Merge and Disciple: Two Short Novels (From Crosstown to Oblivion) Kindle
Edition
Walter Mosley
Fiction 243 pages
Tor Books, 2012
Like Jumpnauts, these two short novels are concerned with what might occur if humans encountered an awarness greater than their own. In all three works the consequences are planet changing but the stories themselves are very different.
Walter Mosley is best known for his crime and detective fiction. His heroes, Easy Rawlins, King Oliver, and others walk the thin edge that separates morality from immorality. Mosley heroes are driven by moral considerations and behavior, and that’s just as true for the protagonists in Merge and Disciple. These two works, are science fiction in the best sense, but they also waft a bit of eau de detective noir. Mosley’s characters passage between mundane and enhanced consciousness is tempered with violence, pain and uncertainty. Fair warning: graphic sexual scenes may be disturbing to those more used to traditional vanilla science fiction.
Mosley writes in contemporary style, but with sufficient lyricality to lift his prose above the commonplace. In his book, This Year You Write Your Novel, he stresses that those wanting to write prose fiction should first become familiar with poetry. “Of all writing, the discipline in poetry is the most demanding. You have to learn how to distill what you mean into the most economic and at the same time the most elegant and accurate language.” Mosley has the skills to use words with economy, fitness and purpose.
From Merge: “You killed me,” I said with no emotion, vibration, or intention. “That’s like a table complaining about being dusted,” she said, “a sheet worrying about being hung out to dry.”
From Disciple: Nothing is as it seems, friend Hogarth. Nothing in the world that human beings believe in is really what exists. There was no primal atom, no Big Bang. There is no space as such. Life is not unique. There is no Not God.
