Review on Public Books

There’s a new piece on Unwrapped Sky by Public Books, written by Sarah Balkin. It’s a serious intellectual piece, and that thrills me no end. Balkin writes:

The novel is at pains to distinguish a politics of impersonality from a politics in which the ends justify the means. Davidson’s own means are a fantastic city and revised notions of life and death. Staring down at a burning city in the wake of revolution, Max pronounces, “Caeli-Amur is alive. Full of possibility. I hope it never changes.”

Unwrapped Sky does not fully endorse Max’s impersonal perspective—he does not realize the revolution has come and gone without him. But its depiction of the city as an organism livelier than its inhabitants suggests that for a posthuman aesthetic to become a posthuman politics, we must reconfigure our relationship to death.