The outcome of the first international conference on David Mitchell's writing, this collection of critical essays, focuses on his first three novels - Ghostwritten (1999), number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004) - to provide a sustained analysis of Mitchell's complex narrative techniques and the literary, political and cultural implications of his early work. The essays cover topics ranging from narrative structure, genre and the Bildungsroman to representations of Japan, postmodernism, the construction of identity, utopia, science fiction and postcolonialism. Contents: Foreword (David Mitchell); 1. Introducing David Mitchell's Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction (Sarah Dillon); 2. The Novels in Nine Parts (Peter Childs and James Green); 3. Or something like that : Coming of Age in number9dream (Kathryn Simpson); 4. Remediations of Japan in number9dream (Baryon Tensor Posadas); 5. The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity Through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas (Courtney Hopf); 6. Cloud Atlas: From Postmodernity to the Posthuman (Hélène Machinal); 7. Cloud Atlas and If on a winter s night a traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel (Will McMorran); 8. Strange Transactions : Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas (Caroline Edwards); 9. Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial: Critique in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas (Nicholas Dunlop); 10. Moonlight bright as a UFO abduction : Science Fiction, Present-Future Alienation and Cognitive Mapping (William Stephenson); Notes on Contributors; Index