A tour de force novel from the "wickedly talented" (
The Boston Globe) and "darkly funny" author of
Misconception (
The New York Times Book Review).
Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award
It is the afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called "the Age of Fucked Up Shit." A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked.
Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who's been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Restaurant and Hotel Management Olympic medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time-climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age-
Blueprints of the Afterlife will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.
"Duct-tape yourself to the front of this roller coaster and enjoy the ride." -
The New York Times
"Challenging, messy and funny fiction for readers looking for something way beyond space operas and swordplay." -
Kirkus Reviews
"The absurdities are cleverly crafted and highly entertaining. Imaginative [and] heartfelt." -Hannah Calkins,
Shelf Awareness
"Ingenious. . . Frenzied, hilarious, and paranoid. . . A bracing dystopian romp through contemporary dread." -
Publishers Weekly
"Probably the strangest post-apocalyptic novel in ages." -io9
"What an inspired mindfuck of a book!" -
City Paper (Baltimore)
