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How to Mutate and Take Over the World
OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS FOR AN EXPLODED POST-NOVEL
This is not a novel.
Don't think you can just hold your nose and jump into this.
You might get boiled or vaporized. Anodized.
THIS IS NOT A NOVEL
Before you start reading an exploded post-novel, you should think strategy.
While we do recommend reading this book from front to back--left to right--you can skip around as you please. It is disguised as a scrapbook. You can channelsurf it. Or graze through sections, munch munch munch. After you acquire the taste, you'll feel strong enough to start at the beginning and read through to the end, in precisely that order. Don't take too much at one sitting. Do not overdose. It's dense, fast. Things get technical. There's a relentless quality to the first-person narrative that may exhaust you secondhand. Read only until the vertigo overwhelms you. When you find yourself crying out, "For god's sake, give it a break!!!". . . well, exactly. Put the book down. . . gently. Rest. Watch TV. Read Ben Is Dead. Go somewhere watery and lie in the hard radiation. Read a nonexploded novel. Take up crime. Then. . .
Read a little at a time. Swallow it slowly like crème br-lée. Or hold it in your cheek like Copenhagen Smokeless. But do not rush. If you go slowly enough, by the time you're done, the made-for-TV movie will be out. Starring Steven Seagal as R. U. Sirius and Whoopi Goldberg as St. Jude.
This is not a novel.
Don't think you can just hold your nose and jump into this.
You might get boiled or vaporized. Anodized.
THIS IS NOT A NOVEL
Before you start reading an exploded post-novel, you should think strategy.
While we do recommend reading this book from front to back--left to right--you can skip around as you please. It is disguised as a scrapbook. You can channelsurf it. Or graze through sections, munch munch munch. After you acquire the taste, you'll feel strong enough to start at the beginning and read through to the end, in precisely that order. Don't take too much at one sitting. Do not overdose. It's dense, fast. Things get technical. There's a relentless quality to the first-person narrative that may exhaust you secondhand. Read only until the vertigo overwhelms you. When you find yourself crying out, "For god's sake, give it a break!!!". . . well, exactly. Put the book down. . . gently. Rest. Watch TV. Read Ben Is Dead. Go somewhere watery and lie in the hard radiation. Read a nonexploded novel. Take up crime. Then. . .
Read a little at a time. Swallow it slowly like crème br-lée. Or hold it in your cheek like Copenhagen Smokeless. But do not rush. If you go slowly enough, by the time you're done, the made-for-TV movie will be out. Starring Steven Seagal as R. U. Sirius and Whoopi Goldberg as St. Jude.
305 pages, Hardcover
First published February 20, 1996
1 person is currently reading
83 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 27, 2016
I picked this up when it was first published back in 1996 simply because the inside flaps sang to the 27-year-old-me with all kinds of words and phrases I didn’t really get: “post-novel” … “meta-structure” … “deconstructionist-narrative” … wait … “cyberpunk!?” Oh, I had to have it. So I purchased it, read a few entries from it’s scrapbook like collection of articles, clippings, email texts, etc., and put it on my “to read” pile down in my office. After Y2K, when I had to get a “real job” at a “real company,” the book pretty much stayed down in the unused home office, until I came across it while remodeling … now 20 years later. I have since become a big fan of R.U. Sirius, having followed his writings and podcasts for years online, so now seemed a good time to finally sit down and actually read the book that I was so taken with in my youth.
I’m not sure “challenging” is the word to use … possibly “amusingly frustrating.” As mentioned, this is what the author’s term a “post-novel.” Essentially, it is a scrapbook of emails, articles, clippings, and essays starting in the then present, and carrying forward to the early 2000’s (which were the future at the time). Thrown together, they tell sort of a detached story about a government that goes insane with censorship of the ever expanding “electronic frontier” of information that is being made available. At the same time, their lack of understanding of technology gives rise to various movements, groups, cults, etc. who live sort of a half-real-world/half-virutal existence on message bords, chat rooms, tobacco bars (cigarettes are a controlled substance in this nightmare future), mental institutions (spolier?), and religious compunds. Countering this narrative is a separate story made up of email exchanges between the authors and the publisher discussing the trials and tributions of writing and publishing the book you’re reading. This seems absurd at first, they are actually discussing how contrived everything is, how you can slap “cyberpunk” on anything and people will buy it, and how they really don’t have a story or a climax worked out, but since they’ve already spent their advances, they have to come up with something. About halfway through the book, this “author commentary” starts to take on a dramatic plot of it’s own, with elements of this realitiy becoming influences for the fictional reality of the “scrapbook” storyline, and that’s when things get a little confusing.
