ONLY FORWARD is one of the most original, mind-bending novels I have had the pleasure to read in as long as I can remember.I planned to read it sometime this year, but when I put it on my to-read list, my friend Gregor promptly advised me that this deserved my immediate attention.To begin with, I read the Straw Men trilogy by Michael Marshallmany years ago, and had no idea that the masterful author of those books also wrote under the name Michael Marshall Smith. When I learned this, I sought out...

What a wonderfully weird, touching and inspired story. The first half was rough - a noir style detective story with writing I found flat and wholly unsubtle, and humor that mostly missed the mark. It was almost a DNF.Yet, the second half takes on whole new dimensions, not even hinted at earlier. The story weaves together elements of magical realism and alternate realities that mix and blend in bizarre, dreamlike ways that feel bewildering but also strangely compelling. Think what the film Incept...

Weird. Really. Hard to classify too. The first half of the book follows Stark, who is hired to find an important person, who is believed to have been kidnapped. He lives in an interesting alternative world, with many oddball friends and neighborhoods, my favorite of which is the Cat Neighborhood. About halfway through, everything changes as we are abruptly transitioned into a dreamworld, with little upfront explanation. As the explanation unfolds bit by bit, we long for a cohesive end. There is

DNF, *definitely* not for me. SF/mystery, twisty, ’humor.’ I didn't like it. Oh, well. From my 2002 booklog notes. The only one of his books I've tried, as the others sound similar.OTOH, my GR friend Carol liked it a lot: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Michael Marshall Smith combines dystopia, hardboiled mystery and magic realism but he is always staying on the mocking side of things so the black humour fountains up.The dystopian world is sinister and kitschy:There's no good or bad time to get on a Red mono. They don't have hours where you do certain things, or days even. You just pay your money and take your chances. Actually, by Red standards the carriage I boarded was fairly civilised. True, there was both vomit and a human turd on the seat...

‘Destination?’‘Department of Doing Things Especially Quickly.’‘Contact? ‘‘Zenda Renn, Under-Supervisor of Really Hustling Things Along.’ A private investigator who claims to have some undefined paranormal ability is called to the Centre to get a top secret job: find a missing senior Actioneer named Alkland and bring him back no matter what the costs. Some weird shit is going on, and Stark is the best man available to unravel the mystery.Oh, Goodie! was my first thought. Philip Marlowe meets Dou

100 pages - DNF. No rating.Despite glowing reviews and enthusiastic recommendations, this book ultimately didn't pull me along. Relentlessly imaginative, I found it was the lack of forward narrative momentum that ultimately put me off, ironically enough. The tone was lighthearted without being outright funny, but the characters didn't engage. I skimmed the remainder of the book and didn't see anything to pull me back in.I think that fans of David Wong's Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits would

What?! Brilliant and bonkers both, there was nothing conventional about Michael Marshall Smith’s award-winning Only Forward* despite all appearances at the beginning. Unfortunately, those were the parts I enjoyed most with its cynical humor and snappy dialogue. The plot then took such a twisted turn, I suffered from whiplash and have not quite recovered from it. Highly recommended for the experience though. [* 2000 Philip K. Dick Award, 1995 August Derleth Award]

This was an interesting and tight little novel about a future world, until the author overreached himself in a bid for Significance. One of the saving graces about nightmares is that they're actually pretty short. A restrained writer who respects the reader's time actually takes advantage of this -- the most frightening aspect of nightmares is their illogic, their dread sense that you never quite know what's going to happen next. Less-disciplined writers try to use nightmares to tell stories. Ed...

What an odd gem this book is. It starts out as an entertaining thriller set in a unique near-future world. I was digging it immensely, especially because the main protagonist, Stark, is extremely engaging. He was a perfect mix of humor and can-do that makes for some great lines.For instance:"[T]he stations zipped by soundlessly, and I geared myself up for whatever it was I had to gear myself up for. I didn’t have much to go on, so I just geared up generally."Talking about not wanting to remember...

