To The Last Page

Oliver Serang is a rare kind of writer. A professor in Mathematics and Computer Science, Neurobiology and Genome science, a researcher and scientist at the Liebnitz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, you can see how those fields of study all feed into the rather unusual writing process, giving his fiction a unique and surreal character. His first novel, Stay Close, Little Ghost  (2013) had a simple enough premise on a human level, dealing with a broken relationship, but Serang's writing managed to refract this experience through mathematical patterns, dreams, surreal imagery and a host of other styles and ideas that have little in common with conventional writing techniques. It's terrific then to see that style developed further into the science-fiction field in his latest book, At Ocean . Again, the story and its underlying human connection appears simple enough on the surface. As the world is bracing itself for the impact of a threatening comet, E...