Slowly at first, then with increasing speed, animals worldwide develop and surpass human skills in every field, from manual labor to theoretical thinking, with earth-shattering consequences for the future of humanity.
Narrated by an Archaeon, a 3.8 billion-year-old species, the oldest on Earth, this work of speculative eco-fiction describes the impact of ecological pressures on animals that are adopting human behaviors, with droll, and sometimes alarming, results.
"Occasionally books arise that explore unique and provocative universal potentialities, books that are provoked by scientific research and grow into speculative knowledge. Johanna Drucker's
DownDrift is such a book. . . .
Downdrift insightfully and rigorously explores questions of consciousness, processes of biological evolution, and the transformative impact of shifts in communication on society. Sound familiar?
Downdrift is about our time, now, as human beings, navigating extreme turbulence and destabilized subjectivity: surveillance capitalism, populism, memes. . . .
DownDrift is reminiscent of the best parts of Burroughs, Lispector, Pynchon, DeLillo, Patchen. And one hears residues of the poets: Charles Bernstein (for humor), Lorie Graham (on elegies), Lisa Robertson (in
The Weather). The quantum world is strange. The human pinnacle of dominance, precarious.
DownDrift's plot tension is lite. Its intellectual recruitment, high. Insight, agility, style, and humor far above average."
-Electronic Book Review
"Rides the wave of the New Weird, combining elements of fantasy, horror, speculative, psychological, absurdist, and literary fiction. ... A work of tremendous ambition, strangeness, and most import, compassion."
-Library Journal, starred review
"Tales of the many different animals are delivered in deliciously short chapters that build over the course of one year into a story that's by turns droll, subversive, pensive, brooding, off-the-charts weird, and wonderfully surprising. . . . Animal lovers will enjoy the antics of the beagles, bears, salamanders, cows, spiders, and other creatures, but the author's beautifully subtle message isn't just for pet owners or environmentalists. It's for all of us."
-Kirkus Reviews
"Laughing or crying, Drucker skewers the current cultural moment in an novel extrapolation of epic proportions. Taken to the furthest extreme, Downdrift is dogged by an urgent need to understand the difference between the domestic and the wild, measure it, and recalibrate its implications for survival."
-Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"A bold narrative . . . stunningly effective."
Tulsa Book Review
"In actual labs, we've already been able to engineer goats that manufacture spider silk, and tomatoes that are part fish. In Johanna Drucker's brilliant meditation on the dissolution of species, cats process coffee beans in their guts, hyenas recycle foil and we are left to ponder what is lost when the wild grows out of place among the domestic and the domestic grows strange to itself. Just as profoundly, DOWNDRIFT invites us to take the long view of a humanless future."
-Steve Tomasula, author, VAS: An Opera in Flatland
"A genealogical critique of morals-a migratory picture of that sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, working out of the West's metaphysics of justice on a planetary scale."
-Ron Day, Professor, Indiana University at Bloomington
