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The Maze of Transparencies
Dear reader, I am not dumping my shattered cloudbits on your eardrums for your pity or counsel, sympathy, or advice. Nor do I offer this tale as an act of retribution in the wake of a global collapse, wherein I gallivant around the biosphere promoting a kiss-and-tell memoir. I technically do not exist. I’ve virtually kissed nothing except bits and bytes. In other words, I rely on laser-printed carbon symbols for any trace of a physical existence. Please forgive these lexical excesses and disfluent modes of delivery. In a checksum for validation, with apologies, I dwell in em-dashes, amid scattered alphanumeric figures and ellipses…
In the near future, when an epidemic of cyberfatigue has triggered a technocracy collapse, an orphaned cloud narrates the quest of Yang as he visits each of the harbingers of happiness.
A former data cloud, now “a nebulous puff in a starry noosphere of human consciousness,” narrates the story of its creator, Yang, a former tech elite, now “millenial gardener” after a digital shutdown collapses the technocracy and discorporates vast clouds of data, as he undertakes a journey to find, among the ruins of the mezzopolis, the seven harbingers of happiness. But this cloud is also a poet, which is to say, Lee’s writing dazzlingly illuminates the inner life of data, the “maze of transparencies” in which we are enmeshed. The cloud asks, “…does a cloudfree formula for happiness exist?” This is a polyglot guide to existential collapse, a multivalent antiserum for the promises of technological progress. We need this book.
—Evelyn Hampton, author of Discomfort, The Aleatory Abyss, and Famous Children and Famished Adults
Every apocalypse sings its own song, tells its own story – tellings, or re-tellings, of where we are now, whoever we are at any given moment, and how we got here, too, whatever we are at any given moment.
But who can answer the impossible but potentially life-saving question of what an end will look like before it happens, especially when ends—pasts, presents and futures all rolled up into single, decisive moments—are so complicated?
In her astonishing new novel, Karen An-hwei Lee suggests that maybe the answer to the problem of recognizing an end, if that end is not desirable, lies not in looking… but rather in listening to what the present is saying. In a time when everything is connected, perhaps we need to pay attention to what has connected to us, to what has already begun to supersede us, to what is already telling our story, our end, and thus its own beginning.
Karen An-hwei Lee is brilliant. A writer who can hear the present, who is generous enough to give the present a forum to speak, and a writer who knows that a narrative, a narrator, is never what it seems.
—Harold Abramowitz, author of A House on a Hill, Not Blessed, and Dear Dearly Departed
Karen Lee writes the present and the ever-impinging future through the lenses of several jargons. The language is dense, the future, impossible, and this book a solid scream. See you there!
—Alan Davies author of A AN AV ES, ACTIVE 24 HOURS, Candor, RAW WAR, and ODES & fragments.
In the near future, when an epidemic of cyberfatigue has triggered a technocracy collapse, an orphaned cloud narrates the quest of Yang as he visits each of the harbingers of happiness.
A former data cloud, now “a nebulous puff in a starry noosphere of human consciousness,” narrates the story of its creator, Yang, a former tech elite, now “millenial gardener” after a digital shutdown collapses the technocracy and discorporates vast clouds of data, as he undertakes a journey to find, among the ruins of the mezzopolis, the seven harbingers of happiness. But this cloud is also a poet, which is to say, Lee’s writing dazzlingly illuminates the inner life of data, the “maze of transparencies” in which we are enmeshed. The cloud asks, “…does a cloudfree formula for happiness exist?” This is a polyglot guide to existential collapse, a multivalent antiserum for the promises of technological progress. We need this book.
—Evelyn Hampton, author of Discomfort, The Aleatory Abyss, and Famous Children and Famished Adults
Every apocalypse sings its own song, tells its own story – tellings, or re-tellings, of where we are now, whoever we are at any given moment, and how we got here, too, whatever we are at any given moment.
But who can answer the impossible but potentially life-saving question of what an end will look like before it happens, especially when ends—pasts, presents and futures all rolled up into single, decisive moments—are so complicated?
In her astonishing new novel, Karen An-hwei Lee suggests that maybe the answer to the problem of recognizing an end, if that end is not desirable, lies not in looking… but rather in listening to what the present is saying. In a time when everything is connected, perhaps we need to pay attention to what has connected to us, to what has already begun to supersede us, to what is already telling our story, our end, and thus its own beginning.
Karen An-hwei Lee is brilliant. A writer who can hear the present, who is generous enough to give the present a forum to speak, and a writer who knows that a narrative, a narrator, is never what it seems.
—Harold Abramowitz, author of A House on a Hill, Not Blessed, and Dear Dearly Departed
Karen Lee writes the present and the ever-impinging future through the lenses of several jargons. The language is dense, the future, impossible, and this book a solid scream. See you there!
—Alan Davies author of A AN AV ES, ACTIVE 24 HOURS, Candor, RAW WAR, and ODES & fragments.
183 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
January 21, 2020
The first novel I've read in these new 20s proves to be the first great work of the 20s, a definitive literature of now. Even if published in 2019, it reaches forward. And by now I mean The Penultimate Decade, not in the sense or nearly-best, but in the sense of nearly-over (this is my wording and I'm going to stick with it because I must). The best, let's face it, are probably behind us, and there'll be struggles to come even if we make it into the 40s relatively intact afterall.
Here, in Lee's Maze of Transparencies, there have been struggles and a new post-digital era has begun. A period of hyper-data-driven-cultural-digitization collapses under mass data fatigue, resource stress, and attempts by a maybe-only-conceptual junta of postmodern Muses to "minimize" society back into a manageable form. Afterwards, connectivity and technology give way to small community links, barter, gardening, and a general recentering of value systems. What matters after the collapse? And by extension what should matter to us now? These are the questions Karen An-hwei Lee is asking, fundamental human ones, even if through a cloud-narrated soup of techno-linguistic acrobatics, a poetics of jargon befitting Lee's background in poetry, but with a fine-honed clarity of purpose shining through.
Tricky, unfamiliar, exhilarating. Brilliantly and urgently of-the-now-and-post-now.
What else, dear readers of our vast collective user intelligence book data matrix, is the literature of the Penultimate Decade?
Here, in Lee's Maze of Transparencies, there have been struggles and a new post-digital era has begun. A period of hyper-data-driven-cultural-digitization collapses under mass data fatigue, resource stress, and attempts by a maybe-only-conceptual junta of postmodern Muses to "minimize" society back into a manageable form. Afterwards, connectivity and technology give way to small community links, barter, gardening, and a general recentering of value systems. What matters after the collapse? And by extension what should matter to us now? These are the questions Karen An-hwei Lee is asking, fundamental human ones, even if through a cloud-narrated soup of techno-linguistic acrobatics, a poetics of jargon befitting Lee's background in poetry, but with a fine-honed clarity of purpose shining through.
Tricky, unfamiliar, exhilarating. Brilliantly and urgently of-the-now-and-post-now.
What else, dear readers of our vast collective user intelligence book data matrix, is the literature of the Penultimate Decade?
June 28, 2021
A work of genius and unfathomable eccentricity. In a post-societal literal data migration to physical clouds an obsessively cataloguing vehemently organic gardener pontificates on his dysthymia in a voice infused with shades of contemporary zeitgeists through which the reader perceives a softly dystopian alternate reality where rampant "affluenza" afflicts the phantasmal remnants of a happiness-worshipping, technologically dependent, corporately desensitized indistinguishable mass of human consciousnesses embroiled in a perpetual feedback loop of remedy cultivation and symptom diagnosis. A riptide of subtext illuminates the inspired ramblings of a disembodied protagonist.
Lee appropriates techno-babble and marketing lingo to weave a kaleidoscopic prose poem 180 pages in length. An elegant ménage à trois of Eastern philosophy, Western excess, and futuristic speculation.
The only comparable book in existence is perhaps Rikki Ducornet's recent Trafik.
After the "great leap sideways" the soul of humanity is dislocated and pursued. Yang is a grass roots mystic in choose-your-own doom era.
Never have I read such a wily and mesmeric chronicle, percolating with disturbing subliminal undertones of human spiritual heat death.
Lee appropriates techno-babble and marketing lingo to weave a kaleidoscopic prose poem 180 pages in length. An elegant ménage à trois of Eastern philosophy, Western excess, and futuristic speculation.
The only comparable book in existence is perhaps Rikki Ducornet's recent Trafik.
After the "great leap sideways" the soul of humanity is dislocated and pursued. Yang is a grass roots mystic in choose-your-own doom era.
Never have I read such a wily and mesmeric chronicle, percolating with disturbing subliminal undertones of human spiritual heat death.
March 20, 2019
treasure in, treasure out. Saint-Exupéry's little prince gets an update in this beautifully baroque, exquisitely intricate quest held in a near-future world suddenly bereft of high-tech where the flood of data receded and, après le déluge, questions and sadness and karen an-hwei lee's opalescent poetry remain.
more info here.
more info here.
December 20, 2019
I like that the book description here is a review that opens with the quote I snagged as I was reading this. It’s a great encapsulation of the writing style of the book, while also providing some sort of explanation / structure the fanciful and poetic language of the text.
Dear reader, I am not dumping my shattered cloudbits on your eardrtuns for your pity or counsel, sympathy, or advice. Nor do I offer this tale as an act of retribution in the wake of a global collapse, wherein I gallivant around the biosphere promoting a kiss-and-tell memoir. I technically do not exist. I’ve virtually kissed nothing except bits and bytes. In other Words, I rely on laser-printed carbon symbols for any trace of a physical existence. Please forgive these lexical excesses and disfluent modes of delivery in a checksum for validation, with apologies, I dwell in emdashes, amid scattered alphanumeric figures and ellipses.
And “poetic” goes far here - the author also (primarily?) writes poetry, and it shows through the dreamlike prose poetry of the text (plus, of course, the actual poems in the book). The language is lovely here. The ideas are lovely as well.
Mostly this is an exhilarating piece of speculative fiction that thrills in language for the pure love of language, but entrenches that higher diction in a retronymed future where language itself is being reclaimed. It is weird and unwieldy; a highlight of my reading year.
Dear reader, I am not dumping my shattered cloudbits on your eardrtuns for your pity or counsel, sympathy, or advice. Nor do I offer this tale as an act of retribution in the wake of a global collapse, wherein I gallivant around the biosphere promoting a kiss-and-tell memoir. I technically do not exist. I’ve virtually kissed nothing except bits and bytes. In other Words, I rely on laser-printed carbon symbols for any trace of a physical existence. Please forgive these lexical excesses and disfluent modes of delivery in a checksum for validation, with apologies, I dwell in emdashes, amid scattered alphanumeric figures and ellipses.
And “poetic” goes far here - the author also (primarily?) writes poetry, and it shows through the dreamlike prose poetry of the text (plus, of course, the actual poems in the book). The language is lovely here. The ideas are lovely as well.
Mostly this is an exhilarating piece of speculative fiction that thrills in language for the pure love of language, but entrenches that higher diction in a retronymed future where language itself is being reclaimed. It is weird and unwieldy; a highlight of my reading year.
March 15, 2022
I loved this book so much I awarded it the 2019 Big Other Book Award in Fiction: https://bigother.com/2020/05/16/annou...
June 26, 2021
Like nothing else you have ever read. Probably. Unless you've read Lee's other novella, Sonata in K, which I have not at time of writing, but which seems to have come from a similar place. Indescribably ornate, fascinatingly weird, and maddeningly overlooked. And funny, too! This is a hidden gem in the truest sense.
October 10, 2021
A poetic sci-fi tale about the search for happiness. Imaginative and wholly original, unlike anything I've ever read. Karen An-hwei Lee is a genius, and I'd get lost in this Maze forever if I could.
July 15, 2024
2.5. Hated the way this was written. Surprised to learn Lee is a poet—I would almost think of this of a parody of poetry, if this book contained even a scrap of self-awareness or humor. Lee’s idea of “good writing” is to simply find some big, opaque sounding words, throw in some cliche and poorly spelled Latin phrases for good measure, (forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, anyone?), and trick the reader into thinking it sounds profound. Lee’s command of metaphor is weak, and even the descriptions in this book are unoriginal—there are way too many scenes of characters eating/making food in this book because apparently Lee’s descriptive imagination only works when she’s listing off her favorite things to eat. At its worst, the writing is just cringe. Here’s a sample:
“The digerati muses of of postmodern herstory, synthetic music, astrophysics or radioastronomy, love and comedy in stereo as romantic comedy epic poetry slam, electrochoreography, post-traumatic memory, and domestic tragedy reigned over the clody fiefdoms with a paradoxical, flower-wielding museology”
I can’t say I completely hated the book though, it has some relevance to my research right now so at least i got something from it
“The digerati muses of of postmodern herstory, synthetic music, astrophysics or radioastronomy, love and comedy in stereo as romantic comedy epic poetry slam, electrochoreography, post-traumatic memory, and domestic tragedy reigned over the clody fiefdoms with a paradoxical, flower-wielding museology”
I can’t say I completely hated the book though, it has some relevance to my research right now so at least i got something from it
July 22, 2021
Really interesting concepts, and I'm glad I read it.
Reluctantly I'll admit this one was difficult for me to get through. Maybe I failed the text somehow and with closer reading or just more attention somehow I would have liked it more. Some brief descriptions were vivid, but overall just hard to follow and I felt like I enjoyed reading the plot summary online and thinking about all the implications and interpretations the plot summary prompted in my mind, more than I enjoyed the text itself.
