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geoffnelder's review
5.0
I wasn’t aware of any kind of palooza until the scifi writer Brad Lineweaver and fellow organiser, Jessie Lilley, insert an advert for my ARIA: Left Luggage novel in their magnificent flick-fest- horror event magazine, Monsterpalooza. Now I know palooza means a festival occasion it was with pleasure that I had the chance to read an advance copy of Astropalooza. How high in the sky could I get? Astro, however, is underselling and understating the mighty palooza of the end of universes and births of new ones that Russ Colchamiro conjures up in this final book in the Finders Keepers Trilogy.
Our heroes Jason and Theo open the book by finding themselves straddling a comet on a kind of galactic wave heading for...? One gravity wave exhilaration after another. Not too surprising though, considering the three books are predicated on a jar, and not just any jar, of Cosmic Building Material (CBM). This final novel is where the last minder of the universe (you didn’t know HE [kind of] was called Brigsby, did you?) meet antipodean youngsters hell bent on saving Earth.
There are Colchamiro trademark off-the-astronomical-wall phrasing we all wished we could write. Eg ‘...like a tadpole circling a marble, Theo coiled himself around planet after planet...’
If you, like me, have often pondered on what came before the Big Bang, other Big Bangs, and what will happen after the current Big Bang finally fizzles out at the end of the universe (perhaps on a stool in Douglas Adam’s Restaurant) then here is your answer. Or not. Don’t say ‘nah’ because ‘Existence is going to, you know...not exist...and you say nah?’
Seriously, we have conflict on a universal scale complete with resolutions, adventures and more conflict knitted in with such dry humour I had to hold my head under a tap.
Once again, Russ Colchamiro delights us with a narrative more bizzaro than crazy, more literary than any of the dead sea scrolls and infinitely more interesting.
Our heroes Jason and Theo open the book by finding themselves straddling a comet on a kind of galactic wave heading for...? One gravity wave exhilaration after another. Not too surprising though, considering the three books are predicated on a jar, and not just any jar, of Cosmic Building Material (CBM). This final novel is where the last minder of the universe (you didn’t know HE [kind of] was called Brigsby, did you?) meet antipodean youngsters hell bent on saving Earth.
There are Colchamiro trademark off-the-astronomical-wall phrasing we all wished we could write. Eg ‘...like a tadpole circling a marble, Theo coiled himself around planet after planet...’
If you, like me, have often pondered on what came before the Big Bang, other Big Bangs, and what will happen after the current Big Bang finally fizzles out at the end of the universe (perhaps on a stool in Douglas Adam’s Restaurant) then here is your answer. Or not. Don’t say ‘nah’ because ‘Existence is going to, you know...not exist...and you say nah?’
Seriously, we have conflict on a universal scale complete with resolutions, adventures and more conflict knitted in with such dry humour I had to hold my head under a tap.
Once again, Russ Colchamiro delights us with a narrative more bizzaro than crazy, more literary than any of the dead sea scrolls and infinitely more interesting.
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