| Giles of the Goats A Look Back at the Weirdest 1960s Novel of Them All by Ted Gioia |
| conceptual fiction Exploring the Non-Realist Tradition in Fiction |
What exactly is Giles Goat-Boy?
The book's author, John Barth, later called it
"the first American postmodern novel." Others
have read it as allegory or science fiction or
magical realism or Cold War satire. Life
magazine, labelled Giles Goat-Boy "a black
comedy to offend everyone." On the other
hand, a tech savvy reader of the present day,
noting the prominent role computers play in
its plot, might laud it as the first novel of
the digital era or even a Univac-era prototype
for cyberpunk.
I'm not surprised that the critics came to logger-
heads over the merits of this book. Eliot
Fremont-Smith, writing in the New York Times,
suggested that Barth had delivered an elaborate
"shaggy-goat story,” but also wondered whether
it might not be “the great American novel, come
at last into being.” On the other extreme, Gore Vidal
attacked it as a “very bad prose work,” and Berkeley prof Robert
Alter dismissed Barth’s novel as a “failed experiment.”
Me? If forced to come up with a tweet-sized summary, I'd describe
Giles Goat-Boy as a cross between Tarzan of the Apes and the
Holy Bible. Barth’s novel is almost as long as the King James
Version, and follows roughly the same plot line. Clocking it at 710
pages of tiny font print, plus another 33 pages of postmodern
text-before-the-text, Barth's book is sufficiently longwinded for
Gideon's Goat-Boy status at the deconstructionists' Days Inn.
And few novels have incorporated more theology (or perhaps
parodies of theology) into a prophetic narrative. This is as close
to scriptural resonance as meta-fiction gets...but with a heavy
sprinkling of Burroughs (both Edgar Rice and the Unysis predecessor
corporation).
Yet Barth impart a peculiar twist to his evangelical tract (which carries
the daunting but suitably rapturous subtitle: The Revised New Syllabus
of George Giles our Grand Tutor). All the theology—and everything
else in this novel—gets turned into campus politics. The universe, in
Giles Goat-Boy, is a university, and the different regimes are
competing colleges, with a a Cold War (or 'quiet riot') persisting
between West Campus and East Campus. God is the college
'Founder' and all students aspire to pass on Judgment Day, or as it
is known in these pages, ‘Final Commencement’. Failure is equivalent
to eternal damnation.
Here’s a taste of Barth’s reduction of religion to a college honor code:
Our Founder, Who art omniscient,
Commencéd be thy name;
Thy college come; Thy assignments done
On campus as beyond the gate.
Give us this term Thy termly word.
And excuse our cribbing.
As we excuse classmates who crib from us…..
And here is a blues lyric, as conceived by Barth for
his world-as-university:
I had a C, but now my grade’s gone down;
I hate to see the av’rage grade go down.
Gonna flunk, baby; never wear no cap and gown.
A university of this sort needs a prophet and savior
(or 'Grand Tutor' in the parlance of the book), and
Barth gives us a protagonist who aims to fill precisely
that exalted role. He goes by many names: Billy
Bockfuss or George or 'The GILES' or the Goat-Boy, or simply 'The
Goat'. Our hero, like Romulus and Remus and tree-swinging ape-men,
was raised among the animals. In George’s case, he grew up with a
herd of goats, and only realizes at the brink of adulthood that he is
actually a human.
George decides that he is the Grand Tutor the university has long
been awaiting, and tackles a serious of challenges and tasks in
hopes of proving his credentials. In particular, he needs to fulfill
the assignments given him by WESCAC, the all-powerful computer
running the West Campus and managing the deadly defense
technology that deters its East Campus rival (EASCAC) but also
threatens to end all studentdom as we know it. Adding to the plot's
complexity and general weirdness, the computer may be George's
progenitor, and the young goatboy the abandoned result of
WESCAC’s ambitious eugenics program.
Barth works hard to sustain these farcical concepts for more than 700
pages, and his sheer inventiveness and risk-taking in the pursuit of
the absurd is breathtaking. I especially admire his ability to extract
satirical commentaries on a wide range of subjects—political,
philosophical and sociological—from his cardboard characters
and corny plotlines. Every turn in the plot can be interpreted in multiple
ways, and I lost count of the number of myths and venerated literary
works echoed in these pages. You could read this novel as a kind of New
Testament, as I suggested above, or as a modernized Book of Job or
postmodernized Don Quixote, or a reworking of the Hercules myth or
the Odyssey. (Take note, for example, of the number of times the story
of Ulysses and Cyclops is echoed in these pages.)
