5 Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

Bowie fashioned his most memorable personae out of the science fiction he consumed in his youth—for example, the groundbreaking BBC drama The Quatermass Experiment, about a manned space flight that goes horribly wrong, which he recalled watching from behind the sofa aged six when his parents thought he’d gone to bed. An obsession with space, estrangement, and alternative worlds runs through his work from “Space Oddity” at one end to “Blackstar” at the other. So he would have empathized deeply with the plight of nerdy, overweight misfit Oscar de León, the Dominican-American hero of Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel.

Young Oscar loves science fiction and fantasy—all of it, even obscure British stuff like the BBC TV drama Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978 to 1981. When other children are playing wallball and pitching quarters, Oscar is steaming through the canon (H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, William S. Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Ben Bova, Robert Heinlein), fortunate that the local libraries are so underfunded they can’t afford to throw anything out. As a schoolboy growing up in New Jersey during the 1980s he is tormented for this, which only drives him deeper into himself, deeper into movies about doomsday devices and mutants and magic.

There’s more to it than that, though. Sci-fi and fantasy are the only genres capable of reflecting the vicious, parallel-universe quality of life in the country Oscar’s family comes from, the Dominican Republic, under dictator Rafael Trujillo, compared in the novel to Sauron from The Lord of the Rings. Like Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers (see p. 264), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao suggests that human affairs are ultimately governed by supernatural, indeed diabolical forces, in this case a curse called fukú, which was placed on the New World by colonizing Europeans.

Bowie’s nerdery was every bit as epic as Oscar’s, although considering how much of his life the singer spent pretending to be an alien there’s surprisingly little sci-fi on the V&A list. Nothing by fellow Bromley-hater H. G. Wells or Bowie’s occasional Los Angeles dining companion Ray Bradbury. No sign of Heinlein’s Starman Jones—which he must have read!—or Stranger in a Strange Land, whose messiah-from-Mars plot has more than a whiff of Ziggy Stardust about it. Bowie’s Ziggy-era manager Tony Defries even had plans for a movie version in which the singer would make his Hollywood debut as its hero, Mars-born-and-raised humanoid Valentine Michael Smith.

For Oscar, the tragedy of his obsession is that it makes him invisible to girls—not a problem the teenage Bowie ever had (and his idea of a date was going UFO-spotting on Hampstead Heath). So depressed does Oscar feel after one of his sort-of-but-not-really girlfriends, Jenni, dumps him for a tall punk boy who looks like Lou Reed that he jumps in front of a train, ignoring the entreaties of a mystical golden mongoose that has appeared beside him and which stands for zafa, the counterspell that stops fukú.

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Yunior, Oscar’s university roommate, visits him at home afterward. (Our hero has survived the accident but broken both legs.) Yunior notes the X-wings and TIE fighters still hanging from the ceiling; also that of the sundry names scrawled on Oscar’s cast, only two are real—the others are the forged signatures of Oscar’s sci-fi writer heroes (who also happen to be Bowie’s). It’s a poignant, revealing moment in a dazzling multigenerational saga of immigrant life, love, and loss.