BooksScifi

Farewell Horizontal by K.W. Jeter (book review).

This is my first time reading a book by K.W. Jeter, but with a title like ‘Farewell Horizontal,’ you have to be curious what it’s about. You get more about the setting from the back cover.

It’s a future Earth with a massive cylinder rising miles above the planet. There is life on the horizontal levels as well as the vertical levels. Filmmaker Ny Axxter spends much of his time filming the gossamer angels flying overhead doing all their activities, but he is paid poorly for it and will sell it directly, covertly, or through his agent. The only person he might bump into is Guyer Gimble. From the description, his means of transport is a Norton, which one can only presume is a futuristic motorbike.

Axxter runs afoul of the authorities who declare him dead, and it takes a while for him to convince his agent that he is both alive and wanting to earn money, and he was to transverse the horizontal cylinder and televise it for money. Now herein lies the problem. If we treat this cylinder as a big dumb object that hasn’t been fully explored, then you would expect some spectacular moment, but Jeter ignores this for dialogue and window-dressing. Looking at the two main plot elements, I do have to wonder if Jeter wasn’t sure which one to go with and played it safe within the page limits.

When you read a story, you only see the end product, not all the problems with keeping a page count to what the publisher wants or what needs to be cut down or removed. How to spot or speculate on this isn’t something I normally do, except when I do reviews and feel there’s something not quite right. Here, in the opening, we see Axxter doing his job photographing these unusual angel-like creatures, denizens of the Cylinder, and then ignored for the rest of the story. You don’t tend to have loaded guns unless you intend to use them. Switching to a political intrigue seems like a safe option, but it ignores the science fiction element.

GF Willmetts

January 2025

(pub: Grafton Books, 1989. 253 page paperback. Price: varies. ISBN: 0-586-20809-7).

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

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