On his website, Gestalt Real-Time Reviews, Des Lewis has recently been reading the stories in Rhys Hughes’ collection Mirrors in the Deluge and writing a review of each as a ‘thought-stream’ over the last month. It has been fascinating to watch the reviews of these stories pop up on the page on a more-or-less daily basis, in an approach that lends itself well to a book, such as Mirrors in the Deluge, full of 32 such diverse stories. It’s not really feasible to do justice to the extent of Des’ often detailed, and always incisive, review in such a brief summary here, so I hope Des won’t mind me picking out a handful of highlights and then recommending that you go over to his website and read it all for yourself. One general comment that I’d like to pick out first, though, is that Des believes that for many of the stories in the book, “if they had been published separately in high profile anthologies each would have made a name for itself as a literary classic, but they seem lost here gathered together, shame to say.” It is indeed a shame, but hopefully Des’ review will help encourage more people to embrace Rhys (or at least his stories!)
On The Soft Landing
“The autobiography of a deep space photon…
This is so eye-opening, I feel it would not have been out of place as a work in ‘The Big Book of Science Fiction’ that I read recently. Seriously.”
On Najort Esroh
“Only in Rhys Hughes do things happen that make you think more laterally than any other author whom I read makes you think. And I read a lot!”
On The Mouth of Hell
“It creased me up. Seriously.”
On Arms Against a Sea
“This is probably the nearest you will get to reading literature written by an extraterrestrial.”
On The Apple of My Sky
“This light piece with distractive silly names for characters did actually cause me to laugh out loud on more than one occasion (e.g. The Big Apple joke) and that is no mean feat.”
On The Taste of Turtle Tears
“This is a Rhysian classic. If not THE Rhysian classic.”
On The Bones of Jones
“A major Rhysian work that I would love to read aloud, to see if it it is utter rubbish (a stream of word association?) or pure genius. Amazingly, it could be both. It’s certainly set my mind buzzing, as you can tell.” Rhys maintains this is the best story in the book, with which Des does not disagree.
You can review Des’ full thought stream here.
John Gribbin was born in 1946 in Maidstone, Kent. He studied physics at the University of Sussex and went on to complete an MSc in astronomy at the same University before moving to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, to work for his PhD. After working for the journal Nature and New Scientist, and three years with the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University, he has concentrated chiefly on writing books. These include In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, In Search of the Big Bang, and In Search of the Multiverse. He has also written and presented several series of critically acclaimed radio programmes on scientific topics for the BBC (including QUANTUM, for Radio Four), and has acted as consultant on several TV documentaries, as well as contributing to TV programmes for the Open University and the Discovery channel.
Rhys Hughes was born in 1966 and began writing from an early age. His first short story was published in 1991 and his first book, the now legendary Worming the Harpy, followed four years later. Since then he has published more than thirty books, his work has been translated into ten languages and he is currently one of the most prolific and successful authors in Wales. Mostly known for absurdist works, his range in fact encompasses styles as diverse as gothic, experimental, science fiction, magic realism, fantasy and realism. His main ambition is to complete a grand sequence of exactly one thousand linked short stories, a project he has been working on for more than two decades. Each story is a standalone piece as well as a cog in the grand machine. He is finally three-quarters of the way through this opus.