These books are recommended not just as direct source but as inspiration in narrative and how worlds might be constructed. think of them as tasty lubricant for the brain. More to follow.
RIDDLEY WALKER-RUSSELL HOBAN
Riddley WaIker is set in an unspecified, post-apocalyptic era in the future, when dogs have become humanity's enemies, and history is a rubble of allegory. It's told in a language that recalls the "smashed mess of mottage" of Finnegan's Wake, but Mr. Hoban's inventiveness guarantees that the language of Riddley is his own creation. Guttural yet eloquent, we hear in it echoes of rudimentary English (and a tendency toward sagas) that evoke Beowulf, mixed with remnants of the technological catchphrases and political jargon of the 20th Century.
WILLIAM GIBSON-IDORU
Amazon.com Review
The author of the ground-breaking science-fiction novels Neuromancer and Virtual Light returns with a fast-paced, high-density, cyber-punk thriller. As prophetic as it is exciting, Idoru takes us to 21st century Tokyo where both the promises of technology and the disasters of cyber-industrialism stand in stark contrast, where the haves and the have-nots find themselves walled apart, and where information and fame are the most valuable and dangerous currencies.
When Rez, the lead singer for the rock band Lo/Rez is rumored to be engaged to an "idoru" or "idol singer"--an artificial celebrity creation of information software agents--14-year-old Chia Pet McKenzie is sent by the band's fan club to Tokyo to uncover the facts. At the same time, Colin Laney, a data specialist for Slitscan television, uncovers and publicizes a network scandal. He flees to Tokyo to escape the network's wrath. As Chia struggles to find the truth, Colin struggles to preserve it, in a futuristic society so media-saturated that only computers hold the hope for imagination, hope and spirituality
RICHARD PAUL RUSSO-CARLUCCI
Collected together for the first time in one volume-this is Richard Paul Russo's critically-acclaimed science fiction trilogy featuring police Lt. Frank Carlucci investigating high-tech crime and corruption in a near-future San Francisco.
DON WEBB-THE DOUBLE
From Library Journal
John Reynman awakens one day to discover a man who looks just like him lying dead in his living room. John's subsequent dealings with police, his relationship with the female lawyer he hires, and his attempt to learn about his double all take place in a surreal world punctuated by arid humor, graphic sex, and bizarre characters. As he stumbles across arcane clues a weird witness, two books in a car, three men at the door, a strange message on his laptop he ponders the reality of death.
STEVE ERICKSON-AMNESIASCOPE
A postmodern flaneur in a spectral, futuristic L.A., the narrator of Erickson's foggy, metafictional fifth novel is a former novelist known only as "S." Self-absorbed, verging on paranoid schizophrenia, S delivers a sustained, often hypertheoretical monologue on the nature of cities and memory, on the compulsion to write and have sex and on particular movies and people who may or not be figments of his imagination. S's L.A. is a surreal city of ruins, divided into dozens of time zones and lit in concentric rings by official "backfires" meant to separate it from the "new America" to the east. S lives in a dilapidated art-deco hotel and works for a newspaper that operates in the bombed-out Egyptian Theater, but spends much of his time with his girlfriend, Viv ("my little carnal ferret"), trolling the bohemian demimonde-a fanciful realm of voluptuous prostitutes, tortured artists, drug addicts, strip joints and bookstores. What S ultimately seeks is love and redemption; yet he's trapped in a kind of psychological Mobius strip, as the city itself, the fires that consume it and the people who walk its streets appear to be nothing more than projections of his own musings on entropy and lost identity.
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