Author: Steven Shaviro

J. G. Ballard‘s new novel, Kingdom Come, is something of a pendant to his preceding novel Millennium People (which I wrote about here). That book was about an abortive “revolution” of the upper middle class; while Kingdom Come tracks a similar process in a somewhat lower social stratum: the inhabitants of “motorway towns,” anonymous suburbs ringing London, but at too great a distance to be really integrated into the life of the city. (Ballard himself, I believe, has long lived in such a suburb). A suburb of this sort, strung out along a motorway, is “a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity. In short, the town was an end state of consumerism” (8). The only human need well provided for is parking, which is “well on the way to becoming the British population’s greatest spiritual need” (7).

There is nothing to do in the suburbs except root for the local sports teams, and go shopping at the Metro-Centre, a vast indoor mall whose enormous dome dominates the landscape, and whose central atrium is dominated by three enormous bears who inspire veneration from the shoppers. Everyone’s life is dominated by the twin vicarious activities of consumerism and sports fandom; and there’s a strong synergy between the two, since the Metro-Centre sponsors special sports nights, and organizes its promotions around the matches.

Ballard presents consumerism as an ever-accelerating, positive-feedback cycle. Shopping is immediately satisfying; but once you bring the products home, you feel empty and disappointed. Consumerism thus gives rise to disaffection and boredom. But the only cure for such dissatisfaction is still more shopping. And so the cycle replicates itself, on an ever-expanding scale.

Sports fandom, meanwhile, works as an intensifier. “People don’t know it, but they’re bored out of their minds. Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people’s lives you can be sure they’re bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture” (67). Destruction and violence are just the flip side of accumulation. Where Bataille and Baudrillard seem to imply that excess, expenditure, and violence mark a line of escape from the sterility of bourgeois accumulation, Ballard is far more pessimistic. Expenditure, or potlatch, is really just another part of the same logic.

What, then, do the white, lower-middle-class British suburbanites do, after getting pumped up by an afternoon of shopping, and an evening of rooting for their team? Why, they go out and engage in a racist mob rampage — targeting South Asians and Eastern Europeans — under the cover of that old British standby, football [i.e. soccer] hooliganism. The police basically stand by during these riots, and do nothing. For they, and the politicians who command them, know that such outbursts are, ultimately, useful to the social order. “Secretly, they [the police and the town council] want the Asians and immigrants out… Fewer corner shops, more retail parks, a higher tax yield. Money rules, more housing, more infrastructure contracts. They like the bands playing and the stamping feet — they hide the sound of the cash tills” (169).

In the 1930s, Bataille held out the hope that the violent, convulsive, extravagant expenditure — which he presciently saw as the motor driving fascism — could be turned against itself, detourned for revolutionary ends. From the perspective of the early 21st century, however, such a hope seems naive. Sports and shopping might seem like domesticated (castrated?) versions of violent expenditure, but for that very reason they absorb all possibility and all hope, and therefore cannot be mobilized as tools of liberation.

In short, Ballard tells us, “consumerism creates an appetite that can only be satisfied by fascism” (168). But this is a ‘soft’ fascism, a “new politics” with “no slogans, no messages… no manifestoes, no commitments.” Instead, it is all about “people’s dreams and needs, their hopes and fears,” as these are manifested in the purchase of more commodities (146). A politics of affective modulation — such as Brian Massumi describes — rather than one of (classically fascist) mass hysteria. The crowd of fans and shoppers gives way to its own moods, its own feelings, like “a herd of wildebeest on the African plain” (146), with no predetermined direction, and no need for a Duce or Fuhrer to stir them up.

Actually, there is a figure who works as a catalyst or enabler; he helps to provoke the crowds into motion, by urging them to shop. But instead of being a ranting, charismatic figure with an apocalyptic message, this enabler is a washed-up TV actor turned low-affect cable talk-show host, “a ‘virtual’ man without a real thought in his head” (168), who adds a vague sense of disquiet to his otherwise bland and affable persona.

The narrative, as is often the case in Ballard’s novels, builds to a point of destructive, degenerative implosion. Eventually, fanatical shoppers and boosters take over the Metro Centre, holding hostages to fend off an attack by the police. From that point, everything decays: entropy takes over, rather than any sort of energizing explosion. The revolution, when it comes, is disappointing, and ends up reinforcing the very order against which it was directed. The old gentry of the suburban town despise the lower-middle-class crassness and vulgarity of the mall; but they end up revealed as the instigators, and the beneficiaries (except for those of them who get killed in the blowback), of the very processes they so much deplored.

The entropic ending thoroughly demystifies destruction and excess as (supposed) forms of transcendence. There’s no such thing as transgression in late-capitalist society: “we’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach”; instead, “we worship our barcodes” and rely on advertising to supply us with “cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt” (263).

Kingdom Come has so far only been published in the UK, not the US. And it has gotten mostly negative reviews — even from speculative writers like Ursula LeGuin and M. John Harrison, who ought to know better. The book has been criticized for the fact that its plot and characters aren’t slick, catchy, and ‘well-constructed’ enough. But of course these are the wrong standards by which to judge Ballard. He writes genre fiction as social theory — and he remains, at age 76, one of the most acute social theorists that we have. His insights could not be communicated in the form of the artfully structured literary novel. His seeming repetitiveness, his clumsy prosaicness, and his insistence on a kind of pop-culture (so-called) ‘kitsch’ are necessary tools of insight. In a thoroughly Modernist way, his form coincides with his themes; though, as an anatomist of our “postmodern” condition, his forms/themes are such as the classic Modernists could never have imagined.

Shelley Jackson‘s Half Life is a dazzling and amazing book — the first print novel by the author of the hypertext fictions Patchwork Girl and My Body, the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, and the short story “Skin,” which is being tattooed one word at a time on the skin of volunteers (also see here).

Half Life is ostensibly, or overtly, about a pair of conjoined twins, Nora and Blanche Olney, who have separate heads but share a single torso and set of limbs. “Twofers,” as they are known, are common in the world of the novel (which in other respects is naturalistically depicted, and indistinguishable from our own). The twofers born in great numbers ever since the mid-20th century, they seem to be the result of mutations caused by nuclear radiation. (The novel describes the desert of Nevada, where in fact nuclear tests were frequently carried out in the 1950s and afterwards, as the “National Penitence Ground” — in this account, the US Government staged explosions, destroying simulacra of American houses and towns, as expressions of guilt and remorse for Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Twofers or conjoined twins are sufficiently present and visible that they form a distinct minority group, demanding civil rights and proclaiming pride in their identities — San Francisco, in particular, is a haven for twofers, just as it is in actuality for gays and lesbians.

Half Life is narrated (or, more accurately, written, since the process of writing the text we read is itself narrated within that text) by Nora, who feels alienated both from the twofer community, and from “singleton” (i.e. “normal,” unicephalous) society. Her twin, Blanche, has been asleep since childhood (since puberty? this is hinted but not made entirely clear), leaving Nora in sole control of their joint body. But now Blanche shows signs of awakening, and this puts Nora into a panic. She seeks out the shadowy “Unity Foundation,” an illicit organization that apparently offers to cut off one of a twofer’s heads, thereby restoring the body to singleton normativeness. The narrative follows a double track in alternating chapters: on the one hand, Nora’s account of her quest to rid herself once and forever of Blanche; on the other, the story of Nora’s and Blanche’s childhood, from an account of their conception to the traumatic moment when Blanche lapsed into silence.

Nothing quite goes the way we expect; but plot is not really the point of the novel. It is long (437 dense pages) and expansive; and I found it so absorbing that, when I was done, I only wished it were even longer. Despite the outrageous premise, the surfaces of life (both physical and social-cultural) are naturalistically depicted; the streets of San Francisco and London, and (as far as I could tell) the deserts of Nevada are all recognizably rendered, in loving detail. This is not to say, however, that Half Life in any way resembles either mainstream naturalistic fiction, or the sort of “world-building” fantasy that seeks to create an alternative world as rich and consistent as possible. Rather, Jackson creates a text in which ontological distinctions are abolished. There is no opposition here between the real and the fantastic, between actuality and mere possibility, between fact and fiction, or — most important of all — between language as a description of some extralinguistic real, and language as a dense, reflexive medium that performs and produces itself, rather than referring to anything outside itself.

That is to say, the novel is “postmodern” in the quite literal sense (rather than in the more prevalent extended senses of the word “postmodern”) that it doesn’t reject these modernist distinctions, nor take one side of them against the other, but rather subsumes them all into itself, and speaks unresolvable multiplicities with one voice — what Deleuze calls the “univocity” of being. We move, in a single paragraph, from, say, a description of London streets, or of the rocks and sparse vegetation of the desert, to a description of twofer anatomy or psychology, to pure linguistic play, to outright, florid hallucination: and none of these is marked out from the others, they all share the same degree of actuality and presence within the world or body of the text.

Half Life is filled — as indeed Jackson’s earlier writings were also — with such peculiar objects as dolls and dollhouses, automatons, prosthetic limbs (including prosthetic heads!), and “medical curiosities” and “freaks of nature” (like the two-headed animals and deformed fetuses on display in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, described at great length in the novel). But there is really nothing “perverse” or willfully weird and shocking (a la the “freak show” films and documentaries which seem almost timelessly popular) about all these — I hesitate even to call them obsessions on the author’s part. Because Jackson so powerfully suggests that these strange objects are not exceptions to some pre-assumed “normality,” so much as they are themselves constitutive of what we blindly take for granted as “normal.” The uncanny strangeness of dolls and automata and freaks — and, in Half Life, of twofers themselves — comes not from their being exceptional, or alien to “us” (however we use the category of we/us), but precisely from being so intimately close and recognizable to “us” — they cause the recognition that the “normal” singleton state — or the state of being heterosexual, or male, or white, or whatever else is socially dominant and thought of, by those who fit into these categories, as “normal” — is itself as much a contingency, as arbitrary and “accidental,” as inessential, as the “freaks” themselves are, or as anything else. Hierarchy unravels, not only in language (which we post-deconstructionists know to be slippery and unreliable), but in the depths of the body, in “nature,” as well.

Part of the novel’s univocity is that it theorizes its own allegories and metaphors, without these theoretical suggestions being anything like a master key to the rest of the book — the theories are on the same level as the narrated events and bodies and languages that they theorize. There is much about “transitional objects” (a psychoanalytic term originally from Winnicott — 136) that mediate the exchanges between Self and Other, or Self and World, and whose very presence ought to remind us that Self/Other or Self/World are not resolutely opposed categories, but ones that have overlaps and very leaky boundaries. Half Life also plays at great length with a quasi-poststructuralist theory based on Venn diagrams (those pictures of two overlapping circles, in which the logical relations between two realms — exclusion, inclusion, union, separation — or, the logical operators NOT, OR, AND, and XOR (exclusive or) — are mapped out. The diagrams represent the relation between the two individuals (or the two heads) of a twofer; but we are told repeatedly that such multiplicities — disunities of the self, or overlapping selves and others — are basic to all selves, those of singletons (with or without twins, with or without sibilings) as much as they are to those of conjoined twins.

In this way, Half Life‘s conjoined twins, and specifically the narrator(s) Nora and Blanche, are metaphors for selfhood or subjectivity in general — which is never unified but always sundered, and which is always somewhat fictive, but never able to be definitively discarded. “A cleft passes through the center of things, things that do not exist except in their twinship. That cleft is what we sometimes call I. It has no more substance than the slash between either and or” (433). The slash, the cleft, is barely there; but it is a material presence nonetheless, albeit a rather minimal one. This slash or cleft is something that happens in language, Jackson (or Nora) says, in the doubleness, or the gap, between actual events and their telling. But it is also something that happens in the body, in the foldings of our flesh and viscera, and in the detours and delays of chemical-electrical signals coursing through our neurons. (The subject-as-gap, located in language, sounds rather Lacanian. But this gap is also something physical and visceral, a material barrier and membrane, a physical experience and limit, rather than a “lack”).

Another way to put this is to say that, for Jackson, language and body are two sides of the same thing (two sides of a Moebius strip?). The pleasure of reading Half Life comes largely from its playful and extravagant language — a writing that couldn’t be further removed from naturalism. In a blurb on the rear jacket of the book, Jonathan Lethem (rightly) praises Jackson’s “Nabakovian verbal fireworks”; but in fact, her prose reminded me as much of Lewis Carroll as it did of Nabokov. There’s a Carrollian air of gleefully demented logic running throughout, alongside a very modernist/postmodernist metaphorical extravagance. The book is actually quite hilarious, page by page — even as its subject matter mostly involves morbidity, alienation, and a certain inexpugnable sadness.

