Chimera (Salt Modern Fiction)

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The synopsis doesn't touch on anything that would make you think it's tying in themes of mythos and I'm unsure if that's the intent or not, so hence my prefaces so future readers hopefully feel satisfied of this genre blend. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. These adverts enable local businesses to get in front of their target audience – the local community. Artemis is one of the few to have been trusted with the knowledge that this is the second mission sent, and that Mission Control wishes to know what became of the first. Based off of earlier reviews I think this understanding of how mythology played largely in this story gave it a low avg.

Dreams being such a prominent motif, the novel’s uncomfortable sense of dislocation is both blurred and heightened by a hallucinatory otherworldliness, and once the crew have reached Oneiros to find an AI-created virtual reality awaiting them it becomes harder than ever to say for sure what’s real and what isn’t.Set in a not-so-distant future, Alice Thompson's eighth work of fiction, Chimera, is just that: a chimera of a novel. It seems connected by literary electricity to other tales of isolation: The Shining, Pincher Martin, The Sea, The Sea. 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.

By a happy coincidence, this is similar ground to that covered by Alice Thompson’s latest book, a hauntingly cerebral science fiction novel that makes use of terms drawn from psychology and mysticism, but is arguably even more beholden to poetry. Accompanied by dryads, sophisticated AIs with synthetic bodies, nothing is quite as it seems, even desire.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.

It’s a wise decision, as this prose style also matches better the sparse landscape of the island itself. Thompson is unique in her approach in how she weaves these themes and messaging in, giving it's significance at just the right moments, to leave you in awe of what she's mastered in this book. Whatever happened during her mission has left her with impaired memory, and lacking the resentments felt before she left. Instead, the focus is on Artemis’s almost clinical observation of the character traits and behaviours of crew members and dryads, which appear incongruous.

When he is asked by an eccentric scientist to investigate the whereabouts of his amnesiac missing wife, Louise, Will finds himself entangled in layers. After the lengthy journey, as the ship nears its destination, unexplained glitches in safety features are detected.

Again that feeling, acutely sensory, that flushed through her body, upwards into her thoughts, until she felt she could apprehend the icy reality of the world. So much of what they find on the Moon appears to be manifestations of the previous astronauts’ imaginations or dreams.

Ultimately, this is a very interesting book with some flaws in execution that made me more curious about the author's other work, which I can imagine working better.