Skin Elegies
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Olsen’s fascinating experiment achieves heft by the accumulation of personal and collective loss, which makes the nightmarish coda feel eerily plausible. Together, the elegant and heartbreaking set pieces prompt deep reflection on the connections between minds and bodies, and on where both are ultimately headed.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
Skin Elegies uses the metaphor of mind-upload technologies to explore questions about the relationship of the cellular brain to the bytes-entity to which it gives rise; memory and our connection to the idea of pastness; refugeeism (geographical, somatic, temporal, aesthetic); and where the human might end and something else begin.
At the center stands an American couple who have fled their increasingly repressive country, now under the authoritarian rule of the Reformation Government, by transferring to a quantum computer housed in North Africa. The novel’s structure mimics a constellation of firing neurons—a sparking collage of many tiny narraticules flickering through the brain of one of the refugees as it is digitized. Those narraticules comprise nine larger stories over the course of the novel: the Fukushima disaster; the day the Internet was turned on; the final hours of the Battle of Berlin; John Lennon’s murder; an assisted suicide in Switzerland; the Columbine massacre; a woman killed by a domestic abuser; a Syrian boy making his way to Berlin; and the Challenger disaster.
With his characteristic brilliance and unrivaled uniqueness, Lance Olsen delivers an innovative, speculative, literary novel in the key of Margaret Atwood, Stanislaw Lem, and J.G. Ballard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Olsen (My Red Heaven) draws on stories of historical disasters for this impactful speculative vision of a totalitarian future. In the year 2072, a couple elects to each have their consciousness uploaded to the new Refugee Mind Upload Project. Most of the text unfurls in fragmented bits of data and shards of memories uploaded by others over the past century, beginning with the Soviet offensive on Germany in 1945 and also including the Challenger explosion, the Columbine shooting, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and John Lennon's murder. Intimate dramas play out against the backdrop of history: a scene of horrific domestic abuse takes place during Nixon's resignation speech, an elderly woman pursues assisted suicide on 9/11 as her doctor watches the plane strike the second tower. Olsen's fascinating experiment achieves heft by the accumulation of personal and collective loss, which makes the nightmarish coda feel eerily plausible. Together, the elegant and heartbreaking set pieces prompt deep reflection on the connections between minds and bodies, and on where both are ultimately headed.