Description:

In this outrageously funny, outrageously inventive debut, one of the most outrageously talented new writers to break onto the sci-fi scene in decades asks the most loaded question of all…

"Don't you hate it when this happens?"

…that’s what the business card asks Jonny X67, dream architect to the rich and jaded. It’s all the thieves who stole his house left behind. And if that weren’t bad enough, a saleswoman named Caroline E61 drops from the sky to sell him a set of encyclopedias and won’t take no for an answer. Can his luck get any worse?

In this rip-roaring roller-coaster ride through a brilliantly imagined future of paranoid absurdity, Jonny X will learn the answer soon enough when he falls afoul of a lunatic motorcycle gang nicknamed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a relentless Belgian assassin, and his own irate girlfriend. Traversing a cityscape whose neighborhoods are organized by musical genres, running into joke-telling elevators and holographic computer viruses, Jonny is about to learn what a nightmare it’s going to be to get his old life back in a reality warping faster than the speed of the imagination. Outrageous Fortune heralds a marvelous new talent sure to be delightfully altering the minds of readers for years to come.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

**

From Publishers Weekly

At the start of Scott's diverting debut, a zany tale of a slippery future shaped by bogus reality and prefab memories, Jonny X67, an architect who designs custom-made dreams for paying clients, returns home from work one day to find that his house has been stolen. Shortly thereafter, he's chased by a motorcycle gang planning to assassinate God; imprisoned by his society's comically Orwellian security network; and rescued by a guardian angel encyclopedia salesman. After several long and discursive screwball scrapes, which always seem to bring him back to the same point of desperate obliviousness, Jonny senses that his tribulations may be a consequence of his work on the Dream Virus Project, an experiment to craft dreams that target a victim's DNA. Given the extent of Jonny's outrageous experiences, the novel ends a little too abruptly. Readers may forgive Scott, however, if only for his delightfully droll sense of humor, which keeps his story going longer than would seem possible. (June)
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From Booklist

Dream architect Jonny X67 enjoys the rewards of designing prepackaged nighttime reveries for the rich and powerful—until the worst day of his life. First his house is stolen via the latest house-shrinking technology; then a persistent encyclopedia saleswoman badgers him all the way to his favorite watering hole. While he deconstructs his misfortunes over Long Island ice tea, a quartet of motorcycle thugs, each nicknamed for one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, kidnaps him and spirits him away to an abandoned hospital. After a riotous rescue by the saleswoman segues into a Kafkaesque incarceration by the omnipotent traffic police, Jonny's increasingly surreal journey takes him into and out of wisecracking elevators, cities subdivided by musical category, and a succession of dreams holding clues to his destiny's denouement. Rarely does a first sf novel have as much energy and creativity as Scott's madcap, mischievously irreverent depiction of a definitely post-postmodern future. Consider this the opening salvo of one of the genre's most promising and original new voices in years. Hays, Carl