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I'm going to try a balancing act and support both Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Vladimir Nabokov's Ada because they're full of the SciFi trappings, but so absurdly speculative that they become science-challenge in a religious vein. Prove it Wrong novels, guaranteed to bring NLP-fans, the gnosticism-is-a-science types, and sometimes just the optimistic up and gunning. There's no stab at being real science, and yet, there are people who ascribe to the ideas in our own world, and the metaphoric relevance makes the practical application entirely secondary... but you still have to allow for a broad chance there may be reflections of, if not entirely accurate projections of, real future science in them.
They're both politically and socially relevant, damned well written and emotionally viable, both being in their way guidebooks of failure, stabs and corrrection, and still more failure, glorious and pathetic. Neither makes an attempt to be directives to life or society, to have great lessons or assignations of the moral realm. Snow Crash was a good riff on its cyberpunk predecessors, while acting as encouragement towards a future and new developments. Ada did something similar with its predecessors, precursors, and projected future responses and developments. Neither is afraid to be goofy, makes a stab at being dreadfully serious, they wear their influences on sleeves and across chest, face and palms of their literary hands, and both contain references to Finnegans Wake, which can't hurt. |
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