Tag: Books

Blueprints of the Afterlife in the NY Times

About a quarter of the way through the book I’m finding this to be a great mix of Snow Crash-type characters in a world that would give Philip Dick a run for his money, with hints of Oryx and Crake and Against the Day. My intent is not deny Boudinot’s originality – it’s to get you to read the book.

At the NY Times: All Sorts of Strange Stuff Happens When You Destroy the World: Ryan Boudinot’s Novel ‘Blueprints of the Afterlife’, by JOHN SCHWARTZ

This novel is, in a word, freaky. Woo-jin, the dishwasher, finds a young woman’s body. It is taken away by the police, and he finds it again. But the first body is still in the morgue. Continue reading “Blueprints of the Afterlife in the NY Times”

Thomas Pynchon understands the basic ingredient of lab work

Electrical arcs stabbed through the violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in distant corners of the facility, sending up showers of glass as nearby workers cowered beneath seaside umbrellas set up for just such protection. Gauge needles oscillated feverishly. Sensitive flames sang at different pitches. Amid a gleaming clutter of burners and spectroscopes, funnels and flasks, centrifugal and Soxhlet extractors, and distillations columns in both the Glynsky and Le Bel-Henninger formats, serious girls with their hair in snoods entered numbers into log-books, and pale gnomes, patient as lock-pickers, squinting through loupes, adjusting tremblers and timers with tiny screwdrivers and forceps. Best of all, somebody in here somewhere was making coffee.

– Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day p. 235

Cyborg and Cyberpunk links

In association with my reading of Bernard Wolfe’s post-apocalyptic, proto-cyberpunk, Limbo, I’ve run across a few fun links:

Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson by Dani Cavallaro (PDF):

In contemporary western and westernized cultures, people are sur- rounded by an increasingly wide range of tangible products that seem to impart a sense of solidity to their lives. Objects such as mobile phones, computers, portable physiotherapy units, personal stereos, microwave ovens, video recorders and fax machines (to mention but a few examples) are integral components of many people’s everyday existence. Often, they are regarded not merely as useful tools for the accomplishment of practical tasks but actually as defining aspects of people’s identities, lifestyles and value systems. They thus become comparable to prostheses, the artificial supports used by medical technology to complete otherwise lacking physical organisms.

“Cyberpunk 101”, Richard Kadrey and Larry McCaffery (PDF) Continue reading “Cyborg and Cyberpunk links”

The literature of the 21st century is science fiction?

Recently I’ve been engaged in a little reading project – reading post-Hiroshima End of the World science fiction side by side with the best mainstream literature of the 1950’s. What I see is that 1950’s sci-fi at the time ignored the last 100 years of development in literature, while the mainstream literature of the time ignored the last 100 years of technological development. Very slowly, this has changed over the last 60 years, and we’ve reached the point where things are getting really exciting…

Guardian columnist Damien Walter on “Why Science Fiction is the Literature of Change: Continue reading “The literature of the 21st century is science fiction?”

First Post-apocalyptic sci-fi for 2012

I picked up Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife for Christmas, and can’t wait to start reading it. (Alas, I must first make a little room on my stack.)

Here’s what Paul de Filippo has to say about the book that io9 called this year’s weirdest post-apocalyptic novel:

With his new book, Blueprints of the Afterlife, Boudinot takes this finely wrought but perhaps thematically underpowered mimetic-absurdist vehicle and drops in a rocket-powered speculative engine. If Misconception took off from “So Little Time,” Blueprints launches hypersonically from “Written by Machines.”

The bulk of the novel unfolds about a century from now, in a postapocalyptic future barely emerging from an interregnum called the Age of Fucked Up Shit. We will witness at several removes, in the form of interview transcripts with one Luke Piper, the birth of FUS, an enigmatic era whose full meaning and dimensions Boudinot sternly and bravely refuses to fully resolve. With its leitmotif of “superposition,” the physics riff most familiar from the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, this novel pinwheels out multivalent explanations for almost everything, demanding that the reader navigate his or her own best-determined path of causality through the sly and shifting narrative.

But do not take that to mean that Blueprints of the Afterlife is an impenetrable nest of hypertext. Far from it. Its linear propulsion, studded with bravura set pieces, is compulsively readable in the manner of any consumer-friendly epic fantasy novel, overstuffed with unforgettable freakish characters (in the Age of FUS, freakish is the new normal); laugh-out-loud or cringe-worthy incidents; and rafts of genuinely innovative scientific, spiritual, and philosophical speculations delivered in sleek and colorful prose.