While I was writing my third novel, Un-American Activities, I watched a lot of conspiracy theory videos on youtube. The book is a series of interrelated stories exploring a variety of popular conspiracy theories and I was entertained by videos about UFO sightings, Area 51, and mysterious satellites lurking in Earth’s orbit. but I was particularly fascinated by the videos about the “nephilim”. these combined apocalyptic theology with conservative social ideology and blatantly photoshopped giant skeletons to argue that an alien race of human angels once ruled the earth.
the videos are a kind of popular science fiction that weaves ideas drawn from often contradictory sources into reactionary cultural paranoia. For the book, I took some of these conspiracies and turned them back into fiction, but treated them as literal truth.
You are reading: Best conspiracy books fiction
These ideas have always had a special attraction for me. they exist at a curious intersection between fictional and historical interpretations of events, highlighting how much of what we understand as “history” is a partial narrative, a history based on a selective interpretation of the facts. in a way, every conspiracy theory, like a story, tries to simplify the complexity of an event into a stable, unified narrative, with clearly traceable agency and explainable motive. as a result, the conspiracy theory tends to prevail with a stronger sense of truth and falsehood, right and wrong. the fiction writer does something somewhat similar, but without pretending to reveal the truth. the best novelists, it seems to me, use conspiracy theories to show complexity and explore the doubts, confusions, and uncertainties that lurk in every official version of “what really happened.”
These novels explore both “real” and fictional conspiracy theories, showing how history mixes with fiction and speculation can complement reality.
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1. the illuminatus! Comprising the Eye in the Pyramid, the Golden Apple, and the Leviathan trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, this is the cult fiction of postmodern conspiracy theory. The authors were associate editors at Playboy and claimed to have been inspired by letters they received from readers, full of bizarre plotlines and paranoid tirades. Taking these theories as truth, Shea and Wilson wrote a novel that playfully melds a variety of conspiracies, particularly around the Illuminati, into a wacky intertextual collage of countercultural mayhem, including their own religion: Discordianism.
2. libra de don delillo (1988)the image of heat and light is woven through delillo’s fictional account of the jfk assassination, representing the sheer volume of material on the event, the overwhelming and dazzling accumulation of information. at one point a character asks: “what are you holding back? how much more is there?” I’m still looking for that last detail that explains what happened. delillo’s novel dramatizes the extent to which information overload does not always lead to clarity or understanding.
3. thomas pynchon’s cry of lot 49 (1966)what if a hidden conflict between two rival mail delivery companies was the key to understanding the history of the united states? a secret postal system: the tristero, with mailboxes disguised as garbage cans displaying the mysterious catchphrase w.a.s.t.e (we await the silent empire of the tristero), is an ever-present presence in this novella. But does it exist, or is it all a figment of Oedipa Maas’s feverish imagination as she tries to execute a former lover’s will in the middle of the pop cultural wasteland of Southern California?
4. Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972)In Reed’s postmodern voodoo fable, the Order of Wallflowers is an international conspiracy seeking control and order. fights to repress the “jes grow” virus, a feverish dance of jazz and freedom spread by certain black artists (“jes grow that played the tenor of john coltrane; that colored the voice of otis redding”). Reed rewrites and undermines Judeo-Christian mythology by drawing on voodoo traditions and Afrocentric mythology to produce a hybrid tapestry of alternate history and parody mythology.
5. the plot against the united states by philip roth (2004)a celebrity “strongman” charles lindbergh becomes president of the united states. Backed by obscure foreign powers and sympathetic to Hitler, Lindbergh begins to introduce anti-Semitic policies. for a moment it looks like the country might be about to ally with the Nazis. however, roth concludes his alternate history with a clear resolution and the normal course of events is restored. something like this could never happen in real life, could it?
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6. the trial of franz kafka (1925) josef k never finds out why the agents have come to arrest him or what he is supposed to have done wrong, and neither does the reader. The opaque nature of the conspiracy against K, and his futile efforts to make sense of the situation, point to a faceless world of bureaucratic terror and anticipate the unreal but oppressive nature of many totalitarian regimes.
7. daniel de el doctorow’s book (1971)in 1953, julius and ethel rosenberg were executed after being found guilty of disclosing nuclear weapon designs to the ussr. the tense case did much to stoke fears of Soviet infiltration during the cold war’s darkest days. Doctorow’s novel is a fictional account of the case from the point of view of his eldest son, who investigates what happened to his parents while he was studying for his Ph.D. The novel is set against the backdrop of Vietnam War protests as Doctorow makes a tongue-in-cheek comment on the nature and possibility of dissent in America.
8. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004)It is impossible to summarize the scope and complexity of Bolaño’s 900-page masterpiece, but at its core are the unsolved murders of hundreds of women in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa. . The failure of the authorities to solve these crimes seems related, in some way, to the German fictional writer Benno von Archimboldi, who is eventually tracked down by a team of academics to the same city. Dense, enigmatic and polyvocal, 2666 blends fact with fiction and documentary with invention to comment on the tense and murderous nature of Mexican-American history.
9. Life of Marge Piercy (1980)The turn from anti-war and pro-environmental activism in the 1960s to more violent anti-state action in the late 1970s is the subject of Piercy’s sixth novel. Inspired in part by the meteorologists, the novel tells the story of his life as he struggles to maintain a double life, between clandestine anti-state actions and superficial legitimacy. Again, the paranoid and conniving texture of contemporary American society forms the novel’s backdrop, highlighting the contrast between the idealism of the 1960s and the darker turn of the 1970s.
10. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) Eco’s fiendishly complex novel presents us with a mind-boggling array of esoteric conspiracies, from the Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati to Opus Dei. the novel is about a parody of the conspiracy theory, “the plan”, created by three publishers who discover that their invention has taken on a mysterious life of its own. Like Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, the novel is based on the Rennes-le-Château mythologies about the Ark of the Covenant. but the echo treatment is far more sophisticated, showing how such conspiracy theories can seduce skeptics and believers alike.
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- unamerican activities by james miller is published by dodo ink, priced at £8.99.