VAS: An Opera in Flatland, Cyborg Edition
Book, Custom Slipcase, and Audio CD
A limited edition available from Chiasmus Press, Amazon, and Powell’s Limited Edition Book Club. Audio CD (without book) available from Amazon, iTunes, and streaming services.
This special, limited edition is a must-have for book collectors. The original, groundbreaking novel of identity in the biotech age comes in a clear, polystyrene slipcase reminiscent of the lab. The custom slipcase also holds the voice of the book: an audio CD of readings especially created for this edition and set to music by Alloy Orchestra, renowned creator of contemporary scores for silent movies. Additional music and performances by Paul Johnson, Maria Tomasula, Chris Jara, and Scott Appleby. Scroll down for a look inside this hybrid image-text novel, and sample sound clips from the CD.
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.
VAS will be of interest to anyone concerned with the futures we are now writing into existence.
An Opera in Flatland Audio CD
(available at Amazon and streaming services)
An Opera in Flatland, the CD that accompanies the Cyborg Edition of VAS, consists of two parts: a story drawn from the print novel, and an opera based on the opera that Square and Circle attend in the novel. Excerpts from both section appear below.
Part I: Bodies in Flatland (32:51) (story) read by Steve Tomasula, with Christian Jara and Maria Tomasula. Music composed and performed by Alloy Orchestra: Terry Donahue (percussion, accordion), Caleb Sampson (synthesizers), Ken Winokur (percussion). Sound Design by Christian Jara.
Part II: The Strange Voyage of Imagining Chatter (opera) read by Steve Tomasula, Paul Appleby (Acts I & II) and Paul Johnson (Act III). Music composed by Paul Johnson. Lyrics to Act I by Lord Byron. Sound Design by Christian Jara.
Track 2: Introduction B (0:09)
Track 3: Overture (3:55)
Track 4: Act I Intro (0:42)
Track 5: Act I (5:31)
Track 6: Act II Intro (0:33)
Track 7: Act II (3:51)
Track 8: Intermission (0:48)
Track 9: Act III Intro (0:41)
Track 10: Act III (3:05)
Track 11: Act III Conclusion (0:26)
Track 12: The Clinic
Slipcase
A clear, polystyrene slipcase evokes Petri dishes and other lab equipment. With walls that are 3/8 inch thick, this sturdy slipcase is custom made to hold the CD inside, against the book. Viewed through the slipcase, the CD itself resembles a drop of blood seen through a microscope. The outside of the slipcase measures 5-3/4” (w) x 10” (h) x 2” (d).
A breathtaking inquiry into the artifacts of the human imagination, VAS: An Opera in Flatland is sensuous, ferocious, and original.
- Rikki Ducornet, The Novelist
…this novel constitutes a leap forward for the genre we call ‘novel.’ Collapsing nonfiction into fiction, women’s reproductive concerns into men’s, history into present, work into play—this novel takes juxtaposition and digression to new heights.
- American Book Review
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