Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

A living form of money results in the unraveling of the world.

"The bank is there to save and lend."

"Workers work and customers spend."

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Weird Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, New Weird, Literature

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Michael Cisco is an American weird fiction writer, Deleuzian academic and a teacher, currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999.

He is interested in confusion.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Animal Money… Money suggests economics… But the modifier ‘animal’, suggestive of zoology, is bewildering…

Two squirrels facing each other in the grass of his lawn. One reaches inside its mouth and pulls out something deep blue, like a sequin, round and flat, and hands it to the other. The other squirrel receives this thing, puts it in its mouth, goes to one corner of the garden, digs up an acorn, returns to the first squirrel, removes the acorn from its jaws with its paws, places the acorn in the open paws of the first squirrel. The first squirrel then puts the acorn in its mouth and goes “arching away.”

So animal money is money animals use…
The novel is an absurdist dystopia modeled on the modern society. It works on many extravagant levels… The process of globalization runs unstoppably… Economists turn into an esoteric caste boasting their own rites and a vow of celibacy… 
In some fictional country the international economic conference is taking place… Five accidentally disabled economists come up with an idea of animal money… 
Supernatural beings are in evidence… Penanggalan – a flying female head lacking body but possessing the full set of innards – feeds on menstrual blood and embryos it rips out of wombs…

Assiyeh kneels by the head, examining it. She explains she’s been tracking it ever since the attack on the pregnant woman in the public toilet the other day. That’s what they do: eat foetuses, drawing them out of the womb with prehensile intestines.

Economists publish their concept of animal money… They all are fired from their respective universities… But they are all offered jobs right here in the capital… Enigmatic events start happening around them… They feel that they are watched and pursued… Now there is an obvious whiff of an absurdist mystery…
Occurrences turn more and more exotic… Dreams… Visions… Reality turns into virtuality… Irreality becomes actuality…
There is a great secret… In fact animal money isn’t money animals use… Animal money is alive and multiplying… Or is it just a hallucination?

Their animal money is gathering virulence. From these seed points, the living money begins to proliferate through treasuries of the world. The bison on one coin is fucking the eagle on the other, and the resulting eggs hatch into more living coins sporting Abyssinian centaurs and other chimeras, letters and numbers no one can read, denominations that rely on entirely different categorization schemes.

The desire to become omniscient results in going astray.

[Justin Zigenis · Rating 4 out of 5]

End money.

What did I just read? It can be read by taking notes, using sticky tabs to track plot lines, flipping back and forth to connect the dots, painstakingly trying to make sense of the surreal metaphors and asides—or you could read it like me: like watching a parade on an unknown planet, celebrating a holiday you’ve never heard of, eating something they call an elephant ear because not even they know what it is, and just enjoy the show.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

We discuss each paper, even the latter. In the criss--cross of our conversation the idea of animal money appears. None of us can account for it, none of us can take credit for it.

The idea silences us for a while, as we try to grasp it, each within ourselves. It really is only a chance coupling of two words, but they seem to call to each other. It is immediately obvious to us that animal money does not refer to the age-old practice of rating wealth in head of cattle or otherwise using livestock as money; there is something new in our minds.

As far as I can tell, Cisco is the best of all authors currently active in the long-form Weird Fiction / New Weird space.

And there are a ton of qualifiers and retractions and specifications that go along with that, most of them actually unimportant. But I will say that the general speculative scene has over the years become progressively less interesting and compelling to me, to the point that it receives little of my attention or passion, and that has been the case for at least a few years now. There are a few authors I still pay attention to, and Cisco is high on that list. Truthfully, only Reza Negarestani is higher, and he has still not followed up Cyclonopedia yet, so he might not actually count for these purposes.

And even with Cisco being high on the list I've still got his last three sitting unread on a shelf - this sounded too good to skip though, so I gave it a shot.

As the rating belies, I greatly enjoyed this, though I will say that I still feel The Narrator is his best work. He seems to have evolved a bit over the last few years - where in the past I felt his voice was only his own, at times here he sounds a bit like Miéville (via his earliest works or maybe Embassytown), Eco (via Foucault's Pendulum), and a bit like a less theory driven (not as versed in Deleuze, Guattari, Brassier) Negarestani - but the evolution suits the story he's trying to tell, so it's difficult to tell if he has a writer has changed or if he only adapted for the needs of the narrative. Even all that said, his voice is still firmly his own, just influenced.

