by Ted Gioia
A critic in the New York Times once called them the
Great Male Novelists—and, no, it wasn’t intended
as a compliment. John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul
Bellow and Norman Mailer may have first made
their names as free spirits and prophets of
liberation—in that capacity, I've seen their names
linked with a motley crew, that also includes Hugh
Hefner, Lenny Bruce and
Woody Allen—but in time
they became inextricably
linked with a pronounced
masculinist—in the minds
of some critics, misogynist
—perspective in American
fiction that flourished
during the second half of
the 20th century.
Of course, the attacks did
not come solely from a
feminist perspective. Others,
finding an easy target, took their best shots. David
Foster Wallace called them "the Great Male
Narcissists"—and, in a fine quip, dubbed Updike as
the leading chronicler of "the single most self-
absorbed generation since Louis XIV." Yet Wallace
then went on to admit that he had read 25 of
Updike's books—apparently he liked to decorate
his mind with Louis Quatorze. On the other
extreme, parents in Medicine Bow, Wyoming
rejected Updike's work for its frankness and
profanity, while as recently as 2010, Updike’s
writing was kept out of Texas jails in order to
"protect the safety and security of our institution,
but also aid in the rehabilitation of our offenders."
(I gleefully imagine apprehended recidivists with
copies of The Centaur and Bech: A Book mixed in
with the loot from their latest bank heist.)
That said, women have been even tougher on
Updike than the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice. "Updike provides no blameless way of
being female," Margaret Atwood has complained.
Wendy Lesser has labeled Updike as a "thorough
misogynist." "It was the way he depicted women,"
Anna Shapiro has explained. “It was the way he
described them – us. You felt yourself squirming,
wanting to pull a blanket over you, preferably lead-
lined, to shield yourself from the merest stray
phrase or casual observation.”
Did Updike care? Around the time he published
The Witches of Eastwick, the author noted "I've been
criticized for making the women in my books
subsidiary to the men." So what better way to
address these concerns than by putting three
women at the forefront of his latest novel?
Ah, the esteemed Mr. Updike, now softened by his
entry into late middle age, was turning a new leaf.
Hardly! The three women in question—Alexandra
Spofford, Jane Smart, and Sukie Rougemont—are
smarmy, manipulative, caustic and catty. And did I
mention that they are witches? Something about
the fictional Rhode Island town of Eastwick is
apparently conducive to channeling and fortifying
women’s supernatural powers. As a result, these
three amigas terrorize the local community, and it's
hard to tell who fares worse, their friends or their
enemies.
The novel is not without its precedents. Fritz
Leiber relied on a similar concept two decades
earlier—a little less acerbically—in his novel
Conjure Wife. And Updike, for all the ammo he
directs on his female leads, will never top Flaubert
in trenchant and unforgiving portrayal of the
bêtises of fair sex. Yet the most obvious role model
here is Macbeth, explicitly referenced in Updike’s
novel—"tamale and tamale and tamale," witch Jane
proclaims in anticipation of a Mexican dinner—in
which three Shakespearean witches dished out their
own sizable helpings of toil and trouble.
Updike offers blacker humor than any of these role
models, and his book is at his best when it is most
irreverent. Our three sorceresses have no
monopoly on sacrilege here. Their shared love
interest, a new arrival in Eastwick named Darryl
Van Horne, can give them stiff competition. At
one point in this novel, Updike lets his male lead
deliver a guest sermon at the local Unitarian church
on a subject of his own choosing—his topic turns
out to be "This is a Terrible Creation." The
interlude does little to advance the plot, but
showcases Updike's zest in the outrageous and
transgressive. This section of the novel, which
reads like Hunter Thompson delivering a mix-and-
match school book report on "The Grand
Inquisitor" and The Selfish Gene, could stand-alone
as a set piece or, with the addition of a few more
one-liners, work as a comedy stand-up routine.
Throughout much of this book, however, Updike
seems to waver between two opposed approaches
for his novel. For long stretches he remains
determined to present a sober and fastidiously
detailed "landscape" novel—one that captures this
part of Rhode Island in the same way that Cormac
McCarthy evokes the US-Mexico border region or
William Faulkner celebrates Yoknapatawpha
County. Paragraphs stretch out over two or more
pages, filled with references to geology, plant life,
weather patterns, and local color. Sometimes
Updike is overly fond in showing off the minutiae
of his research—although, I hasten to add in his
defense that this type of writing had more clout
before the age of Googling, when the most obscure
facts are only a few keystrokes away—but the better
passages are quite breathtaking.
