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Three Rooms Press
April 2018
On Sale: April 10, 2018
256 pages
ISBN: 1941110614
EAN: 9781941110614
Kindle: B077KBJ6Y9
Trade Size / e-Book
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Fantasy | Science Fiction
Narrated by an Archaeon, a 3.8 billion year old species,
the oldest on earth, Downdrift is a work of speculative
eco-fiction that describes the impact of ecological
pressures on animals that are adopting human behaviors,
with droll and sometimes alarming, results. The book
follows a year of changes and the travels of a housecat
and a lion who are inexplicably driven towards a
rendezvous. At first, a few isolated harbingers of change
appear, but they quickly escalate. Squirrels take up
manic knitting, wild hares steal earth-moving equipment,
rats go in for disco music and form-fitting metallic
leisure-ware. Data-sorting abilities appear among urban
populations of birds, and frenzied domestic pets seek
celebrity careers. Droll, melancholic, and poetic, the
tale is crammed with witty vignettes and poignant
reflections on the ways the pressures on the once-natural
world are accelerating mutations in behaviors among the
animals. Genetic material alters. The differences between
animals blur. Odd mutant forms appear–goat-chicks and
dog-flies, fish-birds and flying lizards–as if some mad
rush is propelling genetic code to propagate across every
form of flesh and living matter. As large-scale
infrastructure projects make their appearance, each of
the animals takes the role appropriate to its disposition
—or not. Melancholic rather than apocalyptic, the book is
a celebration of species as well as a mourning of the
damage done in our time. Throughout, the emergent voice
and character of the Archaeon extremophile records events
as well as a slow coming to consciousness about its own
identity as a hyper-organism.
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