The Imagination Thief
- Video
- 2021
![Teaser for the video-book of Rohan Quine's novel "The Imagination Thief" - teaser 26(i) "was beauty such delusion?". // [...] You shook your head. Was beauty such delusion, then? you wondered, then remembered that you'd asked yourself this very same question once before, in little-boy language, when you were a little boy, with your toes in the sand beneath the serpents and the dolphins on the wall of the Convention Hall. // Just before you'd asked this in your little-boy words, you had run down the sand with tiny steps toward the sea, beneath a sky you carried in you - a sky filled with heavy planets, dark brown caverns and the glint of pink stars on gigantic deepest blue - a magic sky amid ten thousand less enchanted skies. The sea had been mercury, not sinking through the sand but sliding waveless across it. From the ocean, standing there, you had conjured copper snails, silver dolphins, uranium express-fish, chromium sea-snakes and worms of plutonium, and watched them dance in front of you, bursting and sprouting in the quicksilver bay while you paddled and you capered in the shallows. Dry shiny drops had splashed up from your hand when you'd stooped to flick the liquid up. Then the slope of the scene had curved up, until above you there had been a shaft with shiny spinning galleries rising to a sweet space of honeylight in giant circles telescoped within one another, out beyond, to where this face smiled down at you from here and now. Your ground had risen upward, with a great turn of gears ... but then you'd looked again and seen that all of that had not been real: there were no heavy planets, caverns, pink stars or deepest blue, no snails, dolphins, mercury, express-fish, worms or sea-snakes, and no shining shaft or galleries or honeylight or face. // Instead, you just looked east, across a flat dull sea, beneath an empty grey sky. // So then came the moment when you asked it, all those years ago: was beauty such delusion? [...]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA5ZGQ0MjMtODZkYS00NTdmLTkwYTUtM2I3MmRjYTEzYTQ2XkEyXkFqcGdeQXRyYW5zY29kZS13b3JrZmxvdw@@._V1_QL75_UX1000_CR0,0,1000,563_.jpg)
In an iconic but decayed seaside town, a web of secrets and wonders is triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories.In an iconic but decayed seaside town, a web of secrets and wonders is triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories.In an iconic but decayed seaside town, a web of secrets and wonders is triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories.
