Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is Alice in Wonderland in space. I initially felt the form was getting in the way of function, with a lot of storylines on their own, but halfway through the book they did get together and so got my interest in it.
A lot happens and it becomes a fun tale of imagination. The writing is sharp and actually, the greatness of this book comes from the absurdity of the situation and the dead-pan mundane every-day-language used in it:
“We tried to revive our cleaning staff but we discovered they’d been dead for nearly thirty thousand years. Who’s going to clear away the bodies, that’s what I want to know.”