Outrageous Fortune
Tim Scott
Language: English
Pages: 226
ISBN: 0553589857
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this outrageously funny, outrageously inventive debut, one of the most outrageously talented new writers to break onto the sci-fi scene in decades asks the most loaded question of all…
"Don't you hate it when this happens?"
…that’s what the business card asks Jonny X67, dream architect to the rich and jaded. It’s all the thieves who stole his house left behind. And if that weren’t bad enough, a saleswoman named Caroline E61 drops from the sky to sell him a set of encyclopedias and won’t take no for an answer. Can his luck get any worse?
In this rip-roaring roller-coaster ride through a brilliantly imagined future of paranoid absurdity, Jonny X will learn the answer soon enough when he falls afoul of a lunatic motorcycle gang nicknamed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a relentless Belgian assassin, and his own irate girlfriend. Traversing a cityscape whose neighborhoods are organized by musical genres, running into joke-telling elevators and holographic computer viruses, Jonny is about to learn what a nightmare it’s going to be to get his old life back in a reality warping faster than the speed of the imagination. Outrageous Fortune heralds a marvelous new talent sure to be delightfully altering the minds of readers for years to come.
vivid slabs of memories from the past few days coming to the fore, then sliding away from my consciousness, like the ice shelves calved off a glacier. Huge, knifelike crevasses cut through the very sense of who I was. I had a heart-burning, tearing sensation that a foreign part of me was careering through my mind, grasping an older me by the collar, trying to drag it free from this melee before it was totally crushed and lost. “I did this,” I said, before I had even been aware of knowing it, and
I mean the hodgepodges of moments and thoughts of the day past, where your subconscious is trying to organize your head, organize your fears, and organize your future. And then there are the ones about dead people. These are different. They have a realism that transcends normal dreams, and they have a quality about them that is comforting and comfortable. They are situations that are fresh, born not from things that can be traced to fleeting images or words from the day before, but a new world
leader. “This is business.” “Yeah, but it’s Death. All right?” said the chirpy one. “For fuck’s sake. Then shut up, Death!” cried the leader. “Yeah that’s me.” Death smiled. “He’s the Pestilence thing now. Death,” he said, straightening his shoulders. “Mr. Death, when I’m in a more formal situation.” “Do you want me to fucking shoot you? Right. Can we do the business, then? Right, Jonny X, you are going to write a dream on that thing, in which the dreamer believes God doesn’t exist. OK?”
to slide perilously around, like cargo that has broken free on the deck of a ship. It was beyond my control, and yet it was happening inside me. I tried desperately to focus on reality, but all I saw was the woman in the clamps still staring at me, and now she seemed annoyed that I didn’t get what she was trying to convey. My eyes creeped shut, forced down by some outrageous weight. I swayed unsteadily. An aching pain jabbed at the base of my skull, and then erupted into an unearthly fork of
the tail of an excited dog. It would have to be Christmas Single. I fought with the sluggish, overheavy steering that felt like it had been drugged, and I screamed at myself not to hit the brakes too hard or I’d lose the thing for sure. And all the while fresh flares of slush sprayed up in a brown-white fog. The bike skewed again, knocked almost sideways by a drift of hard-packed snow, and we virtually careered into one of the huge smiling angels that were plastered up along that particular