Radical Futurity
The Shrieking of Nothing
Jordan A. Rothacker
Spaceboy Books, 2024
Although unfamiliar with the first book in this series, The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, I do not think that hindered my enjoyment of Jordan Rothacker’s novel The Shrieking of Nothing: A Domed Atlanta Future Noir (Spaceboy Books, 2024). This is a fast-paced work of fiction that invites readers into an intricately woven narrative where reality and perception blur in unsettling ways. It is a ripping good yarn with twists, turns, and an erudite eye to world-building.
I whole-heartedly appreciate the nods to David Bowie, which includes the title, The Shrieking of Nothing, a lyric from Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” as well as some of the chapter headings: “Changes,” “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed,” and “The Next Bardo” (a lyric in the song “Quicksand”), scattered among a litany of other Bowie easter eggs.
The Shrieking of Nothing unhinged my imagination from the present to think about radical futurity several generations removed from our own, and this book offers more than an escape from the terrifying exigencies of now. Truly a moon-age daydream, set in the year 2220 in futuristic Atlanta, people freak out after things go awry at an Ego Death Festival on New Gibraltar.
This novel follows a pair of Sacred Detectives, Edwina Casaubon and Rabbi Jakob “Thinkowitz” Rabbinowitz, who use “negative deduction–a process adapted from Moses Maimonides,” (pg. 44) to try and crack the case. They must use logic to reason their way through a vision of the future that seems subsumed by new age mythology while also trusting intuitions along the way. People take on avatars of their favorite Gods and actually choose which pantheon to adopt for themselves, some choosing Tongan goddesses and others the Toad King of Thailand, and on and on without taboos except for the split between religion and literature as sacred and profane. This world is constructed deep into the future of a post-Kapital society where,
We use our technologies to emulate nature. We use our technologies to preserve nature, and what is natural about ourselves. That is part of life Post-Katastrophe, Post-Kapital-death. No technology is for its own sake. It is all for ours, for the Greater Good. (Pg. 27)
Rothacker sets to re-imagine the end of capitalism prior to the end of life on this planet. In this way, it’s not a total collapse into pre-capitalist life without technology. People have cyborg enhancements (and not only the rich, because there are socialist aspects to this world), the dome runs on solar energy, and mass transit takes people around the city.
Oh, and there is a healthy dose of skepticism to distance the narrator from donning the mask of a true believer. At one point the character remarks,
I had a slight reflexive shudder to the words Greater Good, but I tried to ignore it. (pg. 75)
As a reader, I felt myself coaxed into this refreshing vision of what the world might become in a few centuries time. However, the sense I get from this work is that Rothacker is deliberately laying seeds in the reader’s imagination of ways to enact a more compassionate, imaginative ethos as an intervention into the present. Since this is a mystery novel where a murderer is loose and needs to be captured, the naivete that perhaps accompanied past political projects on the socialist left are called into question.
If, as one famous theorist once said, religion can be the opium of the masses, the cry of an oppressed soul, then this book is riddled with the sedation of the mythical. In this regard, I cannot help but think there is a major influence from Alduous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, a book that seems to have fallen out of fashion at a time when it critiques precisely the legalized weed and free ketamine present that we are in now.
By setting this mystery in the midst of a soporific Solarpunk future, Rothaker takes a different approach to the ‘dome-society’ sci-fi/cli-fi trope. New Gibraltar’s dome was built in synthesis with the natural surroundings.
Welled-up, 350 million years past, magma from our core to cool here. When this dome was young, Africa touched our shores. One world of many. (pg. 2)
Historical memories of past mistakes are preserved, and humans, believe it or not, are learning from the historical damage done by capitalism, the legacy of which seems to be the individual decision about which pantheon to worship. Religion as consumer choice, a legacy of neo-liberalism.
For me, the most fascinating aspect of the novel is the way Rothacker draws on extensive knowledge of literature, philosophy, and world religions. A vision of what the philosopher Michel Foucault might have called a heterotopia. Appearances have subtle layers and parallel spaces that contain multiple cultural references.
In these pages, you can see Rothacker is well-researched in BIPOC literatures, Brahmanist belief systems, Shintoism, some Pacific Islander beliefs, and futurisms other than the typical eurocentric dystopian nightmares that saturate the sci-fi/cli-fi genres. The Shrieking of Nothing has homages to literary titans as well. From Melville, and numerous so-called Profane Prophets in this vision of the future, such as Percival Everett, Paul LaFargue, and Mariame Kaba to name a few.
The ending was satisfying. I often found myself anticipating the next philosophical insight around the turn of the next page, perhaps more than any interest in who solved what cases (although those were interesting aspects of the novel as well).
In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Shrieking of Nothing by Jordan Rothacker. I hope there are new books in this series. It is a fun read that offers us a vision of the future that frustrates our expectations of inevitable progress or inevitable collapse. Rothacker invites us to break our implicit contract with a predictable future.
This review has been edited for style and clarity.
Bradley Kaye teaches Sociology at D'Youville College in Buffalo, New York. His most recent publication is a short story in Snoozine Magazine titled "The Hobbles".