AGŌN has been released 16 May 2023!

Release Date

AGŌN will be available in Print (KDP print-on-demand) and E-Book form on 2 April 2023 (AGŌN has been released 16 May 2023). Remember to leave a review! 

Edit: Publication date pushed back to 16 May 2023.

Edit: AGŌN has been published! Get your Kindle copy now at this link!

Synopsis

A new and powerful technology resurrects a long-dead warrior from the distant past, triggering a deadly game of corporate politics. As shadowy schemes spiral out of control, the ensuing bedlam upends life on the crowning achievement of corporatist innovation - Iceberg City. In the thick of confusion, fundamental values bend and then break as each player jostles, lies, cheats and kills for profit. But from within the tortured life of 'utility' emerges the ancient call towards the self-determination of meaning - a call which harbours inevitable self-destruction.

"Agōn" is a post-modernist dark fantasy set in a science-fiction world where untrammelled human competition culminates in the breakdown of morality. From breakdown comes greater heights of reflection and morose delectation. At the core of its human drama lies the fraught odyssey through the vale of death, guided by the ultimate alienation of the human creature from its moralities. From this pitiless view of creatural existence-as-rebellion emerges the triumph of convolution and competition, a triumph that suspends all emotion in the soup of its tragedy.

Human Thought as Recursion

This project, which has taken some years to complete, represents a summary of some of my thought and their corresponding developments. The outlines of the underlying philosophy I had conceived of in an earlier piece titled "Human Thought as Recursion", a piece which still remains private. 

The medium of fiction has often allowed thought to be followed according to the patterns of the fantastic, which is not so far removed from the strictures (or axioms) of rationality as it might seem. In some cases, and to some people, the latter may be considered an outgrowth of the former, as it must have seemed to Pierre Loti, that venerable French writer, who wrote in The Book of Pity and Death, in the account of the death of his Aunt Claire (done justice by the translation of T. P. O'Connor):

In dreams one is perhaps more capable of understanding the mysterious, more capable of penetrating into the unfathomed depths of origins and causes.

This understanding, helped along perhaps also by the contemplation of such writings as Kierkegaard's Either/Or or Voltaire's Candide, has inspired my own attempt at a conte philosophique. 

From as detached a perspective as I can muster, Agōn, in its implicit dialecticism, seems to me to have a flavour of a kind of Marxist historical materialism, although this was not salient to my mind whilst I was writing it. For my part I consider it an essential milestone, but of what I cannot yet tell.

"Human Thought as Recursion" can thus be developed with renewed clarity. If luck would have it, I might someday publish it with more confidence in its being taken seriously.

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