It is important to note, therefore, that Jackson’s prose style is not just self-referential; her metaphors are not just metaphors; even as Nora and Blanche, or conjoined twins more generally, are not just metaphors for (singleton) subjectivity and self-consciousness. For Half Life determinedly literalizes its own lingustic and conceptual extravagances (“literalizes” is not quite the right word, but I cannot think of a better one). Its metaphors and its characters and its situations have to be taken as absolutely given, in the same way as the cleft of subjectivity has to be taken as something inscribed in the body, and not just in language. (“Not just” is again a wording that isn’t quite right; because language also has/is a body). And the novel’s conceptions and conceits are as powerful as they are because they also and simultaneously work on an affective level — this is the odd mixture (though “mixture” is once again not quite the right word, because it implies the combination of previously independent elements, whereas here the elements do not and cannot exist independently of their combination) — the mixture of gleefulness and melancholy that I have already mentioned. And also a mixture (with the same reservation about the word) of full-fledged delirium with a kind of reserve or detachment, a simultaneous participation and extreme distance. Half Life is all at once a mind-blowing derangement of the senses, and a cool display of carefully calibrated literary pyrotechnics. I can only describe the affective impact of the novel (which is also its style) in the terms of these inextricable pairs of gleefulness/melancholy and delirium/cool-detachment.

For all these reasons, I don’t find it in the least disappointing that Jackson has moved from “new media” like hypertext (and bodily inscription, for that matter) to the older (or supposedly “more conventional) medium of the novel. I don’t see this as in any way a “retreat,” but rather as another way to explore the same ramifying conjunction of flesh and language, or of desire and disappointment, or of connectedness and singularity, that has always been Jackson’s subject.

Julian Dibbell‘s Play Money, Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot is his account of a year spent, not just on the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) Ultima Online, but actually trying to make a living buying and selling Ultima Online artifacts on sites like eBay, for “real” US dollars. Dibbell endeavors to earn as much money through virtual artifact-trading as he ever did as a freelance journalist (which is his regular day job); and, though he doesn’t quite succeed, he does enter and explore a shadowy world, having to do with money and commerce, and blurring the lines between virtual and actual, reality and fantasy. Working in these markets is as strange an experience as anything he could have encountered purely online, in Ultima or elsewhere.

Play Money is something of a sequel to Dibbell’s earlier book, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, which recounted his time spent, in the mid-1990s, in LambdaMOO, a text-based virtual world. (I discussed that earlier book briefly here). The difference between the two books speaks profoundly to how our experiences of “virtual reality” have changed over the last decade or so.

Much of the difference between the two books is encapsulated in their very different subtitles. Dibbell has moved from “crime and passion” to money-making schemes. My Tiny Life is mostly about what it felt like to live in a virtual, online environment, at a time when not many people had ever done so. The book has its roots in Dibbell’s celebrated 1993 Village Voice article, “A Rape in Cyberspace”, which was revised to become the book’s first chapter. This article recounted an incident on LambdaMOO in which one of the players hacked the system in such a way as to control the actions of other characters, so as to subject them to various sexual indignities. My Tiny Life went on to narrate the aftermath of the incident: how the virtual crime was sanctioned by a virtual punishment, the banishment of the offender from LambdaMOO; and further, how the whole order of things on the MOO was turned upside down, and something like an experiment in virtual democracy was born. Dibbell explored the rich texture of life on the MOO in the years following the incident. He described the social, sexual, and aesthetic aspects of virtual life, its often intense satisfactions and equally insistent annoyances. He raised questions about how virtual identities and virtual experiences related to physical ones, and about the gender fluidity, multiplication of identities, and strange emotional intensities that seemed to characterize life in cyberspace. Above all, he sought to persuade his readers — many of whom might have never experienced it first-hand — that a life lived as a made-up persona in a world composed only of bits and texts was nonetheless “real” in any way that really mattered: in terms of time and interest, emotional experience, relationships with other people, creativity, and even a sort of physical engagement.

