Solage (5) - Nimbus Ashley

2 thoughts on “Solage by A. Nimbus (5)”

1. Séance 

   “She wiped her pupils clean as if to cover the significant pools of light emitting from their circumference lest a tentative reading gave cause for her friends to rejoice in her identification as a Trouser Person.”

   Take a deep breath before you start this massive section. It takes pluck to read it in one sitting, a deep pleasure, too.
   A ‘tentative reading’, yes, but one that needs a reader’s osmosis as well as an UNtentative deliberation and ratiocination. It needs a self-séance as well as a mingling with the characters and their motives, stemming from the book’s previous leitmotifs, portals and wormholes of style and meaning. The plot machinations are complex, Machiavellian, ever-morphing, and I will not be able to itemise in this real-time review what these various characters are manipulating, whether it is to rescue Pollymina from the spider craft’s Socrat-V7, or to optimise the effects of Elégiac, or to prepare humanity for interstellar travel following all that has been going on, and to consider if the internet will outlast humanity, all geared and fine-tuned, inter alia, to the act of interpersonal ‘wooing’ patterns and musical formulations. I give below some more of what this book might call ‘bleeding chunks’ as a tiny few examples out of many, and the particular quote containing mention of Brahms seems to broad-brush the skills the reader actually needs in reading this book at all!
   Its ‘hex codes’ and ‘magical runes’, to match Poe’s ‘magic pinions and wizard wheels’ in his ‘The Premature Burial’, to jump-start a moribund existence alongside our ability to absorb some of the many ideas and plot-lines and characters playing out in this book. Analogue and digital and numinous, just three of the other factors holding hands around the planchette. The ‘turbines’ and ‘metal golem’, notwithstanding. 

   “This was much ado with opening a supply chain to sell old brooms and kitchen utensils. The square shaped shop they now owned contained extra dimensions…”

   “Thereafter, Elégiac evoked a speeding world out of its allotted sequence of events — to have one’s cake and eat it all in one chomp.”

   “She usually preferred runic script as the most legible for any of her missives sent out to a human crowd, angered by their constant reprimand twittering with sound bites into the delicate microphones as if to threaten her harm. Olympia was trying hard to channel Violet’s strange articulations into symbols by writing just above the ledgers and in plain text. So that Olympia revealed what Violet was truly saying, she operated an age-old analogue typewriter tinkling to a light musical accompaniment.”

   “…a musical incantation of similar ilk to that of Brahms might forge from musical structure, repeatedly cloning the main theme in a variety of disguises from vanilla and not forgetting the concluding fugue at the end, otherwise the music might decide to go on infinitely. The written melody was comprised of the little squiggles and dots superimposed upon ruler lines counting as the source code of the sound emitted, another DNA of sorts. Though the bookending fugue was a complex musical form based on mathematical splicing of a simple musical idea — some of the notes simply relied upon the final double bar line from which it was clear where the music should stop downwind of the last musical note that was struck.”

2. “The fiends were ready for the battle and due to the multiplication of tangible bodies over the territorial boundary of space and time, measured by an extraterrestrial dimension beyond human reach, the demons came flooding over the natural threshold of chaos and entropy and from the other side of shadows into the light of Sol.”

   Three relatively short sections of visionary power via the book’s own disarming style of rhythmically guileless complexity. The ‘sage planet’ and its far future or far lateral state of existence seen alongside the ‘he’ of Socrat-V7 and the ‘she’ of Cob-Irena — as filtered through a gradual accretion of plot and human characters in a combined linear snd non-linear direction of accretion.

   “After disappointing millennia, human contact relied upon the innumerable keyboards simultaneously co-operating with silicon cities welded grid by grid and frame by frame, buttoned to what look like fields of pastures green.”