“Excruciatingly relevant”
Excruciatingly relevant, Reintroduction is at once the past, present and future brought together in the stuff of man’s darkest thoughts and most selfish of intents. Yet as lonesome mankind and their machines seek each other out in the world above and the world below, trying to control who and what they are becoming, there are moments of tenderness that surprise and remind: Each of us need the company of another soul when all about us is disintegrating.
K L Miller, Author and Editor
“Like the bastard child of Philip K Dick and John Milton”
In a short novel, Duncan Brown has created a world entire, one that feels like our own may be in the process of becoming, subsumed as it is by environmental and social degradation, increasing scarcity of resources and drastic inequality. A world wherein a gap in your cv can become a hole into which you disappear without trace, prompting middle manager Robert Corrigan to apply for a position with Dennett and Reese Technology as overseer for the mysterious Project ‘Egret’. What this proves to be will have profound consequences for more than just Corrigan.
Its nominal goal is liberation from the biological constraints of humanity, if only for a select few. However, under the aegis of the enigmatic CEO Caspar Ulmer, Corrigan finds his self-styled ‘omnicompetence’ applied to creating a prison more total than any previously conceived, his meticulous foresight leading him, step by inexorable step, in to Hell.
Like the bastard child of Philip K Dick and John Milton, Brown marries luminous prose to themes of ontological estrangement precipitated by mortality and technology. And suggests the cure may be very much worse than the disease. Reintroduction is a sustained gaze at where we might be going and just how much we stand to lose getting there.