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Sunday 14 January 2018

Government Conspiracy Fiction Books That Changed The World

By Ann Lee


The Thirty-Nine Steps is one of the first books to explore the genre of the paranoid thriller. It was written by John Buchan and came out in 1915, and is the first of his government conspiracy fiction books that features the character of Richard Hannay, who appears in Buchan's other works. This ambiguously titled novel follows Hannay's unlikely adventures, full of action and heroics.

While there are plenty of great novels about conspiracies that take place on a very high level, such as within or between governments, sometimes it is easier to relate to a story when it isn't on such a large scale. "Nightmare Town" is a short story that Dashiell Hammett wrote in 1924. The plot consists of a small town that plans to commit insurance fraud and results in people being murdered.

In 1943, Graham Greene wrote a novel called Ministry of Fear that would change the way people thought of the conspiracy thriller genre. In this book, Greene tells a story about how the Nazi used their influence to gain information that could be used to blackmail individuals. The meaning behind the title of this book becomes clear in the reading.

Although there are two movies that The Manchurian Candidate has been made into, neither of them are quite true enough to the original story. This was a novel that Richard Condon wrote, and it first came out in 1959. At this time, the fear of communism was running high, and this is reflected in his story about a man being brainwashed in a communist plot.

John F. Kennedy's assassination was a tragedy, and an event that left a lot of people wondering who really did it. While conspirators can speculate to no end without ever having any proof of their beliefs, Richard Condon chose to express his feelings in a story called Winter Kills. This dark tale covers both what is known to have happened and goes into theories as well.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy came into existence thanks to the work of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. These two men got together to write three books that were published over the course of several years in the late 60s and early 70s, and combines genres that were new and controversial at the time like psychedelia. This collection is one of the most widely read in the genre.

Thomas Pynchon's novella called The Crying Lot 49 may be a relatively quick read, but it is a literary journey worth taking. Published in 1966, it is full of cultural references out of that colorful time that Pynchon is very prone to making. The plot in this story has to do with two postal services that were pitted against each other due to a conflict dating all the way back to the Middle Ages.

Gravity's Rainbow is one of the deepest and most complex novels a reader might come across when looking for a paranoid thriller. Although there is a large number of characters and the book deals with topics that are at a very high level, if the reader is up for the challenge, it can be very illuminating. When the book came out, many people saw it to be too obscene or not comprehensible at all.




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