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Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: danielshortell.com
ISBN-10: 0692831185
Type: Fiction
Pages: 372
Copyright: December 1, 2016
ISBN-13: 9780692831182
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
The elite use a "science-based" marketing trick to re-class themselves as genetically superior in order to extract the labor and resources from the lower classes. As economic inequality fractures society, citizens act in bizarre ways to cope. Narrated from seven perspectives, th!s explores philosophy, science, technology, economics and religion to reveal the trajectory of inverted totalitarianism.
With its multiple protagonists, meta/sub-story structure, and sub-story convergence, th!s does not lend itself well to a traditional synopsis. Structurally, the novel is complex providing an unorthodox read and allowing ample space between sub-stories to permit the progressive intertwining of mutually dependent narratives, merging circumstances and staggered timelines. The meta-story, narrated by a single protagonist at a time, is comprised of four interleaved sub-stories that progress non-linearly with each story helping to flesh out the bones of the meta-story. Succinctly, eight narrators tell four sub-stories, stories that are broken into 43 interlaced sections all of which bands together to create the meta. The novel concludes with a 129-line heroic couplet acting as a sort of satirical moral lesson from the ether.
Sections of the novel are delineated by the symbol representing the narrating protagonist. Several sections have simultaneous co-narrators, and are identified by more than one symbol.
As a guide, readers should be aware of the emergence of the following sub-stories and their respective narrators:
- Finding Self (co-narrated by Bryson Acenes)
- Finding Love (co-narrated by Sariya Ribeaux and Alain Nelling)
- Finding God (co-narrated by Father McMurty and God)
- Finding Conviction (jointly narrated by Aphamali Twist, Zuberi Ortiz and John Voyes)
These sub-stories coalesce into the larger meta-story that emerges as the novel progresses: Humanity has fractured resulting in the emergence of the constitutionally protected Homo beatus species, a Superclass of humans defined by their extreme wealth and nearly infinite level of scientifically-proven motivation. When society begins to crumble under the weight of social inequality, absurdity becomes the norm as citizens scramble to find meaning and happiness in a world gone mad. Seven people from across the social strata give a personal account of how to persevere in the worst of times. One's wife moonlights as a prostitute to afford her mounting religious debts, a politician achieves immortality through a pedophilia addiction and a impoverished orphan finds peace and contentment in nihilism.
Narrated from seven meticulously interconnected perspectives, th!s aims to overshoot in its attempt to find reason in a perfectly irrational world. Only through an exploration of philosophy, science, technology, economics and religion can readers understand how citizens cope inside an inverted totalitarian society.
th!s seesaws between humor and despair to tease out the motivations for why people across the socio-economic spectrum seem to behave in a self-defeating manner. The novel explores a range of themes including diminishing interpersonal connectivity, cultural homogenization, corruption, the cult of self, the illusion of social mobility, and religion as an economic tool. th!s doesn't fit well into any fiction genre as it is somewhat pre-dystopian, somewhat satirical, somewhat science fiction but always true to its literary core.
Excerpt
(the following excerpt is a flashback a corrupt politician is having about his first exposure to the fashion industry):
"Sitting there, hoisted decadently on his throne of sweaty men, men interlocked into an exquisite chaise of flesh and blood. He alone wielded the power to summon the Gods of Appeal while looking down upon his panel of creative directors with the critical eye's doubtful squint.
“We’re not pushing hard enough!" his shrill voice sang. "The Spring line is less than six months away and this is shit, what you are showing me is pure shit! To compete with food, to compete with soap, to compete with the basic necessities of life, we must push boundaries, we must entice consumers in new ways! Fashion people! Fashion and its inextricable link with sex. Fashion is sex, period. Sex couldn't even exist without fashion's foreplay! The entire procreativity of mankind hangs in the balance! We need to push the envelope further! You know what? Screw the fucking envelope, let’s fly right through it, without regard, without a single stress test. We are the pioneers. We are the cartographers of taste, of refinement, of desire! Now come on team, Springtime, I’m thinking flowers, green shoots, fertility, rebirth, the softness of new fuzz, the breaking of winter's fast, the yellow beams of sun teasing life from chilly, rain-soaked earth! Let’s push this to an entirely new realm of thought! Thought beyond thought. The sort of thought stimulated only by the synesthetic broodings, broodings that yield salivary squirts at the first glance of a bold, new color! Thought that itself becomes the precious seed of copulation, the carnal yearning to go beyond decency, to rearrange one's own sense of sexuality!”
Scurveus' team was in a frenzy, whipped up into a orgy of creativity that was bound to give birth to the epitome. Fashion perfected on humble planet earth. His eyes, heavily shadowed in black, the irises spinning a dizzying array of digital sparks around his pupils, surveyed the troops, while his wasting pale frame shifted uncomfortably atop a perspiring plateau of entangled underlings.
