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

[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, with its dazzling, admirable narrative nerve, travelling through space and time, across continents and generations, dependent less on the usual principles of fiction than a reinvention of the past as though it were science fiction, informed by Milgram's six degrees of separation and the snares and brakes of late western capitalism. The novel makes a series of journeys through inner and outer space: on the one hand, "the hollow feeling that comes over you on sleepless nights, that you are living beyond your time"; on the other, that implacable journey in which Lovell, as humanity's representative, steered his way home "across unimaginable distances, across oceans of night, through the deep black calm of death".

[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.