Drones and Puppets: An Analysis
In one week, ANTHROPICA will be released into a world that is nearly as terrible as the one depicted within its pages. From a commercial standpoint, the Author realizes that the timing of this release could not be any worse. Not only does the world continue to languish within its COVID-19 limbo, but the uptick in book-buying and book-reading registered in the early months of the pandemic has seemingly exhausted itself, as depression and despondency have sank deeper into the hearts and minds of hominids everywhere. Add to this the proximity to an American Election so swollen with Meaning, and a public sphere saturated with a rhetoric normally reserved for fantasy epics (good vs. evil; darkness vs. light; “the dark lord on his dark throne”; etc.), and it is clear that the last thing most people are prepared to do right now is tuck into a 500-page apocalypse comedy that both lampoons human myopia and wrongheadedness, and creates a theory to explain why we have somehow survived to this point despite them. As a capitalist enterprise, ANTHROPICA is surely doomed.
But there is another way in which ANTHROPICA’s release is timed perfectly. Here are a few hidden-in-plain-sight Problematics that the book identifies or concerns itself with, each of which has never been more relevant:
Capitalist theories and free markets that rely on “growth” willfully ignore the fact that no human enterprise can grow forever. Eventually resources are exhausted. Then what?
Our cockroach-like infestation of the planet must eventually reach a tipping point; we cannot continue to proliferate without accelerating the disappearance of all the things that fuel this proliferation.
Attention to and progress on sociopolitical identity-issues (as admirable as they may be) will do nothing to prevent any of various global cataclysms, some of which are happening right in front of us as we go about our business of decrying injustice.
Human technological progress has relegated human relationships (and to a lesser extent, the human mind itself) to the margins of the Life Project. We have been enslaved by the technologies that we believe have freed us.
The best thing for the universe might very well be for human beings to be eradicated, as ANTHROPICA’s arguable protagonist, Laszlow Katasztrófa, fervently believes.
For all our reverence for human history — a history that includes an evolutionary track toward consciousness, the development of complex social and political systems, the birth of values like “freedom” and the quest for “a more perfect union,” an investment in clans and communities, and a slow movement from overt, feudal brutality to covert, system-based brutality — the fact is humans just got here and will be gone before the universe can blink.
These are only a few of the issues ANTHROPICA identifies, as it creates a textual playground that, the Author hopes, conjures up the sort of heightened madness and debauchery that accompanies the fall of all empires. It is the soundtrack (so to speak) of our current unraveling.
So while the Author is sad, in advance, for the quick and certain plunge that ANTHROPICA will make into the great ocean of obscurity that swallows most novels, he is also delighted — in the half-ironic way that is the only pathway to delight available to our traumatized and unhappy Author — to see that the book he has written is truly a book for this moment. It is both an exploration of our shortsightedness, our inability to see the burning forest for the burning trees, AND a loving sort of testament to our endurance, our ability to make it this far. It is an exploration of rage and despair, but also a divining rod for the love and light that continue to survive. At its heart, despite its pandemonium, is hope.
The Author knows you will not read his novel. But knowing something, and hoping for its opposite are hardly alien to the human animal. And we at Poets & Suicides are pleased, perhaps for the first time in this publication’s unseen and unknown history, to be hitched to the Author’s dark star. Alis grave nil. May language release you from its lies.