Of Flowers and Book

Legendary book must be savoured, not read. 

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New review coming soon.

New Sun upon the Sea

Jewel of the skies

Burning white 

Blue is the sea 

Gone are the days

You walked away 

And smiled at me 

Where my tears flow

Into a thousand streams

Into the ocean 

Below the new sun. 

Island of Eagles

A view from the top of one of the peaks

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It is amazing and breathtaking! 

Sisyphean

Synopsis from Goodreads.com:

Even after the world and humanity itself have been rendered nearly unrecognizable by genetic engineering, a day in the office can feel… Sisyphean.

The company stands atop a tiny deck supported by huge iron columns a hundred meters high. The boss there is its president—a large creature of unstable, shifting form once called “human.” The world of his dedicated worker contains only the deck and the sea of mud surrounding it, and and the worker’s daily routine is anything but peaceful. A mosaic novel of extreme science and high weirdness, Sisyphean will change the way you see existence itself.

A strange journey into the far future of genetic engineering, and working life. After centuries of tinkering, many human bodies only have a casual similarity to what we now know, but both work and school continue apace. Will the enigmatic sad sack known only as “the worker” survive the day? Will the young student Hanishibe get his questions about the biological future of humanity answered, or will he have to transfer to the department of theology? Will Umari and her master ever comprehend the secrets of nanodust?

Review/Comment:

Weird fiction, I would say. Its cover and short descriptions lured me to buy it, not knowing that it was one of the weirdest books I've ever read. I needed to read twice just to scratch the epidermis of the book.

Sisyphean is a bio-horror, far-fetched future sci-fi that has the story of strong culture and some elements of Kafkaesque. It is not a novel actually, but a 'conglomeration' of 4 major stories that interweave to form a universe.

Illustrations by the author himself. The Canvasser

And it's not an easy book to read. You might find some made-up words or some portmanteau of a sort in it. Some foreign words are used, like ebisu and momonji, which you might not need to look up a foreign dictionary to find its meaning because their meaning are... meaningless. The descriptions are vivid enough for you to visualise it. OK, to show you how weird and challenging it is, this is the prologue (mind you, it's only THE prologue!):

In stable orbit above a congealed accretion disc in the depths of galactic space, there swarmed untold millions of corporatians, who together formed the immense, nimbotranslucent corpuspheres of which an archipelagolopolis was composed. In the midst of their jostlings were two consolidated corporatians - <Gyo the Intercessor> and <Ja the Vigilant> - who together formed a stately, gourdlike shape over ten thousand shares in diameter. Seeking to engulf one another, these two had made mutual acquisition bids, and after a passage of a great length of time, in the midst of the unnatural equilibrium maintained within their incorporeated system, subordinapes dictated from life-forms sampled on countless worlds toiled each according to the standards of corporatians to whom he belonged. They formed a vast, multifaceted ecosystem, wherein cycles of death and rebirth are repeated endlessly.

No, there aren't any typos. This is the opening passage for the four stories that followed: Sisyphean (Or Perfect Attendants), Cavumville, Castellum Natatorius (Or, Castle in the Mudsea) and Peregrinating Anima (Or, Momonji Caravan) and each stories have a short fragments between them, not to omit those magnificent drawings by the author himself Dempow Torishima.

The first story is about an unnamed worker who worked tirelessly to create (I think) a human and there a tool called the magatama is introduced.

The second story is about a periodic fall of fleshes and meats and organisms from a sky and some elements of divinity.

The third story is about a life mollusc (I think) city where insect-like inhabitants are staying in there of constant fear of sinking or exploding due to increased level of potassium nitrate.

The fourth story is about momonji and a group of travellers and this tells a better picture of the Sisyphean universe. 

Also, in line with what other readers understand, I think in the far future, humans are devastated by the nanomachines and many of them offered to be translated into computers where their information are stored in devices called the magatama and then by spinning out codes, the computers created avatars for humans in the real world in various forms of flesh and mutations.

Kudos to the translator Daniel Huddleston for such remarkable texts! It's not easy to translate this type of fiction!

Want to read? Think twice and read twice. It's enjoyable and it takes your time! Worth it!

Paddy Field

Green was our food and the sky blesses it.