BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE

I kept seeing a title of a book crop up on Facebook, Twitter feeds, local alternative newsweeklies, the websites of Elliott Bay Books and Powell's City of Books, and various literary blogs and review sites.  The book was Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot.

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One night, I found myself wandering the stacks of Elliott Bay, killing some time until my writing group began, and there it was: Blueprints of the Afterlife, its cream cover adorned with "AFTERLIFE" spelled out in the skyline of New York (Alki) under construction.

(The layout of the cover alone, both inside and out, is attractive and enticing.)

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On the front of the book: the sticker: "Autographed Copy."

And inside: a line drawn through "Ryan Boudinot," a few humps of squiggly ink lines, and a cat body drawn upon the Black Cat imprint logo.

Mr. Boudinot had read from Blueprints the night before, when I was unable to attend.

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The cover was strewn with names dropped and blurbed like nobody's business.  Comparisons are many.  Philip K. Dick (many times over).  China Miéville.  Kurt Vonnegut.  Charlie Kaufman.  Thoman Pynchon.  Neil Gaiman.  Neal Stephenson.  Chuck Palahniuk.  George Saunders.  William S. Burroughs.  Aldous Huxley.  David Foster Wallace.  Haruki Murakami.  J.G. Ballard.

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Other authors they could have name dropped and blurbed, but didn't.  Jeff Noon.  William Gibson.  Paul Di Filippo.  Bruce Sterling.  Rebecca Brown.  Kathy Acker.  Matthew Sharpe.

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Anyway, it looked and sounded like something I would read, so I skimmed a few pages, bought it, and brought it home.

I was instantly snared within its pages once I sat down and began to read.

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Blueprints of the Afterlife is one of those books that really defies comparison.  The authors that Boudinot were compared to speak in their own voices, as does Boudinot.  Even though he may share elements here and there with each of them, his voice is unique, his vision his own.

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"I tried to determine if these sad thoughts were just the results of growing old.  Probably, but that didn't make them any less real.  Maybe I had lost so much myself—my family, my friends—that I couldn't help but project my grief onto the world at large.  It was no longer enough for me to grieve for a lost mother, father, sister, or friend.  Now my grief intended to encompass the planet."

—page 333, Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot.

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The novel takes place a couple hundred years in the future, after the Age of Fucked Up Shit, or FUS.  Time is measured as pre-FUS and post-FUS.  We get glimpses of the FUS—a marauding malevolent glacier apparently bent on eliminating human life, robot (newman) armies fighting against corporate militias (Boeing, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and the like) for the control of the United States, hinted-at cataclysms.  The world isn't in good shape, but has been somewhat put back into place, albeit with a lot fewer people.  Some areas have been rebuilt and some areas are abandoned.

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Much of the action of the novel takes place in the Pacific Northwest.  Bainbridge Island figures prominently as it is the site where New York Alki (a to-scale replica of Manhattan) is being built.  Seattle, Portland, Lake Chelan, and Vancouver BC all make cameos.

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To say too much about the story ruins it.  There are plenty of things that go unexplained.  The novel is a labyrinth filled with turns, twists, dead ends.  Its minotaurs are giant floating heads that communicate with some of the characters.

Strangeness abounds.

There are plenty of false starts and stops along the way.  Storylines are sometimes introduced or dropped without warning, although the core stories that emerge feel like the right ones.  In the end, the novel feels as "complete" as it's going to be, which, for me, was alright.

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Blueprints is a hypercube onion, with layers peeled back to reveal other possibilities.

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I feel a bit pummeled and sore (and sad) at the novel's conclusion.  What was it that I just experienced and witnessed?  It was compelling and unlike most other novel's I've ever read.  It reminded me a bit of many of the novels and short stories of Philip K. Dick, but perhaps was a closer cousin to Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex or the novels of Jeff Noon (Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice).

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I highly recommend this novel.  It is not one you will soon forget.

And don't let the list of science fiction authors Boudinot was compared to on the cover of the book scare you away.  This is not your dad's science fiction, and definitely not your grandmother's.  This is a good, solid read that will make you examine your own life, the culture we share, the world we live in, and what we are currently doing to each of them.