How to Mutate and Take Over the World - Hardcover

St. Jude; R. U. Sirius

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345392167 ISBN 13: 9780345392169

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1996

Synopsis

OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS FOR AN EXPLODED POST-NOVEL
This is not a novel.
Don't think you can just hold your nose and jump into this.
You might get boiled or vaporized. Anodized.
THIS IS NOT A NOVEL
Before you start reading an exploded post-novel, you should think strategy.
While we do recommend reading this book from front to back--left to right--you can skip around as you please. It is disguised as a scrapbook. You can channelsurf it. Or graze through sections, munch munch munch. After you acquire the taste, you'll feel strong enough to start at the beginning and read through to the end, in precisely that order. Don't take too much at one sitting. Do not overdose. It's dense, fast. Things get technical. There's a relentless quality to the first-person narrative that may exhaust you secondhand. Read only until the vertigo overwhelms you. When you find yourself crying out, "For god's sake, give it a break!!!". . . well, exactly. Put the book down. . . gently. Rest. Watch TV. Read Ben Is Dead. Go somewhere watery and lie in the hard radiation. Read a nonexploded novel. Take up crime. Then. . .
Read a little at a time. Swallow it slowly like crème br-lée. Or hold it in your cheek like Copenhagen Smokeless. But do not rush. If you go slowly enough, by the time you're done, the made-for-TV movie will be out. Starring Steven Seagal as R. U. Sirius and Whoopi Goldberg as St. Jude.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

STRUCTIONS FOR AN EXPLODED POST-NOVEL<br>This is not a novel.<br>Don't think you can just hold your nose and jump into this.<br>You might get boiled or vaporized. Anodized.<br>THIS IS NOT A NOVEL<br>Before you start reading an exploded post-novel, you should think strategy.<br>While we do recommend reading this book from front to back--left to right--you can skip around as you please. It is disguised as a scrapbook. You can channelsurf it. Or graze through sections, munch munch munch. After you acquire the taste, you'll feel strong enough to start at the beginning and read through to the end, in precisely that order. Don't take too much at one sitting. Do not overdose. It's dense, fast. Things get technical. There's a relentless quality to the first-person narrative that may exhaust you secondhand. Read only until the vertigo overwhelms you. When you find yourself crying out, "For god's sake, give it a break!!!". . . well, exactly. Put the book down. . . gently. Rest. Watch

Reviews

In the very near future, a war will break out over the direction of the Internet. On the side of greater control of online behavior will be an authoritarian-minded government and a strained coalition of feminists and right-wingers concerned with matters of decency. On the other side will be the "cypherpunks" who develop encryption codes too complex to be broken, media pranksters for whom the message is the medium, and the child pornographers, pedophiles and hatemongers who exploit a "free" Net. The multiple authors of this novel, who include two pseudonymous founders of the futuristic magazine Mondo 2000, plus some of their E-mail buddies, take this premise and "explode" the subsequent narrative. That is, they make themselves the protagonists, with R.U. Sirius appearing as a rock/TV/political star and St. Jude as a laptop guerrilla. The narrative includes E-mail between the authors and their editor at Ballantine, and a dizzying array of graphics featuring varying column widths, different fonts for different types of communications and agitprop photos. What all this adds up to seems to be, essentially, a collection of E-mail files with delusions of grandeur. The book offers no real story line, no viable characters and absolutely no perspective, though it does include myriad examples of the lively, punning language of the Net ("scroom" for screw them, for example). The narrative makes fun of itself, and of us for reading it, and yet demands that the issues it raises be taken seriously. Presciently, it also offers prewritten reviews of the book that are remarkably on-target: for instance, "smug and glib to the point of exhaustion." Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It is hard to describe a novel--or as this book styles itself, "an exploded post-novel" --that doesn't have a plot, or, rather, has several, both sequentially and simultaneously. In fact, discussions between the authors and the editor as to whether the book has or even needs a plot (discussions accompanied by the authors' glee at having sold the book and their chagrin at having prematurely spent the advance) form just one thread among the many that make up the book's somewhat curious approach to narrative fiction, which may seem less daunting if you think of it as a 1990s version of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. What's it about? Censorship on the Net, or maybe sex, drugs, and music in the cybernetic age. Whatever. It's set in the present, or at least a present, and the near future, and typographically, it mimics hard copy downloaded in various fonts and styles. It's vastly amusing, very confusing, and from time to time, it both requires and stimulates thought. What more do you want from fiction? Dennis Winters

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345392167
• ISBN 13: 9780345392169
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 305