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The City Of Folding Faces
“After returning from the system, each morning Mara forgot who she had been the day before. Every day showed her a new world.”
At the mysterious research facility known only as the Casino, anyone can play Roulette—but it’s not a game for the faint of heart. Those who upload themselves into the system expand their consciousness far beyond natural human limits. But when they return to their bodies and the everyday world, they struggle to function, finding their memories, their speech, and even their dreams changed beyond recognition.
Like many who have played Roulette and fallen into a state of profound dimensional dysphoria, Mara chooses to undergo a cutting-edge body-modification surgery, which by changing the very structure of her face promises to give her a language for expressing the inexpressible. And so she joins a growing subculture: the Ruga, who thanks to the surgery can communicate with each other through infinite permutations of facial colorations and wrinkles. Among themselves, the Ruga can express with satisfying clarity the way they now experience the world—with the side effect that they are increasingly cut off from the rest of humanity.
But Mara still wants to communicate her experience to the non-Ruga people who matter most to her, especially her boyfriend, Arlo. As she feels him slipping away, she undertakes radical changes in her life in order to hold on. It is through her struggle to remain connected to him that she at last discovers a way to adapt, living with a divergent psyche in a linear world.
At the mysterious research facility known only as the Casino, anyone can play Roulette—but it’s not a game for the faint of heart. Those who upload themselves into the system expand their consciousness far beyond natural human limits. But when they return to their bodies and the everyday world, they struggle to function, finding their memories, their speech, and even their dreams changed beyond recognition.
Like many who have played Roulette and fallen into a state of profound dimensional dysphoria, Mara chooses to undergo a cutting-edge body-modification surgery, which by changing the very structure of her face promises to give her a language for expressing the inexpressible. And so she joins a growing subculture: the Ruga, who thanks to the surgery can communicate with each other through infinite permutations of facial colorations and wrinkles. Among themselves, the Ruga can express with satisfying clarity the way they now experience the world—with the side effect that they are increasingly cut off from the rest of humanity.
But Mara still wants to communicate her experience to the non-Ruga people who matter most to her, especially her boyfriend, Arlo. As she feels him slipping away, she undertakes radical changes in her life in order to hold on. It is through her struggle to remain connected to him that she at last discovers a way to adapt, living with a divergent psyche in a linear world.
84 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 19, 2019
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415 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
April 29, 2019
I can clearly recall my brain doing a jellied backflip the first time that I read Neuromancer, those first 30 pages rewiring my brain in uncomfortable yet meaningful ways. In the hundreds of books read since Gibson's magnum opus I've not had that same experience until reading' Basu's poetic mindfuck. When humanity ascends to the next level of consciousness it will probably look and feel a lot like what we see through the eyes of Mara, the story's protagonist. There's so much happening in these 170 pages the reader is forced to slow-it-all-down, chew slowly, rethink and re=read. This past weekend I met a stranger at a party; we got to talking about books and he told me he had just finished reading this gem, and that he couldn't really concentrate on much else. Having finished the book this morning before work, I totally understand. I've been infected and want to go back and read this again. Join me?
July 21, 2019
A phenomenology of contemporary reading: Oscar Wilde said that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. In the library I plucked a strange little book from the "new" shelf. It's glossy, white, and almost hand-sized. It has a strange bluish, orangish Rorschach design on the cover. It feels and looks like some device from the future. I love the title: The City of Folding Faces. As a Joycean/Woolfean, I prefer city novels to any other kind, and the title's hint of surrealism intrigues. I am hooked by label and design alone. The first paragraph:
On the one hand, this paragraph indulges a bad habit of contemporary prose that I strive mightily, and often fail, to correct in my own work: the sentence that drifts weakly to its conclusion on a train of progressive verbs. (Or so John complained, tapping his keyboard furiously, drinking his coffee, googling the correct grammatical terms.) Such lists of ongoing actions blur the image, blunt the action. Then again, perhaps the effect, and affect, are justified in so oneiric a text. And could I improve on "marinely" or "muffled glubbing"? I could not. The verbal originality and observant sensibility they portend almost guarantee I will read this short book, poet Jayinee Basu's first work of fiction, to the end. I did, and I recommend you do too.
This science fiction novella's speculative premise, which the back cover does its best to convey, remains mysterious for much of the narrative. My own best effort to explain it is as follows. In the near future, a corporate research scientist develops a technology that can harvest a person's memories and then show them as a visual display or VR immersion. A person's life, when seen from the exterior, looks a "tubeform": the worm or snake we form as we pass through time. When this technology becomes commercially available, many people sign up for the experience as a kind of psychological extreme sport—its purveyors openly use gambling metaphors, calling the experience Roulette and their business The Casino—and it does pose a risk: it often leaves its subjects in a state of "dimensional dysphoria," bereft of memory and unable to live within the fourth dimension after having seen it from a higher plane.
The preferred medical treatment for this dysphoria is a futuristic surgical intervention that renders the faces of the dysphoric into hyperexpressive visages capable of creasing and folding into supersubtle expressions of nuanced emotion, well beyond what language could convey, as befits their transdimensional sensibilities. This class of the surgically altered, called the Ruga (from the anatomical term for a fold or crease), is a new minority within a society marked by growing inequality.
But The City of Folding Faces is a non-linear and psychological narrative, a novella of inner life; Basu does not give pages and pages of exposition, and the book has more in common with the semi-surreal "world-blocking" technique Tyler Malone observes in Anna Kavan's Ice than it does with conventional worldbuilding science fiction.
Its real narrative is the fraught love story between the novel's Ruga protagonist, Mara, and her non-Ruga boyfriend, Arlo—or rather, the love-quadrangle among Mara, Arlo, Arlo's colleague and lover Hanne, and Mara's Ruga friend George, who is eventually disclosed to be more central to Roulette than he at first seemed. And its real theme is how people do and do not connect in a society where personal identity is ever more complex and social experience ever more fragmented. As Basu comments ambivalently in an interview:
Dimensional dysphoria and Ruga identity are usefully flexible metaphors for any number of contemporary social phenomena: the author's own back-cover author bio suggests that one real-world analogue might be the immigrant experience and/or the multi-professional artist-scientist experience, while much of the novella's language also evokes the complexities of gender.
But metropolitan life in general is ever more cut off from "memory" in the sense of stable, traditional meaning and value, and most of us are concomitantly afflicted, often lyrically, with an immobilizing disjunction between the expansiveness of knowledge and possibility, on the one hand, and the narrow strictures of everyday life on the other. At one point in the novel, a character listens to an old speech from a corporate guru:
Are such feelings as love and awe still possible in a society so secularized and atomized? If so, how will they be transformed? As a portrait, a phenomenology, of the urban self in the 21st century, The City of Folding Faces is laudable and convincing. Its fragmented dischronology, its quick but dense metaphorical descriptions of inner states, answer our mindset as stream of consciousness once did for the metropolitan readers of a century ago. When a mouse from Arlo's lab turns up dead in his and Mara's apartment, George places it on a table with an apricot and a mushroom (an allusion, perhaps, to Lautréamont's Surrealist rendezvous of umbrella and sewing-machine on a surgical table), and Mara reflects:
On the one hand, such agents of purposeful meaninglessness are writers, especially writers of imaginative fictions like this one. On the other hand, fiction does provide information, does confer and complicate identity, and so adumbrates our ever-infolding and therefore perhaps terminal complexity. The novella is caught between the old humanism and the new materialism.
The technology that gives rise to futuristic identities in this narrative come from the same commercial and corporates forces that make its San-Francisco-like city setting increasingly unlivable for masses of people ("There are feces everywhere—enough is enough!"), yet the identities themselves are beautiful and, in their way, natural (Mara desires to be like a plant, immanently meaningful: "A plant's body is nothing but a map of its decisions"). Not to mention existential:
The novella implies by its conclusion that the Ruga, products of the system, will be the system's undoing—in other words, that history is dialectical, that capitalism produces its own gravediggers. This prophecy has failed before, and anyway the delicate love story at the narrative's center is rendered more persuasively, with more texture, sexy and irreal, surprisingly transformative, imbricated with markets and exploitation yet no less transcendent for that, than its more fashionable political divagations.
Time is qualitative, not quantitative. Many works of fiction have been published in the last two decades, but not all are what The City of Folding Faces undeniably is: a 21st-century novel.
Mara was underwater: suspended and swaying marinely in a light green broth of plant matter, her body getting progressively lighter, nearly floating off the slippery plastic seat of the chair. The water felt cool around her face as her eyelids drooped. Everything was muffled except the muffled glubbing of her heart. Eventually a flutish tone sounded, followed by a male speech emulator.
On the one hand, this paragraph indulges a bad habit of contemporary prose that I strive mightily, and often fail, to correct in my own work: the sentence that drifts weakly to its conclusion on a train of progressive verbs. (Or so John complained, tapping his keyboard furiously, drinking his coffee, googling the correct grammatical terms.) Such lists of ongoing actions blur the image, blunt the action. Then again, perhaps the effect, and affect, are justified in so oneiric a text. And could I improve on "marinely" or "muffled glubbing"? I could not. The verbal originality and observant sensibility they portend almost guarantee I will read this short book, poet Jayinee Basu's first work of fiction, to the end. I did, and I recommend you do too.
This science fiction novella's speculative premise, which the back cover does its best to convey, remains mysterious for much of the narrative. My own best effort to explain it is as follows. In the near future, a corporate research scientist develops a technology that can harvest a person's memories and then show them as a visual display or VR immersion. A person's life, when seen from the exterior, looks a "tubeform": the worm or snake we form as we pass through time. When this technology becomes commercially available, many people sign up for the experience as a kind of psychological extreme sport—its purveyors openly use gambling metaphors, calling the experience Roulette and their business The Casino—and it does pose a risk: it often leaves its subjects in a state of "dimensional dysphoria," bereft of memory and unable to live within the fourth dimension after having seen it from a higher plane.
The preferred medical treatment for this dysphoria is a futuristic surgical intervention that renders the faces of the dysphoric into hyperexpressive visages capable of creasing and folding into supersubtle expressions of nuanced emotion, well beyond what language could convey, as befits their transdimensional sensibilities. This class of the surgically altered, called the Ruga (from the anatomical term for a fold or crease), is a new minority within a society marked by growing inequality.
But The City of Folding Faces is a non-linear and psychological narrative, a novella of inner life; Basu does not give pages and pages of exposition, and the book has more in common with the semi-surreal "world-blocking" technique Tyler Malone observes in Anna Kavan's Ice than it does with conventional worldbuilding science fiction.
Its real narrative is the fraught love story between the novel's Ruga protagonist, Mara, and her non-Ruga boyfriend, Arlo—or rather, the love-quadrangle among Mara, Arlo, Arlo's colleague and lover Hanne, and Mara's Ruga friend George, who is eventually disclosed to be more central to Roulette than he at first seemed. And its real theme is how people do and do not connect in a society where personal identity is ever more complex and social experience ever more fragmented. As Basu comments ambivalently in an interview:
Everyone wants to find their people — the ones who have experienced similar traumas and have a shared language with which to discuss that trauma. But no one will ever understand your trauma in all its subtlety, in all the little details of it that really make it yours, and realizing that is a disturbance in and of itself.
Dimensional dysphoria and Ruga identity are usefully flexible metaphors for any number of contemporary social phenomena: the author's own back-cover author bio suggests that one real-world analogue might be the immigrant experience and/or the multi-professional artist-scientist experience, while much of the novella's language also evokes the complexities of gender.
But metropolitan life in general is ever more cut off from "memory" in the sense of stable, traditional meaning and value, and most of us are concomitantly afflicted, often lyrically, with an immobilizing disjunction between the expansiveness of knowledge and possibility, on the one hand, and the narrow strictures of everyday life on the other. At one point in the novel, a character listens to an old speech from a corporate guru:
Over the last century, religion has all but disappeared from the lives of Americans and people the world over. God has been dead since the advent of modernity. The last major victim of our culture's process of ruthless illusion shattering has been romantic love. We can see the negative impact this has made. People are crying out for something to worship.
Are such feelings as love and awe still possible in a society so secularized and atomized? If so, how will they be transformed? As a portrait, a phenomenology, of the urban self in the 21st century, The City of Folding Faces is laudable and convincing. Its fragmented dischronology, its quick but dense metaphorical descriptions of inner states, answer our mindset as stream of consciousness once did for the metropolitan readers of a century ago. When a mouse from Arlo's lab turns up dead in his and Mara's apartment, George places it on a table with an apricot and a mushroom (an allusion, perhaps, to Lautréamont's Surrealist rendezvous of umbrella and sewing-machine on a surgical table), and Mara reflects:
Mara looked at the table and suddenly understood. People always talk about the importance of knowing who you are and writing your life story. But her life did not seem to her like a story. It seemed more to her like this dead mouse, a deteriorating fruit, and a mushroom lined up in a row. [...] Purposeful meaninglessness. The more she focused on this, the more it produced a sensation of both fear and relief, which resulted in a burst of laughter that sprang from her lips in a sharp bark. The idea that there might be agents in the world whose only goal was to slow the human race's suicidal sprint toward a pinprick of ultimate complexity by producing meaninglessness disguised as information became supremely comical, and Mara began to laugh even harder.
On the one hand, such agents of purposeful meaninglessness are writers, especially writers of imaginative fictions like this one. On the other hand, fiction does provide information, does confer and complicate identity, and so adumbrates our ever-infolding and therefore perhaps terminal complexity. The novella is caught between the old humanism and the new materialism.
The technology that gives rise to futuristic identities in this narrative come from the same commercial and corporates forces that make its San-Francisco-like city setting increasingly unlivable for masses of people ("There are feces everywhere—enough is enough!"), yet the identities themselves are beautiful and, in their way, natural (Mara desires to be like a plant, immanently meaningful: "A plant's body is nothing but a map of its decisions"). Not to mention existential:
No one ever touches anything. It's always just electrons interacting at surfaces that makes it appear as if our tissues have bridged the gap between us and other things. But there is always a space, and we have always begun to feel from afar, Mara wanted to say but didn't have the words.
The novella implies by its conclusion that the Ruga, products of the system, will be the system's undoing—in other words, that history is dialectical, that capitalism produces its own gravediggers. This prophecy has failed before, and anyway the delicate love story at the narrative's center is rendered more persuasively, with more texture, sexy and irreal, surprisingly transformative, imbricated with markets and exploitation yet no less transcendent for that, than its more fashionable political divagations.
She pulled into her driveway and rubbed rose cream blush onto the apples of her cheeks. Her wan olive features suddenly looked alive with the shifting, iridophoric gleam of a cuttlefish.
Time is qualitative, not quantitative. Many works of fiction have been published in the last two decades, but not all are what The City of Folding Faces undeniably is: a 21st-century novel.
October 17, 2019
I knew when I picked up this book that it might be more literary fiction than science fiction. The packaging isn't traditional sf, and the back cover description looked more like weird fiction than the rigorous working out of some speculative ideas.
It turned out I was right, but there is a sizeable amount of future neuroscience in the book along with some interesting ideas about the nature of self if you were able to see yourself as an entity in four dimensional space-time. Basu also adds in commentary on fashion and marketing and a glimpse at how human society could bifurcate given enough neural differences in the population. But the plot feels like a modern short story --- a quick glimpse of characters and strangely incomplete resolutions. I wanted more detail and more explanation, but that may just be my wish for a book that is less literary and more genre driven.
It turned out I was right, but there is a sizeable amount of future neuroscience in the book along with some interesting ideas about the nature of self if you were able to see yourself as an entity in four dimensional space-time. Basu also adds in commentary on fashion and marketing and a glimpse at how human society could bifurcate given enough neural differences in the population. But the plot feels like a modern short story --- a quick glimpse of characters and strangely incomplete resolutions. I wanted more detail and more explanation, but that may just be my wish for a book that is less literary and more genre driven.
February 19, 2023
Lots of cool ideas, but they get passed over without a whole lot of deep consideration in favor of a fairly standard relationship drama. Too, the writing is sloppy to the point of obscuring the interesting parts: the sentences are filled with unnecessary adjectives, similes and SAT words that feel like filler.
March 30, 2025
A wild, surreal glimpse at our reality and the commodification of our lives.
August 13, 2019
This book was so unexpected in its direction, but thoroughly enjoyable. I love the idea of the Ruga, and the Casino, a play on both hard sci-fi tropes and more nuanced, relatable issues of isolation and connecting are here in abundance, not to mention wonderful writing. Looking forward to what is next from the author!
June 28, 2019
I'm not sure what I just read. At first, I suspected it was a metaphor for existential angst, but now I don't know.
December 1, 2019
I enjoyed the world building and questions about identity/self brought up throughout the book. The central plot, characters and more narrative writing were...less strong and seemed more used to insert these questions than have their own meaning/purpose.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 9, 2019
Very interesting. I'm not sure if I 100% understand happened but I enjoyed it. It's short and probably would be even better on a reread. It reminded me a bit of Philip K Dick, not so much in style but in content. I look forward to seeing more from Jayinee Basu!
May 16, 2024
A very weird book. Less of a sci-fi novel and more of an extended prose-poetry meditation on the self, what it means to construct the self, whether memories are the self, how memories construct the self, if the self can ever be truly expressed or communicated. And advertising.
Honestly, the advertising connection - what is the self? Is it who we are, or who we see ourselves as, or who we want to be, or who we present ourselves to the world as? And how advertising latches onto that, leeches off of that, sells the self back to you, sells you your ideal self, tries to understand who you are in order to sell more stuff you don't need to you, promises that you will become more truly yourself if you buy their product - how corporate greed is so dependent on understanding but also trying to shape and trying to play on who you are and who you think you are and who you want to be seen as - how the self is just a collection of data to make advertising more effective on you - that was the most interesting and least developed part. I would have loved to see a version of this book that developed the Ruga aspect better in relation to the communication/advertising angle. There was a lot of meandering navel-gazing, which was very beautifully written, but all the sci-fi concepts (Roulette! at all!) went under-utilized. All mood and theme, but I wanted something slightly different, I guess. Interesting, gorgeous prose, but could have used its potential better, imo.
Honestly, the advertising connection - what is the self? Is it who we are, or who we see ourselves as, or who we want to be, or who we present ourselves to the world as? And how advertising latches onto that, leeches off of that, sells the self back to you, sells you your ideal self, tries to understand who you are in order to sell more stuff you don't need to you, promises that you will become more truly yourself if you buy their product - how corporate greed is so dependent on understanding but also trying to shape and trying to play on who you are and who you think you are and who you want to be seen as - how the self is just a collection of data to make advertising more effective on you - that was the most interesting and least developed part. I would have loved to see a version of this book that developed the Ruga aspect better in relation to the communication/advertising angle. There was a lot of meandering navel-gazing, which was very beautifully written, but all the sci-fi concepts (Roulette! at all!) went under-utilized. All mood and theme, but I wanted something slightly different, I guess. Interesting, gorgeous prose, but could have used its potential better, imo.
June 12, 2021
A gem of a book - beautiful in every way. Every word is exquisite and just so skillfully and meticulously selected and placed so that the text reads like poetry. Example: "All objects seemed to be imbued with an alien sense of temporality. Symbols that she had been able to read with ease and fluency in the past now seemed to explode with meaning, each letter of the alphabet vomiting up a multitude of semantic content." (pg 24) or "Mara was in a large room with a black-and-white checkered floor that held a tangible manifestation of sound. The sound was that of an explosion" (36).
The plot deals with the question of what happens when circumstance turns you into an entirely different person overnight? You wake up and you discover your brain is different (damaged? or maybe just, changed?) and you are different. How do you handle the fallout and how do the people you love handle the fallout? There is mourning of the old self, but there is also acceptance of the new self -- the new self isn't even necessarily bad, just different. And in the end there is the discovery that the real source of suffering isn't the new self, but the attempt to integrate the new self into the old life, when the two are incompatible.
The plot deals with the question of what happens when circumstance turns you into an entirely different person overnight? You wake up and you discover your brain is different (damaged? or maybe just, changed?) and you are different. How do you handle the fallout and how do the people you love handle the fallout? There is mourning of the old self, but there is also acceptance of the new self -- the new self isn't even necessarily bad, just different. And in the end there is the discovery that the real source of suffering isn't the new self, but the attempt to integrate the new self into the old life, when the two are incompatible.
July 10, 2023
exploitation, isolation, a generous helping of screens, and dead mice. what’s not to love?
this is a sparse book populated by dense prose. while i enjoyed feeling of being completely swathed in the details of the writing style, there was a lack of direction - most frustratingly apparent in the introduction of various technologies that don’t end up playing a major role.
in terms of form, the interpolation of abstracts and interviews felt pleasantly disorienting and appropriate. i think basu may have shot themself in the foot with the length - i would’ve liked to inhabited this world for a while, if only to see what became of it.
this is a sparse book populated by dense prose. while i enjoyed feeling of being completely swathed in the details of the writing style, there was a lack of direction - most frustratingly apparent in the introduction of various technologies that don’t end up playing a major role.
in terms of form, the interpolation of abstracts and interviews felt pleasantly disorienting and appropriate. i think basu may have shot themself in the foot with the length - i would’ve liked to inhabited this world for a while, if only to see what became of it.
September 20, 2021
Excellent worldbuilding and interesting ideas about the self and memory, with a focus on neuroscience. I didn't really enjoy the plot or characters, however, which made the emotional pull for human connection fall a bit flat.
January 28, 2022
wonderful and interesting setup that fizzles out fairly unimpressively near the end. i would love to read longer works from this author by the future, as they clearly have some great ideas, but this one just didn't click with me all the way.
June 15, 2020
I am captivated! I have been reading and re-reading this book for the past 6 months. Check out my Youtube book review to find out what I love about it.
https://youtu.be/pojom4uQa-U
https://youtu.be/pojom4uQa-U
November 21, 2021
Kind of cyberpunkish short fiction. Not bad.
May 10, 2023
sci-fi, knowing yourself, knowing others
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