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This Twisted Earth
The Past flows into The Future. The Present is our constant home. But what if all that changed? If Time became tangled, history would be… havoc.
Welcome to This Twisted Earth
a pulp-fuelled, shared-world anthology featuring brand new stories from Adrian Tchaikovsky (Shadows of the Apt), Jess Nevins (Encylopedia of Fantastic Victoriana), Mike Chinn (Swords Against the Millennium / Starblazer), and nine more talented tale-smiths. This volume also features a stash of bonus material from Dion Winton-Polak - the world devisor, editor, and lunatic in charge of this ambitious project.
Welcome to This Twisted Earth
a pulp-fuelled, shared-world anthology featuring brand new stories from Adrian Tchaikovsky (Shadows of the Apt), Jess Nevins (Encylopedia of Fantastic Victoriana), Mike Chinn (Swords Against the Millennium / Starblazer), and nine more talented tale-smiths. This volume also features a stash of bonus material from Dion Winton-Polak - the world devisor, editor, and lunatic in charge of this ambitious project.
- GenresShort Stories
425 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 20, 2016
I received an ARC of “This Twisted Earth” in exchange for an honest review.
Wow is the only suitable word to use when attempting to summarize the collected tales found in “This Twisted Earth”. Described as “…a chance to play cat’s cradle with Time”, this anthology is based entirely on a singularly bold and mind-expanding proposition - what if Time itself was fluid, fractured and a jumbled mesh of temporal threads from yesterday and tomorrow - all intersecting today?
The very premise of the collection opens countless doors and landscapes for writers to experiment and play within; trouncing traditional tropes, mixing high fantasy with high technology and everything in between. Shootouts between cowboys and Aztecs. Chariot of the Gods-type scenarios wherein the “aliens” are our own sons and daughters, countless times removed. Literally, there are no limits to the potential.
One of the most exciting aspects of reading this anthology is not just the single, consistent thread which binds these otherwise exceptionally diverse tales together but rather the passion and vision of editor, Dion Winton-Polak. The Foreward and Acknowledgements are written with such a sense utter sincerity and gratitude, one readily understands “This Twisted Earth” is truly a labor of love.
While all of the collected works are overall strong pieces, several standouts come to mind:
“The Ghost in Michelle” by Matt Lewis (a delightful and truly tricky piece of fiction with just enough clues to shock the reader)
“Curiosity is a First Step” by Piotr Swietlik (remarkable in tone, plot and setting - unique to me)
“Stagecoach Mary and the Ride Over the Mountain” by Jess Nevins (good old-fashioned dime store novel action and adventure)
“The Electric Eye of the Silver God” by Adrian Tchaikovsky (an epic and mythical quest tale written with dizzying skill and one of the most satisfactory conclusions to a short story I’ve read in quite sometime. This one will keep you guessing the whole way through)
“The Man Who Would Be King of the Monsters” by Hereward L.M. Proops (an outrageously fantastic tale, based on a work by Rudyard Kipling, written with a remarkable degree of similarity yet VERY different from the original. Fantastically fun read)
The only challenge I had in finishing the collection was the scope of the anthology itself. As described above, the basic premise is by design, one without bounds and broadly interpreted. I felt that a few of the selections were inconsistent to a degree with other works in the book. It did not detract from the experience and each story was strong on its own, but the specific stories which resonated with me seemed to truly capture the essence of what I interpreted the theme to be.
To summarize, in few cases, the concept was almost too big and some of the mini-stories and poetry selections were, in my mind, a bit out of a place.
But it is a minor quibble. The editor has created a vibrant concept, rife with possibilities. Best of all, it is his stated intention to continue work in “This Twisted Earth” and I will eagerly await to see what fantastic possibilities emerge next.
Great reading for any fan of speculative fiction looking for something off the beaten path.
Wow is the only suitable word to use when attempting to summarize the collected tales found in “This Twisted Earth”. Described as “…a chance to play cat’s cradle with Time”, this anthology is based entirely on a singularly bold and mind-expanding proposition - what if Time itself was fluid, fractured and a jumbled mesh of temporal threads from yesterday and tomorrow - all intersecting today?
