Y
Others:
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, and in the alternative history category, The Years of Rice and Salt (World history if the black death had wiped out essentially all of europe--yay!)
Ursula K LeGuin - The Dispossesed.
When I was twelve, I wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer. Today, I'm not sure I ever really became one. I suspect I was already something else when I began - probably what Donald Theall (1928-2008) defined as "paramodernist", meaning any cultural text that is neither modern nor postmodern, but can be classified as either/both). I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any "future" I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into "worlds" (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be "the future".
William Gibson recently wrote an article for New Scientist about the future of science fiction.
Just started reading the Year of Rice and Salt. my, it's good! really, really good.
I'm a sucker for alternate history done right (Yiddish Policeman's Union too)
Theall was McLuhan's only PhD student. He is probably the best art/literary critic in terms of connecting radical modernism (late Joyce, Kafka, Dada, Surrealism, Vorticism, etc.) to postmodern science fiction and media studies. He cites Deleuze more than McLuhan though.
If Duchamp's The Large Glass (1914) marks a turning-point in the marriage of art, science and technology, Joyce's major new directions in and revisions of the style of Ulysses (1919) marks the moment of his moving toward his complex merger of narrative, science, mathematics, technology and poetics in Finnegans Wake. While Apollinaire, Tzara, Duchamp, and Picabia had noted the value of the transgressive potency of the "pun" in their new "playful science" of the new post-electric arts, Joyce consciously set out to develop the polyvalent, polysemic "pun" using it along with grammar (traditional grammatica, early linguistics and semiotics), mathematics and mnemonic theory to achieve the "abnihilisation of the etym."4 While the efforts of these artists's and of Joyce may initially seem far removed from questions of digitalisation, virtuality or hypertextuality today, they actually contribute to an understanding of the social, artistic, intellectual and practical (i.e., applied) contexts leading to their development. In discussions of art and technology in the 1960s and after, Duchamp, Max Ernst and others stand as figures on the road to the MIT Media Lab, for at the root of the evolution of digital, artificial or virtual reality (i.e., cyberspace) are the early post-electric visions of synaesthesia, of the "orchestration [or integration] of the arts" and of the networks of connections and allusions to other arts, science and technology.5
I dunno - according to the Dick thread started ages ago there is much love for it here -
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=220&highlight=high+castle
I prefered Ubik and Flow my Tears but I am yet to be convinced I am reading truly great stuff when i read him. But, then again, I'm not a Sci-Fi expert and any I've read has been based on recommendations here.
And, sorry - I called it High Tower when in fact it is High Castel, sorry.
commentators from William Gibson to Michael Heim frequently describe Finnegans Wake as an exemplar of hypertext. Ted Nelson, too, has drawn attention to the literary characteristics of the medium; indeed, his most famous axiom, "everything is deeply intertwingled", is distinctly Wakeian. Joyce's exploitation of equivocation is well recognised as a method of dreamwork. But it is less well known as a form of electronic thought, of hyperlogic. Joyce extended verbal freeplay to such a degree that his language space becomes a manifestation of the marvelous, the phantasmagoric [...] The inclusiveness made possible by the Wake in this respect makes Lautreamont's chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table seem positively banal. We can learn also learn a lot about the concept of extension from the Wake, for its systematic patterns of self-reference create the dense, web-like organization of information ("messes of mottage") (FW 183) that we associate with the term "network".