Another Now

Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis takes place in a future, in two futures actually. Every future, like an investment, has a place in the now (whether positive or negative). That is a bit of a pretense, because the brilliance of the prose is in itself recognizing the deviations (or derivations) of these two futures.

But anyone with an interest in speculative literature will recognize that the series of dispatches around which the plot centers amount to an epistolary novel disguised in the dust jacket of prose. While the difference is, of course, only modular, what’s less evident at first glance is that the writer’s toolbox has been hacked (by a HAL 9000-like cancer), which has turned the speculative into the invasive.

I admire writers like Varoufakis who can pour emotion and nuance into their side plot, because not all novels are meant to be stories. Another Now works exceedingly well as a manifesto, and its characters are believable enough to be archetypes. It fails as a speculative piece because there is no “other,” no “frontier” to resist, discover, fail against. But like any manifesto, Another Now does not really claim to ask questions––only to incite answers.