Supervert’s ‘Vision of the Future’ Has Arrived

It is possibly Supervert‘s most impressive book beauty to date, judging not only from the immaculate white-and-black antiseptic look of it and the heft of it — the text comes to 240 pages — but also, obviously, from the read of it. At one level POST-DEPRAVITY is a page turner (literally) and at another a densely reasoned philosophical proposition (indicated by the letters S&M R&D on the book’s spine). Set in a hospital, the story updates notions of perversion beyond Sadean for an age beyond technology with characters like Dr. Francis Malenkov (“a neurosurgeon who has become a prophet or a madman”) and Kat Harlow (who “takes a job as an actress in a simulated patient facility,” while “recovering from a nervous breakdown”). Supervert offers his own summary in more scientific terms: The book “uses the method of a cross-sectional study, focusing on a representative population at a specific moment in time.” It yields a story that “describes a near future in which people are little more than vectors for strange desires — and yet the increasing ordinariness of strange desires causes a vicious circle [of] degenerates striving for ever more outlandish forms of sexual gratification. The result, ‘post-depravity,’ is an impending state in which perversity and normality become identical.” If that sounds Ballardian, was J.G. Ballad’s procedure ever as rigorous? On a lighter note, the book is dedicated to “Those Who Are Biologically Unable to Conceive” and, per the back cover, the Terms to Learn are: “Anti-Penis / Anti-Vagina, Clone Incest, Creepy Simulations Paradox, Exocortical Perversion, Futuropathy, Neosadism, Neural Deviance, Parthenotherapy, Pornolepsy, Post-Depravity, Psychogynecology, Reincarnation Fetishism, Sexual Oddball Effect.” As little Shirley Temple used to say, “Oh my!”

Facebook

Twitter