Sensation (Spectacular Fiction) - Softcover

Mamatas, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604863544 ISBN 13: 9781604863543

Publisher: PM Press, 2011

Synopsis

When Julia Hernandez leaves her husband, shoots a real estate developer, and then vanishes without a trace, she slips out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum—a place where human history is both guided and thwarted by the conflict between a species of anarchist wasps and a collective of hyperintelligent spiders. When Julia's ex-husband Raymond spots her in a grocery store he doesn't usually patronize, he's soon drawn into an underworld of radical political gestures where Julia is the new media sensation of both this world and the Simulacrum. Told ultimately from the collective point of view of another species, this allegorical novel plays with the elements of the Simulacrum apparent in real life—media reports, business speak, blog entries, text messages, psychological-evaluation forms, and the lies lovers tell one another—and poses a fascinating idea that displaces human beings from the center of the universe and makes them simply the pawns of two warring species.

 

About this title

About the Author

Nick Mamatas is the author of the novels Move Under Ground and Under My Roof, as well as the short story collection You Might Sleep. His writing has been translated into German, Italian, and Greek, and he has been nominated for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Awards and the Kurd Lasswitz Prize. He is the coeditor of the online magazine Clarkesworld and his essays have appeared in the Clamor, In These Times, the New Humanist, the Smart Set, and the Village Voice. He lives in Oakland, California.

Review

"The Majestic Plural, or Royal We, is well known—Sensation introduces the Arachnid Plural, the we of spiders, the ones that live inside you. The spiders care about you—deeply—and want to use you in a millennial war against certain parasitic wasps. No, I was wrong. The spiders only want to help. So let them in."  —Zachary Mason, New York Times-best-selling author, The Lost Books of the Odyssey

"Mamatas is a powerfully acerbic writer, both in fiction and online. His acid wit is infamous, and it is on splendid display in Sensation, which is alive with scornful insight about pop culture, the net, and politics. I recommend it highly." —Cory Doctorow, www.boingboing.net

"(A) self-consciously [post-modern] third novel. This accumulation of pop-culture babble, layered with thin insight and metatextual archness, is amusing enough in an epigrammatic way." —Publishers Weekly (June 22, 2011)

"Sensation, in many ways, does what all good science fiction aims to do: it offers a critique of the status quo. It depicts an alternative in order to highlight the problems in our reality." —www.htmlgiant.com

About this edition

• Publisher: PM Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1604863544
• ISBN 13: 9781604863543
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224