Specify Books In Pursuance Of Blueprints Of The Afterlife
Original Title: | Blueprints of the Afterlife |
ISBN: | 0802194745 (ISBN13: 9780802194749) |
Edition Language: | English URL http://blueprintsoftheafterlife.com/ |
Characters: | Abby Fogg, Al Skinner, Woo-jin Kan, Dirk Bickle |
Literary Awards: | Philip K. Dick Award Nominee (2013) |
Ryan Boudinot
ebook | Pages: 305 pages Rating: 3.69 | 2147 Users | 372 Reviews
List About Books Blueprints Of The Afterlife
Title | : | Blueprints Of The Afterlife |
Author | : | Ryan Boudinot |
Book Format | : | ebook |
Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
Pages | : | Pages: 305 pages |
Published | : | January 3rd 2012 by Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
Categories | : | Science Fiction. Fiction. Dystopia. Fantasy |
Interpretation Supposing Books Blueprints Of The Afterlife
A tour de force novel from the "wickedly talented" (The Boston Globe) and "darkly funny" author of Misconception (The New York Times Book Review).Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award
It is the afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called "the Age of Fucked Up Shit." A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked.
Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who's been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Restaurant and Hotel Management Olympic medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time--climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age--Blueprints of the Afterlife will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.
"Duct-tape yourself to the front of this roller coaster and enjoy the ride." --The New York Times
"Challenging, messy and funny fiction for readers looking for something way beyond space operas and swordplay." --Kirkus Reviews
"The absurdities are cleverly crafted and highly entertaining. Imaginative [and] heartfelt." --Hannah Calkins, Shelf Awareness
"Ingenious . . . Frenzied, hilarious, and paranoid . . . A bracing dystopian romp through contemporary dread." --Publishers Weekly
"Probably the strangest post-apocalyptic novel in ages." --io9
"What an inspired mindfuck of a book!" --City Paper (Baltimore)
Rating About Books Blueprints Of The Afterlife
Ratings: 3.69 From 2147 Users | 372 ReviewsCritique About Books Blueprints Of The Afterlife
(In some sort of frustrating example of life imitating art, the internet just ate my review. As a result, I get to rewrite it all over again. Yay for awful!)As the legions of you who follow my reviews have probably noticed, I haven't given out any 1-or-2-star review yet. This is because if I'm not enjoying a book by, say, half way through it, I don't have much issue with setting it down and never picking it up again. And, as policy, I don't review any books here until after I finish them. Thathere is my page!isn't is awesome when a power outage eats your book review?? i think so.let me try this again. i understand greg's difficulties in reviewing this, what with not wanting to give anything away, because this is a book constructed in such a careful way, it could only be spoiled by a careless reviewer.mfso has threatened to write a "word-limit breaching review" of this, and greg's is pretty long too, once you hack into all his nested spoilers. i am going to try to do this
This is the best book I've read in 2014, and maybe the last few years. It does lot of things at once, but almost all of them work--and, in particular, it seemed like Boudinout is succeeding where so many other writers have failed. Blueprints of the Afterlife has a lot of the elements we generally associate with "postmodernism" (structural innovation and layers of narrative; a cerebral but also casual tone somewhere in the post DFW tradition; moments of metafiction, etc) but what seems most
There's a lot to love about this novel. Conceptually, it's one of the best novels I've read in a long time. Maybe ever. It's hugely ambitious with big ideas that're completely awesome and interesting. The characters and the world are all there and everything's pretty great.That being said, the narrative style is perhaps my least favorite kind. It's very David Foster Wallace-y, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it hits on a lot of the recent postmodern narrative trends that I find least
Theres a rising tide of weirdness, you see it in movies (Being John Malkovich, City of Lost Children, Love Exposure, I Heart Huckabees), you hear it in music (Six Organs of Admittance, Animal Collective) and of course we see it onrushing into the wonderful world of modern fiction too.Me, I go only so far. I like jazz, for instance, when I can discern the vestiges of the melody the guy is improvising upon, when theres the merest mental toehold left in the cacophony, its 99% wildness but theres
here's a quote from page 405 as a summation: "Sylvie [sylvie is really abby, but abby now lives in new york alki and has slowly taken on the persona of sylvie, a book editor from the "real new york" who was killed, one assumes, during the fus, and she is referring to the book about love that Woo-jin, another character, has written on pizza boxes. sylvie/abby has been djed so really is not living in "reality"] sighed. "It's about the beginning of a new world. There's a rampaging glacier in it.
This is one of those sci-fi books that is filled (over-filled maybe) with clones, technological anomalies, future apocalypse scenarios, new methods in transplant organ growth -- all kinds of obviously sci-fi devices -- except that it doesn't feel like sci-fi while you're reading it. It feels like (and probably is the literary progeny of) some of the greats of ecstatic post-modernism, Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, people with big ideas and a taste for both pulpy genre device and formal
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