Excerpt from Tales of the Incorrigible: A Song of Wood and Meat about a poet who lived the dream.
The story takes place in an absurd far future. Ting was an acquaintance of both Greasly and Throom. Ting spoke often of his "poet friend". That's all you need to know for this.
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Greasly told Throom the story of Brio Tojita. At the time that Ting knew Tojita, the poet was living comfortably off the proceeds from his best-selling poem “A Haiku Concerning the Fire Flowers of Southern Knurl As A Metaphor for the Endless Possibilities of Recombination.” In fact, Ting met the poet at a reception following a public reading marking the fiftieth anniversary of the poem’s publication and celebrating it as the most successful debut poem by a young left-handed poet in history, excepting two.
At the reception, Ting asked Tojita to read some of his other poems. He was shocked at Tojita’s response: “There are no others.”
Tojita had never written another poem. That evening Ting had heard Tojita’s entire corpus of work---all seventeen syllables of it. He carried in his mind the entire life’s work of a best-selling poet!
Ting had told Greasly that he remembered it word for word, but even in an otherwise empty room on a ship in Flitzville, he would not recite it. The reason being that the poem’s publisher was Gatekeep and Gouge.
Gatekeep and Gouge were notoriously keen on squeezing every last millimoola out of their properties. In the case of “A Haiku Concerning the Fire Flowers of Southern Knurl As A Metaphor for the Endless Possibilities of Recombination,” they completely removed it from print to better be able to control its distribution. Instead, they sent it out on reading tours every ten years. The rest of the time it was kept in the “G&G Vault,” safe from the eager eyes and ears of the public.
...
“He never did tell you the poem?” Throom asked.
“Never.”
“I wonder if it was any good?”
“Ting said it dragged a little in the middle but picked up at the end.”
SHARP, SATIRICAL DYSTOPIAN near-future adventure skewers privatized government, social censorship, and unrestrained avarice—and it’s a high-energy thriller as well! B PLUS
Today in Writing History May 21, 1703: The authorities imprisoned writer Daniel Defoe for seditious libel. Defoe was most famous for his novels Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, and Moll Flanders (1722). However, he also wrote political pamphlets, including The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which satirized how Tories handled religious dissenters by proposing that they all be exterminated. As a result, the authorities arrested and imprisoned him for seditious libel.
I've finished: House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky
House of Open Wounds wasn't what I expected.
It's not a middle book in a trilogy, it has an ending. It's not about the mysterious Woods at the edge of Ilmar that were so promenant at the end of City of Last Chances.
It's about my favorite characters from that novel, Yasnic and his God. It's about the healers that are allowed to work their miracles at the periphery of the Pall war camp because they are useful. It dangles the promise of healing in return for pacifism at a humanity that can't stop fighting.
Like City of Last Chances, it's about the people stuck in the gears of the Palleseen Empire's ambitions. Not about kings and emperors.
Tchaikovsky has grown allot at a writer since the Shadow of the Apt series and has written a very compelling story that concentrates on engaging characters.
I couldn't put it down, I listened at every opportunity. It did sometimes feel repetitive and perhaps could have been shorter. But the ending clinched it all and most of it payed off brilliantly.
A friend of mine told me that the characters in this series remind him of Pratchett characters and that House of Open Wounds reminds him of Monstrous Regiment. Now that he has brought my attention to it, I can't unsee it.
Tchaikovsky isn't Pratchett and isn't trying to be Pratchett. He is not trying to be funny, but the social commentary, humanism and satire are reminiscent of Pratchett.