Despite the author’s unflagging creative (and polemical) zeal, many
readers will bail out before the final "Footnote to the Postscript to
the Posttape," exasperated by the long-winded narrative and the
repetitions in the plotline. I realize that a retelling of the Gospel
requires a quasi-crucifixion and for our Goat-Boy to confront
WESCAC who, like Darth Vader, may be the hero’s unlikely
chrome-and-plastic daddy. But after Barth achieves these ends,
and brilliantly in my opinion, a little after 500 pages into the book,
he repeats the formula two more times—again a comparison with
Star Wars comes to mind—with return encounters with WESCAC
and the resulting turmoil. The final 200 pages of the novel drag
along with little momentum, a joke that was never quite funny now
turning sour.
Is unrelenting cleverness sufficient to make a novel into a masterpiece?
If so, Giles Goat-Boy is a classic. Even if some of the interludes do
little or nothing to move ahead the story—for example, a long parody
of a Greek tragedy presented in full over the course of fifty pages—they
are so smartly conceived that they could stand on their own as set
pieces. Another example: Barth offers his campus equivalent of
Dante's Inferno, describing the different levels of the college 'main
detention' where university offenders receive appropriate punishments
for their crimes. Among the damned we encounter "students who
refused to choose a major," "those who abused their dining-hall
privileges," "professors who turned their sabbatical leaves into
honeymoons or participated in faculty wife-swapping parties,"
"textbook writers who published revised editions to undercut the
used-book market," "proliferators of unnecessary footnotes," and
"teachers employed in the same departments from which they hold
degrees," among other miscreants. Yes, Barth has them on his list,
and they'll none of them be missed. In such sardonic passages we
learn that our author not only knows how to use university life to satirize
the real world, but also can rely on the real world to satirize university
life.
And I enjoyed a few of the minor characters, even if they are hardly
more plausible than comic book villains and get endlessly manipulated
as stand-ins for concepts. Harold Bray, a competing prophet who
possesses a chameleon-like ability to change his appearance and
abilities, is the most fascinating of the bunch, and the one least
easy to interpret. (I'm not surprised that Barth brought him back in
a later book.) But I also took some delight in the devilish Stoker, who
runs the campus powerhouse and main detention when he isn't
cruising with his motorcycle gang, and Lady Creamhair, the
Goat-Boy's mother, who becomes less coherent but more amusing
as the story unfolds.
Let me call it straight. If you are seeking sheer, unadulterated
weirdness, you won't find a stronger candidate from that long,
strange trip of the 1960s. By comparison, Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow is a realistic war novel and Ken Kesey a candidate to
drive the local elementary school bus. So let's give two cheers—
maybe even one cheer more—for the Goat-Boy's esprit de corps.
He's a true postmodern hero with all the equivocal associations
implied by that label. Yes, this could have been a better novel if it
weren't quite so bloated. Then again, if John Barth were the kind
of author to show restraint, he probably wouldn't have pursued
such a crazy and extravagant project in the first place.
Ted Gioia writes on books, music and popular culture. His next book,
Love Songs: The Hidden History, will be published by Oxford University Press.
This essay was published on May 29, 2014
The book's author, John Barth, later called it
"the first American postmodern novel." Others
have read it as allegory or science fiction or
magical realism or Cold War satire. Life
magazine, labelled Giles Goat-Boy "a black
comedy to offend everyone." On the other
hand, a tech savvy reader of the present day,
noting the prominent role computers play in
its plot, might laud it as the first novel of
the digital era or even a Univac-era prototype
for cyberpunk.
I'm not surprised that the critics came to logger-
heads over the merits of this book. Eliot
Fremont-Smith, writing in the New York Times,
suggested that Barth had delivered an elaborate
"shaggy-goat story,” but also wondered whether
it might not be “the great American novel, come
at last into being.” On the other extreme, Gore Vidal
attacked it as a “very bad prose work,” and Berkeley prof Robert
Alter dismissed Barth’s novel as a “failed experiment.”
Me? If forced to come up with a tweet-sized summary, I'd describe
Giles Goat-Boy as a cross between Tarzan of the Apes and the
Holy Bible. Barth’s novel is almost as long as the King James
Version, and follows roughly the same plot line. Clocking it at 710
pages of tiny font print, plus another 33 pages of postmodern
text-before-the-text, Barth's book is sufficiently longwinded for
Gideon's Goat-Boy status at the deconstructionists' Days Inn.
