Giles Goat-Boy

'''Barth, John. Giles Goat-Boy'''. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966. New York: Fawcett, 1967.

An alternate-world story, but primarily SF in the sense of "Satura Fantastique": a particularly wild hodgepodge of elements that add up (more or less) to a satire, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Significant for the study of mechanized environments for the hero's various descents into the Belly of WESCAC: a computer that may or may not be a "Troll," that may or may not be a kind of metonym for a mechanical universe, and that may or may not be the fictive main author of GG-B (see vol. Two, Third Reel, ch. 5—p. 733 in Fawcett edn.; second paragraph of "Posttape," p. 755; second paragraph of "Publisher's Disclaimer," p. xi, and title page following "Cover-Letter"; and passim).