StarTwist Blue

About the Book

Eight decades have passed since you picked up this rollicking, rambunctious, wickedly satirical, unabashedly feminist, comic sci-fi odyssey.  Halley’s comet no longer returns, a retired circus clown with a gift for juggling is U.S. president, the first woman pope enjoys romantic liaisons with a philosopher-king hearkening back to Plato’s Greece, brave Native Americans break free from barbed-wire reservations and terrorize the sleepy-eyed midwest, a renowned astronomer in Antwerp watches white drawfs suddenly become bowling balls and crash into toppling constellations, mystics in India protest demon-eyed capitalism by holding a hostage a sacred chain of the Himalayas, and the megaliths of Stonehenge crash near a witches’ coven--anybody hurt?

Causes?  The derring-do, no-holds-barred results of space-time interacting with the Julian calendar.  Hey, a dozen decades have passed since you picked up this book.  Erring planets and political theories travel near the speed of light.  Stonehenge and the Himalayas pass on a highway in mid Ohio.  Distant galaxies play musical chairs.  The music of the spheres sounds eerily out of tune.  Okay, you’ve been reading fifteen decades now compacted to a spin around the block and the two great, cosmic prophets--Edwin Hubble and John the Divine--pass like lonely ships in the solitary star-crossed night.

About the Author

Tom O. Jones has published the scholarly Hermeticism and Renaissance Magic in the Shakespeare Sonnets with Edwin Mellen Press. His novel The Death Gods of Applevale was a 1992 winner of the West Virginia Writers award. Other novels include Red Swastika at the Crystal Palace and StarTwist Blue: A Science-Fiction Comedy. He has published 150 poems in 50 literary quarterlies and is a member of the American Academy of Poets. His latest book is a combination of collected poems with the short novel The Fatima Letter: A Gnostic Gospel of the Virgin Mary. With Royal Fireworks Press, he has published two young adult novels, Lord of the Geats, a retelling of the Beowulf epic, and Tinyacha’s Quest, a retelling of ancient Peruvian Peruvian folktales. He is an environmentalist, a member of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition ()VEC), and lives in West Virginia.