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Agreed. Really great book. That and Cloud Atlas are my favourite non-linear books (pls forget the movie)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)

Either Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.

Lots of good stuff in this thread. Two books I haven't seen are Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas. The only thing is, you can't Google them, for risk of spoilers.

Also, the movie based on Cloud Atlas is not great.

Cloud Atlas was a divisive film.

While the film may be guilty of taking itself too seriously, that's a small flaw in contrast to its bold vision. It's a very ambitious work, and I count it among my favorite films of all time.

There’s so much awesome SF out there... it depends what you like!

Personally, in very different styles, I found pretty much everything written by Iain M Banks excellent (start with Excession or Player of Games), I enjoy John Scalzi’s humourous sci fi space operas a fair bit too, Peter F Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction trilogy was pretty decent... I’ve loved most of what I’ve read from Charles Stross but particularly Accelerando, Greg Egan’s Diaspora was awesome, like a modern day Childhood’s End (read that too if you haven’t, though it’s aged badly). Cloud Atlas is sorta science fiction and amazing. I’ve yet to not enjoy any book by Cory Doctorow - start with Pirate Cinema. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi was excellent.

This should be enough to get you started!

The Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet are both greatly entertaining novels as well (and tangentially related to both, the shorter novel Slade House).

Personally I found these more enjoyable than Cloud Atlas, which is good and a must-read nonetheless, but relies a lot on its narrative structure for its effect (this is not a negative, but the Matryoshka doll structure of the book does define it rather strongly).

It might be interesting. And maybe a common theme would emerge why those four fictional books got never published. It might be a bit like "Cloud Atlas" where the different stories are connected in a way that becomes apparent only in the end.

Consider that none of the sub-stories of Cloud Atlas were good enough on their own to be published (and turned into a movie).

If "stylistically abusing" punctuation is worth of blocking an ebook, then I have to assume Huck Finn and Cloud Atlas are next on the list of books to remove for their heavily punctuated attempts to represent speech patterns.

> But what is the "main text"

Right. See this incredible example. Both versions are authentic, in a way.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/cloud-atlas-as...

> Mitchell himself explains the reasons for the discrepancies in an interview quoted in Eve’s paper: they occurred because the manuscript of Cloud Atlas sat unedited for around three months in the US, after an editor there left Random House. Meanwhile in the UK, Mitchell and his editor and copy editor worked on the manuscript, but the changes were not passed on to the US.

This reminds me of reading Cloud Atlas

No: the author of Cloud Atlas etc.

A little more context for the quote:

We all knew one of the commonsense edicts of Hollywood is “never invest in your own movie." But I did it anyway.

-- Garry Marshall, My Happy Days in Hollywood [1]

A few of the many well-known movies that are self-financed: Blair Witch Project, Clerks, most Robert Rodriguez movies[2], the upcoming Cloud Atlas by the Wachowskis. Self-financing might still lead to low odds of success (probably difficult to properly study this), but it seems to me there are enough success stories to question the "never" advice.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=X3eXiLG9WnIC&pg=PA196&#...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/robert-rodriguez-talks-spy-kids-4-the-joys-of-self-financing-and-his-5-000-upcoming-projects#" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/robert-rodriguez-talk...</a>

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Bootstrap by Kenneth Hess

82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell