::A Geek in Korea::

I’ve been sleeping poorly for the past three nights. I don’t know why, and it sucks. My normal sleep problems are tied to specific problems in my life, but this isn’t the same sort of thing.  I go to work and drink some coffee, teach a class while I try not to mumble through my lesson, then come back home. Everything is basically the same, except I get about five hours less sleep than usual.

I don’t know what’s keeping me up, but I don’t think I can maintain my health and social skills if it continues for a prolonged period of time. I feel like I’m sleepwalking through things at the moment, and I don’t like it. I’m not sleepy or yawning. I just feel generally “out of it”, and not on top of things like I usually am.

Usually when I can’t sleep it’s due to stress or worry. Job worries and general money worries haven’t been bothering me for a long time, but with a downturn in the Korean economy, and a large debt, this might seem like a reasonable guess. It’s certainly what my wife thought had kept me up after the first night, but I hadn’t been sitting around gloomy eyed because of the economy. We’ve got options. I’ve been working pretty much all the time the past few days. The increased workload means I have to get up much earlier. The only thought about my work at the moment is “When do these annoying morning classes end?” I don’t really have the energy to get worried about work.

The only other time I usually go sleepless is when I’ve caught some creative bug that demands an immediate itch. Usually I’ll stumble onto something new, get really caught up with it, and work late into the evening before realizing the time. When I’m finished with it, I go to bed and keep thinking about it. That’s why I lose sleep, revising and improving it in my head. I’ve done this because of being a Dungeon Master in the past, but not this time. I’m much more in control of my habits now that I’m aware of my tendency to get carried away from things and try to limit to planning between classes or on my breaks. Nothing much happens at work. I might spend a few minutes trying to think of a story complication or a way to make a mechanic work, but I’m not nearly as worried about it as I was in the past. I’m not looking for social acceptance this time around, so my stress has greatly diminished.

I’m also usually two or three days ahead on my blog. The past week, due to a lack of Internet access at work, as well as a general writer’s block, I’ve been posting day by day. I hate that. I’ve actually been posting later and later each day, struggling with writing about something in my day, even when I get things done. I’m usually bursting with ideas about what I want to write about, but now I can barely put together a few sentences.

I haven’t increased my caffiene intake. I still have a single coffee a day. My diet isn’t significantly different either. I go for exercise more frequently, trying to get away from the computer. I can’t keep my attention focused on things when I’m on the computer like I used to. I’m more scattered with my thoughts. When I’m not working I walk around the block for exercise, either with the dog, or alone. I really like walking as a way to spend my time, and have started going out for walks even when I have no particular reason to just because I enjoy it. Walking around the neighborhood while everyone was celebrating Lunar New Year was nice.

I listen to some podcasts when I’m on my own, but some of the things I was really interested in just a few months ago seem stale. There are a few things I’m always excited for, but the number of things I’m following on the whole is falling. I’m still following political stuff, but things like word etymology that I had been getting into last year don’t keep my attention and will be dropped. I still get excited about some television programs, but that’s only because I have so much time between classes I spend my day needing something to do. If I didn’t have my PMP for whatever reason at work, I’d probably go crazy from boredom at work since I wait around nearly as much as I teach these days and I have nothing else to do.

My relationship with my friends and family is fine.  I don’t have any major problems with anyone I deal with besides the occasional annoying student from time to time. Even then I just treat things like I’m on cruise control, because there is always a chance the students I deal with won’t be in my class in a month’s time. Professional detachment seems to come with the territory. I still look forward to the weekend when I don’t have to work, but it’s not like I have plans that would make me nervous about anything. Even having a baby on the way doesn’t have me rattled.

It might be connected with the weather. I might be trapped inside all day, working mornings into the late evenings. It doesn’t seem to have messed up my internal clock. I manage three or four hours of sleep after sitting awake for hours listless. I wake up at the exact same time each day, right before the alarm rings. This is completely normal. I get up at the same time every day. It’s just strange  for me to go to work not feeling rested. When I take a shower my eyes are puffy and inflamed. When I take naps, I wake up feeling no more rested.

I know things like exercise, diet, and stress are factors for sleeplessness. I’ve been trying to get away from the computer and get more sunlight in case I’m affected by the season too. Failing that, I don’t know how long this sleeplessness will last. I know I’m not my best when I’m not well rested, and I like being my best whenever possible.

I’m short on the details, but the new  foreigner coworker is supposed to arrive the middle of next week.  I don’t know details besides that they are American, and from “The Twin Cities”. I don’t even know which city in particular. Age? Qualifications? Gender? I know nothing. My director told me that I’ll have to go to Seoul to get training, and that they wanted me to go with this new person. I hope they prove to be competent, fast learners that don’t suffer from jet lag, because this franchise is rolling out now and I don’t know how far away from the shit pile it’s going to land. Someone that can keep awake while being trained after a long flight is about the best I can hope for at the moment.

One student asked when there would be a new foreigner at the school. I told them there should be someone in classes sometime next week from the United States. A few murmurs of interest from some of the bad students got me wondering what was going on.

One group of students said, “Oh, I miss the last foreign teacher. I wish he’d come back.”

The other, more vocal group of students said, “I hope it’s a woman.”

“Why do you want a female teacher?”

The reply was a glimpse into the character of a frustrated boy, “I want someone new to fight with. I haven’t fought with a female Foreign teacher in a long time. ”

This wasn’t a threat of violence. The bad students just intend to make the new teacher’s life a living hell, like they try to do with all teachers. I’ve been here so long that nearly nothing they do or say rattles me anymore. They want easier targets, which means…I must be tough?

I guess I should warn the new teacher, whenever they arrive, to lay the smack down on a few of the dumber students.

With Lost and Battlestar Galactica (and to a much, much lesser extent shows like Fringe) being back on television, there has been plenty to watch recently. However, the gem I’ve discovered that no one I know had talked about before this week was a show called Breaking Bad. If you already know about this television show, excuse yourself while I gush, but shame on you for not telling me about it earlier. I was surprised that even people that usually keep a pretty good watch over geek culture, like the Totally Rad Show, had completely missed this. If you run across something this good, you are supposed to share it!

Breaking Bad, as it stands, is a 7 episode show. I’m a little more than half way through and I can’t stop telling everyone I know to watch it as soon as possible. The second season starts in March. It’s about a guy named Walter that was a high school science teacher. He has a second degrading job at a car wash to pay the bills. He has a son with disabilities, and is expecting his second child. He finds out some bad news about his health and then starts cooking Crystal Meth with a local drug dealer. He wants to sell it so that he can leave his family with cash because of his health problems. Quickly, his life spirals out of control and he’s living a double life. It might be a fish out of water story, but it’s handled very well. He is hanging out with one of his old students that he had failed, but has unwittingly become the drug kingpin in his town.

It’s a very believable show where people need to make choices that they don’t want to make, but are trapped by their circumstances. You empathize with the characters, even the drug users, which is really hard for me to do. The main character, Walter, is a good guy at heart, forced to do terrible things at great personal cost because he sacrifices for his family. His wife just has a way of saying something that makes you feel she’s right, but wishing she’d be quiet because you know Walter is going to suffer trying to please her. She doesn’t know the weight of responsibilties he’s carrying. He weighs his options and lands at a perfectly rational place that is at the same time completely crazy

Perhaps it’s because he has a baby on the way in the series, and needs to work hard to pay off a debt to help his family, but I really sympathise with Walter. I hope to never be pushed to such extremes to make a living, and I never want my life to take the crazy turns his had, but I enjoy watching him handle each new problem that presents itself. I highly recommend this show.

Take a little time out of your day and please go vote for this blog over at the Korean Blog awards for “Best Diary, Blog” (Survey 2).

It’s listed erroneously as “Geek in Korea”, but the URL is correct.

Go vote for the numerous Korean blogs in different categories and find new websites to read. I didn’t nominate this blog, so it must have been one of the readers  that put me on this list to begin with! Thank you for your consideration, and if you go on to vote for me, thank you for your vote!

Due to the move to a new location on a different floor of the school, the teachers and students are in a sort of limbo. The new school hasn’t started, but we’re in their classrooms. The new system isn’t in place, but we aren’t using our old system any more. The remnants of the previous system still linger on. We have no computers, no office, and move like nomads through the halls carrying out coats and personal belongings. It’s really a strange sight.

I still check homework I assign, but I can no longer post homework to the Internet for students to check while at home. Some of the worse students have started calling their teacher’s bluff and saying that the “Rewards” we give them for finishing homework won’t be honored this month when they go to check them in. They are saying they’d rather be wrong and burn off any rewards they’d earn, because they know they won’t hit the cash in mark before the school switches over. I honestly don’t know if they are right, but I’m making it a hard decision by doubling rewards and giving them more opportunities to reach that cut off mark before their time is up.

