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Showing posts with label Boudinot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boudinot. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Blueprints of the Afterlife, by Ryan Boudinot

Extraordinary post-apocalyptic novel. In the years after the FUS (Fucked Up Shit), residents of the Pacific Northwest are creating New York Alki on Bainbridge Island, using newman (essentially cyborg) labor, people are hooked into Bionet, which can be hacked by DJs who control them, the climate is fucked, polar bears (ACK) are gone, a rogue glacier has hunted down cities...
Overwhelming, epic stew of ideas and words, brilliantly done, but not super focused.
I loved it, it read like Bacigalupi in some ways, but I do wish it was a tiny bit tighter. So good though, and wildly different from Boudinot's first novel, Misconception, which I also thought was insanely good.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Misconception, by Ryan Boudinot

Wonderful, twisted little book. From two of the most unreliable narrators I've seen in fiction, this tiny masterpiece was such a blurry little nightmare. Even to the last line, nothing was clear. Kat and Cedar haven't seen each other since they were teens, at the end of a first-love summer that went incredibly awry. 20 years later, Kat needs Cedar to sign off some documents her publishers require, saying that he won't sue over what she has written in her memoir- parts of which she has written from his point of view. The power of the novel lies in the space inbetween her memories and his, and between truth and fiction, and the loopy meta-ness of having Cedar read an Amazon review of Kat's first collection of short stories by a Ryan Boudinot- sneaky!
Wonderful.