Ascension

“In this epic-scale novel, Steve Tomasula uses multiple modalities and media formats to track the course of ecological impacts and change. From illustrations of contact encounters, to a movie script, to elaborate aerial views and data visualizations, Tomasula demonstrates his unique capacity to engage with technologies of knowledge in constructing his provocative narrative. As always in his projects, the result is a striking work of combined intellectual and creative force. He makes vividly evident the terrifying reality of our current dystopia as we careen towards disaster—starting with the epigraph ‘it did not have to happen this way.’”
—Johanna Drucker, author of Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist

“Steve Tomasula has opened up a lyric atmospheric experience for readers across time and space, playfully, beautifully, and sometimes frighteningly staged upon the page. In Ascension, the interplay between the human longing to understand who we are and our unstoppable will to pursue knowledge all of our creations and destructions are laid bare. What an epic story across three epochs of being and knowing—from Darwin to the digital revolution to the present tense. Breathtaking.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust: A Novel

 

“Tackling the catastrophes of colonization, digitization, and encroaching extinction, what history feels like at a scale where homo sapiens become the size of stray thoughts, Ascension is both a brilliant contemplation of just how wrong we’ve become, how poorly we’ve read the text of our planet and ourselves, and a keen exploration into how we represent these unimaginables through our culturally-inflected imaginations. Rich with vast research, thought, illumination, every page a unique visual space, Ascension is, like all Steve Tomasula’s work, a mind-boggling report sent back from the library of the future. “
—Lance Olsen, author of Skin Elegies and My Red Heaven