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Arcadia novel iain pears7/6/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And yet, I was holding the hardcopy in my hands with no mention of needing to access the internet in order to enjoy it. I was also intrigued to see that Arcadia had made this year’s Kitschies shortlist (the Kitschies being a literary prize for “the most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic”), but in the Invisible Tentacle category for “Natively Digital Fiction”. Then I said that it was quite probably the most complex and entertaining book that I had read in some time. Tolkien, and that Tolkien’s Middle-earth played a small but important part in the narrative, and that it incorporated British military intelligence, Soviet espionage, Shakespeare (and very strong comparisons to As You Like It, as a plot device), teen-age rebellion, advanced mathematics, a bleak future where elites controlled society, corporate warfare, and a writer’s unfinished pastoral fantasy come to life, and by then I realized that I probably sounded like a blathering idiot. That one of the main characters was a contemporary of C. I told him that it had time travel, kind of, but it wasn’t a book about time travel, or travel to other worlds or other dimensions, but it kind of was. Recently, I attempted to explain the plot of Iain Pears’ novel, Arcadia, to a friend who is both an author and a literary scholar, well versed in folk stories and fairy tales. ![]()
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