Overview

"Karpa Talesman is unique - an adult crossworlds fantasy, brilliantly combining elements of dystopian, quest and high fantasy to tell a story about our dying Earth and a brave man dream-traveling other worlds, risking grave danger to discover the key to our rescue. The story: Planet Earth is running out of time, and scientist Sheena Drey's husband, Copper, is missing. Without her knowledge, he has volunteered with The Dream Project scientists who are convinced that the multiverse contains many worlds similar to Earth. The project uses powerful drugs to send Copper, a gifted ""dreamer,"" to find a possible answer to our planet's plight. Copper wakes to find himself an abandoned child on Urth, a world that resembles a primitive version of Earth. Forced to flee the fate of human sacrifice, he survives as a thief, a soldier, and a storyteller, while growing more certain that his 'outsider' status on Urth conceals his true existence in a different world. Left to her fate on a disappearing Earth, Sheena struggles to protect her daughter and to pry an explanation for her husband's disappearance from Dream Project scientists. Finally receiving word that her husband has struggled back to waking consciousness, Sheena learns that Copper has managed to mutter a single word. Scientists suspect the word may be a code. But it is Sheena who realizes that word is an anagram that, when decoded, might lead to Earth's salvation."

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"""Whether he's writing a historical as he did with SUOSSO'S LANE, or veering into science fiction as he does with in his bold new novel, Bob Knox has a unique ability to tap into the zeitgeist of the time, to show us not only who we are, but who we might become. I loved Karpa Talesman this for its prescience and originality, the sheer fun of playing with language, but most of all for the compassion and wisdom that floods a dark world with light."" - Patry Francis, author of The Orphans of Race Point and All the Children Are Home Karpa Talesman is a radical departure from Knox's other/earlier writing. Still the voice of the poet and the prophet and the wry humorist/wordsmith comes through. When it comes to tight, elegant and consequential writing, some things do not, and should not change. Knox is a fine writer. Karpa, the protagonist, lives between two worlds, and the reader, along with Karpa, is continually challenged to decide which is which. Part existential novel, part ""A clockwork Orange,"" and thoroughly original, Karpa Talesman, is an intriguing take on on the life and times of ""Everyman,"" and well worth your time. - Rev. Dr. Judith Campbell, author of the Olympia Brown and Viridienne Greene Mysteries. www.judithcampbell.holymysteries.com In Karpa Talesman, the accomplished poet, novelist, journalist, and naturalist Robert Knox has unleashed his formidable imagination to cavort on a grand scale. Though the premise is an apocalyptic dislocation of Earth's climate and tides, a ""winding down"" of all that is familiar and life-sustaining, the novel is not another moral tale of ecological ruin with both causes and responsibility all-too-well understood. Here, the planetary disruption is mysterious and natural science of no avail. In their desperation, the experts have recourse to something metaphysical and far older than their disciplines. They seek salvation through dreams, a solution in oneiromancy. The book is full of dreams within dreams. The hero is Copper Drey, would-be poet, part-time instructor, a dreamer even before he volunteers for The Dream Project, an enterprise with precursors as old as Plato's Cave and as recent as The Matrix. In Copper's complicated dream world, he becomes Karpa Talesman-Copper the Storyteller-undergoing more trials than Hercules and more journeys than Aeneas. He serves as a galley slave, scribe, human sacrifice, pilgrim, and entertainer, masters new mythologies, learns strange dialects, and invents fabulous tales of his own. Like Odysseus, Karpa/Copper must find his way back to his wife, his child and, by doing so, redeem his home and ours. Good speculative fiction does what all good fiction does; it deceives us into the truth by entertaining both possibilities and readers, making the former so persuasive that they persuade the latter. This is what Robert Knox has dazzlingly done in Karpa Talesman, a tour de force of sustained imagination. -- Robert Wexelblatt, author of the novel Zublinka Among Women, Petites Suites, Hsi-wei Tales, etc."

Author Information

Robert Knox is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and Boston Globe correspondent. He is the author of Suosso's Lane, a historical and mystery novel based on the notorious Sacco and Vanzetti case, and of House Stories, a collection of linked short stories, published by Adelaide Books in 2021. His short stories have been published by Words With Jam, The Tishman Review, Lunch Ticket, and Eunoia Review, among other journals. He is a contributing editor for the poetry journal Verse-Virtual and his poems have appeared there and in many other journals. He has published two poetry chapbooks, Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty and Cocktails in the Wild. As a freelance journalist, his book reviews, feature stories, columns and opinion pieces have appeared in The Boston Globe and other newspapers. His news stories appear regularly in The Boston Globe. His commentaries appear on Medium.com.

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