Super Flat

[skasm]

Though some people might find this book and review interesting.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0324/lim.php

[glubose]

Heh,

Yeah, I read Super Flat Times for class last semester. After months of tearing out my hair trying to think of how to write stories set after some vast singularity of some sort takes place (obvious immediate influence from The Invisibles and Terence McKenna, who I just can't get out of my head), I'm given this fellow to read.

The author came to our class (his book had just been published), but he didn't mention the book being some attempt at understanding life after hyperdimensional shift, however. And I was too chicken to mention my encounters with the idea of the Singularity and ask how it might connect with his book somehow.

It was weird--I guess one of those instances of synchronicity--I remember telling my writing instructor that I wanted to write science fiction but like how Raymond Carver would do it--or was it to a classmate, or to my notebook. Either way, one of the first things I see on the cover is a blurb from some guy using Carver and SF to describe Derby's prose.

So yeah, I don't know what his influences are, but it was quite the special moment when I found the book I had wanted to write and was given the great pleasure of reading it instead.

Devon

PS. Anyone else have any encounters with books they were intending to write if it weren't for the fact they already existed?

[Luna]

I'd like to have written any of Derrick Jensen's books. They've got nothing to do with psychedelics but they talk a great deal of the death trap that our civilization is, and one of his books (A Language Older Than Words) has a great deal to do with the conciousness of(and communications with) non-humans. He's got a beautiful writing style, he writes in such a way that you can't put it down even when he's graphically describing atrocities that make you wish you could go back to ignorance. Pure brilliance.