Tonguing the Zeitgeist - Softcover

Olsen, Lance

3.7

40 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1882633040 ISBN 13: 9781882633043

Publisher: Permeable Pr, 1994

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

So you want to be a rock 'n' roll star? In a future that isn't distant enough, you'll have to sell your soul to MTV just to pick up a guitar. And then they start carving you up, making you over in the mega-media image of glitter and bone.

Poor Ben Tendo, he just wanted to play music and make love to Jessika. . . _Tonguing the Zeitgeist_, finalist for the 1995 Philip K. Dick Award for best science fiction novel, is a social satire in the tradition of Anthony Burgess's _A Clockwork Orange_ about the music industry and the commercialization of the arts.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Lance Olsen's many books include the novels _Time Famine_, _Burnt_, and _Live From Earth_, as well as the first full-length study of the godfather of cyberpunk, William Gibson. His prose and poetry have appeared in over two hundred magazines and anthologies, among them _Fiction International_, _The Pushcart Prize XXIII 1999_, and _VLS_. Born in New Jersey and raised in Venezuela, he has sampled Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, Kentucky, London, and Oxford, but now lives on a farm in northern Idaho with his artist-wife, Andi, and their modem.

From Booklist:

While Olsen's recent study of William Gibson identifies the cyberpunk founder as one of his chief literary influences, his latest novel owes at least as much to the macabre vision of Hieronymous Bosch. By turns deliciously satirical and disturbingly prophetic, the book takes the rock-music industry for a ride into a twisted twenty-first century. Ben Tendo is an unassuming order-taker for an offbeat mail-order porno supplier, Beautiful Mutants, Ltd., and also moonlights for the heavy-metal band Lithium Breed in postearthquake Seattle. When every member of the reigning media-anointed grunge band is assassinated by a psychopath, the music industry must find a new puppet to peddle, and Ben Tendo is it. Kidnapped, forcibly addicted, and implanted with a new voice-box, Ben soon learns the road to fame is paved with market shares and can end as quickly as it began. Olsen's densely packed, kaleidoscopic prose paints a nightmare vision of a near future spawned from our worst contemporary fears, such as rampant global warming, environmental decay, and an increasingly sick and cynical media. Brilliant black comedy. Carl Hays

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.