And few novels have incorporated more theology (or perhaps
parodies of theology) into a prophetic narrative. This is as close
to scriptural resonance as meta-fiction gets...but with a heavy
sprinkling of Burroughs (both Edgar Rice and the Unysis predecessor
corporation).
Yet Barth impart a peculiar twist to his evangelical tract (which carries
the daunting but suitably rapturous subtitle: The Revised New Syllabus
of George Giles our Grand Tutor). All the theology—and everything
else in this novel—gets turned into campus politics. The universe, in
Giles Goat-Boy, is a university, and the different regimes are
competing colleges, with a a Cold War (or 'quiet riot') persisting
between West Campus and East Campus. God is the college
'Founder' and all students aspire to pass on Judgment Day, or as it
is known in these pages, ‘Final Commencement’. Failure is equivalent
to eternal damnation.
Here’s a taste of Barth’s reduction of religion to a college honor code:
Our Founder, Who art omniscient,
Commencéd be thy name;
Thy college come; Thy assignments done
On campus as beyond the gate.
Give us this term Thy termly word.
And excuse our cribbing.
As we excuse classmates who crib from us…..
And here is a blues lyric, as conceived by Barth for
his world-as-university:
I had a C, but now my grade’s gone down;
I hate to see the av’rage grade go down.
Gonna flunk, baby; never wear no cap and gown.
A university of this sort needs a prophet and savior
(or 'Grand Tutor' in the parlance of the book), and
Barth gives us a protagonist who aims to fill precisely
that exalted role. He goes by many names: Billy
Bockfuss or George or 'The GILES' or the Goat-Boy, or simply 'The
Goat'. Our hero, like Romulus and Remus and tree-swinging ape-men,
was raised among the animals. In George’s case, he grew up with a
herd of goats, and only realizes at the brink of adulthood that he is
actually a human.
George decides that he is the Grand Tutor the university has long
been awaiting, and tackles a serious of challenges and tasks in
hopes of proving his credentials. In particular, he needs to fulfill
the assignments given him by WESCAC, the all-powerful computer
running the West Campus and managing the deadly defense
technology that deters its East Campus rival (EASCAC) but also
threatens to end all studentdom as we know it. Adding to the plot's
complexity and general weirdness, the computer may be George's
progenitor, and the young goatboy the abandoned result of
WESCAC’s ambitious eugenics program.
Barth works hard to sustain these farcical concepts for more than 700
pages, and his sheer inventiveness and risk-taking in the pursuit of
the absurd is breathtaking. I especially admire his ability to extract
satirical commentaries on a wide range of subjects—political,
philosophical and sociological—from his cardboard characters
and corny plotlines. Every turn in the plot can be interpreted in multiple
ways, and I lost count of the number of myths and venerated literary
works echoed in these pages. You could read this novel as a kind of New
Testament, as I suggested above, or as a modernized Book of Job or
postmodernized Don Quixote, or a reworking of the Hercules myth or
the Odyssey. (Take note, for example, of the number of times the story
of Ulysses and Cyclops is echoed in these pages.)
Despite the author’s unflagging creative (and polemical) zeal, many
readers will bail out before the final "Footnote to the Postscript to
the Posttape," exasperated by the long-winded narrative and the
repetitions in the plotline. I realize that a retelling of the Gospel
requires a quasi-crucifixion and for our Goat-Boy to confront
WESCAC who, like Darth Vader, may be the hero’s unlikely
chrome-and-plastic daddy. But after Barth achieves these ends,
and brilliantly in my opinion, a little after 500 pages into the book,
he repeats the formula two more times—again a comparison with
Star Wars comes to mind—with return encounters with WESCAC
and the resulting turmoil. The final 200 pages of the novel drag
along with little momentum, a joke that was never quite funny now
turning sour.
Is unrelenting cleverness sufficient to make a novel into a masterpiece?
If so, Giles Goat-Boy is a classic. Even if some of the interludes do
little or nothing to move ahead the story—for example, a long parody
of a Greek tragedy presented in full over the course of fifty pages—they
are so smartly conceived that they could stand on their own as set
pieces. Another example: Barth offers his campus equivalent of
Dante's Inferno, describing the different levels of the college 'main
detention' where university offenders receive appropriate punishments
for their crimes. Among the damned we encounter "students who
refused to choose a major," "those who abused their dining-hall
privileges," "professors who turned their sabbatical leaves into
honeymoons or participated in faculty wife-swapping parties,"
"textbook writers who published revised editions to undercut the
used-book market," "proliferators of unnecessary footnotes," and
"teachers employed in the same departments from which they hold
degrees," among other miscreants. Yes, Barth has them on his list,
and they'll none of them be missed. In such sardonic passages we
learn that our author not only knows how to use university life to satirize
the real world, but also can rely on the real world to satirize university
life.
