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All the World's a Simulation
Stephen Moles returns with his most complex and rewarding novel yet. All the World's a Simulation is a metafictional tour de force featuring Shakespeare, Snow White and an infinite number of evil Stephen Hawkings. While its main characters attempt to escape from it, the book constantly rewrites itself before the reader's gaze to reveal a profound secret about the power behind this and all other literary works. Thoroughly playful yet deeply serious, this extraordinary novel offers a personality-altering reading experience and an initiation into the realm of dark meaning.
(This edition includes as an appendix two related works, the novellas Fossil People and Life.exe.)
(This edition includes as an appendix two related works, the novellas Fossil People and Life.exe.)
- GenresScience FictionFiction
356 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 19, 2018
Moles is a stimulating cross between Borges and Barthelme, if one can slap a comparison on his peculiar, elliptic, non sequitorrential prose, a puckish explorer of literature as refracted through a technoillogical prism. His work is unfurling like some unstoppable, demented anti-roman fleuve, as he hones a singular universe, replete with neologistic concepts (“buckarastrano�, “screading�) and subtle wordplays, in the creation of an airtight personal mythology that is explored and exploited para- and intertextually inside the works themselves. The strongest moments in this novel are not the self-swallowing metawinks, or the comic dialogues, but the reflections on (sc)reading in a self-swallowing age, and although Moles is quick to traduce meaning or coherence, and lead the (sc)reader down conceptual cul-de-sacs, there are lines that resonate and tantalise in the midst of the hilarious, deviatory, mindboggling comedy that keeps the novel rollicking along nicely.
October 7, 2019
Imagine a perfectly good novel, written entirely on one big sheet of paper. Then imagine a giant fist scrunching it into a tight ball. Imagine what it would be like to read the novel without unscrunching the ball and imagine your surprise on discovering that the perfectly good novel is better this way.
Ideas, characters, plot points and themes that had appeared on the big page as discreet and cogent entities now rub up against each other, interrupt each other, reinterpret, involute and corrupt each other. The original text is overlaid with the crumple of accident.
The world needs books like this. You need books like this. Flippant books written in deadly earnest. Serious books that are silly. Playful books that mean business.
Bravo.
Ideas, characters, plot points and themes that had appeared on the big page as discreet and cogent entities now rub up against each other, interrupt each other, reinterpret, involute and corrupt each other. The original text is overlaid with the crumple of accident.
The world needs books like this. You need books like this. Flippant books written in deadly earnest. Serious books that are silly. Playful books that mean business.
Bravo.
August 22, 2018
All the World’s a Simulation, Stephen Moles, 347 pages. Four stars. When I was first reading this novel, I thought, What a clever piece of meta-fiction. And then, on page 68, I ran across a reference to Julian Jaynes oddball non-fiction book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind. Bang! (To steal a trope from Moles� own novel) Something other than clever humor is going on here, I realized. And indeed, a few pages later comes a reference to Daniel Dennett's similar book. Soon enough, my take on Moles� novel then became that it is something of a disguised essay on language’s nefarious influence on our world outlook. Moles, through his characters Professor Blackstone and Professor Dewey (The Meaners) and Miss Craze (the Meta-fictioner), seems to be arguing that the fact of language’s existence irreparably influences, nay colors, nay alters, nay hallucinates not only our world view but our psychological view of our very selves. Despite there being no plot as such, there is a seductive pull provided by the ongoing battle between the Meaners and the Meta-fictioners, not to mention the quest for a defining self that several characters (Isaac, for instance) undergo. Of the appended novellas, which are constantly referred to in the novel, I highly recommend Life.exe for it crisp and innovative language. Oddly, that novella has something of a plot involved with the characters Sally and Betty, business partners of sorts. This plot, however, plays a heavy second fiddle to the language: here’s the novella’s second sentence: “She was leaning against the wall with a fresh helping of darkness behind her as I discoursed crudely with my heavy suitcase.� Nice, eh? Oh, and beware of the buckarastanos!
July 29, 2018
Like everything Stephen Moles puts out, this was pretty mind-blowing. The guy thinks on a higher level than most mere humanoids on the Planet Earth. His previous work 'The Most Wretched Thing Imaginable' (also, I think, his best to day) built upon the idea of reversing the role of story and theme in fiction. This time, through all the madness, his characters are trying to find reality, to find a way out of the confines of the story. They are trying to break out of reality itself it seems like. Of course, the language used is very often Moles's very own vernacular. Kind of how Burgess did in 'A Clockwork Orange'...well, maybe not so much- but in a way. I thought his prose was a little less lyrical this time around. Just a bit stiffer. His previous work 'The Most Wretched...' besides being wildly different, was also poetic and lyrical. The words chimed. Not that his writing his poor on this go. Far from it. Stephen Moles, along with MJ Nicholls and some of the other guys over at Sagging Meniscus Press are the best modern literature, experimental, (I hate the term avante garde) have to offer today.
I heartily recommend this title. And anything else Stephen Moles writes. And watch out for other Sagging Meniscus writers at the same time!
I heartily recommend this title. And anything else Stephen Moles writes. And watch out for other Sagging Meniscus writers at the same time!
April 17, 2022
Self-congratulatory and pseudo-profound, this book follows the golden thread out of the meta-fictional labyrinth and straight into the sea. Moles is so sure this book will change the way you read, and for me it simply didn’t live up to its own hype.
Self-aware, self-indulgent, and less than subtle.
Self-aware, self-indulgent, and less than subtle.
June 10, 2023
Moles has a miraculous ability to rewire your brain, or your understanding of language, or language itself, or perhaps the linguistic simulation we're all trapped in (like the characters of this mind-boggling novel). This is a labyrinth of words and ideas that I could spend a lifetime wandering inside of. An anti-literary masterpiece!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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