The first Creative stepped onto the hot plate. Far too singular and aloof to bear an ordinary name, his name, a clever little palindrome, right? Something about cats?
"Yes, you, Senile Felines, what have you got for me?"
“Well sir, I’m thinking dicey boundaries, teasing the consumer with the speckled-stub of pubic hair sprouting from the crotch of a fresh face. A girl with a sort of alienesque beauty, overly elongated features, immense almond eyes. The sprouting pubes reminiscent of Spring’s eternal regrowth!” his voice an affected Received Pronunciation, passionately torqued and sounding as though bleated through a paper towel roll.
“NO, never! Pubes are so overdone, so last decade! Who tries to sell with pubes anyhow? And what the hell on God's-blue-green-ball-of-chaos am I paying you dolts for? Think!”
“But sir," aghast, "You don't understand! I’m not talking about the unkempt fringes of the triangle. What I’m saying is that we come from behind, āni pūbēs! Delicate and mysterious, forbidden yet curious! No clothing on the model, of course, just a sheer satin cloth draped across the naked back of an disgustingly gorgeous nymph, the cloth parting ways with decency right at the point of her upwardly arched anus, the whiskers sprouting in circular perfection around those delicate radial wrinkles.”
The room, and the silence borne of a creative outburst. Eternity quickly evaporated.
“Lame! A cheap riff on last year’s success,” shouted a wild-eyed Scurveus. “Listen folks, we are in the fashion industry, WE ARE ICONS! There are expectations the world places on us! Think people, let’s push this to a newly created stratosphere! You, Verruche Anali, what have you got?”
“Sir, I’m thinking flowers, Springtime, nothing but flowers. I’m thinking labia, engorged, excessively large labia. Generous folds! Ten models, no, twenty! All cramped into a life-sized planter box perched ornately below the glistening yet wavy panes of antique beveled, leaded glass. The models, lying spread-eagle, with legs overflowing the rim of the planter box like so many searching vines, perfectly nude, of course, each with their hypertrophied genitals sprouting forth Spring’s most urgently crimson fecundity!”
Silence. Billions of meteor shower eyeballs darting silently. The moment clung precariously from anticipation's edge. Permission to breathe was collectively revoked, individually enforced.
“It will never work!” Scurveus brayed, simultaneously twisting two of his five nipples (the rumor, if remembered correctly, was that he surgically added three additional nipples, shirt-button fashion, down his centerline to better align his pilomotors with the pentatonic scale for maximum aural stimulation. However, as is often the case with demigods, the rumors took on a life of their own increasing the mystique, the wonder, shrouding this iconoclast). “It’s cheap sex, nothing more. We’re not challenging our consumers to think deeper, to push the boundaries of what fashion aims to represent. To leave a mark on culture by staking the stick of haute couture to the sheer ridge of necessity!”
Silence again. The overbearing processing power of the collective minds, neurons overheating, inching the mercury to Mars.
“Wait, I have it! Yes! Listen and learn people. I see a speculum, shiny and understated in it’s clinical sanitariness. A woman’s flower, up close, no clothes, of course, splayed open for a view of the ultimate representation of Springtime's regeneration, the egg! A magnifying glass, hovering over a single ovum, recently discharged from the Isle of Fallopia and resting expectantly on a carpet of warm red satin, waiting for the initiation of metamorphosis, waiting for the consumer to engage, to become one with the new fashion! And the woman! She should be gorgeous! No, I mean repulsive! Yes, the woman will be utterly repulsive! Asymmetrical, lipless, foreheadless...all chins and ears with narrow, cross-set eyes! Let us split the purchasing mind into a basic dichotomy, blunt sex on the one hand, a desire for social conformity on the other, and focus exclusively on the half that urges the sale based on nothing more than carnal desire to procreate, and, no less, with the mandatory assistance of a paper bag or two!”
The crashing wave of applause filled the room as a sea of heads nodded feverishly, lips quaking, eyes tearing. For once, the word "genius" wasn't tainted by the stink of hyperbole. Scurveus, his angular frame anchored to the slippery manthrone, calmly receiving the impassioned accolades and wincing grunts rightfully due a fashion eclecticist with infinite insight into human elegance. A aesthete so over-programmed for beauty that his ideas themselves became black holes, sucking in entire universes of visual perfection. Chagall's flowers never looked so hopelessly uninspired.
But wait, here. Here in this moment. Here is where we sit! This Alvin Tan, what a specimen, what a treat! A light brush of that Oriental mystique, a splash of malty brown in his smooth flesh, the still soft yet rapidly thickening hair of hebetic years."
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