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Jack Kirby Mandala
"FOR EVERY INDIVIDUAL LOSS, LEGIONS POUR FORTH!!! THE HIVE BELOW HAS BEEN RESTLESS--MULTIPLYING!"
"Two billion years ago, it [the Sun] blew up, and the Earth was blown apart with it...The exploding Sun shattered the Earth and cast the hot debris into the cold darkness of the void...A few thousand years ago, an intelligent being from a reality we had never suspected found our dust. For its own alien purposes and by its own strange science, that intelligent being read in our dust the cryptarch of our lives...From our cryptarch, the alien created us again. And not just our bodies. You remember Earth because your consciousness, which is in fact a wavepattern of light emitted by your brain, was retrieved from the vacuum, where it had been expanding at the speed of light since you died...The alien is not a spiritual being...The truth is, this being regenerated you to serve as bait for yet another alien intelligence, its enemy, a species of sapient, winged spiders called zotl. Zotl eat people."
That passage from A. A. Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth* gives you the flavor of the book: high pulp of cosmic sweep, and "pulp" is used here with reverence since it is in the discarded and unvetted we often find the best art. (The position of this page is that you can take your books about aging college professors finding passion, then ennui through affairs with young students and fuckin' stick 'em. So to speak.) Attanasio's tome seamlessly meshes heroic fantasy--his main character is a reconstituted Viking with a "ramstat flyer" instead of a longboat and his near-omniscient aliens meddle in human affairs like Greek gods--with skeptical, even new wave-y plot quirks. The novel peaks about 3/4 of the way through its 481 pages and the remainder is a series of short story-like vignettes of characters living in the biological, post-human end times before the alien's constructed binary star system collapses. Oh, yes, and it's also a love story.
The book belongs in the company of Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter and Brian Aldiss's Helliconia tales in being both epic and wised-up, although its exalted, utterly committed narrative style feels almost Biblical. Attanasio's imagination is so huge you feel your head ballooning to embrace his conception of a universe where particle physics, time travel, Lovecraftian elder gods, and medieval warriors and peasants all mesh in a grand narrative. The poetry of his language, which can be felt even in the pulpiest sentences, drives the yarn as much as the mind-blowing science. The author was in his late 20s when he wrote this (it appeared in '89) and almost perfectly balances visionary abandon and storytelling control. A close televisual equivalent might be the Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which also injects apocalytic religion into futuristic sci fi with its incendiary battles among superhuman AIs.
*The edited passage in the first para. came from an amazon reader. Link is to Barnes & Noble, a "blue" company, unlike amazon. Hit Bush backers in their wallets!