Reluctantly I'll admit this one was difficult for me to get through. Maybe I failed the text somehow and with closer reading or just more attention somehow I would have liked it more. Some brief descriptions were vivid, but overall just hard to follow and I felt like I enjoyed reading the plot summary online and thinking about all the implications and interpretations the plot summary prompted in my mind, more than I enjoyed the text itself.
Read
May 19, 2025a breath of fresh air for the genre!
beautifully written, beautifully meta, and beautifully sentimental.
i especially appreciated all the parallels drawn between nature and technology
not to mention the many gold nuggets of wisdom sprinkled throughout
worth the read!
beautifully written, beautifully meta, and beautifully sentimental.
i especially appreciated all the parallels drawn between nature and technology
not to mention the many gold nuggets of wisdom sprinkled throughout
worth the read!
punctuation optional
October 18, 2025
Karen is gifted with language and this book is rich in beautiful passages and deep thinking about how technology shapes our reality.
March 2, 2022
DNF @ 86. Seems almost like an Oulipo experiment chopping up jargon into poetry/prose. But it sucks.
Seriously. Give me a break. The same words over and over with no stylistic variance. And they're big 5 dollar words so it's glaring. I never want to see the word "data" again.
Seriously. Give me a break. The same words over and over with no stylistic variance. And they're big 5 dollar words so it's glaring. I never want to see the word "data" again.
October 4, 2020
Lee is a poet and it feels like every single sentence is a lush, beautiful, densely packed poem. This does not make for easy reading, but the prose was so beautiful I refused to give up. The story structure itself is fairly simple: a data cloud narrates the story of a gardener who, chapter by chapter, seeks out the harbingers of happiness in a period of technological collapse after the “information wars.” I got less menacing Orwell vibes from the mysterious junta that seem maintain political power or possibly to have recently lost it. The Orwellian vibe is amplified by Lee’s use of compound and multisyllabic words that read to me like her version of newspeak. In fact, it felt like reading a book in a language where I only understand 75 to 80% of the vocabulary. So it was unsurprising that the final harbinger of happiness is the Angel of Translation. Other things that kept me going were Lee’s incredibly gorgeous fantastical descriptions that reminded me of Coover’s Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell)— a favorite of mine. For me this was a challenging read, but all the more rewarding for it.
April 24, 2021
Holy smokes, Ms Lee is a verbally adroit genius. Firmly shelved on under unconventional fiction.
September 23, 2019
A beautiful and disorienting post-mortem of our near future.
April 22, 2022
Really impressive book! In terms of mood/atmosphere, there are similarities to ambient, wandering-focused games. I love the kinds of complex imagery the poetic style can conjure, and then how it draws into focus by shifting into Yang's dialogues with the harbingers of happiness. The ways in which I'm not sure if the text is describing something with metonymy (like cloud, jellyfish) are fun. The mood reminded me a little of Yoko Tawada's The Last Children of Tokyo / The Emissary - a post-collapse setting that feels very heavenly/light/dreamy, characters going about their normal routines, getting by. In some ways the mood reminds me of Shadow of the Colossus a bit - wandering this bright landscape, thinking about the past, then finding a colossus to fight, although the new knowledge doesn't seem to get you much closer.
The protagonist, Yang, goes on a mission to learn about happiness (by tracking down 7 people who the previous junta had kept tabs on?), giving them offerings and talking with them. It was interesting to see how these others spend their lives, the kinds of ideological or historical disagreements they have with Yang - a world in which a hypocritical "minimize tech excess" ruling group caused a lot of genocide. (The world ends up in an agrarian, barter-driven state with some occasional tech still running)
I think there's a loose relation of this story to China's "Great leap forward" - the junta's movement is called the 'great leap sideways' - although I can't say I can intelligently comment on those links beyond that the "Great leap sideways" is not portrayed as a particularly wise move.
The protagonist, Yang, goes on a mission to learn about happiness (by tracking down 7 people who the previous junta had kept tabs on?), giving them offerings and talking with them. It was interesting to see how these others spend their lives, the kinds of ideological or historical disagreements they have with Yang - a world in which a hypocritical "minimize tech excess" ruling group caused a lot of genocide. (The world ends up in an agrarian, barter-driven state with some occasional tech still running)
I think there's a loose relation of this story to China's "Great leap forward" - the junta's movement is called the 'great leap sideways' - although I can't say I can intelligently comment on those links beyond that the "Great leap sideways" is not portrayed as a particularly wise move.
July 20, 2021
This is a very interesting book, but it's not that easy or pleasurable to read.
All surface, all depth...it took me almost two thirds through to start feeling comfortable in the text. There is narrative but it is mostly obfuscated in dense and specific language and meanders between (imagined) history, philosophy and memory amongst others.
