Behemoth

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This is the way it was meant to be. Well, not all pixellated and virtual or (at best) home-printed, but integrated, dammit, a single novel in a single package, and fuck the beancounters and their Solomonesque book-splitting travesties. We aren’t in the old-school economy any more, Toto— we’re giving this stuff away now, and you can judge it for better or worse as a single standalone entity. You may agree with Publisher’s Weekly and call this the capstone to one of the major works of hard-sf in the new century. Or you may side with Kirkus and dismiss it as horrific porn, rife with relentlessly clinical scenes of sexual torture. (Hell, you may even decide they’re both right.) But whatever you decide, at least you’ll be basing that assessment, finally, on complete data.

If you lost your eyes, Achilles Desjardins had been told, you got them back in your dreams.

It wasn’t only the blind. Anyone, torn apart in life, dreamt the dreams of whole creatures. Quadruple amputees ran and threw footballs; the deaf heard symphonies; those who’d lost, loved again. The mind had its own inertia; grown accustomed to a certain role over so many years, it was reluctant to let go of the old paradigm.

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