This World Is Not Supported

Arthur's father stupidly imagines it biologically impossible for any of his children to be anything but scientists. After all, Arthur's elder brother is an astronaut.

But the signs are all around him: the constant sketching, the Bach and Beethoven, the array of fine art posters in Arthur's bedroom. No, it's time to call a spade a 'manually actuated soil-engagement implement designed to translate operator-applied forces into localised substrate displacement'; his second son is an artist! And to rub salt in the wound, his friends call him Art. 

But Art is finding it hard. In a world fixated on technology, opportunities for him are few and far between. It's even harder when he's kidnapped to an adjacent universe where scientists, so suspicious of anything they can't measure, have banished all the artists and their art to the other hemisphere. All knowledge now resides in an artificial intelligence housed in a long stick, which they consult twice daily in a pathetic ritual. At least they used to, because the stick has been taken by Side Carr, a six-legged mutant who'd once been a butler.