Why Read Literature?

A Rhetorical Exercise in Memory of David Foster Wallace[1]

(Written for Students)

“…and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”

-Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

            O’Brien’s words stick with me, and it hasn’t been but a few months since one of my favorite writers, D.F. Wallace, took his own life in response to how the world (for him) was not.  Since this will be my last issue of the Pub, it seems like a good time to consider the question of why people write and read and teach serious literature.

            It’s tempting to think of novels, poems, stories, and the rest of it as merely ornamental:  just decoration, just snob amusement, “just art.”  By this view, what matters instead is work, emotions, the stuff of Real Life.  Why waste time on stories when reality is so much more important, urgent, and unavoidable?  Why study literature when one’s personal tastes run more to competition, concerts, fashion, fishing, or whatever you please?

           

            This latter question would make sense if literature amounted only to entertainment.  It’s true, of course, that some genres tend that way—lots of stories are just for fun, and there is no reason to insist on that kind of fun more than on any other.  A thrilling novel is no more inherently valuable than the thrill you get from watching football or playing video games, if that’s your thing.[2]  There really is no accounting for taste, nor should there be.

            But some writing offers more than (only) entertainment, amusement, and diversion; we call these stories “literature” to mark the difference.  Yes, the term is a value judgment.  Arguing the criteria for this judgment is beyond the scope of this essay; it’s enough, here, to recognize that there is such a distinction and that some stories rise to the faith of its expectations.[3]

            So what is literature for, and how does it justify the time it seems to take away from life and life’s urgent concerns?  For an answer I’ll offer two apparently technical but really very human terms:  subjectivity and representation.

            Subjectivity is the sad fact of human boundaries.  As human beings we are limited by perspective and by time:  we live as ourselves and only as ourselves, in our own place and period, and with each breath the self comes a step closer to the point at which no more experience is possible.[4]  Remarkably, though, and almost miraculously, literature realizes at least a partial escape from these boundary limits.  Whatever else it does, literature communicates the experience of human life as other selves and in other places and times.  Nothing else offers such a direct glimpse of what it means to be[5] a person other than oneself.  No other human creation is so fully concerned with representing the subjective experience of being alive and engaged with times and places other than the one at which we sit reading.[6]

            “Representing the subjective experience of others;” that’s the key to this whole thing.  Literature has two sides:  from the reader’s position, it is the art of active engagement with other selves.  That self may be the writer, writing in her personal voice, or it may be any variety of characters, selves existing only as language and through reading.  Aside from the diary or the memoir, there is no writing that addressed to the self from the self; there is always an Other involved.[7]  To read literature is necessarily to get beyond the boundaries of one’s own subjectivity.  It’s a way around what there’s no way out of.

            Literature’s other side is the writer’s work, the creation of this experience of other life.  This is representation—that is, a presentation again, a version in language of something that, although it may be entirely new (just as every child born to the world is entirely new) nevertheless partakes (just as every child etc.) of what we share, what we know, and where we all reside. 

Of course all art presents or represents:  a photograph or a film shows what something looks like or how some people might act; a painting or a sculpture gives an interpreted vision; music produces new feelings in the moment of listening and remembering.[8]  All of this is invaluable.  My special plea for literature is this:  that it requires a reader’s engagement with the thoughts and feelings of others in language, and language has the peculiar quality of creating its meaning not through the senses but through imagination and reason.  Words themselves are sense-neutral.  We experience stories not as something apprehended by the eye or ear, but as meaning unfolding inside of us.[9]

You can think of representation as a kind of simulation.[10]  We twenty-first-century types are familiar with simulation almost from childhood.  Science experiments, meteorology, computer games—these are all instances where something real or potentially real (operations of nature, tornadoes, battles between orcs and elves) are played out by rules and models intended to explain how and why things happen as they do (or would).  The point is to understand, and we judge any simulation by how it helps us do so.  We come to ignore the Ouija Board and trust the weatherman. [11]  We learn about the methods, and we judge.

