Here are 100 books that Dhalgren fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a Canadian science fiction writer who writes very, very slowly. I’m interested in experimental fiction and books that are unique, both thematically and stylistically. I’d like to think my books fall into this category, or at least that’s what I aspire to. I used to read science fiction exclusively, and the five books I’ve listed here were all read during those formative years; they were fundamental stepping-stones for me, as a writer, and each of them left a profound mark on my idea of how good, or effective, novels can be.
Attanasio can run hot and cold, but when he’s hot he’s on fire! This book may have the most ambitious plot of any novel I’ve ever read and is almost impossible to describe. It spans galaxies, has a truly bizarre vibe, and yet rings true, with a love story thrown in.
Seven billion years from now, long after the Sun has died and human life has become extinct, alien beings reconstruct homo sapiens from our fossilized DNA drifting as debris in deep space. We are reborn to serve as bait in a battle to the death between the Rimstalker, humankind's re-animator, and the zōtl, horrific creatures who feed vampire-like on the suffering of intelligent lifeforms.
The resurrected children of Earth are told: "You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect it to guide you or benefit you in any way." Yet,…
I am a professional artist and musician, and I owe a huge debt to Philip K. Dick. I started to read his works at a very young age (I believe I’ve read most everything he’s written at least twice), and my love of his work has continued throughout my life and he has been the greatest inspiration to my music, writing, and art. I felt so influenced and indebted that a created a comic book to honor him and to tell my stories and ideas that have populated my imagination as a result of his books.
I am a huge fan of dreampunk books and this book helped create the genre. Reading it took me into a dreamworld that lead into another dreamworld and then yet another.
As with all Philip K. Dick books I was left wondering if I ever did return to the reality I believe I live in. I also found the character of Palmer Eldritch himself to be one of my all-time favorites.
In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late twenty-first century, tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D, which enables the user to inhabit a shared illusory world.
But when industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which is far more potent than Can-D. But could the permanent state of drugged illusion it induces be part of something much more sinister?
I was a teacher and a professor who showed generations of students how to find x, how to prove figure 1 was similar to figure 2, how to make a machine search through millions of bits of data for an answer. An inspiration for a story struck me one day early in retirement as I was daydreaming. I began to write and have never stopped. It turns out that “if-then” is not so different from “what if.” The first is more like destiny, the second like free will. One is science, the other is fiction. “What if” has led me into strange lands.
I loved this book because it has mathematics to the nth degree! Some of it in the form of inside jokes like “easy to use partial differential equations” that made me laugh out loud. Some of it, such as “equations that had sadness as a constant,” are in a “techno-poetic” style that I strive to achieve in my own writing. But this “meta-science fiction” novel is also filled with musings on writing and creativity. The self-referential recursion of a book within a book within a book makes the paradoxes of time travel even more interesting. The “reality portions” in which the main character pursues his quest to “find his father” are as deep and well done a theme as any I have read in sci-fi.
With only TAMMY - a slightly tearful computer with self-esteem issues - a software boss called Phil - Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0 - and an imaginary dog called Ed for company, fixing time machines is a lonely business and Charles Yu is stuck in a rut.
He's spent the better part of a decade navel-gazing, spying on 39 different versions of himself in alternate universes (and discovered that 35 of them are total jerks).…
I was a teacher and a professor who showed generations of students how to find x, how to prove figure 1 was similar to figure 2, how to make a machine search through millions of bits of data for an answer. An inspiration for a story struck me one day early in retirement as I was daydreaming. I began to write and have never stopped. It turns out that “if-then” is not so different from “what if.” The first is more like destiny, the second like free will. One is science, the other is fiction. “What if” has led me into strange lands.
What is it? A first contact story. Sort of. They were aliens? Yeah, Russians. What are they like? Don’t know. They’re gone now. Did you find anything good? Lots and lots. What’s that? The God hypothesis. It allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing. Can you show me something else? No. You gotta go yourself. Can I really go into the Zone? If you’re old enough. And brave enough. Is it dangerous? People don’t come back. Is it legal? No, but you can sneak in.
Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he…
Two themes run through my book recommendations. First is the lone protagonist against impossible odds. Don’t we all feel this way from time to time in our lives? I’m no exception and still have the scars to prove it, which is why my first novel was intended to promote awareness and prevention of child abuse and domestic violence. Secondly, I’ve had an affinity for speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal) since I was a child so it only stands to reason that I would be inspired by the likes of Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Philip José Farmer, Philip K. Dick, and other masters of these genres.
Following an attack by a jilted lover, renowned TV variety show host Jason Taverner awakens in a cheap motel and discovers that he’s unknown to the world. Neither his current girlfriend nor his lawyer recognizes him when he calls. Further, all records of his identity have been erased.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is an exciting, fast-paced story with a protagonist both capable and mysterious. I’m a sucker for the theme of the “lone hero against impossible odds” and as usual with Philip K. Dick, the antagonist is not merely a single character, such as the unethical police general or his drug-dealing sibling/spouse. Rather, the enemy is the corrupt state, the totalitarian government, and the decaying society.
It’s easy to see why Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said earned the John W. Campbell award as well as nominations for a Hugo and Nebula.
Jason Taverner has a glittering TV career, millions of fans, great wealth and something close to eternal youth. He is one of a handful of brilliant, beautiful people, the product of top-secret government experiments forty years earlier. But suddenly, all records of him vanish. He becomes a man with no identity, in a police state where everyone us closely monitored. Can he ever be rich and famous again? Or was that life just an illusion?
I’m a Canadian science fiction writer who writes very, very slowly. I’m interested in experimental fiction and books that are unique, both thematically and stylistically. I’d like to think my books fall into this category, or at least that’s what I aspire to. I used to read science fiction exclusively, and the five books I’ve listed here were all read during those formative years; they were fundamental stepping-stones for me, as a writer, and each of them left a profound mark on my idea of how good, or effective, novels can be.
Hand’s sentences are always beautiful, and this novel, her first, is dense with new ideas and original imagery. She evokes a bizarre future in a post-apocalyptic city where twins go on a hallucinogenic quest. Reads like a somewhat disturbing mythology. Gods and talking animals, autistic prophets, feral children, and death is personified. Unforgettable.
The “sensuous and evocative” debut of the Nebula Award–winning author of Waking the Moon: A dystopian journey through a world unburdened by moral taboos (Library Journal). Set in the surreal, post-apocalyptic City of Trees, Winterlong centers on Wendy Wanders, a girl who can tap into the dreams and emotions of the people around her, and her long-lost twin brother, Raphael, a seductive, sacred courtesan to the City’s decadent elite. During their voyage, they encounter man-made and godlike monstrosities—both hideous and gorgeous—in their effort to stop an ancient power from consuming all. Blending science fiction and fantasy, Winterlong is a dark…
Before I even started writing my outline, I spent four months researching everything I could on quantum entanglement. I read textbooks, watched seminars and lectures, and even went to Tokyo, Japan to visit the quantum physics exhibition at a museum! I have immersed myself in time travel novel, films, and even music (i.e., Electric Light Orchestra’s Timealbum, where my novel gets its title from—track #2 on the album is “Yours Truly, 2095”) since I was very young. I even gave a presentation to the Library of Congress on the differences between time travel with engineering and time travel with physics.
While it’s hard to dismiss 12 Monkeys on a list of fiction where there are not machines creating the passage for time travel (even though it was never a novel), I have to say Jack London’sThe Jacket does a better job at being subtle. The novel was adapted into a film in 2005 and follows a main character who experiences a time slip at the point of a near-death experience when he is in confined situations (i.e., when they think he’s dead and put him in a casket or when they need to subdue him in a straitjacket.) These tight confines of space initiate his ability to time travel through teetering on the brink of death. The story is slightly more ‘spiritual’ than ‘science based,’ but I felt it stood out as a good example of using the power inside of us to be able to defy the fabric…
The Jacket (1915) is a novel by American writer Jack London. A groundbreaking work of science fiction that blends elements of mysticism, The Jacket critiques the harsh reality of the American criminal justice system. The novel was inspired by the experiences of Ed Morrell, a man who spent time at San Quentin State Prison for robbing trains. Horrified by his description of "the jacket," a constricting device used to punish inmates, London wrote the novel to explore the psychological effects of torture. Darrell Standing was a Professor of Agronomics at the University of California, Berkeley when, in a fit of…
Science fiction is rightly famous for experimenting with new and strange social worlds, but fantasy tends to fall back on the usual feudal tropes: the whims of kings, the valor of knights, the always-temporary powerlessness of farm boys, the technicalities of succession. Which is a shame, because fantasy provides just as much opportunity to reimagine what society could look like. That’s what I try to do in my books, and at my job, where I’m working to bring 21st-century data literacy and quantitative reasoning to a state government stuck resolutely in the ’90s. When I think of books that have done what I’m trying to do, these five are at the front of my mind.
The action in this book begins when Severian, an apprentice in the Torturers’ Guild, gives a convict a weapon to kill herself rather than be tortured.
The reason there’s a Torturers’ Guild is, allegedly, that it beats prison: Better to deliver a punishment and then let the punished person return to their life, the thinking goes, than confine them to a useless existence as a ward of the state. Severian is expelled from the Guild, but not from the profession, and wanders the world plying his trade, at least until the plot can’t spare him.
It’s a constant dissonance, looking through the eyes of a character whose training and purpose is the infliction of pain, who seems so decent and forthright in the story he narrates. (But don’t be fooled.)
In a thoroughly decadent world of the future, Severian the torturer is cast out from the torturer's guild when he falls in love with one of his victims and allows her to die
As a former librarian I have long been fascinated with Borges’s view of books: their metaphysical shape and their tendency to open into the uncanny and the infinite. Illness early in life drove me to books, to their particular isolation. Since then, I’ve found that worlds can open almost anywhere in literature by way of a mood, a patina of language, a vision, a set of images completely beyond the control of the writer. Now, I read these books to remind me of what fiction can do, the places it can go, the worlds it will open.
I can’t name what so destroyed me about this book; it speaks to a level of pain for which there’s no language.
I believe a book’s hidden subject will chase a writer down: a fear, a state of mind. Barnes had to write it in order to survive her experience.
A loose group of outcasts appears in Nightwood: a gay doctor, logorrheic, poetic, desperate, witty, alone. A woman obsessed with another woman whom has left her and whom she’ll never reach, never understand.
Dancers and circus performers all in the baroque shimmer of a prose so fascinating it becomes clear almost by virtue of its density. What comes through is the tragedy of what it is to be alive.
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna-a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.
The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction-there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the…
As a former librarian I have long been fascinated with Borges’s view of books: their metaphysical shape and their tendency to open into the uncanny and the infinite. Illness early in life drove me to books, to their particular isolation. Since then, I’ve found that worlds can open almost anywhere in literature by way of a mood, a patina of language, a vision, a set of images completely beyond the control of the writer. Now, I read these books to remind me of what fiction can do, the places it can go, the worlds it will open.
I stumbled on this book in a free box outside a bookstore when I was a teenager and the family I had moved across the country to be with had collapsed.
My sisters and stepmother moved out of state, my brother moved to California, and my dad, after borrowing my student loan money for truck driving school, went over the road.
Bloodsport was rain-rippled—with a gigantic, dried fly smashed flat in the middle, sliding like a secret toy over the page.
An entire world opened up. I felt no less alone, but the experience changed my understanding of realism, the mythic, and the surreal: a book of immense oddness about a father and son journey up an apocalyptic river, toward Ratnose, the leader of a motorcycle gang.
Welcome to the wilderness of masculinity, where anything goes-where women throw themselves unreservedly at men and games are played to the death. This is the outdoor paradise of the Hassayampa, a legendary river whose bank is overrun with prehistoric and mystical creatures prime for hunting and whose water is said to turn honest men into liars. Here a father takes his prepubescent son on an unforgettable adventure, a rite-of-passage quest that starts as an innocent fishing trip and soon turns into a bizarre Homeric journey. In turn comic and brutal, Blood Sport is more than just the ultimate cult outdoor…
