Actual title
10 A BOOT STOMPING 20 A HUMAN FACE 30 GOTO 10. A non-winning entry in 2009's 3-Day Novel contest, picked up by Australian publisher
Legume Man Books
and released in April 2010.
Jess Gulbranson's second trope-conscious novel.
The name comes from the computer programming language BASIC, in which it originally required each line to start with a number. The term "GOTO 10" will go back to the line starting with the number 10, which, since there is no way to break out of the loop, would continue forever. It quotes George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Short and sweet, the story concerns a music-fixated young man's discovery of a bizarre gift/curse, and his involvement with the parties that would like to exploit it. Buy it
here.
This book provides examples of:
- Alien Geometries: The cold thing's presence alone causes the rules of physics to go awry locally.
- Brown Note: The Jordanian glyph.
- Determinator: Jones.
- Crazy Cultural Comparison: Jethro Tull on a desert island?
- Deadpan Snarker: Eric, Osborn, and Fargo.
- Disability Superpower: Anna and her friends. By the end of the book could be considered a case of Blessed with Suck.
- Faster-than-Light Travel: The cold thing is explained as being able to send information and parts of itself over vast distances instantaneously by changing physics.
- Formulaic Magic: 1 divided by 0. Not just a good idea, it's the law.
- Fridge Brilliance: IT sophisticates generally claim that exposure to BASIC causes irreversible brain damage... yep, even the title of this work is a Brown Note.
- Ghostly Goals: Averted.
- Headphones Equal Isolation: Eric
- Historical Domain Character: Several, or at least their ghosts: Ian Curtis, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, and John von Neumann
- Intrigued By Humanity: Just not all of it.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Osborn. Stated in the afterword to be an Author Avatar.
- Kill 'Em All: Sometimes more than once. Word Of God has it that despite- or perversely because of this, there will be a sequel.
- Literary Allusion Title: From Nineteen Eighty-Four.
- Necromancer: Eric, the narrator
- Pretty Little Headshots: Averted.
- Psychic Nosebleed: Using necromancy in a way that defies logic results in psychic diarrhea.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Graceland
- What Measure Is a Mook?: "The only reason I'm alive is because you're not a murderer. Unless you count the driver and all those guards..."
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