Literature is the same, but what it simulates is human experience.[12]  Where a science experiment uses laws of chemistry and physics, where a computer game uses maps and mathematics, a poem or a story uses language.  Every literary word is a choice made to represent what it means to be a particular person in a particular situation.[13]  While other modes of simulation (lab work, weather reports, Halo 3) crunch out objective results, or at least results presented as objective, literature depends on the ability of a reader to experience the representation through the lens of her own relationship to language.  The best that any literature can do is always limited by that relationship.[14]  A science experiment produces information about the world.  Literature offers a new relationship to it.  Indeed, it insists on it.

Of course it is possible to ignore all of this.  Why bother?  This is the question where we started.  So I have offered two points:  subjectivity and representation.  But even given these two heavy-duty ideas, why put time into the reading of stories, a practice that requires quite a bit of mental effort in addition to falling pretty low on the sexy whiz-bang technology scale?  Why not just drive and shop and anything-but-read?  Why not settle for what’s in front of you?

My answer is that literature offers you the gift of wider life.  Every day (as I keep dolefully reminding you here) reminds us of the sad fact of human limitation.[15]  Literature sidesteps the limitations of perspective. In a peculiar way, it provides you with experience of life that you don’t have and—no matter how far you travel, how much you spend, how well you are connected—can never have.  In literature there is a plenitude of this.  Stories are artificial; they concern what’s real.  The writer meets the reader, and then something transcends both.  Provisionally, yes; partially, yes.  But there it is, and nowhere else.

If that sounds too airy, think of it this way: literature shows life as it might be, and as it should or (with a mission here) shouldn’t be.  O’Brien’s words stick with me.  He’s talking about the paradoxical beauty of war, but he is also talking about stories, and about stories as the only medium available to try to communicate that “hard, aching love” which so elevates and frustrates him. This is literature.  It comes to teach about the life you live, but also to awaken you to lives that others live, or could.  (Is there a better definition of love?)  It comes simply to say (they that have ears, let them hear) that you might have more life, and have it more abundantly. And isn’t that enough?

I ask you.  Really.[16]

                                                                             

---

[1] (1962-2008, R.I.P., a lot of people’s favorite writer.)

[2] I play computer games myself, if you’re wondering.  Some of them are awesome, but they’re just not literature yet (although some stuff from Bioware may be getting close).

[3] Currently it is fashionable to eschew value judgments as somehow unfair or distasteful.  This attitude proceeds from an inability to differentiate judgment from prejudice.  Prejudice is the particular form of stupidity that fails to recognize appropriate criteria for evaluation, but judgment—informed judgment—has always and rightly been considered the highest human faculty.  You have read Pride and Prejudice.  (Haven’t you?) 

   It must be added that rejection of value judgments is itself a value judgment, albeit a wrong one. 

[4] I’m not trying to be a downer here, but there it is.

[5] That is, to be subjectively, not just to look at or listen to another but to feel and think as another feels and thinks.

[6] This paragraph calls for consideration of story-media beyond traditional written literature:  movies, for instance.  As much as the present author love good movies, the argument must be made that film is (usually) limited by two elements:  time and the visual.  The visual medium appeals to the eye in a way that language does not, and for the most part the eye is naively biased towards the beautiful and the exceptional.  Also, few people have the patience for movies running more than two or three hours, limiting what can be said and shown.  Finally, the economics of movie production and distribution work against anything that isn’t popular and pleasing, two qualities that truth often lacks, alas.

[7] In fact, it has been argued that the act of writing produces its own Other, the reader, and that (therefore) even a diary writer is not writing to himself.  However personal, the self who writes is never identical with the self who reads.

[8] Here I’m talking about the reception side of all these arts.  Listening to music or watching dance (e.g.) are not the same as playing music or doing dancing.  The creation of those arts lies beyond the scope of this essay, just as they lie beyond my competence.

[9] Think of this way:  we look at a picture, and it may show us many things; we look through language, and to some degree must show things to ourselves.  The corollary is that it is possible to passively watch, but it is not possible to passively read.

[10] Or vice-versa, really, but that doesn’t matter here.

[11] Just as we come to trust some authors more than others.

[12] No doubt there is some good reason for the root shared by experience and experiment.   Look it up.

[13] And this representation, by the way, doesn’t depend on realism—it can just as fanciful as any computer game, so long as the aim is to involve the reader in subjective experience in some fully human way (as opposed to involving the player in, say, merely the tactics of spellcasting).  (This is the difference between Tolkien and World of Warcraft.)

[14] This, by the way is the point of English classes.  The true topic (I could say subject, but that is obviously a freighted word at this point) of English class is not literature per se, or even language, but the student’s relationship to these.  It’s impossible to “learn” the “content” of an English class in the way you can learn, say, Physics.  If a student refuses to read well and to try to write well, it’s not that the content didn’t get learned.  Rather, the content (the student’s relationship to language and literature) simply never came into existence at all.  An unopened book is hollow.

[15] Unless, of course, you’re not paying attention, in which case, go play!  You won’t have long.

[16] P. Rob (Springside, 2002-2009)

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and etc.

I'm not sure I agree with the argument I make below.  Take this as a writing exercise.  I wanted to see if I could articulate this stance and whether doing so would clarify my thinking.  I don't know that it has. I do know that the writing is a little stiff.

But if it *is* true that the use of the bombs saved many hundreds of thousands of other lives in the months that followed, this seems like a valid line of thinking.  The real problem (one not addressed here at all) is this:  how do we understand (even forgive) the horrors of the past without giving license to the future?

-


A few thoughts on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a propos of a recent personal discussion.

Obviously, bombing civilians is an awful thing and should not be done. This principle should guide us as we act in the present and plan for the future. But we do wrong by the past when we look at the atomic bombings and judge them purely in hindsight.

It's far from clear that Imperial Japan was ready to surrender. The "tottering Empire" myth shaped most condemnations of the bomb from the sixties until recently, but it has begun to give way. (The Soviets were fond of this line, but they had their own reasons.) Richard Frank's Downfall: the End of the Imperial Japanese Empire makes a strong case that Japan was far from finished, and I think most historians have taken his view as a necessary correction.

More to the point, Truman and company had no reason to *believe* that Japan was getting close to surrender. At the end of the war in Europe, Germany was in worse economic and military shape than Japan a few weeks later, and it still took fighting in the streets of Berlin before the Germans gave up. The Japanese were still fiercely loyal to the Emperor, with little popular resentment or expression of war weariness. (In Germany there was visible civilian cynicism about Hitler as early as 1944, but there seems not to have been any such cynicism in Japan.) The Japanese government put out no feelers of surrender, and were in fact accelerating their brutality towards POWs and conquered civilians--hardly the behavior of a country that expected to be negotiating as the losers any time soon.

The Americans in the summer of 1945 looked at Japan and knew that an invasion would be necessary in order to eliminate and replace (rather than merely contain and humiliate) the Japanese regime. They knew that invasion would be insanely costly in terms of American lives (not to mention Japanese lives, but of course no one did). The spectacle of an all-but-defeated Germany resisting the Russians at tremendous cost was really the only model at hand. No one welcomes the hated invader, even when defeat is inevitable.

In short, after four years of grinding slaughter in the Pacific, Truman faced the choice: he could launch a months-long invasion in which hundreds of thousands of American boys would die or be maimed, or he could use the new super-weapons and possibly end the war in a few days at the cost of no American lives. We can criticize the nature of the targets, but civilian targets were an established feature of the war as a whole to this point, not of the atom bombs particularly. (We had already been routinely fire-bombing Axis cities at higher civilian cost than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the end of the war, such attacks were routine.  They would have continued for months as the invasion approached.)

