Books by John Fraser

Two novellas by John Fraser, described by the Whitbread Award winning poet John Fuller, as 'the most original novelist of our time'.Stardust examines the adventures of the journalist, Hadar. At sea, he and the odious Pietro, a banker cum sailor, are marooned by the shipboard scientists whose expedition has lost contact with land. Hadar's lover, Doctor Chin, is the principal in an experiment into the conversion of humans into marine creatures. The mission is desperate, the participants self-destructive in their wish to make world-saving discoveries. The story explores two connected themes - Hadar's many, unsuccessful relationships under the shadow of Pietro, banks and cashiers, and his memories of following the experiment of a fusion reactor - the attempt to build a star on earth.Wisdom is something many people seek, though what it is remains uncertain. Raul, a common man, is pledged to seek wisdom, though his life is one of happenstance, rebounding from archaeological expeditions to politics, a grooming for leadership which seems more like a prison, interrogation without purpose but with threats, and finally transformation as a literary and sexual subject. Along his haphazard way, he finds himself in extreme situations where the meaning of 'wisdom' should become more evident. Life and wisdom seem incompatible - but in the end, with an old associate, he continues his quest - in control, but in a landscape of increasing hardship, and isolation.

Thinking Scientifically is John Fraser's latest wildly original, experimental work of fiction: three stories ('The Opera', 'Round the World', 'The Shaft') centred on one theme: while we can think scientifically, can we be scientifically?We can train as scientists - but that's a job, and when we stop doing it - we're the same chimpanzee types as everybody else. When we thinkscientifically, what happens to all the other layers, the modalities, systems, of thought and being: the magical, the religious, the hunting and the gathering, the philosophical, the artistic...? The characters in the three long tales that make up Thinking Scientifically are involved in science, certainly - science as setting records, sport, endurance ... science as the psychology ... of art: of desire, the desire to be a libertine, the search for the unknown and unattainable - our Kurdistans: of what we know is there, somewhere, and leaves us flattened and exhausted by the search. Science - has no end: if it has a scope, it is not ours, not our happiness, certainly. Is it the discovery, rather, that what we know, or would like to know, and what we are,are not at all the same?In the end, after the exploration and the hypotheses - there's kids, maybe not ours, crowds and causes, bureaucrats. Not at all scientific ... what then? Enough of thought? Of experiment? In the end ... company? A welcome? An opera, exotic clubs: the world: and a hole in the ground. The protagonists use their best analyses to draw conclusions and wisdom from these familiar settings.

This book couples anecdotes with real data to help nature lovers, zoo staff, zoo fans, and even zoo foes understand the many ways zoos are conceptualized, used, and valued, unpacking what seems to happen in the minds of diverse zoo-goers to highlight powerful opportunities for learning, engagement, and activism.

Behaving Well consists of three stories on a related theme: When people are forced to leave their home, in the new place they're often told to 'behave themselves' or be sent back, to to somewhere else. In jail or equivalent, they - everyone - may be let go early for 'good behaviour'. Behaving well is a condition for staying somewhere - even somewhere you don't want to be - and 'going back' may pose dilemmas even more problematic than behaving badly. You find yourself in a chain of ill-fortunes and tragedies - a nakba, a catastrophe as one aspect of it has been called. What other rules exist, except our efforts at 'behaving well'? But, you change, through life; you watch injustices you say you cannot remedy. And your behaviour changes, together with its driving principles. If you want history - you can't have good behaviour. Good Behaviour: Alex, undocumented immigrant, is inspired, shadowed, by the adventures of Alexander, the Great. No one says Alexander behaved well - but he acted! He transformed. He shaped the classical world, scattered Greeks all over, changed cultures, till his suicidal addictions finished him. Alex starts precarious: is jailed, meets a real hero, Valerio - joins the ex-prisoners and outcasts in a barren place. There, they improvise a polity - growing natural drugs, organising an army. Valerio is their inspiration, their guide. Alex teams up with Anicette, whose inspiration is the book 'On Lying'. He spins out of control but his behaviour is consistent. People close to Alex behave in different ways, but all maintain their principles, Anicette as well. Anicette joins with a young ambitious woman, Mélisande. After the death of Alex, we see all who are left have indeed behaved well - at least, consistently. Alex, though, has acted, and imagined: the others, they only react. Anicette concludes, instructing Mélisande - the only judge of our behaviour is ourself. Misconduct: Does behaving well count for something? It doesn't seem to matter for success and failure, revelation or obscurity. In Misconduct, Matti, a political exile with aspirations of humanistic value, tries to make a life - maintaining principles, but surviving - the betrayal of his partner, unofficial enslavement. He wanders, has adventures - becomes a military strategist, travels to the stepps with a lady jockey - but his life is seeing others ride away, betray, or suffer punishments, promotions - which he's been unabvle to prevent or even understand. Ultimately, his organisation gives him the mission - to assassinate the Chief. To do so means his organisation will be expunged - a mass non-violent movement, non-violent, exposed. But for the otther opposition, assassination means a civil war that they are bound to lose. Matti would betray his principles, his own morality - and probably involve all oppositions in disaster. But - loyalty, behaving well or badly - he has no choice. Many real circumstances involve the exiled militants in just this - perfidious - choice.Catastrophe: The catastrophe is that everything happens comes to an end - without a scrap of meaning, still less justice, truth, equity. Some people behave very poorly: Yannick who has 'saved' Hana and enslaved her, Pavel .... for others, the behaviour is just on the edge of awful - Typhaine .... Dr Hoffman sees and can do nothing except register. Hana has character, but no context where the character can assert itself or, indeed, be good or bad.

Three novellas on friendship: Cities on the Plain, on a Hill is the story of Ahmed and Nico, ex-pats and best friends. The protagonist of Fame is engaged to follow the past life of an ancient, who hopes to achieve a kind of immortality. In Cleansing there are mysteries, situations not resolved, friends who lead astray and who you lead astray.

John Fraser’s latest work of fiction follows the refugee Khalil in two related stories, ‘The Refugees’ and ‘Travels with Strangers’.  We are all refugees seeking an entry to soCaucasmewhere when we’ve left somewhere else. Our knowledge is a raft that’s carried us on lumpy seas. We can forget all that when we arrive. It doesn’t serve. We don’t, of course, stop being refugees, not ever, but we have a lot of living to do while we’re forgetting where we were before.  It’s a commonplace, to say we’re strangers to ourselves – not only when we are alone, but especially when we are in company. Khalil comes from a ruined land, chooses the obvious role in his  new places – acting. On film, where someone else will edit him. He longs to find the treasure we all want – and isn’t his, or ours.  He flits through ‘Travels with Strangers’ too – but people of all spots and stripes are rolling down, shaken from their safe spots – and finish in the Caucasus! A place that once was Eden – and they try to plant and harvest there again. It doesn’t necessarily work. It’s strange, because they’re of all human types. Maybe the world wasn’t made for people, or maybe it’s too far gone for them to find a space to think and talk. And how they talk! Seek love and sex and something – nothing - in between. There must be, of course, conclusion. Khalil’s a fine dancer - exhibition standard. That’s a gift! 

Three stories about The Ends of the Earth by John FraserMaking the world uninhabitable is a prospect facing us all, each has a strategy to hasten or retard - even avoid - it. Such a project would be the greatest exploit of an evolving species - greater than the creation, quicker than biology and a cock-eyed triumph of the good life and its sciences. Most of us alive won't know if the plan succeeds, so hypothesis is the mode proposed.The people described in these thematically connected tales are precarious, but very human. Extinction would come when the exploration of the planet has barely finished - one thinks of the poet's 'round earth's imagined corners'. If the world indeed is not flat, it still can be conceived of as having ends.In 'Rain', the characters display their comfortably familiar habits - competition, jealousy, distraction. They find they're ill-equipped to wait out their end - which comes (or maybe not) from an unanticipated direction.'Summer Nights' has its protagonists at the edge of modernity - in the shadow of a monster tower, they seek their space, a 'green', beyond exploitation, beyond the limitations of their work and relationships - and only partly succeed.'The Esplanade' sets its scene in an imaginary 'Cambodia', where the past, war and massacres, still looms over the new visitors and long-term occupants. Preservation of the ruins means also preserving the realm of Death. The story ends with a parade where Death and human power are both featured, in a temporary equilibrium.

John Fraser's latest work of fiction, The Future's Coming Everywhere,comprises two thematically linked stories. In the first, Candice, echoingboth Voltaire's Candide - a disillusioned idealist and world traveller -and Zadig, the last wise, just king of Babylon - Candice sets out to findpower and wisdom. Her reason is dwarfed by a huge powerless electronicbrain, functioning without purpose or control. She is compelled by officepolitics to flee, through the natural park she herself created. Managing toevade pursuit, regaining her autonomy and mobility, she finds the peopleshe meets along the reservation's edge have neither power nor wisdom,but they do illuminate. Eventually she finds solace and refuge in a bar,The Truce. In the second tale, Friends, Danièle, after adventures in the cateringtrade and estrangement from her friends and lovers, realises that it is inLaw that wisdom and justice must reside. Wisdom is everywhere, law isprecarious, but in the end she finds the latest king of Babylon, in his vast,near-deserted residence. She waits for people to arrive, to benefit fromthis enlightened rule, but will she wait alone…?

John Fraser's latest novel shows how confessions are less about contrition than about seeking accomplices and pardoners - though there is a nod to various 'confessors' - Augustine, Rousseau. Confessions starts with an invocation to addiction, those who take on that burden, and those who will take it on or share it. The story follows the branches of a family tree, rooted in the life of an alcoholic and his accomplice-therapist, and their descendants. Their children are shown being forced to confess what they - probably - haven't done, and to perform a personal sacrifice in recompense, connecting a funicular between the high town and the low. Metaphorically, there is a contrast between addiction in the higher- ups, and that of the lower. Crime too is a sort of addiction, involving pardon, repentance, cures not taken, punishments evaded and selfless accomplices sought. In the end, what is confessed depends on what you think is good and bad. Necessity, among other things, seems to decide. The last protagonist, Clémence, has to choose, as her last resort, a branch of the tree - piecework in the fashion trade, which may require prostitution too....

John Fraser's latest work of fiction People You Will Never Meet consists of three thematically-linked trajectories. In the first, two Palestinians escape to humble, even humiliating work in Belgium. They manage to set themselves up as a think-tank above a public dance-hall, and their lives divide between the search for a lofty principle and the drinking and music in the floor below. The link between the levels is provided by a fussy, garrulous first-person narrator, whose own adventures turn out to signify little. There is a party, where the upper and lower worlds mingle, the protagonist dressed as moths and butterflies. The Palestinians move on - one to a ruined Syria, the other to frustration in Europe. The second tale involves a bright country girl, seduced by her teacher with aspirations to a powerful career. She seeks speed, which does not end well for her. In the final tale, the hero aims higher still - a project for the human species. This involves journeying through Eastern Europe, and its underground. Its climax is the burning of a stranger's house, and a long long wait for a slow train...

An attempt to prove that vaccination with its compulsory law, - Instead of being a general blessing, is a universal curse : in a series of letters addressed to the Right Hon. H. A. Bruce, Home Secretary of State is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1871.Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

What is victory? What would victory actually be in our present world? What would revolution be - and what would happen after?In John Fraser's latest novel, Mack meets an old combatant, a revolutionary, his revolution accomplished: satisfied. He leaves his girlfriend Sophie, but never shakes her off. He tries revealed religion, mysticism, sex. Through his showy friend, Paco, he meets Aurora - a flaky performer, a woman every man would die for her. He tries to define what's on the inside from the outside - specifically, a poor, resource-rich country, between revolt and foreign intervention.He joins a committee deciding between a project for reform: justice: complicity ... or colluding with a persecuted opposition. Complexity gradually comes to prevail... He takes refuge in isolation, a leisure centre-cum retreat, where political plotting carries on, a kind of Mongol wave may be in preparation. He recoils: neither reform nor revolutionary onslaught - both certainty, predictability, that is, and destruction - are to his taste.As his latest girl is seduced by his new best friend, he returns to the beginning: for tomorrow is the victory…

