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Welcome to the Arms Race
Churches made of meat, spaceships powered by song, simulated authors and a soul-warping artwork that may or may not exist—in these ten stories you will be confronted with a garish neon blueprint of post-humanity, a form-fixated vision of the Altermodern less New Wave than No Wave. Torrents of alien language and remixed fragments of science fiction hauntology merge in the valley of the shadow of unguessable metaphysics, while atomized characters scramble for self and meaning only to find themselves overwritten or revised out of reality.
360 pages, Paperback
First published December 16, 2015
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About the author
Justin Isis
26 books175 followersJustin Isis //primary succession psychic automatism citizens of teh universe publishing industry intransitive cauliflower !! Shizuka Muto's brand "Rady# is recommended International law must properly be regarded as another branch of fantastic literature
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
February 26, 2021
A work of genius.
While the stories in this collection are miraculous, they do not always defy description.
"Welcome to the Arms Race." - cyberpunk. disorienting, bizarre, anarchic, descriptive, fascinating.
"Some Notes on the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm," - a similar premise to "The Ring," or Infinite Jest's central conceit, or Death Sentences by Chiaki Kawamata. Art that kills. But it's startlingly beautiful in execution. Leaves a lingering doubt in the mind, an eerie, pervasive atmosphere of dread.
"M-Funk Vs Tha Futuregions of Inverse Funkativity." - wildly inventive inversion of traditional storytelling forms. Repurposed pop vocabulary in a pseudo-retro-futuristic setting, with a bedazzled Sam Johnson expounding on Funk waves, and laying on the SnoopDog slang thick as a Kerdrizzling landslide. Laugh-inducing, but also mind-altering.
"The Stars and Yellow Doubt." So abstract and difficult to parse that it went WAY over my head. Something odd happened in this one, where words took on multiple shades of meaning and no meaning at all. I could not tell you with confidence what it was about or how it intrigued me without reading it again. More like a whirlpool of concepts and imagery than a story.
"The Heart of a Man." A brilliant story. Either imitating or recreating the language and style of Gogol, Bulgakov, or any number of politically charged Russian short story masters. Isis proves his own mastery of the fundamentals of storytelling by recasting his style with such precision and convincing realism that I almost forgot the experimental bliss invoked by the previous stories.
"Brent Beckford Vs Writing" - A familiar concept, with perfect execution. A real person believes he's a fictional character and part of an apocalyptic prophesy. It contained the exact feeling of Golden Age s-f, including appropriate setting and references to that era. Another superb story.
"The Portrayed Man." The classic doppelgänger trope, played out with straight-faced aplomb. Pseudo realist, like Dostoyevsky's "The Double", only spiraling into a chilling climax where what is left unsaid is just as important as the stated.
"The Plot."Similar concept as Roald Dahl's "The Great Automatic Grammatizator." This dark fable of AI-thors outclassing human writers is probably the most prophetic of the bunch. Only question is how many years will it take before this scenario comes to pass.
At this point I had to admit that Justin Isis was a genius. I don't just throw that term around. You get all of the mechanics of good writing, along with oodles of personality. I would qualify him in the same stratum as Borges, Bradbury, and R. A. Lafferty, and above Ballard. Even the flaws are beautiful. Each story provides a singular experience, a memorable world in which to escape.
"The Willow." This read like Clark Ashton Smith. A far-future where the familiar is rendered alien. An encounter with a willow from the skewed perspective of a post-nature observer. Pure description. Reminiscent of Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood.
"Defense/ Prosecution." What the hell was this one about? It began with abstract experimentation, absolutely impenetrable, then slid into a young child's voice, depicting the dawning horror of a perceived landscape of indescribable forms within a white wall. Deserves a reread for its subtle shades of peculiar iridescence.
In summary, it is one of the best collections I've ever read. He is almost too good. Perhaps this author will achieve recognition within a hundred years, or perhaps the mild obscurity will persist until the century-long pandemic of bland writing expires or we are all replaced by AI. At first it strains belief that such quality passes under the radar, but upon reflection, amid so many millions of books, how does one run across something this good? The answer is, one doesn't. At least, not more than once or twice in a lifetime.
While the stories in this collection are miraculous, they do not always defy description.
"Welcome to the Arms Race." - cyberpunk. disorienting, bizarre, anarchic, descriptive, fascinating.
"Some Notes on the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm," - a similar premise to "The Ring," or Infinite Jest's central conceit, or Death Sentences by Chiaki Kawamata. Art that kills. But it's startlingly beautiful in execution. Leaves a lingering doubt in the mind, an eerie, pervasive atmosphere of dread.
"M-Funk Vs Tha Futuregions of Inverse Funkativity." - wildly inventive inversion of traditional storytelling forms. Repurposed pop vocabulary in a pseudo-retro-futuristic setting, with a bedazzled Sam Johnson expounding on Funk waves, and laying on the SnoopDog slang thick as a Kerdrizzling landslide. Laugh-inducing, but also mind-altering.
"The Stars and Yellow Doubt." So abstract and difficult to parse that it went WAY over my head. Something odd happened in this one, where words took on multiple shades of meaning and no meaning at all. I could not tell you with confidence what it was about or how it intrigued me without reading it again. More like a whirlpool of concepts and imagery than a story.
"The Heart of a Man." A brilliant story. Either imitating or recreating the language and style of Gogol, Bulgakov, or any number of politically charged Russian short story masters. Isis proves his own mastery of the fundamentals of storytelling by recasting his style with such precision and convincing realism that I almost forgot the experimental bliss invoked by the previous stories.
"Brent Beckford Vs Writing" - A familiar concept, with perfect execution. A real person believes he's a fictional character and part of an apocalyptic prophesy. It contained the exact feeling of Golden Age s-f, including appropriate setting and references to that era. Another superb story.
"The Portrayed Man." The classic doppelgänger trope, played out with straight-faced aplomb. Pseudo realist, like Dostoyevsky's "The Double", only spiraling into a chilling climax where what is left unsaid is just as important as the stated.
"The Plot."Similar concept as Roald Dahl's "The Great Automatic Grammatizator." This dark fable of AI-thors outclassing human writers is probably the most prophetic of the bunch. Only question is how many years will it take before this scenario comes to pass.
At this point I had to admit that Justin Isis was a genius. I don't just throw that term around. You get all of the mechanics of good writing, along with oodles of personality. I would qualify him in the same stratum as Borges, Bradbury, and R. A. Lafferty, and above Ballard. Even the flaws are beautiful. Each story provides a singular experience, a memorable world in which to escape.
"The Willow." This read like Clark Ashton Smith. A far-future where the familiar is rendered alien. An encounter with a willow from the skewed perspective of a post-nature observer. Pure description. Reminiscent of Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood.
