Reza Negarestani
Author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials
Works by Reza Negarestani
Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development. Volume VII: Culinary Materialism (2011) — Editor — 32 copies
Dust Enforcer 4 copies
Associated Works
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists (2011) — Contributor — 487 copies, 17 reviews
Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development. Volume IV: Concept Horror (2008) — Contributor — 44 copies
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Air is a vision machine through which the world looks safe.
—Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia
On Plot Holes
Is there sight underground? The savvy subject, Deleuze-familiar, devourer of paragraphs, this cultural contemporary — open to inquiry — is perhaps the 'ideal reader' to ask this question. As Negarestani notes, such readers, whose so-called capacity for contemplation functions to flex cultural capital, are not without (c)thrawn motivation: "'I am open to you' can be recapitulated as 'I show more have the capacity to bear your investment' or 'I afford you,'" (201). So, in response to questions of (c)thulite sight, the text responds, "Yes such things exist, but not that you can afford." The project that claims, "You can't afford me," is in a state of immense internal pressure — it has to keep running up the bill to match your accumulating cultural capital — such claims are "inevitably very oily" (36). "According to the classic theory of fossil fuels, petroleum was formed, as a Tellurian entity, under unimaginable pressure and heat, in absolute isolation — a typical Freudian Oedipal case" (33). As the genesis of oil demonstrates, a super large "quantity" of pressure-heat-isolation (read: real life; also: the grad school money pit) becomes, in time, an unbridgeable difference of "quality," perhaps something "un-affordable."
In Lovecraft, the omen-ous cavern is always so deep that suddenly it's "bottomless" — a typical Freudian Oedipal case. We are supposed to have forgotten that a good petroleum engineer could still get you a depth reading, deploy a liner and pump cement. We should call this a plot hole. (There are other holes: Lovecraft's stories leave off at precisely the moment when they might be getting interesting — texts always conclude with a swoon in the penultimate moment. Like Marx's theory of use value in Capital. Or the phrase, "this-marks-the-potential-beginnings-of-a-project," which is always burrowing its way into the conclusion of the grad student's essay. Enough diverticulations . . . ) Lovecraft is writing mostly not very well . . . but this is the precisely the point when mining for plot holes: “The truth of what is: writing literally hasn’t a damn sight to do with it. It has rather a blindness to do with it.” (Derrida, Dissemination) For Negarestani, plot holes are "perforations" which produce a "positive disintegration, or more accurately, collectivization of an authorial voice and its transformation to an untraceable shady collective of writers. This misauthorial problem is directly connected to the distortion or bastardization of books and their questionable backgrounds. Inauthenticity operates as complicity with anonymous materials" (77). This is to say, perhaps the advanced post-structuralist appreciates the novel full of plot holes for its "complicity with anonymous materials," though in this sense he doesn't distinguish himself from the so-called target audience of those so-called genre fictions, who are demonstrably (af)fording it, and perhaps even for the same (unstated) reasons.
We have to go deeper into the (plot) hole to get where Negarestani wants to go with this text (i.e. the 'un-affordable'). The problem with "unfathomable depths" of the lovingly-crafted-Lovecraftian-plot-hole is that, precisely because they are "unfathomable," we "fathom" (read: "afford") them as "unfathomable." Donald Rumsfeld files the problem away in the box of "unknown unknowns" (along with all those old, unread Lovecraft paperbacks). Though all this neglects to mention that there is a solution (read: bottom) to the problem of the bottomless pit. In the work of Alexander Kluge ( Learning Processes With a Deadly Outcome (1996)) one already finds a hole with the deepest possible depth: Tellurian cata-strophe has blown Earth to bits, more hole now than planet, and yet the outcome is unexpected, "All one can properly observe is that the Earth has lost its spherical shape and is now revolving around the sun in several large pieces. At the moment no global public sphere can be established. Agent Myers drafts a radio message. 'That the Earth is utterly uninhabitable, is characteristically exaggerated insofar as the Chinese Marxists still inhabit and cultivate this mountain of ruins one way or another. One can only speak of ruins from the viewpoint of a society based on exploitation, for which nature becomes a ruin only when its natural resources can no longer be easily over exploited. In this respect, this report is only an example of the inability of the observers to adapt'." (Aside: the world in this state, shattered as after a great tragedy, divested of the "exploitable resources" in the earth's crust, and turned over to literal a subsistence on Negarestani's so-called "solar capitalism," would be, perhaps, the (ironic!) state of fulfillment of Gershom Scholem's tikkun i.e. "the repair of shattered vessels" culminating in the messianic separation of light from darkness — and yet, for those fictional "Chinese Marxists" still inhabiting this space, such a situation would only be an occasion to begin to take up one's tools once again . . .)
