160 pages
English language
Published Dec. 5, 2021 by Fantagraphics Books.
Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse
"Kaczynski’s stories try and envision some way to invert that free-market alchemy: they wish to smear the pristine surfaces of global capitalism with shit or piss or blood, some primitive and uncivilized part of our lives, to see what might result."—Sean Rogers, The Comics Journal
"It's not important what happens to the people in Kaczynski's comics; what's important is how they process a world that's crumbling and becoming harder to navigate by the day. They adjust, in the same way that people in a dream learn to accept talking animals or purple skies or whatever other strangeness abounds. And in Beta Testing The Apocalypse, the fact of that adjustment is even more disturbing than doomsday."—The A.V. Club
At once science-fiction, contemporary demonology, an occult theory, a mutant utopia, and an architectural treatise, Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse is a series of fictions about the contemporary global megalopolis. Tom …
"Kaczynski’s stories try and envision some way to invert that free-market alchemy: they wish to smear the pristine surfaces of global capitalism with shit or piss or blood, some primitive and uncivilized part of our lives, to see what might result."—Sean Rogers, The Comics Journal
"It's not important what happens to the people in Kaczynski's comics; what's important is how they process a world that's crumbling and becoming harder to navigate by the day. They adjust, in the same way that people in a dream learn to accept talking animals or purple skies or whatever other strangeness abounds. And in Beta Testing The Apocalypse, the fact of that adjustment is even more disturbing than doomsday."—The A.V. Club
At once science-fiction, contemporary demonology, an occult theory, a mutant utopia, and an architectural treatise, Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse is a series of fictions about the contemporary global megalopolis. Tom Kaczynski's short stories trace a complex space-time trajectory from the smallest corporate cubicle out to farthest fathoms of the multiverse. Occult economics, metaphysical traffic jams, Marxist zombies on Mars, secret architectural societies, designer ghosts from the future, and demographic demons are just a few elements of a new untested future eschatology. This updated edition of this groundbreaking collection includes an introduction by Christopher Brown, three previously uncollected stories, and extensive notes by Adalbert Arcane.
