Blueprints for the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot | Book review

Woo-Jin is not fit for this world, or at least he’s managed to be even worse off than the world is a century from now, having just emerged from an era dubbed “The Age of Fucked-Up Shit.” Though the apocalypse remains back story, its aftershocks have not. Woo-Jin lives in a barren Pacific Northwest, in a trailer with his obese foster sister Patsy, whose folds of flesh serve as an organ farm for the government. Woo-Jin suffers from “ennui,” which is the wrong word for massive empathy attacks, in which his body spasms in fits of mind-melded suffering. Woo-Jin is one of many characters—Abby Fogg is an archivist tasked with resurrecting pre-FUS documents, and Rocco is her hacker boyfriend, who disrupts Bionet, a company that uses implants to download medical care to the ill. Meanwhile, in Puget Sound, the government is building a replica of pre-apocalypse Manhattan.

You would need to grow several post-nuclear- meltdown hands to have enough fingers to count all of the post-apocalyptic novels that have come out in the last decade. You can probably thank Bush and Wall Street for that, and you probably should thank them. Whether it’s Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown or Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, the weird thing about this trend is that the books have actually been good.

Add Blueprints to the list. Batshit in the best way, pitch-perfectly condemning of corporate callousness and very funny, Blueprints does more than provide a morality tale about the extreme conclusions of contemporary excess. It also provides a fairly stirring critique of the resilience and perniciousness of nostalgia in the face of so much fucked-up shit.