RELEASED 14 SEPTEMBER
304 pages | Hardback/ebook
Author James Kennedy
Publisher Quirk Books
Who’d want to know the exact date and time of their death? According to Dare To Know, plenty of people – and they’d be willing to pay for it too. The unnamed narrator is a mathematician and salesman, making the arcane and subjective calculations that produce expiry dates for the clients of a company called Dare To Know.
He’s also middle-aged, divorced and directionless; his performance at the company is on the slide and his commissions are shrinking. After a car crash, he takes the forbidden step of looking up his own time, only to discover that he was supposed to die 23 minutes ago. This is unheard of. The calculations are never wrong. He becomes desperate to find out what it means, and seeks the answers in his own past.
James Kennedy’s first novel for adults (he has a previous children’s book to his name) is audaciously clever and well-written. It’s set in a present day where this weird branch of physics, based around particles known as thanaton, has become a normal part of the world. It hasn’t actually changed the world that much, though it’s opened up philosophical quandaries around the nature of free will, and naturally it’s had an effect on those who have elected to find out their death date.
It makes sense that everyone else would just try to ignore it. A particularly striking and bleakly funny passage relates an incident where a man informed all the passengers on a plane that he’d just learned he was going to die on this flight, and therefore everyone else was surely going to die too.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 2021 من SFX.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 2021 من SFX.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Making Alien - Jaws in Space - Forty-five years on from its original release, Alien continues to terrify. We dissect what arguably remains the most chilling instalment in the saga
The seven-strong crew of the commercial mining spacecraft the Nostromo seal their fate after reluctantly responding to a mysterious distress signal on a hostile planet. Here, a face-hugging alien from a derelict ship impregnates and later kills executive officer Kane (John Hurt) after its offspring is birthed onboard. After being unleashed, the fearsome newborn with acid for blood proceeds to dispatch the remainder of the crew.Ridley Scott's much more convoluted prequels have yet to reveal how the knowledge that led to this initial interception was acquired. However, the premise of the original Alien is perfect in its uncomplicated purity.
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