Chimera (Salt Modern Fiction)

Product Information

Humans live their lives plugged into virtual reality, entertained so accepting of this limited lifestyle. The reasons being unfold over time, but the main points, it's how dreams and consciousness, desire, humanity all share the same root to Dreams. By writing down sensations, dreams and literary fragments floating in her consciousness, she is hoping to recover some of those experiences. Instead, the focus is on Artemis’s almost clinical observation of the character traits and behaviours of crew members and dryads, which appear incongruous.

We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse. She was the former keyboard player with post-punk eighties band, The Woodentops and joint winner with Graham Swift of The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Justine . Similarly, it is the sub-text of Chimera that haunts, and the questions this provocative novel asks.She is glad to be on this mission because she can trust that all the materials around her are real, unlike the ubiquitous fabricated scenarios of virtual realities on technology-obsessed Earth.

The Book Collector throws the essential elements of the gothic chiller into a blender and what emerges is something between pastiche and critique, in which its author never loses sight of the need to give her readers, first and foremost, an un-put-down-able yarn. Accompanied by dryads, sophisticated AIs with synthetic bodies, nothing is quite as it seems, even desire.The case takes Will to brothels, nightclubs and amusement arcades in the Scottish seaside resort of Portobello.

There’s a starkness to the writing that reflects the characters, slowly becoming charged with emotion over the course of the book. Salt is a small independent publisher and the two books I have read from them have pushed me out of my usual genre in a good way. She was the former keyboard player with post-punk eighties band, The Woodentops and joint winner with Graham Swift of The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Justine. Her ship, the Chimera has been sent to look for organisms that will help assuage Earth's global warming, but it becomes clear on the journey that there are other disturbing reasons for the mission. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.The Existential Detective is a surreal, dreamlike story of loss, incest and what it means to remember. She has produced playful and provocative novels in several genres – supernatural, espionage, crime and postmodern metafiction. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. Considering especially the horrible ending of original Artemis, that ends up negating a lot of the emotional impact thus far.

Following logic, it would then mean that the reader cannot trust literally anything to have actually happened as described. I'm not a big reader of Sci-Fi, but I do know my way around the genre to some degree, so my first question was whether the fact that it's Sci-Fi by a literary author would be an issue.With its gothic motifs, this dark portrait of a ‘fairytale’ marriage is full of mystery and suspense … an elegant and bloodily shocking entertainment. It had been assumed that the development of AI would lead inevitably to machine consciousness, but that has yet to come to pass. It’s a wise decision, as this prose style also matches better the sparse landscape of the island itself.