The Villages

by Dave Hutchinson

Fresh out of University, young Tim Ramsay is ready to make his mark in the world. Desperate for work, he agrees to take on the low-paying thankless job of researcher for Lonesome Charley Productions -- an indendant film company putting together the definative historical documentary of Hitler's Blitz on London during WWII. Before the movie is anywhere near completion, Lonesome Charley's boss, along with his secretary, disappear without a trace. Poor Tim finds himself holding the bag, with television sponsors, bill collectors, and the police all crawling down his neck for money and explanations -- neither of which Tim has. Determined to track down his boss, Tim sets out on a search that will take him from England to Poland, where he'll stumble upon a remarkable life-altering secret in places known only as... The Villages.

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

UK writer who published four volumes of stories by the age of twenty-one – Thumbprints, which is mostly fantasy, Fools' Gold, Torn Air and The Paradise Equation, all as David Hutchinson – and then moved into journalism. The deftness and quiet humaneness of his work was better than precocious, though the deracinatedness of the worlds depicted in the later stories may have derived in part from the author's apparent isolation from normal publishing channels.

After a decade of nonfiction, Hutchinson returned to the field as Dave Hutchinson, assembling later work in As the Crow Flies; tales like "The Pavement Artist" use sf devices to represent, far more fully than in his early work, a sense of the world as inherently and tragically not a platform for Transcendence. His first novel, The Villages, is Fantasy; The Push, an sf tale set in the Human Space sector of the home galaxy, describes the inception of Faster Than Light travel and some consequent complications when expanding humanity settles on a planet full of Alien life. Europe in Autumn (2014), an sf thriller involving espionage, takes place in a highly fragmented and still fragmenting Near-Future Europe, one of whose sovereign mini-nations is a transcontinental railway line; over the course of the central plot – which seems to reflect some aspects of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 – the protagonist becomes involved in the Paranoia-inducing Les Coureurs des Bois, a mysterious postal service which also delivers humans across innumerable borders.

- See more at: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hutc...

Works
* The Villages (Holicong, Pennsylvania: Cosmos Books, 2001)
* Europe in Autumn (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Rebellion/Solaris, 2014)

Collections and Stories
* Thumbprints (London: Abelard, 1978)
* Fools' Gold (London: Abelard, 1978)
* Torn Air (London: Abelard, 1980)
* The Paradise Equation (London: Abelard, 1981)
* As the Crow Flies (Wigan, Lancashire: BeWrite Books, 2004)
* The Push (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2009)

Reviews

[Ben Brackett · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I wasn't bored reading it because Hutchinson always strike the right action cord form me, for the payoff this was way too long.