by Ted Gioia
Someone ought to write a history of literary
misdirection—the story of the stories that avoid
telling stories, the tales that set out towards a goal
and never quite get there. We think of this as a
postmodern conceit, but its roots can be traced in
Tristam Shandy, Don Quixote, perhaps even back to
Apuleius's The Golden Ass. At an extreme, such
narratives end right where
they begins—Finnegans
Wake is the classic example
—and remind me of those
long distance runners who
circle round and round on
the same route, never going
anywhere except back to the
starting line. Readers often
gripe at these roundabout
stories, yet even a closed
loop can offer an enticing
journey if the landmarks and milestones are
sufficiently compelling.
Kelly Link has made her reputation on precisely
this kind of narrative. She knows an endless
number of ways to prevent her stories from
reaching a destination. In "Lull," the final tale in
her 2006 collection, Magic for Beginners, she
interrupts the narrative with a story within a story
—then a few pages later, starts up another story
within that story. One might think that these
would serve as sufficient obstacles to achieving
narrative closure—but Link, emulating the famous
aviator Wrong Way Corrigan, goes a step further,
presenting the chronology of the central story in
reverse (akin to Martin Amis's Time's Arrow), an
approach that ensures that readers can only end up
back at the beginning.
Close to half of the stories in Magic for Beginners deal,
in some degree, with zombies. What cats are for
Murakami and bullfights are for Hemingway, the
undead are for Ms. Link. To find another author
so obsessed with the life after death, you would
need to go the eschatology section of a theological
library. Even when the undead don't actually
appear on the scene—as in the story "Some
Zombie Contingency Plans"—the characters talk
and think about them endlessly. At first, I puzzled
over this recurring obsession, but then I figured it
out: the zombie, caught in the perpetual now of an
existence that is neither true life or true death, is the
perfect character for a writer who avoids linear
narrative. The state of Zombiehood (allow me to
coin a word) represents a kind of ideal of stasis, an
existence that Pastor Rick Warren might call The
Purposeless-Driven Live.
Yes, zombies lack goals—a premise that is central
to my favorite story in this book, "The Hortlak."
(The title—I learned with a little bit of web
sleuthing—is a Turkish word for a ghost or
phantom.) Eric, the manager at the All-Night
Convenience, has a plan for a new retail concept:
attracting dead people as customers. Talk about
potential market expansion! But there’s a slight
problem—zombies don’t have any money, and it’s
not clear whether they need any of the products
sold at All Night Convenience, which is
(conveniently) located near a hangout for the
undead. Undaunted, Eric concocts plans for barter
transactions, and tries to enlist the help of his
skeptical colleague Batu with promises of a future
retail empire serving the deceased.
Where other authors offer up plots, Link—what an
appropriate name for this writer!—pushes ahead
more on the basis of free associations. Here is a
typical paragraph, which summons up the aesthetic
musings of a character named Soap:
"Modern art is a waste of time. When zombies
show up, you can’t worry about art. Art is for
people who aren't worried about zombies. Besides
zombies and icebergs, there are other things Soap
has been thinking about. Tsunamis, earthquakes,
Nazi dentists, killer bees, army ants, black plague,
old people, divorce lawyers, sorority girls, Jimmy
Carter, giant squids, rabid foxes, strange dogs, news
anchors, child actors, fascists, narcissists,
psychologists, ax murderers, unrequited loved…..
contact lenses, ninjas, performance artists,
mummies, spontaneous combustion. Soap has been
afraid of all these things at one time or another.
Ever since he went to prison, he’s realized that he
doesn't have to be afraid. All he has to do is come
up with a plan. Be prepared. It's just like the Boy
Scouts, except you have to be even more prepared.
You have to prepare for everything that the Boy
Scouts didn't prepare you for, which is pretty much
everything."
We start with modern art and end up with the Boy
Scouts, along a path that one could hardly retrace,
but with lots of strange scenery in-between. Yogi
Berra once warned against just this kind of journey:
"You've got to be very careful if you don't know
where you're going," advised the oracle of the
Yankees, "because you might not get there." But
Kelly Link must be following a different Yogi, and
has staked out her career as the tour guide over this
ever-shifting terrain, which has become her
distinctive home turf.
I see Link as emblematic of the post-millennial
fever of our times, an era in which the whole
culture has renounced what Frank Kermode called
"the sense of an ending." Stand-up comedians, I am
told, now avoid punchlines to their jokes—having
learned that today’s audiences laugh more when the
big wisecrack is excised. Television producers have
taken a similar route, embracing reality concepts in
which the contrived and calculated closing
crescendos once essential to a 30-minute or 60-
minute show are replaced with the banality of the
ongoing and everyday. In an age in which songs
climb the charts without hooks and the angst of the
teenager's diary is replaced by the vapid tweet and
text message, Kelly Link has found the narrative
structure to match our fickle temperament. Follow
her on the roundabout path, and when you've
finished the book, you just might start it all over
again.
Ted Gioia writes on music, books and popular culture. His most
recent book is The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.
Someone ought to write a history of literary
misdirection—the story of the stories that avoid
telling stories, the tales that set out towards a goal
and never quite get there. We think of this as a
postmodern conceit, but its roots can be traced in
Tristam Shandy, Don Quixote, perhaps even back to
Apuleius's The Golden Ass. At an extreme, such
narratives end right where
they begins—Finnegans
Wake is the classic example
—and remind me of those
long distance runners who
circle round and round on
the same route, never going
anywhere except back to the
starting line. Readers often
gripe at these roundabout
stories, yet even a closed
loop can offer an enticing
journey if the landmarks and milestones are
sufficiently compelling.
Kelly Link has made her reputation on precisely
this kind of narrative. She knows an endless
number of ways to prevent her stories from
reaching a destination. In "Lull," the final tale in
her 2006 collection, Magic for Beginners, she
interrupts the narrative with a story within a story
—then a few pages later, starts up another story
within that story. One might think that these
would serve as sufficient obstacles to achieving
narrative closure—but Link, emulating the famous
aviator Wrong Way Corrigan, goes a step further,
presenting the chronology of the central story in
reverse (akin to Martin Amis's Time's Arrow), an
approach that ensures that readers can only end up
back at the beginning.
Close to half of the stories in Magic for Beginners deal,
in some degree, with zombies. What cats are for
Murakami and bullfights are for Hemingway, the
undead are for Ms. Link. To find another author
so obsessed with the life after death, you would
need to go the eschatology section of a theological
library. Even when the undead don't actually
appear on the scene—as in the story "Some
Zombie Contingency Plans"—the characters talk
and think about them endlessly. At first, I puzzled
over this recurring obsession, but then I figured it
out: the zombie, caught in the perpetual now of an
existence that is neither true life or true death, is the
perfect character for a writer who avoids linear
narrative. The state of Zombiehood (allow me to
coin a word) represents a kind of ideal of stasis, an
existence that Pastor Rick Warren might call The
Purposeless-Driven Live.
Yes, zombies lack goals—a premise that is central
to my favorite story in this book, "The Hortlak."
(The title—I learned with a little bit of web
sleuthing—is a Turkish word for a ghost or
phantom.) Eric, the manager at the All-Night
Convenience, has a plan for a new retail concept:
attracting dead people as customers. Talk about
potential market expansion! But there’s a slight
problem—zombies don’t have any money, and it’s
not clear whether they need any of the products
sold at All Night Convenience, which is
(conveniently) located near a hangout for the
undead. Undaunted, Eric concocts plans for barter
transactions, and tries to enlist the help of his
skeptical colleague Batu with promises of a future
retail empire serving the deceased.
Where other authors offer up plots, Link—what an
appropriate name for this writer!—pushes ahead
more on the basis of free associations. Here is a
typical paragraph, which summons up the aesthetic
musings of a character named Soap:
"Modern art is a waste of time. When zombies
show up, you can’t worry about art. Art is for
people who aren't worried about zombies. Besides
zombies and icebergs, there are other things Soap
has been thinking about. Tsunamis, earthquakes,
Nazi dentists, killer bees, army ants, black plague,
old people, divorce lawyers, sorority girls, Jimmy
Carter, giant squids, rabid foxes, strange dogs, news
anchors, child actors, fascists, narcissists,
psychologists, ax murderers, unrequited loved…..
contact lenses, ninjas, performance artists,
mummies, spontaneous combustion. Soap has been
afraid of all these things at one time or another.
Ever since he went to prison, he’s realized that he
doesn't have to be afraid. All he has to do is come
up with a plan. Be prepared. It's just like the Boy
Scouts, except you have to be even more prepared.
You have to prepare for everything that the Boy
Scouts didn't prepare you for, which is pretty much
everything."
We start with modern art and end up with the Boy
Scouts, along a path that one could hardly retrace,
but with lots of strange scenery in-between. Yogi
Berra once warned against just this kind of journey:
"You've got to be very careful if you don't know
where you're going," advised the oracle of the
Yankees, "because you might not get there." But
Kelly Link must be following a different Yogi, and
has staked out her career as the tour guide over this
ever-shifting terrain, which has become her
distinctive home turf.
I see Link as emblematic of the post-millennial
fever of our times, an era in which the whole
culture has renounced what Frank Kermode called
"the sense of an ending." Stand-up comedians, I am
told, now avoid punchlines to their jokes—having
learned that today’s audiences laugh more when the
big wisecrack is excised. Television producers have
taken a similar route, embracing reality concepts in
which the contrived and calculated closing
crescendos once essential to a 30-minute or 60-
minute show are replaced with the banality of the
ongoing and everyday. In an age in which songs
climb the charts without hooks and the angst of the
teenager's diary is replaced by the vapid tweet and
text message, Kelly Link has found the narrative
structure to match our fickle temperament. Follow
her on the roundabout path, and when you've
finished the book, you just might start it all over
again.
Ted Gioia writes on music, books and popular culture. His most
recent book is The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.
| THE YEAR OF MAGICAL READING Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link |
Click on image to purchase
| The Year of Magical Reading (click here) |
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
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
Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/tedgioia
Conceptual Fiction:
A Reading List
(with links to reviews)
Home Page
Abbott, Edwin A.
Flatland
Adams, Douglas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits
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.
Crash
Ballard, J.G.
The Crystal World
Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man
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
Bulgakov, Mikhail
The Master and Margarita
Burgess, Anthony
A Clockwork Orange
Card, Orson Scott
Ender's Game
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
Danielewski, Mark Z.
House of Leaves
Delany, Samuel R.
Babel-17
Delany, Samuel R.
Dhalgren
Delany, Samuel R.
The Einstein Intersection
Dick, Philip K.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Dick, Philip K.
The Man in the High Castle
Dick, Philip K.
Ubik
Doctorow, Cory
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Esquivel, Laura
Like Water for Chocolate
Gaiman, Neil
American Gods
Gibson, William
Burning Chrome
Gibson, William
Neuromancer
Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum
Haldeman, Joe
The Forever War
Hall, Steven
The Raw Shark Texts
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
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
Kundera, Milan
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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
Márquez, Gabriel García
100 Years of Solitude
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
Murakami, Haruki
1Q84
Niffenegger, Audrey
The Time Traveler's Wife
Niven, Larry
Ringworld
Noon, Jeff
Vurt
Obreht, Téa
The Tiger's Wife
Okri, Ben
The Famished Road
Pohl, Frederik
Gateway
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
Saramago, José
Blindness
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Silverberg, Robert
Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings
Simak, Clifford
City
Simak, Clifford
The Trouble with Tycho
Smith, Cordwainer
Norstrilia
Smith, Cordwainer
The Rediscovery of Man
Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash
Stross, Charles
Glasshouse
Sturgeon, Theodore
More Than Human
Sturgeon, Theodore
Some of Your Blood
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
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
Wells, H.G.
The First Men in the Moon
Wells, H.G.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Wells, H.G.
The Time Machine
Zelazny, Roger
Lord of Light
Special Features
Notes on Conceptual Fiction
Ray Bradbury: A Tribute
The Year of Magical Reading
Remembering Fritz Leiber
Samuel Delany's 70th birthday
The Sci-Fi of Kurt Vonnegut
Curse You, Neil Armstrong!
Robert Heinlein at 100
A.E, van Vogt Tribute
Links to related sites
The New Canon
Great Books Guide
Postmodern Mystery
Ted Gioia's web site
SF Site
io9
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Los Angeles Review of Books
Big Dumb Object
Jospeh Peschel
The Misread City
Reviews and Responses
SF Signal
True Science Fiction
Disclosure: Conceptual Fiction
and its sister sites may receive
review copies and promotional
materials from publishers,
authors, publicists or other
parties.
www.twitter.com/tedgioia
Conceptual Fiction:
A Reading List
(with links to reviews)
Home Page
Abbott, Edwin A.
Flatland
Adams, Douglas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits
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.
Crash
Ballard, J.G.
The Crystal World
Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man
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
Bulgakov, Mikhail
The Master and Margarita
Burgess, Anthony
A Clockwork Orange
Card, Orson Scott
Ender's Game
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
Danielewski, Mark Z.
House of Leaves
Delany, Samuel R.
Babel-17
Delany, Samuel R.
Dhalgren
Delany, Samuel R.
The Einstein Intersection
Dick, Philip K.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Dick, Philip K.
The Man in the High Castle
Dick, Philip K.
Ubik
Doctorow, Cory
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Esquivel, Laura
Like Water for Chocolate
Gaiman, Neil
American Gods
Gibson, William
Burning Chrome
Gibson, William
Neuromancer
Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum
Haldeman, Joe
The Forever War
Hall, Steven
The Raw Shark Texts
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
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
Kundera, Milan
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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
Márquez, Gabriel García
100 Years of Solitude
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
Murakami, Haruki
1Q84
Niffenegger, Audrey
The Time Traveler's Wife
Niven, Larry
Ringworld
Noon, Jeff
Vurt
Obreht, Téa
The Tiger's Wife
Okri, Ben
The Famished Road
Pohl, Frederik
Gateway
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
Saramago, José
Blindness
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Silverberg, Robert
Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings
Simak, Clifford
City
Simak, Clifford
The Trouble with Tycho
Smith, Cordwainer
Norstrilia
Smith, Cordwainer
The Rediscovery of Man
Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash
Stross, Charles
Glasshouse
Sturgeon, Theodore
More Than Human
Sturgeon, Theodore
Some of Your Blood
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
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
Wells, H.G.
The First Men in the Moon
Wells, H.G.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Wells, H.G.
The Time Machine
Zelazny, Roger
Lord of Light
Special Features
Notes on Conceptual Fiction
Ray Bradbury: A Tribute
The Year of Magical Reading
Remembering Fritz Leiber
Samuel Delany's 70th birthday
The Sci-Fi of Kurt Vonnegut
Curse You, Neil Armstrong!
Robert Heinlein at 100
A.E, van Vogt Tribute
Links to related sites
The New Canon
Great Books Guide
Postmodern Mystery
Ted Gioia's web site
SF Site
io9
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Los Angeles Review of Books
Big Dumb Object
Jospeh Peschel
The Misread City
Reviews and Responses
SF Signal
True Science Fiction
Disclosure: Conceptual Fiction
and its sister sites may receive
review copies and promotional
materials from publishers,
authors, publicists or other
parties.