Islands In The Net

Author: Bruce Sterling

Imagine the world as an alternate 1985, where Whitney Houston's ubiquitous voice, those eyeball-raping neon colors, leg warmers, Kirk Cameron's ubiquitous face didn't exist. Actually, anything would have been better than real life 1985. But I'm happy to embrace Jasper Fforde's vision of an alternate 1985, where literary detective Thursday Next (see, even the names are far more awesome than Stacey, Cindy, Brandon, and Zach) follows a criminal through Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. England and Imperial Russia fought the Crimean War for over a century, and England is a plice state run by a weapon production company called the Goliath Corporation. In the novel, Jane Eyre ends with Jane going with her cousin, St John Rivers, to India for missionary work. Literary debates end in gang wards and murder. Thursday Next investigates the theft of a Charles Dickens manuscript by Acheron Hades. Thursday is injured during a steak out to stop Acheron, only saved by a copy of Jane Eyre that stops his bullet. She is helped on the scene by a good Samaritan who leaves a monogrammed handkerchief and a jacket behind. These items are the same ones that Rochester, a character from Jane Eyre. This is the part where it gets even trippier - Thursday knows this, because she entered the book as a child. And just when you tell yourself you're not hallucinating, Thursday's future self instructs her take a job in her hometown, where her uncle has created the "Prose Portal", which allows people to enter works of fiction. Telling any more of the plot would ruin this delightfully surreal, literary journey. Wall Street Journal described it as a mix of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you enjoy absurd, comedic writers like Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams, you need to read this novel.