Category: eBooks

Dr. No by Percival Everett

Possibly the strangest book I’ve ever read …

I’m really at a loss how to describe this.

It’s a thriller, but also a comedy (so, a comedy-thriller then), but it sort of has a poetic majesty about it (right, it’s a comedy-thriller with overtones of literary fiction).

So the easiest thing is to just tell you a bit about it.

Meet Wala Kitu, a mathematics professor at Brown University and the owner of a one-legged dog called Trigo, Kitu’s particular field of research is Nothing. Yup, the Professor has devoted his academic career to Nothing, that is Nothing as a concept, which as we discover, is completely different to the number zero, or a vacuum (which is something).

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Inverted World by Christopher Priest

This was first published in 1974, so I’m getting to it a tad late. I wasn’t sure what to read next, so for me, that’s a good time to dip into the SF Masterworks collection.

Now if you’ve read anything about Inverted World then you’ll be expecting something exceptionally mind-blowing. I’m not sure if I’d go as far as that, but it certainly qualifies as mind-bending.

The story is set on a planet that might be Earth … or might not and follows the life of Helward Mann, a denizen of a city that, for the past few hundred years, has been dragged around across the continent on rails in order to stay ahead of some unknown catastrophe. Helman works his way through a youth opportunity programme that will eventually see him graduate as a member of the Guild of Surveyors which is tasked with mapping the land ahead so that the Guild of Navigators, Bridge-builders, and the Traction Guild can work together to keep the city (inconveniently called Earth) moving.

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