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Title: The Death of the Cyborg Oracle
Author: Jordan A. Rothacker
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” said philosopher Frederic Jameson. In Jordan A. Rothacker’s The Death of the Cyborg Oracle the former has led to the latter.
It’s 2220 and climate catastrophe has made most of the earth uninhabitable. In this future, domed Atlanta, solar energy has ended want, but socialism would be more fun if the guilt of capitalism’s role in the destruction of earth wasn’t inherited by its descendants. Out of this void all goddesses and gods are reborn for worship, monotheism is verboten, and crime is divided into Sacred and Profane.
Meet Assistant Sacred Detective Edwina Casaubon, she’s just transferred from Profane and working with the legendary Sacred Detective Rabbi Jakob “Thinkowitz” Rabbinowitz. And not a moment too soon, someone has murdered the Oracle of Delphi.
ISBN: 978-1-951393-04-5
Price: $12.95 (paperback) $2.99 (Kindle ebook)
Release Date: 11/17/20
Praise for The Death of the Cyborg Oracle:
“The Death of the Cyborg Oracle is as much Rabelaisian farce as it is a heart-aching death note to our philosophical and spiritual future. Rothacker’s handling of the genre is inspiring, he writes with passion, style, and pathos. I’m convinced he can do anything. Michael Moorcock would have been proud of this book.”
— Chris Kelso, author of I Dream of Mirrors and The Dregs Trilogy
“A solar noir intrigue, complete with climate apocalypse, capitalism abandoned, and the murder of the Oracle at Delphi. Rothacker’s bold intelligence and fleet styling will elevate and mesmerize you. Simultaneously a thrilling page turner, and a brilliant critical inquiry as to our time and our future. Smart, creative, prescient.”
— John Reed, author of Snowball’s Chance and All the World’s a Grave.
“Rothacker’s fresh take on ancient symbolism, cutting characters, and doomsday clock-like cadence strikes a death chord from genesis to cessation.”
— Hillary Leftwich, author, poet, and founder of Al·che·my Author Services
“A deeply satisfying, intensely flavored stew of ancient myths and Hebrew iconoclasm, served warm in a glass postmodern bowl. I found it very comforting, especially in its humane account of genders and gods. If this is the future, we don’t do as badly as we deserve.”
— Peter Gardella, religion scholar, author of Innocent Ecstasy and American Civil Religion
“When the Profane prophet Alfred North Whitehead made that comment about footnotes and Plato, he could not have foreseen that The Death of the Cyborg Oracle would be the ideal embodiment of Platonic mythmaking. Set after the destruction of one Amazon and the dismantling of another, Rothacker’s prescient fiction laments and celebrates our all too human blindnesses and insights. Like the eagle-like eyes of Detective Rabbi Jakob “Thinkowitz” Rabbinowitz, it felt like this book was reading and writing me all at once. Its particular mix of knowing tragedy and anarchic hope will continue to resonate long after closing its pages, like the thud of realization made by a brick of marble thrown into the hole of Tartarus.”
— Minus Plato, author of No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump (AC Books 2020)
“With an encyclopedic knowledge of religion, Rothacker takes readers on a noir quest flipped on its head—full of sincerity and hope—that has all the fun of a Rick Riordan book without the teenage hubris. In the domed post-apocalyptic City (which just so happens to save all the best parts of contemporary hipster Atlanta; Crystal Blue or The Earl, anyone?) religion has become a sincere re-enchantment that could potentially save us after all— now that it’s divorced from capitalism and group worship. As an artist, I couldn’t help but feel simultaneously proud and irked by Rothacker’s spot-on analysis of my fictional future artist brethren (I guess some things never change…) clinging to the last vestiges of irony by choosing to genuinely worship fake gods of literary invention instead of the classical gods of world religions, and raucously debating with lead detective Thinkowitz Rabbinowitz at the Variety Playhouse deep into the Little Five Points’ night—still weird after 300 years.”
— Vivian Liddell, artist, Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of North Georgia, host of Peachy Keen Podcast
“When I read through The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, I wept. Not from sadness, but from its comforting familiarity and universalism during our times of chaos, anxiety, destruction, and uncertainty. Jordan A. Rothacker’s treatment of themes ranging from science fiction to religion, and mythology to ontology provides hope in a time of despair, and a call for rebirth and regeneration while we stare at the possibility of our own dystopian future. Most of all, The Death of the Cyborg Oracle—through its stunning prose and flow—calls on us to examine, understand, and utilize the past to work for a better present.”
— Adam Shprintzen, historian, The Vegetarian Crusade
“A bristling archetypal drama, Jordan Rothacker’s latest science fiction, is a mythopoeic delight, a space oddity in an asteroid belt of Ovid, Lovecraft, Sophocles, and hip detective stories. A total blam-blam!”
— James Reich, author of The Song My Enemies Sing
“Despite the murder of the titular cyborg oracle, the domed city of Jordan Rothacker’s novel seduces you with its post-capitalist, pan-theist society. There has been catastrophe here—environmental, religious, monetary—but this version of a future Atlanta, unlike Philip K. Dick’s San Francisco, emerges as somewhere that you might actually want to live. It’s a perfect backdrop for a noir that’s as inspired by the futuristic as it is the ancient, traversing realms of both the sacred and the profane.”
— Farooq Ahmed, author of Kansastan
“The Death of the Cyborg Oracle is a finely-crafted work of futurist-noir that utilizes the genre as a lens to address society, philosophy, religion, and human nature.”
— Peter Woods, cultural organizer & Accomplice
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