In his latest piece for The Stranger, Charles Mudede quotes my book Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (Repeater Books). Mudede tackles the dread that only comes from the threat of nuclear apocalypse (a dread Generation X is all too familiar with).
Describing the emergence of personal computers, cyberpunk, and the Cold War, he writes in part,
Many of these monumental transformations in consumer products are described by music and culture critic Roy Christopher in his new book Post-Self. So considerable and novel were the new receivers, distributors, and processors of data that cyberpunk, a movement at the heart of Post-Self, imagined a future where we could download our self-awareness into the electronic ether of cyberspace and live for as long as no one in the real world pulled the plug.
My generation was also the last to live, as young adults, within a social reality described as the Cold War. We saw the bomb shelters, and were taught in school to “duck and cover” if a nuclear weapon, launched by the Soviets or its allies, hit our city.
Indeed, In Post-Self, Roy Christopher recalls watching an episode of the The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough at Last,” which was about a bespectacled and bibliophilic bank teller who survives the detonation of an H-bomb because he happened to be in the bank’s vault. He then roams the ruins of a world that has no other people, but lots of books to read.The bank teller, however, accidently breaks his glasses and is left practically blind. “The trepidation of that tragic moment,” writes Christopher, “recombinant with worries of the apocalypse, was a seed planted in my head. And more than any other Cold War-era image of imminent destruction splashed on the television during my childhood…”
Many thanks to Charles for the time and attention.