Colour has color rules, including a strict after-dark black jacket code. I know that sounds kind of weird, but it works for them.' Some are just futuristically weird, like Colour, where the narrator, Stark lives. They just want to be left alone to be kind and gentle to each other. They don't care about anyone else, and they have no argument with anyone. Some of these cities make perfect sense, such as Idyll, 'an old Neighborhood, where people come and go quietly and peacefully. Set in a Britain of the future, it is one we can almost recognize, where cities have become something like gated communities known as Neighborhoods, where people of a kind can band together and really support what they believe in. Note: also an award winner, with the British Fantasy Award in 1995 and the Philip K. First published in 1994, it feels amazingly current in 2017.

All take a skewed view of the world, people sort of making connections and an emotional undercurrent to make something quite interesting. Probably some people might feel there is a similarity with Vonnegut, but it's been a very long time since I read him, and I found Stark to be far more accessible than any of Vonnegut's characters. Staying alive, for example, not dying: it looks so easy, but sometimes it's almost too difficult to be borne.'Ī really good book that is unlike most things I've read, but perhaps similar in tone and scope to The Gone-Away World, Cursed or Pandemonium. Nothing that's important, really important, looks impressive, because it only means something to the person that does it.

The point is too deep, too personal and too small to explain. but I won't, because that's not the point. 'I could defend myself, say it isn't easy. My mental memos are different from my mental notes: I always do something about them eventually, and they're typed so I can read what they say.'Īnd then suddenly my updates stopped, because, damn, that shit started to get real, going from world-weary, cynical humor to semi-thriller to something deeper and more devastating. 'Working out what that might be was going to be important, and I put a memo in my mental file to have a crack at it when I could be bothered. My reading updates show chuckling and snerking through the first hundred pages. I do know that I found the beginning undeniably clever and almost unputdownable. I had some intelligent things to say about Only Forward, but I can't find my mental sticky notes. Sort of an embarrassing thing to think, but I knew it was safe I always lose my mental notes.' 'I made a mental note to tell the next Street Engineer I met that they were doing a damn fine job.

Only forward by michael marshall smith