nine persons. No more than this number may witness any spectacle or drama, or hear a musical presentation, or watch a sporting event. This is to prevent the citizens from becoming mere spectators rather than originators or partakers. Similarly, no writing -- other than certain rare official promulgations -- may be issued in more than thirty-nine copies in one month. This, it seems to us, is a conservative ruling to prevent popular enthusiasms. A father of a family who twice in five years appeals to specialists for such things as simple surgery for members of his household, or legal or financial or medical advice, or any such things as he himself should be capable of doing, shall lose his citizenship. It seems to us that this ruling obstructs the Camiroi from the full fruits of progress and research.
"Slow Tuesday Night" is a whimsy about people who've had a mental stutter removed-- they live so fast that they can have three careers in eight hours. "Primary Education Among the Camiroi" is about a culture which develops maximum intelligence and self-reliance, at the cost of a few of the children being killed. It teaches slow reading (reading slowly enough that everything is remembered), and the world government course consists of governing a world (not a first aspect world) for three or four months.
"Winthrop Was Stubborn" by William Tenn-- a group of time travelers are trapped in the future because one of them doesn't want to go home. I only remember a little of it-- I think there was artificial living/moving food-- but the point of the story was to portray a society which was weird for a modern reader and delightful for its inhabitants.
Any other nominations?