Imagine a picture puzzle.... It comes in a box filled with hundreds of pieces. When assembled, it may depict a landscape, perhaps, with large swatches of blue sea and blue sky. Imagine my mind is like one of those picture puzzles, and so is yours. I take one of those blue puzzle pieces, give it to you, and declare, “Here's a bit of the picture in my mind. I give it to you so you can see the picture I see.”

Memorable fiction I've enjoyed

and listed in no meaningful order...

253 (the print remix), by Geoff Ryman. 253 characters travel a brief, memorable journey, or as the author describes it: “a novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash”. It's a fascinating, innovatively structured story orginally composed online at www.ryman-novel.com

Catch 22, Joseph Heller; hilariously tragic cultural criticism

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, as well as the other four books of the “increasingly misnamed trilogy”

Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner; also The Shockwave Rider, and The Sheep Look Up

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut; also Slaughterhouse Five and, well, everything else by Vonnegut

The Cider House Rules, John Irving; also A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Setting Free the Bears, and ... well, you get the idea.

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins

Ubik, Philip K. Dick; Reality is now available in a convenient aerosol spray! Safe when used as directed.

The Year's Best Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois, ed.; This annual collection of speculative fiction often turns up writers who think differently.

Meet Me in the Moon Room, by Ray Vukcevich. I mentioned this in my ten books meme, too. It's that good.

Feel free to comment here, or send email to my Gmail.com account, mybluepuzzle@...

 
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5 License