10 years ago I wasn't reading science fiction. I found this in a free library by the place I was living at, held together with electrical tape (fixing a book with black tape = baller move) and missing pages. The back copy sounded so bad, I thought I'd be in for a trashy, lazy knockoff dystopia full of half-baked reactionary ideas. I thought I'd skim though it for a laugh. What I got was an absolute mindbender that derailed my reading life for the next decade: a chaotic anarchist (u/dys)topia, an intriguingly ambivalent attitude to violence, pre-60s mindwipe identity psychedelia, witchcraft, mass shootings+terrorism, and a positive-nihilist conclusion... I became pretty immediately obsessed with Kornbluth's simultaneous pro- and anti-authoritarianism, his atypical libertarianism, his flashes of melancholy, his clever careening plots. Far from trash, I had found an idea-packed nightmare that changed my reading habits for years as I searched for something that could touch it. Gonna be posting more capsule reviews here in days/weeks to come so that I can throw out my book journal