Giovanni requests fiction recommendations!

[applez]

gioogle, I dissuaded you from the Harry Turtledove avenue, so I owe you some contemporary alternatives:

All you on my Friend List, please add to the list

In the area of alt history/counterfactual history...1. "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson

Comments

[celestialweasel]

In what way is Cryptonomicon alt.history, other than the sense that any novel is about that-which-is-not-so, so is alt.history? I don't think the fact that Stephenson likes to make up fictional names for the odd thing, mainly companies, counts.

[applez]

Well, if you want to get into a classification argument...

I think it suffices that it tracks technological development through a historical setting, and is not particularly factual.

[celestialweasel]

You young people are all confusing me :-) I don't understand what makes the Ings novel (which I thought was reasonably good, although somewhat arch) alt.history. Is alt.history different to alternate history in some way?

I am not sure that the Ings even qualifies for alternative history in the same way the Cryptonomicon does.

[coalescent]

Oh, right. No, it's not strictly alternative history, but it's certainly secret history, and I suspect it will appeal to those who like Cryptonomicon. I also broadly agree with this review:Although Ings has previously written straightforward SF, The Weight of Numbers is largely naturalistic, taking place in the here and now featuring no fantastical technological advances. It is SFnal in the same sense that M. John Harrison's 1992 novel The Course of the Heart (which it strongly resembles in its bleak beauty) is a fantasy. Harrison's novel is a brutal, uncompromising screed against the central tenet that informs many of the genre's major works-that any one of us can be the main character in a vast epic quest, and that one day we will be swept off into a great adventure. Ings's novel is similarly an attack on science fiction's core assumption-that the world is reducible to a finite and understandable problem, which can then be solved by the application of reason, logic, and science.
And with this oneAnd so it goes on, this rolling story

[celestialweasel]

Even if I didn't know that Ings was an SF person (he was a BSFA person at some time IIRC), I would probably have guessed the connection - in the same way that I read Zodiac before Stephenson published any SF but was not all surprised when he did.

[coalescent]

I believe the traditional answer to this question is "Enoch Root".

[celestialweasel]

Enoch Root makes it fantasy, surely? Although I have another big question about Cryptonomicon - see http://celestialweasel.livejournal.com/129213.html (contains spoilers).

[coalescent]

Haven't the foggiest about that question, but re: Enoch Root I gather The System of the World has some things of relevance to say.

[celestialweasel]

So I understand, but I don't think I am going to read it to find out :-)