And I enjoyed a few of the minor characters, even if they are hardly
more plausible than comic book villains and get endlessly manipulated
as stand-ins for concepts. Harold Bray, a competing prophet who
possesses a chameleon-like ability to change his appearance and
abilities, is the most fascinating of the bunch, and the one least
easy to interpret. (I'm not surprised that Barth brought him back in
a later book.) But I also took some delight in the devilish Stoker, who
runs the campus powerhouse and main detention when he isn't
cruising with his motorcycle gang, and Lady Creamhair, the
Goat-Boy's mother, who becomes less coherent but more amusing
as the story unfolds.
Let me call it straight. If you are seeking sheer, unadulterated
weirdness, you won't find a stronger candidate from that long,
strange trip of the 1960s. By comparison, Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow is a realistic war novel and Ken Kesey a candidate to
drive the local elementary school bus. So let's give two cheers—
maybe even one cheer more—for the Goat-Boy's esprit de corps.
He's a true postmodern hero with all the equivocal associations
implied by that label. Yes, this could have been a better novel if it
weren't quite so bloated. Then again, if John Barth were the kind
of author to show restraint, he probably wouldn't have pursued
such a crazy and extravagant project in the first place.
Ted Gioia writes on books, music and popular culture. His next book,
Love Songs: The Hidden History, will be published by Oxford University Press.
This essay was published on May 29, 2014
Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/tedgioia
Conceptual Fiction:
A Reading List
(with links to essays on each work)
Home Page
Abbott, Edwin A.
Flatland
Adams, Douglas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits
Amado, Jorge
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
Amis, Martin
Time's Arrow
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
Asimov, Isaac
The Foundation Trilogy
Asimov, Isaac
I, Robot
Atwood, Margaret
The Handmaid's Tale
Banks, Iain M.
The State of the Art
Ballard, J.G.
The Atrocity Exhibition
Ballard, J.G.
Crash
Ballard, J.G.
The Crystal World
Ballard, J.G.
The Drowned World
Barth, John
Giles Goat-Boy
Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man
Borges, Jorge Luis
Ficciones
Bradbury, Ray
Dandelion Wine
Bradbury, Ray
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
The Illustrated Man
Bradbury, Ray
The Martian Chronicles
Bradbury, Ray
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Brockmeier, Kevin
The View from the Seventh Layer
Bulgakov, Mikhail
The Master and Margarita
Burgess, Anthony
A Clockwork Orange
Card, Orson Scott
Ender's Game
Carpentier, Alejo
The Kingdom of This World
Carroll, Lewis
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Chabon, Michael
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Chiang, Ted
Stories of Your Life and Others
Clarke, Arthur C.
Childhood's End
Clarke, Arthur C.
A Fall of Moondust
Clarke, Arthur C.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Clarke, Susanna
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Crowley, John
Little, Big
Danielewski, Mark Z.
The Fifty Year Sword
Danielewski, Mark Z.
House of Leaves
Davies, Robertson
Fifth Business
Delany, Samuel R.
Babel-17
Delany, Samuel R.
Dhalgren
Delany, Samuel R.
The Einstein Intersection
Dick, Philip K.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Dick, Philip K.
The Man in the High Castle
Dick, Philip K.
Ubik
Dick, Philip K.
VALIS
Disch, Thomas M.
Camp Concentration
Disch, Thomas M.
The Genocides
Doctorow, Cory
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Donoso, José
The Obscene Bird of Night
Ellison, Harlan (editor)
Dangerous Visions
Ellison, Harlan
I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
Esquivel, Laura
Like Water for Chocolate
Fuentes, Carlos
Aura
Gaiman, Neil
American Gods
Gaiman, Neil
Neverwhere
Gibson, William
Burning Chrome
Gibson, William
Neuromancer
Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum
Greene, Graham
The End of the Affair
Grossman, Lev
The Magicians
Haldeman, Joe
The Forever War
Hall, Steven
The Raw Shark Texts
Harrison, M. John
Light
Heinlein, Robert
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein, Robert:
Stranger in a Strange Land
Heinlein, Robert
Time Enough for Love
Helprin, Mark
Winter's Tale
Herbert, Frank
Dune
Hoffman, Alice
Practical Magic
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
Keret, Etgar
Suddenly, A Knock at the Door
Kundera, Milan
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Kunzru, Hari
Gods Without Men
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Dispossessed
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Lathe of Heaven
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Left Hand of Darkness
Leiber, Fritz
The Big Time
Leiber, Fritz
Conjure Wife
Leiber, Fritz
Swords & Deviltry
Leiber, Fritz
The Wanderer
Lem, Stanislaw
His Master's Voice
Lem, Stanislaw
Solaris
Lethem, Jonathan
The Fortress of Solitude
Lewis, C. S.
