Only Forwards - Michael Marshall Smith

This is a great book. You won't read anything weirder. You could read everything Robert Rankin, Terry Pratchett & Douglas Adams ever wrote and you still won't find a book as weird as this. The main character is Stark, he's world weary but loves his cat Spangle. He's a fixer, he's the type of man people contact when they need "things" doing that would prove otherwise difficult or possibly illegal. He lives in what I assume is the fairly near future where people live in Neighbourhoods. That's Neighbourhood with a very definate capital N though and they are places like Colour(where Stark lives and the inhabitants are only allowed on the ...  Read the complete review

Michael Marshall Smith's first novel. Hey, let's introduce another spurious categorisation system, for fun. I know this kind of approach is going out of fashion, but let's look at the process closely; if you use rigid categories, of course you will have problems, unless you encounter something the maker of which is trying to make it fit into the same system. Works beautifully, even indispensably, with bricks, nuts and bolts and suchlike, but for works of the free imagination it falls flat on it's face. The secret is to use flexible- walled, ambivalent categories, and disregard them even then. The very worst thing a writer can do is to try to ...  Read the complete review

Synopsis ---------- Stark lives in Colour, a neighbourhood whose inhabitants like to be co-ordinated with their surroundings. Then there's Red close by: if you want to see a tactical nuclear battle recreated as a sales demonstration. Stark has friends in Red, which is just as well because something is about to happen. My review ----------- I bought this book after reading several Amazon reviews of this new author; I had actually found the book as a recommendation from a Neal Stephenson book ?INTERFACE?. The book sounds incredibly interesting, and is right up my usual street, set in the not too distant future, society is bound ...  Read the complete review

The first novel by Michael Marshall-Smith is a superb first effort, exploring dreams and how Mankind damages environments it does not fully understand. But saying that, I don't want to give the impression that this lectures the reader. Far from it, in fact. The main character (Stark) lives in a world wher like-minded individuals live together in themed neighbourhoods. He happens to live in Colour, where the walls are controlled by AIs to coordinate with the clothes of passers-by. Hired by a neighbourhood of workaholics to find a missing scientist, Stark stumbles into a deadly situation that his past actions have created... This is a worthy debut from ...  Read the complete review

Some books are like marmite. No, not sticky and derived from yeast extract, but you either like them or hate them. I can see both sides of the argument when looking at 'Only Forwards' as I found it great in places but confusing and dire in others. Stark is a great character, we find him living in a world where a giant city has been divided into a series of self-contained Neighbourhoods each sporting its own way of life; from having no sound, or being colourful, busy, or rich! With this high end science fiction concept Marshall Smith writes a great first 100 pages as Stark sets out over a number of Neighbourhoods to seek a missing man. And then we enter ...  Read the complete review