By Ted Gioia
Are you looking for stories that anticipate the future?
Well, first of all, ignore science fiction. Back in the
mid-1970s, Star Wars might have been the biggest box
office hit with its extravagant futurism and cutting
edge special effects; but for my money, The Rocky
Horror Picture Show (1977) did
a better job of anticipating
American ways and means of
a later day. In pop music,
David Bowie was closer to
the mark with Ziggy Stardust
than "Space Oddity." And
the same is true of early modern
fiction: in the late 1920s, Edgar
Rice Burroughs excited readers
with his adventure books set
on the planet Mars and in the
mythical world of Pellucidar
(located beneath the Earth's
crust), but Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) was far
more forward-looking than anything in the sci-fi camp.
Back in the 1920s, the word 'gender' usually only
showed up in your high school Latin textbook, or in
other equally boring discussions of grammar. You
talked about it with the same enthusiasm you referred
to the 15 uses of the ablative case or the hortatory
subjunctive. For the record, 'gender' only appears
once in Orlando—in a description of an article of
clothing 'of ambiguous gender'—but even this
passing mention is revealing. Orlando is a book where
the concept of gender is wide-ranging and deliberately
amorphous, and not just with the clothes (or anything
else) left hanging in the closet; in Ms. Woolf's fictive
universe, the biological imperatives seemingly set in
stone at birth can be countered and redefined. Male
and female are no longer binary oppositions, but part
of a fluid continuum. Sound familiar?
Orlando enters chapter one as a man and—about a
third of the way through the novel—turns into a
woman. If this were a science fiction novel, some new
technology or advanced medical procedure would be
inserted at this point, or a strange nuclear fallout that
messes with X and Y chromosomes. But Virginia
Woolf did not write that kind of a novel. In her story,
Orlando simply falls asleep as a man and wakes up as
a woman. "He stretched himself. He rose. He stood
upright, and….we have no choice left but confess—
he was a woman…..The change seemed to have been
accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a
way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it."
Nor do the many people who deal with Orlando
express any amazement—although the courts have a
field day dealing with the legal implications of this
transformation (another way in which Orlando
anticipated a later day, no?).
And Woolf takes the same liberties with biological
aging as she does with gender. Orlando is born
under the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, and by
the time the book concludes, she is still around for
the birth of the second Queen Elizabeth. Over the
course of more than three centuries, Orlando has
aged a little but, with no help from Botox of the
surgeon's knife, is still barely into middle age at the
conclusion of our story, which Woolf tells us, in the
final sentence, takes place at "the twelfth stroke of
midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October,
Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight."
Along the way Orlando has a dalliance with Elizabeth
(the first, not the second), pursues an ill-fated
romance (while still a man) with a Russian princess
—an interlude based on an affair between Vita
Sackville-West, a real-life model for Orlando, with
Violet Trefusis; he serves as ambassador in
Constantinople, and (now as a woman) lives with
gypsies before returning to England. Orlando takes up
the cause of British letters, and associates with John
Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison and other
esteemed authors—who invariably are less
prepossessing in person than on the printed page.
After friendships and courtships with women and
men—or, in one instance, a woman who turns out to
be a man, in a mirror image of Orlando's own
transformation—our heroine marries a sea captain,
and becomes a prize-winning writer herself.
But no synopsis of the plot can do justice to the
distinctive qualities of this novel. For all its fanciful
storylines, the tone and atmosphere of Orlando is
what readers will remember about the book. I first
read Woolf's novel during my student years, after a
visit to Knole House, one of the largest country
estates in England, with hundreds of rooms and
located on a thousand acres—a residence for
Sackville-West's ancestors and the inspiration for
Orlando's palatial home in Woolf’s novel. In my
memory the texture of the novel blurred with the
colors and images of the Knole House paintings and
tapestries. A mythic quality pervades these pages,
which seem to present a stylized and heightened kind
of existence, not real life as we live it, but as we might
encounter in a hallucination or dream.
"Sunsets were redder and more intense," Woolf
writes; "dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our
crepuscular half-light they knew nothing. The rain
fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there
was darkness….The withered intricacies of and
ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were
unknown to them. Violence was all. The flower
bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover
loved and went."
But on re-reading the work nowadays, I pick up so
much more than I perceived at the age of twenty. I
am now familiar with Woolf's other novels, and turn
to her for the sheer beauty of her language as much as
for the story itself. Few writers in the history of the
English language have ever written better, on a
sentence-by-sentence basis, or gone further in blurring
the boundaries between prose and poetry. But above
all, Orlando stands out today as a prescient forerunner
of so many later novels—from The Left Hand of
Darkness to Middlesex—that present gender as dynamic
rather than static, and have made femininity and
masculinity as surface themes, rather than unstated
presumptions, in contemporary fiction.
But, ultimately, no single category or label can do
justice to this sui generis work. Woolf offers the sub-
title "A Biography" to her novel, and in the course of
its pages repeatedly adopts the tone of a biographer or
historian—albeit, usually in mockery of the
conventional attitudes adopted by chroniclers of past
lives. We might also be justified in treating Orlando
as a roman à clef, and attempting to find the real life
people that stand behind the fictional characters. Or
we could classify this novel under the rubric of
magical realism or fantasy. Just as readily, this novel
can withstand interpretation as a political novel, or
serve as a springboard for discussions of various
social, psychological or cultural themes—as
documented by the numerous dissertations written
on this book. But I suspect that Nigel Nicolson, son
of Vita Sackville-West, may have summed it up best.
In his words, Orlando is "the longest and most
charming love-letter in literature." And though Woolf
may have written it with Nigel's mother in mind, we
can still fall under the emotional sway of her billet-doux
these many years later.
Are you looking for stories that anticipate the future?
Well, first of all, ignore science fiction. Back in the
mid-1970s, Star Wars might have been the biggest box
office hit with its extravagant futurism and cutting
edge special effects; but for my money, The Rocky
Horror Picture Show (1977) did
a better job of anticipating
American ways and means of
a later day. In pop music,
David Bowie was closer to
the mark with Ziggy Stardust
than "Space Oddity." And
the same is true of early modern
fiction: in the late 1920s, Edgar
Rice Burroughs excited readers
with his adventure books set
on the planet Mars and in the
mythical world of Pellucidar
(located beneath the Earth's
crust), but Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) was far
more forward-looking than anything in the sci-fi camp.
Back in the 1920s, the word 'gender' usually only
showed up in your high school Latin textbook, or in
other equally boring discussions of grammar. You
talked about it with the same enthusiasm you referred
to the 15 uses of the ablative case or the hortatory
subjunctive. For the record, 'gender' only appears
once in Orlando—in a description of an article of
clothing 'of ambiguous gender'—but even this
passing mention is revealing. Orlando is a book where
the concept of gender is wide-ranging and deliberately
amorphous, and not just with the clothes (or anything
else) left hanging in the closet; in Ms. Woolf's fictive
universe, the biological imperatives seemingly set in
stone at birth can be countered and redefined. Male
and female are no longer binary oppositions, but part
of a fluid continuum. Sound familiar?
Orlando enters chapter one as a man and—about a
third of the way through the novel—turns into a
woman. If this were a science fiction novel, some new
technology or advanced medical procedure would be
inserted at this point, or a strange nuclear fallout that
messes with X and Y chromosomes. But Virginia
Woolf did not write that kind of a novel. In her story,
Orlando simply falls asleep as a man and wakes up as
a woman. "He stretched himself. He rose. He stood
upright, and….we have no choice left but confess—
he was a woman…..The change seemed to have been
accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a
way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it."
Nor do the many people who deal with Orlando
express any amazement—although the courts have a
field day dealing with the legal implications of this
transformation (another way in which Orlando
anticipated a later day, no?).
And Woolf takes the same liberties with biological
aging as she does with gender. Orlando is born
under the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, and by
the time the book concludes, she is still around for
the birth of the second Queen Elizabeth. Over the
course of more than three centuries, Orlando has
aged a little but, with no help from Botox of the
surgeon's knife, is still barely into middle age at the
conclusion of our story, which Woolf tells us, in the
final sentence, takes place at "the twelfth stroke of
midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October,
Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight."
Along the way Orlando has a dalliance with Elizabeth
(the first, not the second), pursues an ill-fated
romance (while still a man) with a Russian princess
—an interlude based on an affair between Vita
Sackville-West, a real-life model for Orlando, with
Violet Trefusis; he serves as ambassador in
Constantinople, and (now as a woman) lives with
gypsies before returning to England. Orlando takes up
the cause of British letters, and associates with John
Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison and other
esteemed authors—who invariably are less
prepossessing in person than on the printed page.
After friendships and courtships with women and
men—or, in one instance, a woman who turns out to
be a man, in a mirror image of Orlando's own
transformation—our heroine marries a sea captain,
and becomes a prize-winning writer herself.
But no synopsis of the plot can do justice to the
distinctive qualities of this novel. For all its fanciful
storylines, the tone and atmosphere of Orlando is
what readers will remember about the book. I first
read Woolf's novel during my student years, after a
visit to Knole House, one of the largest country
estates in England, with hundreds of rooms and
located on a thousand acres—a residence for
Sackville-West's ancestors and the inspiration for
Orlando's palatial home in Woolf’s novel. In my
memory the texture of the novel blurred with the
colors and images of the Knole House paintings and
tapestries. A mythic quality pervades these pages,
which seem to present a stylized and heightened kind
of existence, not real life as we live it, but as we might
encounter in a hallucination or dream.
"Sunsets were redder and more intense," Woolf
writes; "dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our
crepuscular half-light they knew nothing. The rain
fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there
was darkness….The withered intricacies of and
ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were
unknown to them. Violence was all. The flower
bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover
loved and went."
But on re-reading the work nowadays, I pick up so
much more than I perceived at the age of twenty. I
am now familiar with Woolf's other novels, and turn
to her for the sheer beauty of her language as much as
for the story itself. Few writers in the history of the
English language have ever written better, on a
sentence-by-sentence basis, or gone further in blurring
the boundaries between prose and poetry. But above
all, Orlando stands out today as a prescient forerunner
of so many later novels—from The Left Hand of
Darkness to Middlesex—that present gender as dynamic
rather than static, and have made femininity and
masculinity as surface themes, rather than unstated
presumptions, in contemporary fiction.
But, ultimately, no single category or label can do
justice to this sui generis work. Woolf offers the sub-
title "A Biography" to her novel, and in the course of
its pages repeatedly adopts the tone of a biographer or
historian—albeit, usually in mockery of the
conventional attitudes adopted by chroniclers of past
lives. We might also be justified in treating Orlando
as a roman à clef, and attempting to find the real life
people that stand behind the fictional characters. Or
we could classify this novel under the rubric of
magical realism or fantasy. Just as readily, this novel
can withstand interpretation as a political novel, or
serve as a springboard for discussions of various
social, psychological or cultural themes—as
documented by the numerous dissertations written
on this book. But I suspect that Nigel Nicolson, son
of Vita Sackville-West, may have summed it up best.
In his words, Orlando is "the longest and most
charming love-letter in literature." And though Woolf
may have written it with Nigel's mother in mind, we
can still fall under the emotional sway of her billet-doux
these many years later.
| THE YEAR OF MAGICAL READING Orlando by Virginia Woolf |
Click on image to purchase
| The Year of Magical Reading (click here) |
| conceptual fiction Exploring the Non-Realist Tradition in Fiction |
Welcome to my year of magical
reading. Each week during the
course of 2012, I will explore an
important work of fiction that
incorporates elements of magic,
fantasy or the surreal. My choices
will cross conventional boundary
lines of genre, style and historical
period—indeed, one of my intentions
in this project is to show how the
conventional labels applied to these
works have become constraining,
deadening and misleading.
In its earliest days, storytelling almost
always partook of the magical. Only
in recent years have we segregated
works arising from this venerable
tradition into publishing industry
categories such as "magical realism"
or "paranormal" or "fantasy" or some
other 'genre' pigeonhole. These
labels are not without their value, but
too often they have blinded us to the
rich and multidimensional heritage
beyond category that these works
share.
This larger heritage is mimicked in
our individual lives: most of us first
experienced the joys of narrative
fiction through stories of myth and
magic, the fanciful and
phantasmagorical; but only a very
few retain into adulthood this sense
of the kind of enchantment possible
only through storytelling. As such,
revisiting this stream of fiction from a
mature, literate perspective both
broadens our horizons and allows us
to recapture some of that magic in
our imaginative lives.
The Year of Magical Reading:
Week 1: Midnight's Children by
Salman Rushdie
Week 2: The House of the Spirits by
Isabel Allende
Week 3: The Witches of Eastwick
by John Updike
Week 4: Magic for Beginners by
Kelly Link
Week 5: The Tin Drum by Günter
Grass
Week 6: The Golden Ass by
Apuleius
Week 7: The Tiger's Wife by Téa
Obreht
Week 8: One Hundred Years of
Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Week 9: The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Week 10: Gargantua and Pantagruel
by François Rabelais
Week 11: The Famished Road by
Ben Okri
Week 12: Like Water for Chocolate
by Laura Esquivel
Week 13: Winter's Tale by Mark
Helprin
Week 14: Dhalgren by Samuel R.
Delany
Week 15: Johnathan Strange & Mr.
Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Week 16: The Master and
Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Week 17: Dangerous Laughter by
Steven Millhauser
Week 18: Conjure Wife by Fritz
Leiber
Week 19: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Week 20: The Hobbit by J.R.R.
Tolkien
Week 21: Aura by Carlos Fuentes
Week 22: Dr. Faustus by Thomas
Mann
Week 23: Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Week 24: Little, Big by John Crowley
Week 25: The White Hotel by D.M.
Thomas
Week 26: Neverwhere by Neil
Gaiman
Week 27: Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Week 28: Fifth Business by
Robertson Davies
Week 29: The Kingdom of This
World by Alejo Carpentier
Week 30: The Bear Comes Home
by Rafi Zabor
Week 31: The Color of Magic by
Terry Pratchett
Week 32: Ficciones by Jorge Luis
Borges
Week 33: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Week 34: Dona Flor and Her Two
Husbands by Jorge Amado
Week 35: Hard-Boiled Wonderland
and the End of the World by Haruki
Murakami
Week 36: What Dreams May Come
by Richard Matheson
Week 37: Practical Magic by Alice
Hoffman
Week 38: Blindess by José
Saramago
Week 39: The Fortress of Solitude
by Jonathan Lethem
Week 40: The Magicians by Lev
Grossman
Week 41: Suddenly, A Knock at the
Door by Etgar Keret
Week 42: Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Week 43: The Obscene Bird of
NIght by José Donoso
Week 44: The Fifty Year Sword by
Mark Z. Danielewski
Week 45: Gulliver's Travels by
Jonathan Swift
Week 46: Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Week 47: The End of the Affair by
Graham Greene
Week 48: The Chronicles of Narnia
by C.S. Lewis
Week 49: Hieroglyphic Tales by
Horace Walpole
Week 50: The View from the
Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier
Week 51: Gods Without Men by
Hari Kunzru
Week 52: At Swim-Two-Birds by
Flann O'Brien
reading. Each week during the
course of 2012, I will explore an
important work of fiction that
incorporates elements of magic,
fantasy or the surreal. My choices
will cross conventional boundary
lines of genre, style and historical
period—indeed, one of my intentions
in this project is to show how the
conventional labels applied to these
works have become constraining,
deadening and misleading.
In its earliest days, storytelling almost
always partook of the magical. Only
in recent years have we segregated
works arising from this venerable
tradition into publishing industry
categories such as "magical realism"
or "paranormal" or "fantasy" or some
other 'genre' pigeonhole. These
labels are not without their value, but
too often they have blinded us to the
rich and multidimensional heritage
beyond category that these works
share.
This larger heritage is mimicked in
our individual lives: most of us first
experienced the joys of narrative
fiction through stories of myth and
magic, the fanciful and
phantasmagorical; but only a very
few retain into adulthood this sense
of the kind of enchantment possible
only through storytelling. As such,
revisiting this stream of fiction from a
mature, literate perspective both
broadens our horizons and allows us
to recapture some of that magic in
our imaginative lives.
The Year of Magical Reading:
Week 1: Midnight's Children by
Salman Rushdie
Week 2: The House of the Spirits by
Isabel Allende
Week 3: The Witches of Eastwick
by John Updike
Week 4: Magic for Beginners by
Kelly Link
Week 5: The Tin Drum by Günter
Grass
Week 6: The Golden Ass by
Apuleius
Week 7: The Tiger's Wife by Téa
Obreht
Week 8: One Hundred Years of
Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Week 9: The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Week 10: Gargantua and Pantagruel
by François Rabelais
Week 11: The Famished Road by
Ben Okri
Week 12: Like Water for Chocolate
by Laura Esquivel
Week 13: Winter's Tale by Mark
Helprin
Week 14: Dhalgren by Samuel R.
Delany
Week 15: Johnathan Strange & Mr.
Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Week 16: The Master and
Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Week 17: Dangerous Laughter by
Steven Millhauser
Week 18: Conjure Wife by Fritz
Leiber
Week 19: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Week 20: The Hobbit by J.R.R.
Tolkien
Week 21: Aura by Carlos Fuentes
Week 22: Dr. Faustus by Thomas
Mann
Week 23: Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Week 24: Little, Big by John Crowley
Week 25: The White Hotel by D.M.