"Defense/ Prosecution." What the hell was this one about? It began with abstract experimentation, absolutely impenetrable, then slid into a young child's voice, depicting the dawning horror of a perceived landscape of indescribable forms within a white wall. Deserves a reread for its subtle shades of peculiar iridescence.
In summary, it is one of the best collections I've ever read. He is almost too good. Perhaps this author will achieve recognition within a hundred years, or perhaps the mild obscurity will persist until the century-long pandemic of bland writing expires or we are all replaced by AI. At first it strains belief that such quality passes under the radar, but upon reflection, amid so many millions of books, how does one run across something this good? The answer is, one doesn't. At least, not more than once or twice in a lifetime.
September 3, 2016
What sorcery is this? A paperback? No deluxe edition, no expensive cloth boards, no two colour text inside, no foil stamping? Then how the heck am I supposed to enjoy reading this? I fear the book will keep falling out of my hands each time I will try to read something from it. Or perhaps I will go blind or lichen will start growing out of my nostrils or perhaps mushrooms out of my ears. In any case, something bad is going to happen. I know it. The God of Deluxe, Limited Editions books will most definetely spit in my face. Brrrgggh! You don't want to mess with that bloke. Nope. Then I've taken a good look at the cover art. OK, I've said, this cant be that bad. Most probably a collection of fanfiction pieces featuring Gundam chicks, homages to Zelda the Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy XIII, Dragon Ball Z, plus walkthroughs for obscure Nintendo games and stuff. You are in the know, right?, this book seemed to ask me. Oh yeah, bring it on. After reading the first five stories I was lost. What is happening? Where is Guts, where are the promised boss fights, where the tentacles? This is actually one of the best collections of literate weird stories I have read in a long time. I stand in awe and I demand more.
December 30, 2015
What interests me about Justin's work is that while many writers have a discernible style, I feel that he's the opposite in that there's something almost chameleon-like about his short story collections (especially his second one, "Welcome to the Arms Race"). Each of the ten stories here is written in a completely different style, almost as if each one had been written by a completely different person. In this regard then he's almost like the anti-Lovecraft. It reminds me almost of the work of J.H. Williams III (one of Justin's favorite comic book artists), as I've read interviews where Williams describes himself as a sort of sponge with no trademark style of his own, a chameleon who can employ a wide variety of styles in his own work but isn't bound to just one.
I found the title story very imaginative, really loved the idea of the biochurches and religious types growing giant versions of their own bodies so they can explore their own "interior mansions" (to use the phraseology of St. Teresa of Avila). Some interesting portmanteau words: I especially liked "Rhizosigil." I've found that when a lot of writers write about the future they often fall into one of two traps, in that they either set it in a utopia or a dystopia. With the title story here I feel the tone is neutral, in that while there's a lot of darkness in this futuristic world there's also a lot of very interesting stuff going on as well. Essentially "Welcome to the Arms Race" is a good example of information overload, and has more ideas squeezed into its 76 pages than I've seen in some entire novels.
The second story ("Some Notes on the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm") is written in an almost entirely different tone of voice from the first: whereas the first story has kind of a brash experimental cyberpunk-ish vibe, this one has more of a dry academic air which reminds me a bit of Borges (maybe its the use of footnotes that makes me think of it as academic). I liked the premise, the idea of an "artwork that could trigger suicidal ideation," and the overall impression I got of the story was that it could almost function as a sort of cerebral Creepypasta article for intellectuals. I'm not entirely sure I "got" it, and the ending went over my head, but I did like this poetic description of a sunset: "a thread of fire stitched between two night-blue eternities."
I think one of my favorite stories in this book was "The Plot," which at only 13 pages is the shortest story in the book. It depicts a futuristic scenario in which most novels are being written by computers (or AI-thors), and how a human writer deals with the idea that he has become obsolete. In this story there are programs in which human beings can feed a plot germ into the computer and the computer in turn will turn it into a full book. I hate to say this but there are times in which I wish I had one of these. It reminds me of something that Ligotti said in an interview once: “To me the actual task of writing is a real pain in the ass. I've fantasized about just imagining the characters and incidents of a story and having it appear in written form before my eyes. I know that there are plenty of writers who genuinely enjoy the nuts and bolts of the literary process. I'm not one of them."
Another interesting story is "The Willow," the title of which instantly evokes in one's mind that of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" (well, in my mind, anyway). Fittingly enough, it's the closest thing the collection has to a horror/Weird Fiction story (there's something vaguely Lovecraftian about its presentation as well, in that it's in the form of a letter in which the writer recounts a strange experience from his life). Only in some ways it inverts the classical Weird Fiction formula, in that the source of horror isn't something otherworldly, but instead something that is quite mundane and familiar... to us, at least. Though maybe I'm misinterpreting it!
A few of the other stories I liked were "The Heart of a Man" and "The Portrayed Man." The former is a story done in a kind of social realism style, and it could be classified as historical fiction in that it's set in the Stalin-era Soviet Union (for that reason alone I found it of interest). However, as the story goes on it becomes increasingly strange. The latter story involves a company that lets lazy human beings hire identical twins of themselves (in the story identified as "actors") to deal with the tedious task of living for them. It reminded me of that old Calvin & Hobbes storyline where Calvin used one of his devices to create identical twins of himself so they could go to school for him and he could just stay home and goof off. Oddly enough I felt this story had a kind of Mark Samuels-type vibe in a way I find hard to pinpoint (perhaps because it deals with a sinister corporation).
Two stories that completely went over my head were "The Stars and Yellow Doubt" and "Defence/Prosecution." I really had no idea what Justin was trying to say with those two. The latter I found more rewarding: it starts off in a very bizarre manner involving something to do with lights before turning into a Q&A session in which a mentally disturbed (?) woman is being interviewed, but I don't see how the two sections connect. The former story has me completely baffled, and I'm not even sure how to describe it... even though I only read it two days ago I've already forgotten much of it, mainly because it seems there's almost nothing to latch onto (kind of like how I feel about some of Samuel Beckett's fiction). I'd be very curious as to what other readers of this book would make of these stories, or how they would interpret them.
Finally, I would just like to add that I found the story "M-FUNK VS THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY" was totally hilarious: I especially enjoyed its all-out attack on the status society gives me to so-called "authentic" and "sincere" music, especially of the kind related to that most overrated of instruments, the acoustic guitar (though I'll make exceptions when it comes to Suzanne Vega and Current 93). Though I don't think that M-FUNK would like me: I love 4AD (though I can't say I'm a fan of the Red House Painters) and have an unironic appreciation of Keane (something my British friends always give me grief about). Liked the reference to the old Konami cheat code in this one.
