Imagine what crazy exciting things Albert Einstein got up to as a student at University.Well come with me back to the fin de siècle year 1900, and Paris, for his comic adventures where he will meet the great and the famous like Nietzsche, Rasputin, Picasso, Proust, Freud, Mata Hari, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, Houdini and Jack the Ripper.All the time being attacked by a malign super-entity who … who distorts the world by Futurism, Dadaism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and other tricks of the eye.
Like one of Einstein’s famous thought-experiments: witness lectures by famous scientists turn into marvellous magic acts; see famous paintings come alive; or if you have to, take a nap and let the story play in your mind.
And let Young Einstein bring along fellow students Niels Bohr and Marie Curie to chase down villains and get chased themselves, ending up in improbable situations.
Like a bumbling amateur detective Einstein soon finds himself in farce upon farce of great hilarity at places like the Moulin Rouge, a performance of Puccini’s Tosca, Buffalo Bill’s bigtop circus, the Louvre, the Paris Metro, the zoo, the second Olympic games, the International EXPO and more.
With best mate Niels Bohr, he debates the new Quantum science causing no end of disagreements and fights between them. And then there is Marie Curie, proto-feminist, who keeps the two boys in check.
We will go back in history to see him steal the first ever Mercedes car, and test-drive it ‘Top Gear’ style across Europe. And watch him defuse a bomb like a big-bang hero. And his days will only get crazier and crazier.
He dances fast, he fiddles fast, he thinks fast – after all he is after the great speed of light itself.
This is speculative weird fiction you will go WOW at, and disbelieve your own eyeballs at a unique book full of strange passion and grand conspiracies and anarchists and mysteries of the quantum substrate.
It’s ‘Harry Potter’ meets ‘Breaking Bad’ meets ‘The Prague Cemetery’ meets ‘1066 and All That’. A cross-genre of historical fiction and comedy. A fast rollicking mystery story full of crazy things and farces and forces, as Einstein ponders new ground. A right rip-roaring runaround.
What we want – an extraordinary story for an extraordinary man. All for a century of geek-nation.
There is nothing else like it in the world. You will never have read a book like this before. Read it now.
more
I read this book as part of a book club, which is the beauty of such a group as I would otherwise never have experienced the mind-boggling weirdness of quantum punk fiction. I enjoyed the journey of trying to detect and understand the references to the different art styles, which you can link to via the author’s website. It’s all very cleverly done. My conventional book brain wasn’t so impressed though, as it kept looking for a plot and a hook to keep me interested. It reads like a poem rather than prose and maybe is more something I could dip in and out of to challenge my brain and have a bit of fun, rather than reading it as a story.
Let me start of by saying this: This book is extremely well-written. Reekfeel is absolutely a talented writer. The ingenuity that it must’ve taken to craft a book like this is beyond me. It is both creative and new while pulling from classic art styles. Reekfeel seems to have created their own genre and language! That takes talent!
That being said, this book is not for me. I didn’t like that I couldn’t understand what was going on most of the time because the writing style jumps around so much. I wasn’t able to focus on the story at all because I was constantly trying to figure out what obscure references meant along the way.
There’s an audience for this, which is why I’m giving it four stars instead of three, but I am not that audience.
**I read this book for a book club that I’m in.**
The most unusual book I ever read!
For the fans of Quantumpunk, this is a must-read!
I had the privilege of reading this book as part of a book club, and each member came up with ideas and helpers to make the reading fun.
You either love it or hate it; I don’t think there is a middle ground here.
I can’t give it but a maximum rating due to its originality. It was a rollercoaster of a journey for me; I thought I got the idea, and the next second I lost it. I did a lot of Googling and researching and came back with even more questions. It’s not a genre I would pick up as my next read; however, it was a fantastic learning experience.
It might help go through the sample content and then through the Prologue, where useful information about each chapter is provided.
Keep an open mind and enjoy the ride!
Marmite!!!
A single word headline but how did that word alter your thoughts. A single word can conjure up a myriad of thoughts when used in certain contexts. This is the third novel I’ve read by this author and, predictably, it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before. Before you grab your teaspoon and bury it into the jar of writhing turmoil that interchanges characters with concepts and concepts with characters, I suggest you dip gently by reading the first 10% for free. You really must try that sample or you will never know what you have missed. For me, Reekfeel’s unique quantumpunk is how I imagine crack-cocaine alters a user’s physiological and psychological state. I find it totally addictive but I can only go under for an hour at a time. For me, this is not a book to gobble up at one sitting, like the contents of the jar, it is best served in moderate quantities to be savoured and digested as the after-taste fades after the dopamine high. If you are still interacting with this review, I will slip a hint about the contents. The early 20th century was an exciting time as modern physics emerged through the great minds of the time. Rather than always working together, there were conflicts of interest and philosophical belief. The raft of novel ideas are played out in a surreal performances portrayed in artistic scenes. Personally, because I have a physics background, I found myself distracted in the early part of the book by my unconscious bias. There is such a wealth of intellectual disciplines threaded in a complex weave in this piece of work, there is something for anyone who is prepared to raise the spoon and taste the complex flavours of this dark jar.
This book started out as an oddity to me. At first, it was like trying to speak with the Mad Hatter and have a normal conversation which of course you cannot. I would have to change my way of speaking for us to reciprocate and understand. I wanted to have a conversation with this book and for it to speak to me with its wild and ingenious prose; I wanted this inventive tale to tell me a story. As I read along, I began to switch gears from the traditional to the very unique and I got it. I got it like one might “get” Shakespeare if it ever eluded them. It was exciting with laugh out loud moments that I shall never forget! Thank you for this inspiring prose, the clever words of description, the humorous moments that made me feel moved to never try this style of writing on my own. What does it take to succeed at such a feat of imagination?! May we never come into contact as our own electrons may shookshake and destroy the universe!