Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #68
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My previous reviews of TQF: HERE
Fiction by Mitchell Edgeworth & Michael Wyndham Thomas.
When I read this fiction, I hope my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
NETWORK by Mitchell Edgeworth
“A gargantuan banyan tree grew at the centre of the asteroid, thriving in the low gravity and artificial humidity, its endless system of roots and branches crafting a tiny world of clearings and pools which circled around it like coral. It also, handily, nullified the vertigo many planet-dwellers felt when they arrived inside an asteroid and looked up to find people on the other side of the world standing on the ceiling looking back down at them.”
Delightful offworld shenanigans, offlazing about in the vast archipelagos or asteroids of the solar system or of some alternate galaxy much like it, an osmosis of Jack Vance or of an alternating author of that ilk here extrapolated into search engines with identity theft, and with winged humans amid ambidexterity of sex with either sex by the pool, and our hero, if hero hereon he is, my bad memory forgetting its earlier backdrops, a hero who is relaxing after life’s machinations of trade and negotiating the universe…. I may have all this wrong…so if I am going to forget it, why record it at all. Just enjoy it, and you will, too. Its slick pace about space and stylish prose included,
I have read so far up to: “Come on, man. Forget it. Have another drink…”
My bold, the text’s ellipsis. And indeed this work is too open-hearted to fustianly serialise as a real-time review, so I will just wallow in its further episodes, nursing that offered drink, without a care in the world, not trying to remember what to record from its no doubt wild audit-trail of plot, but simply soaking it in as a read worthy of forgetting myself with, or within it. When I have finished it, I shall come back here to review the next story in this journal. A lacuna to relish?
Or a refreshing epiphany of space?
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/mitchell-edgeworth/
The Erkeley Shadows
Michael Wyndham Thomas
“Odd, that always seemed. You’d have thought someone in the immigration chain would have wanted to check that they weren’t smuggling a weirdo, a human virus, into the unsuspecting former dominion.”
Give you a game? This author – one of my favourite’s – has decided to give me a right old game this time! Starting off as a police mystery about a body found with police badinage, behaving as boys in a gang, pinching evidence and reading it to get one up on the solution. Smeets and streets, midges and ridges, copses and corpse, Mars as a crater between council houses and detached ones. As if the boy with his yeah yeah yeah dansette all you need is love (“John, Paul and George were perched on bar-stools with those mikes like Skyrocket lollies. John chewed gum as he sang”) disappears before he is incriminated for bottling a boy foe’s face. Now a man grown into this story as a whodunnit corpse before he emigrates to Canada as a code word for Razalia! But where’s the tartan scarf? (Hope to meet old Tafler again.)
“Man, the guy had just flowed or maybe worked and worked his story so it would say just what he wanted.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/michael-wyndham-thomas/
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There is much else in TQF in addition to its fiction.