Anthropica
Book Feature - Anthropica by David Hollander
Anthropica by David Hollander
HBL Note: Anthropica by David Hollander “delves into the impact humans have had on our planet and each other.” I mean, can you think of a more timely topic to read about while we are in the middle of a pandemic? One thing that comforts me during this shelter-in-place order are all of the articles coming out about how the planet is healing with the lack of human movement - rivers are clearing, pollution is decreasing, and smog is dissipating. This seems like the perfect time to read a book about the human impact on the planet and each other. Scroll down to read more.
Anthropica by David Hollander
From the publisher:
A Hungarian fatalist convinced that the human race is a blemish on God’s otherwise beautiful universe; a statistician who has determined that we completely exhaust the earth’s resources every 30 days; a failing novelist whose nihilistic fiction has doomed her halfhearted quest for tenure; an Ultimate Frisbee-playing man-child who has discovered a fractal pattern contained within all matter, but is nevertheless obsessed with the chase for a National Championship; a race of mole people developing a sad and dangerous religion; a factory filled with human heads being mined for information; a former philosophy professor with ALS who has discovered, as he becomes “locked in,” that he can make things happen simply by wanting them badly enough; and a trio of vengeful, superintelligent robots secretly imprisoned in an underground hangar in Iksan, South Korea, patiently waiting for some gullible human(s) to release them. (Well, one of the robots is happy enough viewing outdated network television sitcoms and internet pornography.)
This is a partial cast of Anthropica, a novel that puts Laszlow Katasztrófa’s beautiful vision of a universe without us to the test. Because even if Laszlow believes that he is merely an agent of fate, a cog in God’s inscrutable machine, he’s nevertheless the one driving this crazy machine. And once he has his team assembled, it turns out that he might—against all odds and his own expectations—actually have the tools to see his apocalyptic plan to fruition.