The Chronicles of Narnia
Link, Kelly
Magic for Beginners
Mann, Thomas
Doctor Faustus
Márquez, Gabriel García
100 Years of Solitude
Markson, David
Wittgenstein's Mistress
Matheson, Richard
Hell House
Matheson, Richard
What Dreams May Come
McCarthy, Cormac
The Road
Miéville, China
Perdido Street Station
Miller, Jr., Walter M.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Millhauser, Steven
Dangerous Laughter
Mitchell, David
Cloud Atlas
Morrison, Toni
Beloved
Murakami, Haruki
1Q84
Murakami, Haruki
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the
End of the World
Nabokov, Vladimir
Ada, or Ardor
Niffenegger, Audrey
The Time Traveler's Wife
Niven, Larry
Ringworld
Noon, Jeff
Vurt
Obreht, Téa
The Tiger's Wife
O'Brien, Flann
At Swim-Two-Birds
Okri, Ben
The Famished Road
Pohl, Frederik
Gateway
Pratchett, Terry
The Color of Magic
Pynchon, Thomas
Gravity's Rainbow
Rabelais, François
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Robinson, Kim Stanley
Red Mars
Rowling, J.K.
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
Rushdie, Salman
Midnight's Children
Russ, Joanna
The Female Man
Saramago, José
Blindness
Sheckley, Robert
Dimensions of Miracles
Sheckley, Robert
Mindswap
Sheckley, Robert
Store of the Worlds
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Silverberg, Robert
Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings
Simak, Clifford
City
Simak, Clifford
The Trouble with Tycho
Smith, Cordwainer
Norstrilia
Smith, Cordwainer
The Rediscovery of Man
Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash
Stross, Charles
Glasshouse
Sturgeon, Theodore
More Than Human
Sturgeon, Theodore
Some of Your Blood
Swift, Jonathan
Gulliver's Travels
Thomas, D.M.
The White Hotel
Tiptree, Jr., James
Warm Worlds and Otherwise
Tolkien, J.R.R.
The Hobbit
Updike, John
The Witches of Eastwick
Van Vogt, A.E.
The Mixed Men
Van Vogt, A.E.
Slan
Van Vogt, A.E.
The Voyage of the Space Beagle
Van Vogt, A.E.
The World of Null A
Verne, Jules
Around the Moon
Verne, Jules
From the Earth to the Moon
Verne, Jules:
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Vonnegut, Kurt
Cat's Cradle
Vonnegut, Kurt
The Sirens of Titan
Vonnegut, Kurt
Slaughterhouse-Five
Wallace, David Foster
Infinite Jest
Walpole, Horace
Hieroglyphic Tales
Wells, H.G.
The First Men in the Moon
Wells, H.G.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Wells, H.G.
The Time Machine
Wilson, Robert Anton & Robert Shea
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Winton, Tim
Cloudstreet
Woolf, Virginia
Orlando
Zabor, Rafi
The Bear Comes Home
Zelazny, Roger
Lord of Light
Special Features
Notes on Conceptual Fiction
Ray Bradbury: A Tribute
The Year of Magical Reading
Remembering Fritz Leiber
A Tribute to Richard Matheson
Samuel Delany's 70th birthday
The Sci-Fi of Kurt Vonnegut
Curse You, Neil Armstrong!
Robert Heinlein at 100
A.E, van Vogt Tribute
Links to related sites
The New Canon
Great Books Guide
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
SF Site
io9
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Los Angeles Review of Books
The Millions
Big Dumb Object
SF Novelists
More Words, Deeper Hole
The Misread City
Reviews and Responses
SF Signal
True Science Fiction
Disclosure: Conceptual Fiction and
its sister sites may receive review
copies and promotional materials
from publishers, authors, publicists
or other parties.
www.twitter.com/tedgioia
Conceptual Fiction:
A Reading List
(with links to essays on each work)
Home Page
Abbott, Edwin A.