Ultimately the bombs saved more lives (on both sides) than they cost. Hirohito later said (unless this is myth--it's not my specialty) that the spectacle of the bombs was the only thing that allowed him to plausibly surrender, and that he could not have capitulated simply in the face of invasion. It can be argued, too, that the actual employment of the only two nuclear weapons in existence gave the world a view of horror that is responsible for preventing employment of the thousands of weapons that followed. Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Korean war (or Cuba or Vietnam) would almost certainly have gone atomic, and there were many more bombs available then.

Obviously we should take the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, viewed in hindsight, into all of our thinking about choices we make now and in the future. But we shouldn't (as Walser, whom I really respect, unfortunately does, and as Rawls apparently does too) mistake our ethical calculus for a comprehensive understanding and judgment of historical choices. Real experience is too messy and too fraught for that. I believe that Truman and the allies opted for the lesser of necessary evils as they understood them.

I suspect that not a few of my friends disagree here, particularly those leaning farthest left.  But I think the fault line is not essentially about the use of force, but about the use of historical experience, of hindsight.  To understand the use of the A-bombs in the circumstances of 1945 is not to condone the use of WMDs in the present or the future.  It's difficult to imagine how a leader today might come to face precisely the same choice that Truman did at that time.  Were they to do so, however, it is difficult to imagine how they could make a different choice.

On Contemporary Belief in Witchcraft

Two people I love most now attend an independent Evangelical church that is modern and highly polished in most respects. The crowd is mixed in age and contains a smattering of non-whites, the rock 'n roll gospel music is talented without dominating the service, the preacher is poised and presents himself as with-it and modern (or at least be-soul-patched). They are not charismatic in the technical sense, and most of the lessons I've heard (or heard of) are focused on morality, salvation, and modern life, not crazy demon stories.

And yet...

Dear Conservative Friend (Health Care Reform)

Dear Conservative Friend,

I’ve been listening to some of the claims about “Death Panels” and such in the current debate over health care reform. I know we don't have a great track record when it comes to controversial political issues, and I don't want to start a fight. But I have to say that you're falling for some pretty blatant propaganda when it comes to the idea that the Democratic reforms would mean some kind of euthanasia nightmare.

I've done my homework. The basis for the “euthanasia panic” appears to be the requirement that Medicare cover consultations between patients and doctors over end-of-life questions (which, as you know, deal with things like living wills and the patient’s intentions about comatose life support). End-of-life is a real medical issue—when it is possible for a machine to keep your lungs breathing for a decade after your brain has died, you need to think about whether that’s what you want for yourself. The inclusion of support for such discussions is itself non-controversial; numerous Republicans have supported similar moves in the past.

To draw some connection between coverage for those discussions and some sort of forced euthanasia is plainly ridiculous. I know you hate (on principle) the idea of Big Government authority, but making a leap from “support for end of life counseling” to “being put to death by the government” is about as valid as a leap from “support for childhood literacy” to “Matrix-style mind-control.” It’s like declaring that “support for public parks” leads to “the seizure of all private property.” It is logically false, it is groundless, and it is nothing more than a political scare tactic.

The facts are there: nothing in the bill goes anywhere near making someone choose death over life. (Or even choose to choose—end-of life counseling is no more mandatory than rhinoplasty.) But the best test for the truth of the euthanasia claim is this: what possible motive would the Democratic Party have for supporting a policy like that? Would any American group (beyond crazy KKK’ers) have any reason at all to want to kill other Americans for any reason? Is it simply that liberals are evil and enjoy doing evil things? Do liberals secretly long for the chance to impose a 1984-style totalitarianism because all they really crave is power?

You know me personally. I’m a liberal and I voted for Obama. We may disagree about reform of the employer-based health insurance system (which is all that this debate is really about), but do you really think that I am evil? Do you think I hate life or freedom or American ideals? If you know me, you know that I believe America is the best country the world has ever known.

