Professor Sophia Stuart, smart, sexy, and sassy, finds herself in competition for a prestigious academic appointment with her closest friend, a prospective lover, a nasty colleague, and one very strange little man. Over the course of a sometimes whacky, sometimes heart-wrenching semester, as she campaigns for the honor that would be the crowning achievement of her professional career, Sophia becomes swept up in the private war of wills between two powerful personalities for whom the university is a battleground and whose clash of incompatible ideologies masks a struggle for nothing less than the soul of higher education itself. In negotiating this contested space, bestrewn with obstacles and challenges, the failure to overcome any one of which could frustrate her aspirations toward fulfillment, Sophia must learn how to reconcile her fragile sense of personal integrity with professional ambition. Somehow in this world circumscribed by philosophy and faction, Sophia, a quick study and shrewd, must craft the means to that reconciliation; and somewhere in the midst of this turbulent landscape she must locate a calm refuge for the preservation of the self, a place with room enough in which tender heart, tireless mind, and boundless soul can find adequate scope for enriched expression. Restoration Court, the inaugural novel in the Winston University Series, offers an irreverent glimpse into one of the most deliriously dysfunctional institutions of higher learning ever imagined. But for anyone who has worked in higher education, nothing of extreme shading and artful distortion of the novel can hide the underlying and disturbing realities present in the fictional representation, unquiet but for the modesty of its truth.
The squirrelly little professor Stanley Kosiewski occupies an unstable place in the world located between two realities: an imagined one in which he socializes and converses with some of the most famous characters of world literature and the academic world of dysfunctional Winston University. The latter is defined by his relationship with four colleagues. Together with K, they comprise the Fellowship of the Fire, a literary clique of philosophically minded, antiquated intellectuals with antiquated opinions on everything from soup to nuts. When faced with the prospect of retirement from academia, the odd little professor, affectionately known as the gerbil by students and colleagues alike, begins to reflect on the purpose and meaning of his life and his career. Waiting to be discovered in the vague space between these realities is something of an answer to his perplexing questions about his relevance.
The Saurians are coming! No, claims Dr. Alistair Truepenny, professor of xenoarchaeology at Winston University, they are already here, and, what’s more, they have been among us for centuries, patiently manipulating us politically, economically, and socially. So says the Codex, an ancient text found by Truepenny in the ruins of an underground labyrinth on the distant world to which he has ventured by way of the wormhole that one day mysteriously opened in his office. The codex, Truepenny asserts, tells the story of a predatory species that, having abandoned their dying world, struck out aggressively across galaxies in search of other worlds to subjugate and other races to dominate. Together with his dashing alter ego Anselm, the cryptic exolinguist Clavdia, his graduate assistant and spiritual advisor Ganesh, and a supporting cast of zany characters, Truepenny, armed with his alarming knowledge, has determined to forewarn the world of the Saurian danger. But will the world take heed? Or are the Saurians—and his assorted assistants themselves—merely figments of Truepenny’s imagination?
Who am I? What is my purpose? Before only available in e-manuscript to the “Geek Underground” on campus, here for the first time in print is Denn “Doc” Quinn’s disturbing vision of the world of the Pharak and Mukti, a chilling dreamscape woven and governed by the forces of Psytechsci, policed by the brutally repressive kordac-mukti, and haunted by the nightmare figures of shadow-stalkers, ghouls who devour souls; by high-tech pleasure junkies who steal identities and experiences; by pharaphrenics, sexually ambiguous beings capable of mind invasion; and by the Innominati, whose bodies emptied of essence drift like aimless wraiths through the night. This is the world to which the Pharak Andrew awakens following a mysterious surgery that has left him with partial amnesia and an identity reconstructed by government scientists. Before long Andrew discovers discrepancies between the life that science has given him and the life he seems once to have led. Confused by vague memories of his former self, troubled by bizarre dreams that will not let him alone, Andrew determines to unravel his past. Wandering in an existential labyrinth, he can cling to but one certainty: that he is a citizen of the City of Singular Longing. Beneath the utopian surface of the city, however, lurks a world oppressed by class antagonisms and rebellion and a world unfitted to furnish satisfying answers to Andrew’s most urgent questions. Only the Liminal, the trackless wilderness beyond the city, may hold the answers. The Liminal—to which all access has been sealed off by protective shield. A forbidden space. An impenetrable space except to rebels like Andrew bold enough to risk everything to get there. The Liminal—where the fugitive soul, if unprepared for the revelations that await it, may in the act of self-discovery lose itself forever in the deeper spaces of endless dream. Or nightmare.
Professor Sophia Stuart, smart, sexy, and sassy, finds herself in competition for a prestigious academic appointment with her closest friend, a prospective lover, a nasty colleague, and one very strange little man. Over the course of a sometimes whacky, sometimes heart-wrenching semester, as she campaigns for the honor that would be the crowning achievement of her professional career, Sophia becomes swept up in the private war of wills between two powerful personalities for whom the university is a battleground and whose clash of incompatible ideologies masks a struggle for nothing less than the soul of higher education itself. In negotiating this contested space, bestrewn with obstacles and challenges, the failure to overcome any one of which could frustrate her aspirations toward fulfillment, Sophia must learn how to reconcile her fragile sense of personal integrity with professional ambition. Somehow in this world circumscribed by philosophy and faction, Sophia, a quick study and shrewd, must craft the means to that reconciliation; and somewhere in the midst of this turbulent landscape she must locate a calm refuge for the preservation of the self, a place with room enough in which tender heart, tireless mind, and boundless soul can find adequate scope for enriched expression. Restoration Court, the inaugural novel in the Winston University Series, offers an irreverent glimpse into one of the most deliriously dysfunctional institutions of higher learning ever imagined. But for anyone who has worked in higher education, nothing of extreme shading and artful distortion of the novel can hide the underlying and disturbing realities present in the fictional representation, unquiet but for the modesty of its truth.
The Saurians are coming! No, claims Dr. Alistair Truepenny, professor of xenoarchaeology at Winston University, they are already here, and, what’s more, they have been among us for centuries, patiently manipulating us politically, economically, and socially. So says the Codex, an ancient text found by Truepenny in the ruins of an underground labyrinth on the distant world to which he has ventured by way of the wormhole that one day mysteriously opened in his office. The codex, Truepenny asserts, tells the story of a predatory species that, having abandoned their dying world, struck out aggressively across galaxies in search of other worlds to subjugate and other races to dominate. Together with his dashing alter ego Anselm, the cryptic exolinguist Clavdia, his graduate assistant and spiritual advisor Ganesh, and a supporting cast of zany characters, Truepenny, armed with his alarming knowledge, has determined to forewarn the world of the Saurian danger. But will the world take heed? Or are the Saurians—and his assorted assistants themselves—merely figments of Truepenny’s imagination?
Who am I? What is my purpose? Before only available in e-manuscript to the “Geek Underground” on campus, here for the first time in print is Denn “Doc” Quinn’s disturbing vision of the world of the Pharak and Mukti, a chilling dreamscape woven and governed by the forces of Psytechsci, policed by the brutally repressive kordac-mukti, and haunted by the nightmare figures of shadow-stalkers, ghouls who devour souls; by high-tech pleasure junkies who steal identities and experiences; by pharaphrenics, sexually ambiguous beings capable of mind invasion; and by the Innominati, whose bodies emptied of essence drift like aimless wraiths through the night. This is the world to which the Pharak Andrew awakens following a mysterious surgery that has left him with partial amnesia and an identity reconstructed by government scientists. Before long Andrew discovers discrepancies between the life that science has given him and the life he seems once to have led. Confused by vague memories of his former self, troubled by bizarre dreams that will not let him alone, Andrew determines to unravel his past. Wandering in an existential labyrinth, he can cling to but one certainty: that he is a citizen of the City of Singular Longing. Beneath the utopian surface of the city, however, lurks a world oppressed by class antagonisms and rebellion and a world unfitted to furnish satisfying answers to Andrew’s most urgent questions. Only the Liminal, the trackless wilderness beyond the city, may hold the answers. The Liminal—to which all access has been sealed off by protective shield. A forbidden space. An impenetrable space except to rebels like Andrew bold enough to risk everything to get there. The Liminal—where the fugitive soul, if unprepared for the revelations that await it, may in the act of self-discovery lose itself forever in the deeper spaces of endless dream. Or nightmare.
The squirrelly little professor Stanley Kosiewski occupies an unstable place in the world located between two realities: an imagined one in which he socializes and converses with some of the most famous characters of world literature and the academic world of dysfunctional Winston University. The latter is defined by his relationship with four colleagues. Together with K, they comprise the Fellowship of the Fire, a literary clique of philosophically minded, antiquated intellectuals with antiquated opinions on everything from soup to nuts. When faced with the prospect of retirement from academia, the odd little professor, affectionately known as the gerbil by students and colleagues alike, begins to reflect on the purpose and meaning of his life and his career. Waiting to be discovered in the vague space between these realities is something of an answer to his perplexing questions about his relevance.
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