At 780 pages this book felt a bit too long at times, but Cisco is doing a lot here, and covering a lot of ground - he's really telling at least four to five different narratives all wound together, so while there is some bloat : : and it's likely what put this behind the more crystalline The Narrator for me - what I've noted as bloat is surprisingly minimal for a book of this size.

All that said, I'm not sure who I would recommend this to outside of people who are already fans of Cisco. It is more difficult that mostly anything currently circulating in the Speculative space, but it's too Speculative (there are aspects of this particular book that make it more genre that anything he's done prior) to really push off on those who like dense literary experimentation (unless they also overlap into some Speculative tastes).

But it's good, and reinforces for me that Cisco is an author to continue to stay aware of (and hell, maybe I'll read those three I've got sitting at some point).

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

didnt reread this review but its probably bad so im gonna rewrite it when i eventually reread this book lol

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sort of like the surreal offspring of Julio Cortazar's THE WINNERS, Samuel R. Delany's THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION, and Renee Gladman's Ravicka novels. By which I mean that I enjoyed this a whole lot.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Threaded by confusion that compels you to wander until you ... reach the end. Lovely words, ideas mingle, brackishness throughout. So many things, so many of them amazing, so many confounding. Interpretation is critical and it is only yours. We are all economists of our own reality yet slaves to a tongue louse.

[David Wegehaupt · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far the craziest book I've ever read! What in the bizarro weird world just happened for 780 pages? Animal Money contains so many fantastic passages, and often has some wonderful narrative momentum. It's some of the most fun I've had reading in years. I also would be hard pressed to describe a plot to someone without sounding like a lunatic. There were chunks of the book where I had no idea what in the hell I was reading but decided to just go along, enjoy the ride, and not insist on clarity or anything being easy.

The book starts in a bizarre fictional future where a bunch of economists traveling to a conference all coincidentally(?) get (hilarious) head injuries. As they recover together, they find their recent work has common themes and the collaboratively develop a new, bizarre and fascinating economic system... and it gets them in a lot of trouble with the powers that be. The book becomes an adventure/conspiracy, with all sorts of powerful forces trying to suppress their treatise on Animal Money .... and it gets weirder as it goes, including aliens and space travel, extra dimensions, at least one dead ghost narrator, a heavy drinking journalist controlled by his louse-infested tongue, a giant spider who runs an island that appears from nowhere and communicates by people drinking her venom (or something), a scientist who may or may not be a fictional creation of other characters to distract from their economic theories that threaten to change the world as it is known, etc etc etc ... Also, one of my all-time favorite characters, SuperAesop. It's a helluva lot of fun and insanely imaginative. Half the time I just was wondering how Cisco's mind conjured this phantasmagorical adventure.

There was a while in the middle of this where I had to take a break for a week or two. Overall it was fairly slow going, but I also never wanted it to end ... It'd be hard to recommend to anybody whose reading preferences I am not super familiar with. Think Pynchon, Wallace, some David Lynch (and/or Cronenberg as suggested by some Amazon reviewer), and then get (a lot) weirder. 95% of the time I was really enjoying each wonderful scene. Losing coherence and clarity of plot as the book got weirder is not problematic for my reading tastes, but surely would be for others. I'm definitely looking forward to reading more Michael Cisco once I've recovered from the mind-melting fun that is Animal Money. I don't think I'll be able to get this book out of my head for a really long time. As soon as it's gone, I might have to read it again...

And if you want a more authoritative recommendation, weird maestro/expert Jeff VanderMeer says of it "not just possibly the finest weird novel of the modern era, but also an uncanny Infinite Jest by way of early Pynchon and Robert Bolaño’s 2666. This novel requires your full and undivided attention, but will not come away from the experience unchanged." https://electricliterature.com/jeff-v...

Thanks to Lazy Fascist Press for consistently introducing me to amazingly creative and fun to read contemporary authors!

[Seth Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review available on YouTube

Audio version available on AnchorFM or your preferred Podcatcher

Text transcript on SubStack

[Phillip Freedenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Cisco’s nearly 800 page brick of a book Animal Money (2015) is as much fun as a book can be, so much so that it could put television out of business. In short the book is about 5 economists, including protagonist CUNY economics professor Ronald Crest, who travels to San Toribio, Archizoguayla for an academic economics conference in which they all end up suffering debilitating head injuries shortly after their arrival in unrelated accidents.

