Ariadne's Thread

  'They know that they are monsters, but I believe they do not really understand what that means to humans.' Lucy Nield reviews 1997 novel Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis.                  @lucy_nield1 Shockingly I have not come across Bakis before, and I am certainly glad that fellow PhD student (David Tierney) leant me his twentieth-anniversary edition for me to read. This edition also includes an extremely valid and thought-provoking introduction from Jeff Vandermeer, which makes you confront thoughts and themes present throughout the text. A Preface introduces us to Cleo, who is going to tell us the tale of the monster dogs. Cleo informs the reader that it has been 6 years since the events of the novel took place, when was 21 the dogs arrived. Suffering from heartbreak she was walking in New York on the West Side when the helicopter landed and the first dog had arrived. What she saw stood on hind legs, wore clothes an...

‘They did find footprints. And they weren’t human.’ The Sideways Award Winner: The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A Review by Lucy Nield @lucy_nield1 The Doors of Eden, is one of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2020 publications, alongside Firewalkers. As an admirer of Tchaikovsky’s previous novels such as Arthur C. Clarke winning Children of Time and internationally loved Dogs of War, I was excited to be submerged into another speculative world, with eager anticipation of what many legged creatures we may, or may not, meet. I was not disappointed. Whilst the Blurb might suggest a novel overwhelmed by conspiracy theories and cryptozoological mysteries, this text moves far beyond what you can possibly expect or imagine with the mention of ‘monster hunting’ as a starting point. I will be the first to admit that I lost touch with reality whilst reading. You do not feel a sense of existentialism with this text, more of an acceptance, that there could be something more. However tenuous,...

WHAT IS SURVIVAL IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE WHOLE?… WHAT IF YOU NO LONGER HEAR THE MUSIC OF LIFE? MEMORIES ARE NOT ENOUGH UNLESS THEY CALL YOU TO NOBLE PURPOSE! –Leto II, Heretics of Dune Adapted from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#/media/File:Dune-Frank_Herbert_(1965)_First_edition.jpg Since its 1965 publication, Frank Herbert’s Dune has been adapted across a wide range of media to varying degrees of success. With part one of Denis Villeneuve’s new adaptation in the cinemas, there’s been a lot of reflection on the previous attempts to bring Herbert’s magnum opus to the big screen. David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation for the big screen and John Harrison’s 2000 miniseries for the Sci-Fi Chanel both failed to capture the grandeur and breadth of the original novel in different ways, and Jodorowsky’s ambitious but doomed attempt to film the novel in the 1970s has become the stuff of legend. Dune has also had many game adaptations, from card games and board games to RPGs t...

    Ariadne ’ s Thread Anthology CFP for Vol I bacchanal / ˈ bak ə n( ə )l/ / ˈ bak ə nal/ 1. A wild and drunken celebration. 2. A priest, worshipper, or follower of Bacchus. Four-walls-bound, we flourish, in isolation, together. Consider this an invitation to the Dance. A Revel. A Reveille. Bacchanal. Send us your wyrdest words, your lustiest poems, your stories that sing of joy ’ s apex. Tell us about you, and all your lives, myriad; embody the Bacchanal, just as the word contains both bonfire and the dancing sparks within. The details:  We will accept essays/articles, poetry, short stories, or any way you choose to answer the call. How does your recent reading or research align with the above? How can you read bacchanal into the world around you, within you?  Deadline for submissions is 31st December 2021.  All submissions must be the original, previously unpublished, work of the author.   Submissions should be between 2000-6000 words long (not including...

<commence-mesh00>_C/tp-#7|Mj+|[7C]>>Gt-00>>P:Ana-1 <data-recovery>_217_“H_S_REC”+“P.A.N.”+“Zn-3[0004.15]” >file_located_<Axsys_bypass>//download_complete Hyperstition (n): Element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional quantities functioning as time travelling potentials. Hyperstition operates as a coincidence intensifier, effecting a call to the Old Ones. 1 As long as the human animal is bound to a singular perspective for the sake of its sanity, the mysteries of the multifaceted jewel known to us as Time will remain eternally ineffable and inscrutable. 2 + + + + + + In his essay ‘The Hyperstitional Philosophy of Time-Travel Cybernetics’, Cabrales establishes the baseline Heideggerian nature of meta-temporal narratology: “The time-traveler (…) intervenes in History to try and reveal a World which is the effect of its causes” 3 . There is the movement backwards – the transition of temporality from a fixed-forward state to a mall...

  The Last Englishman – A. S. Salinas “You’re not who you think you are. You never were. Your real name is Horatio, and you’re the world’s greatest secret agent.” Thank God, he thought. For a minute there, he was convinced he was just some writer nobody had ever heard of. From bloodthirsty dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts to decadent garden parties at the end of the world, the life (or lives, or un-life) of Horatio Welington is truly remarkable. To his metatemporal nemesis John Constant, he is the wretched Englishman who both thwarts his schemes and enacts his own with elegant menace; to his transdimensional lover Melissa Prophet, he is both glorious champion and pathetic cuckold – but who or what truly is Horatio Wellington? World War II flying ace? International man of mystery? A hapless teenager in way over his head? Or something far more complex? For those who love the works of Michael Moorcock (especially his Eternal Champion books and the Jerry Cornelius Quarte...