Mondo Bungle

Arcadia by Iain Pears, 2015

I bought a fire signed first edition of this book from the dollar tree and now it's one of my favorites.

It's a virtuosic smorgasbord of themes, genres, and plot lines that should please if not completely arouse to ejaculation any fans of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, and even maybe political thrillers alike. It's simply loaded to the brim with awesomeness and surprises and putting it down proved to be a nuisance.

A mathematician from some distant future (who knows which one) is devising highly polarizing technology supposed to have the capability of accessing parallel dimensions and/or time periods, which is tested with the open ended fantastical jottings or a brilliant professor. The device feeds off the information to create a sort of projection of the story, a Tolkieny fantasy land of swords and lords. A young girl wanders in on accident and complications arise. And these complications are quite complicated. There's blackouts and deaths and the institute that formerly employed the machine's creator needs to track her and it down in the interest of public safety. But the whole nature of the technology is to study the inverse of cause and effect and whether the future can alter the past as it does the other way around.

So new universes come to be and that's just not the way things are supposed to be so the timelines of the respective worlds have to conform to keep the story logical, thereby sending the other into a state of complete never-existence because the nature of things is that it's all just one universe after all. You never really know when or where the dimension is located with respect to the other and the way they're connected also ought to be a subject of deep speculation.

Arcadia is amazingly inventive and deft in so many fields and impossibly gripping. A true feat.

5/5

__________________