The Defectors

by René Georg Vasicek

From NEA-award winning author R.G. Vasicek, a cybernetic anti-novel like no other. The Defectors is a book of odd and uncanny episodes about a man named Zig trying to "defect" from reality. Zig is a quantum being. He morphs from one state to the next. Zig is a secret policeman in 80s communist Prague who becomes obsessed with a fiercely independent female detective novelist. Zig is a machinist who wanders the labyrinth of a totalitarian "City of Machines." Zig is a Buddhist psychotherapist who travels around Amerika with his German shepherd in a Volkswagen Beetle offering the "talking cure" to anyone who will listen. Zig is an adjunct professor in Russian émigré Brooklyn who quits his job to build a Golem made of stainless steel. As the book progresses, the episodes become increasingly experimental. Ultimately, like particles in a supercollider, they get smashed together and fly apart. And we get a brief glimpse of something new, some never-before-seen particle, a cosmic thought.

202 pages, Hardcover

Published January 17, 2020

About the author

R.G. Vasicek is a lo-fi samizdat artist & machine elf in NYC.

Reviews

[J.S. Bratton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise poetics arranged into chaotic patterns forming improvised histrionics absorbed yet forgotten.

[MarcusMeltdown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got lent this book by my publisher and oh boy, I can understand why he published RG Vasicek. The book is Philip K Dickian, but sexier, hornier, and far more Czech than any American novel has tried or will ever be. Gripping, very easy to follow, considering the books nature and non-linearity, but, within the non-linear there is, a linear device.

[Rachel Paster · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel of astoria, or prague, or neither and both