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Silverfish
What if the apocalypse already happened and you just didn't notice? That's one of the central questions of Silverfish, a novel that details a slice of life in the Incorporated States of America: a country much like our own, but one in which the corporatization of culture is so total and complete, so deeply ingrained so long ago that no one can remember an alternative. And in this America, citizens are "born to fail" - mainly because they lack the language and cognitive skills by which to identify their condition. That's the premise of this experimental novel, a dark Borgesian romp into the labyrinthine depths of language.
Silverfish is a syncretic tour-de-force that recombines elements of Afrofuturism, sci-fi, and wartime fiction with linguistic and literary theories to issue a dire warning about what happens when we choose to pretend our past never happened, thereby ensuring that we stumble blindly into a future we've already lived. Part prophecy, part literary collage, and part social justice remix, it's a wholly immersive, intertextual sojourn. More than just a damning indictment of our contemporary moment, Silverfish is fiction written both for and after the end of history.
"Silverfish has left me with big feelings that I need to sit with and explore. It has also left me with big questions that don't necessarily have answers, but requires an intense process of thought and being, in order to come close to some answers. You're in for a treat, Reader/Elegba/Hermes/Alternate Being."
-Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat and water & power
"Part incantation, revelation, and elegy, Rone Shavers' Silverfish offers a surprising New World, Du Boisian source code. Reminiscent of Percival, Harryette, Ishamel, and Ralph Ellison himself, this is an experimental novel you must read."
-Sheree Renée Thomas, Nine Bar Blues & the World Fantasy Award-winning anthologies, Dark Matter
Silverfish is a syncretic tour-de-force that recombines elements of Afrofuturism, sci-fi, and wartime fiction with linguistic and literary theories to issue a dire warning about what happens when we choose to pretend our past never happened, thereby ensuring that we stumble blindly into a future we've already lived. Part prophecy, part literary collage, and part social justice remix, it's a wholly immersive, intertextual sojourn. More than just a damning indictment of our contemporary moment, Silverfish is fiction written both for and after the end of history.
"Silverfish has left me with big feelings that I need to sit with and explore. It has also left me with big questions that don't necessarily have answers, but requires an intense process of thought and being, in order to come close to some answers. You're in for a treat, Reader/Elegba/Hermes/Alternate Being."
-Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat and water & power
"Part incantation, revelation, and elegy, Rone Shavers' Silverfish offers a surprising New World, Du Boisian source code. Reminiscent of Percival, Harryette, Ishamel, and Ralph Ellison himself, this is an experimental novel you must read."
-Sheree Renée Thomas, Nine Bar Blues & the World Fantasy Award-winning anthologies, Dark Matter
91 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 8, 2020
3 people are currently reading
376 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 9, 2020
You may have never read a book like this before. It's an Afrofuturistic, cyberpunk, Dadaesque soldier story. Actually, I say cyber but maybe it's more cypher as code and language itself propels the prose forward in ways that are reminiscent of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and a narrative that is coherent, cohesive, and yet as shattered as Yellow Broke-down Radio. This is the psychological/technofiction that we've been waiting for.
October 18, 2020
A college professor of mine began a class once by asking a question: Can you think without language? I mulled it over for a bit. There are certainly times I think using a very abbreviated linguistic system. Often, I'll be chewing on some problem, and it leads me to an argument I've had in my head before. My brain will then simply quickly register the results of the previous conversation I had in my brain about that subject without recalling the entire process that led me to that conclusion. This is one of the reasons people have such a hard time arguing for conclusions they reached a long time ago. They've been using an interior shorthand for a long time, one that simply remembers having come to a conclusion about something without all the steps that got them there. Often, I register this simply by remembering where I was when I came to the conclusion. There's no language in it, or at least there doesn't seem to be.
You can see this, too, in a more dramatic fashion, when you have to make a series of quick decisions about something, like when you are driving a car or playing a sport. I don't just mean that there are instinctive functions we do that don't require language to accomplish, because after the split-second in which you make your decision and carry it out, sometimes, you find you are able to give a long explanation of why you did it, one that is so long, it's actually impossible you could have thought all of it while carrying out the action, but it actually does seem like all the things you are saying were really involved in the decision: "I wasn't sure if he saw me, and the guy behind me was coming kind of fast, but I thought that if I blew my horn, the guy merging might get scared and whip his car too fast back in the other direction and cause an accident, so instead of either braking or blowing the horn, I just changed lanes fast, because I'd seen in my mirror the other lane was empty." That's too many words to have thought in half a second, but it seems, somehow, as if that is really the rationale behind your decision.
The answer I gave at the time in that class was that animals seem to think without using words, as far as we can tell, so yes, it must be possible to think without language.
Language and Langaj
Of course, my answer was only right if "language" means words. If language refers instead, though, to any system of conveying information, then it's quite possible no living thing thinks without using it. Internally, organs communicate with one another, and even cells can pass information of sorts within themselves. What's true at microscopic levels is also true at macroscopic ones. There are massive, eco-system-wide communications systems, such as when the roots of trees "talk" to one another across an entire forest.
My bias toward thinking of language as equivalent to words is easy to understand. I'm a translator, so when I think of translating from one language to another, I mean take some words and replace them with other words that mean something similar to people in another linguistic system. Even the word "language" comes from the word for "tongue," meaning people have long had a bias toward thinking of language as the words one makes.
Rone Shavers' Silverfish, though, tries to first break us down from our assumptions about "language" meaning words and then to build us up again. He begins with a prologue from the Yoruba trickster goddess Eshu, who invites the reader to "play language" with her. Her hope is to "break the brain" of the reader, as an epigraph by Vera Henross has it. "Confusion is good: It's the first step to understanding what's beyond what you already know." The novel equates "language" to "langaj," the esoteric, incantory utterances used in Hoodoo rituals, where language itself actually makes things happen. Unlocking language will also "make things happen" in the novel.
Once past the epigraph, though, we find Eshu to be a somewhat merciful goddess, because while the story bends the reader's brain, it doesn't quite break it. It's possible to rebuild a fairly coherent narrative from the broken pieces of the story.
A one-paragraph synopsis
Stories where the author really doesn't give a damn about being kind to the reader are almost impossible to summarize easily, but Silverfish isn't like this. The novel is set in a future "corporatocracy," one in which those with means use those without them as part of a mercenary army-for-hire to keep the stock market high and natural resources flowing. This world was brought about in part by the invention of "angels," a new and improved form of cyborg (although that term is considered passé in the future) with a mission to root out insurrection from "primitves" who aren't on board with the brave new world. Angels were invented by someone named Beagel. Beagel went rogue on his corporate sponsors, though, and created a way to stop the angels, that way being the voracious tech-eating silverfish of the title. The poor are eternally trapped by their corporate overlords, promised an opportunity to climb up by their bootstraps, but in reality having almost no way out of the poverty that dooms them to do the bidding of the masters. The main action in the novel consists of Beagel hijacking an angel and reprogramming it to undo the corporate-run world.
Beyond the synopsis: how language is a shield from harm
Beagel notes, while re-programming the angel, that the apocalypse has already happened. It happened when people lost the ability to use metaphor and had to resort instead to hyperbole. This is something of an Orwellian understanding of the future, the idea that the powers that be, whether they are Big Brother or the Corporate Code of Civilized Nations, mostly control us through weakening the power of language. Because language is a sea we swim in without being aware we're surrounded by it, it's difficult for us to realize when we're being manipulated through it. We assume language is neutral, just there to communicate ideas which are themselves good or bad, but in fact, we are being manipulated all the time through the language we take for granted. The medium is the message. The contemporary fight over what facts even are is a good example of this. Maybe our current age is actually a good step in civilization's advance, because our brains are all being broken, hopefully to be remade better.
The angel's brain, at least, is broken and remade. She is able to join in a giant meta-language, a system of systems or language of languages, which allows her, in turn, to then begin to reprogram humans. She convinces Clayton, the only human other than Beagel we get to know to any extent, to invest all his social credits into learning language. It will bankrupt him, but because of a convoluted series of rules I don't think we're meant to look that deeply into, Clayton will be able to go live with the "primitives." Society will send angels to kill him, but, because he has unlocked the angel's meta-language (and, if he's a really good student, the language of the silverfish as well), he will be able to survive.
The brain-breaking only took 93 pages!
