'What’s the weirdest thing you could imagine going on in a national library?
'Dropout physics student Angela Donohoe is about to discover just that. Release it. Become it. All in a world where colonial history did not quite turn out like ours, where the global power is the Federated Kingdom of Mendana and David Bowie was an astronaut, The White Library is a surreal escapade of library friends and enemies, love—and a remarkable woman.
'The White Library: beautifully written, sensitive, idiotic.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
The Weird Colonial Boy
London
:
Gollancz
,
1993
Z491816
1993
single work
novel
satire
humour
fantasy
Martin Livings, in a review in Eidolon, offers the following synopsis:
'If I were to sum up the genre of The Weird Colonial Boy, I'd have to call it an SF/humour/alternate history/romance/bush-ranging tale, sort of Monty Python meets Robbery Under Arms, with a pinch of For The Term Of His Natural Life thrown in for good measure. In essence, it describes a world where the Reformation never took place, where the British Empire still rules supreme, where Australia is still effectively a penal colony in 1978. It's a harsh reality compared to [protagonist] Nigel Donohoe's native Melbourne, a comparatively luxurious world of tropical fish and punk rock. First he must come to terms with no longer being in his own universe (I won't divulge how he managed to skip across dimensions - let's just say it involved a tropical fish, a plastic spaceship and some chicken poo), then with the imminent likelihood of no longer existing in this or any other reality.'
Source: Eidolon 13 (July 1993): pp.87-90.
