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A woman tells her grandchildren a story. It is the same story over and over again, and neither the woman nor the grandchildren ever seem to tire of it, though over the years their responses to the story become more fractious. On her deathbed, she repeats the story again and again, the story of Briar Rose who sleeps for a hundred years in a castle surrounded by thorns until she is awakened with a kiss. Her last dying wish to her youngest granddaughter, Becca, now a journalist, is to find this fairy-tale castle. An impossible task. After all, it's just a story. But amongst her belongings is a box, and in that box are clues, and those clues will lead Becca to another story hidden behind the fairy tale.
This short, lovely book packs an enormous emotional wallop. It's easy to get a little impatient with the opening chapters of family life and the early stages of the investigation. After all, the canny reader will be well aware of where this is all going. But the domestic scenes, the painstaking search and the long journeys lay the groundwork for the final story, teasing, laying careful threads about family and the job of searching for the truth before finally plunging us into the past, so that the full and devastating power of a lovely, haunting tale pulled from the wreckage of unimaginable horror can only be properly understood in the context of survival and remembrance.
There are those who question whether Art can truly exist in a world where the Holocaust occurred, and in truth this book is a flimsy little thing to set against those years when God, whether real and outside of us or imagined and within us, turned away. But so too are fairy stories, flimsy, ragged things out of the darkest, deepest shadows of history. If works like this add to the remembrance, then perhaps they are justified, but that's not for me to say.
This short, lovely book packs an enormous emotional wallop. It's easy to get a little impatient with the opening chapters of family life and the early stages of the investigation. After all, the canny reader will be well aware of where this is all going. But the domestic scenes, the painstaking search and the long journeys lay the groundwork for the final story, teasing, laying careful threads about family and the job of searching for the truth before finally plunging us into the past, so that the full and devastating power of a lovely, haunting tale pulled from the wreckage of unimaginable horror can only be properly understood in the context of survival and remembrance.
There are those who question whether Art can truly exist in a world where the Holocaust occurred, and in truth this book is a flimsy little thing to set against those years when God, whether real and outside of us or imagined and within us, turned away. But so too are fairy stories, flimsy, ragged things out of the darkest, deepest shadows of history. If works like this add to the remembrance, then perhaps they are justified, but that's not for me to say.
This must be one of the most prosaic epic fantasy novels I've ever read, a matter-of-fact, down-to-earth novel set in an imaginary world. So much so that a significant conceit, lawyers fencing to the death to decide court cases, is an anomaly albeit taken for granted by the natives but regarded as barbaric and inexplicable by outsiders.
Bardas Loredan is one of the fencing lawyers, on the brink of giving it up and founding a school of his own. A succesfully fought case, however, brings a curse on his head and ensnares assorted characters in its resolution. Meanwhile, Temrai of the Plainspeople comes to stay in the city and learn its ways. Then his father dies and he goes home to become Chief and returns with an a horde thousands strong to put his learning to use in razing the city to the ground. Bardas Loredan is put in charge of the city's defence.
It would be wrong to say that this books is free of passion and drama. Passions drive the plots, with plenty of revenge and hate under the surface, friendships are formed and there's even a suggestion of hidden attraction, but even the most driven of characters rolls up their sleeves and gets to to work learning or building or trading or fighting. And there is plenty of drama, what with fights to the death and sieges and battles and politics, but most of the people involved are pros and they go about their business with a mixture of detachment and diligence. Between Martin's High Romance with blood and mud and Abercrombie's deeply embedded cyncism comes this: Parker's workaday world.
It's terrifically readable and refreshing in its lack of need to grapple with genre conventions, putting them to work instead and making them earn their way. Highly enjoyable.
Bardas Loredan is one of the fencing lawyers, on the brink of giving it up and founding a school of his own. A succesfully fought case, however, brings a curse on his head and ensnares assorted characters in its resolution. Meanwhile, Temrai of the Plainspeople comes to stay in the city and learn its ways. Then his father dies and he goes home to become Chief and returns with an a horde thousands strong to put his learning to use in razing the city to the ground. Bardas Loredan is put in charge of the city's defence.