The very premise of the collection opens countless doors and landscapes for writers to experiment and play within; trouncing traditional tropes, mixing high fantasy with high technology and everything in between. Shootouts between cowboys and Aztecs. Chariot of the Gods-type scenarios wherein the “aliens” are our own sons and daughters, countless times removed. Literally, there are no limits to the potential.
One of the most exciting aspects of reading this anthology is not just the single, consistent thread which binds these otherwise exceptionally diverse tales together but rather the passion and vision of editor, Dion Winton-Polak. The Foreward and Acknowledgements are written with such a sense utter sincerity and gratitude, one readily understands “This Twisted Earth” is truly a labor of love.
While all of the collected works are overall strong pieces, several standouts come to mind:
“The Ghost in Michelle” by Matt Lewis (a delightful and truly tricky piece of fiction with just enough clues to shock the reader)
“Curiosity is a First Step” by Piotr Swietlik (remarkable in tone, plot and setting - unique to me)
“Stagecoach Mary and the Ride Over the Mountain” by Jess Nevins (good old-fashioned dime store novel action and adventure)
“The Electric Eye of the Silver God” by Adrian Tchaikovsky (an epic and mythical quest tale written with dizzying skill and one of the most satisfactory conclusions to a short story I’ve read in quite sometime. This one will keep you guessing the whole way through)
“The Man Who Would Be King of the Monsters” by Hereward L.M. Proops (an outrageously fantastic tale, based on a work by Rudyard Kipling, written with a remarkable degree of similarity yet VERY different from the original. Fantastically fun read)
The only challenge I had in finishing the collection was the scope of the anthology itself. As described above, the basic premise is by design, one without bounds and broadly interpreted. I felt that a few of the selections were inconsistent to a degree with other works in the book. It did not detract from the experience and each story was strong on its own, but the specific stories which resonated with me seemed to truly capture the essence of what I interpreted the theme to be.
To summarize, in few cases, the concept was almost too big and some of the mini-stories and poetry selections were, in my mind, a bit out of a place.
But it is a minor quibble. The editor has created a vibrant concept, rife with possibilities. Best of all, it is his stated intention to continue work in “This Twisted Earth” and I will eagerly await to see what fantastic possibilities emerge next.
Great reading for any fan of speculative fiction looking for something off the beaten path.
September 6, 2016
A mind-bending, high concept anthology edited by Dion Winton-Polak. It’s refreshing to read a collection based on such an abstract and complex theory - and the writers themselves do well to interpret Winton-Polak’s premise of an intertwining past, present and future in an accessible way. There’s a nice mix of poetry and prose in here too.
My personal favourites were ‘The Electric Eye of the Silver God’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky, ‘Dead Horse Walking’ by Andrew Coulthard and ‘And the Desert Cried Tears’ by Phil Sloman – all three were beautifully written and exhibited a certain dark, experimental take on fantasy and noir that really appeals to my sensibilities.
‘This Twisted Earth’ is an ambitious shared world collection that will have you on the edge of your seat throughout.
My personal favourites were ‘The Electric Eye of the Silver God’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky, ‘Dead Horse Walking’ by Andrew Coulthard and ‘And the Desert Cried Tears’ by Phil Sloman – all three were beautifully written and exhibited a certain dark, experimental take on fantasy and noir that really appeals to my sensibilities.
‘This Twisted Earth’ is an ambitious shared world collection that will have you on the edge of your seat throughout.
October 29, 2016
Originally reviewed at Booksquawk.com
Imagine Brexit was more than an economic and political separation. Imagine Britain was physically torn from its place alongside the continent, and dropped into an empty gap in the middle of the Amazon. In the Mesolithic period. Also, add monsters. Think of the horrors which could be unleashed, and not just on prominent UKIP members. Mouth-watering, isn’t it?
“This Twisted Earth” is an eclectic collection of stories all anchored by one central premise: that the world as we know it has experienced a kind of cosmic calamity, creating a temporal and geographic Eton mess, blending past, present, future, and parallel dimensions, and dropping them all together in the same physical plane. Prehistoric vs post-historic. Mundane vs fantastic. Dogs vs cats. In short, anything goes, and as the contributors to this volume have fired up their imaginations – fueled, I imagine, by whisky and Hunter S. Thompson’s first aid kit – anything usually does. The stories move between familiar yet warped geographies and periods – was-Africa, was-Japan, was-Britain, was-Wild West – and in each of them there is a defining weirdness, some weirdnesses weirder than others.
Each story could warrant a review in its own right, but here is a grab-bag of examples:
In “Fatal Planet”, a twisted Aztec encounters a Star Trek-esque spaceship which has been dragged into this dimensional mashup, and the reader is given a drone’s-eye view of the landscape to come. In “The Ghost in Michelle”, a fiery Welsh girl is dropped into a medieval fantasy-scape, surviving the relocation only to be promptly decapitated by a deranged knight-of-sorts. “Little Boy” follows a mother’s journey to find her lost son, across a violent and deadly was-Japan. “Stagecoach Mary and the Ride over the Mountains” is the retelling of a legendary tale of Mary Fields, a no-nonsense skull-cracker from the Wild West, who makes a perilous journey by wagon to trade meat for artillery with a Boston from the year 2133, encountering beasties from some other time and place on her way. Then we have “The Man who would be King of the Monsters” by Booksquawk’s own Hereward Proops, an awesome account of a battle in a kind of twisted British Raj, where gargantuan mammoth-like monsters called balaa battle one another to the death, ridden by teams of warriors from rival villages.
Some authors directly reference the twisting event, setting it as a post around which they pivot their stories, while others consider its implications and cut loose with the monsters and weirdness. Some stories are fantastically pulpy, while others take on a darker edge – but they are all conceived and executed with a sharp eye and ear, resulting in an oddly harmonic whole. The collection’s curator and editor, Dion Winton-Polack, ties the stories together with invented articles, poems, essays and other fictions. The end result is a glorious tapestry of weird and wondrous, where the map of the world and its history is re-imagined piece by piece, then torn apart and stuck back together again with the aid of a blindfold and a hefty whiff of ether. It’s a clever stage on which to host such an anthology, and it really works. I genuinely hope there will be more pieces added to the twisted map in the future.
Imagine Brexit was more than an economic and political separation. Imagine Britain was physically torn from its place alongside the continent, and dropped into an empty gap in the middle of the Amazon. In the Mesolithic period. Also, add monsters. Think of the horrors which could be unleashed, and not just on prominent UKIP members. Mouth-watering, isn’t it?
“This Twisted Earth” is an eclectic collection of stories all anchored by one central premise: that the world as we know it has experienced a kind of cosmic calamity, creating a temporal and geographic Eton mess, blending past, present, future, and parallel dimensions, and dropping them all together in the same physical plane. Prehistoric vs post-historic. Mundane vs fantastic. Dogs vs cats. In short, anything goes, and as the contributors to this volume have fired up their imaginations – fueled, I imagine, by whisky and Hunter S. Thompson’s first aid kit – anything usually does. The stories move between familiar yet warped geographies and periods – was-Africa, was-Japan, was-Britain, was-Wild West – and in each of them there is a defining weirdness, some weirdnesses weirder than others.
Each story could warrant a review in its own right, but here is a grab-bag of examples:
In “Fatal Planet”, a twisted Aztec encounters a Star Trek-esque spaceship which has been dragged into this dimensional mashup, and the reader is given a drone’s-eye view of the landscape to come. In “The Ghost in Michelle”, a fiery Welsh girl is dropped into a medieval fantasy-scape, surviving the relocation only to be promptly decapitated by a deranged knight-of-sorts. “Little Boy” follows a mother’s journey to find her lost son, across a violent and deadly was-Japan. “Stagecoach Mary and the Ride over the Mountains” is the retelling of a legendary tale of Mary Fields, a no-nonsense skull-cracker from the Wild West, who makes a perilous journey by wagon to trade meat for artillery with a Boston from the year 2133, encountering beasties from some other time and place on her way. Then we have “The Man who would be King of the Monsters” by Booksquawk’s own Hereward Proops, an awesome account of a battle in a kind of twisted British Raj, where gargantuan mammoth-like monsters called balaa battle one another to the death, ridden by teams of warriors from rival villages.