Where are we? Where are we going? What's in store?John Fraser's The Answer considers these questions in four stories:In 'The Colours of Air': many characters live in an apartment, a microcosm - intellectuals from Sartre to de Beauvoir, security experts, émigrés and refugees, traditionals from the country, all involved in strategies of survival. In the end, the question becomes to survive, what must be jettisoned, what has irrevocably been lost?In 'Peace and War' - chronicles couples, joining up and spinning off, East Europeans on the margin of a West where music and drink are the context - hiding and burying the dead is a main task - Pavel, the protagonist seems to find permanence in stonework, sculpture, but all wait expectantly for the sound of horses, horsemen and their messages. These characters are on the margin - there seems to be no core, though they are seeking it.In 'Interlude': two displaced intellectuals are being vetted for their status, their security. The theme is 'space without freedom' - waiting, with expectancy, but without knowing what comes next.The answer finally comes in 'The Answer'. It's daring, a risk, a leap into the unknown, with probable disastrous results.

The most recent work of fiction by John Fraser, hailed as 'the most original novelist of our time' by the distinguished poet and Whitbread Award winner John Fuller, Sisters is a contemporary reworking of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.The protagonist, Masha, a young woman with a rich MiddleEastern culture, is forced by war to leave her country, her sisters, and even change her name. Abandoning her training as a surgeon, she is involved in an innovative scientific venture - superconductors. Intrigued by the philosophical aspects of her work - energy, time and distance - she seeks new 'sisters' and tries to assert herself in the unfamiliar cultures and human projects she encounters. After many adventures she finds two sisters in an idyllic tree house, but provokes the accidental death of one of them. She follows the other sister to a utopian commune in Brazil - but the group is in effervescence and conflict. The two take refuge on an island, involved in illicit chemistry this time - but there are conflicts with the native inhabitants. She meets up with a predatory dealer in cultural artefacts, and this ends badly. Her relation with a musician who pushes her to political celebrity also ends badly. She tries reconciliation with her 'sister', who has chosen a 'primitive' lifestyle, 'back to the forest....' In the end she's taken up by Irene, who is occupied in a big house with a laboratory equipped for research in space travel. She finds affection, but in an echo of the Chekhovian theme which runs through the plot, the train which promises escape in the Cherry Orchard finds an ironic resonance in the expedient of space travel and re-location.

The Magnificent Wurlitzer is an epic work of literary fiction, divided into four parts. Its theme is that of the 'guilty Faust' on a fantastic, grotesque journey seeking his truth, his Mephistopheles. Its hero treads in the footsteps of epics from East and West, Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, Götterdämmerung.

In John Fraser's latest novel, Down from the Stars, an assistant to a distinguished astrophysicist, is tormented by the fate of the Soviet space dog, Laika, incinerated above the earth. Losing the confidence of his master, and losing his girlfriend, he is increasingly drawn into local political life. Having an affinity with the arts, he becomes responsible for the policy of art tourism, which, with organised crime, is the speciality of the place. After many adventures and disasters, and growing complicity with criminality, a new boss forces him and his associates to leave. Destitute, and disillusioned with science and art, he makes an approach to nature, visiting an African wildlife lodge. He is joined by an associate, a former dancer. Together, he decides, they will rise again, and resume their destinies as 'stars.'

The Case is John Fraser's latest fictional tour de force. It is a novelabout loss - loss of memory, of love, of money, of friends. Theprotagonist searches throughout the book for a suitcase - maybe valuable initself, maybe because it represents resources and a destination. The Casetakes us on a trip through the American dream, of wealth, cowboys andHollywood movies, and out the other side, to police shootouts, mortal dangerand revolution, on a quest for the missing case.'One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years hasbeen the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser.There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous andlargely belated appearance of a mature ouvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus'sforehead. And the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think ofnothing much like it in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironicdistance from the extreme conditions in which his characters findthemselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions torooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives,surreal but somehow apposite social customs. Like Thomas Pynchon, whom insome way he resembles, Fraser is a deep and serious fantasist, wildlyinventive. The reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuousattention, with effects flashing by at virtuouso speeds. The characters seemto be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection the authorbestows upon them. They move with shrugging self-assurance throughcircumstances as richly detailed and as without reliable compass-points as aChinese scroll.' (John Fuller, English poet, novelist, Booker Prize nomineeand Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford)

