Apocalyptic Technocratic Dystopia: William S Burroughs Meets Biological Mutation
Reviewing the past history of science fiction cult classics in the context of a variety of steampunk, cyberpunk, information science fiction et al, I realized after awhile that I was pining for the olden days of truly new weird writing, along the lines of the first reading of William S Burroughs Nova Express or The Ticket that Exploded, Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow, or heck, even Franz Kafkas The Castle. Not exactly pulp science fiction, but a kind of extended pulp sci fi that hinges on dementia. Jonathan Lethem worked it a little bit in Amnesia Moon, but its hard to find that kind of technocratic analytic order-in-disorder writing around.. it seems what with all the chaos and stress of real life (tm), its become a world of Heinlein, Ayn Rand, and Hard SF. Rudy Rucker might be a little chaotic, but not so much textually. William Burroughs is a good writer! Dag. The Strugatsky Brothers old Russian Science Fiction might have been amongst the last to visit the "Interzone" of textual/philosophical complexity that whatever this genre Im trying to name for myself is.. economic genre fiction? textual arcology? Weird matrix-like graphic novels like the Invisibles or The Watchman are pretty close. Either way, a weird, cultish, illustrated, dystopic science fiction book The Solid Confessor recently took me back to the good old days. Apocalyptic like Naked Lunch and Nova Express, confusing and twisted as Thomas Pynchon, but crazy over analytic up front. Kind of like cyberpunk, steampunk, science fiction, artificial intelligence hyper reality filtered thru Kafka. Another good book I recently re-read was Ubik, by Philip K. Dick. A lot of the writing today is just way too polished. Thank the (FSM) someone out there is avoiding the machine production mentality and putting out some hard core rough stuff. Otherwise all us biological mutations will be out of a job, grist for the mill.
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1 comments:
I was trying to find out more about who did the art for The Solid Confessor...
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