VAS: An Opera in Flatland
A Novel of Biotechnology
Up until now, everyone alive on earth was bound to one another through African Eve, our last common ancestor: a woman who, 5,000 generations ago, passed her genes and language to sons and daughters who did the same as they gradually populated the world. Today, however, Square, Circle and the other inhabitants of Flatland have the opportunity to step outside this lineage. To rearrange the bodies of animals, plants, and even themselves. VAS: An Opera in Flatland is the story of Square’s decision to undergo an operation that will leave him sterile for the good of his wife, Circle, for the good of their daughter, Oval, and for the good of society, including the unborn descendants he will never have. VAS is, in other words, the story of finding one’s identity within the double-helix of language and lineage—and Square’s struggle to see beyond the common pages of ordinary, daily life upon which he is drawn.
Utilizing a wide and historical sweep of representations of the body, from pedigree charts to genetic sequences, this hybrid novel recounts how differing ways of imagining the body generate differing stories of knowledge, power, history, gender, politics, art, and, of course, the literature of who we are. It is the intersection of one tidy family’s life with the broader times in which they live.
A novel of biotechnology by Steve Tomasula with art and design by Stephen Farrell, VAS will be of interest to anyone concerned with the futures we are now writing into existence.
370 pp, 3-color throughout, including artwork, illustrations and diagrams. One trifold foldout page.
$34 (hardback) SOLD OUT $18 (paperback from University of Chicago Press) AVAILABLE ISBN 0-226-80740
Steve Tomasula's extraordinary "novel" —or is it a film script? collage art work? philosophical meditation? —tracks the story of a "simple" event in the life of a 21st century family. But "story" is the wrong word here, for Tomasula's dissection of post-biological life is about the new interaction of bodies and DNA possibilities. Tomasula's imagination, his satiric edge, his wildly comic sense of things, combined with Farrell’s inventive page lay-out make reading this "Opera in Flatland" an unforgettable experience.
- Marjorie Perloff, The Critic
VAS , a beautifully vibrant collaboration…balances terrifying facts and a desperate humor with an ease worthy of David Markson,…an experience both disturbing and enlightening, and one for which I am grateful.
- Review of Contemporary Fiction
VAS is an encyclopedic quest for three-dimensional thinking in a two-dimensional quadvaverse of cloned geneticists replicating racialist double binds. With striking visual aplomb, VAS casts factoids off the steps of the Temples of the Predetermined into the yet-to-be-written name of errant possibility.
- Charles Bernstein, The Poet
VAS: An Opera in Flatland is a beguilingly intricate, immaculately crafted labour of love and anyone interested in the future of genetics or writing, or both, should seek it out.
- Eye [U.K.]
…visually brilliant—VAS: An Opera in Flatland redesigns the novel, taking it to a dimension beyond the one in which it ordinarily lives.
- Rain Taxi Review of Books
VAS is a welcome and an innovative contribution to the ongoing discussion and debate on biotechnology and the posthuman....
- Leonardo
Bound in a cover made to look like human flesh…VAS: An Opera in Flatland…interweaves myriad forms: novel, short story, poetry, comic book, history, science, reference, libretto, musical score, epigraph, science fiction, meta-text, and genetic code….The result is a project so stunningly ambitious…that the only true disappointment is that it has to end.
- Gulf Coast Review
Amazing, breathtaking in its originality….
- SirReadalot
…an unforgettably unique reading pleasure and the most visually exhilarating fiction to appear in years.
- American Book Review