In some ways I wish the poetry was used more clearly as device to contrast the prose and enlighten ...or inform.
It is however, a very engaging imagining of a near and post-digital future...and our own evolution with technology.
All surface, all depth...it took me almost two thirds through to start feeling comfortable in the text. There is narrative but it is mostly obfuscated in dense and specific language and meanders between (imagined) history, philosophy and memory amongst others.
In some ways I wish the poetry was used more clearly as device to contrast the prose and enlighten ...or inform.
It is however, a very engaging imagining of a near and post-digital future...and our own evolution with technology.
Read
May 4, 2023almost feels wrong to say i read this...was so interesting when it didn't feel like my brain was being knocked around ! even if i do understand that the overly complicated/fragmented style Was a style and not just a mean trick, nd there were a bunch of lines that i think helped in finding meaning(or something that resembled it), i just feel so defeated.
i do appreciate that it's new, nd im sry i couldn't get more out of it when it so clearly has lots to give...but, another day! hopefully, when im feeling braver, ill try again :'3
i do appreciate that it's new, nd im sry i couldn't get more out of it when it so clearly has lots to give...but, another day! hopefully, when im feeling braver, ill try again :'3
May 31, 2023
It's not the author's fault I'm not wired for poetry and she's a poet.
But for me, this is a cybertech dictionary put in a blender with a modern poetry book and a Proust chapter, then whirred to a thick goo.
For i=1-100 do {Yang, tea, unexplained tech collapse, flowers, nice words};
An introduction might have helped Philistines like me, just to get us oriented. Someone mentioned a plot outline, and if I can find that I might come back and try this again.
There's no question that Lee is accomplished in her style; it's just not for me.
But for me, this is a cybertech dictionary put in a blender with a modern poetry book and a Proust chapter, then whirred to a thick goo.
For i=1-100 do {Yang, tea, unexplained tech collapse, flowers, nice words};
An introduction might have helped Philistines like me, just to get us oriented. Someone mentioned a plot outline, and if I can find that I might come back and try this again.
There's no question that Lee is accomplished in her style; it's just not for me.
October 1, 2020
Incredibly beautiful, and perhaps a bit too cerebral for me. It definitely takes a while for you to get your footing in the sort of language An-Hwei Lee develops for this world, and I’m not sure I ever wrapped my mind around what the setting was. Despite this I still found the story both interesting and haunting. Read this book with a pen in your hand - you'll definitely learn a new word every chapter! :)
July 26, 2025
Beautiful and unexpected. A wonderfully meandering meditation on love and happiness in the offline world. Full of daring questions regarding the impact of the net on our minds, our emotions, and our bodies, all presented in a somber, reflective past-tense, just after the dust has settled and the death rattle of technology has breathed its last sigh. What then?
Some of the most enjoyable prose I've read in a long time, just an absolute delight to read slow and let the words dance.
Some of the most enjoyable prose I've read in a long time, just an absolute delight to read slow and let the words dance.
May 11, 2020
Weird as hell and like nothing I've ever read before. Definitely found softness in the post mechanical collapse and enjoyed an alternative view to my own where robots don't dominate the future but slow food and savant children.
August 20, 2021
Just not my cup of tea. The writing style and lack of plot isn't my thing. It was neat to give it a try but ultimately I spent months trying to finish this book and I don't know why I put that kind of effort in to it.
did-not-finish
February 3, 2026DNF page 85 -- decided I got what I wanted out of this and want to read some other things more than I want to finish this before it has to go back to the library -- the writing style of this fascinated me with its word choice especially.
January 8, 2020
[3.5/5] Undeniably inventive and linguistically playful, but I must admit I'm not quite sure what to say beyond that.
Read
August 19, 2020As richly textured and cloudy as data itself--or happiness.
December 16, 2024
Brilliant premise. Gorgeous prose and poetry. Maddeningly difficult to read. But worth it.
May 26, 2025
i adored this book but i would never dare to say i understood it. i also think it would be unbearable to anyone who didnt genuinely treasure getting their stem degree at a liberal arts college
November 7, 2024
took me a while to write this review. this is a difficult book for me to understand and form an opinion about. its use of technical terms, terms that I am familiar with in my own career, in ways which are lyrical and poetic and which carry entirely different meanings from those im used to was very disorienting at first -- how do I conceive of a digital "cloud" that actually follows its users around? but I think detaching my own understanding of these concepts from how they're portrayed in this book helped me. the narrative is dizzying and abstract; im still not entirely sure what "happened", but there is so much to dissect and interpret. this book is unlike anything I have ever read
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews