Mason & Dixon

Mason & Dixon, a post-modern novel by Thomas Pynchon, centers on the collaboration of the historical Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the American Revolutionary War.

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers

Intermingled with Mason's and Dixon's common biography, the reader ascertains their differing backgrounds, meets the enveloping story-telling environment of Wicks Cherrycoke, and makes excursuses into geomancy, Deism, a hollow Earth, the romance of the American West; along with philosophical discussions and parables of automata/robots, the afterlife, slavery, feng shui and others. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Nevil Maskelyne and Samuel Johnson make appearances. And Pynchon provides a superb conspiracy-theory involving Jesuits and their Chinese converts. All-in-all a densely written, richly satisfying pseudo-18th century epic.