How to Mutate and Take Over the World (Hardcover)

~ St. Jude (Author), (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you thought the media-cyberspace-information-overload techno Tower of Babel had reached dizzying heights before, you clearly never dreamed you'd be exposed to a novel that reads like someone tossed Douglas Adams, William Gibson, Mark Leyner and Thomas Pynchon into a Cuisinart and hit the puree button. This self-described "exploded post-novel" can be read front to back, back to front or grazed in snippets. Probably the first novel you can channel-surf.

From Publishers Weekly

In the very near future, a war will break out over the direction of the Internet. On the side of greater control of online behavior will be an authoritarian-minded government and a strained coalition of feminists and right-wingers concerned with matters of decency. On the other side will be the "cypherpunks" who develop encryption codes too complex to be broken, media pranksters for whom the message is the medium, and the child pornographers, pedophiles and hatemongers who exploit a "free" Net. The multiple authors of this novel, who include two pseudonymous founders of the futuristic magazine Mondo 2000, plus some of their E-mail buddies, take this premise and "explode" the subsequent narrative. That is, they make themselves the protagonists, with R.U. Sirius appearing as a rock/TV/political star and St. Jude as a laptop guerrilla. The narrative includes E-mail between the authors and their editor at Ballantine, and a dizzying array of graphics featuring varying column widths, different fonts for different types of communications and agitprop photos. What all this adds up to seems to be, essentially, a collection of E-mail files with delusions of grandeur. The book offers no real story line, no viable characters and absolutely no perspective, though it does include myriad examples of the lively, punning language of the Net ("scroom" for screw them, for example). The narrative makes fun of itself, and of us for reading it, and yet demands that the issues it raises be taken seriously. Presciently, it also offers prewritten reviews of the book that are remarkably on-target: for instance, "smug and glib to the point of exhaustion." Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 305 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1st edition (February 20, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345392167
• ISBN-13: 978-0345392169
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,837,557 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars mind-melting - this is what "Postmodern" means, June 19, 2000

By	John Austin "Bhikku" (Olympia, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For sheer paranoid frenzy power, this book is best read in turns with Shea & Wilson's "Illuminatus!" trilogy. This is brilliant stuff, I truly believe this is a fine sample of where writing can take us if we give Art free reign. This is one colossal whack on the brain that makes acid look like ginger ale. The complex layering of stories-within-stories here toys with the rational mind, gradually drawing you in and distorting all perception until the barrier between real and not-real starts to bleed, and sorting what's going on from what isn't becomes frightening, difficult, and rediculous. For anyone struggling with literary catchphrases, this book is what they mean when they say "Postmodern." I have two copies, a friend of mine has ten. We take this seriously. Sorta.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Strange weird and not to serious, January 5, 2002

By	Jim Richards "mr_grumpy" (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

R. U. Sirius and St. Jude have taken us all for a ride. This post-novel is a poke in the eye for want-a-be cyberpunks and cypherpunks. I'm sure the book is not to be taken seriously.

It is a mix of email between the two authors, interspersed with email to their publisher, news stories, book reviews (yes, reviews for a book in the book they review, and very poor ones too!), and interviews. We are left no knowledge of what is real, fake or somewhere inbetween. Some of the interviews (well, one because we see the credits for it at the start) may be real, and as for the editorial assistant Trudy, who knows?

The only clue is a note at the end telling us that the book does make fun of some of their friends, and their only consolation is that it makes fun of the authors as well. Also the Phil Zimmerman defence fund mentioned on page 26 is true, thus leading the reader to believe the rest is complete fabrication.

Where that leaves us is that it is a complete work of fiction. Which I suppose we should expect. As a work of fiction it meanders, walks around, tells tales and really doesn't get us very far. It is interesting as a story telling device, but you need to realise that R. U. Sirius and St. Jude are fictional characters created by each author. They are their online persona's that seem to leak out into the real world every now and then. The book is interesting for its own sake, and that's about it really.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very interesting read, April 25, 1998

By A Customer

Agreed! This is actually a very interesting book with unique style, probably would not be appreciated by the right-wing republican extremists or even baby boomers. This is a book for the college kids who called themselves X generation or whatever. You have to randomly dig into the text and get something out of periodically. Both co-authors sometimes would give the readers an impression that most of the time during their writing, their minds were in a rocky mountain HIGH condition, and full of inspirational thoughts, sometimes rebellious, cynical, anti social, and full of hatred to the corporate world; yet sometimes calm, penetrative, perceptive and philosophic. For example, they have pointed out that in order to meet with the signed contractual publishing deadlines, lot of modern day authors have to use formatted writing technics to actually manufacture a book like a product in a rush. That's why so many books we read nowadays would always look alike: having a good start, then a lousy medium process and finally, a terrible and rushed wrap-up; an ending so focusless that always let readers feel helplessly pissed, being cheated and wanted their money back! I think this book is the collection of both authors' trivial thoughts during their grow-up journey, since they are also middle aged people now, these sometimes ridiculed, twisted ways of looking at life and the world might never be materialized again. It would make this book look like a combined personal diaries that they felt should have to be shown to other generations before they put it away. This is a book that you could flip through randomly but never feel lost, bored, or beign cheated; a far better candid read than the tasteless, aimless, circling-around, all-read-similar "Spenser" series by Robert Parker.