Only Forward (Voyager Classics) [Paperback]

Michael Marshal Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2002 | Series: Voyager Classics

Michael Marshall Smith's surreal, groundbreaking, and award-winning debut which resonates with wild humour interlaced with dark recollections of an emotional minefield. Now part of the Voyager Classics collection. Stark is the hero the future is waiting for -- God help it. He's smart, alarmingly cool, and has immaculate taste in shirts. He's a troubleshooter in the City, a lawless sprawl of Neighbourhoods which covers the country from coast to coast. Each is totally geared to the desires of those who live in it, from can-do corporate types, through deranged criminals, to people who just don't like loud noises. Stark accepts a job from Zenda Renn, the human face of the Action Centre -- where people who have to be doing something all the time hang out. Someone's missing. Zenda needs him found, and soon. In a world where the past and future, reality and dreams meet and have a fist fight, Stark is the only man who can make a difference. Time's running out and there's no going back. Only Forward.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The dazzling pyrotechnics of British author Smith's last two future noir spectacles, Spares (under option to DreamWorks) and One of Us (under option to Warner Brothers), are prefigured in his promise-filled debut novel, a 1994 U.K. paperback original now seeing its first hardcover publication. Set in a stylized future City where individuals live in neighborhoods organically responsive to their moods and lifestyles, the story begins as a routine missing persons case for its narrator, Stark, an irreverent soft-boiled detective type who specializes in "finding people, or things." Stark's retrieval of Fell Alkland, a scientist who has fled the driven environment of Action Center for the placid Stable neighborhood, proves relatively easy. But pursuit by Action Center operatives and Alkland's crippling work-related nightmares force Stark and his quarry to escape to Jeamland, a collective repository of dreams and childhood memories that Stark appears to know very well, and to which, as he discovers only belatedly, he has been lured back deliberately. The genius of Smith's narrative is its casual revelation that the detective scenario and detailed elaborations of the City that pull the reader into the story are clue-filled set-ups for the real story of Stark's self-discovery in Jeamland. Ultimately, this requires chapters of explanatory exposition that slow down the finale and betray the awkwardness of a new writer growing into his skills. Nevertheless, the story blazes with a visionary intensity that fires its imagery and fuels its premise that "once you've gone forward, you can't go home again." (Dec.)Philip K. Dick award for distinguished science fiction published as a paperback original in the U.S.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

When a senior member of Action Center disappears, the authorities hire Stark to find him. Stark succeeds in his mission"and then the trouble begins. The author of Spares sets his latest sf action thriller in a color-coded near future, where independent neighborhoods vie for dominance in a dangerous and deadly high-tech world. Smith combines a whirlwind plot with a genially laconic hero to produce a fast-paced tale that belongs in large sf collections.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Voyager (June 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007127758
• ISBN-13: 978-0007127757
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,898,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Novelist, short story writer and screenwriter, writing under the names Michael Marshall Smith and Michael Marshall. As the former, winner of the International Horror Guild and Philip K Dick Award - in addition to winning the British Fantasy Award for best short story more than any other author in history. As Michael Marshall, an internationally-bestselling writer of thrillers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny 'n' Nasty, April 21, 2000

By 

Pat - See all my reviews

This review is from: Only Forward (Paperback)

Found this book at a used book store. It's the Britishversion, with the funky black cover, and the only things on it werethe title and the phrase "May we introduce Stark. Oh, and by the way, good luck...." I flipped it open to skim the first couple pages and it hooked me. I was laughing in the store. I had to buy it. It didn't disappoint me. It was a convoluted book, alternately funny, nasty, and tragic, with a cast of characters that constantly surprised me, and a flurry of intriguing new concepts. The one that sticks out most for me was this: "The reason that it seems to take less time to return from a place than it was to get there in the first place, is because the way back is actually shorter".

The second time I read it, the comedy wasn't as sharp, which was fine, because it made the real story, the tragedy, stand out all the more.

I'm not doing this book justice at all. I can't. Buy it, borrow it, do anything to wrap your hands around it. And read it. And read it again. I'm going to.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars not all ha ha hee hee, December 16, 1999

By 

"wide_inside" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Only Forward (Paperback)

So, you start reading this book with your Douglas Adams head on. At least, I did. it's a bit sci-fi, you see, but with comedy asides. It's not until you get about halfway through that you realise you actually care about the characters in a way that you wouldn't normally, it they were only there for comedic effect. As soon as this happens, you will find yourself unable to put this book down, as it gives the most accurate description of dreaming that i have ever read. This book lulls you into a false sense of security, but don't be fooled, it has very dark moments. Also, as the book is written in first person, as soon as you have a plot premonition, you are admonished by Stark, the main character, for missing the bigger picture. Fantastic book, great author. Read all his stuff. ("Spares" next, if i were you)

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wow, a challenging book to review., August 21, 2006

By 

Ian Martin (Belmont, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Only Forward (Mass Market Paperback)

What a fascinating book.

I'm giving this one a good review because I thought that elements of only forward were greater than the sum of it's parts. As a collective, the novel really doesn't hold together all that well but when you examine it's finer pieces there are some really beautiful things at play here.

I picked up Only Forward because I am presently going back and reading all the Philip K Dick award winners. For those of you who don't know, the award is given each year for the best annual sci-fi novel that did not receive a hard cover publication. Dick never received a hardcover publication in his lifetime which was why the award was created. I've read some phenomenal books as a result, including one of my favorites 'Altered Carbon' by Richard K Morgan. Altered Carbon is brutal, hard-boiled, and very conventional cyberpunk and I think that when Michael Marshall Smith gave some of the readers who left bad reviews here a taste of something similar they fully expected him to run in that direction.

Instead, at almost exactly the halfway point, Only Forward slips right off the deep end. All of the conventional worlds and detail that Smith has established are eliminated and it's almost as though we start completely from scratch again. It's quite a leap of faith he makes with his readers to expect them to come along for the ride and I have to admit I found the next 75 or so pages to be a little bit of drudgery.

Eventually he started to reel me back in with characters and backstory that I found extremely compelling. Perhaps I was in just the right mood for it but the ending was a perfect pitch of sadness and satisfaction, despite the fact that (due to the unreliable narrator) Smith jammed a TON of exposition into the last 50 pages.

So I suppose I was finally able to suspend my disbelief enough to let the themes play out and just come along for the ride, though I can understand enough why some readers just couldn't. Upon reflection I found that the sci-fi aspects of the book were actually pretty conventional and cliche, almost satirically so. It's the plunge and what follows after which was really unique and satisfying.

There is a lot here that DOESN'T work though. While I found the Douglass Adams-y aspects of the writing entertaining (the bug finder made me laugh out loud), eventually they just dissapear and also it just DIDN'T fit together with the brutal and hard boiled aspects of the first half. To go from humorous jokes about the main characters shirt to women defecating on each other (an isolated element here but still) was just too much of a stretch for me. Also some of the material suffers because Smith just attempts to do too many things at once and it becomes unclear exactly WHAT he's shooting for. If the cyperpunk-ish city is meant as sci-fi than aspects of it (the cat city) need a clearer explanation for their existence than what he gives. If the incidental to what he was really trying to accomplish than (in my own limited opinion of course) he shouldn't have spent SO much time establishing it's rules.

If this all sounds vague and unclear than you have some idea of what it was like to read the second half of the novel.

Either way I found each of the individual elements of the story interesting individually even if they weren't cohesive. There were moments that I found Michael Marshall Smith actually managed capture horror in a way that you're conventional blood drenechd "horror" novels can only stab at (pun intended.) There are nightmares here that left me a little sick and uneasy as though they'd been my own. Parts of it are really funny. And some of it is really exciting. If you can get past the fact that it is inconsistent and just take the story as it evolves you may just have a good time.