The group, agents of a secret society of economists known as the International Economists Institution seek the creation of Animal Money. Animal Money is many things, one of which is “latently present in any exchange already,” but it is only a matter of making certain adjustment to current structures of “economy,” “by removing hindrances such as systemic inequalities, wages, salaries, investments, finance, profits, capitalism...its post-financial, the impedimenta of administration, laissez faire, banking, shares, stocks, insurance, markets, would all have to fall by the wayside.”

If you like Shifting narrators; including the desk chair in room 248, smilebot mechanical companions, flying squirrels who exchange dried flower petals for familial relations buying and selling grandparents, penanggalan vampires, secret zoos within zoos within universities, money mutations, telescoping hallways that are time machines, non-codified languages, UFO’s, a man enslaved by sexually deviant chimpanzees, a League of Disgusted Mothers, CIA abductions, neural configurations of money, Uhuyjhn transmissions, communist aliens, investigative tabloid journalists, cultural revolution, particle physics, horses buying sugar cubes with blue cloth horse money, luxury brand gravity - Monopoly Goodwill Gravity, political, and academic conspiracies, hermetic and occult literature, new currencies, economics, philosophy, X13 secret experiments, imaginary people, malevolent standardized spelling campaigns to impose the Greek alphabet, and cymothoa exigua tongue eating sea louses knowledgeable on the secrets of the ocean, you will LOVE this novel, in a world where “the bank is there to save and lend, and workers work, and consumers spend.”

[Vincenzo Bilof · Rating 5 out of 5]

VOICE: “What can you tell us about Animal Money?”
Assiyeh awoke after the conference and began to wonder if all of her revolutionary technologies had made a difference, but it is not the difference that she wondered about, but rather, the idea of the technologies being revolutionary and what it meant for those technologies to be revolutionary. There is a sort of awareness that occurs for Assiyeh while reflecting upon the definition of a revolution and whether or not something can be revolutionary, and her mind began to consider the idea that a revolution is a movement that can only exist in opposition to stagnation and that same movement might better be understood during her attempt to create a state of absolute rest. Assiyeh began to experiment, and her conclusion that we are always moving to search for something that is better than ourselves by constantly creating materials that will enhance our state of existence—whether it is a brand new television set or a new way to have sex by using only your fingertips—each new idea both a quantitative and qualitative doubling from nonexistence to existence. Through discussing the idea or the awareness of the idea there is a doubling that occurs between all individuals who partake in the exchange, for if they did not have the idea before they now have the idea. When you consider what you know about Animal Money and then begin to learn about it, your experience with the very literature that discusses Animal Money doubles your knowledge from zero to something more than zero, which is a sort of doubling. There is always a sort of self-awareness that the exchange is taking place; that an author of a book, for example, knows they are composing a piece that becomes a medium of exchange with the reader, because the reader starts with zero experience with that book and upon completing it becomes the beneficiary or inheritor of a type of currency that is qualitative relative to the reader and the author; the book need not be about Animal Money, but it could be a science fiction novel in which the idea of Animal Money becomes a sort of metaphor for those people or characters who first talked about the idea of Animal Money but could not exactly determine where the idea came from, because their own knowledge of Animal Money became itself an exchange of experiences and ideas…. and the only way to review such a book is to ask what Animal Money is and to wonder whether or not we should expect a certain kind of answer or whether or not there is an answer, or maybe whether or not we are capable of understanding that the question itself exists and we are aware of the question…

(Note: I don't think you can actually review the book, on a philosophical level, but it is very good, interesting, a challenge to read, with aliens or maybe not aliens, with ideas, some action or maybe not action depending on whether or not everything is a dream, and if it is a dream or not a dream then what is fiction if not Animal Money...?)

[SurDiablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, without a doubt, is one of the weirdest books out there I have read, probably even stranger than Infinite Jest. It’s an ambitious, sprawling, and deeply surreal experience that starts off feeling humorous and quirky but gradually spirals into something almost too smart for its own good. The premise itself is wildly creative: five economists come up with the concept of animal money, which is literal living currency, and from there, the book expands into a chaotic, dystopian vision filled with time-traveling necromantic physicists, communist aliens, people with superpowers, and so much more. But I feel like listing these elements doesn’t even count as spoilers anymore because, by the end, it’s hard to say what actually happened or what was even real.

The first half is where the book shines the most grounded (relatively speaking), sharp, and strange in a way that’s still engaging. The writing is exuberant, the satire biting, and the absurdity controlled just enough to keep you hooked. But once the second half kicks in, it transforms into a full-blown psychedelic trip, with random POV shifts, supernatural absurdity, and fourth-wall-breaking moments that amplify the feeling of total narrative collapse. It was intentional, but at a certain point, my emotional investment in the story faded because it became impossible to tell what was real anymore. It reminded me of Infinite Jest in that way somewhat, since I couldn’t help but feel like it would have been stronger if it had been more trimmed and focused. That said, it’s a truly unique experience, and its chaotic, excessive nature is also what makes it special. It’s a wild, satirical deconstruction of capitalism and money itself, but whether it fully lands depends on how much you're willing to surrender to the madness. For me, I guess it's a solid 3, although not because of any glaring flaws. It’s fascinating enough, but unfortunately, not entirely my thing. I might re-read this in the future because its nature warrants it, and there are not enough external resources out there for you to make complete sense of it.

[Caulen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does the reader want the incidents the reader fantasized?
Yes

Does the reader want to escape from the incidents the reader fantasized?
Yes

Does the reader want to have not lived those incidents?
No

Does the reader want to live incidents of an entirely different kind, without going into the details of the difference?
Yes

Does the reader want things to change or things to freeze?
I prefer change, but both, really.

Does the reader want to escape from these questions?
No, thanks for asking.

[Jeroen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I understood about 60% of this. But the parts I understood were 5/5.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like 3 but upgrading to 4 for sheer oddness (and we like oddness - don't we?)

Starts off with 5 economists coming up with their theory of "animal money". It's not fully explained - but what the hey, I'm not too bothered.

Then another character comes into focus , a physicist experimenting with trying to bring her paent back from the dead (or something like that or time travel maybe).

For the 1st 500 pages I was enjoying the ride, even if it wasn't really leading anywhere. But after that you get a series of monologues with eerie/weird connotations, heavily influenced by HP Lovecraft. The book lost whatever focus it had for me from then on.

[Axolotl]

So far it is a lot of hilarious non-sense and I love it! There is more to hold onto than I feel Cisco usually allows.

There was an early narrator switch that I think was just a mistake as right now Ronald Crest appears to be the man in charge.

[K.H. Vaughan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to review, and I think it will be a five-star book for a small number of people. On the one hand, I enjoyed the writing enough to continue through to the end. Cisco has a strong voice and can create compelling imagery. He has a wicked sense of humor and the occasionally graphic or explicit content stands out in contrast to the rest of the text to good effect. I think I did not ultimately enjoy the book as a whole because of several issues:

Animal Money is willfully non-linear, with the narrative jumping perspectives, times, and in and out of hallucinatory episodes without any warning or roadmap. I can live with this; I'm a big fan of David Lynch, and I am more than willing to do the work to try and meet a work on it's own terms. However, I didn't have a sense of this technique reflecting any underlying coherence. It too often read as surrealism for its own sake. If you enjoy the disorienting long strange trip for its own sake, then you might get more mileage out of this than I did. I don't need to read nearly 800 pages to get the point that things don't necessarily conform to our preconceptions of what narratives or reality are supposed to be. It's old news. If that is the only goal of Animal Money, it isn't enough. Besides, Hunter Thomson does a better job of describing drug-induced experiences. (Besides, if you want to experience that terrain, reading is a very indirect and poor substitute.)

Animal Money is intentionally obscure. There is a thesis, of sorts, about economics and its relationship to reality in the text, but Cisco goes out of his way to hide that point. Every once in a while, he seems to get to some sort of more explicit statement (the closest he comes, really is "end money"), but why all the obfuscation? He is brutally critical of academic institutions and the absurdity that often goes with the ritual orthodoxy of the Academy, and I agree with his views there - so much of academic writing is nothing more than fancy verbiage that hides a lack of rigor or meaning. Yet Cisco critiques obscurantism only to double down on it in the book. If he has a real thesis about the things he is concerned about, then why hide it?