I found the title story very imaginative, really loved the idea of the biochurches and religious types growing giant versions of their own bodies so they can explore their own "interior mansions" (to use the phraseology of St. Teresa of Avila). Some interesting portmanteau words: I especially liked "Rhizosigil." I've found that when a lot of writers write about the future they often fall into one of two traps, in that they either set it in a utopia or a dystopia. With the title story here I feel the tone is neutral, in that while there's a lot of darkness in this futuristic world there's also a lot of very interesting stuff going on as well. Essentially "Welcome to the Arms Race" is a good example of information overload, and has more ideas squeezed into its 76 pages than I've seen in some entire novels.
The second story ("Some Notes on the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm") is written in an almost entirely different tone of voice from the first: whereas the first story has kind of a brash experimental cyberpunk-ish vibe, this one has more of a dry academic air which reminds me a bit of Borges (maybe its the use of footnotes that makes me think of it as academic). I liked the premise, the idea of an "artwork that could trigger suicidal ideation," and the overall impression I got of the story was that it could almost function as a sort of cerebral Creepypasta article for intellectuals. I'm not entirely sure I "got" it, and the ending went over my head, but I did like this poetic description of a sunset: "a thread of fire stitched between two night-blue eternities."
I think one of my favorite stories in this book was "The Plot," which at only 13 pages is the shortest story in the book. It depicts a futuristic scenario in which most novels are being written by computers (or AI-thors), and how a human writer deals with the idea that he has become obsolete. In this story there are programs in which human beings can feed a plot germ into the computer and the computer in turn will turn it into a full book. I hate to say this but there are times in which I wish I had one of these. It reminds me of something that Ligotti said in an interview once: “To me the actual task of writing is a real pain in the ass. I've fantasized about just imagining the characters and incidents of a story and having it appear in written form before my eyes. I know that there are plenty of writers who genuinely enjoy the nuts and bolts of the literary process. I'm not one of them."
Another interesting story is "The Willow," the title of which instantly evokes in one's mind that of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" (well, in my mind, anyway). Fittingly enough, it's the closest thing the collection has to a horror/Weird Fiction story (there's something vaguely Lovecraftian about its presentation as well, in that it's in the form of a letter in which the writer recounts a strange experience from his life). Only in some ways it inverts the classical Weird Fiction formula, in that the source of horror isn't something otherworldly, but instead something that is quite mundane and familiar... to us, at least. Though maybe I'm misinterpreting it!
A few of the other stories I liked were "The Heart of a Man" and "The Portrayed Man." The former is a story done in a kind of social realism style, and it could be classified as historical fiction in that it's set in the Stalin-era Soviet Union (for that reason alone I found it of interest). However, as the story goes on it becomes increasingly strange. The latter story involves a company that lets lazy human beings hire identical twins of themselves (in the story identified as "actors") to deal with the tedious task of living for them. It reminded me of that old Calvin & Hobbes storyline where Calvin used one of his devices to create identical twins of himself so they could go to school for him and he could just stay home and goof off. Oddly enough I felt this story had a kind of Mark Samuels-type vibe in a way I find hard to pinpoint (perhaps because it deals with a sinister corporation).
Two stories that completely went over my head were "The Stars and Yellow Doubt" and "Defence/Prosecution." I really had no idea what Justin was trying to say with those two. The latter I found more rewarding: it starts off in a very bizarre manner involving something to do with lights before turning into a Q&A session in which a mentally disturbed (?) woman is being interviewed, but I don't see how the two sections connect. The former story has me completely baffled, and I'm not even sure how to describe it... even though I only read it two days ago I've already forgotten much of it, mainly because it seems there's almost nothing to latch onto (kind of like how I feel about some of Samuel Beckett's fiction). I'd be very curious as to what other readers of this book would make of these stories, or how they would interpret them.
Finally, I would just like to add that I found the story "M-FUNK VS THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY" was totally hilarious: I especially enjoyed its all-out attack on the status society gives me to so-called "authentic" and "sincere" music, especially of the kind related to that most overrated of instruments, the acoustic guitar (though I'll make exceptions when it comes to Suzanne Vega and Current 93). Though I don't think that M-FUNK would like me: I love 4AD (though I can't say I'm a fan of the Red House Painters) and have an unironic appreciation of Keane (something my British friends always give me grief about). Liked the reference to the old Konami cheat code in this one.
June 19, 2022
This is a collection of very odd science-fiction short stories most of whom break almost every conceivable rule of both sexual morality and storytelling convention accepted in the genre today. The overall reading experience is halfways between what I imagine reading Burning Chrome by William Gibson must have been like back in the mid 1980's before Gibson's innovations became worn out clichés, and latter period William S Burroughs. Credit should go to the author Justin Isis for writing something as "out there" by today's standards as WSB did by those of the 1950's and 1960's, or Gibson did by the standards of the 1980's, which is no small achievement.
One of the main similarities to Wm. Gibson is Isis' gift for describing the physical settings of his fictional universes and inner lives of the characters in a poetic and beautiful way that's unusual for dystopian SF without making those passages feel out of place. That is certainly how I got "hooked" on the titular short story which opens the collection. Both authors also have a similar "throw readers headfirst into a strange unfamiliar universe with little exposition" writing style.
"Welcome to the Arms Race" impresses me in how varied the stories are as well. Another similarity with "Burning Chrome" where it surprised me how little most of the content fit into the cyberpunk clichés codified by Gibson's imitators. "Some Notes of the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm" is a horror story told through fictional news articles about an avantgarde artist whose audience and associates inevitably end up committing suicide, "M-FUNK VS THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY" a truly delirious space opera featuring characters from various song lyrics (eg Parliament-Funkadelic's "Dr. Funkenstein") and representing conflicting trends in popular music, "The Stars and Yellow Doubt" an Erich von Däniken/Zechariah Sitchin type ancient astronauts story told from the viewpoint of the sufficiently advanced aliens. A couple stories here fit into the category of metafictional magical realism where literature that is fictional in-universe ends up warping reality, a la John Carpenter's film "In the Mouth of Madness": "Brent Beckford vs Writing" which applies this to Robert Heinlein style US pulp science-fiction with very grisly results, I guess this story fulfils a similar place here as "The Gernsback Continuum" did in "Burning Chrome" in overall theme; "The Heart of a Man" set in the Soviet Union and riffs on the evolution of Soviet-era Eastern European literature, complete with a cameo from Mikhail Bulgakov. The most conventional story here is probably "The Willow", a satirical post-apocalyptic story that I can easily imagine being run in a 1950's/1960's pulp SF magazine.
So, there is something for everyone here at least as fans of unconventional contemporary fiction in general are concerned, not just science-fiction/fantasy fans who want something different. "Welcome to the Arms Race" is often shocking and confusing, not always easy to understand, but never boring and among the very few works of genuinely inventive fantastic literature I've read from Western authors in recent years.
I should add that as of 2022 this book is currently out-of-print as a result of the publisher Chômu Press closing earlier this year, I hope that another micropress will reprint "Arms Race" in the near future. (probably the author's current home Snuggly Books)
One of the main similarities to Wm. Gibson is Isis' gift for describing the physical settings of his fictional universes and inner lives of the characters in a poetic and beautiful way that's unusual for dystopian SF without making those passages feel out of place. That is certainly how I got "hooked" on the titular short story which opens the collection. Both authors also have a similar "throw readers headfirst into a strange unfamiliar universe with little exposition" writing style.
"Welcome to the Arms Race" impresses me in how varied the stories are as well. Another similarity with "Burning Chrome" where it surprised me how little most of the content fit into the cyberpunk clichés codified by Gibson's imitators. "Some Notes of the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm" is a horror story told through fictional news articles about an avantgarde artist whose audience and associates inevitably end up committing suicide, "M-FUNK VS THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY" a truly delirious space opera featuring characters from various song lyrics (eg Parliament-Funkadelic's "Dr. Funkenstein") and representing conflicting trends in popular music, "The Stars and Yellow Doubt" an Erich von Däniken/Zechariah Sitchin type ancient astronauts story told from the viewpoint of the sufficiently advanced aliens. A couple stories here fit into the category of metafictional magical realism where literature that is fictional in-universe ends up warping reality, a la John Carpenter's film "In the Mouth of Madness": "Brent Beckford vs Writing" which applies this to Robert Heinlein style US pulp science-fiction with very grisly results, I guess this story fulfils a similar place here as "The Gernsback Continuum" did in "Burning Chrome" in overall theme; "The Heart of a Man" set in the Soviet Union and riffs on the evolution of Soviet-era Eastern European literature, complete with a cameo from Mikhail Bulgakov. The most conventional story here is probably "The Willow", a satirical post-apocalyptic story that I can easily imagine being run in a 1950's/1960's pulp SF magazine.
So, there is something for everyone here at least as fans of unconventional contemporary fiction in general are concerned, not just science-fiction/fantasy fans who want something different. "Welcome to the Arms Race" is often shocking and confusing, not always easy to understand, but never boring and among the very few works of genuinely inventive fantastic literature I've read from Western authors in recent years.
I should add that as of 2022 this book is currently out-of-print as a result of the publisher Chômu Press closing earlier this year, I hope that another micropress will reprint "Arms Race" in the near future. (probably the author's current home Snuggly Books)
December 12, 2015
In Welcome to the Arms Race, Justin Isis, as usual, dazzles with his rendition of shattered reality where deeply damaged characters kick up their heels as they revel in their self-inflicted agonies. There’s just no letting up—from depravity involving a squid to the relentless mirroring of our deep-seated anxieties in ‘The Heart of a Man,’ from cosmic horror in ‘The Willow’ to the tortuous psychedelia in ‘M-FUNK VS THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY.’ Another terrific collection of stories from Chômu Press.
August 21, 2021
M-FUNK VS THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY may be my new favorite short story of all time. The other stories are pretty great, too. If Neo-Decadence ever enters the mainstream, I reckon Justin Isis will be getting some awards.
August 20, 2016
GIVE THIS MOTHERFUCKER A HUGO PRONTO.
August 9, 2022
Justin Isis , the only non-derivative heir to the New Wave of Sci-fi, early Vertigo- Morrison and Faction Paradox sci-occult mindscape voyages. THE ARMS RACE IS HERE!!!
May 8, 2022
I read this after reading Justin's first collection, I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like. It's different. Very much so. But that's not a bad thing. What struck me first is how prescient these stories are. First, they're decidedly sci-fi but not Battlestar Galactica sci-fi. Think more along the lines of a movie like I Origins or something like that. AI, genetics, cancel culture, oppressive governments, changing cultural norms. This was published in 2015 and the last 7 years have seen an acceleration in all these things, to the point where they're commonplace to talk about and mention and think about. Justin was on it years ago. These stories, I'd say, are more accomplished than those of his first, which isn't a negative at all in regards to Human Flesh. The first collection was ace and this is better, though it may be a little less satisfying because there are no neat endings, no comprehensive resolutions...but I think that's the point. There are no quick and easy resolutions to things, usually. Especially big things like these. But we do see where they're going, or at least could go. It's up to us what happens, which is what I think these stories are telling us: we control our destinies, so...what do you want? All of these stories haunt you with that question.
September 10, 2024
Takes seriously the vertiginous and uncanny experiences engendered by transhumanism, at the level of physiology, psychology, and philosophy. Imagine body dysmorphia at the level of infrastructure and architecture. Cognition trapped by its own enfolding across infinitely increasing orders of chaos. Wyrd horrors that drag the dialectic kicking and screaming into metaphysical effacement. All that is solid melts like so many bodies dismantled by memetic viruses, signifiers circulated around the void of capital. As Blindsight puts it, capitalism rewards sociopathy, pushing human evolution towards antisociality; here, we're shown its frontiers as
terror, terror built into the system
.
—
*I viscerally hate the story "M-FUNK" and recommend avoiding it until you've read the rest of the collection. It's quite tonally inconsistent with the other stories, and wears out it's welcome quickly, but it's amusing enough as a closer.
—
*I viscerally hate the story "M-FUNK" and recommend avoiding it until you've read the rest of the collection. It's quite tonally inconsistent with the other stories, and wears out it's welcome quickly, but it's amusing enough as a closer.
October 7, 2021
It's almost frustrating how adept Justin Isis is at working in different styles. Here we have a literary mixtape that dips and dives between slipstream sci-fi set on the streets of Perth, P-funk mythology reimagined as picaresque space opera, near-total verbal abstraction, Soviet paranoid irrealism, a modernised spin on one of the great Weird tales (I'll leave you to figure out which one), and more. Motifs of doubles and soul-destroying technology weave in and out of these narratives and through it all Isis holds us captive with a genuine mastery of language and style. Well worth your time and more proof that the Neo-Decadents are writing some of the most exciting fiction today.
August 12, 2016
I like the vibrant fuchsia of the cover with the simply centred, majuscule title, fractured to suit meaning – Welcome to the Arms Race - and the simplicity of title and author – Justin Isis - on the spine. I’m less sure of the pneumatic blonde, reminiscent of a girl I’ve met, in full armature on the back cover with what looks like a plugged-in iron on metallic stilts and another jewelled weapon but I like that the weight of the design’s on the back. Nimit Malavia’s the artist.
The publisher primes us to like the book by two quotations, one by Jeremy Reed on its predecessor, the other by Mark Samuels on the author himself. What I liked about Justin was after my critical analysis of his writing in his last book and beyond I read something else by him that completely undermined it. I laughed in delight at his development. That might qualify him as the genius Mark is not afraid to repeat he is, that is as possessing an exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability or tendency.
The book title’s taken from that of the first story. The spelling’s inconsistent, neither British like the publisher, Chômu, nor American, possibly Australian since the story’s set there but probably from indifference. It’s inventive, imaginative, easy to read and amusing, with junkies licking walls. The characters are pretty well junkies themselves having engineered the drug they’re taking and feeding to a squid they subsequently eat on specious reasoning. The drug-taking involves sex, equating sperm with life as more demonstrably so than a receptive ovum I suspect though a grabbing gesture is made toward the latter. I had to wonder if they were up to engineering this drug but the protagonist is reflective enough to make that he is acceptable. The dialogue’s plausible. I had no idea what the abbreviation VB stood for but settled for vodka bottle and passed on but not out. The protagonist and his companions are skilfully described physically in relation to a meeting with alterpeople, corporate-made synthetics that make him feel inferior. Being superior they are not interested in the drug, already enabled to do what it induces. He’s disappointed when they leave but ‘he didn’t blame them either’, an expression I find interesting, unless all he means is they wouldn’t find him interesting enough to stay, because why think in terms of blame? It’s a past tense narrative but not free indirect style because only the protagonist’s thoughts are indicated and without any separation from the writer’s to let the reader think differently.
The narration becomes increasingly funny as I chortled along, first at his designed T-shirt. He keeps in touch with texts, a whole virtually real world of banality is being created in quotes and lists, which I did read, looking for purpose, coherence over and above etc and, having finally found out who Ryan Gosling is, was interested in why he should be of significance to people but all I got was the word, ‘Ryan’, twice. The Reagan quote made me chuckle.
Now, an alterperson refers to his sculptures I wasn’t aware of, and he says it’s mostly those two, making me think his friends were sculpted, but he goes on that he’s only the technician, so it may mean his friends did the basic sculpting. At any rate, I reverted to taking them as human.
He admits the drug-taking provides experience only, no communication is taking place. He tells a story from his life I found funny to explain how he got the idea though it doesn’t. I’ve no idea what the drug called bud might be but the ritual is enough like chasing the dragon or smoking crack for me simply to accept it’s something such and press on. He naturally has difficulty following what the synthetic’s saying and – I had to exclaim at this, with an ! in the margin – offers her the specifications for making the new drug he’d come up with. He is not of the brightest.
I chuckled at, ‘Well there you go,’ mistakenly taking it as our hero’s line, though subsequently realising it’s not.
Why do heterosexuals adopt the worst from lowlife homos? It’s ‘come’! as is evident from the meaning of the word. ‘Cum’ means with. The vulgarity is, however, excusable in the context.
Our hero is finding the artificial more beautiful and more useless than the natural. It’s pointed out to him he doesn’t want to help humanity and puts effort into doing what’s pointless. On that basis, and to my amusement, a synthetic explains he’s been designed to sharpen hatred among humans by means of built-in empathy, and to my even greater amusement wants to know what our hapless hero thinks. Thinks? This guy is a druggie and even in thoughtful repose has a drink to hand if not already in it. Gets out of bed, sees a bottle of vodka on the table and decides to keep on drinking. He smokes too. A synthetic over the ether taunts the human race there’s nothing it can do to stop him. Our hero’s death obsession is raised lightly and amusingly. He’s disgusted with those in favour of death overcoming civilisation’s morals but not its aesthetic conventions. Isis springs to mind. Also that it applies to him, who’s akin to a lapsed catholic who can’t rid himself of the upbringing.
My own bias must be in favour of life because I took it at first it was his grubby female friend people were taking as real and not the synthetic he was meeting. I was reminded of, as a child, watching a young woman acting as if she were attractive and men being attracted, an illusion I went on to wonder how long sustainable before reality kicked in.
He has a passage on god, presuming there is one and that he’s a creator, that’s well integrated but like the story carries the whiff of being put in because the writer wants it included somehow.
He takes the drug with the synthetic and experiences an encyclopaedic dribble that doesn’t cohere and gives him a headache. She gets more out of it than he does. The deepest part of the writing ensues as if he realises there’s more than consciousness but such is its conceit of self - he goes all Platonic at this point – he can’t get beyond it, unsurprisingly considering his hedonistic proclivities. No wonder despair lurks. If it’s any consolation, without the drugs and drink he’d still get nowhere. Because he can’t, the narrative falters a little. The conclusion is surprising and good, just a little too consciously put on. It doesn’t satisfactorily explain why he’s important to the synths.
The story affected my unconscious. I dreamt a power plant was belching out bleach and ammonia into the air and the authorities were doing nothing about it because only humans would die; it suited the aliens. There was human resistance, personified by a man and a woman, guns slung from the shoulder, who were at odds. I liked her room underground I shouldn’t be in, her clutter piled comfortably against the walls with a clear central passage. Coming out the way I went in, I dropped money I didn’t want to leave behind so was hurriedly picking up when surprised. She was bantering: possession was nine-tenths of the law and since he’d caught her, she’d go along with what he wanted. They’d better hurry up before we all die but, despite the odds, the humans would win, call me a facile optimist if you will.
I’ve read the second story, Some Notes on the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm, before. It’s probably the one put paid to my critical analysis of Justin’s oeuvre based on earlier stories. It has an intrinsic rationale for use of the third person past as a quasi-academic treatment, with scholarly footnotes, of the purported effects of the artefact on people’s lives, a clue given in the sixth footnote, though the effects vary. Although a name was mentioned in a footnote, because not previously in the text, I misinterpreted it initially as that of an investigating detective and not a journalist. The style reminded me of Quentin S Crisp’s.
I have cavils: how the writer came into possession of a doctor’s confidential file on another character and perhaps also of the artist’s journal. Though the latter how is readily deducible, I’m not sure an explanation should be supplied if the writer didn’t give one for the former. The artist’s motive for his work is given towards the end of the story and the assumption has to be he achieved this. I doubt it because that is not how one acquires consciousness of, say, a future time and the acquisition depends on much more than consciousness itself, but I do like the story. Who wouldn’t want to make an artefact that altered people’s lives for good - or ill?