Homework, journals, and other paperwork is now officially a waste of time. If it doesn’t go into the computer, it doesn’t get tabulated. If it doesn’t go on a report card, there isn’t any point to checking, other than keeping up the mirage we still care. I’m not going to sit down and grade fifty journals on my time to catch up when all that happens is the secretary looks at them for a minute before handing them all back to the students. The students only hand them in to get practice, but they only correct and fix their essays when it affects their grades later. I did grade some student’s journals while they were in my class and gave them a face to face critique of their writing. Even with the grades being a farce, they can get something out of that. It’s just the piles of papers with students I don’t teach that I will no longer bother touching.

Cameras are inactive and disables, yet still installed. If I ever wanted revenge for a bad class, this would be the time. One of my worst classes asked if I ever had problems with students beating me up when there weren’t cameras in the classroom. I laughed and told them about a time when a student spit gum at me. I told them that if they ever did something like hit me or bite me, I’d do the same thing to them that I did to the boy that spit his gum at me. They asked what I did.

Nonchalantly, I said, “I picked him up, in his chair, and threw him out of the class. Literally.”

The students thought that was hilarious, but they also wanted to know when and where this happened. I was subdued on the details, but if there is some high school student looking for revenge for being tossed out of class waiting for me when they come back to class next time, I’ll know they found the right kid.

At our last game of Dungeons and Dragons, I jumped at the opportunity to DM the next session. I had a rough idea about what we were going to do during the gameplay sections, but I wanted to do my first bit of Homebrew for D&D 4th edition. The first, last, and only other time I planned to make a mission entirely from scratch, I got obsessive about it.

This is because I was nervous about having people over to my house while I was a host, also because I wanted to show I could put together and plan a story that was interesting for the group. There were so many mechanical and story issues I thought I could capture in a few hours of gameplay, but instead the actual session turned out to be average. I blame the complexities of D&D 3.5 edition. My mistake was biting off too much my first time around, and not running something already made by an expert DM. Trying to get a handle on all the rules when only recently becoming a player myself put me way out of my depth.

Anyway, now that we’ve moved onward to D&D 4th edition, and I have a few pre-built encounters of experience under my belt, I decided to see if I could throw together three encounters, and only encounters of limited scope, to tell a short, one shot sort of story. I figured with the four day weekend giving me lots of free time, I could surely plan out what I want to do in the game and set it down to paper. Since I had sort of said what I had planned for the next scenario, I have to come up with it and can’t wimp out and use a pre-written adventure now.

The problem is that every time I try to come up with an idea, I suddenly try to be too clever. Coming up with a simple “Go here, fight some people” sort of mission is easy. The Dungeon Master’s Guide provides the rules for setting out an appropriate challenge based on the levels. That only gives you the rules about which monsters, traps, or challenges you should set out on the table to test the skills of players. Putting a story to those elements and giving a driving reason why the players should attempt those challenges is always where my stuff gets out of control from me.

In particular, this encounter has to be limited in scope because I promised to take over for one session. One of our players will be in the States for the rest of the month so I need to get my story done before he leaves. I’m wrapping up a loose plot point from the introduction of our characters and I wanted to make it simple. I’m also only going to have half the time we usually work with because the last adventure’s climatic battle ran long and we’re going to finish up at the beginning of the session I’m running my encounters. That means that if my stuff starts to run long, I’ll have a hard time keeping people’s enthusiasm up to finish. I know I start to fade after a few hours and can’t concentrate as well as I should.

Right now, I’m trying to mix things up. I started out with the idea for a limited number of encounters. I’m trying to contain my enthusiasm and keep it short and sweet. One is informational and fact finding. This was supposed to set up the plot of the story. One is an encounter based on a difficult river crossing. This was supposed to represent the harrowing journey. The third was going to be a climatic showdown on a partially sunken boat. The problem is that I couldn’t find a plot contrivance that would compel the characters into heading into the danger I presented them. The last thing I wanted to do was go building an entire set of encounters and hear, “Wait, why are we doing this again?” If that’s all we did, it would be lame. The stuff our DM has been doing has worked better than that, so I think I need to rise to the challenge and make a story.