Play Money, on the other hand, comes at a time when immersion in the Internet — whether in the form of game-playing on MMORPGs and on networked servers, or in the forms of email, chat rooms, P2P filesharing networks, blogs, social networking sites like myspace.com, and personal media distribution sites like youtube.com — has become a commonplace for most of the population of the United States and other industrialized countries. It is no longer a question of convincing people that an online, virtual “life” is “real,” as of tracing the ways that the “virtual” aspects of our lives intersect with other aspects. Today, there is basically a continuity between physical contact, contact over the telephone, and contact online — it no longer makes sense to oppose one of these to the others, as Rl (“real life”) used to be opposed to VR (“virtual reality”). It no stranger that people should spend much of their leisure time slaying dragons and making artifacts on Ultima Online, than it is that they should spend their leisure time going to baseball games, or watching DVDs, or knitting sweaters; and indeed, all these other activities increasingly have online components as well. So it’s not surprising that, in his new book, Dibbell writes about how an online virtual world intersects with the rest of his life, rather than how that online world is a self-enclosed place of its own.

Play Money is about the trade in virtual artifacts. The economist Edward Castronova has written about how MMORPGs have virtual economies that, translated into “real world” dollar terms, are larger than those of many developing nations. People spend much of their time in Ultima Online, and other such worlds, making virtual artifacts, like houses to live in, armor to fight better, objects that allow one to cast spells, and so on. These artifacts can be made by doing a lot of pointing and clicking. Sometimes it is purely mechanical, other times it involves real creativity (writing, or programming, new features that appear in the game’s visuals, and that have actual effects on character behavior). Within the game, these artifacts can be bought and sold for virtual gold. (You can also earn virtual gold by doing such repetitive tasks as killing monsters for a bounty). Ultima Online thus has a virtual or simulated economy, arising (as mercantile and capitalist economies do in the ‘real world’) as a result of scarcity.

But why is there scarcity in Ultima Online? The answer is, that it is programmed in. In My Tiny Life, Dibbell had already written about the “economy” of LambdaMOO. Since this virtual world ran on a single server, hard-drive space was necessarily limited. Each player was given a certain number of bits: you could use these to program, or to make virtual objects and spaces. If you wanted more hard drive space than was allocated to you, you had to present your plans to a democratically-elected review board, which decided who would get the scarce additional quota. LambdaMOO thus had a non-market, socially administered “economy” of sorts.

Ultima Online and other MMORPGs run on multiple servers, profitably funded by the players’ monthly account fees; so this sort of scarcity doesn’t need to exist. And online, as many theorists have noted, “information” is plenteous and (aside from the scarcity enforced by copyrights and the like) nearly free, because — once the system is in place — the marginal cost of generating and reproducing additional information is vanishingly small. Nonetheless, Dibbell suggests, people enjoy scarcity, enjoy the experience of struggling to overcome constraints. Online games in which anything was possible haven’t done very well. But lots of people will pay to be stimulated by the challenges of scarcity in games. “In an atmosphere of oxygen, our bodies learned to breathe; in a world of scarcity, the soul might just as likely learn to need the universal obstacle to its desires” (43). I always think of this as the Captain Kirk principle: again and again, the Enterprise comes upon what seems to be a utopian world, a world of effortless play. But Kirk always ends up destroying these worlds — in direct violation of the Prime Directive — for the worlds’ peoples own good. Since if they don’t have obstacles, if they don’t have something to strive for, they are decadent and ultimately doomed. This is the anti-utopian side of MMORPGs (in contrast to the utopianism that suffused places like LambdaMOO in its glory days, over a decade ago). There’s something weirdly perverse about all this, as Dibbell freely admits. But perversity, of course, is itself endlessly fascinating, as so-called “normality” is not.

Anyway. So scarcity is built into worlds like Ultima Online. And people willingly do a lot of what might be thought of as work — even though it is taking place voluntarily, inside a game — in order to increase their virtual wealth within the game, to have a nicer house, a more prestigious social position, cooler or more aesthetically pleasing artifacts. But what’s more — and this is really where Dibbell’s own experiences come in — there’s a spillover between the play (or simulated) economy of the game, and real-world money and economics. If you want a nice mansion in Ultima Online, but don’t have the patience to spend 800 hours of game-playing time killing monsters in order to accumulate enough virtual cash to be able to afford to buy and furnish the mansion, you can take a shortcut and buy the mansion in eBay with real US money. Thus, as Castronova explains, you can calculate an exchange rate between Ultima Online’s virtual money and real-world currencies; most of the stuff never gets sold off-world, but you can calculate its value all the same, which is how Castronova compares the virtual economies of MMORPGs to the actual economies of developing nations.

