An excerpt from my diary I wrote right after finishing:
”It is absurd how much we hate ourselves and eachother. It’s so cruel how much those emotions that we refuse to let go of trap us inside of ourselves, unable to see the beauty of life itself. I'm just happy to have been.”
Sublimina Syndrome is a wonderful book full of characters that reflect a uniquely imaginiative, imperfect -some might even say; Exurbian!-- - perspective. I think that’s sort of the point Exurb1a is trying to hammer home. We live & breathe & experience the beauty and magic of existence & the world asks us to give it up. Like a card from a magician. It’s no wonder that life makes us go insane. Insanity is the only response to any of this that really makes any sense.
Exurb1a explores these Ideas in 5 short stories, with a loose narrative about a space fable of a group called “The Big Sisters.” They created objects that made people insane, & then they left, & nobody knows where --or why!-- they went. In a second channel video Exurb1a mentions Cloud Atlas, and how much of an influence it had on him. You’d have to close your eyes to not notice similarities.
While there was one story that I was not particularly fond of, the sci-fi was certainly amazing and worth the price of reading it alone. Perhaps I was missing something, but it was just a romance that felt forced to me. As if someone who doesn’t know what love is sat in a hole & tried to write about it, which is sort of how it feels. I mean, who talks to someone in the past & drinks alcohol with them til they’re sloshed every night and falls in love? It seems to me a strange dynamic to frame a love story, and it certainly didn’t feel very authentic, personally. That being said, I’m a huge fan, and I do genuinely believe that I might not be doing whatever the fuck this is right now if it wasn’t for him. The ending made me cry.