Brain Worms Book Club

In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work and features many never-before-published pieces, international bestselling author and legendary creator of From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and other modern classics, Alan Moore, presents nine stories full of wonder and strangeness, each taking us deeper into the fantastical underside of reality. In A Hypothetical Lizard, two concubines in a brothel for fantastical specialists fall in love, with tragic ramifications. In Not Even Legend, a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In Illuminations, a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella What We Can Know About Thunderman, which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that - a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.

Available from all good libraries and book shops.

You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.

We will be meeting in the Function Room upstairs in the Star of the East. It is a 3 minute walk from Westferry DLR station. It has a wide selection of food and drinks: https://thestaroftheeast.co.uk/

We hope to see you there.

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A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profund as it is playful. Now in his new novel, David Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity. As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

Available from all good libraries and book shops.

You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.

We will be meeting in the Function Room upstairs in the Star of the East. It is a 3 minute walk from Westferry DLR station. It has a wide selection of food and drinks: https://thestaroftheeast.co.uk/

We hope to see you there.

...

The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.

Available from all good libraries and book shops.

You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.

We will be meeting in the Function Room upstairs in the Star of the East. It is a 3 minute walk from Westferry DLR station. It has a wide selection of food and drinks: https://thestaroftheeast.co.uk/

We hope to see you there.

...

A disparaging examination of the Castro regime that combines cryogenic freezing, artificial intelligence and surveillance with evil wizards, time travel and killer robots in a gripping adventure story. The peace of Tranquil Grove is violently disturbed when the Imperial Service's Hydras awake from a 200-year sleep and implant the consciousness of a sadistic, lascivious torturer and a desperate aging secret agent into the minds of a film-obsessed boy and his mother, an 'emotional engineer.' Drawing as much from the realms of the adventure novel, spy thriller and political satire as from hard science fiction and fantasy, THE YEAR 200 is on the one hand steeped in hard science and prophetic in its address of cryogenic freezing, artificial intelligence and surveillance, and on the other full of the action and intrigue brought on by evil wizards, time travel and killer robots. A cult classic and Cuban SF father Agustín de Rojas's most popular work, de Rojas critiques the Castro regime by holding it against its own impossible standards. An imaginative and bold social extrapolation and nuanced political parable, THE YEAR 200 brings contemporary trajectories to their logical extremes and asks, What does 'the greatest good for the greatest number' really mean?

Available from all good libraries and book shops.

You don't have to have read it to join us - but it'll probably help.

We will be meeting in the Function Room upstairs in the Star of the East. It is a 3 minute walk from Westferry DLR station. It has a wide selection of food and drinks: https://thestaroftheeast.co.uk/

We hope to see you there.

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