As both storylines became increasingly ludicrous and build towards the “meta-climax,” you tend to lose track of what happened to which manifestation of the author/characters 200 pages earlier, and everything sort of just blends together into surrealism out of lazy exhaustion– or possibly this was the intent. By the time you get to the two page climax of the “scrapbook” which I wouldn’t exactly call a deus ex machina so much as a deus ex parachute to get out of the crashing plane, you realize that this is the only possible ending the book could have had. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because you read this as a historical/cultural reference of the early (scary) Internet era; not because you’re looking for a gripping story. In all, if you don’t stop to study it too much, you can enjoy some really neat ideas, a few good chuckles, and get a nice little light-to-moderate workout for your thought organ.
I’m not sure “challenging” is the word to use … possibly “amusingly frustrating.” As mentioned, this is what the author’s term a “post-novel.” Essentially, it is a scrapbook of emails, articles, clippings, and essays starting in the then present, and carrying forward to the early 2000’s (which were the future at the time). Thrown together, they tell sort of a detached story about a government that goes insane with censorship of the ever expanding “electronic frontier” of information that is being made available. At the same time, their lack of understanding of technology gives rise to various movements, groups, cults, etc. who live sort of a half-real-world/half-virutal existence on message bords, chat rooms, tobacco bars (cigarettes are a controlled substance in this nightmare future), mental institutions (spolier?), and religious compunds. Countering this narrative is a separate story made up of email exchanges between the authors and the publisher discussing the trials and tributions of writing and publishing the book you’re reading. This seems absurd at first, they are actually discussing how contrived everything is, how you can slap “cyberpunk” on anything and people will buy it, and how they really don’t have a story or a climax worked out, but since they’ve already spent their advances, they have to come up with something. About halfway through the book, this “author commentary” starts to take on a dramatic plot of it’s own, with elements of this realitiy becoming influences for the fictional reality of the “scrapbook” storyline, and that’s when things get a little confusing.
As both storylines became increasingly ludicrous and build towards the “meta-climax,” you tend to lose track of what happened to which manifestation of the author/characters 200 pages earlier, and everything sort of just blends together into surrealism out of lazy exhaustion– or possibly this was the intent. By the time you get to the two page climax of the “scrapbook” which I wouldn’t exactly call a deus ex machina so much as a deus ex parachute to get out of the crashing plane, you realize that this is the only possible ending the book could have had. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because you read this as a historical/cultural reference of the early (scary) Internet era; not because you’re looking for a gripping story. In all, if you don’t stop to study it too much, you can enjoy some really neat ideas, a few good chuckles, and get a nice little light-to-moderate workout for your thought organ.
March 23, 2008
I assume this was some terrible joke, conceived under the working title "How to make Douglas Coupland look like an insightful thinker and embarrass your parents". At $1.98, I paid one hundred and ninety eight cents too many. I'm not sure how something like this got published, but I didn't understand how the Counting Crowes avoided bullets through their empty shrill heads, either. Life is certainly full of mysteries.
December 21, 2015
One of the books that inadvertently helped to warp my worldview. It's bizarre and at times painful. I recommend it to everyone, and at times have tracked down used copies of it so I can force it on people.
January 30, 2013
It's the Internet. It's the 1990s. This is a "deconstructed post-novel" winding its way through the possibilities of the big old "Information Superhighway," which so few people understood back then. It was good, it was bad, it was frustrating. It brought back a lot of memories of the original Clinton administration, things I thought my brain had purged long ago.
Want to read
July 21, 2008I read this in 1997 and I think it scared me away from cyberpunk for which I hates it forever. I'd like to read it again and find out if it's truly bad or if it just went over my head.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews