The Raw Shark Texts
Eric Sanderson wakes up in a place he doesn't recognise, unable to remember who he is. All he has left are journal entries recalling Clio, a perfect love now gone. So begins a thrilling adventure that will send Eric and his cynical cat Ian on a search for the Ludovician, the force that is threatening his life, and Dr Trey Fidorus, the only man who knows its secrets.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
5people
2009–2026years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Forget about it. Read The Raw Shark Texts instead.
- If you liked it and want something in a similar style (conceptually) but with a bit more personal/human element I would recommend The Raw Shark Texts.
As for best sci fi books I’ve read in a while: The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch (think sci fi meets True Detective) - some awesome concepts here and really strong pacing. The other one was Version Control by Dexter Palmer which is a bit slower and more subtle sci fi (big concepts presented in a personal drama style of book)
- You might enjoy The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.
- House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski
The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
- Then there are various typographical and layout features – at a very minimum cursive, bold and possibly underlines should be not that uncommon. Quite a few books use footnotes, which are a bit of a paint to represent in a plain text format that's lacking the ability to explicitly link footnote symbols with their corresponding texts. (So you either need to introduce hard pagination, or convert them to endnotes, neither of which is really satisfactory.)
Sometimes the pagination is explicitly played with, so even if your digital book doesn't use hard pagination, it'd still be useful to at least being able to force a new screen page.
Font sizes occasionally get used for creative effects or to otherwise convey meaning, and the same goes for font selection itself. Sometimes even colour is used.
And some books get quite creative in with playing with layout and typography effects. The Raw Shark Texts had some ASCII-art style pages, but utilising a proportional font (!) [1], and House of Leaves went totally bonkers in its use of creative typography (https://www.google.com/search?q=House+of+Leaves+typography&t...).
[1] Even if those were based on a fixed-width font, you still need a way of indicating to the e-book reader software "Hey, here's some ASCII art, please don't reflow the text here and don't put a page break in the middle of the art, either". With a proportional font you either need to make sure the exact same font you used for layouting also gets used for display, or just give up and include that text as an image (and an appropriate alt-text, especially if the text for the ASCII-art isn't just random gibberish, but actually meaningful text, too).