Some authors directly reference the twisting event, setting it as a post around which they pivot their stories, while others consider its implications and cut loose with the monsters and weirdness. Some stories are fantastically pulpy, while others take on a darker edge – but they are all conceived and executed with a sharp eye and ear, resulting in an oddly harmonic whole. The collection’s curator and editor, Dion Winton-Polack, ties the stories together with invented articles, poems, essays and other fictions. The end result is a glorious tapestry of weird and wondrous, where the map of the world and its history is re-imagined piece by piece, then torn apart and stuck back together again with the aid of a blindfold and a hefty whiff of ether. It’s a clever stage on which to host such an anthology, and it really works. I genuinely hope there will be more pieces added to the twisted map in the future.
October 11, 2023
I love a good short story collection, and setting them all on the same brown earth made for a great world building experience. Very nicely done!
November 20, 2016
This anthology explores what happens when past, present and future collide in vivid, adventurous detail. Highly recommended.
I'm a big fan of mish-mash tales - I loved the Doctor Who episodes such as The End of Time, or Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, and enjoyed the pulp-fiction nature of having such anachronistic characters as Egyptian Pharaohs, dinosaurs, intergalactic transportation, Philosophers stones and advanced life-lengthening technology, current-day politics and Victorian-style machines all wrapped up in one package, one daring escapade. This sort of mish-mash story is mighty fun – but I often wondered about the real impact something like this would have?
Anne McCaffrey went briefly into the mechanics of splicing in her Dragons of Pern novels – and the horrors of what should happen when such spacetime magic goes wrong (the image of a dragon partially embedded in a rock face is etched into my mind forever). Kingdom Hearts got a little too complicated after the first game as it tried to resolve a lot of multi-world and multi-timeline story arcs whilst maintaining a central chronology – admittedly this still works for a lot of people but I found myself losing engagement in the series as it went further along due to this.In fact anything from the Dying Earth subgenre of sci-fi tends to get into the pitfall of trying too hard to keep a central chronology. The very nature of a world at the end of time itself seems to go against chronology.
So how best to deal with a story that involves the meshing, melding and merging of time? Perhaps the best response is to chronicle smaller stories from varied viewpoints, immersing the reader in the full chaos of the brave new world(s) they would face after such a cataclysm. So it is with the anthology of short stories, This Twisted Earth.
None of the stories in This Twisted Earth shy away from anything. All stories take place after ‘The Cataclysm’, a mysterious event that caused time to twist in all directions. Some stories feature newbie travellers in the twisted world, others feature seasoned veterans, and others yet feature later-generations who have been born and grown up in the twisted world. As Winton-Polak himself says, ‘This is your chance to grab the skein of history and play cat’s cradle with it.’
There is also the reality of what merging multiple moments of time would cause. For instance, at the moment of cataclysm, most people on Earth would die, as the Earth is on an orbit around the sun, and can’t occupy every point of said orbit at once. Depending on what moment in time you get thrust suddenly into, it’s more than likely you’re going to end up in the cold vacuum of space. A chilling thought – and a good way to realistically look at what such a time-breaking event might do.
‘Earth was a Trick-or-Treater’s egg, hurled against the void’s front door. It was cracked and splashed, nothing more than a chaotic mess, frozen in a huge splatter pattern.’ (excerpt from Fatal Planet by Mike Chinn)
It’s incredibly ambitious – that goes without saying, really, for an anthology that breaks the format of what we consider an anthology to be demands more attention, and asks that the reader be comfortable with feeling out of their comfort zone. But it’s this quality, I think, that allows This Twisted Earth to shine, as all readers are put in the position of the characters, unsure of what to expect next. It could be dinosaurs, but it could also be a nice cup of tea and a singsong.
Dion Winton-Polak has envisaged more volumes of This Twisted Earth in the future, which is awfully exciting. It’s a living series, one that has no fixed reason behind the cataclysm as of yet, and that’s something that contributors are going to be working on together as things progress. It’s designed to be a shared world, the development of which everyone can partake in if they desire, and this selfless public nature of the work gives it authenticity and credence. If you like reading about old gods and new, if you like prehistoric monsters meeting futuristic civilisations, if you want to meet some talking severed heads or learn what a deus otiosus is or just fancy picking your way through a post-nuclear wasteland, this is the book for you. I certainly enjoyed it immensely.