It would be wrong to say that this books is free of passion and drama. Passions drive the plots, with plenty of revenge and hate under the surface, friendships are formed and there's even a suggestion of hidden attraction, but even the most driven of characters rolls up their sleeves and gets to to work learning or building or trading or fighting. And there is plenty of drama, what with fights to the death and sieges and battles and politics, but most of the people involved are pros and they go about their business with a mixture of detachment and diligence. Between Martin's High Romance with blood and mud and Abercrombie's deeply embedded cyncism comes this: Parker's workaday world.
It's terrifically readable and refreshing in its lack of need to grapple with genre conventions, putting them to work instead and making them earn their way. Highly enjoyable.
Well, I've been pleasurably wading through this slab of witty exposition for what feels like most of the year now, re-reading it, to be exact, and finding comfort in the chaos, warfare, catastrophe and upheaval of the late 1600s. Daniel Waterhouse wends his way back to England beset by pirates and recalls his formative years attending Cambridge with a young Isaac Newton. Raised by a religious extremist who believed the world would end in 1666 (obviously) and wanted Daniel to stand on the Cliffs of Dover ready to great the returned Jesus in a variety of ancient languages, Daniel's education begins as a great revolution in science and philosophy takes hold, shaking the world to its core simply by explaining it. Then we have Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe, who rescues Eliza from a seraglio at the Siege Of Vienna. Together they cross Europe as Vagabonds, ready to take the world of finance by storm.
These books aren't everybody's cup of tea: too big, bloated and clever-clever. I love 'em. I eat 'em up. They're epic, picaresque, hilarious celebrations of wild intelligence at war with crazed irrationality, and you're not always sure which of them are the good guys at any given time.
Found my original review from 2004:
This vast, sprawling historical (actually an alternative history) novel is the first in a vast, sprawling historical trilogy that ambitiously sets out to chart the rise of the age of reason and enlightenment, which, it must be noted, marks no abatement in man’s eternal quest for new and interesting way to kills each other, but which certainly saw a marked increase in the numbers of obsessive scientists suffering from mercury poisoning.
1713, the story opens in the Colonies and the arrival of Enoch Root, Stephenson’s more sanguine immortal Melmoth figure (who also figures in Cryptonomicon, to which this trilogy is a prelude) searching for the now aged Daniel Waterhouse and prevailing upon him to return to England to mediate in a bitter, wildfire scientific feud that has riven the ranks of the Philosophical Society which Daniel helped found. Old Daniel then spends the rest of the nine hundred-odd pages on a ship trying to leave Boston Harbour. Unfortunately the ship is beset by a large fleet of pirates and is captained by a man with a real hard-on for buccaneers and whose idea of a good time is to send as many of them as possible to a watery grave. Lively and all as the ensuing maritime manoeuvres prove to be, the bulk of the actual book is thankfully filled with the tale of Daniel’s early career in the Philosophical Society and his friendships with various historical characters, most significantly one Isaac Newton. Against the backdrop of plague, fire, revolution and restoration, we are treated to debates, feuds, intrigues, dissections, theories, revelations and the whole cloistered, obsessive world of mad, venerable old scientists who can’t blow their nose without making new and awesome discoveries and then writing treatises of thousands of closely reasoned pages on the issue, and others who blunder down disastrous dead ends ruining their lives, fortunes and reputations.
Book One ends, and Old Daniel is finally making progress for England. But never mind about him, Book Two brings us the exciting adventures of the legendary Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, and Eliza, rescued from a Turkish harem at the Siege of Venice. The two set out to make their fortune in the markets, courts and battlefields of war-torn Europe. ‘Half-Cocked’ Jack is slowly going mad from a fatal dose of the pox while Eliza has a gift for numbers, intrigue and networks which gets both of them into horrible amounts of trouble. Swashbucklingly stupid exploits and fiendishly clever stratagems which flounder and backfire keep the second book a lively read, and we even get to revisit young Daniel – well… getting on for middle-aged Daniel - in filthy, teeming bristling London.