Here’s an example:
"The winter passed. In the darkroom of overnight
blizzards, New England picture postcards were
developed; the morning's sunshine displayed them
in color. The not-quite-straight sidewalks of Dock
Street, shoveled in patches, manifested patterns of
compressed bootprints, like dirty white cookies
with treads….The town itself in winter, deprived of
tourists, settled more compactly upon itself, like a
log fire burning late into the evening. A dwindled
band of teen-agers hung out in front of the
Superette, waiting for the psychedelic-painted VW
van the drug dealer from South Providence
drove….Martyrs of a sort were these children, along
with the town drunk, in his basketball sneakers and
buttonless overcoast….martyrs too of a sort were
the men and women hastening to adulterous trysts,
risking disgrace and divorce for their fix of motel
love—all sacrificing the outer world to the inner,
proclaiming with this priority that everything solid-
seeming and substantial is in fact a dream, of less
account than a merciful rush of feeling."
I find it revealing that Updike is most powerful in
conveying the particularities of place when he
makes people part of the landscape. Here
adulterers and drug addicts constitute the local
fauna. In this regard, Updike is fundamentally
different from those authors who can commune
directly with nature—like Dr. Frankenstein, he
needs the human element, the pulse, the flow of
blood in the veins, the respiration, and plenty of
body organs (usually below the belt ones for this
author) to bring his creations to life.
Hence I am not surprised that the best descriptive
passages here—as with the sermon above,
throwaway set pieces about a tennis game and the
performance of Bach's cello suites stand out—are
never still lifes, but always imbued with passion and
sometimes considerable angst. The fuel that drives
an Updike novel is invariably the frictive human
element, which constitutes the second novel hidden
between the interstices of Updike's Rhode Island
period piece. The machinations of his three witches
and their agendas—usually hidden, partially or
wholly—with family, lovers, fellow citizens and the
alluring Mr. Van Horne provide the animating
spark here. So much so that these sections tend to
eclipse in your memory the sober, elegant writing
that Updike periodically inserts to ground his
fantastic story in everyday New England life.
For all its flaws, the novel has considerable
panache. Updike himself was charmed enough by
his creation to write a sequel, and Hollywood was
even more charmed—funding a big budget film of
The Witches of Eastwick with Jack Nicholson, Cher,
Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer in the star-
studded cast. That said, the book did nothing to
endear Mr. Updike to his feminist critics, and
tended to elicit even more criticism from that
quarter than his earlier novels. I suspect, however,
that was part of Mr. Updike’s own hidden agenda
from the start.
Ted Gioia writes on music, books and popular culture. His most
recent book is The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.
A critic in the New York Times once called them the
Great Male Novelists—and, no, it wasn’t intended
as a compliment. John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul
Bellow and Norman Mailer may have first made
their names as free spirits and prophets of
liberation—in that capacity, I've seen their names
linked with a motley crew, that also includes Hugh
Hefner, Lenny Bruce and
Woody Allen—but in time
they became inextricably
linked with a pronounced
masculinist—in the minds
of some critics, misogynist
—perspective in American
fiction that flourished
during the second half of
the 20th century.
Of course, the attacks did
not come solely from a
feminist perspective. Others,
finding an easy target, took their best shots. David
Foster Wallace called them "the Great Male
Narcissists"—and, in a fine quip, dubbed Updike as
the leading chronicler of "the single most self-
absorbed generation since Louis XIV." Yet Wallace
then went on to admit that he had read 25 of
Updike's books—apparently he liked to decorate
his mind with Louis Quatorze. On the other
extreme, parents in Medicine Bow, Wyoming
rejected Updike's work for its frankness and
profanity, while as recently as 2010, Updike’s
writing was kept out of Texas jails in order to
"protect the safety and security of our institution,
but also aid in the rehabilitation of our offenders."
(I gleefully imagine apprehended recidivists with
copies of The Centaur and Bech: A Book mixed in
with the loot from their latest bank heist.)
That said, women have been even tougher on
Updike than the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice. "Updike provides no blameless way of
being female," Margaret Atwood has complained.
Wendy Lesser has labeled Updike as a "thorough
misogynist." "It was the way he depicted women,"
Anna Shapiro has explained. “It was the way he
described them – us. You felt yourself squirming,
wanting to pull a blanket over you, preferably lead-
lined, to shield yourself from the merest stray
phrase or casual observation.”
Did Updike care? Around the time he published
The Witches of Eastwick, the author noted "I've been
criticized for making the women in my books
subsidiary to the men." So what better way to
address these concerns than by putting three
women at the forefront of his latest novel?
Ah, the esteemed Mr. Updike, now softened by his
entry into late middle age, was turning a new leaf.
Hardly! The three women in question—Alexandra
Spofford, Jane Smart, and Sukie Rougemont—are
smarmy, manipulative, caustic and catty. And did I
mention that they are witches? Something about
the fictional Rhode Island town of Eastwick is
apparently conducive to channeling and fortifying
women’s supernatural powers. As a result, these
three amigas terrorize the local community, and it's
hard to tell who fares worse, their friends or their
enemies.
The novel is not without its precedents. Fritz
Leiber relied on a similar concept two decades
earlier—a little less acerbically—in his novel
Conjure Wife. And Updike, for all the ammo he
directs on his female leads, will never top Flaubert
in trenchant and unforgiving portrayal of the
bêtises of fair sex. Yet the most obvious role model
here is Macbeth, explicitly referenced in Updike’s
novel—"tamale and tamale and tamale," witch Jane
proclaims in anticipation of a Mexican dinner—in
which three Shakespearean witches dished out their
own sizable helpings of toil and trouble.
Updike offers blacker humor than any of these role
models, and his book is at his best when it is most
irreverent. Our three sorceresses have no
monopoly on sacrilege here. Their shared love
interest, a new arrival in Eastwick named Darryl
Van Horne, can give them stiff competition. At
one point in this novel, Updike lets his male lead
deliver a guest sermon at the local Unitarian church
on a subject of his own choosing—his topic turns
out to be "This is a Terrible Creation." The
interlude does little to advance the plot, but
showcases Updike's zest in the outrageous and
transgressive. This section of the novel, which
reads like Hunter Thompson delivering a mix-and-
match school book report on "The Grand
Inquisitor" and The Selfish Gene, could stand-alone
as a set piece or, with the addition of a few more
one-liners, work as a comedy stand-up routine.
Throughout much of this book, however, Updike
seems to waver between two opposed approaches
for his novel. For long stretches he remains
determined to present a sober and fastidiously
detailed "landscape" novel—one that captures this
part of Rhode Island in the same way that Cormac
McCarthy evokes the US-Mexico border region or
William Faulkner celebrates Yoknapatawpha
County. Paragraphs stretch out over two or more
pages, filled with references to geology, plant life,
weather patterns, and local color. Sometimes
Updike is overly fond in showing off the minutiae
of his research—although, I hasten to add in his
defense that this type of writing had more clout
before the age of Googling, when the most obscure
facts are only a few keystrokes away—but the better
passages are quite breathtaking.
Here’s an example:
"The winter passed. In the darkroom of overnight
blizzards, New England picture postcards were
developed; the morning's sunshine displayed them
in color. The not-quite-straight sidewalks of Dock
Street, shoveled in patches, manifested patterns of
compressed bootprints, like dirty white cookies
with treads….The town itself in winter, deprived of
tourists, settled more compactly upon itself, like a
log fire burning late into the evening. A dwindled
band of teen-agers hung out in front of the
Superette, waiting for the psychedelic-painted VW
van the drug dealer from South Providence
drove….Martyrs of a sort were these children, along
with the town drunk, in his basketball sneakers and
buttonless overcoast….martyrs too of a sort were
the men and women hastening to adulterous trysts,
risking disgrace and divorce for their fix of motel
love—all sacrificing the outer world to the inner,
proclaiming with this priority that everything solid-
seeming and substantial is in fact a dream, of less
account than a merciful rush of feeling."
I find it revealing that Updike is most powerful in
conveying the particularities of place when he
makes people part of the landscape. Here
adulterers and drug addicts constitute the local
fauna. In this regard, Updike is fundamentally
different from those authors who can commune
directly with nature—like Dr. Frankenstein, he
needs the human element, the pulse, the flow of
blood in the veins, the respiration, and plenty of
body organs (usually below the belt ones for this
author) to bring his creations to life.
Hence I am not surprised that the best descriptive
passages here—as with the sermon above,
throwaway set pieces about a tennis game and the
performance of Bach's cello suites stand out—are
never still lifes, but always imbued with passion and
sometimes considerable angst. The fuel that drives
an Updike novel is invariably the frictive human
element, which constitutes the second novel hidden
between the interstices of Updike's Rhode Island
period piece. The machinations of his three witches
and their agendas—usually hidden, partially or
wholly—with family, lovers, fellow citizens and the
alluring Mr. Van Horne provide the animating
spark here. So much so that these sections tend to
eclipse in your memory the sober, elegant writing
that Updike periodically inserts to ground his
fantastic story in everyday New England life.
For all its flaws, the novel has considerable
panache. Updike himself was charmed enough by
his creation to write a sequel, and Hollywood was
even more charmed—funding a big budget film of
The Witches of Eastwick with Jack Nicholson, Cher,
Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer in the star-
studded cast. That said, the book did nothing to
endear Mr. Updike to his feminist critics, and
tended to elicit even more criticism from that
quarter than his earlier novels. I suspect, however,
that was part of Mr. Updike’s own hidden agenda
from the start.
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 The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike |
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
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Like Water for Chocolate
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Time Enough for Love
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Conjure Wife
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Magic for Beginners
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More Than Human
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Some of Your Blood
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Cat's Cradle
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Slaughterhouse-Five
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Infinite Jest
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Lord of Light
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