Haunting the Library

by Edd

Tomas loved books. At first, like most children, he preferred to chew on them. That changed when he learned to read at the age of three. Dr. Seuss was the gateway drug. Oz, Wonderland, and Narnia led the way to harder texts.

He was seven when he made the promise. “I’ll read every book ever!” From that day on he was never without one. Fiction or nonfiction, it made no difference. A quirk in his brain made him remember every word of every page.

Tomas visited libraries. He learned to speed-read. He taught himself other languages. Facts bubbled through his brain, joining and sparking one against the other. Were he not so busy reading, he’d have become an inventor, a philosopher, or quite thoroughly insane.

He studied dead languages. He worked in bookstores and was fired for reading on the job. He put every penny into ordering more books. Read once, they wound up in stacks he carried daily away to be sold.

He gave up sleep. It was just a matter of willpower, or another quirk of his brain. Evicted from his efficiency, he lived in his van subsisting on peanut butter and Proust.

Tomas traveled from city to city visiting libraries and estate sales and bookstores, finding underpriced books and selling them for gas money.

He read hundreds of books a day, as fast as his fingers could flip the pages. Movie novelizations and abstruse textbooks and choose-your-own-adventures, he gulped them all. Older books he hadn’t already read grew harder to find, so he picked up every translation. English, Russian, Japanese, Javanese, Esperanto, he read them all.

And yet the number of new books being published grew faster than he could read. He read while eating, he read while driving. Something had to give.

Tomas overclocked himself, blazing through piles of books in seconds. Day and night he ghosted through library stacks seeking the odd unread volume. He broke into publishers’ offices seeking not-yet-published manuscripts, into museums to read diaries and journals.

He gave up dying. He learned to teleport. For three hundred years he lived from page to page. Finally, he reached the day of equilibrium.

“I have read every book published. There will be a new book released in four seconds. Do I wait to read it? Or do I end it now?”

Tomas took a second to admire the sunrise. He took another to sum up his life so far. Then, with a happy sigh, he moved on to the next book.

A Bit of Summer Reading

by Rudi Dornemann

Review: Through the Wonderglass and Adventures in Lookingland by Seelie Nican
Given all the adaptations, rearrangings, and reimagings to which Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland books have been subjected over the past 150 years, a steampunk Alice was, I suppose, inevitable. Nican’s books are more a techno-Victorian translation of the originals than a wholesale reworking on the order of Frank Beddor’s recent Looking Glass Wars. She keeps the sequence of scenes intact and even weaves a sentence of two of Carroll’s prose into each chapter, which lends an interesting patina to the text.

When her method works, which is most of the time, Nican’s visions can be striking. Her steamwork caterpillar is a cyborg fused to its own hookah. Her hatter, afloat in his mercury tank, is unsettlingly mad. Her Cheshire cat is a holograph generated by the ivory mechanism of its own smile. Her mock turtle might have swum over from the island of Dr. Moreau, and her dodo/gryphon is a metaphysical Machiavelli, orchestrating Alice’s journey among all these creatures.

With the basic method set out in Wonderglass, Nican really cuts loose in Lookingland, riffing on the more dreamlike movement of Carroll’s second book, to create such extended sequences as the tulgey wood (where the forest is the jabberwock), the Dickens-meets-Dante bleakness of the walrus and carpenter’s story, or the Escheresque sprawl of the sheep’s seagoing millworks.

While the gears and airships treatment works well for Alice, the approach is less fruitful in Nican’s space opera Hunting of the Snark. Perhaps because the Snark offers less material to work with, she spends far too long establishing the world and backstory against which she can set the voyage of Carroll’s doomed questers. The book occasionally delivers some of the frisson of Nican’s Alice books — as in the final chapter, where the Baker makes his way through the echoing, flickering caverns of the generation ship’s vast computer in search of the android that may be programmed as either snark or boojum, or, tragically, both.

Next, I’m reading Ulro’s Dream, book one of the Zoasiad, Nican’s nine-volume epic fantasy series based on the work of William Blake. The cover, melding Blake’s artwork with stereotypical fantasy art in a Frank Frazetta vein, isn’t all that appealing, but I hear the story’s good, once you get past the first couple hundred pages of the prologue.