The Gift of Fire

March 12, 2012
While Mosley is best known for his Easy Rawlins mystery series, this “double” of two short novels demonstrates his proficiency with high-quality speculative fiction and are equally accessible to mystery and fantasy readers. In “The Gift of Fire,” the Titan Prometheus, tortured by an eagle sent by Zeus as punishment for sharing divine knowledge with mankind, manages to escape to present-day Los Angeles, where he adopts human guise. The reality-bending “On the Head of a Pin,” focused on a technological breakthrough that accidentally led to “the most important discovery in the history of this world, or the next,” is even stronger. Both are distinguished by Mosley’s often biting descriptions of humanity’s humble place in the universe. Fans of thoughtful, subtly eerie present-day fantasy will eagerly await future Crosstown to Oblivion novellas. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins-Loomis Agency.

June 1, 2012
Moving far from the milieu of Easy Rawlins and Socrates Fortlow (Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 1997, etc.), Mosley offers two novellas in one volume, part of a series entitled Crosstown to Oblivion, the common theme being, "a black man destroys the world." In The Gift of Fire, the Titan Prometheus escapes from the bondage and torture imposed on him by the Olympians for bringing mankind the gift of fire and alights in present-day Los Angeles, intent on bringing humans a second gift: that of enlightenment, so they can free themselves from unwitting slavery at the hands of those selfsame Olympians. But so spiritually impoverished is the modern age that Prometheus finds he cannot bestow his gift without killing the recipients or driving them insane. Finally he comes upon a physically helpless black boy, Chief Reddy, who fantasizes about being a superhero and saving the father he never knew from the forces of doom. What happens next will come as no surprise to fans of Robert A. Heinlein's classic Stranger in a Strange Land. Flip the book, and read again from the front, like the old Ace doubles, to encounter On the Head of a Pin, where Joshua Winterland works as a documenter at a company designing a fiber-optic tapestry, the Sail, intended for advanced animatronics editing techniques. But to everybody's surprise, the Sail turns out to be something quite different: a window into alternate worlds and times. Joshua finds he's particularly attuned to the device and soon contacts beautiful Thalla of the Alto, a future race created by humans and perpetually threatened by a remnant humanity guided by a huge computer. Complications ensue when the government gets wind of the device. Ingenious and mystical, although readers familiar with fantasy and science fiction will find little new or provocative here. Fans of Mosley's gumshoe noir books (or Blue Light, 1998, his earlier foray into the domain) will certainly wish to investigate.

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May 15, 2012

With this volume, Mosley (All I Did Was Shoot My Man), a longtime sf fan, launches a new series of speculative novellas published as double sets. In "On the Head of a Pin," an animatronics company opens a portal to other worlds, but the powers that be co-opt it for their own purposes. In the disturbing "The Gift of Fire," Prometheus escapes from the mountain where he's been chained for millennia. He flees to Los Angeles to rekindle the flame he lit in our souls thousands of years past. Prometheus implants a spark in a disabled African American boy, who preaches love and respect, and the establishment comes down on him like a hammer. VERDICT What's missing here is Mosley's sure hand with characterization. These characters seem more ciphers than real people. There's no denying, however, Mosley's anger at how we waste our promise and his pessimism about our chances of redemption. For all its flaws, this slim book is worth reading. Mosley fans will devour it. [The next book, Merge/Disciple, will be published this November.--Ed.]--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2012
Harkening back to the old Ace Doubles, which printed two novels back-to-back (flip the book over for the cover of the second novel), here are two short science-fiction novels from Mosley, best known as a mystery writer but with some sf under his belt. On the Head of a Pin tells the story of some software engineers at a cutting-edge film-production facility who, in their quest for photo-realistic computer-generated imagery, seem to have created images that exist in their own reality. The Gift of Fire finds Prometheus, the supposedly mythical Greek Titan, escaping Olympus and winding up in contemporary Los Angeles, where he befriends a career criminal and winds up changing the world. The stories (which are the first of a projected series collectively known as Crosstown to Oblivion) share some religious-poetic themes, although it should be noted that On the Head of a Pin is the more successful of the two, with a better story and more focused characters. Mosley seems to be in experimental mode here, which could be either good news or bad for his fans, depending on their expectations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)