Missing Links and Secret Histories - Softcover

Duchamp, L. Timmel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1619760398 ISBN 13: 9781619760394

Publisher: Aqueduct Press, 2013

Synopsis

Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries from across the Known Multiverse is an anthology of short fictions by Nisi Shawl, Anna Tambour, Lucy Sussex, Mark Rich, and others. Ever wonder who that frequent addressee of Anglophone Nineteenth-century narrators, ''Dear Reader,'' really was? Or about the true story on which Edgar Allan Poe based his melodramatic '''Fall of the House of Usher''? Perhaps it never occurred to you to wonder whether there might have been a relationship between H.G. Wells' supposedly fictional Dr. Moreau and Joseph Conrad's supposedly fictional Col. Kurtz. Missing Links and Secret Histories elucidates these and other mysteries (some admittedly obscure). It even includes excerpts from lost or suppressed manuscripts scholars have not even suspected exist, such as ''The V Manuscript'' written by the Marquis de Sade in 1783 while imprisoned in the Chateau de Vincennes.

About this title

About the Author:

L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of the five-novel Marq'ssan Cycle and two collections of short fiction, Love's Body, Dancing in Time and Never at Home, as well as the short novel The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) She is also the founder of Aqueduct Press and the editor of Narrative Power: Celebrations, Encounters, Struggles; Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies; and The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 1, and co-editor, with Eileen Gunn, of The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2.

Review:

Like Wikipedia, this book is written by many contributors but forms a unified whole. Sticking strictly to Wikipedia formatting, each chapter is a ''missing'' entry, detailing everything from the lost history of Nancy Drew's mother to the life of the independent, 19th-century female author who inspired Poe's ''Fall of the House of Usher.'' Editor Duchamp, a longtime publisher of progressive, independent science fiction, has put together a wicked and witty sendup of how history is written today and how some people and stories are systematically edited out of it. It's both an experiment with alternate history storytelling and a kind of companion piece to Beukes' Shining Girls. We are invited to think about whose stories disappear from the timestream, and why some ideas are so quickly erased by cultural amnesia and editorial ''consensus.'' --Annalee Newitz, NPR June 14, 2013

About this edition

• Publisher: Aqueduct Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1619760398
• ISBN 13: 9781619760394
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238