Pursuing this thread of virtual economies, Dibbell uncovers a strange world of mercantile activity related to Ultima Online and other MMORPGs. There are brokers who make a living by acting as middlemen, buying and selling Ultima Online artifacts on eBay, and pocketing the difference. There are “gold farmers” who discover loopholes in the virtual world’s programming, which allow them to produce virtually valuable articles easily; they run bots to perform the repetitive tasks necessary, exchange the virtual goods thus produced for virtual gold; and sell the virtual gold on eBay and other sites for actual US currency. There are even, apparently, entrepreneurs who set up virtual sweatshops: hiring workers in developing countries like Mexico and China to play the games eight to twelve hours a day, making virtual artifacts or earning virtual gold; the entrepreneurs pocket the difference between the (real currency) wages they pay and the (real currency) money they get for selling the virtual artifacts and gold outside the game. This last scenario is one that Dibbell spends the entire book trying to track down; he hears tantalizing reports and rumors, but is never able to verify it; finally the New York Times reports it as fact. It’s a mind-blowing scenario, really; it involves a process of production, and an extraction of surplus value, that is entirely based on virtual activity; and it suggests that leisure and play, as well as work — or more precisely leisure-as-work — can itself be exported to the Third World by corporations seeking to maximize profit.

Most of Play Money is mostly autobiographical, as Dibbell adopts the purchase and sale of virtual artifacts as his full-time profession. There’s something gripping in his narrative of profit and loss, of economic ups and downs, of profitable coups he made, and of the ones that got away. My Tiny Life was all about community and social life online. But in Play Money, as Dibbell gets more involved in these economic pursuits, he increasingly loses interest in the social, community, and networking aspects of life in Ultima Online, and indeed in the Dungeons-and-Dragons-like gaming aspects as well: “as I invested myself more and more in the economy of UO players, I could feel myself drifting further and further from their community”; he is no longer interested in “the dungeon quests, the crafting trades, the big houses and the little chunks of fame that came with owning one”; all he is interested in is the money (149).

But interwoven with the personal narrative, Dibbell offers a number of provocative theoretical asides on the relation of work to play, of the real to the virtual, and of money to the activities it makes possible, and for which it substitutes. He eventually suggests that we are entering an era of “ludocapitalism,” in which work and play merge, and Weber’s “iron cage” of the capitalist economy’s “meaningless hyperefficiency” gives way to an economy based on “contriving meaningful activity… through the mechanisms of play” (298-299). This is a prospect that I find considerably more disturbing than Dibbell does — though I cannot give good reasons for explaining why I am disturbed without lapsing into a sort of Adornoesque melancholic moralizing.

Dibbell demonstrates convincingly, in any case, just how real the virtual economy — or play economy — actually is. Of course, from a global perspective, corporations and individual entrepreneurs or arbitragers who make money from the commercial activities surrounding MMORPGs are pretty small-potatoes. But the world economy of “casino capitalism” is increasingly driven by virtual wealth, by speculation in things like derivatives, the money value of trades in which exceeds by several orders of magnitude the value of the world’s physical economic production. Such money is entirely virtual — there is way too much of it to be used in purchasing physical goods or investing in physical production — yet it has powerful effects on “real” economic conditions, as trade in derivatives can easily crash whole economies, and relegate millions of people to very real misery, through a short series of nearly instantaneous computer-mediated transactions. Something further may follow of this masquerade.

Cormac McCarthy has a new novel coming out on Septemer 26: The Road. It sounds pretty science-fictional to me: “Violence, in McCarthy’s postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a ‘long shear of light and then a series of low concussions’ that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea.”

And then, Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming out on December 5: Against the Day. “Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.” And it’s nearly a thousand pages long.

Two of my favorite living authors coming out with major works; I can’t wait.