Wayfaring is the latest of John Fraser's tour de forces in experimental fiction. It consists of three novellas, with the common theme of travelling in difficult places.'Coming in to Land on Saturn' is the (fictionalised) account of the extreme physical and psychological experiences of a trainee Intelligence operative.In 'Sometimes the Watchman Is Drunk' four people travel round the ethnically fragmented regions of Southern Yugoslavia before the wars of the 1990s. Faced with the imminence of communist breakup, the four turn to self-inquiry, as the future becomes more troubled and unreadable.'Coney Island' is the story of a godlike narrator who follows the fortunes of Stark and Pippa, unemployed but enterprising young friends. Many past and future scenarios of human destinies are explored.

The latest tour de force in speculative fiction from John Fraser. The 'Military Roads' of this book, which consists of three tales running consecutively, are, first, the adventures of a narrator following the fortunes of a leader of a revolution in a distant country: second, a journey starting in the 'military road' which in Soviet times and before, ran from Moscow to the Caucasus: and finally, a mission undertaken from Italy, through North Africa, with the aim of recruiting a private army of bodyguards for a global tycoon. The narrator's amorous adventures, and his struggles to survive these radical shifts of place, commitment and perspective, conclude with a sweet-and-sour relationship with his boss's partner, and a precarious acceptance of traditional religious practices. The military roads, it is supposed, will continue to be travelled, with results which never achieve a lasting resolution, but provide temporary satisfaction for some, at least, of the protagonists.

An Illusion of Sun is the first of John Fraser's 14 novels (12 published, two forthcoming). 'I wanted to do a novel that smelled of fascism (I hope not a fascist novel!) -' Fraser says '- the slaughterhouse, the canals, the fruit - every kind of South and Central European fascism, from Franco to Tiso and Dolfuss, its impregnation of other discourses, from "democracy" to "socialism". It was intended to show how that virus had penetrated the bourgeoisie, its philosophy and its theorists, the ornamental style itself the modesty veil thrown over.'The novel is located in a Slavonic Venice, a city in a state of decline. Perrina attempts to salvage her decaying palazzo both from the depradations of time and the ambiguous bureaucrats who seem to have designs on her as well as on the mansion. Torgano establishes a difficult and masochistic relation with Perrina, her concerns - and the city itself. A liberation seems to lie in leaving her and the city, but will this resolve anything?Of Fraser's unique writing, the distinguished poet John Fuller has commented: 'In Fraser's fiction the reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection Fraser bestows upon them; they move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.'

John Fraser's last work of fiction, Hard Places, was a series of novellas concerning physical and moral dilemmas, left unresolved at the expense of the protagonist. This sequel, Soft Landing, is the opposite - a novel of quest and adventure, in which scruple is overcome, and demanding or impossible situations have outcomes favourable to the hero. The trail takes us from urban violence to Eldorado, the regime of a bikers' club, and the secret finds of a prospectors' camp. The last section shows all puzzles solved, and the protagonists' return home with gifts. In keeping with the tale's sour vision of a crumbling present, the landing though soft, is not pleasant.

Two novellas by John Fraser, Blue Light and Starting Over, conclude a quadrilogy whose previous volumes comprised The Red Tank, Runners and Medusa.We may like to imagine what the end of the world is like - it's not dissimilar to our own end. Blue Light shows what it's like, the running down, the onset of rigor mortis - and the new life sprouting, notwithstanding. Living for ever may not be too bad - but do you really want it? When the world has ended, how attractive is rebirth, or resurrection? Starting Over may mean you have to piece a whole new world together - just using the ruins of the past. The poet John Fuller writes: 'In Fraser's fiction the reader rides as on a switchback or luge of impetuous attention, with effects flashing by at virtuoso speeds. The characters seem to be unwitting agents of chaos, however much wise reflection Fraser bestows upon them; they move with shrugging self-assurance through circumstances as richly detailed and as without reliable compass-points as a Chinese scroll.'

A selection of short stories and poems together with the novella 'Black Masks'.