I volunteered to read a complimentary copy of this book.
I'm a big fan of mish-mash tales - I loved the Doctor Who episodes such as The End of Time, or Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, and enjoyed the pulp-fiction nature of having such anachronistic characters as Egyptian Pharaohs, dinosaurs, intergalactic transportation, Philosophers stones and advanced life-lengthening technology, current-day politics and Victorian-style machines all wrapped up in one package, one daring escapade. This sort of mish-mash story is mighty fun – but I often wondered about the real impact something like this would have?
Anne McCaffrey went briefly into the mechanics of splicing in her Dragons of Pern novels – and the horrors of what should happen when such spacetime magic goes wrong (the image of a dragon partially embedded in a rock face is etched into my mind forever). Kingdom Hearts got a little too complicated after the first game as it tried to resolve a lot of multi-world and multi-timeline story arcs whilst maintaining a central chronology – admittedly this still works for a lot of people but I found myself losing engagement in the series as it went further along due to this.In fact anything from the Dying Earth subgenre of sci-fi tends to get into the pitfall of trying too hard to keep a central chronology. The very nature of a world at the end of time itself seems to go against chronology.
So how best to deal with a story that involves the meshing, melding and merging of time? Perhaps the best response is to chronicle smaller stories from varied viewpoints, immersing the reader in the full chaos of the brave new world(s) they would face after such a cataclysm. So it is with the anthology of short stories, This Twisted Earth.
None of the stories in This Twisted Earth shy away from anything. All stories take place after ‘The Cataclysm’, a mysterious event that caused time to twist in all directions. Some stories feature newbie travellers in the twisted world, others feature seasoned veterans, and others yet feature later-generations who have been born and grown up in the twisted world. As Winton-Polak himself says, ‘This is your chance to grab the skein of history and play cat’s cradle with it.’
There is also the reality of what merging multiple moments of time would cause. For instance, at the moment of cataclysm, most people on Earth would die, as the Earth is on an orbit around the sun, and can’t occupy every point of said orbit at once. Depending on what moment in time you get thrust suddenly into, it’s more than likely you’re going to end up in the cold vacuum of space. A chilling thought – and a good way to realistically look at what such a time-breaking event might do.
‘Earth was a Trick-or-Treater’s egg, hurled against the void’s front door. It was cracked and splashed, nothing more than a chaotic mess, frozen in a huge splatter pattern.’ (excerpt from Fatal Planet by Mike Chinn)
It’s incredibly ambitious – that goes without saying, really, for an anthology that breaks the format of what we consider an anthology to be demands more attention, and asks that the reader be comfortable with feeling out of their comfort zone. But it’s this quality, I think, that allows This Twisted Earth to shine, as all readers are put in the position of the characters, unsure of what to expect next. It could be dinosaurs, but it could also be a nice cup of tea and a singsong.
Dion Winton-Polak has envisaged more volumes of This Twisted Earth in the future, which is awfully exciting. It’s a living series, one that has no fixed reason behind the cataclysm as of yet, and that’s something that contributors are going to be working on together as things progress. It’s designed to be a shared world, the development of which everyone can partake in if they desire, and this selfless public nature of the work gives it authenticity and credence. If you like reading about old gods and new, if you like prehistoric monsters meeting futuristic civilisations, if you want to meet some talking severed heads or learn what a deus otiosus is or just fancy picking your way through a post-nuclear wasteland, this is the book for you. I certainly enjoyed it immensely.
I volunteered to read a complimentary copy of this book.
December 24, 2022
A very mixed bag
I'm not even sure how I feel about it as a whole. Some parts I wanted more but other parts I did not care about.
I initially rated it as 3 Star but I changed it to 4 after considering that it really is an image of a fractured earth with everyone having a different experience and viewpoint.
I'm not even sure how I feel about it as a whole. Some parts I wanted more but other parts I did not care about.
I initially rated it as 3 Star but I changed it to 4 after considering that it really is an image of a fractured earth with everyone having a different experience and viewpoint.
November 15, 2023
Only read “The Electric Eye of the Silver God” by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews