Blueprints of the Afterlife - Softcover

Boudinot, Ryan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802170919 ISBN 13: 9780802170910

Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat, 2012

Synopsis

From the “wickedly talented” (Boston Globe) and “darkly funny” (New York Times Book Review) Ryan Boudinot, Blueprints of the Afterlife is a tour de force.

It is the Afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called “the Age of F***ed Up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked.

Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who’s been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time—climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age—Blueprints of the Afterlife will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.

About this title

Reviews

Boudinot returns to the comic, inventive form that garnered him attention for Misconception (2009), this time anticipating dark times to come. Set in the not-too-distant future, where the recent past is known as the Age of Fucked Up Shit, the novel introduces a world colonized by clones, computers, and free-roaming polar bears, and where Manhattan is being fully reconstructed in Seattle. Dishwasher Woo-jin Kan, a self-aware dullard suffering from a crippling overabundance of empathy, is haunted by a reappearing corpse. Mysterious Dirk Bickle offers Abby Fogg a job recovering important data from one-time pop star Kylee Asparagus and her subservient team of clones. Veteran Al Skinner recalls his bloody war experiences. Narcissistic actor Nethan Jordan recounts his adventures in a bawdy hit TV series. And running throughout are excerpts from a recorded interview with Luke Piper, creator of the Bionet, a neurotransmitted Web connection that unites everyone in all their uproarious despair. Boudinot’s madcap world and mastery of various voices evoke Douglas Adams or George Saunders, but his novel is a work of sheer originality, readability, and joy. --Jonathan Fullmer

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802170919
• ISBN 13: 9780802170910
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416