What do you think?
Rate this book
Almost Nowhere
Once upon a time, Anne lived in a tiny and orderly universe.
845 pages, ebook
Published July 4, 2023
4 people are currently reading
25 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 4, 2023
NOWHERE TO HIDE
January 27, 2025
(Note that this is a trilogy packaged together as "one book" - my ratings are 4.5 stars for book one, 3.5 stars for book two, and three stars for book three.)
A challenging, multi-faceted, poetic, and ultimately beautiful work, Almost Nowhere keeps combining opposites in gorgeous ways. It's clearly written by the same person as TNC, but takes its rambling surrealism in a totally different direction (I'd say it improves on it, at least at first). To be brief, it's an insanely high-concept setting, yet with well-written, complex, and ironically very human characters we get to know on a deeply personal, intimate level.
Self-important made-up terms are introduced, as in hard sci-fi (bilaterals, crashes, sign-trains; later, rebases, kosmopoesis, and the titular Almost-Nowhere), but they're always introduced as mystery words, turning characteristic, likable prose into more-than-real surrealistic poetry suffused with gooey foreshadowing, as in a memorable moment in chapter 6 when Hector praises bilaterals' ability to do something that's only really explained in a much later chapter while listening to "Damian Marley's sign-train blaring."
It's a mystery set in a world where you don't even understand the laws reality operates by, a drama intersticed with quantum physics lectures. Its prose - influenced half by technical, hard sci-fi and half by poetry (as in a particularly memorable chapter towards the end where a long bout of exposition about how multiple timelines "really" work turns eye-poppingly into a dark, surrealistic, desperate stream-of-consciousness screed) is flowery enough to make me even consider using words like fucking "intersticed" to describe it, yet that proves to be one of its greatest strengths, creating a grandeur and genuine self-importance that's very rare among modern books.
It really explores every crumb of meaning it can wring out of the premise. The anonymous author has said at some point that he writes outlines for chapters like a fanfic author theorizing what might happen next, and at some other point that he feels like he only "channels" his works rather than actually "writing" them. Accordingly, there's a fundamental love of the setting and characters, but also a willingness to completely change the stakes on them.
VAGUE SPOILERS BELOW
The second and third books are inferior to the first one, but the "Act 6 Act 1"-esque beginning of the second is very clever, not to mention NOWHERE TO HIDE. The mysteries keep getting set up well. The third is just alright, and I mostly kept reading out of an obligation of seeing what happened to the characters, although the bit with the singing and the beasts was just beautiful. I thought it tangled itself up too much and self-sabotaged with all that postmodern meta-goofery when it could have been more dignified without it.
I've been reading the 300k-word book on and off for months, and now my daily routine has an Almost Nowhere-shaped hole in it. I feel like the Anne who was deprived of her Ratleak. Well, I guess this guy does have two more books I haven't read...
A challenging, multi-faceted, poetic, and ultimately beautiful work, Almost Nowhere keeps combining opposites in gorgeous ways. It's clearly written by the same person as TNC, but takes its rambling surrealism in a totally different direction (I'd say it improves on it, at least at first). To be brief, it's an insanely high-concept setting, yet with well-written, complex, and ironically very human characters we get to know on a deeply personal, intimate level.
Self-important made-up terms are introduced, as in hard sci-fi (bilaterals, crashes, sign-trains; later, rebases, kosmopoesis, and the titular Almost-Nowhere), but they're always introduced as mystery words, turning characteristic, likable prose into more-than-real surrealistic poetry suffused with gooey foreshadowing, as in a memorable moment in chapter 6 when Hector praises bilaterals' ability to do something that's only really explained in a much later chapter while listening to "Damian Marley's sign-train blaring."
It's a mystery set in a world where you don't even understand the laws reality operates by, a drama intersticed with quantum physics lectures. Its prose - influenced half by technical, hard sci-fi and half by poetry (as in a particularly memorable chapter towards the end where a long bout of exposition about how multiple timelines "really" work turns eye-poppingly into a dark, surrealistic, desperate stream-of-consciousness screed) is flowery enough to make me even consider using words like fucking "intersticed" to describe it, yet that proves to be one of its greatest strengths, creating a grandeur and genuine self-importance that's very rare among modern books.
It really explores every crumb of meaning it can wring out of the premise. The anonymous author has said at some point that he writes outlines for chapters like a fanfic author theorizing what might happen next, and at some other point that he feels like he only "channels" his works rather than actually "writing" them. Accordingly, there's a fundamental love of the setting and characters, but also a willingness to completely change the stakes on them.
VAGUE SPOILERS BELOW
The second and third books are inferior to the first one, but the "Act 6 Act 1"-esque beginning of the second is very clever, not to mention NOWHERE TO HIDE. The mysteries keep getting set up well. The third is just alright, and I mostly kept reading out of an obligation of seeing what happened to the characters, although the bit with the singing and the beasts was just beautiful. I thought it tangled itself up too much and self-sabotaged with all that postmodern meta-goofery when it could have been more dignified without it.
I've been reading the 300k-word book on and off for months, and now my daily routine has an Almost Nowhere-shaped hole in it. I feel like the Anne who was deprived of her Ratleak. Well, I guess this guy does have two more books I haven't read...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews