Divine Play : Thomas A. Ukinski
Divine Play: An Epic with Commercials
Divine Play begins with Aiden Fesyo discovering he has a four-year-old child…somewhere. In his quest to find his child, he encounters people personally linked to the seven members of the latest “HorrorShow” team, who must pass through nine “circuses” on California Island, and defeat the megacorporation, SPORT, to win the trillion-dollar prize.
The team, “Valwadi VII,” is a spangled banner of races, skills and troubled pasts: a gay Hispanic gymnast, a native-American stunt coordinator, an Aborigine swimmer, a genetically engineered “fiteball quarrelback,” a Bosnian movie star and entrepreneur, a Japanese-American courtesan and assassin, an African-American “bizzyball” player and terrorist’s daughter. Three are killers; three blame themselves for deaths. One aborted her child. Another watched his lover waste away with retroviruses.
They must contend with: radioactive dumps, deserts, boiling lakes, high velocity winds, hot-headed centaurs out of David Mamet, equine aliens with British accents, homunculi bikers, mutant hairdressers, clumsy Ninjas, talk show hosts in tanks, and distortion fields that carry them through space and time.
Ultimately, Aiden joins the “HorrorShow” team to confront a gigantic triple-bodied Satan who reveals that the universe is a “divine play” of good-in-evil and evil-in good.
The novel is a particle accelerator full of tropes, pastiches, parodies, songs, commercials, miniplays, sound bites, neologisms, wordplay, movie promos, maps, charts and sacrilege. Even if you don’t read science-fiction, take a gander at this. It’ll cheer you up.
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