Silas Morlock   by Mark Cantrell

Okay, so here is very obviously a book written by a reader for readers to read about readers reading. While the first couple of chapters introduce us slowly to a mysterious world — a planet-spanning organic metropolis under the thumb of an oligarch (nothing like Darth Sidious) — the third chapter brings on a massive facepalm as the true nature of the book reveals itself. In the dying pages, the apex is the line, “… they'd come all this way to imprison the man in a literary circle,” which literally book-ends the silliness.

However, the book takes itself dead-pan seriously, and though the reader may struggle at first to keep a straight face, a story unfolds which keep's them firmly anchored in the storyʼs direction.

And it manages to do this despite there being plenty of other distractions. The book tries achingly hard to be clever, using every technical trick available: footnotes, font changes, leading (line space) changes, 'Lexicon' (nomenclature), book-within-a-book, CAPITALIZED section breaks (really not sure what the purpose of those is), literary quotations erring towards the Biblical. After the strangely unbalancing opening, the work turns into Star Wars Episode IV, then morphs into Alien; images of Darth Vader and Sigourney Weaver drift in and out of the readerʼs mind. Some of the final scenes contain almost literal descriptions of cinematic special effects.

The prose leans heavily on vocal intercourse between two people at a time, occasionally involving three or four, quite often a single monologue or soliloquy. While the landscape is explained narratively, it feels a bit disconnected from the disperse action and the meat of the story.

The biggest failing is the arrival of a handful of new characters immediately prior to the climax (Boris?). It is like the Alien sequence was written independently of the rest of the work.

The closing is massively over-worded and slightly tangential to the rest of the book, but manages despite this to keep the excitement high enough to propel the reader through, and leaves with the world a massive open mess which the reader can tidy up in their mind as they see fit.

On the whole the book manages with some aplomb, despite the strange changes in direction, to keep its head above water, branding itself as proper science fiction, serious not slapstick, and providing a thoroughly entertaining read.

Ultimately it is a nice mess, an enjoyable romp over tropes and film scripts, which allows the reader plenty of opportunity to interpolate as far as their imagination will go.