Kluge's donut earth that you can fall clean through is an illustration of a plot hole in the theory of plot holes: i.e. plot holes are not "perforations," as Negarestani suggests, but are part of the topology of a given space/text, which we can think of as its invaginated surface. We already have an understanding that Lovecraft's texts are infested with plot holes not because something important has been left out of them, but instead that these fictions are pumped full of plot holes precisely because they constitute the text as part of its topology. Kluge's fiction, in which the planet's reserves of tellurian oil have been blown out into space (Cyclonopedia doesn't conceive of this aspect of oil's "hole-y" plan) demonstrates that oil, as we ought to think of it, occupies a fold in geologic space, illustrated, for example, in that image from the NOAA (above). (Caption: "Cross-section of an oil deposit, known as a 'play' in the industry, including its source rock, reservoir, trap, and seal. The best place to drill to recover this oil is at its thickest and shallowest point.") The "play" of the oil deposit in its fold is perhaps the neglected basis for Cyclonopedia's discussion of the "militant horizontality" of Wahabi sects, whose pursuit of topological flatness can be understood as a demonstrative proof of a deeper topological concept, "The Middle East is a militant horizontality which tolerates no contour of any kind against its monopoly and flatness [. . . ] Wahhabism suggests that, to purge idols, it is otiose and absurd to hunt them down one by one; the solution is to raze their abode to the ground [. . .] If the pax Islamica (the Umma) is so enthusiastic to drive the war into urban spaces, it is because they know that the US warmachines do not merely wipe out an urban area like the conventional armies of a conventional enemy; they overkill cities: Their tactics and extra-terminating weaponries have been programmed to make deserts of cities, disassembling anything erected; this is how they become as one with their Wahhabi adversaries in leveling anything erected" (148).
The "Tiamaterialist" quality of oil, however, lies precisely in the fact that it doesn't remain secure in its tellurian fold. An additional invagination in the topology of the oil field develops when a drill bit breaks the "seal." The pipeline, a demonstration of movement within the fold, shows by this movement something in the process of becoming "un-affordable." Negarestani notes that the laminar flow of hydrocarbons in the oil pipeline is something like an electric current in the way it produces effects on the body of "solar capitalism," "If any movement in a conductive material produces a magnetic field, then the gas pipeline where oil and Islamic warmachines move must produce an immense magnetic field of [sorts] encircling the tube" (87). The distribution of a magnetic field has its own characteristic topology, including an emergent property which is the folds in the topography of the global magnetosphere (see image below). It should be superfluous to note who is in the "trap" and what the "play" once the reader realizes himself (unexpectedly) within the fold (exercise left to the reader . . . solution: the humanoid reading-subject in the moments before his imminent "exploitation").
Source: NOAA
In this context it's tempting to characterize Oil's project as if it were an otherworldly invading force à la Lovecraft with the objective of, say, perpetuating hydrocarboniferous effects in its play upon Climate. It's not an unreasonable plot, but the plot hole in this scheme is precisely its "reasonability." Such things are too "affordable." The alien invasion stories in Lovecraft (and popular media) are always so unconvincing because so-called "alien" agents are always united in hegemonic military discipline. Extraterrestrial first-contact forces rarely engage in the earth-shattering (literally) internal dissent so characteristic of human crews in similar films. Lovecraft's (c)thulu cultists are portrayed as (mixed-race) post-political agents, whereas we know the insular religious (oc)cult is precisely the opposite of post-politics. Kluge, (once again) provides the key illustration of the appearance of an united front in what is really a death struggle: "A Special Application of the Force of Labor, Drilling into the Hills of Vauquois: French and German sappers, especially chosen for their mining experience, dug tunnels deep into the hill from both sides. An inflation of materials in the most confined of spaces. All professionals. Finally the hill was useless for further tunnel building. You can' t drive tunnels into ground shaken apart by explosions.
—So what did the sappers do after that?
—They built concrete pipes into the mountain.
—From the outside it looked like cooperation. " (Kluge, History and Obstinacy, 1993)
Perhaps one reason Cyclonopedia finds the projects of crude oil to be so inscrutable is that it never conceives the possibility of a "Differance" between hydrocarbonic (double-bonded) double-agents. Certainly in their admixture as "crude" oil they get along in a reliable, predicable laminar flow — close together as can be — though this is no more evidence of unity-of-purpose than the analogous situation one might observe in crude commuter traffic.
Multiplicity offers a less "affordable" interpretation of the weak alchemical theme in this text: Rubedo (redness) is unity, the end of the alchemical line, the philosopher's stone achieved, Jung's actualization, and so on . . . The problem, of course, is that its enclosure of perfect conspiratorial unity is always false. What would it mean to take each petrochemical object as divided (even against itself) and pursuing its own objectives — this would be to undergo "pinking" i.e. what Negarestani might mean by the suggestion "Pink come after red" (242). "Pink magnolias, cherry blossoms in DC more pink [. . .] a fleshed out nipple, little girls' pink velvet ribbons, pink spaces, pink lights, my entryway and upstairs foyer bright pink glaze, a pink cashmere sweater set, Christos' pink. Pink poodles pink cats pink cover of Laches pink blush the most perfect shade of pink lipstick pink cd holders pink pearl necklace pink pearl earrings pink camisole pink highlighter pink Christmas lights and pink flowers, peonies, tulips, rare pink poppies [. . .] Chinese crab apple flash by my eyes. Pink torrent" (17). The paranoid Tiamaterialist thinks conspiratorial oil speaks with one voice. All rocks are the same; the particles of air appear to be in complicity. . . Yes, air seems safe to see through, but air only looks this way because it cannot look otherwise. The clarity of air is illusion — the mere appearance of the absence of internal strife. If the particles of the earth could agree to put their differences aside — which may happen for an unlikely instant — there would be sight underground. show less
If there is an award for unreadable fiction, this book should get it.
To begin with, it is a collection of incoherent essays that attempt to create a new mysticism based on oil and the Middle East. By incoherent I mean that not only are the chapters independent of one another, but that the paragraphs of these chapters are unconnected, and indeed many times the sentences within each paragraph bear no relationship to each other. It's a pretty basic aspect of writing, but one which modern show more authors seem to have forgotten, that each sentence follows from the previous, grouped as a sequence into coherent paragraphs, and that each paragraph is a consequence or a clarification of the preceding paragraph, unless an explicit transition is provided. There are various justifications for not doing this, such as subverting the narrative expectation of the reader, breaking the constraints of traditional structure, making the reader aware that they are reading a book, and so on - but really it is just bad writing.
It's hard to tell whether the bad writing on display here is intentional, or the writer is incompetent. This is because the contents are presented as a "found work" with some introduction and footnotes by the actual author(/protagonist, but ultimately who cares), so making the thing unreadable makes it more realistic. Except that the found-work is an academic study of another source-work, so already we're at two removes from the incompetent writer (assuming academics can write well, which I am inclined to believe despite ample evidence to the contrary). This source work, written by yet another Mad Arab, is quoted liberally throughout, but the inept typesetting and the refusal to use traditional methods of quoting makes it difficult to tell where the source-work ends and the found-work begins. Is this intentional, or incompetent? Who cares! It's rubbish either way.
The content itself, that is the ideas, are the sort of nonsense you see plastered to lamposts or left in laundromats. The sort of etymologically-ignorant ("what do bugs have to do with anything?") and rhetorically-suspect word association used in Five Percent Nation building and second-wave feminism ("history is HIS-story and should be replaced with HER-story") makes great propaganda, but poor argumentation. This is buttressed by the most inept numerology one is likely to encounter outside of Madonna's Kabbalah circle: if the numerical values of a word's component letters cannot be coerced into a desired value or combination,then change the spelling of the word, and claim without evidence that this is the true spelling of the word (before or after transliteration from the original alphabet, as needed)!
But yeah, okay, oil is a Force, Gog and Magog are two ends of an Axis (unclear why these names were chosen), Decay is a Mystic Process, and so on. There is a lot of asserting in this book, but very little explaining, and ultimately no conclusions. X is this. Y is that. Why should we care? Nobody bothers to say, nor to provide any evidence that the scholar isn't just making all of this up as he goes along (and if that's intentional, does that really improve things?).
An attempt is made at the beginning to provide a framing story, like in House of Leaves: a preface describing, however unbelievably, the discovery of the scholar's manuscript, followed by an exchange of views in the footnotes. This exchange peters out pretty early on, and eventually is replaced by footnotes that are in code. It's not a hard code, just a simple substitution cipher, one you could probably do in your head, though after determining about 1/3 of the words in a footnote it becomes clear this is just more garbage, so why bother finishing. The narrative supposedly winds up in the end notes, but spoiler, it doesn't, they are just more garbage, and the book has no narrative after the prologue.
So why 3 stars instead of 1? Good question. I did enjoy reading a few of the schizoid rants, such as the Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards The Sun and Decay (the Excursus sections were all borderline unreadable, and the stuff on geopolitics was pretty naive). Usually while smoking a cigar outside on a sunny day; they were somewhat amusing to contemplate as possibilities. So, for those that want to mix things up at the expense of enjoyment, reading this is an option.
I want to be clear though: I do not in any way recommend or endorse reading this book. Maybe it's an art project attempting to re-create the unreadable work of a schizophrenic, maybe it's a collection of drug-addled screeds written in the timeless small hours, maybe it's the catalogue to accompany an unidentified modern art exhibit. Regardless of the author's intended purpose for this work, absolutely no indication is given of why this should be considered reading material. show less
To begin with, it is a collection of incoherent essays that attempt to create a new mysticism based on oil and the Middle East. By incoherent I mean that not only are the chapters independent of one another, but that the paragraphs of these chapters are unconnected, and indeed many times the sentences within each paragraph bear no relationship to each other. It's a pretty basic aspect of writing, but one which modern show more authors seem to have forgotten, that each sentence follows from the previous, grouped as a sequence into coherent paragraphs, and that each paragraph is a consequence or a clarification of the preceding paragraph, unless an explicit transition is provided. There are various justifications for not doing this, such as subverting the narrative expectation of the reader, breaking the constraints of traditional structure, making the reader aware that they are reading a book, and so on - but really it is just bad writing.
It's hard to tell whether the bad writing on display here is intentional, or the writer is incompetent. This is because the contents are presented as a "found work" with some introduction and footnotes by the actual author(/protagonist, but ultimately who cares), so making the thing unreadable makes it more realistic. Except that the found-work is an academic study of another source-work, so already we're at two removes from the incompetent writer (assuming academics can write well, which I am inclined to believe despite ample evidence to the contrary). This source work, written by yet another Mad Arab, is quoted liberally throughout, but the inept typesetting and the refusal to use traditional methods of quoting makes it difficult to tell where the source-work ends and the found-work begins. Is this intentional, or incompetent? Who cares! It's rubbish either way.
The content itself, that is the ideas, are the sort of nonsense you see plastered to lamposts or left in laundromats. The sort of etymologically-ignorant ("what do bugs have to do with anything?") and rhetorically-suspect word association used in Five Percent Nation building and second-wave feminism ("history is HIS-story and should be replaced with HER-story") makes great propaganda, but poor argumentation. This is buttressed by the most inept numerology one is likely to encounter outside of Madonna's Kabbalah circle: if the numerical values of a word's component letters cannot be coerced into a desired value or combination,then change the spelling of the word, and claim without evidence that this is the true spelling of the word (before or after transliteration from the original alphabet, as needed)!
But yeah, okay, oil is a Force, Gog and Magog are two ends of an Axis (unclear why these names were chosen), Decay is a Mystic Process, and so on. There is a lot of asserting in this book, but very little explaining, and ultimately no conclusions. X is this. Y is that. Why should we care? Nobody bothers to say, nor to provide any evidence that the scholar isn't just making all of this up as he goes along (and if that's intentional, does that really improve things?).
An attempt is made at the beginning to provide a framing story, like in House of Leaves: a preface describing, however unbelievably, the discovery of the scholar's manuscript, followed by an exchange of views in the footnotes. This exchange peters out pretty early on, and eventually is replaced by footnotes that are in code. It's not a hard code, just a simple substitution cipher, one you could probably do in your head, though after determining about 1/3 of the words in a footnote it becomes clear this is just more garbage, so why bother finishing. The narrative supposedly winds up in the end notes, but spoiler, it doesn't, they are just more garbage, and the book has no narrative after the prologue.
So why 3 stars instead of 1? Good question. I did enjoy reading a few of the schizoid rants, such as the Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards The Sun and Decay (the Excursus sections were all borderline unreadable, and the stuff on geopolitics was pretty naive). Usually while smoking a cigar outside on a sunny day; they were somewhat amusing to contemplate as possibilities. So, for those that want to mix things up at the expense of enjoyment, reading this is an option.
I want to be clear though: I do not in any way recommend or endorse reading this book. Maybe it's an art project attempting to re-create the unreadable work of a schizophrenic, maybe it's a collection of drug-addled screeds written in the timeless small hours, maybe it's the catalogue to accompany an unidentified modern art exhibit. Regardless of the author's intended purpose for this work, absolutely no indication is given of why this should be considered reading material. show less
To understand the militarization of oil and the dynamism of war machines in War on Terror, one must grasp oil as an ultimate Tellurian lubricant, or a vehicle for epic narratives.
I kept thinking of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries while plowing through this book. Sure the prose as such was the epitome of opaque and dense: thus a sheer alternative to the smooth spaces of the Warmachine and the Lines of Immanence. I read somewhere recently that the Israeli Defense Force has begun show more incorporating Deleuze and Guattari into their combat manuals. This could only be a pregnant coincidence with respect to this narrative -- one where petroleum is a sentient evil, at war with the Sun and hoping for an inevitable Lovercraftian return of Lost Gods or some such. Along the way we are guided by a Col. Kurtz of the Delta Force in Iraq and an eerie caress of John Carpenter's The Thing. The glossary of theory-ese at the end is great fun as well. Despite the heavy lifting and a wonky Farsi perspective, this was great fun, though hardly for the uninitiated. show less
I kept thinking of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries while plowing through this book. Sure the prose as such was the epitome of opaque and dense: thus a sheer alternative to the smooth spaces of the Warmachine and the Lines of Immanence. I read somewhere recently that the Israeli Defense Force has begun show more incorporating Deleuze and Guattari into their combat manuals. This could only be a pregnant coincidence with respect to this narrative -- one where petroleum is a sentient evil, at war with the Sun and hoping for an inevitable Lovercraftian return of Lost Gods or some such. Along the way we are guided by a Col. Kurtz of the Delta Force in Iraq and an eerie caress of John Carpenter's The Thing. The glossary of theory-ese at the end is great fun as well. Despite the heavy lifting and a wonky Farsi perspective, this was great fun, though hardly for the uninitiated. show less
‘Cyclonopedia’ is an experimental text consisting of both fiction and theory. I spotted it shelved under sci-fi at my local radical bookshop and would dispute that categorisation. It meshes literary fiction with postmodern political theory, with the unsurprising consequence that it’s very difficult to read. A great deal of effort was required and I’m not at all sure it was worth putting in. I persisted because the oddness appealed and I wanted to find some insight amid show more incomprehensibility. This probably says as much about my shortcomings as the book’s; others might find it easier to follow if they’re well versed in Deleuze and Guattari. The fictional elements seem curiously Victorian: a framing mechanism whereby the main text is a mysterious manuscript found by a first person narrator. In addition to this person, I presume that Dr Hamid Parsani and Colonel West, both frequently quoted, are also fictional.
The theme of the book, as far as I could tell, was the theoretical and mystical influence of oil on the contemporary Middle East. That’s where the main text begins, in any event. I struggle to describe what the latter chapters were about. Worms, Zoroastrianism, and demons, amongst other things. Such was my confusion by that point that I genuinely couldn’t tell what was meant by ‘openness’, so bewildering was the context. I carried on reading in part due to a pleasant quasi-poetic quality in the writing and in part due to the sunk cost fallacy. Nothing became clear at the end. Nonetheless, in the first half there were some intriguing comments on the War on Terror as a figurative clash of machines:
By intriguing, I mean that I was able to grasp something there but felt it could have been explained more clearly. I had a similar experience with the material on guerrilla warfare eliding the distinction between soldier and citizen. I found the beginning easier to understand, as there is evidently a thesis about oil (a substance I am very interested in the sociopolitical role of). Negarestani has some magnificent ways to describe oil, among them Tellurian Lube, The Black Corpse of the Sun, and Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice. My favourite was this:
I enjoyed the list of oil descriptions so much that they merit adding a star to the two I originally intended. Like [b:In the Dust of This Planet|11944741|In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy, #1)|Eugene Thacker|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348583638s/11944741.jpg|16906202], ‘Cyclonopedia’ struggled to hold my attention when it descended into mysticism and demonology. I don’t understand why some postmodern theorists are fascinated by horror fiction in general and Lovecraft in particular. Negarestani briefly discusses Lovecraft’s virulent racism and fear of the contaminating Other, but that was hardly unique among authors of the period! I suppose using occult horror as part of a philosophical framework isn’t to my taste. Lovecraft certainly seems too flimsy for such purposes.
While I do enjoy challenging reading matter, the latter half of ‘Cyclonopedia’ felt a bit too much like wading through crude oil while ancient demons sniggered at me. Rather than elucidating the world, it periodically made me doubt my ability to understand words. It is not quite like anything else I’ve ever read, though, I will give it that. show less
The theme of the book, as far as I could tell, was the theoretical and mystical influence of oil on the contemporary Middle East. That’s where the main text begins, in any event. I struggle to describe what the latter chapters were about. Worms, Zoroastrianism, and demons, amongst other things. Such was my confusion by that point that I genuinely couldn’t tell what was meant by ‘openness’, so bewildering was the context. I carried on reading in part due to a pleasant quasi-poetic quality in the writing and in part due to the sunk cost fallacy. Nothing became clear at the end. Nonetheless, in the first half there were some intriguing comments on the War on Terror as a figurative clash of machines:
Since western warmachines have already (stealthily) been programmed and contaminated by Islamic warmachines smuggled through oil, they militantly rush towards Islamic warmachines, or, in other words and more precisely, they are attracted to Islamic warmachines by an internal force which has already mutated them from within through their oily nervous system and petromania. For western warmachines, the addiction to oil is not limited to oil as fuel, but extends to Islamic Apocalytpticism, in a twisted enthusiasm for interlocking and clashing with Islamic warmachines.
By intriguing, I mean that I was able to grasp something there but felt it could have been explained more clearly. I had a similar experience with the material on guerrilla warfare eliding the distinction between soldier and citizen. I found the beginning easier to understand, as there is evidently a thesis about oil (a substance I am very interested in the sociopolitical role of). Negarestani has some magnificent ways to describe oil, among them Tellurian Lube, The Black Corpse of the Sun, and Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice. My favourite was this:
An autonomous chemical weapon belonging to earth as both a sentient entity and an event. Petroleum poisons Capital with absolute madness, a planetary plague bleeding into economies mobilised by the technological singularities of advanced civilisations. In the wake of oil as an autonomous terrestrial conspirator, capitalism is not a human symptom but rather a planetary inevitability. In other words, Capitalism was here even before human existence, waiting for a host.
I enjoyed the list of oil descriptions so much that they merit adding a star to the two I originally intended. Like [b:In the Dust of This Planet|11944741|In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy, #1)|Eugene Thacker|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348583638s/11944741.jpg|16906202], ‘Cyclonopedia’ struggled to hold my attention when it descended into mysticism and demonology. I don’t understand why some postmodern theorists are fascinated by horror fiction in general and Lovecraft in particular. Negarestani briefly discusses Lovecraft’s virulent racism and fear of the contaminating Other, but that was hardly unique among authors of the period! I suppose using occult horror as part of a philosophical framework isn’t to my taste. Lovecraft certainly seems too flimsy for such purposes.
While I do enjoy challenging reading matter, the latter half of ‘Cyclonopedia’ felt a bit too much like wading through crude oil while ancient demons sniggered at me. Rather than elucidating the world, it periodically made me doubt my ability to understand words. It is not quite like anything else I’ve ever read, though, I will give it that. show less
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