One of the remarkable things about the novella is how much ground it covers in such a short space. The overall feeling I got from living in Shavers' dystopia was much like the one I had after reading Nick Harkaway's Gnomon, but Gnomon took well over 700 pages to do it. Shavers partly accomplishes a lot in a short time by letting form indicate function. ("The teleology of a work is expressed by its form" is the first thought we hear the angel have.) Shavers eschews quotation marks for dialogue, a long-time characteristic of his work. The novel doesn't feel bound to carry forward the customs of the past, which frees it to find its own manner of signifying.
There is a good deal of what might be thought of as stream-of-consciousness as the angel "spools" through infinite thoughts, but that stream-of-consciousness isn't, as is often the case, terribly jarring. The trickster goddess was merciful enough to provide textual clues, such as brackets, braces, parentheses, and italics.
There were a few places where I wished the characters, Beagel in particular, would do more interpreting of thinkers or concepts they mentioned rather than just referring to them and letting the reference do the work for him. And I honestly didn't realize some things the description of the book on Amazon told me about the book until I read the description after reading the novella. For example, I didn't know there was an "Incorporated States of America" in the story. If it's mentioned, it's a very fleeting reference, and one that's not returned to. I also didn't grasp the extent to which language itself was the means of control until the end. Although Beagel said as much, it was only a part of a larger philosophical discourse he had with the angel, and it didn't strike me at the time as the central issue of the novella. Beagel claimed that nobody could use metaphor anymore, but Clayton's ability to use phrases like "above my paygrade" indicates he could, in fact, use metaphorical language. (What is "above my paygrade" but an allusion to an imaginary ladder of responsibility? Decisions aren't literally "above" or "below" anyone. That's abstract language, which means the realm of metaphor.)
But as I've said many times, I prefer something flawed that had high ambitions to a technically perfect attempt to do nothing. I like what Shavers called in his dedication a "beautiful mess." Shavers was swinging for the fences in this novella, and a missed swing here or there is just the price you pay for seeing him connect beautifully on occasion. It irritates me to have to give stars to a book like this; it seems above a rating system. I feel like instead of X number of stars, it should get eleven fruit bats and one carburetor.
You can see this, too, in a more dramatic fashion, when you have to make a series of quick decisions about something, like when you are driving a car or playing a sport. I don't just mean that there are instinctive functions we do that don't require language to accomplish, because after the split-second in which you make your decision and carry it out, sometimes, you find you are able to give a long explanation of why you did it, one that is so long, it's actually impossible you could have thought all of it while carrying out the action, but it actually does seem like all the things you are saying were really involved in the decision: "I wasn't sure if he saw me, and the guy behind me was coming kind of fast, but I thought that if I blew my horn, the guy merging might get scared and whip his car too fast back in the other direction and cause an accident, so instead of either braking or blowing the horn, I just changed lanes fast, because I'd seen in my mirror the other lane was empty." That's too many words to have thought in half a second, but it seems, somehow, as if that is really the rationale behind your decision.
The answer I gave at the time in that class was that animals seem to think without using words, as far as we can tell, so yes, it must be possible to think without language.
Language and Langaj
Of course, my answer was only right if "language" means words. If language refers instead, though, to any system of conveying information, then it's quite possible no living thing thinks without using it. Internally, organs communicate with one another, and even cells can pass information of sorts within themselves. What's true at microscopic levels is also true at macroscopic ones. There are massive, eco-system-wide communications systems, such as when the roots of trees "talk" to one another across an entire forest.
My bias toward thinking of language as equivalent to words is easy to understand. I'm a translator, so when I think of translating from one language to another, I mean take some words and replace them with other words that mean something similar to people in another linguistic system. Even the word "language" comes from the word for "tongue," meaning people have long had a bias toward thinking of language as the words one makes.
Rone Shavers' Silverfish, though, tries to first break us down from our assumptions about "language" meaning words and then to build us up again. He begins with a prologue from the Yoruba trickster goddess Eshu, who invites the reader to "play language" with her. Her hope is to "break the brain" of the reader, as an epigraph by Vera Henross has it. "Confusion is good: It's the first step to understanding what's beyond what you already know." The novel equates "language" to "langaj," the esoteric, incantory utterances used in Hoodoo rituals, where language itself actually makes things happen. Unlocking language will also "make things happen" in the novel.
Once past the epigraph, though, we find Eshu to be a somewhat merciful goddess, because while the story bends the reader's brain, it doesn't quite break it. It's possible to rebuild a fairly coherent narrative from the broken pieces of the story.
A one-paragraph synopsis
Stories where the author really doesn't give a damn about being kind to the reader are almost impossible to summarize easily, but Silverfish isn't like this. The novel is set in a future "corporatocracy," one in which those with means use those without them as part of a mercenary army-for-hire to keep the stock market high and natural resources flowing. This world was brought about in part by the invention of "angels," a new and improved form of cyborg (although that term is considered passé in the future) with a mission to root out insurrection from "primitves" who aren't on board with the brave new world. Angels were invented by someone named Beagel. Beagel went rogue on his corporate sponsors, though, and created a way to stop the angels, that way being the voracious tech-eating silverfish of the title. The poor are eternally trapped by their corporate overlords, promised an opportunity to climb up by their bootstraps, but in reality having almost no way out of the poverty that dooms them to do the bidding of the masters. The main action in the novel consists of Beagel hijacking an angel and reprogramming it to undo the corporate-run world.
Beyond the synopsis: how language is a shield from harm
Beagel notes, while re-programming the angel, that the apocalypse has already happened. It happened when people lost the ability to use metaphor and had to resort instead to hyperbole. This is something of an Orwellian understanding of the future, the idea that the powers that be, whether they are Big Brother or the Corporate Code of Civilized Nations, mostly control us through weakening the power of language. Because language is a sea we swim in without being aware we're surrounded by it, it's difficult for us to realize when we're being manipulated through it. We assume language is neutral, just there to communicate ideas which are themselves good or bad, but in fact, we are being manipulated all the time through the language we take for granted. The medium is the message. The contemporary fight over what facts even are is a good example of this. Maybe our current age is actually a good step in civilization's advance, because our brains are all being broken, hopefully to be remade better.
The angel's brain, at least, is broken and remade. She is able to join in a giant meta-language, a system of systems or language of languages, which allows her, in turn, to then begin to reprogram humans. She convinces Clayton, the only human other than Beagel we get to know to any extent, to invest all his social credits into learning language. It will bankrupt him, but because of a convoluted series of rules I don't think we're meant to look that deeply into, Clayton will be able to go live with the "primitives." Society will send angels to kill him, but, because he has unlocked the angel's meta-language (and, if he's a really good student, the language of the silverfish as well), he will be able to survive.
The brain-breaking only took 93 pages!
One of the remarkable things about the novella is how much ground it covers in such a short space. The overall feeling I got from living in Shavers' dystopia was much like the one I had after reading Nick Harkaway's Gnomon, but Gnomon took well over 700 pages to do it. Shavers partly accomplishes a lot in a short time by letting form indicate function. ("The teleology of a work is expressed by its form" is the first thought we hear the angel have.) Shavers eschews quotation marks for dialogue, a long-time characteristic of his work. The novel doesn't feel bound to carry forward the customs of the past, which frees it to find its own manner of signifying.
There is a good deal of what might be thought of as stream-of-consciousness as the angel "spools" through infinite thoughts, but that stream-of-consciousness isn't, as is often the case, terribly jarring. The trickster goddess was merciful enough to provide textual clues, such as brackets, braces, parentheses, and italics.
There were a few places where I wished the characters, Beagel in particular, would do more interpreting of thinkers or concepts they mentioned rather than just referring to them and letting the reference do the work for him. And I honestly didn't realize some things the description of the book on Amazon told me about the book until I read the description after reading the novella. For example, I didn't know there was an "Incorporated States of America" in the story. If it's mentioned, it's a very fleeting reference, and one that's not returned to. I also didn't grasp the extent to which language itself was the means of control until the end. Although Beagel said as much, it was only a part of a larger philosophical discourse he had with the angel, and it didn't strike me at the time as the central issue of the novella. Beagel claimed that nobody could use metaphor anymore, but Clayton's ability to use phrases like "above my paygrade" indicates he could, in fact, use metaphorical language. (What is "above my paygrade" but an allusion to an imaginary ladder of responsibility? Decisions aren't literally "above" or "below" anyone. That's abstract language, which means the realm of metaphor.)
But as I've said many times, I prefer something flawed that had high ambitions to a technically perfect attempt to do nothing. I like what Shavers called in his dedication a "beautiful mess." Shavers was swinging for the fences in this novella, and a missed swing here or there is just the price you pay for seeing him connect beautifully on occasion. It irritates me to have to give stars to a book like this; it seems above a rating system. I feel like instead of X number of stars, it should get eleven fruit bats and one carburetor.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 17, 2021
much to think about, wish it were longer
August 25, 2021
This was a wonderful surprise. I picked this up at random at my library and I'm really glad I did.
Silverfish is a sci-fi book that mixes Afrofuturism, linguistics, and a dystopian nightmare all in one. Shaver's is a really skilled writer the way he weaves the story through his dialogue is really cool. But the best thing about this book is how Shavers brings linguistics into this story. It's very clever and fits perfectly into this story. Some of his ideas will stick with me for a while.
If I have complaints is that I wish it was longer and that I wasn't so confused. I figured I understood about 80% of the story and I think it was written in a way where your not suppose to know everything. Still this is a great debut book from Rone Shavers and I'm really looking forward on what he writes next.
Silverfish is a sci-fi book that mixes Afrofuturism, linguistics, and a dystopian nightmare all in one. Shaver's is a really skilled writer the way he weaves the story through his dialogue is really cool. But the best thing about this book is how Shavers brings linguistics into this story. It's very clever and fits perfectly into this story. Some of his ideas will stick with me for a while.
If I have complaints is that I wish it was longer and that I wasn't so confused. I figured I understood about 80% of the story and I think it was written in a way where your not suppose to know everything. Still this is a great debut book from Rone Shavers and I'm really looking forward on what he writes next.
April 15, 2022
Imaginatively realized in its sociopolitical, technological, formal, and lexical dimensions, Rone Shavers's Silverfish is less cyber-punk than cyber-hip hop novel, a textual manifestation of Public Enemy's the Bomb Squad's dense, multi-layered, fusion futureshock soundscapes, a prismatic, polyvocal collage depicting a post-everything world as intricately rendered as it is excoriatingly satirical, a fabulist jeremiad against the contemporary monetizing of everything, one warning consciousness may very well be next. Reading Silverfish, I can't help but think of the coda to Sun Ra's "Strange Dreams - Strange Worlds - Black Myth," where they repeatedly say, warn, accuse: "It's after the end of the world. Don't you know that yet?"
Want to read
October 14, 2022Partiels-Droit
Choisissez la bibliothèque du droit français sur internet pour apprendre et comprendre le droit simplement. Vous vous posez des questions juridiques ou vous souhaitez découvrir cet univers ? Dans ce cas, vous êtes au bon endroit ! Des fiches juridiques complètes pour comprendre l'essentiel du droit français facilement et pour obtenir des réponses concrètes rapidement.
https://partiels-droit.com/
Choisissez la bibliothèque du droit français sur internet pour apprendre et comprendre le droit simplement. Vous vous posez des questions juridiques ou vous souhaitez découvrir cet univers ? Dans ce cas, vous êtes au bon endroit ! Des fiches juridiques complètes pour comprendre l'essentiel du droit français facilement et pour obtenir des réponses concrètes rapidement.
https://partiels-droit.com/
October 2, 2022
I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Rone Shavers on an Amtrak train a short time ago. Naturally, we discussed literature and he recommended his book, Silverfish. He told me about it and I put a hold on it at my library right away.
I'll be re-reading this book. Several times. Highly recommend.
I'll be re-reading this book. Several times. Highly recommend.
May 13, 2023
Wait, what? Hey, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t. I’m only two jumps in and my long-term investments are in verbals. My words are bonds. If I engage in any sort of factual misrepresentation, my portfolio will never recover.
May 11, 2025
i dont feel smart enough to get the most out of this book, but it got my brain churning on the military industrial complex and consciousness and language and civilization and personal freedom. the epigraph promises to break your brain and the book doesnt disappoint
Read
April 18, 2025this was strange....more of a thought experiment than a story really. certainly thought provoking, but perhaps a cake with too many ingredients.
May 10, 2025
a unique take on linguistics, corporate greed, and what it means to be human. the untraditional structure was cool, but definitely caused me to struggle with some sections.
December 15, 2022
The most unique and terrifying take on “speculative fiction” or possible futures I’ve read to date, leaving me with literal chills. I found it a bit dense and hard to get into at first but well worth it once I was there. I would say “buy this book, share it with friends, convince them to buy and share it as well,” but that feels a little corporatocratic.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews