Scan barcode
sisanmo's review against another edition
5.0
Initially a hard book, this is especially suggested to those who love plots where for more than half of the book the narrator keeps scattering the pieces all over. It’s up to you to give sense to the narration, to detect reality from fiction. I considered it a wonderful narrative transposition of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.
A great discovery!
A great discovery!
mamimitanaka's review against another edition
5.0
When people click my page, I assume the thing they’ll first see is my list of favorite literary genres, as follows [and I know this is admittedly kinda trite, but bear with me here] - “postmodernism, fantasy, horror, literary, theory, magical realism, classics, western, drama, philosophy, gothic, weird fiction, speculative, surrealism, experimental”. Now take a second to let it sink in, as I did, that “Animal Money” arguably encompasses not one, not two, not three, but TWELVE of these fifteen superlatives, and then realize there is no possible fucking way I could have ever not absolutely loved this as completely and obsessively as I did. This is nothing short of an unbelievably, limitlessly creative tapestry of mind-obliterating psychedelic imagination working at level ten-fucking-thousand the entire way through, a riotous neverending circus of ideas, shifting narrators and timelines, surreal imagery, perfected interplay between the literate and the pulp, economic and political theory, fantasy and reality, and literally everything you can imagine in between, congealing in a phantasmagoric experimental dark fantasy comedic nightmare so genuinely ambitious that Dali, Marx, Pynchon, Lovecraft and Lautremont may very well all have knelt reverently before an altar with this book atop it. This is one of those things that just comes along every rare once in awhile and revivifies my own desire to make art and to fully embrace everything beautiful, wild, fucked up and revelatory about the human creative process in all its glory and history-spanning influence. This is a landmark in my lifelong love for speculative fiction and Cisco here has created something so immense, so cerebral, so mind-bogglingly huge in its creative scope that I almost don't even know where to begin in my analysis, but there's so much here to unpack and so much worthy of discussion that I have to give it my best shot.
Y'know, as much as I loved it I could see why some people would find this novel to be a mess, an explosion of weird wild insanity that engulfs so much range that it results in the novel feeling disconnected, just because there is so much working here at so many levels and so much variation on themes from a page-to-page basis that I could see why some people would get absolutely lost in it and end up giving up out of frustration, trying to find a clear point and failing amidst all the narrative chaos that snowballs upon itself and never lets up. It's understandable because Cisco really is working at maximum overdrive here - every five or so pages of this novel contains concepts and themes that many other sff authors would spend entire three hundred page novels on, and I really don't think I'm exaggerating. This is sheer maximalism in its most realized incarnation, one so massively enveloping that the reader has no choice but to just let go and be swept away in. And considering who I am, who is always itching for more fiction that packs itself to overstuffing with ideas and classification-smashing abandon without a care in the world, this feels absolutely made for me, especially in its integration of its constant sense of devilishly clever class-conscious satire combined with an unabashed [and completely unhinged] adoration for genre fiction, something Cisco seems radically attuned to in realizing just how much genre can elevate a novel, rather than undermine it as many of its detractors throughout literary history would claim.
Yes, there is indeed an ever-present "tropeyness" that abides every page of "Animal Money", an endless torrent of synapse-activating engagement with sci-fi and fantasy mechanics. Androids, cults, Lovecraftian horrors, space travel, time travel, reality bending, alien invasion, zombies and phantoms, body horror, apocalypses, anthropomorphism, etcetera ad [ostensibly] infinitum - point is, if you can think of something confined to the realms of the fantastical and the magical, Cisco, at the very least, touches upon it here. But there's consistently a very clear understanding of the limitations of tropes, and Cisco doesn't ever really linger on a specific cliche so much as he allows the narrative to layer so much of these disparate ideas atop each other that they end up transforming into something whose scope ends up revealing not only the deeply unique and dense narrative texture that is created by weaving so many of these things together but also results in something so phantasmagorically explosive on its own terms that it ends up feeling independent of tropes, despite having such an overflowing abundance of them. Basically, Cisco has looped "cliches" around on themselves so hard that he completely broke through their own limits, resulting in the creative canvas of "Animal Money" feeling truly boundless in the most visionary, mind-expanding way. The final result feels like a frenzied love affair with all things speculative while also completely bursting from its chains and transforming into something that goes beyond the pale for anything in that sphere, or at least anything I’ve read, and I would be surprised if there is much of it that matches the absolute vivaciousness of this book.
But even beyond all the textural detail, there really is a hugely prevalent thematic purpose to all the psychedelic genre-chaos being indulged in here. Fantasy is such a presence here because Cisco is exploring the fantasy of the system, especially the way this system is reliant on the assigning of monetary value and capital as an absolutely dominant governing force in human [and animal] lives. The “central” plot here - there are really three overlapping major perspectives about as integral as each other, but the one that sets the story in motion - concerns five foreign economists who, after inexplicable head injuries, come together in a university in the fictional South American state of Archizoguayla to write a thesis on the titular concept of “animal money”, a nebulously defined yet apparently ostensibly communalistic form of monetary exchange that revolutionizes its own alien form of capital, which leads to the five attracting the ire of world governments and the bourgeoisie classes who double down on trying to eliminate this rapidly [and magically] expanding idea from circulation, including trying to make the economists unpersons. What’s interesting [and hilarious] here are that economists in “Animal Money”’s world are less like what we would imagine in reality and more like cultists, engaging in bizarre rites and routines and exchanging coded phrases amongst each other, even down to the protagonists’ creation of “animal money” itself, which is staged like a taboo occult ritual. But is it really much different in reality? The protagonists are mouthpieces for the worldwide cult of neoliberal capitalism and its economic policies, and when they realize its inefficiency they decide to go against the apparatus that they have been enraptured in, one so huge that when it comes down on them full force they are unable to fully comprehend it even as they themselves have “known” it and worked in favor of it until their discovery.
The question that really feels like it’s being asked here is - why? What purpose exactly does capital have beyond being a fantasy of the bourgeoisie to keep those under their influence in line, money as means for herding the populace and keeping them in control and in numb complacent apathy [or despair, if you’re one who can’t sustain themselves because of lack of the almighty dollar in your bank account]? Much like the economists’ own thesis, there’s nothing concrete about material reality that adheres to capital as we know it, yet those of the capitalist class and its defense force must uphold it as though it is a force as natural as the world itself and must necessarily remain unchanged [religion would also be an applicable apparatus for comparison here as bolstered by the religious subtext throughout the novel, and it’s no secret that religion and elite hegemonies have acted as bread and butter to one another for much of history]. But this is obviously for the ruling classes' own benefit, for changes as revolutionary as those that occur in “Animal Money” would shake their iron grip on the world and its resources to the very foundation, which cannot be duly accepted by these classes. What is capitalism other than a man made system as fallible as any other, unnaturally upheld as natural by the power hegemonies that need to keep it upright and stable at the expense of those who suffer as a result of it? What is economics and the neoliberal apparatus of “all for me, none for thee” that defines this system, other than a fantasy we’ve agreed to repeat to one another over and over until we’ve forgotten that it’s built on a lie, forgotten empathy the sanctity of other peoples’ lives for the sake of conforming to a status quo that grinds our bones to dust daily, a fantasy whose ostensible “naturalism” is so deeply integrated into our thinking that even many of those who are materially harmed by it buy into it completely?
If you’re a Marxist [or at least some kind of anti-capitalist], you’ve probably heard a phrase somewhere along the lines of “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and this is a phrase that kept entering my head at various intervals throughout this book and one that I think really gets at the heart of what Cisco is going for here. As the clamorous romp of the narrative marches forward it gives way to an increasingly entropic unfolding of events, with the world[s] and the book itself seeming to collapse under its own weight [which also formally justifies the book’s massive length], old structures being disintegrated in place of new ones so beyond the reach of what we have been conditioned to understand in our society that it feels unbelievable, unreal. “Animal Money” is such a bursting bloom of bizarre creativity because it attempts to imagine a world where neolib capitalism is unraveling and giving way to what lies beyond, something that to many would seem like complete armageddon [in light of a lack of class consciousness and centralized worker movements to set up the world after this, which the vast majority of people, being alienated from their class and labor, don’t have the means to do on an individual basis]. A world beyond this is possible but it will need the combined efforts of the oppressed and an understanding of this alienation and the fact that our current apparatus can, and will, unravel, no matter how difficult to imagine it is for most of those who live in a world ravaged by endless and unsustainable growth, especially those in the imperial core. The end of neoliberal capitalism does not have to be the end of reality but a new horizon beyond the shackles this world has endowed us with.
On the character end of things, I really appreciated SuperAesop and Assiyeh’s characters [they are the two other main storylines I mentioned earlier], because both of them respectively act as arbiters for the novel’s spec-fic fixations and political subtext while also both being richly defined characters in their own right. Through her experiments and her devotion to them, Assiyeh explores the dichotomy between fantasy and reality as her own desire for love and desire to concretely prove her own and others’ existence manifest, giving a surprisingly tragic and tender register to her as her arc unfolds, meanwhile SuperAesop truly feels like the heart of the novel and the closest thing to a true protagonist it has; a black revolutionary embittered with the chaos surrounding him, he nevertheless is always unwavering in his convictions and tries to his fullest extent to shape the world in the image he wants no matter how much state antagonism is directed his way. And character-wise he’s just incredibly charming to read, being a true eccentric whose personal and ideological diatribes are phrased very bizarrely and with a tendency to go off on tangents that nevertheless perfectly circle back to his main thesis and end up strongly illuminating not only his worldview but who he is as a person, no matter how strange his trajectory of thoughts may seem.
Also gotta love the abundance of absurdist comedy here, which is sort of to be expected for fantastic fiction this patently obsessed with all things absurd [though too an oft underrated aspect of weird literature in my experience], and the comedy helps further illustrate both the fantasy elements and the actual fantasy of what Cisco is poking fun at here. As far as mind-bending doorstop genre-busters go, I don’t find it as consistently wickedly funny as “Gravity’s Rainbow” [which is a book this shares a bloodline with in a lot of ways, if my preceding review didn’t prove that], but Cisco’s humor is more dry and more overtly sarcastic, which really lends itself perfectly to the amount of venomous anti-establishment satire being engaged in here. I found the five economists’ parts early on especially got a lot of laughs out of me, just because they’re so out of their depth when it comes to the power structures surrounding them and their unorthodox responses to their various paranoias and neuroticisms, as well as the steadfast seriousness with which they take their jobs and the concept of “animal money” that they’ve penned.
And I hate to sound like a broken record, but the sheer amount of incredible imagination here leads to setpieces so hallucinogenic and immense and there are just so many individual scenes that stick out in my mind as clear as a long, weird movie [of which one was vividly playing in my head throughout the entire duration of this book]. Cisco, while engaging with tropes like I said, never fails to put some bizarre spin on many of them as though he was dousing them into a vat of lysergic acid and just rolling with whatever strange, freakish trajectory they decided to take. There’s so much here on a page by page basis that it would be absolutely pointless to try and list everything I loved [because it was pretty much all of it], but I feel like I have to mention some absolute favorites: SuperAesop running from Urtruvel’s infohazardous posters in the subway station, second-Long’s strange astro travels through a Black Lodge-like dimension ala Twin Peaks, Assiyeh’s cosmic adventures, the Arieto scenes where it basically turns into a supernatural action movie, the story-in-a-story about the monastery, and especially, which has probably some of my favorite descriptive work I’ve read in a fiction novel since my reading journey began. There’s so many others, and those were just off the top of my head; Cisco really knows how to craft the fuck out of a scene, he is able to milk powerful and evocative imagery for all its worth and he keeps this momentum going for nearly eight-hundred pages. To say it’s entertaining would be like calling the Atlantic Ocean a bit wet.
Finally, I don't usually do this kind of thing but I feel like I at least have to mention the cover, because it’s just so obviously amazing and so clearly tells the reader that they know what they’re getting into the second they see it so absolutely nobody going into this will get the wrong idea. Though what it depicts isn't entirely present in the text, it's gorgeous, mind-expansive and overwhelming, much like the novel itself and fits just perfectly as an introduction to it, and I feel like the lack of text or a blurb was the right choice to make it stand out as much as it does.
This isn't an easy novel to follow; it's jam packed with everything you can think of on every page, it follows multiple narrators and shifting timelines and at times it's hard to even tell what planet it's supposed to be taking place on. But it's one of the most intensely readable "difficult" novels I've ever read in my life, to the point where I finished this thing in less than two weeks of just being completely, obsessively immersed in the world Cisco has created so beautifully, hilariously and terrifyingly here. I enjoyed the first two works of his I read well enough, but this one has completely convinced me this guy is the real deal. This is the kind of thing that needs only to be experienced to be believed, and experienced multiple times when I have the time to return to it. If there's another modern author of fantastic fiction working at the level of delirious experimentalism and anticapitalist subtext even close to this book, I will be legit surprised. This one here is proof that speculative fiction still has a say in the overall course of contemporary literature, and its influence and capability for boundless creativity isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
"What is money? Social human power made numb and separate. Amputated under anaesthesia. You'll feel all that pain later, though. Without knowing what it is.
End money. Why let others decide how your social power, your time, your work will be unitized and stored up? Why not make your own money? Why not make your own society? What choice do you really have? A bank is a symbol of fear. End money. End it by making it. It's all counterfeit, that stuff you use. End money. It didn't come from you. It is you taken away from you by somebody else. Fed back to you in dribs and drabs and drabber everyday. Money is not a means of exchange. Money is a means of preventing exchange. Look at the countries where there is the greatest volume of money circulating: those societies are frozen. There is relentless change but there is no difference. Everyone is bound by the enchantment of the money spell, cast by the most pedestrian magicians the world has ever seen."
