Maeby: No, deep is good. People are going to say, “What the hell just happened? I better say I like it.” ’Cause nobody wants to seem stupid.
Rita: I like it!


Somewhere, in some beautiful alternate universe, some years ago the young Iranian student Reza Negarestani was denied entry to the graduate school of the University of Warwick and, crushed, never received any academic training in the field of philosophy. After wallowing in disappointment for a few years, he channeled his despondency into Cycl More...

Sui generis, confounding, disturbing, difficult, absorbing, and ingenious: all of these adjectives are fitting labels to describe Cyclonopedia, a work of theoretical fiction by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani that falls about halfway between theory and fiction - a nebulous netherpoint with blurred edges that is so utterly appropriate to the contents that lie within.

Posit an Earth that, in its submissive wholeness, is an ordered and orderly component of the Solar Empire, the hegemonic domain More...

Cyclonopedia is indisputably one of the most challenging and impressive books of the 21st century. I am not sure how much familiarity with key texts like the works of Deleuze and Guattari or Middle Eastern references can be helpful in reading the book. The synthesis of ideas and the mechanism of analogies are quite different from anything out there. It is a book that requires the reader to think differently and become accomplice in the way it thinks and put things together. For reading cyclonope More...

Not ready to review yet... mind still blown.

UPDATE 5/14/2012: Fifteen months later, I'm still not capable of writing a coherent review, but I definitely recommend it if you like at least two of the following: cracked conspiracy theories, occult horror, Tristram Shandy.

Cyclonopedia is a work of philosophy embedded in a horror novel which is wrapped in a literary hoax involving the written legacy of Dr. Hamid Parsani, recently disappeared. While comparisons to House of Leaves are apt, Cyclonopedia offers more theory than plot and leaves a thick, oily residue in your brainpan. Is the Middle East an intelligent entity? Does the earth yearn for solar immolation? What is the esoteric role of oil in the "war on terror"? The book's blurb rounds it all out nicely:

"An More...

Cyclonopedia is a dense word salad smothered in a thick dressing of crude oil and bitter herbs. Taking the Lovecraftian conceit of a corrupting found manuscript to its logical, postmodern extreme, Cyclonopedia posits an accidentally-discovered philosophical treatise riddled with plot ( )holes and uncanny revelations, including sentient oil animating and inhabiting the Middle East, embroiled in an eternal conflict with solar hegemony. A touch of cosmic horror, an inkling of Apocalypse Now, a pinc More...

A very interesting book. The back cover copy makes it sound like it's science fiction, and Jess Martin's review (on this site) makes it sound like some generic mysticism. One of the endorsements in the book describes it as "an uncategorizable hybrid of philosophical fiction, heretical theology, aberrant demonology and renegade archaeology." That is a bit sloppy, because the book is only philosophical fiction in the sense that it is invented, � la Borges or Lem. And heresy isn't its point. "Cyclo More...

Allow me to get on my soapbox for bit: A book's difficulty is not directly proportional to its brilliance. Some difficult books are pure drivel, and some simple looking books are pure genius. This particular book requires a lot of work, and a great deal of patience. For this, it is to be both admired and alternately thrown against a wall.

Part of the unusual nature of the book is the way that it is written. It starts out as a somewhat typical story would - meaning that it contains characters and More...

"In Shawwal of 783 AH, Um al-Ghathra was in a caravan heading to Khurasan, Iran for trade and pilgrimage. Towards the end of its journey, the caravan changed its direction in the night because what they sighted ahead in their assumed direction was a lagoon instead of a city. After a few days of wandering, they headed back for their homes. Once settled, Um al-Ghathra began to write a treatise on what would later be called the Middle East as a sentient and living entity - alive in a very literal s More...

Man, this one is kind of hurting me to read it. It's a bit crazed. And the endnotes!§ If this ends up being a waste of my time I'm going to punch China Mieville and the guy from BLDGblog in the mouth.

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Yeah. I'm done with this.
























































































































































































































































































































































































































































































§ ARGH! ENDNOTES! More...

Fortunately or unfortunately I was never into Theory (with an uppercase T) although I did once haunt the sites likes ctheory.net and hyperstition and Reza's own blog/s. They call it Theory Fiction. Reza has been heavily involved in the Speculative Realism project mainly driven by Graham Harmann in the UK and Quentin Meillassoux in France backed by Urbanomic, their Cornish publishers (based in Daphne de Maurier's Falmouth).

Cyclonopedia is first part of Reza's "Blackening" trilogy. Part II, The Mo More...

A strange and demanding reflection on the Middle East through the lens of critical theory and paranoiac demonology. Although there is much a admire about the book for people with a particular set of idiosyncratic interests (of which I am one) the demands the author places on the patience and attention of even the devoted are fairly extreme. Worth reading if you admire Deleuze and Guattari, Lovecraft and Bataille and have a high tolerance for experimental literature. I got something out of it, an More...

Excuse me if this is off the mark, just trying to grapple with the book.

A quote from Brian Massumi's 'A User's Guide To Capitalism and Schizophrenia' (a series of attempts to interpret two Deleuze and Guattari works) is instrumental here, and serves to illustrate Negarestani's mode of operation:

“The question is not, Is is true? But, does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open to More...

The sheer amount of work that must have gone into writing, researching and formatting this book is astounding, and for that reason alone it's worth your attention. Favorite sections include "The Dust Enforcer," "Decay," and "The Z. Crowd: The Infested Germ Cell of Monotheism." It's no coincidence that these sections are also the most lucid.

For those interested in the larger implications of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Middle-Eastern horror (this book takes the term "War on Terror" to new levels), More...

Not everything we read is to our liking. These past weeks, I’ve been spending bits of my time wrestling with a mish-mash of Middle Eastern esoterica, Critical Theory, and metaphysical Political Economy called Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anonymous Materials by one Reza Negarestani.

It begins with an American woman arriving in Istanbul to meet an online friend. The anonymous acquaintance never arrives. What she does find in her hotel is a mysterious manuscript.

Lured by what seemed like a promisin More...

(2.0) I'd love for someone to explain what the heck this is, I'll even consider reading it again.

I just don't know what I just experienced by reading this. Quick summary:
* there's a short intro, supposedly by Kristen Alvanson (more on her later), journalist(?) who is supposed to meet an Iranian whose name is an unpronounceable (just by her?) serpent-like symbol (Satan? ;) ). Instead of meeting him, she finds a manuscript (Cyclonopedia itself, with odd marginalia that appears in our book as footn More...

Cyclonopedia is an ambitious and extravagant work, pulling in archaeology, demonology, geopolitics, topology, kinesthetics, religious studies, philosophy, mystical numerology, war/military studies, culinary theory, and more into a helical, bitterly paranoid treatise on the Earth, the Sun, and oil. The premise, vaguely, is that the Middle East is a living entity and the oil underground/molten core of the Earth manipulates people and politics in its efforts to achieve a burning immanence with the More...

It is difficult to categorize this book. It starts with a plot, but the plot is quickly pushed to the extremities of the text to occupy the footnotes. The bulk of the text becomes a meandering analysis of a fictional archaeologist's socio-political theories of the middle east, and the original protagonist is sucked in and fades away- perhaps she was never real in the first place, perhaps she was instead a tactic used by the book to lure and entrap the reader.

It is certainly the sort of thing th More...

I haven't finished this yet, I'm barely 50 pages in, but I'm struggling with how to approach it. If I look at it as a sort of artistic emulation of the mystical, numerological, everything-is-connected obsession of a paranoid schizophrenic, then I find it interesting and unsettling. I can ignore the analogies that are, quite frankly, reaching (listing all the metaphysical/metaphorical ways in which oil can be said to be slippery), and I can ignore the justifications that are factually incorrect ( More...

I was excited to read this book once I heard the nutso title. Really excited, but I couldn't find a library that had it, so I sprung for my own copy. Woe be to me. I made it through the first 50 pages before stopping, and I wouldn't have read that much, except I was on a seven-hour flight to Honolulu and had nowhere else to be.

The first few pages are a hopeful kind of Gibsonesque new-century sprawl, as are the footnotes, but the rest is purpoted psychotic rambling. 99% of the book. Mostly incomp More...

stumbled upon this today, and it looks potentially fascinating, perhaps another Illuminatus Trilogy even?

Such a strange book. Take Deleuze & Guattari, HP Lovecraft, Georges Bataille, middle eastern occultism, religious history and the the geopolitics of oil and throw them in a blender.
I agree with some of the other readers that its not quite as it is described but it definitely has some interesting ideas to grapple with.

I am not sure, how much in this book is very sophisticated satirical pastiche on (anti-)philosophic & academic jargon, but it was one of the most challenging, (entertainingly) disturbing and impressive reads I had in a long time.

if you liked the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, you'll like this.
abstruse, academic occulturalism applied to historical, polytical, and economic realities.

Very helpful in confusing my understands. Decay has become more important to me since. Also closure and the dark.

Great concept. Interesting writer. HP Lovecraft meets Deleuze. Unnecessarily tedious

letters started to misplace and occupy their new positions

i can only handle this book a little at a time, it's nuts.

Reads like Finnegans Wake of weird fiction. It needs to be read with Negarestani's philosophical essays in Collapse for the full effect.

Half academic treatise on the intersection of oil in American/Middle Eastern politics, half Lovecraft horror novel. It's all weird and all fascinating.