But you could also call it a concept album. You think you’re going to eat it, but it ends up eating you.Jennifer Egan’s 2010 “ A Visit From the Goon Squad” was, depending whom you asked, a novel, or a collection, or a story cycle. A candy house, on the other hand, is just a trap. Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, in which what happened depends on who’s telling the story. Being made of imagination, it offers a portal to another universe, much like each of the chapters in Egan’s novel. In The Candy House, D&D represents one of several alternatives to the candy house of technology and information. As a dungeon master, instead of dismantling stories, he makes them, collaboratively with others.
Later we find him running Mondrian behind a nonprofit front that organizes Dungeons & Dragons games for recovering addicts. Chris starts out working for company seeking to turn what it calls “stockblocks,” narrative components from movies (“Funny Best Friend Gets Serious to Talk Sense Into Protagonist” “Crowd Rises to Its Feet in Unexpected Tribute”), into mathematical formulae, although to what end he can’t tell. Sometimes the best place to conceal the real is amid the fake, which could be the motto of fiction: the lie that tells a truth. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 Is the Most Disturbing Marvel Movie Yet.Hannah Gadsby’s Latest Is a Very Different Kind of Stand-Up Special
The Weirdest NBA Megastar Career Keeps Getting Weirder King Charles Has a Problem Queen Elizabeth Never Had. The uploading and sharing part, called the Collective Consciousness, was more of an afterthought, but as is often the way with new tech, it soon became the main attraction. Own Your Unconscious, his second breakthrough, was also lifted from an academic’s research and allows people to deposit a copy of their memory to a sexy bit of tech shaped like a luminous cube. The Collective Consciousness is the product of a company named Mandala, founded by Bix Bouton, the protagonist of the first chapter-a charismatic entrepreneur whose “genius lay in refining, compressing, and mass-producing, as a luscious, irresistible product, technology that already existed in crude form.” He’s a bit Mark Zuckerberg, a bit Steve Jobs, except Bix is Black, first drawn into the world of the internet by the belief that, when disembodied, “Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world.” Bix’s first big idea-lifted from an obscure anthropology monograph containing algorithms that calculated how trust and influence formed in a Brazilian tribe-was a social media platform that made him rich and famous.
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