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The Rainier Fields Series
Misfortune
When Rainier Fields, itinerant robot-seller and part-time fortune-teller, sees a girl in the streets with an amazing destiny, his curiosity leads him to attempt to divert the strange and terrible future that he is certain is about to befall her. Despite having spent much of his own life running away from his problems, he quickly becomes enmired in those of the very young Mercery Pockels.
Can he save her from the mysterious Project that seems to be controlling her life? And why is she so important to them? While trying to change Mercery’s future, Rainier entangles himself more deeply in her affairs than he ever anticipated, until it becomes unclear as to which of them is the rescuer and which the rescuee.
Can he save her from the mysterious Project that seems to be controlling her life? And why is she so important to them? While trying to change Mercery’s future, Rainier entangles himself more deeply in her affairs than he ever anticipated, until it becomes unclear as to which of them is the rescuer and which the rescuee.
- GenresScience Fiction
483 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 17, 2012
288 people want to read
About the author
A.C. Fellows
3 books4 followersA. C. Fellows met in North Queensland and lived there a long time. For the past eight years they have lived a long way from anyone on the New England Tableland in New South Wales. They have two children, a role-playing system, and any number of worlds, the most well-developed one of which is Tsai. While most of their works are not strictly co-written, they grow out of a tangled mass of stories, characters, and backgrounds that they have generated together.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 2, 2016
Misfortune follows the adventures of the itinerant fantasist Rainier Fields, who first appears as a homeless tinkerer making small robots from scrap to get by. An unfortunate run-in with the local authorities leads to Fields making the acquaintance of an emphatically young woman named Mercery Pockles. Fields discovers, by way of never-fully-explained precognitive abilities, that Mercery has a mysterious and potent destiny, and determines to ensure that it will come out in her favour.
Told in episodic flashbacks, sometimes in interviews with other characters in the narrative and some from the perspective of many years after the events of the story, Misfortune is an unusual story. Fields is a self-admitted cypher, a fantasist running away from both a miserable childhood and a self-sabotaging personality, both in the literal sense of being a wanderer and by creating a personal backstory of heroic adventures and noble deeds off in space.
The reality he is escaping is rather more grubby and sad, and yet Fields is for the most part an optimist whose determination to live up to his own fantasy is somewhat admirable. He decides that his alter ego would do everything in his power to rescue Mercery from her plight, and so he goes to extraordinary lengths to do so. And yet he's a rather uncomfortable character to live with; a middle aged man, his relationship with Mercery is barely platonic and borderline obsessive. When Mercery's wellbeing is not at stake, he is often passive and uninquisitive, and there are parts of the story that plumb the depths of his psychology at the cost of forward momentum.
The story itself is a series of increasingly unfortunate events that bounce Fields, Mercery and a cast of supporting characters up against weird aliens, sinister conspiracies and cruel experiments. The main characters suffer through a cycle of escapes, separations, captures, torture of one sort or another and fresh escapes, all revealing more about their dark pasts, their strange sort-of-magic-sort-of-psychic powers and their odd relationships as they draw closer to Mercery's great and terrible destiny.
Misfortune has the feel of a small, human struggle told against the backdrop of an epic adventure that could emerge at any moment. The stakes never move far beyond the personal fortunes of Fields and Mercery - Fields frequently displays a lack of interest in the wider universe in his narrative - and yet the sense that great events are in motion is constant. I certainly look forward to the further adventures of Rainier Fields, in the hopes that future stories might pull the camera back and show us more of the strange setting.
Told in episodic flashbacks, sometimes in interviews with other characters in the narrative and some from the perspective of many years after the events of the story, Misfortune is an unusual story. Fields is a self-admitted cypher, a fantasist running away from both a miserable childhood and a self-sabotaging personality, both in the literal sense of being a wanderer and by creating a personal backstory of heroic adventures and noble deeds off in space.
The reality he is escaping is rather more grubby and sad, and yet Fields is for the most part an optimist whose determination to live up to his own fantasy is somewhat admirable. He decides that his alter ego would do everything in his power to rescue Mercery from her plight, and so he goes to extraordinary lengths to do so. And yet he's a rather uncomfortable character to live with; a middle aged man, his relationship with Mercery is barely platonic and borderline obsessive. When Mercery's wellbeing is not at stake, he is often passive and uninquisitive, and there are parts of the story that plumb the depths of his psychology at the cost of forward momentum.
The story itself is a series of increasingly unfortunate events that bounce Fields, Mercery and a cast of supporting characters up against weird aliens, sinister conspiracies and cruel experiments. The main characters suffer through a cycle of escapes, separations, captures, torture of one sort or another and fresh escapes, all revealing more about their dark pasts, their strange sort-of-magic-sort-of-psychic powers and their odd relationships as they draw closer to Mercery's great and terrible destiny.
Misfortune has the feel of a small, human struggle told against the backdrop of an epic adventure that could emerge at any moment. The stakes never move far beyond the personal fortunes of Fields and Mercery - Fields frequently displays a lack of interest in the wider universe in his narrative - and yet the sense that great events are in motion is constant. I certainly look forward to the further adventures of Rainier Fields, in the hopes that future stories might pull the camera back and show us more of the strange setting.
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November 4, 2012Rainier Fields is an identity, a story a man who hated his old life told to himself. An itinerant drifter skilled with robotics, he keeps on keeping on until he sees Mercery Pockels, sixteen years old and with a hideous destiny hanging over her.
In warning Mercery, Rainier changes his own destiny, and loses his self.
In genre this might be called a picaresque (though the first three quarters of the book jump back and forth in time rather than being a continuous narrative) as Rainier's intervention with Mercery puts him in a very bad place and we follow him through his travails, losing and struggling to regain himself. It might also be considered a character piece, since what we witness is the deconstruction of a personality then put back into a slightly different form. It's also a travelogue, as we move about an immensely complex and lovingly detailed multi-species, many-cultured planet. The pace is leisurely, but the puzzle of what is going on and what is going to happen next always kept a little hook in me as I read.
Fans of Stanislaw Lem would likely get the most out of this story. Old-school philosophical science fiction at its most intricate.
In warning Mercery, Rainier changes his own destiny, and loses his self.
In genre this might be called a picaresque (though the first three quarters of the book jump back and forth in time rather than being a continuous narrative) as Rainier's intervention with Mercery puts him in a very bad place and we follow him through his travails, losing and struggling to regain himself. It might also be considered a character piece, since what we witness is the deconstruction of a personality then put back into a slightly different form. It's also a travelogue, as we move about an immensely complex and lovingly detailed multi-species, many-cultured planet. The pace is leisurely, but the puzzle of what is going on and what is going to happen next always kept a little hook in me as I read.
Fans of Stanislaw Lem would likely get the most out of this story. Old-school philosophical science fiction at its most intricate.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews