Choosing to narrate a story from a viewpoint other than human can shake us up and get us to question and challenge the way things are in our own world. In my youg adult novel Geneship I have a race of intelligent big cats with language, culture, and history. They are clearly as intelligent as the human research team, yet their young have been exploited by humans in inhumane ways. in that book one of the viewpoints is that of an alien leader, who gets to comment on human society.
In my Panthera books I returned to one of my favourite themes, artificial intelligence. I combined it with my favourite animals, big cats, and have a sentient AI in cat form. Pan is great for observing human culture. He notes that we put our best security where we have our stuff, and he wonders why we amass so much stuff when we all die and leave it behind.
In my short story The Scent of Other Lives (in my short story collection Otherlives) the trees are sentient planimals that can move their branches and communicate In a simple way with the humans who come to their world. They save my human hero from a flood by flexing their branches and lifting his skimmer up into its branches until the waters recede.
In my novel Snowbird I created Sponges. They are organic pebble-like structures living on the surface of a dusty Mars-like planet. They are a group-mind, linked together by threads. And they've been there for many years. But now humans have come along and want to terraform their world.
The increasingly intelligent AIs we are creating might end up doing more than just maintaining our tech, they might end up running it, deciding what content goes on there and what doesn't. Perhaps it will be AIs who eradicate pornography from the internet, guardian AIs who hunt it down and delete it.
Other eyes can be organic or manufactured. They can be the eyes of animals or a house, or even the "eyes" of a black cloud. Switching viewpoints away from humans can be a powerful device for challenging and examining our culture.
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