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23rd out of 24 books
—
36 voters
Flet
Set in a spaced-out future in which all cities have been evacuated after an "Emergency," FLET is named for its female protagonist, an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the Emergency may be a tool of sociopolitical oppression. An elegant entry in speculative fiction, Flet finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination down to the speed of n...more
Paperback, 137 pages
Published
November 1st 2007
by Fence Books
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Jun 28, 2011
Nate D
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
suspicious aides and techies
Recommended to Nate D by:
Blake Butler, racing archeoptrix of the desertifying Nation
Shelves:
dystopiary
This is ambitious and exciting and often totally over my head. Flet is a government aide in the post-Emergency country known as The Nation. In order to either avoid contacting toxins and disease or avoid another Emergency or both, cities have been entirely depopulated and removed from the maps, all pre-Emergency ephemera are off limits pending sterilization, and no one seems to ever leave their cars (which are required to meet the personal gas consumption quota) or come into any unneccessary con...more
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ok, so i want to give it a five but i can't. which means i don't want to, i think.
anyhow, basically the story for some reason kept making me think of robert coover's baseball book, in that i didn't need to predict what would happen, because it was obvious, but in coover's book, which is an unfair comp as McSweeney and Coover are incredibly different, it didn't matter: i wanted to skip ahead to the obvious. Now that Flet didn't compel me in such a way doesn't take away from Flet, as much as it's...more
anyhow, basically the story for some reason kept making me think of robert coover's baseball book, in that i didn't need to predict what would happen, because it was obvious, but in coover's book, which is an unfair comp as McSweeney and Coover are incredibly different, it didn't matter: i wanted to skip ahead to the obvious. Now that Flet didn't compel me in such a way doesn't take away from Flet, as much as it's...more
Great new fiction, full of absolutely beautiful dystopian poetic prose and imagery that makes one feel a bit insane the way she leaps and bounds from one image to the next, yet this creates the almost effect of watching McSweeny's neurons firing at rates that are out of this world fast. After meeting her, I understand why. She speaks swiftly and with authority that leads you to believe her mind is working even faster than her mouth.
Brilliant :: Phildickian and Pynchonian and Joy(elle)cian dystopian sci-fi psychotropic Dylan-esque speculative phonographic joy.
Jan 02, 2008
Josh
added it
Good lord...this is the direction fiction ought to be going. Speculative fiction that draws as much on Philip K. Dick as Ben Marcus. Not only high-concept but precise on the level of language. As artistic as it is culturally relevant.
Incredible--poets and fiction writers, non-fiction writers, lovers of books--you all must get your hands on this.
I read about 1/4 of the book and still had no idea what I was reading.
May 12, 2013
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