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R. U. Sirius

How to Mutate and Take Over the World Hardcover – February 20, 1996

by St. Jude (Author), R. U. Sirius (Author)

4.1 12 ratings

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—

OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS FOR AN EXPLODED POST-NOVEL
This is not a novel.
Don't think you can just hold your nose and jump into this.
You might get boiled or vaporized. Anodized.
THIS IS NOT A NOVEL
Before you start reading an exploded post-novel, you should think strategy.
While we do recommend reading this book from front to back--left to right--you can skip around as you please. It is disguised as a scrapbook. You can channelsurf it. Or graze through sections, munch munch munch. After you acquire the taste, you'll feel strong enough to start at the beginning and read through to the end, in precisely that order. Don't take too much at one sitting. Do not overdose. It's dense, fast. Things get technical. There's a relentless quality to the first-person narrative that may exhaust you secondhand. Read only until the vertigo overwhelms you. When you find yourself crying out, "For god's sake, give it a break!!!". . . well, exactly. Put the book down. . . gently. Rest. Watch TV. Read Ben Is Dead. Go somewhere watery and lie in the hard radiation. Read a nonexploded novel. Take up crime. Then. . .
Read a little at a time. Swallow it slowly like crème br-lée. Or hold it in your cheek like Copenhagen Smokeless. But do not rush. If you go slowly enough, by the time you're done, the made-for-TV movie will be out. Starring Steven Seagal as R. U. Sirius and Whoopi Goldberg as St. Jude.

Print length

305 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Ballantine Books
Publication date

February 20, 1996
Dimensions

4 x 0.75 x 7 inches
ISBN-10

0345392167
ISBN-13

978-0345392169
See all details

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.

From Booklist

It is hard to describe a novel--or as this book styles itself, "an exploded post-novel" --that doesn't have a plot, or, rather, has several, both sequentially and simultaneously. In fact, discussions between the authors and the editor as to whether the book has or even needs a plot (discussions accompanied by the authors' glee at having sold the book and their chagrin at having prematurely spent the advance) form just one thread among the many that make up the book's somewhat curious approach to narrative fiction, which may seem less daunting if you think of it as a 1990s version of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. What's it about? Censorship on the Net, or maybe sex, drugs, and music in the cybernetic age. Whatever. It's set in the present, or at least a present, and the near future, and typographically, it mimics hard copy downloaded in various fonts and styles. It's vastly amusing, very confusing, and from time to time, it both requires and stimulates thought. What more do you want from fiction? Dennis Winters

From the Inside Flap

STRUCTIONS FOR AN EXPLODED POST-NOVEL
This is not a novel.
Don't think you can just hold your nose and jump into this.
You might get boiled or vaporized. Anodized.
THIS IS NOT A NOVEL
Before you start reading an exploded post-novel, you should think strategy.
While we do recommend reading this book from front to back--left to right--you can skip around as you please. It is disguised as a scrapbook. You can channelsurf it. Or graze through sections, munch munch munch. After you acquire the taste, you'll feel strong enough to start at the beginning and read through to the end, in precisely that order. Don't take too much at one sitting. Do not overdose. It's dense, fast. Things get technical. There's a relentless quality to the first-person narrative that may exhaust you secondhand. Read only until the vertigo overwhelms you. When you find yourself crying out, "For god's sake, give it a break!!!". . . well, exactly. Put the book down. . . gently. Rest. Watch

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books; First Edition (February 20, 1996)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 305 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345392167
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345392169
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4 x 0.75 x 7 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,073,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #135,476 in American Literature (Books)
- #137,083 in Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.1 12 ratings

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4.1 out of 5

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Tim Reutemann

Historic and yet still relevant

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is a gem. If your into cyberspace history, St. Jude and R.U. Sirius are a must-read. And they saw a lot of todays issues around censorship and abuse coming all the way back in 1994.
Explode! Mutate! Take Over!

Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2016

I picked this up when it was first published back in 1996 simply because the inside flaps sang to the 27-year-old-me with all kinds of words and phrases I didn’t really get: “post-novel” … “meta-structure” … “deconstructionist-narrative” … wait … “cyberpunk!?” Oh, I had to have it. So I purchased it, read a few entries from it’s scrapbook like collection of articles, clippings, email texts, etc., and put it on my “to read” pile down in my office. After Y2K, when I had to get a “real job” at a “real company,” the book pretty much stayed down in the unused home office, until I came across it while remodeling … now 20 years later. I have since become a big fan of R.U. Sirius, having followed his writings and podcasts for years online, so now seemed a good time to finally sit down and actually read the book that I was so taken with in my youth.

I’m not sure “challenging” is the word to use … possibly “amusingly frustrating.” As mentioned, this is what the author’s term a “post-novel.” Essentially, it is a scrapbook of emails, articles, clippings, and essays starting in the then present, and carrying forward to the early 2000’s (which were the future at the time). Thrown together, they tell sort of a detached story about a government that goes insane with censorship of the ever expanding “electronic frontier” of information that is being made available. At the same time, their lack of understanding of technology gives rise to various movements, groups, cults, etc. who live sort of a half-real-world/half-virutal existence on message bords, chat rooms, tobacco bars (cigarettes are a controlled substance in this nightmare future), mental institutions (spolier?), and religious compunds. Countering this narrative is a separate story made up of email exchanges between the authors and the publisher discussing the trials and tributions of writing and publishing the book you’re reading. This seems absurd at first, they are actually discussing how contrived everything is, how you can slap “cyberpunk” on anything and people will buy it, and how they really don’t have a story or a climax worked out, but since they’ve already spent their advances, they have to come up with something. About halfway through the book, this “author commentary” starts to take on a dramatic plot of it’s own, with elements of this realitiy becoming influences for the fictional reality of the “scrapbook” storyline, and that’s when things get a little confusing.

As both storylines became increasingly ludicrous and build towards the “meta-climax,” you tend to lose track of what happened to which manifestation of the author/characters 200 pages earlier, and everything sort of just blends together into surrealism out of lazy exhaustion– or possibly this was the intent. By the time you get to the two page climax of the “scrapbook” which I wouldn’t exactly call a deus ex machina so much as a deus ex parachute to get out of the crashing plane, you realize that this is the only possible ending the book could have had. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because you read this as a historical/cultural reference of the early (scary) Internet era; not because you’re looking for a gripping story. In all, if you don’t stop to study it too much, you can enjoy some really neat ideas, a few good chuckles, and get a nice little light-to-moderate workout for your thought organ.

One person found this helpful

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J Rook

mind-melting - this is what "Postmodern" means

Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2000

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.

5 people found this helpful

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salvarsan

Historical meta-document

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2005

This is St. Jude on Zoloft collaborating with RU Sirius to craft a terribly drole chronicle/send up of SanFran's cyberpunk climate in the mid-90's. If you didn't track the culture, you miss a lot of the references, unfortunately, so it has to be viewed as an extended series of inside jokes on a vanished movement.

One person found this helpful

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Jim Richards

Strange weird and not to serious

Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2002

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 people found this helpful

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justin thyme

Oops... missed the Deadline?

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 1999

Hmm, did r.u. and jude miss the dealine on this one aswell. With the text below the title, "An Exploded Post-Novel", it can certainly make you wonder. The style is definitly wired, a precurser to english usage in the digital age. a cybercultural tomb of email babble. more so that most other books, i feel that 'how to mutate and take over the world' would really depend on what the reader goes into the book for. for my purposes of 'technology/culture' research, it proves an excellent resource. aesthetically, the book is quite beatiful; a variety of topography, a catchy semi-translucent cover-sleeve, the digitally altered photograph of an anonymous head on the cover, etc. etc.. if your into the whole "cypherpunk" ordeal, this book will look good next to your 'techgnosis'...

2 people found this helpful

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