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Chimera (Salt Modern Fiction)

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Synopsis Alice Thompson’s gripping, deep space novel sees scientist and dream investigator Artemis travelling to the distant moon of Oneiros. The idea of erasure reminds me of Niamh Prior’s recent short story titled ‘Peter and Jane’ , which uses only the 300 key words from the eponymous Ladybird First Reader Series to convey dark tales of Peter and Jane’s adulthood. These adverts enable local businesses to get in front of their target audience – the local community. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Burnt Island is steeped in self-awareness, as a book about the process and effect of writing might be.

Expertly combining compelling storytelling with a cleverly constructed, elegant and metaphor-ridden style. After the lengthy journey, as the ship nears its destination, unexplained glitches in safety features are detected.

We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. The reveal that it was augmented AI-Artemis who wrote the book - or at least, what it stands in for - does kind of throw the entire preceeding narrative into question for me. Alice Thompson's gripping, deep space novel sees scientist and dream investigator Artemis travelling to the distant moon of Oneiros. 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.

This is a simple yet clever tale, gently satirising literary ambition as it explores the darker sources of inspiration, and told with all the supernatural horror of the best Hammer stories. There is an intensity in the short chapters and strange characters yet engagement felt oddly detached throughout.Artemis, almost compulsively, ticks off their personality traits: their commander, Seth, is inflexible, his life governed by rules; Luther’s faith in technology is akin to religion; Masami is mentally the strongest of the crew because, like Seth, “she lacked all imagination, or originality of thought”. 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. Ostensibly, she’s on board Chimera because astronauts aren’t allowed to dream and she has to supervise their welfare. The mission is to look for micro-organisms that might alleviate the critical levels of carbon dioxide on Earth. 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.

After spending the 80s playing keyboards with the almost, but not quite famous, post-punk band The Woodentops, she turned to writing. 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. At the surface: Artemis is a part of a space mission to get to a new moon to try and find a bacteria that could help consume the carbon in the air on Earth and re-stabilize the environment. As with her previous work, Thompson’s atmospheric palette is hallucinatory, playing with illusion and reality. 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.ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Chimera Thompson, Alice More by this author. It is a profound exploration of human truth (and AI future) that stays with you, asking the question of what is real, and what is not real in one’s own life. But Mission Control have hinted that her knowledge will be vital when the ship reaches its destination.

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