To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. With its gothic motifs, this dark portrait of a ‘fairytale’ marriage is full of mystery and suspense … an elegant and bloodily shocking entertainment. She then reconstructs it into something that doesn’t yet have a name… The Existential Detective is unsettling, unsettlingly erotic, and somehow sadly beautiful. Dreams being such a prominent motif, the novel’s uncomfortable sense of dislocation is both blurred and heightened by a hallucinatory otherworldliness, and once the crew have reached Oneiros to find an AI-created virtual reality awaiting them it becomes harder than ever to say for sure what’s real and what isn’t. Considering especially the horrible ending of original Artemis, that ends up negating a lot of the emotional impact thus far.

This is a simple yet clever tale, gently satirising literary ambition as it explores the darker sources of inspiration, and told with all the supernatural horror of the best Hammer stories.Again that feeling, acutely sensory, that flushed through her body, upwards into her thoughts, until she felt she could apprehend the icy reality of the world. Accompanied by dryads, sophisticated AIs with synthetic bodies, nothing is quite as it seems, even desire. I can see people loving this novella, regardless of my personal opinion, it was a good story and the ending was as I said earlier, unhinged. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. Her ship, the Chimera has been sent to look for organisms that will help assuage Earth's global warming, but it becomes clear on the journey that there are other disturbing reasons for the mission.

Similarly, it is the sub-text of Chimera that haunts, and the questions this provocative novel asks. Expertly combining compelling storytelling with a cleverly constructed, elegant and metaphor-ridden style. When he is asked by an eccentric scientist to investigate the whereabouts of his amnesiac missing wife, Louise, Will finds himself entangled in layers of deceptions and disappearances that lead him inexorably back to an unsolved mystery in his own past: the loss of his young daughter Emily. Based off of earlier reviews I think this understanding of how mythology played largely in this story gave it a low avg. So much of what they find on the Moon appears to be manifestations of the previous astronauts’ imaginations or dreams.It’s a wise decision, as this prose style also matches better the sparse landscape of the island itself. but Thompson takes a very distinctive approach, the notion of "dreams as poetic metaphors of thought" allowing for explorations of the nature of consciousness and where it resides, the fear of losing one's identity, the omnipresence of AI, the frightening implications of virtual reality and the suggestion of forces powerful enough to override both machine programming and human nature - all overlapping and interacting with each other in interesting and inventive ways. The case takes Will to brothels, nightclubs and amusement arcades in the Scottish seaside resort of Portobello. Alice Thompson… grabs hold of the detective fiction tradition, flings it in the air, lets it crash to the floor, and jumps on it till it’s in smithereens.