Glimmering
3/5
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About this ebook
As the New Millennium approaches, Jack’s former lover, a famous photographer reveling in the world's decay, gifts him with a mysterious elixir called Fusax, a medicine rumored to cure the incurable AIDS. But soon, the "side effects" of Fusax become more apparent, and Jack gets mixed up with a bizarre entourage of rock stars, Japanese scientists, corporate executives, AIDS victims, and religious terrorists. While these larger players compete to control mankind's fate in the 21st Century, Jack is forced to choose his own role in the World's End, and how to live with it.
Originally published in 1997, Glimmering is a visionary mix of fantasy and science fiction about a world in which humanity struggles to cope with the ever-approaching "End of the End."
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand is the author of sixteen multiple-award-winning novels and six collections of short fiction. She is a longtime reviewer for numerous publications, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her noir novels featuring punk photographer Cass Neary have been compared to the work of Patricia Highsmith and optioned for a TV series. Hand teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and, when not living under pandemic conditions, divides her time between the Maine coast and North London.
Read more from Elizabeth Hand
Black Light Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Three Tiptree Award–Winning Novels: A Woman of the Iron People, Waking the Moon, and Larque on the Wing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wylding Hall Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Waking the Moon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Last Summer at Mars Hill: And Other Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Glimmering Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5D.C. Noir 2: The Classics Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Errantry: Strange Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mortal Love Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for Glimmering
60 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Elizabeth Hand is fast becoming one of my favorite writers. This apocalyptic tale weaves together high and low culture, joy and terror, against a background of cultural upheaval. Y2K has passed, uneventfully, but Glimmering still stands as a great read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Glimmering, Elizabeth Hand imagines an apocalyptic, but not cataclysmic, end of the end. It's like the difference between dying on the sidewalk from a massive heart attack & dying in inches from Alzheimer's in your own bed; the destination is the same, but the path is pretty different.This is not a book about plot. If you need your reads to be tightly plotted, this isn't the one for you. If, however, you love character, place, time, & beautiful descriptive writing you'll enjoy this.I'm very fond of Hand. Waking the Moon is one of my all-time favorite reads - one I return to again & again for it's beautiful story of what it's like to lose that one true love & survive it to love again. Sounds way cornier than it is since that leaves out the college setting, the ancient orders of paternalistic vs. maternalistic societies, The Benandati (the paternalistic movers & shakers behind the scenes of the world since ancient times), & the simple pleasures of Washington, DC.Glimmering is a very different novel than Waking the Moon, but it has many of the elements that make Hand's writing a pleasure - strong imagery, coherent worldview, words that taste good. She has an uncanny ability to mix goth, raver, & cyberpunk elements while retaining a sense of inclusiveness that makes this work a pleasure to read.I also appreciate that she writes frankly & honestly about homosexuality without stereotyping or caricaturing or delimiting. In Hand's books, homosexuality is normalized as just another fact about a character rather than put on display as a centralizing & defining trait. She isn't necessarily using homosexuality to illustrate a point, but rather creating a world where it's as much a part of life as heterosexuality. Since that's the world I choose to live in (real or not), I appreciate this element in her books.Glimmering doesn't provide any comfortable answers nor does it wrap up any simple plot twists in a bow for presentation to the reader. Instead it takes us on a journey through what the end of the end may look like. To quote Kurt Cobain, "Here we are now. Entertain us."