Lunagrad

On the frozen world of Hurth stands Lunagrad, an inhuman city that redesigns itself. There, once-nomadic human tribes have taken shelter, dwelling in uneasy harmony with the city’s automated mechanisms. The streets are haunted by apparitions of silent Cosmonauts, who some believe may have been the city’s original residents. When a vast new structure erupts from the city’s depths, its façades dripping with a madness-inducing script, the tenuous truce maintained by the warring tribes begins to unravel.

Part planetary romance, part philosophical epic, and part cosmic mystery, Lunagrad is a visionary meditation on language, memory, technology, and becoming. Andrew Joron has imagined a dazzling speculative world in the tradition of Gene Wolfe, Samuel R. Delany, M. John Harrison, and Stanisław Lem.

ANDREW JORON is a poet, essayist, and writer of speculative fiction. He is the author of the poetry collections The Absolute Letter and Trance Archive; the double novella O0; and a selection of prose poems and critical essays, The Cry at Zero. From the German, he has translated Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays and The Perpetual Motion Machine by proto-Dada fantasist Paul Scheerbart. As a musician, Joron plays the theremin in various experimental and free-jazz ensembles. He teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.

"Andrew Joron is reinventing science fiction. Having shown over the past few decades that he’s one of North America’s most interesting poets, Joron has begun to develop his own special genre. Lunagrad is narrative as metaphor, where an alternative universe is not an end in itself, as it is with so much conventional sci-fi. Rather, this book takes the spell that poetry weaves and unweaves it into a world where textual alchemy is an evolving process that may be an oblique mirror for the world as we know it, or possibly a mirror for something we can only begin to know by reading this book. In Joron’s world, readers of fiction are offered a mesmerizing and often playful experience that needs to be learned word by word, phrase by phrase, image by image, like riding a train that moves on dissolving tracks. Lunagrad is a must for anyone who cares about the future of intelligent language." —STEPHEN PAUL MARTIN, author of The Gothic Twilight

"In this page turner, Andrew Joron has created a late-stage world as complete as anything dreamed up by Andrei Tarkovsky, Samuel R. Delaney, or Raymond Roussel. Lunagrad is a mysterious living city, both building itself and falling, even while being dominated by Ob, a violent autocrat, and his gangsters. Speaking Rush, a language derived from Russian, the inhabitants seem to have studied Ludwig Wittgenstein, know mathematical sets, and are illuminated by Joron’s penchant for making homophonic connections. Living inside this constantly transforming, incomplete world—which is also language—Joron’s intrepid adventurers are cosmologists asking which reality they live in: the world of unstable things or the one where language never becomes the thing it names. I love what Joron has achieved in this book." —JOHN YAU, author of Tell It Slant and Ghengis Chan on Drums

"In his remarkable second novel, Andrew Joron transforms the evolving city of Lunagrad into far more than a setting; he makes it the work’s (and our world’s) central cognitive agent of transformation. The city’s shifting architecture answers those who seek to understand it, drawing language and number into an alphanumeric dialogue through which symbolic forms become materially effective via those who read, write, and transform them. It is precisely this dialogic ecology that makes possible this astounding book: a genuinely polyphonic novel where narrative transcends representation and emerges as one of the material forces through which collective life resists erasure and history remains open to the ever-emerging not yet. Highly entertaining and utterly mind-bending, Lunagrad is an unforgettable reminder that the deepest potential of art lies in its capacity to become a co-creative force through which language, number, humanity, and cosmos together engineer realities that none could bring into being on their own." —ANDREW C. WENAUS, author of The Literature of Exclusion

"Welcome to Lunagrad, Andrew Joron’s dazzling vision of a city that watches, rebuilds, and remakes its citizens. Haunted by the memory of a mysterious ‘Crash,’ the eponymous city struggles beneath autocratic rule and the hypnotic hum of ‘buzzah,’ a broadcast that reshapes dreams, memories, and reality itself. Within this endlessly shifting world, Blenk, the last Reader; Ulla, a seeker of forbidden truths; and Vepp, a numbers prodigy pursuing the mystery of his mother’s murder, navigate hidden forces, unstable alliances, and a society caught between erasure and rebirth. Their journeys reveal a place where language is not merely a tool but a source of power, a forbidden art, and the very substance of existence. A visionary fabulist epic, Lunagrad is a singular achievement: a novel that invites readers into a city in perpetual transformation, where stories do not simply reflect reality but actively remake it. Perfect for readers of Renee Gladman, Karen An-hwei Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ben Marcus, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer, Joron takes us on a marvelous journey into the heart of a city (and selves) in perpetual metamorphosis." —JOHN MADERA, author of Nervosities