2010 books
40) Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore), The Far Reality, 1946
This is often described as the companion novel to Tomorrow and Tomorrow, although it was written a year earlier. The high tension surrounding the plot is certainly comparable: a fractious world embroiled in a war between Europe and the US - where all major cities have had to relocate to a mile underground - and a hallucinating American under pressure to solve an impossible problem involving the enemy's weapons that seem to rely on the physical application of variable truth. And then there are the matters of a mysterious equation that drives mad anyone who tries to solve it, and a number of extra-temporal domes that have appeared across the US. On the whole I'd say this was a more accomplished novel than Tomorrow largely because Kuttner and Moore gave themselves a whole host of concepts to juggle with and they're jigsawed together in a rather clever manner; the downside to this is the feeling that readers are given little room to piece it together for themselves while the story races to its complex resolution. This is also the only SF story I know of that applies the concepts of fairy chess to its plot - indeed this novel's original title was The Fairy Chessmen. Not a bad book for ideas, but the functionality of the writing and the absence of much characterisation left me a little cold.