Head Full of Mountains Paperback – June 19, 2014

HEAD FULL OF MOUNTAINS is a unique science fiction find-- complex, sophisticated, challenging, novel. Brent Hayward's imagination never ceases to amaze me. He creates a comprehensive and fully immersive world with such vivid imagery. Mind you, it is not a pretty world but rather a fractured, fragmented one populated by equally irregular, damaged and fragile characters.Crospinal was raised in isolation, with only his father and artificial constructs for companions. He suffers from physical infirmities and perhaps even developmental ones. “Like the leaves, he was fragile, broken, crumbling with the slightest of touches.” Routine and predictability were staples of his upbringing. Necessities were provided for him and his father solely directed his education. But his father was dying and, when he finally passes, Crospinal will be left all alone for much of his artificial environment was similarly dying. With supplies dwindling, power fluctuation, equipment faltering, Crospinal must forage beyond the confines of his home.Crospinal soon learns that while his father taught him many things, they may not have all been true and there are many other things of which he is totally unaware and for which he is entirely unprepared. Even his own identity and very nature are called into question. Hayward quotes Richard Maurice Bucke--“It is not our eyes or ears, nor even our intellects, that report the world to us; but it is our own moral natural that settles at last the significance of what exists about us. In all respects each age has interpreted the universe for itself, and has more or less discredited the interpretations of previous ages.”HEAD FULL OF MOUNTAINS is a sprawling, creative, visionary story, but it is not an easy read. Crospinal is the guide and as he is often confused, misled or ignorant, the telling is often splintered or disjointed. But everything comes together in the end where the baffling, disordered bits and pieces form a cohesive whole. I won't lie. This book is more difficult than Filaria, even The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter, but it is no less haunting, insightful and sublime.Go and read HEAD FULL OF MOUNTAINS. Go read any of Brent Hayward's other works. I promise it will always be challenging, rewarding, thought-provoking. This is science fiction that will jar you from the stupor of formulaic, redundant stories. It is science fiction as it should be-- piercing, exacting, fastidious.

Finished this over six months ago, and it's rarely left my mind since. Honestly, this book is as awesome as something awesome having sex with an even more awesome thing and making the MOST AWESOME BABY EVER.I blurbed it, in fact! It's probably on the book itself!Here's what I say, and mean more intensely than anything's ever been meant:Brent Hayward evokes all the vast, echoing, lonely things in humanity's future. He demands your wonder and discomfort, sending you on a trip through an ornately decaying interior landscape -- an enclosed world that exists on the verge of death, shuddering and clanking around its broken inhabitants like a faltering mechanical lung. HEAD FULL OF MOUNTAINS is a dark, dangerously compelling work from one of the most impressive wordsmiths in science fiction.

Head Full of Mountains was an unexpectedly lyrical novel set at the end of time. Crospinal has spent his life keeping his father company, living in a world of machines and secrets, untouched and heartbroken. As his father slowly dies, the machines die with him, leaving Crospinal alone and uncertain with a task and purpose he cannot understand, and was never explained. The novel follows his confused, uncertain entrance into a world he was unprepared for and doesn't understand. There are a growing number of hints that he is not what he thinks he is, and his father was not entirely truthful. The central mysteries of Crospinal and the world are teased out slowly. This is a novel of ideas that never quite spells things out but trusts in the reader's intelligence. We see the world through at a remove through Crospinal's eyes. He doesn't have a frame of reference for the world he finds himself in, and likewise the reader doesn't have a reference point for his perspective.Head Full of Mountains is a dark interrogation of what it means to be human, what it means to be broken filtered through an at times meandering story of an equally broken world, one that demands and deserves a great deal of attention.**Received copy from NetGalley for Review