Crimson
Some things can get in best through locked doors
Crimson’s determination to discover why people he cares about are disappearing from Olympia, Washington takes the philosophical young man on a journey with a criminal into absolute darkness, where he learns how powerful propaganda can be, and what it takes to fight it.
This slipstream Psychological Suspense novel takes us from the classrooms of a high school where advanced students study the science of the bioplasmic field, to hidden locations under the surface of the Earth where a covert game is being played. Adventure into the transgressive club called Stain, look into a minister's occult secrets in this society entertained by listening to music a powerful DJ samples from thoughts picked up by scanners.
Auras, realistic advanced technology, social engineering through hoaxes, a Japanese-American protagonist, astonishing funerial rituals, game wars, and the trickery of the Agents of the Nevermind.
On Crimson: "Fantastic. Really enjoyed the book immensely Part of me will always be in that cave.
'You’re breathing bits of Jesse James, Hitler, Moses and a bunch of dead rabbits and phoney magicians, janitors all their bodies broken down floating around…. The only thing that holds all these things together is the story of your life.'
Imagine if the singularity came not as a big bang but as a series of choices by those in power who think they know what’s best for us: corporations, the police force, churches and government. What if they persuaded us that keeping our thoughts private was against our own interests? Young Crimson is growing up in a world where his conversations are sampled and played back on the radio, where even his sub-vocalised thoughts might be screened by the police. He can see people’s auras and hopes one day to help solve crimes but then he finds his girlfriend has gone and soon others who question the status quo disappear.
Tantra Bensko’s delicious intrigues with meta-fiction, philosophy, popular culture and the politics of control make us question the uses to which the human need for stories might be put.
'There are happy and sad stories. They have good and bad characters. These are inside Story. Story is created by people, but now it has a mind of its own.”
All the while we root for Crimson, at times naïve, at times canny, he grows from being a manga styled school kid to an ontological knight errant travelling out from home to a place of utter darkness and then on to confront the harrowing revelations about the fate of those he loved.
This wonderful book is where we find terror in the ordinary, terrible beauty in the extraordinary.' - Gal Budgen, author
"Science fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin." Kingsly Amis.
Crimson’s determination to discover why people he cares about are disappearing from Olympia, Washington takes the philosophical young man on a journey with a criminal into absolute darkness, where he learns how powerful propaganda can be, and what it takes to fight it.
This slipstream Psychological Suspense novel takes us from the classrooms of a high school where advanced students study the science of the bioplasmic field, to hidden locations under the surface of the Earth where a covert game is being played. Adventure into the transgressive club called Stain, look into a minister's occult secrets in this society entertained by listening to music a powerful DJ samples from thoughts picked up by scanners.
Auras, realistic advanced technology, social engineering through hoaxes, a Japanese-American protagonist, astonishing funerial rituals, game wars, and the trickery of the Agents of the Nevermind.
On Crimson: "Fantastic. Really enjoyed the book immensely Part of me will always be in that cave.
'You’re breathing bits of Jesse James, Hitler, Moses and a bunch of dead rabbits and phoney magicians, janitors all their bodies broken down floating around…. The only thing that holds all these things together is the story of your life.'
Imagine if the singularity came not as a big bang but as a series of choices by those in power who think they know what’s best for us: corporations, the police force, churches and government. What if they persuaded us that keeping our thoughts private was against our own interests? Young Crimson is growing up in a world where his conversations are sampled and played back on the radio, where even his sub-vocalised thoughts might be screened by the police. He can see people’s auras and hopes one day to help solve crimes but then he finds his girlfriend has gone and soon others who question the status quo disappear.
Tantra Bensko’s delicious intrigues with meta-fiction, philosophy, popular culture and the politics of control make us question the uses to which the human need for stories might be put.
'There are happy and sad stories. They have good and bad characters. These are inside Story. Story is created by people, but now it has a mind of its own.”
All the while we root for Crimson, at times naïve, at times canny, he grows from being a manga styled school kid to an ontological knight errant travelling out from home to a place of utter darkness and then on to confront the harrowing revelations about the fate of those he loved.
This wonderful book is where we find terror in the ordinary, terrible beauty in the extraordinary.' - Gal Budgen, author
"Science fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin." Kingsly Amis.