Karen Joy Fowler's Latest Novel is Science Fiction in the Present

Bewildered by the death of her father, a woman named Rima finds her balance by plunging into a thicket of half-true tales and half-real avatars on the web. Online, she meets her father again — or at least, the many constructs of him he's left behind via a website he's devoted to his writing, and in the fan fiction people have written about a fictional murderer named after him in a series of mystery novels. Karen Joy Fowler's unsettling, wistful new novel Wit's End offers us a present-day world that is science fictional in the same way William Gibson's recent present-day novels are: Her characters' lives are so deeply bound up with technology that it's hard to tell where human connection ends and internet connectivity begins. The author of brilliant scifi novel Sarah Canary, and more recently of non-scifi bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club, Fowler is back in fine form with Wit's End. More »