Imagine that, under a tree in your local park, lives an entire civilization of tiny people. That’s point A. Then imagine that your own world is the size of a shoebox sitting in one corner of a football field; and that football field is like a spare transistor in a toolbox on a nuclear submarine; and that submarine is like a single cell in the body of a man. The man’s name is Claude. Imagine Claude has a tiny scar, within which two bronze-age city-states are at war over a fist-sized gemstone, which contains a nanotech pleasure-planet, in which there is an ant farm. That’s point B.

Jillian Laddor, a socially awkward mnemonic genius whose head keeps falling off at inconvenient moments, needs to get from point A to point B.

And Claude is dying.

Status

The Book of Nine Words is complete at 88,000 words. It’s a tribute to both Gulliver’s Travels and giant robot cartoons in equal measure, and will appeal to fans of Roger Zelazny or Samuel Delany. It was my Brown University Literary Arts MFA thesis. I’m quite happy with it, and would love to talk to publishers about it.

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Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession by Søren Kierkegaard

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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