[PW] Fiction Plotted Backwards

[Charles Early]

And there's Cryptozoic! by Brian Aldiss, in which the flow time is really 
backward and we are remembering the future.

At 01:00 PM 12/3/2007, you wrote:
>At 06:23 PM 11/29/2007, you wrote:
>
> >I don't mean mysteries, of course, where the detective is presented a
> >problem and then unravels it through the course of his or her investigation.
> >That's a pretty normal way mysteries are constructed.  I mean where the
> >viewer or reader sees the normally last scene first, and the first scene
> >last.
> >
> >And is there a name for this style of writing?
>
>
>Among mysteries, there is the genre of "inverted detective stories" in
>which the reader first follows the action of the murderer (or whatever)
>in commiting the crime, usually seemingly "perfect," and only after that
>follows the action of the detective who after all does unravel it.  The
>subgenre is usually associated first with R. Austin Freeman's 1912
>collection THE SINGING BONE; another prolific author at short story
>length who uses the model routinely is Roy Vickers in his "Department
>of Dead Ends" series, which I like a lot (a lot more than Freeman, for
>starters).
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_detective_story
>
>In sf, there's a small subgenre of "time runs backward" novels which
>might also be of interest; Martin Amis' TIME'S ARROW and Philip K.
>Dick's COUNTERCLOCK WORLD are a couple of novel-length examples.
>Some of the stories cited in this list qualify thus:
>
>http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton/timecon.htm
>
>
>Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu
>
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Charles Early
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