Flatland
Adams, Douglas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits
Amado, Jorge
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
Amis, Martin
Time's Arrow
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
Asimov, Isaac
The Foundation Trilogy
Asimov, Isaac
I, Robot
Atwood, Margaret
The Handmaid's Tale
Banks, Iain M.
The State of the Art
Ballard, J.G.
The Atrocity Exhibition
Ballard, J.G.
Crash
Ballard, J.G.
The Crystal World
Ballard, J.G.
The Drowned World
Barth, John
Giles Goat-Boy
Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man
Borges, Jorge Luis
Ficciones
Bradbury, Ray
Dandelion Wine
Bradbury, Ray
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
The Illustrated Man
Bradbury, Ray
The Martian Chronicles
Bradbury, Ray
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Brockmeier, Kevin
The View from the Seventh Layer
Bulgakov, Mikhail
The Master and Margarita
Burgess, Anthony
A Clockwork Orange
Card, Orson Scott
Ender's Game
Carpentier, Alejo
The Kingdom of This World
Carroll, Lewis
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Chabon, Michael
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Chiang, Ted
Stories of Your Life and Others
Clarke, Arthur C.
Childhood's End
Clarke, Arthur C.
A Fall of Moondust
Clarke, Arthur C.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Clarke, Susanna
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Crowley, John
Little, Big
Danielewski, Mark Z.
The Fifty Year Sword
Danielewski, Mark Z.
House of Leaves
Davies, Robertson
Fifth Business
Delany, Samuel R.
Babel-17
Delany, Samuel R.
Dhalgren
Delany, Samuel R.
The Einstein Intersection
Dick, Philip K.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Dick, Philip K.
The Man in the High Castle
Dick, Philip K.
Ubik
Dick, Philip K.
VALIS
Disch, Thomas M.
Camp Concentration
Disch, Thomas M.
The Genocides
Doctorow, Cory
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Donoso, José
The Obscene Bird of Night
Ellison, Harlan (editor)
Dangerous Visions
Ellison, Harlan
I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
Esquivel, Laura
Like Water for Chocolate
Fuentes, Carlos
Aura
Gaiman, Neil
American Gods
Gaiman, Neil
Neverwhere
Gibson, William
Burning Chrome
Gibson, William
Neuromancer
Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum
Greene, Graham
The End of the Affair
Grossman, Lev
The Magicians
Haldeman, Joe
The Forever War
Hall, Steven
The Raw Shark Texts
Harrison, M. John
Light
Heinlein, Robert
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein, Robert:
Stranger in a Strange Land
Heinlein, Robert
Time Enough for Love
Helprin, Mark
Winter's Tale
Herbert, Frank
Dune
Hoffman, Alice
Practical Magic
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
Keret, Etgar
Suddenly, A Knock at the Door
Kundera, Milan
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Kunzru, Hari
Gods Without Men
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Dispossessed
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Lathe of Heaven
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Left Hand of Darkness
Leiber, Fritz
The Big Time
Leiber, Fritz
Conjure Wife
Leiber, Fritz
Swords & Deviltry
Leiber, Fritz
The Wanderer
Lem, Stanislaw
His Master's Voice
Lem, Stanislaw
Solaris
Lethem, Jonathan
The Fortress of Solitude
Lewis, C. S.
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Magic for Beginners
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100 Years of Solitude
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At Swim-Two-Birds
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Gateway
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The Color of Magic
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The Female Man
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Blindness
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Sheckley, Robert
Store of the Worlds
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Frankenstein
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Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings
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City
Simak, Clifford
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Norstrilia
Smith, Cordwainer
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Snow Crash
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Glasshouse
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More Than Human
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Some of Your Blood
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Gulliver's Travels
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Warm Worlds and Otherwise
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Slan
Van Vogt, A.E.
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Van Vogt, A.E.
The World of Null A
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Around the Moon
Verne, Jules
From the Earth to the Moon
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Cat's Cradle
Vonnegut, Kurt
The Sirens of Titan
Vonnegut, Kurt
Slaughterhouse-Five
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Infinite Jest
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Hieroglyphic Tales
Wells, H.G.
The First Men in the Moon
Wells, H.G.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Wells, H.G.
The Time Machine
Wilson, Robert Anton & Robert Shea
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
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Cloudstreet
Woolf, Virginia
Orlando
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The Bear Comes Home
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Lord of Light
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