Nick Mamtas' latest is a Kurt-Vonnegut-like thrill ride through 21st-century life, with sentient wasps and spiders, a political and social movement not only without leaders but without any central philosophy; and, at the center, a couple's troubled relationship.
Those characters are Julia and Raymond. She leaves him after being bitten by a mutant wasp, which drives her away and, seemingly by accident, to start a movement fighting the oppression of everyday life.
It gets deliciously weird from there. The parasitic wasps use a species of spiders as the incubators for their young, causing them to change their behavior and spin a nest for the young that are also eating them from the insides. This has caused a long-standing cold war between the two species, who have guided human history behind the scenes in their endless battle. This has led to a secondary level of reality where the human (and human looking) agents wage their battles.
Mamatas pokes plenty of fun at the elements of everyday life here, but there's something haunting and beautiful about Raymond's quest to reconnect with his wife and the reality that comes when it does eventually happen.
Mamatas' verisimilitude with the current state of social media helps to drive the book, as the characters naturally interact in their "virtual" environments, spreading the Julia-inspired non-gospel across the world. How well that will play in a decade's time is still to be seen, but as a comment on the now, it's a brilliant, brazen work.
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