Note: This post concerns the first novel connected to the "Songs of the Interstitium" transmedia project. The project will utlimately consist of 5 novels and associated media all of which is being distributed across the WWW and elsewhere over the next few years by the Zoetics Institute Transmedia Collective.
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Rowan Sweeney is a thirty-three year old perpetual student with relationship and vocational issues. Out of desperation he takes a job with Douglass Green - a Doctor of 'something or other', publisher of 'curios', and New Age therapist living in Central Victoria. Rowan soon discovers Green has a hidden agenda involving Neo-Druidism, Alchemy, cricket, music, obscure languages, and a quantum computer. Asked to write a biography about Abraham Isles, 'an important 19th Century convict-mystic', Rowan quickly realises he's in over his head ... literally.
The novel is partially set in an alternative Australia where the European colonisation of the continent took a different path early in the 1830s. The novel explores themes related to: the place of creativity in life and society, the impact of colonisation on indigenous peoples, New Science notions of self-identity, creativity and physical reality, and the age old conflict between Materialism and sacred views of the cosmos. It is also a story about love and assuming adult responsibilities in our complex post-modern world.
BUYING The City of Quartz. You can go to: Booktopia (Australian customers) or Book Depository and Amazon.com (international customers). See also Fishpond (free postage in Australia as at Oct. 2016) and Angus and Robertson (Bookworld).Prices range from $15US plus postage to $28Australian (with some sellers listing it in the 30-40 Aus. dollar range). Remember to take a close look at postage costs - for some outlets postage is free or minimal e.g. Book Depository and Fishpond. Abe books also offers various options, particularly for international customers. Ebook version coming soon!
REVIEW:
Extracts from a review of the transmedia project to which The City of Quartz belongs, by Robin Ouzman Hislop [editor of Poetry Life and Times(UK/Spain)].
"Songs of the Interstitium" is an online site created by Australian based poet, writer and academic Ian Irvine (Hobson). ... The artifice he has chosen [for The City of Quartz], as a literary device, is quantum physics and the multiverse. Into it he pours, as in a cauldron, a range of elements: science fiction, mysticism, metaphysics, mythology, archetypes, surreal fantasy, quantum physics and biological evolution. The project emerges as an art form for an age that finds itself transformed by the computer sciences and digital media, the age of the singularity."
... "[In The City of Quartz] a mysterious box containing 5 manuscripts of novels, a series of poetic manuscripts and a DVD from a sect with super secrets from another world is discovered in the outback of Victoria, Australia, transported, apparently, from a parallel universe. The writings are linked to poet and writer Rowan Sweeney. Later we find, in the transcripts of the novels, that Rowan Sweeney is a traveler through parallel universes where he encounters his doppelganger likenesses ...One is almost reminded of the Portuguese poet Pessoa and the many fictional identities he assumed to write poetry. ... All the elements outlined in the first para (above), pervade the series with tremendous innovative, imaginative literary force and mood. There are brilliant constructions, where the writer/poet grapples with an understanding of consciousness and the history of archetypes that underlay it."
SEE ALSO: Motherbird/Poetry Life and Times review of Songs of the Interstitium transmedia project (to which The City of Quartz belongs).
