Bob Toomey (btoomey@javanet.com)
Sun, 26 Dec 1999 04:17:26 +0000
"Paul J. Giguere" wrote:
>>BTW, The Phillip K. Dick novel that "Bladerunner"
was based on is well
>>worth reading, and has one of the all time great
titles: "Do Androids
>>Dream of Electric Sheep?"
>Phillip K. Dick was a great writer and DADoES was a
truly great novel.
Well, Dick is probably my favorite writer, although he didn't
do much that fits with this list. But briefly for those who
are interested in one of America's great home grown
surrealists, novels worth seeking out would include: The Man
in the High Castle (a very mainstream take on an alternate
USA where the Axis won WW II), Martian Time-Slip (probably
his best book in spite of the ditzy title), The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (his most surreal and
terrifying), A Scanner Darkly (the closest Dick got to
writing an actual crime novel), and Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said (Woolrich on LSD). It's rarely mentioned but
worth noting that Dick's stuff, for all of its wild
inventiveness and metaphysical play, is also very
funny.
> Another science fiction/detective novel set in the
future was Alfred
> Bester's THE DEMOLISHED MAN. Definitely worth a
read. I'm not as fond
> however of Isaac Asimov's two cross-genre novels
CAVES OF STEEL and NAKED SUN.
THE DEMOLISHED MAN is more of a police procedural centering
around an impossible crime: How do you commit a murder in a
society where the cops can read minds? Likewise, THE CAVES OF
STEEL is a locked room mystery, where the room is New York
City. I have a higher opinion of it than you do.
Other SF/fantasy more in the hardboiled vein include: Glen
Cook's series about a PI named Garrett in a world of magic,
starting with SWEET SILVER BLUES; similar but better is
Michael Reeves' DARKWORLD DETECTIVE; for a straight SF
extrapolation of the mean streets gone meaner, the Carlucci
novels by Richard Paul Russo, the first of which is
DESTROYING ANGEL; and William Gibson's famous NEUROMANCER,
the book that coined the term cyberspace, owes more than a
passing nod to Chandler.
BobT
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