Metaliterature

None of us is anyone anymore. We all lost who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be so happy to fly this rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it Nova Swing, which is the cheapest name I ever heard... I suspect a running joke. A wry smile and a knowing look. The subversion of science-fiction with the new weird, with literary jazz, China Miéville and William Gibson, the influence of Iain M. Banks (that energetic, bidirectional, peak ‘n’ valley symmetry of the floating initial M again) and Anne McCaffrey (another M!), and a mad obsession with old-fashioned musical instruments and forms. And I suspect my brain may not have the neuroplasticity to keep up with this sort of thing anymore. We’re on book two of the Empty Space / Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, a generation after Chinese Ed and Seria Mau Genlicher of Light , and the tract has fallen – part of it anyway – onto one of the ‘beach’ worlds which form the inhabitable border to this inscrutable sing...