Ryan Boudinot_Blueprints of the Afterlife (Sci-Fi) MOBI

“[Ryan Boudinot] is a second- or even third-generation slipstreamer himself, and it's interesting to see how easily the mode fits him. . . . His work illustrates the dictum that to channel the zeitgeist accurately, you need to go pretty much round the bend of sanity, logic, and good taste. . . . Boudinot's style is light, breezy, and colloquial, hiding much craft and thought behind its addictive surface. . . . With its leitmotif of ‘superposition,’ the physics riff most familiar from the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, this novel pinwheels out multivalent explanations for almost everything, demanding that the reader navigate his or her own best-determined path of causality through the sly and shifting narrative. . . . Blueprints of the Afterlife exists in a shining lineage that extends right back ultimately to William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, the novel that taught us all how to conflate esoteric conspiracy theory with history with lowbrow pop culture with surrealism and absurdity with transgressive assaults on propriety and the bourgeoisie. . . . Boudinot's novel, with near-Neal Stephensonian intricacy and panache, is a brave attempt to forecast the ‘afterlife’ subsequent to our culture's imminent, nigh-inevitable collapse. Yet it's no preachy tract, but rather a glorious carnival of errors, terrors, and numinous possibilities.”—Paul Di Filippo, Barnes & Noble Review