Quarterly Review // Jan-April Wrap-up - Jordan Casstles

Dark Constellations – Pola Oloixarac (trans. Roy Kesey)

In 2024, through the efforts of the Argentinian Ministry of Genetics, privacy is dead. Technology capable of tracking the entire experiential histories of individuals and their ancestors via their genetic code is now in the hands of the powers that be, and the powers that be may do with it as they will. With this deeply unsettling premise as a starting point, Oloixarac weaves a byzantine and Borgesian narrative which stretches from the 1880s to the near future and reveals the dark heart of contemporary surveillance culture to the reader. While the manner in which the narrative has been divided up and presented may be initially confusing for some readers, the path that the author has developed slowly becomes more intuitive to follow and readers will quickly find themselves subconsciously synchronising with the slow but steady rhythm of the text.

Caveat lector: this is not a light read. Expect some explicit sexual content and some potential triggers for paranoid thoughts within this novel. With that said, Oloixarac has produced a creeping horror of a text that will provide the reader with exceptional insights and beautiful prose. 

Only Forward – Michael Marshall Smith

There is a passage from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that always comes to mind whenever I think of Michael Marshall Smith’s debut novel:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest mother**ker in the world… Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest mother**ker in the world.The position is taken.

Only Forward may be one of the single most heroic texts I have ever encountered. It begins with our hero, Stark, working as a very unusual private investigator in the very unusual locale of The City, a vast metropolis consisting of Neighbourhoods that would provide the basis for entire novels on their own (for example, ‘Colour’, in which a vast coordinating computer system controls the streetlights and murals around its citizens so as to better complement their clothing; ‘Red’, a violent, gangster-infested cyberpunk hellscape in which brutal conflicts are an everyday occurrence; and ‘Cat’, a mysterious part of The City which is solely inhabited and controlled by cats) – and things only become stranger from there. 

Smith bounces from science fiction to magical realism to fantasy and back to science fiction again: Only Forward does not so much pull the rug from under the reader so much as yank the very concept of a floor away from your feet before sending you plummeting down a technicolour rabbit hole unlike anything else. 

The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds – John Higgs

Four men enter a boathouse on the Scottish Isle of Jura.

They set up a camera.

They light a fire.

And, while being filmed, they proceed to burn one million pounds. 

Thus begins John Higgs’ biography of the KLF (AKA the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu, AKA the JAMs, AKA the Timelords, AKA the K Foundation), one of the strangest bands that ever came into existence. While the narrative fundamentally orbits around the members of the band – Bill “King Boy D” Drummond and Jimmy “Rockman Rock” Cauty – Higgs uses the KLF as a springboard to navigate the rising weirdness of the 1990s through those who influenced and were influenced by the KLF’s music. 

Discordian Popes, the management methods that made Echo and the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, chaos magic, Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction, Alan Moore and the concept of Ideaspace, classic Doctor Who, Charles Fort, the alchemical importance of mercury, and a fateful stage adaptation of the Illuminatus! Trilogy – all of these seemingly disconnected and estranged elements are gradually revealed to be connected on a far deeper level than expected in a text that proves without a shadow of a doubt that truth is often significantly stranger than fiction. 

Troika! Numinous Edition – Daniel Sell

You begin with two 6-sided dice, and roll them. The number 61 is revealed to you. 

You flick through the pages of this text, and find a description of what you are:

Your eyes are dull ruby Spheres, your skin is hard and smooth like ivory but brown and whorled like wood. You are clearly broken, you have no memory of your creation or purpose, and some days your white internal juices ooze thickly from cracks in your skin.

The person next to you rolls the number 45, and discover that they are a Red Priest – an “anti-sarkic evangelist of the Red Redemption” and “cauterizer of the festering wound of sin” that plagues the world. Now, the two of you are bound to take on a quest like no other: to navigate the winding chrome and golden corridors of The Blancmange & Thistle hotel in time to reach the Feast of the Chiliarch on the sixth floor.

Troika is a tabletop role-playing game that considers the established forms of play before choosing to throw them out of the window with immense force in favour of championing infinitely more strange and whimsical subjects. In a game such as Dungeons & Dragons, one may expect to see Fighters and Wizards doing battle with Goblins and Liches as they travel across the Forgotten Realms: in Troika!, an Ardent Giant of Corda and a Fellow of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks may be found racing to reach their Golden Barge before the dread Alzabo – a “red–furred ghoul-bear” capable of producing “the exact sound of any creature it has ever eaten” – can capture them, shrieking in the voice of said Giant’s horrendous mother-in-law. Expect an aleatoric experience like no other.