17 - Contraption

Spring 2012

in print, online
and e-book editions

PRINT EDITION:
SOLD OUT

ONLINE (E-BROADSHEET) EDITION
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E-BOOK EDITION (no audio/interactive content)
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Click here to download MOBI (Kindle) format

Contraption, the 17th issue of Fuselit, is a clanking micro-machine of unmeasured potential, wrapped up in a gold box bearing a mysterious snake skeleton.

Stoking the fires in the poetry engine room you’ll find:
Christian Ward • Jacqui Saphra • Christopher Barnes • G.B. Clarkson • Kevin Simmonds • Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé • Russell J. Turner • Dan Simpson • Kristine Ong Muslim • Joe Dunthorne • Claire Trévien • Joe Dresner • Louise Warren • Carl Griffin • M.P. Dean

And tightening the bolts in the prose gearbox:
Tony Williams • Jake Stringer • N. God Savage

Our oil-spattered essayist for this issue, translating his notes on time-wielding mechanisms, is Cliff Hammett.

There are also extraordinary pictorial displays popping up on the scanners from Colin Barns, Christos Sakellaridis, Tara Zed, Inga Vesper and Tom Moore, and unprecedented sonic readouts by Louis Gilbert, Simon Messenger, Chris Woolfrey, Robin Vaughan-Williams, Adele Geraghty and Sarah Thomasin, rounded off by an audio adventure starring robotic issue mascot Whirr, as told by The Contrapture.

For the baffled, the limited edition print version comes with an instruction manual (sorry, e-book fans!). Translated – in a tribute to Raymond Queneau’s ‘Exercises in Style’ – into various tones of voice, readers of all dispositions may thus learn how to get the most from their Contraption. Print buyers also get four extra activity pages for them to fill in or contemplate studiously.

The Maxwell’s Demon stopping this issue hurtling into entropy is our bonus booklet, Device Squad. Niall O’ Sullivan, Sophia Blackwell, Nicholas Liu and Chrissy Williams have tinkered with a machine apiece to turn each apparatus into a strange and wonderful poem.

Still not enough to coil your springs? In that case, play this issue’s text adventure game Imperilous, in which you play the imp of the perverse, perched on the shoulder of an Edo-era thief sneaking round a warlord’s castle. Will you convince her to escape with Hideyoshi’s loot, screw up and get caught by the palace guards, plummet from the rooftop or just nick some prize finches and belt off into the woods? Only one way to find out.