Chimera (Salt Modern Fiction)

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As with her previous work, Thompson’s atmospheric palette is hallucinatory, playing with illusion and reality. The Existential Detective is a surreal, dreamlike story of loss, incest and what it means to remember. Ostensibly, she’s on board Chimera because astronauts aren’t allowed to dream and she has to supervise their welfare. 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.

With its gothic motifs, this dark portrait of a ‘fairytale’ marriage is full of mystery and suspense… An elegant and bloodily shocking entertainment. Chimera, by Alice Thompson, is set in an imagined future where faster than lightspeed space travel is a possibility.It's not a fast paced sci Fi thriller, it builds it's momentum to leave an absolutely insane ending. 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! The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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.

Thompson works this chilly atmosphere of alienation into one of suspense and foreboding, keeping our curiosity piqued as a crewman disappears and suspicions arise that the dryads may be evolving beyond their programming, developments to which Artemis responds by growing closer to the most advanced dryad, Troy. Thompson was educated at St George's School, Edinburgh then read English at Oxford and wrote her Ph. For their own good, they are given pills to prevent them from dreaming, because dreams might impact on their sense of reality.It seems connected by literary electricity to other tales of isolation: The Shining, Pincher Martin, The Sea, The Sea. Based off of earlier reviews I think this understanding of how mythology played largely in this story gave it a low avg.

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 . 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.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. Identities become con-fused as his sexual obsession with a nightclub singer becomes entwined with sightings of Louise, his own torturous memories, and new visions of the lost Emily.