Showing posts with label Big Jim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Jim. Show all posts

Thursday, 28 February 2008

"Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink In The Can"...

If you like Voynich-themed short stories, there's most of one posted on the Analog website here. It's called "Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink In The Can", by Thomas R. Dulski: I mentioned it here a few days ago. Of course, the extract stops just at the point the story starts getting interesting, to try to get you to buy a copy of the April 2008 issue (where it appears in full): but that's fair enough, I suppose.

Voynichologically, a few minor typos ("Athansius", "Kirchner", "Baresche", etc), but it's basically all there. Yet to my jaded eyes it reads like a brandname-laden faux-noir short story and a Wikipedia article whose pages have all been shuffled together, not unlike Herbal A and Herbal B.

Turning the whole Big Jim/UFO/Voynich link on its head (as the remainder of the story undoubtedly does) is a nice idea: but writing Voynich fiction is a desperately hard balancing act, and I can't help but feel the attempt to shoehorn plot and history into a short story needs a lighter touch than this.