Discussions of novels that make use of actual unbroken ciphers (or close parallels of them) as key features of their storytelling.
Here’s something that was a surprise for me, perhaps it will surprise you too: “People of the Book“, a 2008 novel by Geraldine Brooks, teasing out (imagined) story after story from the margins, stains and marks left on “the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated texts” (thus spake Wikipedia). One Amazon customer reviewer [...] Read more »
Having just blogged on up-to-the-minute German Voynichiana, what of the rest of Europe? Here’s a quick sampling to whet your appetite, should you ever wish to feast on such morcels…
(2008) El castillo de las estrellas Enrique Joven [mentioned here]
Having worked with Enrique recently (he generously translated my History Today telescope article so that it could appear in Astronomia [...] Read more »
While adding categories to some old blog posts just now, up popped a mention of the Karlsruhe Virtual Katalog (KVK). I normally use KVK to find specific non-fiction holdings: but today I wondered what otherwise-unknown Voynich masterpieces it might be able to tell me about. At Dennis Stallings’ prompting, I’ve just started to add non-English Voynich novels to my Big Fat List, [...] Read more »
This is a weird one: The Voynich Enslavement by Hank Snow is a vaguely Voynich Manuscript-themed experimental novel, in an alternative society built around whipping, slaves, S&M and all that jazz. I’m hardly giving away my personal orientation to say that, ummm, this isn’t really my bag: but there you go, it is what it is.
The story stops [...] Read more »
Back in January, I predicted that 2008 would be “the year of the Voynich” - not that it would get solved (don’t be so ridiculous, tcha!), but rather that we would be engulfed in a semi-tsunami of Voynich-related fiction, a novelistic response to the VMs meme as it seeps into mainstream culture. And this wave has indeed [...] Read more »
I’ve mentioned Lev Grossman a few times on this blog (most notably here and here): so when I recently stumbled across a copy of his novel “Codex” (2004), I jumped at the opportunity to read it. (Thank you the charity shop by Virginia Water station).
Though (strictly speaking) Codex isn’t a cipher novel per se, its protagonists stumble uncertainly [...] Read more »
Another day dawns, and with it comes yet another Voynich novel with a Templar twist - Francisco Díaz Valladares’s just-released novel “El Libro Maldito de los Templarios” (The Damned Book of the Templars) is a twisty whodunit taking the Voynich Manuscript as its raw material.
For English-language novelists, the big mystery here might be how a Voynich [...] Read more »
Wah, looky heyuh - it’s another Voynich novel to add to my big fat list. Retired chemical industry R&D / sales guy Baz Cunningham will be signing copies of his third novel “The Voynich Enigma” next Saturday morning (15th Nov 2008) in New Martinsville, WV.
In the book, a couple of sharp-witted cousins find the key to the VMs [...] Read more »
As a Brit, there’s a very particular class of American-made sequel that fills my film-watching soul with despair. On planes and slow Sundays, you’ve doubtless caught a few exemplars yourself: “Garfield 2″, “Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London”, “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” all spring readily to my mind, but these form but the tip of a particularly yellow-coloured [...] Read more »
In many ways, I have to concede that “The Shakespeare Secret” by J. L. Carrell is a fun little novelistic riff on all things Shakespearean: a series of people die in recreations of famous First Folio fatalities, while the main character (who is chasing after a lost play called “Cardenio”) recoils from each gory death while girding herself [...] Read more »