Some people on the right do believe ridiculous things about people on the left, I’m sure, and the loss of the White House in 2008 has clearly been too much for them to handle. But you are way too smart for simple-minded extremism. Besides, it would put you in terrible company: the fear that Democrats want euthanasia is the same mania that drove some nutty leftists to believe that George Bush planned to suspend the Constitution or that Dick Cheney perpetrated 9/11 to get more power. It’s the same knee-jerk reaction that, on the left, equates any and all Christian cultural criticism with the world of The Handmaid’s Tale.

When I hear the argument that Obama’s healthcare proposals would lead to euthanasia, I’m reminded of the arguments about Obama's citizenship or his plans to suspend democracy and institute Islamic rule. Such claims make good radio, and they are probably a lot of fun, but they fail the reality test: what Americans of any political stripe would want something so offensively stupid as Islamic fundamentalism, a police state, or a world where the government decides who lives and who dies? Where would the Democratic Party find career politicians willing to commit *political* suicide for such a cause?

My point is this: the euthanasia panic isn’t about health care reform at all. It’s about how (at present) the right, but generally the left as well, chooses to demonize the political opposition. It’s about how we don’t even see the other side as fellow citizens.

I’m posting this message for my own purposes. That’s it. I just wish the present political climate didn’t make us so uncomfortable with each other.

Your SF Summer Reading List

(Written for Students)

This is the good stuff. If you’re interested in the possibilities that a “literature of change” offers to writers and readers, I encourage you to explore the books listed here. The great thing is that this list only scratches the surface. Most of these authors are still writing today.  Tomorrow there will be more of them.

Douglas Adams. Adams does on paper what Monty Python does on screen. His Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is a sharp, clever parody of SF conventions that every fan of the genre should read. Hilarious and smart. Too bad he died recently.

Isaac Asimov. The grandfather of modern SF. Asimov was the first to move 1940-50s “space stories” out of the heroic rocket-ship mode to explore more complex social and philosophical themes. His aptly named classic Foundation is the place to start.

Margaret Atwood. Normally considered a “mainstream” writer, Atwood sometimes touches on the fantastic and magical nevertheless. Her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale gives a chilling portrait of a near-future North American nation ruled by extreme fundamentalist Christians.  Her recent Oryx and Crake does something similar, but with genetic engineering and environmental collapse.

Clive Barker. Barker is both more gruesome and more intellectual than Stephen King. His career began in horror but has since expanded to deal with wider themes of desire and frustration in modern life. Imagica is a fantasy epic set in contemporary London but dealing with hidden magic and dimensions beyond our own. Barker’s short story collections will seriously disturb you.

Greg Bear. A good “Hard SF” writer whose science of choice is biology and genetic engineering. Smarter than Michael Crichton (who wrote Jurassic Park). Blood Music and Darwin’s Radio are Bear’s best. Great stuff for pre-med students.

Alfred Bester. Bester took the classic “space opera” model and made it into something weird. The Stars My Destination ushered in a whole new wave of 1960s SF writing that dealt openly with social change, altered states of consciousness, and anti-heroic protagonists.

Octavia Butler. Butler’s brilliant SF deals with race and other social issues without ever being preachy. Lilith’s Brood is a stunning trilogy (under one cover) that presents humanity’s genetic mixing with a truly alien species. Parable of the Sower depicts a violence-torn, economically ruined near future and the decent people struggling to make a life in it. Very powerful.

Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game is an ambiguously heroic novel about young people trained to be killers in the service of the State. Card deals with their training, their maturation, and finally with the ethical dilemmas posed by their role. His series The Seventh Son is an alternative history of the United States in which the American Revolution never happened and Native American magic is real.

Samuel Delaney. Delaney embodies the anarchist, free-spirited soul of 1960s SF. His future societies are always detailed, thought provoking, and vastly different from anything you’ve seen in fiction before. Triton and Dhalgren are two of his best.

