"A
blur-fast caper through a mediated nightmare future which will
thankfully be prevented by a series of massive and man-made disasters." Steve Aylett, author of Slaughtermatic and Lint
"Dr.
Identity is a rollicking romp through a future so absurd,
it can't help but feel real. D. Harlan Wilson shows us everything
we know—but wish we didn't—about ourselves." Robert Venditti, writer of The Surrogates
"Let’s
dispense with the usual predictable analogies ('Kafka/Cronenberg-on-laughing-gas'),
redundancies ('Phillip K. Dick/William Gibson-on-acid'), or accurate-but-somewhat-obscure
references ('the most intense and, in a certain sense, the most
significant young prose writer since Mark Leyner and Ben Marcus
... establishes Wilson as the Steve Katz of the post-everything
generation ... vies with Derek Pell’s The Little Red
Book of Adobe LiveMotion for being the funniest book of the
new millennium'), and cut to the chase: D Harlan Wilson's hilarious
meta-pulp SF novel, Dr. Identity, is a funhouse mirror
whose cartoonish distortions continually amaze and amuse—until
one realizes that what we’re seeing is a disturbingly accurate
vision of ourselves. An instant avant-pop classic by a major new
talent. Two surgically-enhanced, stainless-steel thumbs way, way
up!” Larry McCaffery, editor of Storming the Reality
Studio and After Yesterday’s Crash
"This
book's better'n the bushelfull of Benzedrine-spiked donut holes
with which Dr. Identity tries to bribe his students into civilized
demeanor! Pomo cybertheory never tasted so good or made you fly
this high!" American Book Review
"Readers with a taste for wacky experimental fiction will enjoy D. Harlan Wilson's Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia: A Pulp Science Fiction Novel, set in the postcapitalist city of Bliptown." Publisher's Weekly
"If the ending is a bit flat (though the book is the first of a trilogy), its flatness is the ultimate result of Wilson's entire dystopian vision. Ultimately, Dr. Identity may be a bit exhausting, but you won't be able to put it down, and you'll definitely be thinking about it long after you have." The Bloomsbury Review
“Madcap,
macabre black comedy … Wilson's sardonic, riotously imaginative
vision of the future holds a mirror up to our own increasingly
chaotic society and makes provocative entertainment.” Booklist
"Only
those with a yearning for something different, something truly
off-the-wall, something that pushes the boundaries of good taste
and what they've come to expect from a novel should take the time
to journey through D. Harlan Wilson's Bizarro future world. And
those who do will find the experience entertaining and at times
maybe even a little enlightening." ChiZine
"Dr.
Identity is the most surprising novel to come from the small
press in some time. Vivid, colourful, coarse, expansive, often
hilarious and at times suspiciously pointless, it is an impressive
feat and a decadent read, lending itself equally to painstaking
analysis and seriously heavy entertainment." HorrorScope
"Dr.
Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia is a work of absurdist
fiction that portrays a future so unnerving that it makes Terry
Gilliam’s vision of things to come in Brazil seem
warm and fuzzy. Certainly, it is even more extreme than the future
anticipated by Phillip K. Dick in his Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? ... In the end, the book manages to skewer
academia, technology, consumerism, politics, the media, the internet
and various other facets of modern society with blood-curdling
ferocity." Necropsy
“More
than a tale of science fiction, like any good science fiction
story is, Wilson exposes the truth of why we keep going back to
the same old narrative concepts, then destroys that truth by creating
something completely original, proving that if the novel is dead,
then Dr. Identity is a fully functional zombie.” Susurrus Magazine
“At
its core, this novel does indeed have a simple, almost pulpy,
feel to it. That is only the setup for a book that, in each chapter,
in nearly every sentence, contains far-reaching ideas that leave
the brain racing to catch up. Wilson creates a whole future world
that is as hilarious as it is horrifying. It is this black humor,
this sci-fi slapstick, that makes the novel a thoroughly engaging
read.” The Harrow
"Reading Dr. Identity is like wandering a hall of mirrors: each
page presents a monstrous but all-too-recognizable vision of our
own world." Skullring.org
"Dr.
Identity doesn’t disappoint at all. You’ll be
blinded by morphing zoot-suits, troubled by hippopotamus whips
and left stammering by the satire and the spectacle of it all.
Brilliant and disturbing in equal measure." Fractal Matter |
