What do you think?
Rate this book
The Dérive
The term psychogeography refers to the act of exploring a city (usually an urban undertaking) in a nontraditional way. It is a choice to explore in ways that blend randomness and spontaneity, and in doing so, transform familiar streets into something unexpected.
The dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there."
This book features the stories:
"The Botanist of Sky City Celeste" by Lyndsey Croal
"Dates Around a Driftcity Where We Used to Roam" by Marie Croke
"The Planktonic Tendencies of Homo zooxanthellae in Cyprid Retrograde" by Cameron E. Quinn
"The City Walks Through Me" by Ana Sun
The dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there."
This book features the stories:
"The Botanist of Sky City Celeste" by Lyndsey Croal
"Dates Around a Driftcity Where We Used to Roam" by Marie Croke
"The Planktonic Tendencies of Homo zooxanthellae in Cyprid Retrograde" by Cameron E. Quinn
"The City Walks Through Me" by Ana Sun
- GenresAnthologies
84 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2023
About the author
Lyndsey Croal
28 books51 followersLyndsey is a Scottish author of strange and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared in over eighty magazines and anthologies, including with Apex, Analog, Weird Tales, Flash Fiction Online, Shoreline of Infinity, and PseudoPod. She's a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awardee, British Fantasy Award Finalist, and former Hawthornden Fellow. Her novelette Have You Decided on Your Question (2023) and collection Limelight and Other Stories (2024) are published with Shortwave Publishing. Her novelette The Girl With Barnacles for Eyes appeared in Tenebrous Press' Split Scream Volume Five, and her second collection of Scottish folklore-inspired tales Dark Crescent is forthcoming in 2025 from Luna Press. She lives in Edinburgh with her giant kitten Pippin and works in climate change comms in her day job. She's currently working on a number of longer projects in the sci fi, eco fiction, and horror space. Find out more about her and her work via www.lyndseycroal.co.uk.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 25, 2024
This is a tidy volume that immerses the reader in an imaginative genre of wander and wonder.
Each of the four stories explores the dérive theme in a future city containing speculative features inspired by contemporary cityscapes or urban design trends projected into fantastic but understandable evolutions that are not quite dystopic cyberpunk but also not naively utopian. Each story also contains an interleafed map that orients the reader midway through the narrators' journeys. Each essentially tells a story of a pair of characters on one arc of their relationship.
There is tenderness, longing, societal commentary, love and heartbreak, softly applied wit, and writerly pondering.
It's an appealing universe to step into and I appreciate how the Air & Nothingness themed anthologies seem to do this kind of thing pretty well. I've also read the first The Librarian anthology and have Gargantua on my bookshelf with intent to read. The literary world can sometimes take itself far too seriously, but these stories appeal broadly without sacrificing their individual artistry.
Perhaps the darkest selection, Marie Croke's story ventures boldly into the second person to produce a story about lovers separated by what amounts to an ultimately unsurpassable class divide that reverberates through their souls and ends with tragic betrayal.
Also told in the second person, Cameron Quinn's story probes, without certain answer, the extent to which a seeping hyperconnectedness is blessing or curse to identity and integrity of spirit.
Ana Sun's atmospheric tale alternates passages from the perspective of two souls wandering alone through the Melbourne madrugada twilight whose lives and paths ultimately intersect through the physical poetry of shared loneliness.
Lyndsey Croal's story gives us a plot of different forms of sentient life learning from and teaching one another on their way to a special delivery in a floating city.
Each of the four stories explores the dérive theme in a future city containing speculative features inspired by contemporary cityscapes or urban design trends projected into fantastic but understandable evolutions that are not quite dystopic cyberpunk but also not naively utopian. Each story also contains an interleafed map that orients the reader midway through the narrators' journeys. Each essentially tells a story of a pair of characters on one arc of their relationship.
There is tenderness, longing, societal commentary, love and heartbreak, softly applied wit, and writerly pondering.
It's an appealing universe to step into and I appreciate how the Air & Nothingness themed anthologies seem to do this kind of thing pretty well. I've also read the first The Librarian anthology and have Gargantua on my bookshelf with intent to read. The literary world can sometimes take itself far too seriously, but these stories appeal broadly without sacrificing their individual artistry.
Perhaps the darkest selection, Marie Croke's story ventures boldly into the second person to produce a story about lovers separated by what amounts to an ultimately unsurpassable class divide that reverberates through their souls and ends with tragic betrayal.
Also told in the second person, Cameron Quinn's story probes, without certain answer, the extent to which a seeping hyperconnectedness is blessing or curse to identity and integrity of spirit.
Ana Sun's atmospheric tale alternates passages from the perspective of two souls wandering alone through the Melbourne madrugada twilight whose lives and paths ultimately intersect through the physical poetry of shared loneliness.
Lyndsey Croal's story gives us a plot of different forms of sentient life learning from and teaching one another on their way to a special delivery in a floating city.
Displaying 1 of 1 review