Finding a plot to the challenge was more difficult that the mechanics of running the adventure. Picking monsters and running combat are fairly easy. I’ve even got more freedom than normal, since the plot allows for a crazy mix of monsters that can be thrown into the combat. That’s why I really wanted to run this encounter. This was one of the “hooks” I had added, and I intended on paying it off.

I’ve decided that the “informational” part of the plot will be a murder mystery sort of skill challenge. They have to head across the river to find some sort of evidence to clear a friend’s name. I’ve got the ending, and now I need to work backwards to set it up.This will probably take up the majority of my time to do. Making sure the story is consistent and can have clues that I can give away for the players to solve without being spoonfed is a challenge. In the end I hope it’s like CSI: D&D, except with less lab work.

This idea has evolved over the weekend, and I hope to have it fleshed out well so that I can try out a new skill challenge system the other DM in the group posted for us to use. The other two encounters will have to be finished sometime this week too. I got a lot less finished than I thought this weekend. I have the entire series of encounters to plan, and I don’t have very much time this week to do it. I’m working double shifts with doubly annoying work conditions, so anything I get done during the week will be a challenge of epic proportions. The lessons I’ve learned from previous D&D sessions has already helped me, so I don’t feel nearly as overwhelmed as I did before, but it’s still a lot of work.

With great story telling comes great responsibilties.

2009
1 Jan New Year. (Celebrated on a Thursday)
25-27 Jan Seollal (Lunar New Year) (Celebrated on a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday).
1 Mar Independence Movement Day. (Celebrated on a Sunday)
1 May Labour Day (not an official public holiday but many companies and financial markets close). (Not celebrated at my school, occurs on a Friday)
5 May Children’s Day. (Celebrated on a Tuesday)
2 May Buddha’s Birthday. (Celebrated on a Saturday)
6 Jun Memorial Day. (Celebrated on a Saturday)
15 Aug Liberation Day. (Celebrated on a Saturday)
2-4 Oct Harvest Moon (Chuseok). (Celebrated on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday)
3 Oct National Foundation Day. (Celebrated during Chuseok. ALSO ON a SATURDAY!)
25 Dec Christmas Day. (Celebrated on a Friday)

Other than Lunar New Year, this year SUCKS for holidays. Anything celebrated on a Saturday or Sunday isn’t really celebrated at all by schools I work at, and there are long stretches of months where there are absolutely no days off. While having two days off this week, and one day off for New Year’s Day was nice this month, the next time I’ll have any time off on a weekday is probably Children’s Day in May, four months away. I’m not even sure they still celebrate that holiday officially anymore. Even if I get that time off, there isn’t another multiple day holiday during the week for the rest of the year. Chuseok stealing National Foundation day this year, but still falling on a weekend to shrink the numbers of days off even more is also a gigantic insult to all workers. These lunar holidays really suck, because they fall on weekends and don’t get moved.

There used to be more days on the list, like Arbor day, but those got removed as a concession for moving to an officially sponsored 5 day work week at most offices.  As a resul, in 2009, I will get a whopping five officially days off this year. No snow days. No days off for good behavior.

The fewer the holidays, the worse it is trying to plan anything specifically for those days to join them too. Train, bus, and airplane reservations disappear months in advance every time there is a three day weekend or a lazy work week because everyone else is thinking the same thing, “I’ve got to get out of this office and relax!”

While the situation may seem hopeless, there are at least two bits of vacation I can plan for in advance. I’ll be taking off work when the baby arrives, as well as when my parents show up a few months later. Depending on if I sign my contract, there are also two weeks of non-paid “vacation” sometime during the year that might be offered. Who knows what I’ll be told about those vacation days when they actually arrive. Depending on the franchise, I might even have to surrender free time I have on a weekend for “Training” too. I will not take to that kindly.

Financially, the long periods of time I work uninterrupted by vacation is a boon. I get paid by the hour, and missing days hit my checkbook. However, my sanity is also a boon to my finances, and nothing makes a year seem longer than a long string of months with no hope of getting some time off for yourself. It might seem petty to complain right at the end of a four day weekend, but I won’t get another decent Korean holiday until Korean Thanksgiving in the fall of 2010, and that’s just ridiculous.

Black Uncle Cheesecake Company

Black Uncle is made of passion, love, and stereotypes.

This weekend is when extended Koreans families typically get together for Lunar New Year, one of the two biggest Korean holidays. My wife’s family has a series of complicated rules about who would actually want to get together in an extended group. Some permutations of the family gathering simply do not work as a cohesive whole, and it takes a major event to bring about such a reunion. Instead, we get together in groups to approximate a gathering in one way or another. I’ve been to two so far this year.

For example, I got invited to visit my mother-in-law’s house with my wife right after work. My aunt’s family had come to visit, and we get along with all of them. My brother-in-law and father-in-law weren’t present, which means the younger cousins had the run of the television and were the focus of the scrutiny. When I said something, instead of my wife harassing me to speak Korean, the middle school students got harassed for not translating what I said for their parents. Someone is going to be bothered, but it might as well not be me.

They commented that I had lost weight and looked good despite working a long schedule. I greatly appreciate this sort of lie. They watched boring Korean television shows while I was watching my PMP. Nothing hostile was said except to the children for not studying their English harder and trying to talk to me. Both my mother-in-law and her sister are amazing cooks, so we were spoiled with five star quality foods. We had smoked duck, fermented bean curd stew, and cheopchae noodles.

Then, on Sunday, my wife said that we had been invited back to my mother-in-law’s house to eat another meal with her father and brother. Ironically, I’m the only one in the family that actually enjoys the traditional Korean meal of rice dumpling soup. You are supposed to eat rice dumpling soup on the holiday to celebrate growing one year older. My mother-in-law had decided to make it specifically for me, so we were going to have to go despite the snow and cold weather. Oh no, more delicious Korean food? How I suffer.

When we arrived, I was parked in front of the television with my father-in-law once again. He commented that I looked fat and was in poor health, despite having rested for the past two days and feeling much better than the last time I had seen him. He said I need to take better care of my health. I just smiled politely. He went back to criticizing his wife shortly enough, and telling my brother-in-law to clean the table. My brother-in-law peeked out of his room long enough to change the channel on the television a few times before he disappeared in his room till dinner was ready.

We had another amazing meal that was totally worth all the awkwardness. They forced me to eat seconds, but it wasn’t a difficult thing since my mother-in-law cooks the best rice dumpling soup I’ve ever had. During the meal, my brother-in-law was getting bothered for not wanting to go to the countryside and visit his grandmother. She’s lonely during the holidays out in the country, but no one wants to visit for extended periods of time officially. They might stop in to check in on her, but they don’t want to make it a reason for an official reunion because getting together with the family means the women all must work hard to keep all the men fed. Korean dishes, other than kimchi, are usually prepared right before eating, so Korean women work extremely hard whenever the relatives get together. 99% of the time the men do no work, so there had better be a good reason to get everyone together, otherwise the women work too hard to justify it.

My mother-in-law is being the responsible one and making sure that she visits her mother, and she wanted my brother-in-law to come too so that they could honor her father’s filial piety service. My father-in-law agreed that my brother-in-law should also pay respects and go, even if he wanted to spend his holiday relaxing. Since my wife isn’t “part” of the family any more by marrying me, she got to sit through the meal free from the guilt her parents were dropping on her brother. He finished his soup and left the table in a hurry. Poor guy. I had to chuckle. At least I wasn’t the focus of the evening.

I went to check on what my brother-in-law was up to in his room and he explained the new MMORPG he was playing. He was a merchant tailor that tried selling items made out of chicken feathers. Riveting. It was still better than whatever was on Korean television, so once that conversation ran its course, I eventually just watched some television on my PMP and kept myself out of the conversations that were going around the room. My wife helped do dishes, then we left, family duties completed. My brother-in-law drove home, which was nice of him.

This is all very different from my American relative’s gatherings. The women work too hard there too, but generally I think the family goes out of it’s way to meet each other, instead of trying to find new reasons to avoid each other. I got to see all the relatives I wanted to see this holiday, which was good. I’m still not always comfortable with the way the family operates around each other, but I greatly prefer a small setting with people I’m familiar with than a larger group of relatives that I don’t see as often.

My buddy had a list over on his website of part of The Guardian a list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. Following his format, here are the sci-fi/fantasy novels on the list I’ve read. The ones I’ve read are in bold, the ones I attempted but gave up on are italicized:

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio (1999)
Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Arthur C Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953)
GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)
Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
M John Harrison: Light (2002)
Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)
Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889)
Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)