Sunshine State
Sunshine State
James Miller
Little Brown (2010)
This novel by our Facebook friend James Miller seems to be following a familiar apocalypse model – with much from Heart of Darkness via Coppola – BUT, despite a front cover tagline “Welcome to the end of the world”, this following Evan Calder Williams’ thesis in his ‘Combined and Uneven Apocalypse’ (more on that soon) is not post-apocalyptic but rather the present continued as apocalypse. So far, so impressive – but there are some bonuses.
For within the familiar Mad Max, Book of Eli territory Miller’s hero unexpectedly encounters a wholesome, diverse respectability (and its compromises), a hybrid (part beach party, part Pentecostal rapture) world of ritual and a hint that all the shocks and storms may never have been as bad as they said on TV, that the catastrophe is constructed, that there is undifferentiated information that a catastrophe is incapable of revealing.
This isn’t Joseph Conrad, but, as Evan Calder Williams has often pointed out, we can find revelation in the popular.
CrabMan
James Miller
Little Brown (2010)
This novel by our Facebook friend James Miller seems to be following a familiar apocalypse model – with much from Heart of Darkness via Coppola – BUT, despite a front cover tagline “Welcome to the end of the world”, this following Evan Calder Williams’ thesis in his ‘Combined and Uneven Apocalypse’ (more on that soon) is not post-apocalyptic but rather the present continued as apocalypse. So far, so impressive – but there are some bonuses.
For within the familiar Mad Max, Book of Eli territory Miller’s hero unexpectedly encounters a wholesome, diverse respectability (and its compromises), a hybrid (part beach party, part Pentecostal rapture) world of ritual and a hint that all the shocks and storms may never have been as bad as they said on TV, that the catastrophe is constructed, that there is undifferentiated information that a catastrophe is incapable of revealing.
This isn’t Joseph Conrad, but, as Evan Calder Williams has often pointed out, we can find revelation in the popular.
CrabMan