Thomas
Week 26: Neverwhere by Neil
Gaiman
Week 27: Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Week 28: Fifth Business by
Robertson Davies
Week 29: The Kingdom of This
World by Alejo Carpentier
Week 30: The Bear Comes Home
by Rafi Zabor
Week 31: The Color of Magic by
Terry Pratchett
Week 32: Ficciones by Jorge Luis
Borges
Week 33: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Week 34: Dona Flor and Her Two
Husbands by Jorge Amado
Week 35: Hard-Boiled Wonderland
and the End of the World by Haruki
Murakami
Week 36: What Dreams May Come
by Richard Matheson
Week 37: Practical Magic by Alice
Hoffman
Week 38: Blindess by José
Saramago
Week 39: The Fortress of Solitude
by Jonathan Lethem
Week 40: The Magicians by Lev
Grossman
Week 41: Suddenly, A Knock at the
Door by Etgar Keret
Week 42: Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Week 43: The Obscene Bird of
NIght by José Donoso
Week 44: The Fifty Year Sword by
Mark Z. Danielewski
Week 45: Gulliver's Travels by
Jonathan Swift
Week 46: Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Week 47: The End of the Affair by
Graham Greene
Week 48: The Chronicles of Narnia
by C.S. Lewis
Week 49: Hieroglyphic Tales by
Horace Walpole
Week 50: The View from the
Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier
Week 51: Gods Without Men by
Hari Kunzru
Week 52: At Swim-Two-Birds by
Flann O'Brien
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
Aldiss, Brian
Barefoot in the Head
Aldiss, Brian
Hothouse
Aldiss, Brian
Report on Probability A
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
Blish, James
A Case of Conscience
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
Bunch, David R.
Moderan
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
Delany, Samuel R.
Nova
Dick, Philip K.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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
Farmer, Philip José
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
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
The Centauri Device
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
Keyes, Daniel
Flowers for Algernon
Kundera, Milan
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Kunzru, Hari
Gods Without Men
Lafferty, R.A.
Nine Hundred Grandmothers
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
Malzberg, Barry N.
Herovit's World
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
Moorcock, Michael
Behold the Man
Moorcock, Michael
The Final Programme
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
Percy, Walker
Love in the Ruins
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
Dimension of Miracles
Sheckley, Robert
Mindswap
Sheckley, Robert
Store of the Worlds
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Silverberg, Robert
Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings
Silverberg, Robert
The World Inside
Simak, Clifford
City
Simak, Clifford
The Trouble with Tycho
Smith, Cordwainer
Norstrilia
Smith, Cordwainer
The Rediscovery of Man
Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash
Spinrad, Norman
Bug Jack Barron
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
Vance, Jack
Emphyrio
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
Zelazny, Roger
This Immortal
Special Features
Notes on Conceptual Fiction
When Science Fiction Grew Up
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
The Puzzling Case of Robert Sheckley
The Avant-Garde Sci-Fi of Brian Aldiss
Science Fiction 1958-1975: A Reading List
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
Tor blog
Disclosure: Conceptual Fiction
and its sister sites may receive review
copies and promotional materials from
publishers, authors, publicists or other
parties.
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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
Aldiss, Brian
Barefoot in the Head
Aldiss, Brian
Hothouse
Aldiss, Brian
Report on Probability A
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
Blish, James
A Case of Conscience
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
Bunch, David R.
Moderan
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
Delany, Samuel R.
Nova
Dick, Philip K.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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
Farmer, Philip José
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
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
The Centauri Device
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
Keyes, Daniel
Flowers for Algernon
Kundera, Milan
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Kunzru, Hari
Gods Without Men
Lafferty, R.A.
Nine Hundred Grandmothers
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
Malzberg, Barry N.
Herovit's World
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
Moorcock, Michael
Behold the Man
Moorcock, Michael
The Final Programme
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
Percy, Walker
Love in the Ruins
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
Dimension of Miracles
Sheckley, Robert
Mindswap
Sheckley, Robert
Store of the Worlds
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Silverberg, Robert
Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings
Silverberg, Robert
The World Inside
Simak, Clifford
City
Simak, Clifford
The Trouble with Tycho
Smith, Cordwainer
Norstrilia
Smith, Cordwainer
The Rediscovery of Man
Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash
Spinrad, Norman
Bug Jack Barron
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
Vance, Jack
Emphyrio
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
Zelazny, Roger
This Immortal
Special Features
Notes on Conceptual Fiction
When Science Fiction Grew Up
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
The Puzzling Case of Robert Sheckley
The Avant-Garde Sci-Fi of Brian Aldiss
Science Fiction 1958-1975: A Reading List
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
Tor blog
Disclosure: Conceptual Fiction
and its sister sites may receive review
copies and promotional materials from
publishers, authors, publicists or other
parties.