Only Forward. Michael Marshall Smith
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Only Forward
Michael Marshall Smith
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain as a Paperback Original by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1994
Copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 1994
Excerpt from ‘Silent all these years’ written by Tori Amos, copyright © Sword and Stone Music 1991.Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Michael Marshall Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008117443
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007325368
Version: 2015-04-15
For my family: David, Margaret and Tracey, and in memory of Mr Cat.
Contents
PART ONE: The Paper Over the Cracks
There is an audacity we possess when we are young, a cockiness and a knowledge that stems from, I suspect, two very different things: firstly, we don’t care what the rules are (we don’t even know what the rules are that we are breaking, as we break them. We want it all). Secondly, we may not have much time, we don’t know: if we are going to scrawl our names on the walls of the world we must do it in letters of fire a thousand feet high, and we must do it now.
So when you are a young writer, you put in everything you’ve got.
In the case of Michael Marshall Smith, also now sometimes known as Michael Marshall, you write something that manages to be, at the same time (or at least, in the same book), a work of futuristic parodic science fiction, a jaded and bitter private eye novel, a work of magical realism, a realistic