Y'know, as much as I loved it I could see why some people would find this novel to be a mess, an explosion of weird wild insanity that engulfs so much range that it results in the novel feeling disconnected, just because there is so much working here at so many levels and so much variation on themes from a page-to-page basis that I could see why some people would get absolutely lost in it and end up giving up out of frustration, trying to find a clear point and failing amidst all the narrative chaos that snowballs upon itself and never lets up. It's understandable because Cisco really is working at maximum overdrive here - every five or so pages of this novel contains concepts and themes that many other sff authors would spend entire three hundred page novels on, and I really don't think I'm exaggerating. This is sheer maximalism in its most realized incarnation, one so massively enveloping that the reader has no choice but to just let go and be swept away in. And considering who I am, who is always itching for more fiction that packs itself to overstuffing with ideas and classification-smashing abandon without a care in the world, this feels absolutely made for me, especially in its integration of its constant sense of devilishly clever class-conscious satire combined with an unabashed [and completely unhinged] adoration for genre fiction, something Cisco seems radically attuned to in realizing just how much genre can elevate a novel, rather than undermine it as many of its detractors throughout literary history would claim.
Yes, there is indeed an ever-present "tropeyness" that abides every page of "Animal Money", an endless torrent of synapse-activating engagement with sci-fi and fantasy mechanics. Androids, cults, Lovecraftian horrors, space travel, time travel, reality bending, alien invasion, zombies and phantoms, body horror, apocalypses, anthropomorphism, etcetera ad [ostensibly] infinitum - point is, if you can think of something confined to the realms of the fantastical and the magical, Cisco, at the very least, touches upon it here. But there's consistently a very clear understanding of the limitations of tropes, and Cisco doesn't ever really linger on a specific cliche so much as he allows the narrative to layer so much of these disparate ideas atop each other that they end up transforming into something whose scope ends up revealing not only the deeply unique and dense narrative texture that is created by weaving so many of these things together but also results in something so phantasmagorically explosive on its own terms that it ends up feeling independent of tropes, despite having such an overflowing abundance of them. Basically, Cisco has looped "cliches" around on themselves so hard that he completely broke through their own limits, resulting in the creative canvas of "Animal Money" feeling truly boundless in the most visionary, mind-expanding way. The final result feels like a frenzied love affair with all things speculative while also completely bursting from its chains and transforming into something that goes beyond the pale for anything in that sphere, or at least anything I’ve read, and I would be surprised if there is much of it that matches the absolute vivaciousness of this book.
But even beyond all the textural detail, there really is a hugely prevalent thematic purpose to all the psychedelic genre-chaos being indulged in here. Fantasy is such a presence here because Cisco is exploring the fantasy of the system, especially the way this system is reliant on the assigning of monetary value and capital as an absolutely dominant governing force in human [and animal] lives. The “central” plot here - there are really three overlapping major perspectives about as integral as each other, but the one that sets the story in motion - concerns five foreign economists who, after inexplicable head injuries, come together in a university in the fictional South American state of Archizoguayla to write a thesis on the titular concept of “animal money”, a nebulously defined yet apparently ostensibly communalistic form of monetary exchange that revolutionizes its own alien form of capital, which leads to the five attracting the ire of world governments and the bourgeoisie classes who double down on trying to eliminate this rapidly [and magically] expanding idea from circulation, including trying to make the economists unpersons. What’s interesting [and hilarious] here are that economists in “Animal Money”’s world are less like what we would imagine in reality and more like cultists, engaging in bizarre rites and routines and exchanging coded phrases amongst each other, even down to the protagonists’ creation of “animal money” itself, which is staged like a taboo occult ritual. But is it really much different in reality? The protagonists are mouthpieces for the worldwide cult of neoliberal capitalism and its economic policies, and when they realize its inefficiency they decide to go against the apparatus that they have been enraptured in, one so huge that when it comes down on them full force they are unable to fully comprehend it even as they themselves have “known” it and worked in favor of it until their discovery.
The question that really feels like it’s being asked here is - why? What purpose exactly does capital have beyond being a fantasy of the bourgeoisie to keep those under their influence in line, money as means for herding the populace and keeping them in control and in numb complacent apathy [or despair, if you’re one who can’t sustain themselves because of lack of the almighty dollar in your bank account]? Much like the economists’ own thesis, there’s nothing concrete about material reality that adheres to capital as we know it, yet those of the capitalist class and its defense force must uphold it as though it is a force as natural as the world itself and must necessarily remain unchanged [religion would also be an applicable apparatus for comparison here as bolstered by the religious subtext throughout the novel, and it’s no secret that religion and elite hegemonies have acted as bread and butter to one another for much of history]. But this is obviously for the ruling classes' own benefit, for changes as revolutionary as those that occur in “Animal Money” would shake their iron grip on the world and its resources to the very foundation, which cannot be duly accepted by these classes. What is capitalism other than a man made system as fallible as any other, unnaturally upheld as natural by the power hegemonies that need to keep it upright and stable at the expense of those who suffer as a result of it? What is economics and the neoliberal apparatus of “all for me, none for thee” that defines this system, other than a fantasy we’ve agreed to repeat to one another over and over until we’ve forgotten that it’s built on a lie, forgotten empathy the sanctity of other peoples’ lives for the sake of conforming to a status quo that grinds our bones to dust daily, a fantasy whose ostensible “naturalism” is so deeply integrated into our thinking that even many of those who are materially harmed by it buy into it completely?
If you’re a Marxist [or at least some kind of anti-capitalist], you’ve probably heard a phrase somewhere along the lines of “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and this is a phrase that kept entering my head at various intervals throughout this book and one that I think really gets at the heart of what Cisco is going for here. As the clamorous romp of the narrative marches forward it gives way to an increasingly entropic unfolding of events, with the world[s] and the book itself seeming to collapse under its own weight [which also formally justifies the book’s massive length], old structures being disintegrated in place of new ones so beyond the reach of what we have been conditioned to understand in our society that it feels unbelievable, unreal. “Animal Money” is such a bursting bloom of bizarre creativity because it attempts to imagine a world where neolib capitalism is unraveling and giving way to what lies beyond, something that to many would seem like complete armageddon [in light of a lack of class consciousness and centralized worker movements to set up the world after this, which the vast majority of people, being alienated from their class and labor, don’t have the means to do on an individual basis]. A world beyond this is possible but it will need the combined efforts of the oppressed and an understanding of this alienation and the fact that our current apparatus can, and will, unravel, no matter how difficult to imagine it is for most of those who live in a world ravaged by endless and unsustainable growth, especially those in the imperial core. The end of neoliberal capitalism does not have to be the end of reality but a new horizon beyond the shackles this world has endowed us with.
On the character end of things, I really appreciated SuperAesop and Assiyeh’s characters [they are the two other main storylines I mentioned earlier], because both of them respectively act as arbiters for the novel’s spec-fic fixations and political subtext while also both being richly defined characters in their own right. Through her experiments and her devotion to them, Assiyeh explores the dichotomy between fantasy and reality as her own desire for love and desire to concretely prove her own and others’ existence manifest, giving a surprisingly tragic and tender register to her as her arc unfolds, meanwhile SuperAesop truly feels like the heart of the novel and the closest thing to a true protagonist it has; a black revolutionary embittered with the chaos surrounding him, he nevertheless is always unwavering in his convictions and tries to his fullest extent to shape the world in the image he wants no matter how much state antagonism is directed his way. And character-wise he’s just incredibly charming to read, being a true eccentric whose personal and ideological diatribes are phrased very bizarrely and with a tendency to go off on tangents that nevertheless perfectly circle back to his main thesis and end up strongly illuminating not only his worldview but who he is as a person, no matter how strange his trajectory of thoughts may seem.
Also gotta love the abundance of absurdist comedy here, which is sort of to be expected for fantastic fiction this patently obsessed with all things absurd [though too an oft underrated aspect of weird literature in my experience], and the comedy helps further illustrate both the fantasy elements and the actual fantasy of what Cisco is poking fun at here. As far as mind-bending doorstop genre-busters go, I don’t find it as consistently wickedly funny as “Gravity’s Rainbow” [which is a book this shares a bloodline with in a lot of ways, if my preceding review didn’t prove that], but Cisco’s humor is more dry and more overtly sarcastic, which really lends itself perfectly to the amount of venomous anti-establishment satire being engaged in here. I found the five economists’ parts early on especially got a lot of laughs out of me, just because they’re so out of their depth when it comes to the power structures surrounding them and their unorthodox responses to their various paranoias and neuroticisms, as well as the steadfast seriousness with which they take their jobs and the concept of “animal money” that they’ve penned.
And I hate to sound like a broken record, but the sheer amount of incredible imagination here leads to setpieces so hallucinogenic and immense and there are just so many individual scenes that stick out in my mind as clear as a long, weird movie [of which one was vividly playing in my head throughout the entire duration of this book]. Cisco, while engaging with tropes like I said, never fails to put some bizarre spin on many of them as though he was dousing them into a vat of lysergic acid and just rolling with whatever strange, freakish trajectory they decided to take. There’s so much here on a page by page basis that it would be absolutely pointless to try and list everything I loved [because it was pretty much all of it], but I feel like I have to mention some absolute favorites: SuperAesop running from Urtruvel’s infohazardous posters in the subway station, second-Long’s strange astro travels through a Black Lodge-like dimension ala Twin Peaks, Assiyeh’s cosmic adventures, the Arieto scenes where it basically turns into a supernatural action movie, the story-in-a-story about the monastery, and especially
Spoiler
first-Long’s drugged out nightmare trip through a vision of the apocalypseFinally, I don't usually do this kind of thing but I feel like I at least have to mention the cover, because it’s just so obviously amazing and so clearly tells the reader that they know what they’re getting into the second they see it so absolutely nobody going into this will get the wrong idea. Though what it depicts isn't entirely present in the text, it's gorgeous, mind-expansive and overwhelming, much like the novel itself and fits just perfectly as an introduction to it, and I feel like the lack of text or a blurb was the right choice to make it stand out as much as it does.
This isn't an easy novel to follow; it's jam packed with everything you can think of on every page, it follows multiple narrators and shifting timelines and at times it's hard to even tell what planet it's supposed to be taking place on. But it's one of the most intensely readable "difficult" novels I've ever read in my life, to the point where I finished this thing in less than two weeks of just being completely, obsessively immersed in the world Cisco has created so beautifully, hilariously and terrifyingly here. I enjoyed the first two works of his I read well enough, but this one has completely convinced me this guy is the real deal. This is the kind of thing that needs only to be experienced to be believed, and experienced multiple times when I have the time to return to it. If there's another modern author of fantastic fiction working at the level of delirious experimentalism and anticapitalist subtext even close to this book, I will be legit surprised. This one here is proof that speculative fiction still has a say in the overall course of contemporary literature, and its influence and capability for boundless creativity isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
"What is money? Social human power made numb and separate. Amputated under anaesthesia. You'll feel all that pain later, though. Without knowing what it is.
End money. Why let others decide how your social power, your time, your work will be unitized and stored up? Why not make your own money? Why not make your own society? What choice do you really have? A bank is a symbol of fear. End money. End it by making it. It's all counterfeit, that stuff you use. End money. It didn't come from you. It is you taken away from you by somebody else. Fed back to you in dribs and drabs and drabber everyday. Money is not a means of exchange. Money is a means of preventing exchange. Look at the countries where there is the greatest volume of money circulating: those societies are frozen. There is relentless change but there is no difference. Everyone is bound by the enchantment of the money spell, cast by the most pedestrian magicians the world has ever seen."
justin_zigenis's review against another edition
4.0
End money.
What did I just read? It can be read by taking notes, using sticky tabs to track plot lines, flipping back and forth to connect the dots, painstakingly trying to make sense of the surreal metaphors and asides—or you could read it like me: like watching a parade on an unknown planet, celebrating a holiday you’ve never heard of, eating something they call an elephant ear because not even they know what it is, and just enjoy the show.
What did I just read? It can be read by taking notes, using sticky tabs to track plot lines, flipping back and forth to connect the dots, painstakingly trying to make sense of the surreal metaphors and asides—or you could read it like me: like watching a parade on an unknown planet, celebrating a holiday you’ve never heard of, eating something they call an elephant ear because not even they know what it is, and just enjoy the show.
threeforsilver's review against another edition
3.0
Would have been 5 stars if this book had been half as long.
Fucking frustrating experience.
Great ideas, great style, great humor, great insight.
Crushed to death under its own weight.
Read Steve Aylett or Brian Catling.
Same quality of content in 1/4 the size.
Fucking frustrating experience.
Great ideas, great style, great humor, great insight.
Crushed to death under its own weight.
Read Steve Aylett or Brian Catling.
Same quality of content in 1/4 the size.
javorstein's review against another edition
5.0
An astonishing read that left me stunned when I finished it. A dazzling, colorful, psychedelic array of imagery for 800 pages that makes it feel like the book is falling apart in your hands. From frozen-in-time cities of human aliens from the future that sprout up from between cracks in sidewalks, to occultist economists who slowly stop existing in a physical form, to the possibly-fabricated adventures of a physicist (or entomologist?) onto another planet, to a failed Marxist revolutionary being hunted throughout the slums of fictional cities, the reader is brought through beautifully-painted worlds that seem to affect, contradict, interact with, and cross-pollinate each other to form a brick of a novel with no clear ending and no clear reality. If you enjoy Gravity's Rainbow or LSD, this book is highly recommended.
skooma's review against another edition
5.0
To read this book is to eat a capitalism-induced cluster-headache for breakfast.
