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the boatman
Justin Cronin (Orion Books)
IN THE contemporary science fiction canon, reality is an unstable concept. Books and movies have probed, pummeled, and torn at the fabric of the material world to reveal countless deceptions.
Such revelations are the source of paranoid nightmares in works like Matrix, the truman show or William Gibson’s neuromancer. Then there are the more lucid delusional fantasies in the vein of full recovery, Beginning and Western world. Elsewhere there are stories in which utopian filters obscure harrowing truths.
In this last category you can find the same space for the shining pulp of…