In Books
In Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast, which takes place across numerous alternate universes, the protagonist is asked to identify his timeline, which he does by naming the U.S. Presidents during his lifetime: "Woodrow Wilson—I was named for him—Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy." Upon which another character replies: "Which brings us to 1984, right?" This implies that in Wilson's timeline, the assassination didn't happen.
J. G. Ballard wrote a 1967 short-short story entitled "The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race."
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson depicts the assassination scene, with several would-be assassins trying to kill Kennedy simultaneously.
In Mark Winegardner's The Godfather's Revenge, the assassination of fictional President James Kavanaugh Shea is a parody of the assassination of J.F.K.
In the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore, which portrays an alternate history of America, the character of The Comedian is asked at a dinner party honoring President Richard Nixon if he is clean in relation to the murder of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He replies, "Yeah, I'm clean. Just don't ask me where I was when JFK died." Throughout the novel, The Comedian engaged in black ops work for Nixon, yet The Comedian's involvement in the assassination is only implied.
In Stanley Shapiro's novel A Time to Remember, a history teacher goes back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination, in an effort to prevent the Vietnam war and his brother's death in the conflict.
Stephen King's novel 11/22/63, published in 2011, tells about a time traveler trying to stop the assassination, thereby encountering the dilemma of changing history's course.
Read more about this topic: Assassination Of John F. Kennedy In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and ... if they had been any better, I should not have come.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)