From Publishers Weekly
In this labored vision of a future dystopia, amnesiac Sergei Plotkin finds himself torn between the mission planted in his brain by unknown overlords and the desire to protect his creator. As he travels through computer-controlled UniWorld, Plotkin slowly regains conflicting memories and learns he is meant to kill Grand Junction spaceport's mayor. While plotting homicide and investigating illegal Christians, Plotkin meets Vivian McNellis, whose genetic abnormalities give her an angel's power to rewrite the world. Learning that Vivian created him and is now dying from exposure to her metaphysical opposite, Plotkin abandons his mission, determined to eliminate the threat and save Vivian's life. Dantec, winner of France's Prix de I'Imaginaire for
Les racines du mal, writes harsh, choppy prose—not improved by Kover's translation—and the convoluted plot often grinds to a halt amid technical jargon, discourse on society's devolution and abstruse narrative philosophy.
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
The first major English translation of one of France’s most admired writers, Cosmos Incorporated is a triumph of science fiction–a masterwork of cataclysm, mysticism, and suspense.
Fifty years of warfare, disease, and strife have decimated the world’s population. Those who remain are motes in the mind of UniWorld, a superstate that monitors humanity via a vast computer metastructure that catalog everything about everyone on the planet–race, religion, genetic codes, even fantasies. Those who have the means escape UniWorld’s tight control through the Orbital Ring.
Though his memory has been wiped clean and his history fabricated in order to pass through UniWorld’s check points, Sergei Diego Plotkin knows his name.And he knows his mission: to murder a man in the city of Grand Junction, a Vegas-like outpost that is home to the private launching pad to the Ring. But this sense of purpose is compromised by random memories that flash through Plotkin’s brain. England and Argentina. The shores of Lake Baikal. And something else. Something indescribable.
Now Plotkin is about to meet his maker. As his identity and mission incrementally resurface in his conscious mind, and in the presence of an eerily beautiful woman, Plotkin will soon discover that he has come here not just to kill but to be born. . . .
“Like Houellebecq, Dantec takes inspiration from both high and low culture; he is the sort of writer who cites Sun Tzu’s Art of War and the Stooges’ Search and Destroy with equal facility.”
–The New York Times
“DNA is to Dantec what the swan was to romantic poetry: an invitation to dream. . . . This rocker-writer teleports us into the cyberpunk beyonds of literature. Fasten your seatbelts!”
–Le Nouvel Observateur
