Novels That Ate My Brain
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/20/2001 - 09:59
Tags:
- Bringing Out the Dead, Joe Connelly
- The Short-Timers, Gustav Halford
- The Stand, Stephen King
- Marching Through Georgia, S.M. Stirling
- Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
- The Tales of Arthor series, A.A. Attanasio
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The House of the Spririts, Isabel Allende
- When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One, David Gerrold
- Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
Author Comments:
I read a lot, mostly fantasy. But these novels grabbed me and took me to places I rarely experience in literature, realms where I'd just sit and *ponder* things... surreal or harrowing or just new.
If you liked H.A.R.L.I.E., try Gerrold's THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF - or did you like it mainly because it's a computer story? - THE MAN...is a time-travel/alternate-histories story.
Being geek, H.A.R.L.I.E worked for me as a computer story-- but also as a philosophical work on what it means to be truly human. Alternate-universe and time travel work for me... otherwise, Marching Through Georgia would never have made it to the list.
People who like alternate history really ought to look into Stirling's Domination of the Draka universe (recently bundled up into a compiled work called The Domination). Very nice, sharp work. I used to say I didn't like war novels, and then I read Stirling.
I've not read MARCHING..., but there's another alternate history novel, BRING THE JUBILEE by Ward Moore, the title of which, unless I'm badly mistaken, is taken from the same song.