He offers hints that may explain it - comments about the need for teachers to communicate the message over and over again in as many ways as are possible in order to disrupt the complacent understanding of the unenlightened. The un-woke masses are consistently referred to as dupes in various ways. It's the sort of thing common in Leftist revolutionary theory: the masses must be dragged into revolution against their will as they will never get there on their own. It's a very elitist philosophy for all the alleged glorification of the worker. I also have a sense that Cisco may be entertaining the idea that the medium is the message: that by disrupting expectations and generating dissonance, the reader will somehow be forced to question all. In the book, the release of an economics treatise (also called Animal Money) disrupts the economy of the world and the shape of history. I just disagree with that perspective. A meaningful point or idea can be expressed plainly, and I don't think this kind of exercise will have any sort of impact on any individual not already on board with the ideology. Again, if you are already there, you may enjoy it, but a text like this can only preach to the choir.

Last, as a critique of capitalism, Animal Money fails in the most important respect: it offers no alternative. No one in the text is able to offer a coherent explanation of what Animal Money is, or how it actually functions. It's fine to talk about the failings of capitalism - it has many. But the text offers no more than magical wish-fulfillment about what might replace it. Capitalism sucks, then, I don't know... a miracle... maybe aliens or something... and then we are in a brave new post-capitalist economic utopia, isn't an alternative. If that's all Animal Money can accomplish then it is a profoundly nihilistic text, stating that the system sucks but there is no way out. I don't think that was Cisco's intention, which would make the book a failure on its own terms.

If you like the writing, and can take the trip at face value, then you might enjoy the ride. Otherwise, I think this is going to be a tough sell. I don't think the Emperor is actually naked, but the elaborate suit he is wearing doesn't actually cover the bits it is supposed to. That is, the naive boy would point and say "his junk is still showing!"

[Remi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before the imposing Edinburgh castle gates, sits the statue of Adam Smith, the father of modern Capitalism. Keeping a watchful eye on tourists, tourism representatives, street performers and the odd vagrant scuffling through the crowd, hoping someone will lend them a fiver. Although, should you find yourself overwhelmed by the number of people, all gnashing for the same photo of the cathedral and the litany of selfie sticks, a refuge is just a short walk around the corner.

Blackwell books, Edinburgh's oldest bookshop and one that I found myself in an absolute awe of the selection. With my hands already overflowing with a number of finds that have been on the backlog for quite some time; spotting Animal Money was like some dirty trick played by the employees. It sat in the horror section, with a staff recommendation that absolutely thrilled my imagination, coupled with the eye-catching artwork and to make matters worse, a doorstopper, seemed to check all the boxes of all my literary weaknesses in one fell swoop. So the armful was dropped and the tome (along with two other separate smaller novels for balance sake...) brought to the til.

The novel itself is a beguiling cascade of Lovecraftian divination of cultists, nightmare logic and unknown horror wrapping itself behind every page. But, not just limited to HP, for economic theory pervades the book, and one could be forgiven for thinking that it is a treatise against Capitalism. If anything the novel concerns itself with a new form of capital, rather than standard paper or credit systems that the developed world utilizes, one of growth and with a rhizomatic sensibility takes over. What comes after capitalism, and how the world will change, and within the novel, the world literally changes employing a strange foreign pervading every step.

While it is an alternative reality, the world in which Animal Money exists is very much like our own, and the current pitfalls of late-stage capitalism. The revere of businessmen and economists as some sort of gods or wizards who steer the world, the destruction of Earth and resources to benefit a few; I could go on but anyone familiar with the current arguments against the system, have heard these time and time again. Though while critical of the "source material", Cisco does employ the arguments for the current system, and why/how people squeezed by its tendrils.

"...opening the book is like bursting a chaotic evil puffball in your face. A gush of malignantly psychedelic invective inundates your head whirling in the brain to form mental twisters that are autonomous hate elementals herding the thoughts, driving the thoughts before them, raking the mental air with alarms and searchlights and snarling police dogs that send hapless fantasies, emotions and other mental personnel scrambling for safe places to hide.

If you're a fan of New Weird, economic/social capital theory, which itself is a strange melange of elements, then this novel will completely take you to another thousand plateaus altogether.

[Brian "Alostarre" King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was psychosis written on the page but I loved every moment of it. Impossible to fully understand everything on one reading due to its labyrinthine plot, (notes would have helped tremendously but I'm a masochist and didn't take any)this would benefit from another reading later on at some point to extrapolate all the nuances that I initially missed. If you are a fan of experimental literary fiction such as the works of Pynchon, Fuentes, Donoso, and the like, then look no further my friend, you've found a home to cozy up in here.

[Shawn Gates · Rating 5 out of 5]

Psilocybin in book form.

[Sorina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew my mind. Review to come.

[Lucas Warford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have been 5 stars if this book had been half as long.
Fucking frustrating experience.
Great ideas, great style, great humor, great insight.
Crushed to death under its own weight.
Read Steve Aylett or Brian Catling.
Same quality of content in 1/4 the size.

[Autumn Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Economic professors come up with the concept of Animal Money - which begins to insinuate itself into their lives, and transform the way that human beings interact with each other. A star taken off because the middle of the book begins to slog, taking away from a brilliant and engaging beginning.

[Maurice Crehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sprawling and at some points overwhelming. Often felt like I should go back and re-read sections to get my bearings, but ultimately chose to just go wherever it takes me. Really enjoyed this, even if at some points I was confused on three or four different levels simultaneously. Cisco's absurdist worldbuilding is next level.

[Tait · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cisco’s “Animal Money” may be the most anarchic and anti-capitalist novel I’ve ever read—both in its content and style—which should have granted it an automatic five stars from me if it weren’t for the glaring flaws that mar a lot of the New Weird genre, namely a focus on image over plot and a lack of any emotional depth to humanize the cerebral explosion.

The story follows a group of wounded economists who through an occult experiment invent the concept of Animal Money—an economic system based on living, experiential forms of exchange, which has the potential of upending global capitalism. The rest of the novel spans out an increasingly chaotic and exuberant exegesis of what possibilities might emerge in the wake of capitalism’s demise. Smashing together a wealth of genre tropes and slathering them with torrents on torrents of rich, evocative imagery, Cisco’s text tries to linguistically perform the kind of anti-capitalist, fun house anarchy his dark economists long for. Cisco seems to be channeling Pynchon at times—both in the themes of globalist paranoia and spiritual hope, but also in his use of endless, iterative pocket narratives.

Frustratingly, the fragmented nature of the text made it difficult at times to follow the various narrative threads over against pages of hallucinatory language. This I could accept as intentional and necessary for such an anarchic book. But also the characters felt more like stock cardboard cutouts than the kind of living, emotive human beings that readers identify with and root for. And personally, I would feel that a truly anti capitalist text would open up deeper possibilities of human feeling than evade them.

Despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed Animal Money and highly recommend it. Honestly I think it stands up there in terms of significance (and literal weight) with such greats as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, RAW’s Illuminatus, and Bolaño’s 2666.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what of the events in the book actually happened, how many narrators there were, how many of them actually existed, how many were alive or dead, when it was, when it wasn't, what it was or wasn't, or even why it was. But I do know it was funny, bizarre, occasionally lucid, interesting, confounding, complex, and all sorts of other adjectives. Four stars to begin with. A fifth added because of the exceptional amount of confusing material, and then one subtracted because of the exceptional amount of confusing material. Michael Cisco still has not done wrong by me. A very difficult book to get through, but worth it to me.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Cisco writes:

"It isn’t authority, it’s the look you see on a child’s face when she is in an unfamiliar situation and fiercely understanding everything she sees. It’s what patronizing adults call the exaggerated seriousness of the child. They say that because adult seriousness is not serious but just a hollow meringue of affect. That hard, hard understanding look is the real seriousness."

[Andrew Sare · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You like to read and speculate about the nature of things, about reality, about history... So, speculate with me now about animal money.
All right - if you like -
I like." Michael Cisco

Cisco has put out a big novel here - its full of play and big ideas that will shake your values: new thinking on the value of money, the rat race, self fulfillment and interplanetary travel.

Enjoy the ride.

[Euan · Rating 5 out of 5]

We've got a new winner for weirdest thing I've ever read!

This is not for the faint of heart. I'd definitely recommend someone start with The Narrator or even The Divinity Student before this. It's weirder than Dhalgren, it's weirder than Dead Astronauts, it's weirder than House of Leaves. It's got weirdness on multiple levels- in imagery and events, but also in style, with shifting perspectives and meta-narrative layers.

All that aside, it is really good. Adjectives like phantasmagoric, fever-dream, hallucinatory, surreal all apply. Cisco is excellent at creating vivid, bizarre imagery that threads the reader along in an often breathless, headlong tumble through his prose. The writing is similarly unconstrained, shifting character and tense and narration layer without warning, leaving the reader scrambling to keep up. Even if it's formatted pretty conventionally, this certainly fits the definition of Ergodic literature; it doesn't hold your hand, and expect you to put in the effort to try and follow along.

What it's about is, well, harder to say. Cisco throws a lot at the reader, and in such a deliberately convoluted way it's sometimes not clear if he even knows how to untangle it. In a basic sense, it's about Animal Money, which is a new, living currency/form of money that goes beyond simple 1:1 exchange of goods and services or symbols standing for things of value. How it actually works? Well, there's a lot of delineating it, drawing the outlines and describing what it does and does not do. It's a bit "blind men describing an elephant."

But, that's also kind of not what it's about. This isn't a political treatise; Cisco isn't trying to propose a literal alternative here. He is in a large sense declaiming capitalism, and the structures it enforces on society. Animal Money works as a metaphor for the reader, to simply be something else from which to look back at what there is now, in the same sense that a fish couldn't tell you about the ocean without first experiencing the air. It's not "here's what we should do," it's "have you actually looked at what we have?"

The writing also plays into that, I think. It's difficult to read. Not in the sense of being overly verbose, but in structure. Which character is narrating shifts, without any clear distinction between a new character and just a scene transition, and characters have different noms de guerre. With the different points of view, we have different tenses; first, second, and third. Sometimes the second is the reader being addressed, and sometime it is one character, acting as the narrator, addressing another character. There are dreams relayed, which, in a kind of slipstream/stream of consciousness way blend smoothly into the "normal" action, as well as drug-induced hallucinations and rambling stories invented by the characters.

There's narrative layers, too. I think I counted at least 5? There are the economists who (maybe) come up with Animal Money, there's a physicist who they made up who nevertheless exists and affects their reality, there's a captive(?) being interviewed/interrogated, there's a ghost watching the action, there's the captive before or while captured assisting in the propagation of Animal Money... Add in aliens and multiple timelines and multiple dimensions/layers of reality and you have the layers of a very flaky story-croissant.

As for individual weird events, well, there's far too many to enumerate. But, a sampling: mummified economist-monks atop a mountain constantly bombarded by lightning who, bleeding profusely while taking cue cards from a shadowy corridor, order assassinations; a man whose tongue has been replaced by a sea-louse spewing vitriol, and using thalassic secrets to stifle all response; a planet in the far future with an inherent bureaucracy-field, which rotates in discrete increments, the sun and stars jerking from one position to another; a giant white spider with emerald green eyes who communicates by having people drink its hallucinogenic saliva...

I enjoyed this, and I do recommend it, with a heavy caveat that it's sort of a book which you have to approach on its own terms. If it seems weird, nonsensical, overly convoluted, well, it is. I saw some reviews saying that, as far as they can tell, the Emperor's naked. And they could be right; I may simply have drank the Kool-aid. I don't think so; but it's even a question the book playfully asks at the end. How much of what you get from a book is what's in it, and how much is what you're already bringing to it?

I don't think this gets a full five stars from me, because it did feel very self-indulgent with the profusion of dream/hallucination/story imagery at times, even into convoluted metaphors from characters that seemed to lose the concepts being compared, and I'm not ultimately sure all the threads that crop up cohere/conclude. But, none of these sequences were incoherent in and of themselves, and for that and for sheer scope and ambition, it rounds up. So 4.5-5?

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

A maze. A brilliant maze of a book. Topped with unreliable narrators, never a clear idea of who is actually speaking or what they are speaking about. Constant contradictions, implausible situations, uncanny explanations, confused puzzle-piece like subplot or tangents, or otherwise. Cisco's extreme motifs. If anyone should ask you what this book is about, just show them the cover art and length.

"Were you stupid for liking that idea, or was it that you articulated a good idea in a stupid way?"

"This obstacle is insurmountable."

"We are still not entirely sure what we mean by animal money."

"Don't as me to repeat that word, or to explain."

"It isn't unknown. I know what it is. Describing it is a chore, though."

"Why am I never closer to clowning than when I am thinking my most serious thoughts?"

"The with to the at."

"I don't know, but I keep forgetting."

"The publication of Animal Money was a non-event having no effect at all, or it changed the world."

[Micah Mertes]

DNF. Gave up on page 122.