This book won the August Derleth Award (1995) and Philip K. Dick Award (2000). The books starts with a small boy that is left on his own in a flat. The boy answers a knocking on the front door of his high rise flat to find a man with no head standing on the doorstep.Set in a stylized future City where individuals live in neighborhoods organically responsive to their moods and lifestyles, the story begins as a routine missing persons case for its narrator, Stark, an irreverent soft-boiled detecti...

(Full review 3/25/18)What starts out as a hilarious send-up of cyberpunk and hardboiled/noir eventually turns into a hallucinatory nightmare, making it almost two novels in one. If Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash was cyberpunk-cubed, with loads more action and craziness than your typical Gibson-esque fare, then this is Snow Crash-cubed, at least in the earlier sections. It would have been fine had it kept its initial tone throughout, but the second half takes everything to another level.It takes pl...

i want to take a pair of scissors to this book.not to make confetti, or compost, of it, but to rearrange it.the author is introducing quite central new characters on page 320, fer chrissakes! the last 15 or so pages of the book are a firehose of infodump (well-written infodump, but still), the streams of which tie the book together.but how much better it could have been if those streams were introduced earlier as rills... it would have ameliorated the worst problems of the beginning, and made th...

An adventurous, and a well thought out debut novel for Michael Marshall Smith. Stark is a sort of 'fixer' that solve problems nobody else can, problems in The City which is made up of separate and amazing Neighbourhoods. Stark, resident of the Colour Neighbourhood accepts a job from his friend to find a missing person. Stark also seeks help from another friend a psychotic gangster from the Red Neighbourhood! It goes without saying that the book is just as much about the diverse Neighbourhoods, a...

6.0 stars. On my list of "All Time Favorite" novels. I really enjoyed the two other books I have read by Michael Marshall Smith, Spares and Straw Men and so had fairly high expections going into this book. They were SIGNIFICANTLY exceeded. I loved this book from the opening page to the very last word. This book is defintely a "mind trip" where reality is not always what you think it is and you are never sure what is going to happen next. However, unlike other books like this, the author does a s...

This is probably going to be the worst review I've written.There is so much to say about this novel, but I can't really tell you anything without spoiling it. So, where to start?How about the story? Well, the less you know, the better. Suffice it to say, our hero's travels take on some strange turns.This is the second book I've read by Smith. His thriller Straw Men, under the name Michael Smith, was quite good, but the story wasn't one I wanted to keep following for two more novels. Only Forward...

Conceptually it's brilliant, but with terrible execution and poor writing.95% of it is "Ohh look at x isn't it WEIRD?! Actually, never mind, how about y, isn't y WEIRD?! Well, if you think y is weird, you're really going to go wild for z! It's the weirdest of them all!" Followed by completely ignoring x, y and z, and throwing in a straightforward explanation of what has actually been going on the whole time.I really, really liked the explanation, but the book forgot to tell a compelling story un...

Brought to your courtesy of Reading Project 2015.I love this, I deeply love it, largely because of a single quote which I shall now transcribe:How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all?Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way y...

"I made a mental note to tell the next Street Engineer I met that they were doing a damn fine job. Sort of an embarrassing thing to think, but I knew it was safe; I always lose my mental notes."Glad I'm not the only one. I had some intelligent things to say about Only Forward, but I can't find my mental sticky notes. I do know that I found the beginning undeniably clever and almost unputdownable. My reading updates show chuckling and snerking through the first hundred pages."Working out what tha...

Oh -- my -- god. When I started reading this book I expected it to keep up the fairly light tone of the early chapters. Then it fucked with my heart bad. Don't believe reviews saying it makes no sense: it makes perfect sense, in the end, as long as you stop holding onto normal logic and start applying some dream logic. The narrator is unreliable, yeah, and he has attitude, and he knows he's telling a story, so there are bits that some people find irritating, like the way he keeps saying he'll te...