The Gap in the Curtain

Description

Five men, one scientist, a newspaper from next year. Buchan’s The Gap in the Curtain is a country-house novel of foresight: Professor Moe’s experiment, The Times a twelvemonth hence, and the reader watching how each guest reads his own line. Tavanger tries to turn a headline into money; Mayot into office; Goodeve into a stay of death. Fractal Press ebook: speculation as social comedy, then as moral weather. Inner life under a future already typeset. Determinism on the page as a column of print the characters cannot unread. Not a gadget story. A study of agency once the curtain has a hole, and of the private cost of knowing too much. Daker and Ottery complete the five; the house-party is the laboratory. On the page the reader tracks who tries to cheat the column and who tries to obey it, social comedy tightening into a study of hope against a date already published.