>>Seriously, it's a remarkable book by John Barth, and I highly recommend it to everybody on the planet. But beware. It's no mean book. The edition I read is about 1100 pages, and it's not large print. It is, however, my favourite novel. A historical fiction to end historical fiction.
>
>An academic question here - if we take history to be a science, is this its science fiction then?

I don't know if we can really call history a science. I think history is really just a more formally accredited form of fiction. Sort of an 'us vs them' fiction. Or in the case of more generic type history (ie - how were the pyramids built) it's probably WAG fiction.