Philip K. Dick.  The master of the paranoid form. Dick invents societies where things are never as they seem, and where political power can change the shape of reality itself. The movies Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall were based on his work. Read his novels The Man in the High Castle (set in an alternate America where the Axis won the second World War), A Scanner Darkly, and Valis (which details Dick’s encounters with a being that he believed was God).

Mary J. Engh. Arslan takes an unexpected premise—an almost unknown Asian warlord literally taking over the modern world, à la Alexander the Great—and develops it into a mature and affecting novel about fathers and sons.

William Gibson. Gibson basically invented the “Cyberpunk” style in the 1980s with his novel Neuromancer, set in a dark near future of computer hacking, street violence, and espionage. (The movie Johnny Mnemonic was a bad adaptation of the short story that later became Neuromancer.) Gibson’s novels generally deal with a rapidly changing world in which society is increasingly defined by surveillance and paranoia.  After Cyberpunk, Gibson went on to help invent Steampunk as well:  The Difference Engine (written with Bruce Sterling) is an alternate history that explores what happens when primitive computers are invented in nineteenth-century England.

Robert Heinlein. Another grandfather of the genre, Heinlein took SF in the 1950s and gave it a combative political edge. You may not agree with everything he says (his politics are Libertarian sometimes bordering on Fascist), but Heinlein is constantly thought provoking and vivid. Stranger in a Strange Land is about a messiah who comes from Mars. The movie Starship Troopers was basically a parody of Heinlein’s cold-war novel of the same name.

Frank Herbert. One of the great idea-writers of 1970s-80s SF. The Dune series (there are seven books, Dune being the first) depicts a far future that is just as complicated politically, culturally, religiously and economically as our own era. Herbert’s main theme is always the politics of religion. Heady and thought provoking.

Stephen King. King’s dozens of novels are all over the place, but some of them (e.g. The Shining and It) are very, very good. His post-apocalyptic thriller The Stand is just about the most chilling novel of good and evil that I’ve ever read.

Ursula Le Guin. SF as anthropology. The Left Hand of Darkness details the culture, politics, and crises of a world whose human inhabitants change gender on a monthly cycle. The Dispossessed is a smart Utopian novel of two planets with vastly differently social organizations. Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea trilogy (actually there’s a fourth book now) is the Fantasy world that many people love best after J. R. R. Tolkien’s.

Jonathan Lethem. Can SF be hip? Lethem proves it’s possible. Gun with Occasional Music is a wild take on the 1930s hard-boiled detective genre, except that it takes place in a near-future America where animals talk and kangaroos work for the Mafia. His mainstream novel Motherless Brooklyn is detective story whose protagonist has Tourette Syndrome. (Ask your science teacher what that is!)

H. P. Lovecraft. Writing in the 1920s, Lovecraft invented a dark mythology all his own, and writers continue to add to the world he created even today. Collections of Lovecraft’s many short stories (he never wrote a novel) are still in print. Start with “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” or “At the Mountains of Madness.”

Louise Marley. Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan explores the position of women in a fundamentalist neo-Islamic society on an Earth colony centuries from now.

Maureen McHugh. China Mountain Zhang’s protagonist is a young Chinese man living in a communist America. McHugh’s focus is not on action but on the myriad details and plausible changes that make up daily life and daily struggles in this society.

Ken Macleod. Gritty, Scottish, and unabashedly socialist. Cosmonaut Keep is a split story showing us both an Earth colony centuries from now and the events just years from today that ultimately make the colony possible. Smart and fast moving.

China Mieville. Is it SF or Fantasy? I don’t know, but it doesn’t get any weirder than Perdido Street Station. Set in the down-and-dirty streets of the alien city of New Crobuzon, the novel gives us a desperate cast of non-human eccentrics and binds them together in a sprawling, fascinating set of conflicts and coincidences. Secretive and seductive, beautiful and strange.  Good sequels follow.

Michael Moorcock. Moorcock is the extraordinary writer who just happened to elevate Fantasy from the gutter to high art. He has written more novels than you’ll ever need to read, but his Elric of Melniboné series is an epic worth your attention. The title character is a sickly albino who rules a failing empire. The brutal and glorious world Moorcock creates has more than a few echoes of our own mythologies.

James Morrow. Morrow has been called a Christian satirist, and his main target has always been the pretensions of his own religion. Towing Jehovah imagines the death of God in a very literal way: God’s two-miles-long corpse falls from heaven and lands in the Atlantic Ocean. A cast of difficult characters crews the oil tanker sent by the Vatican to tow the body into the Arctic Circle so that it will not decay. A parable.

Kim Stanley Robinson. “Terraforming” is the process of altering another planet’s environment so that it is more Earth-like. In the series that begins with Red Mars, Robinson chronicles the terraforming of our nearest neighbor by exploring the scientific, economic, and political dimensions of the project. Good hard SF.

Mary Doria Russell. Remember how the sixteenth-century Jesuits were involved in the colonization of the Americas? Russell’s novel The Sparrow imagines a twenty-first-century Jesuit mission to a newly discovered alien civilization on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. The characters are well imagined (if they do talk too much).

Melissa Scott. Scott’s characters inhabit fully-realized social milieus with customs, institutions, and even entertainments all their own. Shadow Man and Trouble and Her Friends exhibit Scott’s perennial concern with gender and sexuality in the variety of human societies she imagines.

Norman Spinrad. Indescribably smart, Spinrad’s novels push all the limits (and maybe all your buttons). The Void Captain’s Tale chronicles a disastrous journey on a starship powered by the human libido. The Iron Dream is a book-within-a-book: a hateful hack science fiction novel written in 1940s New York by a German immigrant (and failed artist) named Adolf Hitler.

Neil Stephenson. A satirist for the internet age. Snow Crash is a riotous parody of the cyberpunk style pioneered by William Gibson (see above). Cryptonomicon is a clever epic of code-breaking set both in World War Two and in a modern Asian “data haven” for hackers and software criminals.

Bruce Sterling. Another cyberpunk writer. Sterling’s novel Islands in the Net rivals Gibson’s as a dark political vision of an information-overloaded tomorrow. Distraction depicts the world of electoral politics and “spin” in a near-future (but vastly transformed) United States. Sterling also writes provocative nonfiction on the cultural and creative impact of technology.  With Gibson, he helped invent Steampunk in The Difference Engine.

Michael Swanwick. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is a darkly comic updating of all the fairy tales you’ve ever heard: its protagonist escapes imprisonment in a dragon-making factory and finds her way to a high school world of tough dwarves, hipster elves, malls, and magic spells. Jack Faust re-tells the Faust legend in a dystopian, totalitarian mode.  Great, smart, compelling re-imaginings all.

J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth is a much more complicated and richly imagined world than some people give it credit for. Tolkien was writing out of his experience as an accomplished scholar of European myths and medieval history, and his books still have a lot to say to the contemporary world.

Harry Turtledove. Turtledove has made a career our of alternative history, basing whole series on questions such as, What if the Roman Empire had never fallen? His best work is The Guns of the South, in which the Confederacy comes into possession of advanced twentieth-century machine guns. This odd premise is only a launching pad for the novel’s real purpose of exploring the American Civil War’s impact on history.

Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is my favorite writer. Sometimes compared to Herman Melville for his stylistic prowess and moral vision, Wolfe continually pushes the boundaries of SF/F in order to make the genre smarter and more mature. You simply must read his adventurous and intelligent Book of the New Sun, which comprises two (really four) volumes: Shadow and Claw and Sword and Citadel. Wolfe’s short stories are beautiful and strange, and his mainstream novel Peace is an unsettling meditation on aging and memory. His double novel The Knight and The Wizard is a good starting point.