Blueprints of the Afterlife, with Ryan Boudinot

Start: 02/26/2012 3:00 pm

End: 02/26/2012 4:00 pm

Blueprints of the Afterlife, by Ryan Boudinot

Ryan Boudinot is one of the most promising young novelists of his generation, called "wickedly talented" (The Boston Globe ) and "darkly funny" (The New York Times Book Review). Blueprints of the Afterlife is a tour de force—part George Saunders, part Philip K. Dick; a novel that marries absurd satire with the high-concept storytelling of slipstream sci-fi.

It is the future. The end of the world is no more than a distorted memory called "the Age of Fucked-up Shit." A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America's cities. Medical care is supplied by networked nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked. Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not her own. And she's right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who's dragged his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medal to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who puts people in the right places at the right times—and it all culminates in a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. Blueprints of the Afterlife establishes Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.

"Wildly imaginative, smart, funny, and hopefully not prophetic, Blueprints of the Afterlife brings to mind Vonnegut, and finds Boudinot at the top of his game as a young writer to watch."—Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here

Ryan Boudinot is the author of the short story collection The Littlest Hitler (2006) and the novel Misconception. He was a DVD Editor at Amazon.com from 2003 to 2007. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Seattle and teaches creative writing at Goddard College's Port Townsend MFA program.