Chimera (Salt Modern Fiction)

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The woman, Artemis, is on board as an expert in dreams and how they are useful in processing consciousness. 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. The intricacies of dreams and humanity, the intricacies of technology and how it conflicts with religion and beliefs, in the nest of it all in the AI Dryads and Virtual realities, the driving forces of life, ahhh I'm fangirling! 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.

There is an intensity in the short chapters and strange characters yet engagement felt oddly detached throughout. 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. Accompanied by dryads, sophisticated AIs with synthetic bodies, nothing is quite as it seems, even desire. Synopsis For disillusioned author Max Long, the offer of a writing-fellowship on the mysterious-sounding ‘Burnt Island’ is a godsend. Alice Thompson’s gripping, deep space novel sees scientist and dream investigator Artemis travelling to the distant moon of Oneiros.

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The narrative swivels from one thing to the next without apparent logic, as though Artemis herself is hallucinating. Alice Thompson… grabs hold of the detective fiction tradition, flings it in the air, lets it crash to the floor, and jumps on it till it’s in smithereens.She has produced playful and provocative novels in several genres - supernatural, espionage, crime and postmodern metafiction. With its gothic motifs, this dark portrait of a ‘fairytale’ marriage is full of mystery and suspense … an elegant and bloodily shocking entertainment. The Earth that she set out to save is an environmental wasteland ruled by an oligarchy of tech corporations and populated by people hooked on the AI-created virtual realities they sell.

As with her previous work, Thompson’s atmospheric palette is hallucinatory, playing with illusion and reality. but Thompson takes a very distinctive approach, the notion of “dreams as poetic metaphors of thought” allowing for explorations of the nature of consciousness and where it resides, the fear of losing one’s identity, the omnipresence of AI, the frightening implications of virtual reality and the suggestion of forces powerful enough to override both machine programming and human nature – all overlapping and interacting with each other in interesting and inventive ways. Considering especially the horrible ending of original Artemis, that ends up negating a lot of the emotional impact thus far.Humans live their lives plugged into virtual reality, entertained so accepting of this limited lifestyle.

In a desperate bid for success, Max decides to compromise his talent by writing a horror bestseller. Similarly, it is the sub-text of Chimera that haunts, and the questions this provocative novel asks. Soon Violet herself is interned in the asylum for treatment only to discover, on coming out, that her husband has hired a nanny while she has been away, the beautiful, enigmatic Clara.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 unputdownable yarn. Science fiction is a genre I read only occasionally and this is an interesting take on the dangers of space exploration.