Tuesday 2 October 2012

!Leonardo Mind for Modern Times, by Donnie Ross



!Leonardo Mind for Modern Times, by Donnie Ross
Downloadable from the Apple iBookstore FREE!

http://itunes.apple.com/book/id541725141?mt=11

The definitive Atlas of Facial Expressions from Aardvark to Zebra, the acoustic design of car-door slamming, musico-erotic compositions for cello, these peculiar topics lead the reader into the first Findo Gask Mystery.  A fierce bronze Greek gynecoid is dredged from the sea in a fisherman’s net off northern Scotland, while a plot is hatched to displace the quasi-assassinated  Holy Emperor Tony Blair from his niche as a cryochilled presentation to future generations, but what on earth is happening in the University of Aberdeen’s Department of Anthropomimetic Genetics?  Never mind that, who is this Memus44, who spends the last ice age in quite a well-known cave in the Cairngorm Mountains, polishing his mind and emerging from time to time to make sure culture triumphs but Findo Gask doesn’t?

The first Findo Gask Mystery in the Trilogy can hardly be expected to solve the entire mystery, but it might be fun to find out just how far !Leonardo Mind for Modern Times might succeed in answering all these questions, as a series of apparently unconnected preliminary short stories covering a wide range of human experience finally coalesces into an extraordinary postmodern interactive sci-fi novel, building to a powerful climax before falling apart into glittering fragments.  Expect cave ravens, masses of medical detail, excruciating jokes, non sequiturs, invented languages, philosophical posturing, a treatise on sculpture in Plato, erotic encounters of half a dozen kinds.

Illustrated with videos, drawings and paintings by the author, this chaotic book has several underlying intentions - but a sense of humour is essential.  And, if you can find it, a copy of the Atlas of Facial Expressions from Aardvark to Zebra.