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Reviewed by Peter Darbyshire and George Murray

Super Flat Times is by far the most exciting, original book we've read and reviewed on Bookninja.

A visionary nightmare of high satire and high emotion, Super Flat Times is quite possibly the SF book of the era.

It makes you want to simultaneously laugh, cry, barf, and flip the page while pluggin your ears and yelling, "LALALALA -- I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

Ninjas Murray and Darbyshire gush.

Novelist Peter Darbyshire and poet George Murray are co-editors of Bookninja.

PETER: As strange as it may sound, I have to thank Chapters for bringing Super Flat Times to my attention. I first saw the book as a staff pick on the wall at the Robson Chapters in Vancouver. (Brilliant staff, there by the way. I always want to buy everything they recommend.) I couldn’t afford the book then because I was unemployed, but I should have gone out and sold my ass to make the money to buy it. Hell, I’d trade a kidney for this book. It’s one of the most original, visionary books I’ve ever read.

How to explain it to readers? It’s set in a post-apocalyptic future, where society and the environment have broken down in various amusing and slightly creepy ways, but everything still looks pretty recognizable to us in the 21st century. There’s been some sort of mysterious purge – it’s unclear exactly who’s behind it – in which the victims were tossed into pools that were then filled with concrete. Now the survivors, fearful of losing the past, have drilled down into the concrete to extract the last breaths of the victims, which they then "translate" into last thoughts and final memories. It’s these that last thoughts that make up the book — sort of like one of those oral history projects.

That sound about right, George?

GEORGE: Yes, that sounds right. But, Peter: slightly creepy? No. So much more fucked up. Pete, I want you to know that while I agree with you that this book is organ-worthy, it is also responsible for giving me chronic nightmares. You sprang this book on me, and while I'm glad you did, I swear I'll get you back. There are images and stories in here so massively fucked, so disturbing, I can't stop thinking of them months after I've finished the book. I laughed out loud or cringed knowingly when reading it, but when my subconscious mind took over, it began to warp the text into a horror movie in my head. It was like the sleeping me forgot I was reading satire.

One of the recurring images includes women's bellies containing permanent pocket flaps, each with a big plastic button for easy uteran access. You see, there "had been" an egg harvest during the Super Flat Times, and women were fed steroids to produce grapefruit-sized clusters of eggs that were then pulled out through the abdominal pocket and divvied up for sale. In one story a woman laments that her harvest was only able to produce two measly eggs. She wonders if those children are out there and how they're doing. When another couple crawl into a hole in the ground to illegally try to have a child, in "Behavior Pilot," it's both heartbreakingly and terrifying. I can't get it out of my head.

PETER: Yeah, that whole egg harvesting thing is stunning. "Behavior Pilot" is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking things I’ve ever read. I actually had to stop reading the book for a while after that story. It was so horrific and yet so moving at the same time.

You’re right about forgetting SFT is satire. The book has so many sharp, black observations, or maybe extrapolations, about our own time that it’s definitely satire. It’s similar to Saunders with its amusement parks and jobs that are parodies of other jobs and lives that are parodies of other lives:

The city we lived in had been recently and brutally reworked to resemble a bustling, late-nineteenth-century industrial center. Old buildings were made to look new, and the new buildings were made to look old. Certain clothing styles from that era returned vengefully and without warning on the bodies of those of us who lived there. We hobbled around in ludicrous, binding pants and topcoats, wielding elaborate, useless canes. I felt the desire to live this way less urgently than most of the people I knew

SFT’s world is like some sort of Khmer Rouge theme park, only it’s in the West, with shopping malls and ski slopes and American nostalgia for the good old past. (Despite its American feel, there are moments that remind me of Toronto: "Summer approached – I knew I would not be able to maintain an erection in the heat.")

But at the same time it’s just so emotional and poignant that you can’t laugh. I’m at a loss to describe how emotionally real SFT is.

Its weird wars and government paranoia make it a timely book, too, given the nature of America today.

GEORGE: That's incredibly important. I'd like to know when Derby started working on these, because, despite looking forward, they seem very much of the time. In fact, they may be considered prophetically era defining, should things not change come November.

In "The Sound Gun" a military platoon leader deals with her troops' emotional breakdowns as they tote around a giant sonic gun, not even sure if they're still at war or what they're supposed to do:

Nobody knows what we are doing here. We are not entirely sure that the war is still happening. Since the mules ate the communications array we have had only the color of the sky to guide us. Evenings it will burst suddenly into a thin purple halo or dense mist. These rings, we believe, must be the fragrant shards of battles occurring elsewhere in secret. So we continue to plow through the jungle, convinced that, any day now, a dark, backlit man in a business suit will descend from the sky in a clear pod and usher us home.

It was fun to drive around in the Sound Gun until it stopped working. Now the people who are fighting us, and who we are pretty sure are still the enemy, are much more dangerous and harder to kill. They come rushing up at us in the night, tossing sticks and VCRs.

At one point the platoon falls, giant gun and all, into a tiger trap of sorts. How do they get out? They shoot the earth around them with the gun, blowing out a gentle ramp up which they can drag themselves and their cargo, a device they barely understand. Egad.

PETER: There are so many weird moments like this in the book: the man who makes recordings of houses’ memories in "Home Recordings," the boy who replaces his father with a robot in "The Father Helmet," the fact that the only food available in all the stories is meat. Same world, but different universes. It’s as if the Super Flat Times are composed of prisms, so each person experiences a completely different world, but one in which the shapes of the others are dimly visible.

But then there are moments that are startlingly familiar, that belong to our world, like the parents who lose their daughter in a shopping mall in "Crutches Used as a Weapon":

I may have let go of her hand hours before we discovered she was gone. It was hard to tell in that place, immersed as we were in the flow of bodies around the center spire, the puffed, flared cylinder of canvas that brought a centrifugal force to the structure. The one thing I remember clearly was the leering orange clown face that topped a public trash barrel, into the gaping mouth of which a thin, gauzy woman had just inserted a foam tray heaped with a family’s worth of crumpled tissue paper and crushed drink cups. Our daughter feared clowns, so I was bending down to shield her from the looming bust when I realized she was not there at all, that the weight I’d been interpreting as her body tugging away at my arm had been nothing but two overstuffed plastic bags. I looked up at Karen, who put as much of her fist in her mouth as she could, as if to bite it off might somehow stanch the delirious onset of panic.

This moment actually reminded me of a time when an ex and I nearly lost our daughter in a mall when she was about five or six. She was trailing about a foot behind us, but when I turned to look for her one time she wasn’t there. She’d stepped into a storefront, and someone pointed her out right away, but yeah, the panic….

GEORGE: I am most impressed with the result of Derby's uncanny ability to both make use of and eschew "restaint." The reason the book is so far out and completely fucked is that he's really let go of the reins to his satirical horse. He's started writing an Onion article about some quirk in society, some political unevenness, and has extrapolated beyond space and time into a world of pure evil. But he's also able to harness this chaos by using extremely real, down-to-earth characters. The people that populate his stories could appear in any other. He highlights the absurdity of contemporary existence by putting someone as basic as you or me into a situation so outlandish as to be laughable, and gives them enough knowledge of process and institution to cope, but not the emotional fortitude. This makes it very believable, in an odd way.

Super Flat Times is more than I thought speculative fiction could ever be, and I love good SF. It's a traffic accident and carnivalesque freakshow. It's an SUV driven by Mark Leyner smacking into the cast and crew of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

PETER: No, Leyner’s driving a burning airship, and he’s dropping cluster bombs filled with viral DNA strands made up of equal parts Mark Levine, Suzan Lori-Parks, Adam Johnson, Donald Barthelme and Alicia Erian.

Now open wide.

Want to comment on this review? (discuss)

Super Flat Times website (includes scenes deleted from the book and the Super Flat Times colouring book!)
Publisher's Website
Identity Theory interview
Excellent Village Voice review of SFT
"Well Dressed Men Sing Songs for Oblivion" (in which Derby clears up the difference between a hermeneutic circle and a hermeneutic spiral and the relationship of both to legwarmers)
"Rebirth of Roy" (tagteam story with Shelley Jackson, of the Ineradicable Strain Project)
"Instructions"
Kokura (a weird hypertext by Derby and Mary-Kim Arnold)

From SFT:

"Sound Gun" (full text of the story)
"Meat Tower" (full text of the story)
"Behavior Pilot" (full text of the story. If our discussion makes you want to read the book, hold off on reading this online story and read it in its proper order in the book instead.)

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