My favorite books where reality dissolves into strangeness and wonder

A family founds Macondo, a city initially isolated from the outside world. Six generations of their descendants succeed in their misfortunes, slowly reintegrating into a country of rigged politics and civil war until a gigantic windstorm wipes the city from the map. Generation after generation, the people of Macondo share the same names. Their identities melt in our minds while the story evolves on multiple layers. The intermix of reality and myth, the unsettling narrative, and the dissolution of the self are all elements of dreams. I doubt any storyteller could ever send their readers into a lucid dream as García Márquez did in this book.

Joseph K. is prosecuted by an impenetrable and faceless justice system. He doesn’t even know the accusation hanging over him. If he does nothing, he can go on with his life. If he wants to prove himself innocent, K. must enter a labyrinthic bureaucracy, which will consume him. He opts for the latter. 

I’ve been reading and rereading The Trial since I was a teen. Each time, Kafka’s dense prose drags me into his universe’s strangeness. With K., I wonder about the meaning of the parabole Before the Law; with him, I walk through the intricate corridors of the Justice and feel its nauseating air.

Ted Chiang is one of the most creative authors of my generation. Each of the stories in this collection builds exquisite worlds. Take, for instance, Story of Your Life (the book is named after this novel, which was later adapted into the movie Arrival). It features a linguist who, to decipher an alien language, must learn to shift her time perspective from the usual past-to-future flow into one where all events are simultaneous. Chiang skillfully builds his narrative to allow us to savor this perplexing atemporal frame. And he still manages to deliver a delicate picture of a mother who can’t do anything to change tragic events in her daughter's life. I defy you not to finish this book and immediately jump to Chiang’s second story collection, Exhalation.

Hard science fiction, firmly based on scientific concepts, is a constant source of wonder. This classic collection—one of my first contacts with the genre maybe thirty-five years ago—is still one of my favorites! 

Since Clarke wrote these stories in the 1950s and 60s, science, technology, and the world have changed dramatically. But his writing aged well. The moral despair of the protagonist of The Star when he uncovers the relationship between a supernova's remains and humanity's history is timeless. The warning, “There is always a last time for everything,” at the closing of the tale The Nine Billion Names of God, still rings prophetic.

Your older self writes a diary and sends it back in time to you. It reveals that between two pathways, you will take a right. You arrive at that crossroads, and no matter how willing you are to defy your unveiled fate, you can’t avoid choosing right again. I often find this type of super-deterministic scenario in science fiction, invariably raising philosophical questions about free will. Nevertheless, Egan is the only author to offer a satisfactory psychological solution to why the protagonist can’t change their fate. And this is just the first of the short stories in this collection. Axiomatic is hard SciFi stretching scientific concepts into their ethical and human limits.