Personally, I love this sort of thing, and I’m also a fan of Stephenson anyway, so Quicksilver was never going to be a hard sell to this particular reviewer. The giddy sense of scientific discovery fuelling the progress of civilisation, for better and for worse, is all part of the pure bliss of science fiction, and the counterpart in historical fiction can be every bit as exhilarating. The work of the Philosophical Society does not occur in a vacuum, cannot be divorced from the cultural, political, religious and economic milieu in which it is set, which enables it far more than it hampers. The scientists are not innocently unaware of the personal dangers of questioning widely held beliefs of the nature of the universe, nor are they ignorant of the admittedly unpredictable, potentially catastrophic repercussions on the wider world (or, in the case of their work on cannon and gunpowder, very predictable) it is simply the nature of the world in which they live.
Tons of historical detail abound, but Stephenson makes no effort to capture much in the way of period dialect or idiom, though he does well in capturing the rhetorical rhythms of courtiers and Natural Philosophers. The ferment of scientific endeavour and extremes of thought and behaviour in the Philosophical Society allow for a great deal of high and low comedy, while unashamedly vicious behaviour can shock and the uncertainties of life in such tumultuous times leads to much tragedy and horror. One passage consists of an hilarious description of the outrageously flamboyant dress of a foppish young aristocrat, a patron of Isaac Newton and a deadly swordsman. In the very next paragraph amusement gives way to revulsion as the same fop horribly abuses an agent in his pay.
Ending with all the principal characters in assorted unpleasant if not downright disgusting circumstances and with two equally massive books to go, it’s clear Stephenson is just getting started. Reading the whole lot looks like as potentially exhausting experience: heck just lifting the damn things could leave you prostrate, but me, I’m a glutton for punishment.
These books aren't everybody's cup of tea: too big, bloated and clever-clever. I love 'em. I eat 'em up. They're epic, picaresque, hilarious celebrations of wild intelligence at war with crazed irrationality, and you're not always sure which of them are the good guys at any given time.
Found my original review from 2004:
This vast, sprawling historical (actually an alternative history) novel is the first in a vast, sprawling historical trilogy that ambitiously sets out to chart the rise of the age of reason and enlightenment, which, it must be noted, marks no abatement in man’s eternal quest for new and interesting way to kills each other, but which certainly saw a marked increase in the numbers of obsessive scientists suffering from mercury poisoning.
1713, the story opens in the Colonies and the arrival of Enoch Root, Stephenson’s more sanguine immortal Melmoth figure (who also figures in Cryptonomicon, to which this trilogy is a prelude) searching for the now aged Daniel Waterhouse and prevailing upon him to return to England to mediate in a bitter, wildfire scientific feud that has riven the ranks of the Philosophical Society which Daniel helped found. Old Daniel then spends the rest of the nine hundred-odd pages on a ship trying to leave Boston Harbour. Unfortunately the ship is beset by a large fleet of pirates and is captained by a man with a real hard-on for buccaneers and whose idea of a good time is to send as many of them as possible to a watery grave. Lively and all as the ensuing maritime manoeuvres prove to be, the bulk of the actual book is thankfully filled with the tale of Daniel’s early career in the Philosophical Society and his friendships with various historical characters, most significantly one Isaac Newton. Against the backdrop of plague, fire, revolution and restoration, we are treated to debates, feuds, intrigues, dissections, theories, revelations and the whole cloistered, obsessive world of mad, venerable old scientists who can’t blow their nose without making new and awesome discoveries and then writing treatises of thousands of closely reasoned pages on the issue, and others who blunder down disastrous dead ends ruining their lives, fortunes and reputations.
Book One ends, and Old Daniel is finally making progress for England. But never mind about him, Book Two brings us the exciting adventures of the legendary Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, and Eliza, rescued from a Turkish harem at the Siege of Venice. The two set out to make their fortune in the markets, courts and battlefields of war-torn Europe. ‘Half-Cocked’ Jack is slowly going mad from a fatal dose of the pox while Eliza has a gift for numbers, intrigue and networks which gets both of them into horrible amounts of trouble. Swashbucklingly stupid exploits and fiendishly clever stratagems which flounder and backfire keep the second book a lively read, and we even get to revisit young Daniel – well… getting on for middle-aged Daniel - in filthy, teeming bristling London.
Personally, I love this sort of thing, and I’m also a fan of Stephenson anyway, so Quicksilver was never going to be a hard sell to this particular reviewer. The giddy sense of scientific discovery fuelling the progress of civilisation, for better and for worse, is all part of the pure bliss of science fiction, and the counterpart in historical fiction can be every bit as exhilarating. The work of the Philosophical Society does not occur in a vacuum, cannot be divorced from the cultural, political, religious and economic milieu in which it is set, which enables it far more than it hampers. The scientists are not innocently unaware of the personal dangers of questioning widely held beliefs of the nature of the universe, nor are they ignorant of the admittedly unpredictable, potentially catastrophic repercussions on the wider world (or, in the case of their work on cannon and gunpowder, very predictable) it is simply the nature of the world in which they live.
Tons of historical detail abound, but Stephenson makes no effort to capture much in the way of period dialect or idiom, though he does well in capturing the rhetorical rhythms of courtiers and Natural Philosophers. The ferment of scientific endeavour and extremes of thought and behaviour in the Philosophical Society allow for a great deal of high and low comedy, while unashamedly vicious behaviour can shock and the uncertainties of life in such tumultuous times leads to much tragedy and horror. One passage consists of an hilarious description of the outrageously flamboyant dress of a foppish young aristocrat, a patron of Isaac Newton and a deadly swordsman. In the very next paragraph amusement gives way to revulsion as the same fop horribly abuses an agent in his pay.
Ending with all the principal characters in assorted unpleasant if not downright disgusting circumstances and with two equally massive books to go, it’s clear Stephenson is just getting started. Reading the whole lot looks like as potentially exhausting experience: heck just lifting the damn things could leave you prostrate, but me, I’m a glutton for punishment.
Utterly savage tale, bitterly funny and utterly horrifying. A portrait of India corrupt and superstitious and stricken with poverty while oceans of money pour in through American outsourcing and Chinese investment. The filth and the squalour permeates every level, from the backward village where our anti-hero is born to the glamorous suites of the wealthy where he labours as a servant and finally breaks free in a deliberate act of violence. Fast-paced, sharply written with a precision of language and a cheerfulness of tone that belies the ugliness of the mess it depicts. It's essentially a crime novel: Jim Thompson or Donald E Westlake might have written something vaguely along these lines. It's superbly written, though I don't suppose that in itself would be enough to catch the eye of Booker judges. I suppose the social portrait of class and servitude set against the backdrop of high-tech capitalism in a teeming post-colonial setting attracted the attention, and it's hard to argue with that. The philosophical digressions probably didn't hurt either. Anyway, cracking, terrifying, angering read. Post-colonial, post-boom Ireland don't have it nearly so bad as some.
Two together this time, and two re-reads: In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead and The Neon Rain, by James Lee Burke. The reason I picked up the first is because I knew that a fim version was due to be released this year. The reason I picked up the latter is beacuse when I finished the former, I wanted more.
The first thing you notice about In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead is that awesome title. Just look at it. Think it. Say it aloud a few times to yourself. Say it in your best aproximation of a Louisiana accent. There you go. The language and the imagery it evokes wafts over your inner ear and eye like something utterly familiar to you that you had somehow forgotten until you read those words in that fake-ass accent and suddenly there it was again. You knew it all along.
That's what Burke's writing does. His lyrical purple passages may describe scenery, weather, humans, states of mind, the many and varied standing wave fronts of ethical behaviours by individuals or groups, magnificently good or staggeringly evil, but every last one strikes clear through the heart and the brain like lightning out of blue sky.
Both feature Dave Robicheaux, Burke's recurring hero. Vietnam vet, alcoholic, haunted by memories and sometimes ghosts, intensely aware of the beauty of the world around him and the evil it hides and, hell, I can't believe I spelled that right first time and without looking it up.
Neon Rain is the first Robicheaux novel, and takes place while he is still with the New Orleans Police Department. In later books he has moved to Iberia Parish and works for the Sherrif's Department there, but New Orleans often features; indeed, 2008's The Tin Roof Blow-Down is an angry dirge to the death of the city at the hands of, first, Katrina and, second, official corruption and neglect. Informed by a death row inmate that someone has put a price on his head, Dave and his partner, Clete Purcel, home in on mob bosses, pimps, pornographers and government assasins, paying a high price while bodies pile up around them.
Cont'd....
The first thing you notice about In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead is that awesome title. Just look at it. Think it. Say it aloud a few times to yourself. Say it in your best aproximation of a Louisiana accent. There you go. The language and the imagery it evokes wafts over your inner ear and eye like something utterly familiar to you that you had somehow forgotten until you read those words in that fake-ass accent and suddenly there it was again. You knew it all along.
That's what Burke's writing does. His lyrical purple passages may describe scenery, weather, humans, states of mind, the many and varied standing wave fronts of ethical behaviours by individuals or groups, magnificently good or staggeringly evil, but every last one strikes clear through the heart and the brain like lightning out of blue sky.
Both feature Dave Robicheaux, Burke's recurring hero. Vietnam vet, alcoholic, haunted by memories and sometimes ghosts, intensely aware of the beauty of the world around him and the evil it hides and, hell, I can't believe I spelled that right first time and without looking it up.
Neon Rain is the first Robicheaux novel, and takes place while he is still with the New Orleans Police Department. In later books he has moved to Iberia Parish and works for the Sherrif's Department there, but New Orleans often features; indeed, 2008's The Tin Roof Blow-Down is an angry dirge to the death of the city at the hands of, first, Katrina and, second, official corruption and neglect. Informed by a death row inmate that someone has put a price on his head, Dave and his partner, Clete Purcel, home in on mob bosses, pimps, pornographers and government assasins, paying a high price while bodies pile up around them.
Cont'd....
There are books that make you squirm. That bring an old, sick feeling back to your stomach. That make you want to climb back under the covers and and not come out until the book has gone away. Pretty much anything that covers going to school in the eighties and bullying and awkwardness and general cluelesness will do it for me.
Back Swan Green covers a year in the life of a boy in 1982. There is family discord. There's a big sister. There's bullies and mad mates and music and books and holidays and fairs and burgeoning literary ambition. It's a year of terror and transformation. magic and disillusionment, loss and enrichment, growth and change, loneliness and embarrassment, poetry and first kisses. It's brilliant, and if it had bee an iota less brilliant I wouldn't have been able to read it. Thanks for all the trauma, David Mitchell. It was epic.
Back Swan Green covers a year in the life of a boy in 1982. There is family discord. There's a big sister. There's bullies and mad mates and music and books and holidays and fairs and burgeoning literary ambition. It's a year of terror and transformation. magic and disillusionment, loss and enrichment, growth and change, loneliness and embarrassment, poetry and first kisses. It's brilliant, and if it had bee an iota less brilliant I wouldn't have been able to read it. Thanks for all the trauma, David Mitchell. It was epic.
Deliciously spooky ghost story, written, constructed and paced to absolute perfection. The debt to MR James is graciously acknowledged, and it saves its greatest shock for the final page, leaving the reader gasping with horror.
Arthur Kipps, junior solicitor is despatched to a remote, windswept, fog-bound corner of Britain, where Eel Marsh House rests far out on a lonely causeway, cut off for hours at a time by the tide. There he is to put the affairs of the deceased client in order. The locals are nervous, however, and at the funeral he sees a woman dressed all in black who is invisible to his companion. Strange sounds, odd occurrences, terrifying encounters on a fog-bound road: this could so easily have slipped into pastiche, but Susan Hill carries it off with aplomb. Spot-on reading for this time of the year.
Arthur Kipps, junior solicitor is despatched to a remote, windswept, fog-bound corner of Britain, where Eel Marsh House rests far out on a lonely causeway, cut off for hours at a time by the tide. There he is to put the affairs of the deceased client in order. The locals are nervous, however, and at the funeral he sees a woman dressed all in black who is invisible to his companion. Strange sounds, odd occurrences, terrifying encounters on a fog-bound road: this could so easily have slipped into pastiche, but Susan Hill carries it off with aplomb. Spot-on reading for this time of the year.
So, Father's Day - also Bloomsday, it turns out - what's a doting Dad to do? Me, I spent most of it on the porch enjoying the low clouds, the cool breeze, the distant cries of unicyclists on the Square and read Betrayals by Charles Palliser. Eventually I went inside and read it some more, because the grey clouds did what grey clouds do and chased even the unicyclists away.
Betrayals was an unalloyed pleasure from first to last, and a reread at that. Since at least two of the disparate ten chapters are devoted in part to abstruse literary theory where the pleasure of reading is likened to an orgasm and reader and text can be, in assorted variations, phallic or emasculated, and in demanding answers from this book I'm being authoritatively phallic and in concealing these answers the book is being deceitfully phallic or silent and phallic or wordless and emasculated and, yes it's wall to wall phalluses at times, wrestling with phalluses, worshipping phalluses and occasionally lopping the unfortunate phalluses off. Let us ponder for a moment the similarity of phallus and fallacy. I bet Derrida liked that one.
So much for the literary theory sections, which also, it should be stated, incorporates poisonous academic rivalry, half-mad, half-depraved philosophers, murder, suicide, attempted murder and even a spot of plagiarism. This isn't even the start, that would be the obituary with the little sting in the tail, something of a theme with this book, then there's the Christie-esque story of travellers caught in a snowstorm and some tales within tales. Mysteries, murders, betrayals, lies, confessions and a parade of the least reliable narrators this side of Pinnochio's nose, constantly betraying themselves and each other with slip-ups, omissions and general cluelessness. In fact, the only narrator prone to telling the truth is the diarist in the longest, arguably central, chapter, and he has some difficulty telling fact from fiction, and befriends someone with a tendency to blend fiction with fact.
This is a reread from me, and fortunately I remembered that you will not end this book with the mysteries solved. Some, yes, some, no, some you're not too sure of. Perhaps the text supplies you with everything you need, perhaps not, I certainly haven't worked it out yet if it does. What it is is immensely clever and fun, pastiching a variety of modern genres, satirising the worlds of academia and publishing, interrogating the divide between true crime and fictional crime as well as high art and entertainment. You'll either run a mile from this or find it the most fun you can have on a rainy Father's Bloomsday when the unicyclists are out, but if you work out who lured the old lady to her doom and why, please let me know.
Betrayals was an unalloyed pleasure from first to last, and a reread at that. Since at least two of the disparate ten chapters are devoted in part to abstruse literary theory where the pleasure of reading is likened to an orgasm and reader and text can be, in assorted variations, phallic or emasculated, and in demanding answers from this book I'm being authoritatively phallic and in concealing these answers the book is being deceitfully phallic or silent and phallic or wordless and emasculated and, yes it's wall to wall phalluses at times, wrestling with phalluses, worshipping phalluses and occasionally lopping the unfortunate phalluses off. Let us ponder for a moment the similarity of phallus and fallacy. I bet Derrida liked that one.
