Word: fiction
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...best novels written about Sept. 11, 2001, was published in August 2000. Look to Windward, by Scottish science-fiction writer Iain M. Banks, is set in a galaxy-wide civilization called the Culture that's so ridiculously technologically advanced that people have become functionally immortal godlings. They can do anything they want; therefore everything is a game and nothing matters. When they interfere in the affairs of a less advanced species called the Chelgrians, the Chelgrians retaliate with a grotesque act of terrorism...
...need a shoulder to cry on. But there is a fine line between being a good friend and becoming a burden who doesn’t understand personal boundaries. In “The Soul Thief,” an eerily provocative and creative work of fiction, Charles Baxter explores the nature of relationships and identity while commenting on the modern American experience. Ambiguity and contingency mediate the relationships in “The Soul Thief,” making it difficult to separate one character from another. An unidentified narrator opens the book with a disembodied portrait of Jerome...
NASA researchers, including one Harvard professor, have found that the surface of Mars has been too acidic to sustain life for the past four billion years, suggesting that Martians are more the realm of science fiction than astronomical research...
...death did, however, untether Ballard's writing from the outer space of conventional science fiction. Instead, he began to explore the "inner space" of everyday culture that was being shaped by consumerism, T.V., sex and celebrity - most of it American. The psychotic hero of his provocative, experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) stumbles through chapters like Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. and You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe. The character's own sense of reality seems to crumble along with the last vestiges of novelistic realism...
...suffering from advanced prostate cancer, Ballard finds the answers that matter in his children and grandchildren - his Miracles of Life. But there are miracles of fiction here, too. So convincing was the story he made of the horrors of Lunghua that when Ballard finally returned there in 1991, it was as if he had "walked up to a mirage, accepted that in its way it was real, and then walked straight through it to the other side." Ballard's own journey from inner to outer space turned out to be no distance...