CYCLONOPEDIA the theory-fiction work of the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani has just been released by re.press and is now available in bookstores and online. I have written the opening narration chapter and designed conceptual diagrams for the book. More information below…
"Incomparable. Post-genre horror, apocalypse theology and the philosophy of oil, crossbred into a new and necessary codex." – China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station
"Reading Negarestani is like being converted to Islam by Salvador Dali." – Graham Harman, author of Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of ThingsCYCLONOPEDIA is a theory-fiction by Iranian philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani. Hailed by novelists, philosophers and cinematographers, Negarestani's work is the first horror and science fiction book coming from and written on the Middle East.
"The Middle East is a sentient entity – it is alive!" concludes renegade Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the lubricant of historical and political narratives.
A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along.
Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...
At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archaeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth's tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.For more information on the CYCLONOPEDIA, please visit: http://www.re-press.org/content/view/58/38/