I’ve also read the third story, probably twice, in Dadaoism. I lived by Queen’s Park and Glasgow was lacking in funk, clouds obscuring the sun, a depressed people two shots of whisky below par, the men dancing with one foot nailed to the floorboards while I danced ‘can’t get no satisfaction’ as Betty went off to get what little satisfaction was to be got from Tom Wright who had the shakes. So far, so realistic but no amount of funkiness can excuse the misspelling of ‘descendant’. Not even Americans do that. There was a lot of bowling on greens all over Scotland, not just Glasgow. I appreciate the reference to Christo (de Wet) while puzzled since the relationship didn’t stretch to Queen’s Park, a small error on the part of the author. Bigger is his excoriation of Bulgarian folk music as antifunk. I deny that, on the basis of personal experience. I walked into a vast proletarian restaurant in Sofia to the sound of a band which inspired me to dance ever faster in friendly competition with the accordionist, challenging him to keep up. The audience – I mean eaters – went wild and as I passed through the throng I was pulled by the most beautiful Bulgar, Peter, by being pulled onto his lap. They are not called Bulgars for nothing. I can vouch for their utter funkiness. The author is committing a most calumnious libel of these highly funked people. He is, however, amusing in his definition of anti-funk, which may have affected me: I too have imbibed at the Turk’s Head where Dennis Waterman thought of chancing his ...arm and I thought to him or picked up his self-reflection, ‘You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for,’ at which he desisted. The author’s postulation of telepathising by machine is quite unrealistic. Think about it: the machine would simply be another and indirect consciousness for the unconscious to slow down to in order to communicate through whereas by bypassing consciousness and communicating one unconscious to another the communication can be infinitely fast and thus slow time to a stop, useful when you want to impress a psychopath for example. Oh, and there’s that vulgar misspelling of ‘come’ again to try me and excuse on the basis of context. This story is another attempt by the author to dominate through art but specious, since the story ends with an order to do what one inevitably would be doing and another to which the only answer has to be no – I don’t take orders, except in sex as I’ve discovered, if I’m able to comply that is – and was about to watch tele.
Another misspelling was so solecistically bad, it couldn’t but be deliberate, part of the 18th century patina of the author’s prose on antifunk as personified by Boswell whose Life I have read but entirely forgotten except for recognising several of this author’s sciolistic allusions to quotations one of which I was impelled to look up in my dictionary of quotations, faster than you can say google, and which was from Edwards, quoted by Boswell in the Life.
The next story was verbal froth liquefying in my hand and draining through interstices. I grasped nothing but a subliming wetness. The fanciful rationale of the story in the author’s mind was insufficiently disclosed. I pencilled beside this: ‘Msa and Ama moved through each other, their souls and attitudes biting, tasting, resonant in argument,’ as an inkling of what that rationale might be. If they moved through each other, they’re noncorporeal entities if they can demerge. They’re living, which is what the designation ‘soul’ means. And if they also have attitudes as well, it isn’t the attitudes of their souls but of their characters or minds perhaps. Both souls and characteristic or individual mental attitudes figuratively bite and taste, since being non-corporeal they can’t physically. It would have to be souls that resonate, souls considered as entities in themselves like the skin of drums or as a bowl shape of the soul at the back of the mind. The only other passage I pencilled was ‘half-consumed heroine of an endlessly delayed wedding,’ which reminded me of Miss Havisham and her cake.
The Heart of a Man was a relief, a conventional third person past narrative without any rationale, that made me laugh at the ‘innovations in terrible prose’, ‘a bourgeois dog, of course, good with children and all that’, ‘he might have written a heretical tract just to risk being burnt at the stake’ and ‘Kolesnikov remembered that this character had been particularly unconvincing.’ Kolesnikov finds him supremely unpleasant in reality, an encounter which preceded my heart’s sinking – more an ‘oh, oh’ – at the mention of dialectic immaterialism, at which the story turned, from one fiction to another inverted one that involved a room like a tardis.
I liked Brent Beckford vs Writing, about ‘people’ determined by writing. I am myself writing this with Jim Smyllie ever in mind. It reminded me of Denise, a colleague when I was supply teaching and who’d just answered a call confirming a job in Brussels. I waited behind to tell her not to go, she’d die in a fire there. I was expecting disbelief but was surprised by her acceptance of her fate. The word fate isn’t mentioned in Justin’s story. When I came to include the story of Denise in a book I was writing, I stopped and went out, coming across Joan, another colleague back then, on the pavement opposite the top of my street. “Have you heard about Denise?” she asked, “She died in a fire in Brussels.” I went back and finished the story.
I liked The Portrayed Man more. In British English paralysed is never spelt with a z. The last line is less portentous than that of the previous story and horrible.
The Willow is a nice conceit. In the last story sentences didn’t make sense so I went for the sound until I came upon the proclivity of the writer for bad puns if that’s what having two ‘characters’ whose names together make another. There’s nothing inadvertent about this writer’s incorrect use of words. The story is called Defence/Prosecution. The prosecution is of a woman’s treatment for a post-partum psychosis, the defence of which is that it’s an effect of dark matter, if the story isn’t simply two welded together. I stumbled at a disparity in time. When time stops it stops throughout the universe. The story also seems inconclusive. The first story, which affected my unconscious, is the best. That’s the sign of a good writer, one whose unconscious uses the cursor of his consciousness to reach through the cursor of the reader’s to unconscious effect, to engage the whole person with his art.
There’s a publishing history, acknowledgments and the publisher’s recommendations for further reading. The reference to Jim Smyllie was a total irrelevance I don’t want you worrying about.
The publisher primes us to like the book by two quotations, one by Jeremy Reed on its predecessor, the other by Mark Samuels on the author himself. What I liked about Justin was after my critical analysis of his writing in his last book and beyond I read something else by him that completely undermined it. I laughed in delight at his development. That might qualify him as the genius Mark is not afraid to repeat he is, that is as possessing an exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability or tendency.
The book title’s taken from that of the first story. The spelling’s inconsistent, neither British like the publisher, Chômu, nor American, possibly Australian since the story’s set there but probably from indifference. It’s inventive, imaginative, easy to read and amusing, with junkies licking walls. The characters are pretty well junkies themselves having engineered the drug they’re taking and feeding to a squid they subsequently eat on specious reasoning. The drug-taking involves sex, equating sperm with life as more demonstrably so than a receptive ovum I suspect though a grabbing gesture is made toward the latter. I had to wonder if they were up to engineering this drug but the protagonist is reflective enough to make that he is acceptable. The dialogue’s plausible. I had no idea what the abbreviation VB stood for but settled for vodka bottle and passed on but not out. The protagonist and his companions are skilfully described physically in relation to a meeting with alterpeople, corporate-made synthetics that make him feel inferior. Being superior they are not interested in the drug, already enabled to do what it induces. He’s disappointed when they leave but ‘he didn’t blame them either’, an expression I find interesting, unless all he means is they wouldn’t find him interesting enough to stay, because why think in terms of blame? It’s a past tense narrative but not free indirect style because only the protagonist’s thoughts are indicated and without any separation from the writer’s to let the reader think differently.
The narration becomes increasingly funny as I chortled along, first at his designed T-shirt. He keeps in touch with texts, a whole virtually real world of banality is being created in quotes and lists, which I did read, looking for purpose, coherence over and above etc and, having finally found out who Ryan Gosling is, was interested in why he should be of significance to people but all I got was the word, ‘Ryan’, twice. The Reagan quote made me chuckle.
Now, an alterperson refers to his sculptures I wasn’t aware of, and he says it’s mostly those two, making me think his friends were sculpted, but he goes on that he’s only the technician, so it may mean his friends did the basic sculpting. At any rate, I reverted to taking them as human.
He admits the drug-taking provides experience only, no communication is taking place. He tells a story from his life I found funny to explain how he got the idea though it doesn’t. I’ve no idea what the drug called bud might be but the ritual is enough like chasing the dragon or smoking crack for me simply to accept it’s something such and press on. He naturally has difficulty following what the synthetic’s saying and – I had to exclaim at this, with an ! in the margin – offers her the specifications for making the new drug he’d come up with. He is not of the brightest.
I chuckled at, ‘Well there you go,’ mistakenly taking it as our hero’s line, though subsequently realising it’s not.
Why do heterosexuals adopt the worst from lowlife homos? It’s ‘come’! as is evident from the meaning of the word. ‘Cum’ means with. The vulgarity is, however, excusable in the context.
Our hero is finding the artificial more beautiful and more useless than the natural. It’s pointed out to him he doesn’t want to help humanity and puts effort into doing what’s pointless. On that basis, and to my amusement, a synthetic explains he’s been designed to sharpen hatred among humans by means of built-in empathy, and to my even greater amusement wants to know what our hapless hero thinks. Thinks? This guy is a druggie and even in thoughtful repose has a drink to hand if not already in it. Gets out of bed, sees a bottle of vodka on the table and decides to keep on drinking. He smokes too. A synthetic over the ether taunts the human race there’s nothing it can do to stop him. Our hero’s death obsession is raised lightly and amusingly. He’s disgusted with those in favour of death overcoming civilisation’s morals but not its aesthetic conventions. Isis springs to mind. Also that it applies to him, who’s akin to a lapsed catholic who can’t rid himself of the upbringing.
My own bias must be in favour of life because I took it at first it was his grubby female friend people were taking as real and not the synthetic he was meeting. I was reminded of, as a child, watching a young woman acting as if she were attractive and men being attracted, an illusion I went on to wonder how long sustainable before reality kicked in.
He has a passage on god, presuming there is one and that he’s a creator, that’s well integrated but like the story carries the whiff of being put in because the writer wants it included somehow.
He takes the drug with the synthetic and experiences an encyclopaedic dribble that doesn’t cohere and gives him a headache. She gets more out of it than he does. The deepest part of the writing ensues as if he realises there’s more than consciousness but such is its conceit of self - he goes all Platonic at this point – he can’t get beyond it, unsurprisingly considering his hedonistic proclivities. No wonder despair lurks. If it’s any consolation, without the drugs and drink he’d still get nowhere. Because he can’t, the narrative falters a little. The conclusion is surprising and good, just a little too consciously put on. It doesn’t satisfactorily explain why he’s important to the synths.
The story affected my unconscious. I dreamt a power plant was belching out bleach and ammonia into the air and the authorities were doing nothing about it because only humans would die; it suited the aliens. There was human resistance, personified by a man and a woman, guns slung from the shoulder, who were at odds. I liked her room underground I shouldn’t be in, her clutter piled comfortably against the walls with a clear central passage. Coming out the way I went in, I dropped money I didn’t want to leave behind so was hurriedly picking up when surprised. She was bantering: possession was nine-tenths of the law and since he’d caught her, she’d go along with what he wanted. They’d better hurry up before we all die but, despite the odds, the humans would win, call me a facile optimist if you will.
I’ve read the second story, Some Notes on the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm, before. It’s probably the one put paid to my critical analysis of Justin’s oeuvre based on earlier stories. It has an intrinsic rationale for use of the third person past as a quasi-academic treatment, with scholarly footnotes, of the purported effects of the artefact on people’s lives, a clue given in the sixth footnote, though the effects vary. Although a name was mentioned in a footnote, because not previously in the text, I misinterpreted it initially as that of an investigating detective and not a journalist. The style reminded me of Quentin S Crisp’s.
I have cavils: how the writer came into possession of a doctor’s confidential file on another character and perhaps also of the artist’s journal. Though the latter how is readily deducible, I’m not sure an explanation should be supplied if the writer didn’t give one for the former. The artist’s motive for his work is given towards the end of the story and the assumption has to be he achieved this. I doubt it because that is not how one acquires consciousness of, say, a future time and the acquisition depends on much more than consciousness itself, but I do like the story. Who wouldn’t want to make an artefact that altered people’s lives for good - or ill?
I’ve also read the third story, probably twice, in Dadaoism. I lived by Queen’s Park and Glasgow was lacking in funk, clouds obscuring the sun, a depressed people two shots of whisky below par, the men dancing with one foot nailed to the floorboards while I danced ‘can’t get no satisfaction’ as Betty went off to get what little satisfaction was to be got from Tom Wright who had the shakes. So far, so realistic but no amount of funkiness can excuse the misspelling of ‘descendant’. Not even Americans do that. There was a lot of bowling on greens all over Scotland, not just Glasgow. I appreciate the reference to Christo (de Wet) while puzzled since the relationship didn’t stretch to Queen’s Park, a small error on the part of the author. Bigger is his excoriation of Bulgarian folk music as antifunk. I deny that, on the basis of personal experience. I walked into a vast proletarian restaurant in Sofia to the sound of a band which inspired me to dance ever faster in friendly competition with the accordionist, challenging him to keep up. The audience – I mean eaters – went wild and as I passed through the throng I was pulled by the most beautiful Bulgar, Peter, by being pulled onto his lap. They are not called Bulgars for nothing. I can vouch for their utter funkiness. The author is committing a most calumnious libel of these highly funked people. He is, however, amusing in his definition of anti-funk, which may have affected me: I too have imbibed at the Turk’s Head where Dennis Waterman thought of chancing his ...arm and I thought to him or picked up his self-reflection, ‘You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for,’ at which he desisted. The author’s postulation of telepathising by machine is quite unrealistic. Think about it: the machine would simply be another and indirect consciousness for the unconscious to slow down to in order to communicate through whereas by bypassing consciousness and communicating one unconscious to another the communication can be infinitely fast and thus slow time to a stop, useful when you want to impress a psychopath for example. Oh, and there’s that vulgar misspelling of ‘come’ again to try me and excuse on the basis of context. This story is another attempt by the author to dominate through art but specious, since the story ends with an order to do what one inevitably would be doing and another to which the only answer has to be no – I don’t take orders, except in sex as I’ve discovered, if I’m able to comply that is – and was about to watch tele.