To read this book is to be kicked in the crotch a thousand times for every single instance of your life that you noticed that the way the the system is structured is specifically structured in such a way that to live within that system feels like a thousand kicks in the crotch.
To notice those thousand kicks in the crotch, and to attach the sensation of a thousand kicks in the crotch to being a part of the system will increase the speed and the fervor with which the kicks will find themselves firmly placed in your crotch.
The system is a thousand boots, horny to kick a thousand crotches.
The system is a crotch, begging "please daddy, please can you kick me a thousand times?"
The system is a crotch, anesthetized by the passage of time. It does not know that it is being kicked a thousand times, or it does not care.
One way or another, the kicks to the crotch will continue until morale improves.
Fuuuuuck.... End Money.
To read this book is to be kicked in the crotch a thousand times for every single instance of your life that you noticed that the way the the system is structured is specifically structured in such a way that to live within that system feels like a thousand kicks in the crotch.
To notice those thousand kicks in the crotch, and to attach the sensation of a thousand kicks in the crotch to being a part of the system will increase the speed and the fervor with which the kicks will find themselves firmly placed in your crotch.
The system is a thousand boots, horny to kick a thousand crotches.
The system is a crotch, begging "please daddy, please can you kick me a thousand times?"
The system is a crotch, anesthetized by the passage of time. It does not know that it is being kicked a thousand times, or it does not care.
One way or another, the kicks to the crotch will continue until morale improves.
Fuuuuuck.... End Money.
dllman05's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
funny
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
jake_'s review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
5.0
What starts out as a farcical 2666 soon becomes a disorientating, hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of vignettes satirising, in the most insanely surreal way possible, late stage capitalism and its obsession with money.
I would recommend the video review on the Youtube channel Waste Mailing List for a thorough breakdown.
I would recommend the video review on the Youtube channel Waste Mailing List for a thorough breakdown.
naokamiya's review against another edition
5.0
When people click my page, I assume the thing they’ll first see is my list of favorite literary genres, as follows [and I know this is admittedly kinda trite, but bear with me here] - “postmodernism, fantasy, horror, literary, theory, magical realism, classics, western, drama, philosophy, gothic, weird fiction, speculative, surrealism, experimental”. Now take a second to let it sink in, as I did, that “Animal Money” arguably encompasses not one, not two, not three, but TWELVE of these fifteen superlatives, and then realize there is no possible fucking way I could have ever not absolutely loved this as completely and obsessively as I did. This is nothing short of an unbelievably, limitlessly creative tapestry of mind-obliterating psychedelic imagination working at level ten-fucking-thousand the entire way through, a riotous neverending circus of ideas, shifting narrators and timelines, surreal imagery, perfected interplay between the literate and the pulp, economic and political theory, fantasy and reality, and literally everything you can imagine in between, congealing in a phantasmagoric experimental dark fantasy comedic nightmare so genuinely ambitious that Dali, Marx, Pynchon, Lovecraft and Lautremont may very well all have knelt reverently before an altar with this book atop it. This is one of those things that just comes along every rare once in awhile and revivifies my own desire to make art and to fully embrace everything beautiful, wild, fucked up and revelatory about the human creative process in all its glory and history-spanning influence. This is a landmark in my lifelong love for speculative fiction and Cisco here has created something so immense, so cerebral, so mind-bogglingly huge in its creative scope that I almost don't even know where to begin in my analysis, but there's so much here to unpack and so much worthy of discussion that I have to give it my best shot.
Y'know, as much as I loved it I could see why some people would find this novel to be a mess, an explosion of weird wild insanity that engulfs so much range that it results in the novel feeling disconnected, just because there is so much working here at so many levels and so much variation on themes from a page-to-page basis that I could see why some people would get absolutely lost in it and end up giving up out of frustration, trying to find a clear point and failing amidst all the narrative chaos that snowballs upon itself and never lets up. It's understandable because Cisco really is working at maximum overdrive here - every five or so pages of this novel contains concepts and themes that many other sff authors would spend entire three hundred page novels on, and I really don't think I'm exaggerating. This is sheer maximalism in its most realized incarnation, one so massively enveloping that the reader has no choice but to just let go and be swept away in. And considering who I am, who is always itching for more fiction that packs itself to overstuffing with ideas and classification-smashing abandon without a care in the world, this feels absolutely made for me, especially in its integration of its constant sense of devilishly clever class-conscious satire combined with an unabashed [and completely unhinged] adoration for genre fiction, something Cisco seems radically attuned to in realizing just how much genre can elevate a novel, rather than undermine it as many of its detractors throughout literary history would claim.
Yes, there is indeed an ever-present "tropeyness" that abides every page of "Animal Money", an endless torrent of synapse-activating engagement with sci-fi and fantasy mechanics. Androids, cults, Lovecraftian horrors, space travel, time travel, reality bending, alien invasion, zombies and phantoms, body horror, apocalypses, anthropomorphism, etcetera ad [ostensibly] infinitum - point is, if you can think of something confined to the realms of the fantastical and the magical, Cisco, at the very least, touches upon it here. But there's consistently a very clear understanding of the limitations of tropes, and Cisco doesn't ever really linger on a specific cliche so much as he allows the narrative to layer so much of these disparate ideas atop each other that they end up transforming into something whose scope ends up revealing not only the deeply unique and dense narrative texture that is created by weaving so many of these things together but also results in something so phantasmagorically explosive on its own terms that it ends up feeling independent of tropes, despite having such an overflowing abundance of them. Basically, Cisco has looped "cliches" around on themselves so hard that he completely broke through their own limits, resulting in the creative canvas of "Animal Money" feeling truly boundless in the most visionary, mind-expanding way. The final result feels like a frenzied love affair with all things speculative while also completely bursting from its chains and transforming into something that goes beyond the pale for anything in that sphere, or at least anything I’ve read, and I would be surprised if there is much of it that matches the absolute vivaciousness of this book.
But even beyond all the textural detail, there really is a hugely prevalent thematic purpose to all the psychedelic genre-chaos being indulged in here. Fantasy is such a presence here because Cisco is exploring the fantasy of the system, especially the way this system is reliant on the assigning of monetary value and capital as an absolutely dominant governing force in human [and animal] lives. The “central” plot here - there are really three overlapping major perspectives about as integral as each other, but the one that sets the story in motion - concerns five foreign economists who, after inexplicable head injuries, come together in a university in the fictional South American state of Archizoguayla to write a thesis on the titular concept of “animal money”, a nebulously defined yet apparently ostensibly communalistic form of monetary exchange that revolutionizes its own alien form of capital, which leads to the five attracting the ire of world governments and the bourgeoisie classes who double down on trying to eliminate this rapidly [and magically] expanding idea from circulation, including trying to make the economists unpersons. What’s interesting [and hilarious] here are that economists in “Animal Money”’s world are less like what we would imagine in reality and more like cultists, engaging in bizarre rites and routines and exchanging coded phrases amongst each other, even down to the protagonists’ creation of “animal money” itself, which is staged like a taboo occult ritual. But is it really much different in reality? The protagonists are mouthpieces for the worldwide cult of neoliberal capitalism and its economic policies, and when they realize its inefficiency they decide to go against the apparatus that they have been enraptured in, one so huge that when it comes down on them full force they are unable to fully comprehend it even as they themselves have “known” it and worked in favor of it until their discovery.
The question that really feels like it’s being asked here is - why? What purpose exactly does capital have beyond being a fantasy of the bourgeoisie to keep those under their influence in line, money as means for herding the populace and keeping them in control and in numb complacent apathy [or despair, if you’re one who can’t sustain themselves because of lack of the almighty dollar in your bank account]? Much like the economists’ own thesis, there’s nothing concrete about material reality that adheres to capital as we know it, yet those of the capitalist class and its defense force must uphold it as though it is a force as natural as the world itself and must necessarily remain unchanged [religion would also be an applicable apparatus for comparison here as bolstered by the religious subtext throughout the novel, and it’s no secret that religion and elite hegemonies have acted as bread and butter to one another for much of history]. But this is obviously for the ruling classes' own benefit, for changes as revolutionary as those that occur in “Animal Money” would shake their iron grip on the world and its resources to the very foundation, which cannot be duly accepted by these classes. What is capitalism other than a man made system as fallible as any other, unnaturally upheld as natural by the power hegemonies that need to keep it upright and stable at the expense of those who suffer as a result of it? What is economics and the neoliberal apparatus of “all for me, none for thee” that defines this system, other than a fantasy we’ve agreed to repeat to one another over and over until we’ve forgotten that it’s built on a lie, forgotten empathy the sanctity of other peoples’ lives for the sake of conforming to a status quo that grinds our bones to dust daily, a fantasy whose ostensible “naturalism” is so deeply integrated into our thinking that even many of those who are materially harmed by it buy into it completely?
If you’re a Marxist [or at least some kind of anti-capitalist], you’ve probably heard a phrase somewhere along the lines of “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and this is a phrase that kept entering my head at various intervals throughout this book and one that I think really gets at the heart of what Cisco is going for here. As the clamorous romp of the narrative marches forward it gives way to an increasingly entropic unfolding of events, with the world[s] and the book itself seeming to collapse under its own weight [which also formally justifies the book’s massive length], old structures being disintegrated in place of new ones so beyond the reach of what we have been conditioned to understand in our society that it feels unbelievable, unreal. “Animal Money” is such a bursting bloom of bizarre creativity because it attempts to imagine a world where neolib capitalism is unraveling and giving way to what lies beyond, something that to many would seem like complete armageddon [in light of a lack of class consciousness and centralized worker movements to set up the world after this, which the vast majority of people, being alienated from their class and labor, don’t have the means to do on an individual basis]. A world beyond this is possible but it will need the combined efforts of the oppressed and an understanding of this alienation and the fact that our current apparatus can, and will, unravel, no matter how difficult to imagine it is for most of those who live in a world ravaged by endless and unsustainable growth, especially those in the imperial core. The end of neoliberal capitalism does not have to be the end of reality but a new horizon beyond the shackles this world has endowed us with.
On the character end of things, I really appreciated SuperAesop and Assiyeh’s characters [they are the two other main storylines I mentioned earlier], because both of them respectively act as arbiters for the novel’s spec-fic fixations and political subtext while also both being richly defined characters in their own right. Through her experiments and her devotion to them, Assiyeh explores the dichotomy between fantasy and reality as her own desire for love and desire to concretely prove her own and others’ existence manifest, giving a surprisingly tragic and tender register to her as her arc unfolds, meanwhile SuperAesop truly feels like the heart of the novel and the closest thing to a true protagonist it has; a black revolutionary embittered with the chaos surrounding him, he nevertheless is always unwavering in his convictions and tries to his fullest extent to shape the world in the image he wants no matter how much state antagonism is directed his way. And character-wise he’s just incredibly charming to read, being a true eccentric whose personal and ideological diatribes are phrased very bizarrely and with a tendency to go off on tangents that nevertheless perfectly circle back to his main thesis and end up strongly illuminating not only his worldview but who he is as a person, no matter how strange his trajectory of thoughts may seem.
Also gotta love the abundance of absurdist comedy here, which is sort of to be expected for fantastic fiction this patently obsessed with all things absurd [though too an oft underrated aspect of weird literature in my experience], and the comedy helps further illustrate both the fantasy elements and the actual fantasy of what Cisco is poking fun at here. As far as mind-bending doorstop genre-busters go, I don’t find it as consistently wickedly funny as “Gravity’s Rainbow” [which is a book this shares a bloodline with in a lot of ways, if my preceding review didn’t prove that], but Cisco’s humor is more dry and more overtly sarcastic, which really lends itself perfectly to the amount of venomous anti-establishment satire being engaged in here. I found the five economists’ parts early on especially got a lot of laughs out of me, just because they’re so out of their depth when it comes to the power structures surrounding them and their unorthodox responses to their various paranoias and neuroticisms, as well as the steadfast seriousness with which they take their jobs and the concept of “animal money” that they’ve penned.
And I hate to sound like a broken record, but the sheer amount of incredible imagination here leads to setpieces so hallucinogenic and immense and there are just so many individual scenes that stick out in my mind as clear as a long, weird movie [of which one was vividly playing in my head throughout the entire duration of this book]. Cisco, while engaging with tropes like I said, never fails to put some bizarre spin on many of them as though he was dousing them into a vat of lysergic acid and just rolling with whatever strange, freakish trajectory they decided to take. There’s so much here on a page by page basis that it would be absolutely pointless to try and list everything I loved [because it was pretty much all of it], but I feel like I have to mention some absolute favorites: SuperAesop running from Urtruvel’s infohazardous posters in the subway station, second-Long’s strange astro travels through a Black Lodge-like dimension ala Twin Peaks, Assiyeh’s cosmic adventures, the Arieto scenes where it basically turns into a supernatural action movie, the story-in-a-story about the monastery, and especially, which has probably some of my favorite descriptive work I’ve read in a fiction novel since my reading journey began. There’s so many others, and those were just off the top of my head; Cisco really knows how to craft the fuck out of a scene, he is able to milk powerful and evocative imagery for all its worth and he keeps this momentum going for nearly eight-hundred pages. To say it’s entertaining would be like calling the Atlantic Ocean a bit wet.
Finally, I don't usually do this kind of thing but I feel like I at least have to mention the cover, because it’s just so obviously amazing and so clearly tells the reader that they know what they’re getting into the second they see it so absolutely nobody going into this will get the wrong idea. Though what it depicts isn't entirely present in the text, it's gorgeous, mind-expansive and overwhelming, much like the novel itself and fits just perfectly as an introduction to it, and I feel like the lack of text or a blurb was the right choice to make it stand out as much as it does.
This isn't an easy novel to follow; it's jam packed with everything you can think of on every page, it follows multiple narrators and shifting timelines and at times it's hard to even tell what planet it's supposed to be taking place on. But it's one of the most intensely readable "difficult" novels I've ever read in my life, to the point where I finished this thing in less than two weeks of just being completely, obsessively immersed in the world Cisco has created so beautifully, hilariously and terrifyingly here. I enjoyed the first two works of his I read well enough, but this one has completely convinced me this guy is the real deal. This is the kind of thing that needs only to be experienced to be believed, and experienced multiple times when I have the time to return to it. If there's another modern author of fantastic fiction working at the level of delirious experimentalism and anticapitalist subtext even close to this book, I will be legit surprised. This one here is proof that speculative fiction still has a say in the overall course of contemporary literature, and its influence and capability for boundless creativity isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
"What is money? Social human power made numb and separate. Amputated under anaesthesia. You'll feel all that pain later, though. Without knowing what it is.
End money. Why let others decide how your social power, your time, your work will be unitized and stored up? Why not make your own money? Why not make your own society? What choice do you really have? A bank is a symbol of fear. End money. End it by making it. It's all counterfeit, that stuff you use. End money. It didn't come from you. It is you taken away from you by somebody else. Fed back to you in dribs and drabs and drabber everyday. Money is not a means of exchange. Money is a means of preventing exchange. Look at the countries where there is the greatest volume of money circulating: those societies are frozen. There is relentless change but there is no difference. Everyone is bound by the enchantment of the money spell, cast by the most pedestrian magicians the world has ever seen."
Y'know, as much as I loved it I could see why some people would find this novel to be a mess, an explosion of weird wild insanity that engulfs so much range that it results in the novel feeling disconnected, just because there is so much working here at so many levels and so much variation on themes from a page-to-page basis that I could see why some people would get absolutely lost in it and end up giving up out of frustration, trying to find a clear point and failing amidst all the narrative chaos that snowballs upon itself and never lets up. It's understandable because Cisco really is working at maximum overdrive here - every five or so pages of this novel contains concepts and themes that many other sff authors would spend entire three hundred page novels on, and I really don't think I'm exaggerating. This is sheer maximalism in its most realized incarnation, one so massively enveloping that the reader has no choice but to just let go and be swept away in. And considering who I am, who is always itching for more fiction that packs itself to overstuffing with ideas and classification-smashing abandon without a care in the world, this feels absolutely made for me, especially in its integration of its constant sense of devilishly clever class-conscious satire combined with an unabashed [and completely unhinged] adoration for genre fiction, something Cisco seems radically attuned to in realizing just how much genre can elevate a novel, rather than undermine it as many of its detractors throughout literary history would claim.
Yes, there is indeed an ever-present "tropeyness" that abides every page of "Animal Money", an endless torrent of synapse-activating engagement with sci-fi and fantasy mechanics. Androids, cults, Lovecraftian horrors, space travel, time travel, reality bending, alien invasion, zombies and phantoms, body horror, apocalypses, anthropomorphism, etcetera ad [ostensibly] infinitum - point is, if you can think of something confined to the realms of the fantastical and the magical, Cisco, at the very least, touches upon it here. But there's consistently a very clear understanding of the limitations of tropes, and Cisco doesn't ever really linger on a specific cliche so much as he allows the narrative to layer so much of these disparate ideas atop each other that they end up transforming into something whose scope ends up revealing not only the deeply unique and dense narrative texture that is created by weaving so many of these things together but also results in something so phantasmagorically explosive on its own terms that it ends up feeling independent of tropes, despite having such an overflowing abundance of them. Basically, Cisco has looped "cliches" around on themselves so hard that he completely broke through their own limits, resulting in the creative canvas of "Animal Money" feeling truly boundless in the most visionary, mind-expanding way. The final result feels like a frenzied love affair with all things speculative while also completely bursting from its chains and transforming into something that goes beyond the pale for anything in that sphere, or at least anything I’ve read, and I would be surprised if there is much of it that matches the absolute vivaciousness of this book.
But even beyond all the textural detail, there really is a hugely prevalent thematic purpose to all the psychedelic genre-chaos being indulged in here. Fantasy is such a presence here because Cisco is exploring the fantasy of the system, especially the way this system is reliant on the assigning of monetary value and capital as an absolutely dominant governing force in human [and animal] lives. The “central” plot here - there are really three overlapping major perspectives about as integral as each other, but the one that sets the story in motion - concerns five foreign economists who, after inexplicable head injuries, come together in a university in the fictional South American state of Archizoguayla to write a thesis on the titular concept of “animal money”, a nebulously defined yet apparently ostensibly communalistic form of monetary exchange that revolutionizes its own alien form of capital, which leads to the five attracting the ire of world governments and the bourgeoisie classes who double down on trying to eliminate this rapidly [and magically] expanding idea from circulation, including trying to make the economists unpersons. What’s interesting [and hilarious] here are that economists in “Animal Money”’s world are less like what we would imagine in reality and more like cultists, engaging in bizarre rites and routines and exchanging coded phrases amongst each other, even down to the protagonists’ creation of “animal money” itself, which is staged like a taboo occult ritual. But is it really much different in reality? The protagonists are mouthpieces for the worldwide cult of neoliberal capitalism and its economic policies, and when they realize its inefficiency they decide to go against the apparatus that they have been enraptured in, one so huge that when it comes down on them full force they are unable to fully comprehend it even as they themselves have “known” it and worked in favor of it until their discovery.
The question that really feels like it’s being asked here is - why? What purpose exactly does capital have beyond being a fantasy of the bourgeoisie to keep those under their influence in line, money as means for herding the populace and keeping them in control and in numb complacent apathy [or despair, if you’re one who can’t sustain themselves because of lack of the almighty dollar in your bank account]? Much like the economists’ own thesis, there’s nothing concrete about material reality that adheres to capital as we know it, yet those of the capitalist class and its defense force must uphold it as though it is a force as natural as the world itself and must necessarily remain unchanged [religion would also be an applicable apparatus for comparison here as bolstered by the religious subtext throughout the novel, and it’s no secret that religion and elite hegemonies have acted as bread and butter to one another for much of history]. But this is obviously for the ruling classes' own benefit, for changes as revolutionary as those that occur in “Animal Money” would shake their iron grip on the world and its resources to the very foundation, which cannot be duly accepted by these classes. What is capitalism other than a man made system as fallible as any other, unnaturally upheld as natural by the power hegemonies that need to keep it upright and stable at the expense of those who suffer as a result of it? What is economics and the neoliberal apparatus of “all for me, none for thee” that defines this system, other than a fantasy we’ve agreed to repeat to one another over and over until we’ve forgotten that it’s built on a lie, forgotten empathy the sanctity of other peoples’ lives for the sake of conforming to a status quo that grinds our bones to dust daily, a fantasy whose ostensible “naturalism” is so deeply integrated into our thinking that even many of those who are materially harmed by it buy into it completely?
If you’re a Marxist [or at least some kind of anti-capitalist], you’ve probably heard a phrase somewhere along the lines of “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and this is a phrase that kept entering my head at various intervals throughout this book and one that I think really gets at the heart of what Cisco is going for here. As the clamorous romp of the narrative marches forward it gives way to an increasingly entropic unfolding of events, with the world[s] and the book itself seeming to collapse under its own weight [which also formally justifies the book’s massive length], old structures being disintegrated in place of new ones so beyond the reach of what we have been conditioned to understand in our society that it feels unbelievable, unreal. “Animal Money” is such a bursting bloom of bizarre creativity because it attempts to imagine a world where neolib capitalism is unraveling and giving way to what lies beyond, something that to many would seem like complete armageddon [in light of a lack of class consciousness and centralized worker movements to set up the world after this, which the vast majority of people, being alienated from their class and labor, don’t have the means to do on an individual basis]. A world beyond this is possible but it will need the combined efforts of the oppressed and an understanding of this alienation and the fact that our current apparatus can, and will, unravel, no matter how difficult to imagine it is for most of those who live in a world ravaged by endless and unsustainable growth, especially those in the imperial core. The end of neoliberal capitalism does not have to be the end of reality but a new horizon beyond the shackles this world has endowed us with.
On the character end of things, I really appreciated SuperAesop and Assiyeh’s characters [they are the two other main storylines I mentioned earlier], because both of them respectively act as arbiters for the novel’s spec-fic fixations and political subtext while also both being richly defined characters in their own right. Through her experiments and her devotion to them, Assiyeh explores the dichotomy between fantasy and reality as her own desire for love and desire to concretely prove her own and others’ existence manifest, giving a surprisingly tragic and tender register to her as her arc unfolds, meanwhile SuperAesop truly feels like the heart of the novel and the closest thing to a true protagonist it has; a black revolutionary embittered with the chaos surrounding him, he nevertheless is always unwavering in his convictions and tries to his fullest extent to shape the world in the image he wants no matter how much state antagonism is directed his way. And character-wise he’s just incredibly charming to read, being a true eccentric whose personal and ideological diatribes are phrased very bizarrely and with a tendency to go off on tangents that nevertheless perfectly circle back to his main thesis and end up strongly illuminating not only his worldview but who he is as a person, no matter how strange his trajectory of thoughts may seem.
Also gotta love the abundance of absurdist comedy here, which is sort of to be expected for fantastic fiction this patently obsessed with all things absurd [though too an oft underrated aspect of weird literature in my experience], and the comedy helps further illustrate both the fantasy elements and the actual fantasy of what Cisco is poking fun at here. As far as mind-bending doorstop genre-busters go, I don’t find it as consistently wickedly funny as “Gravity’s Rainbow” [which is a book this shares a bloodline with in a lot of ways, if my preceding review didn’t prove that], but Cisco’s humor is more dry and more overtly sarcastic, which really lends itself perfectly to the amount of venomous anti-establishment satire being engaged in here. I found the five economists’ parts early on especially got a lot of laughs out of me, just because they’re so out of their depth when it comes to the power structures surrounding them and their unorthodox responses to their various paranoias and neuroticisms, as well as the steadfast seriousness with which they take their jobs and the concept of “animal money” that they’ve penned.
And I hate to sound like a broken record, but the sheer amount of incredible imagination here leads to setpieces so hallucinogenic and immense and there are just so many individual scenes that stick out in my mind as clear as a long, weird movie [of which one was vividly playing in my head throughout the entire duration of this book]. Cisco, while engaging with tropes like I said, never fails to put some bizarre spin on many of them as though he was dousing them into a vat of lysergic acid and just rolling with whatever strange, freakish trajectory they decided to take. There’s so much here on a page by page basis that it would be absolutely pointless to try and list everything I loved [because it was pretty much all of it], but I feel like I have to mention some absolute favorites: SuperAesop running from Urtruvel’s infohazardous posters in the subway station, second-Long’s strange astro travels through a Black Lodge-like dimension ala Twin Peaks, Assiyeh’s cosmic adventures, the Arieto scenes where it basically turns into a supernatural action movie, the story-in-a-story about the monastery, and especially
Spoiler
first-Long’s drugged out nightmare trip through a vision of the apocalypseFinally, I don't usually do this kind of thing but I feel like I at least have to mention the cover, because it’s just so obviously amazing and so clearly tells the reader that they know what they’re getting into the second they see it so absolutely nobody going into this will get the wrong idea. Though what it depicts isn't entirely present in the text, it's gorgeous, mind-expansive and overwhelming, much like the novel itself and fits just perfectly as an introduction to it, and I feel like the lack of text or a blurb was the right choice to make it stand out as much as it does.
This isn't an easy novel to follow; it's jam packed with everything you can think of on every page, it follows multiple narrators and shifting timelines and at times it's hard to even tell what planet it's supposed to be taking place on. But it's one of the most intensely readable "difficult" novels I've ever read in my life, to the point where I finished this thing in less than two weeks of just being completely, obsessively immersed in the world Cisco has created so beautifully, hilariously and terrifyingly here. I enjoyed the first two works of his I read well enough, but this one has completely convinced me this guy is the real deal. This is the kind of thing that needs only to be experienced to be believed, and experienced multiple times when I have the time to return to it. If there's another modern author of fantastic fiction working at the level of delirious experimentalism and anticapitalist subtext even close to this book, I will be legit surprised. This one here is proof that speculative fiction still has a say in the overall course of contemporary literature, and its influence and capability for boundless creativity isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
"What is money? Social human power made numb and separate. Amputated under anaesthesia. You'll feel all that pain later, though. Without knowing what it is.
End money. Why let others decide how your social power, your time, your work will be unitized and stored up? Why not make your own money? Why not make your own society? What choice do you really have? A bank is a symbol of fear. End money. End it by making it. It's all counterfeit, that stuff you use. End money. It didn't come from you. It is you taken away from you by somebody else. Fed back to you in dribs and drabs and drabber everyday. Money is not a means of exchange. Money is a means of preventing exchange. Look at the countries where there is the greatest volume of money circulating: those societies are frozen. There is relentless change but there is no difference. Everyone is bound by the enchantment of the money spell, cast by the most pedestrian magicians the world has ever seen."