Kim Miller
It starts with a depiction of a bleak and abusive dystopia ruled by mindless and relentless bureaucracy. By the time we reach the 25% mark it has been increasingly depressing and the characters increasingly repressed. And then something happens, something very bad. People start dying. The deaths seem random and often violent but without reason. By the halfway point they are being linked to the main character, not as the perpetrator, but by the fact that none of this happened until he arrived in the city, and he's ha some sort of contact with all the victims.
By the 75% point the city is in an uproar. The character is held for forensic examination to see why his simple presence brings about the sudden death of a person soon after. People evacuate the city to avoid him. The death toll increases. This is the heart of the book and it gets increasingly chaotic as everybody tries to deal with the situation.
At about the 75% point the whole tone changes. There is a book that people have been reading that might shed some light on what is happening. The author takes us into the book, where we find people reading a book by the same name, 'A Nest of Worlds'. The story becomes something like a Russian doll with one story inside another that is inside another. It becomes tricky, a mind game, as we try to keep track of how deep we are in nested stories.
And then we are suddenly out of that world and back with our main character. He's beginning to sort out the reality of his own life, and the reality of his city and world. And for us readers out here, we realise we didn't pay enough attention to the Mandelbrot Set and Fibonacci Series in high school.
It starts with a depiction of a bleak and abusive dystopia ruled by mindless and relentless bureaucracy. By the time we reach the 25% mark it has been increasingly depressing and the characters increasingly repressed. And then something happens, something very bad. People start dying. The deaths seem random and often violent but without reason. By the halfway point they are being linked to the main character, not as the perpetrator, but by the fact that none of this happened until he arrived in the city, and he's ha some sort of contact with all the victims.
By the 75% point the city is in an uproar. The character is held for forensic examination to see why his simple presence brings about the sudden death of a person soon after. People evacuate the city to avoid him. The death toll increases. This is the heart of the book and it gets increasingly chaotic as everybody tries to deal with the situation.
At about the 75% point the whole tone changes. There is a book that people have been reading that might shed some light on what is happening. The author takes us into the book, where we find people reading a book by the same name, 'A Nest of Worlds'. The story becomes something like a Russian doll with one story inside another that is inside another. It becomes tricky, a mind game, as we try to keep track of how deep we are in nested stories.
And then we are suddenly out of that world and back with our main character. He's beginning to sort out the reality of his own life, and the reality of his city and world. And for us readers out here, we realise we didn't pay enough attention to the Mandelbrot Set and Fibonacci Series in high school.