So much for the literary theory sections, which also, it should be stated, incorporates poisonous academic rivalry, half-mad, half-depraved philosophers, murder, suicide, attempted murder and even a spot of plagiarism. This isn't even the start, that would be the obituary with the little sting in the tail, something of a theme with this book, then there's the Christie-esque story of travellers caught in a snowstorm and some tales within tales. Mysteries, murders, betrayals, lies, confessions and a parade of the least reliable narrators this side of Pinnochio's nose, constantly betraying themselves and each other with slip-ups, omissions and general cluelessness. In fact, the only narrator prone to telling the truth is the diarist in the longest, arguably central, chapter, and he has some difficulty telling fact from fiction, and befriends someone with a tendency to blend fiction with fact.
This is a reread from me, and fortunately I remembered that you will not end this book with the mysteries solved. Some, yes, some, no, some you're not too sure of. Perhaps the text supplies you with everything you need, perhaps not, I certainly haven't worked it out yet if it does. What it is is immensely clever and fun, pastiching a variety of modern genres, satirising the worlds of academia and publishing, interrogating the divide between true crime and fictional crime as well as high art and entertainment. You'll either run a mile from this or find it the most fun you can have on a rainy Father's Bloomsday when the unicyclists are out, but if you work out who lured the old lady to her doom and why, please let me know.
There’s nothing like a slick, smart, well-written science fiction thriller to set the mind buzzing and racing with strange new ideas and brilliant, imaginative, logical leaps into the future. The reader is plunged into a world that is utterly strange and yet oddly familiar, as the old human passions and drives and desires play their old games in this future funhouse.
The future funhouse of Infoquake, gives us a world where technology is literally built into people, turning them into walking iPhones, and the big business is in creating, developing and selling apps for a populace hungry for novelty and innovation. Fiefcorps compete savagely for their share of the market, and one of the youngest, hungriest and most devious of these fiefcorps is run by a supremely ambitious young man called Natch, along with his old friend Horvil, an engineer, and an analyst called Jara, who finds her conscience under severe strain thanks to some of Natch’s more underhanded strategies. Their exploits bring them to the attention of Margaret Surina, descendant of one of the genuises who helped create the technology that shaped the world. Rumour has it that she may be set to reshape the world again with a mysterious new technology called Multireal.
With enemies and rivals closing in on all sides, Surina convinces Natch to prepare and develop Multireal for demonstration and release in only a few days. But potentially lethal rivals and a crushing deadline are only minor problems compared to the biggest of all: nobody seems to know what Multireal is.
At heart, Infioquake is a old school corporate thriller full of cut-throat boardroom poilitics, maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, back-stabbing and betrayal, all married to a vividly realised world full of wild technological marvels. It’s an adrenaline-fueled ride from start to finish as Neetch and friends fight to stay alive and stay on top.
The future funhouse of Infoquake, gives us a world where technology is literally built into people, turning them into walking iPhones, and the big business is in creating, developing and selling apps for a populace hungry for novelty and innovation. Fiefcorps compete savagely for their share of the market, and one of the youngest, hungriest and most devious of these fiefcorps is run by a supremely ambitious young man called Natch, along with his old friend Horvil, an engineer, and an analyst called Jara, who finds her conscience under severe strain thanks to some of Natch’s more underhanded strategies. Their exploits bring them to the attention of Margaret Surina, descendant of one of the genuises who helped create the technology that shaped the world. Rumour has it that she may be set to reshape the world again with a mysterious new technology called Multireal.
With enemies and rivals closing in on all sides, Surina convinces Natch to prepare and develop Multireal for demonstration and release in only a few days. But potentially lethal rivals and a crushing deadline are only minor problems compared to the biggest of all: nobody seems to know what Multireal is.
At heart, Infioquake is a old school corporate thriller full of cut-throat boardroom poilitics, maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, back-stabbing and betrayal, all married to a vividly realised world full of wild technological marvels. It’s an adrenaline-fueled ride from start to finish as Neetch and friends fight to stay alive and stay on top.