Another misspelling was so solecistically bad, it couldn’t but be deliberate, part of the 18th century patina of the author’s prose on antifunk as personified by Boswell whose Life I have read but entirely forgotten except for recognising several of this author’s sciolistic allusions to quotations one of which I was impelled to look up in my dictionary of quotations, faster than you can say google, and which was from Edwards, quoted by Boswell in the Life.
The next story was verbal froth liquefying in my hand and draining through interstices. I grasped nothing but a subliming wetness. The fanciful rationale of the story in the author’s mind was insufficiently disclosed. I pencilled beside this: ‘Msa and Ama moved through each other, their souls and attitudes biting, tasting, resonant in argument,’ as an inkling of what that rationale might be. If they moved through each other, they’re noncorporeal entities if they can demerge. They’re living, which is what the designation ‘soul’ means. And if they also have attitudes as well, it isn’t the attitudes of their souls but of their characters or minds perhaps. Both souls and characteristic or individual mental attitudes figuratively bite and taste, since being non-corporeal they can’t physically. It would have to be souls that resonate, souls considered as entities in themselves like the skin of drums or as a bowl shape of the soul at the back of the mind. The only other passage I pencilled was ‘half-consumed heroine of an endlessly delayed wedding,’ which reminded me of Miss Havisham and her cake.
The Heart of a Man was a relief, a conventional third person past narrative without any rationale, that made me laugh at the ‘innovations in terrible prose’, ‘a bourgeois dog, of course, good with children and all that’, ‘he might have written a heretical tract just to risk being burnt at the stake’ and ‘Kolesnikov remembered that this character had been particularly unconvincing.’ Kolesnikov finds him supremely unpleasant in reality, an encounter which preceded my heart’s sinking – more an ‘oh, oh’ – at the mention of dialectic immaterialism, at which the story turned, from one fiction to another inverted one that involved a room like a tardis.
I liked Brent Beckford vs Writing, about ‘people’ determined by writing. I am myself writing this with Jim Smyllie ever in mind. It reminded me of Denise, a colleague when I was supply teaching and who’d just answered a call confirming a job in Brussels. I waited behind to tell her not to go, she’d die in a fire there. I was expecting disbelief but was surprised by her acceptance of her fate. The word fate isn’t mentioned in Justin’s story. When I came to include the story of Denise in a book I was writing, I stopped and went out, coming across Joan, another colleague back then, on the pavement opposite the top of my street. “Have you heard about Denise?” she asked, “She died in a fire in Brussels.” I went back and finished the story.
I liked The Portrayed Man more. In British English paralysed is never spelt with a z. The last line is less portentous than that of the previous story and horrible.
The Willow is a nice conceit. In the last story sentences didn’t make sense so I went for the sound until I came upon the proclivity of the writer for bad puns if that’s what having two ‘characters’ whose names together make another. There’s nothing inadvertent about this writer’s incorrect use of words. The story is called Defence/Prosecution. The prosecution is of a woman’s treatment for a post-partum psychosis, the defence of which is that it’s an effect of dark matter, if the story isn’t simply two welded together. I stumbled at a disparity in time. When time stops it stops throughout the universe. The story also seems inconclusive. The first story, which affected my unconscious, is the best. That’s the sign of a good writer, one whose unconscious uses the cursor of his consciousness to reach through the cursor of the reader’s to unconscious effect, to engage the whole person with his art.
There’s a publishing history, acknowledgments and the publisher’s recommendations for further reading. The reference to Jim Smyllie was a total irrelevance I don’t want you worrying about.
October 22, 2021
A thought-provoking collection of slick, smart science fiction heavy with transhuman and cyberpunk themes with none of the pretension that comes with the standard "cyberpunk" fare. The author introduces the reader to worlds akin to Clarke and Asimov but with a firm grounding in our own human history and cultures.
May 8, 2022
Upon reading the author's previous collection, I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, I was left with the overwhelming thought that Justin Isis had created a new form of literature. My first thought upon finishing this book was "Wha... how... HE DID IT AGAIN!!!" To this day, I've never read anything like it.
Among (many) other things found in the book is a novella that, against all odds, combines the fevered communiques found on the inside of the classic P-Funk albums with a very complex and subtle parody of, and homage to, the tropes and motifs of the first new wave of science fiction. This is wielded with unaccountable deftness and makes for both pleasurable and fascinating reading. Every story in this book is different. Each one does something that I've never seen elsewhere. Each one is a like a rare and polished gem.
Needless to say, highly recommended.
Among (many) other things found in the book is a novella that, against all odds, combines the fevered communiques found on the inside of the classic P-Funk albums with a very complex and subtle parody of, and homage to, the tropes and motifs of the first new wave of science fiction. This is wielded with unaccountable deftness and makes for both pleasurable and fascinating reading. Every story in this book is different. Each one does something that I've never seen elsewhere. Each one is a like a rare and polished gem.
Needless to say, highly recommended.
October 31, 2024
CRAZY GOOD 🪼⋆｡𖦹°🫧⋆.ೃ࿔*:･( ꩜ ᯅ ꩜;)ദ്ദി ༎ຶ‿༎ຶ)‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡🪐༘⋆૮꒰ ྀི >⸝⸝⸝< ྀི꒱ა𓉸ྀི𐙚
January 24, 2021
This book needs assiduous confidence to fully assess its gestalt, and I am not yet sure I have managed it. But there are separate works within the book that will astonish the attuned reader one by one.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
July 18, 2016
First collection I've read my Mr. Isis and thoroughly enjoyable. Now to hunt down his previous collection!
February 5, 2023
A thought-provoking collection of slick, smart science fiction heavy with transhuman and cyberpunk themes with none of the pretension that comes with the standard "cyberpunk" fare. The author introduces the reader to worlds akin to Clarke and Asimov but with a firm grounding in our own human history and cultures.
dnf
February 7, 2022for initiates
June 13, 2016
- Welcome to the Arms Race: 2/5
- Some Notes on the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm: 5/5
- M-FUNK VA THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY: 1/5
- The Stars and Yellow Doubt: 1/5
- The Heart of a Man: 5/5
- Brent Beckford vs Writing: 5/5
- The Portrayed Man: 5/5
- The Plot: 5/5
- The Willow: 4/5
- Defense/Prosecution: 1/5
rating: 3,4/5
- Some Notes on the Artwork of Chris Wilhelm: 5/5
- M-FUNK VA THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY: 1/5
- The Stars and Yellow Doubt: 1/5
- The Heart of a Man: 5/5
- Brent Beckford vs Writing: 5/5
- The Portrayed Man: 5/5
- The Plot: 5/5
- The Willow: 4/5
- Defense/Prosecution: 1/5
rating: 3,4/5
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews