The Familiar, Mark Z. Danielewski Options

[Raijinili]

So it looks like the first book (of 27 I think?) is coming out in May. Anyone excited?
I follow him on Facebook, and over the last year or two he's posted a series of random cryptic pictures of a galaxy, each one with a series of numbers attached. When I was looking up info on the new book today, I found out that it was a code, and the code had been broken. The pictures posted so far translate into this:

» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «

"One by one our skies go black.

Stars are extinguished, collapsing into distances too great to breach. Soon, not even the memory of light will survive.


Long ago, our manifold universes discovered futures would only expand. No arms of limit could hold or draw them back.


Short of a miracle, they would continue to stretch, untangle and vanish — abandoned at long last to an unwitnessed dissolution.


That dissolution is now.


Final winks slipping over the horizons share what needs no sharing:

There are no miracles.


You might say just to survive to such an end is a miracle in itself.

We would agree.

But we are not everyone.


Even if you could imagine yourself billions of years hence, you would not begin to comprehend who we became and what we achieved.


Yet left as you are, you will no more tremble before us than a butterfly on a windless day trembles before colluding skies still calculating beyond one of your pacific horizons.


Once we could move skies.

We could transform them.

We could make them sing.


And when we fell into dreams, our dreams asked questions and our skies, still singing, answered back.


You are all we once were but the vastness of our strangeness exceeds all the light-years between our times.


The frailty of your senses can no more recognize our reach than your thoughts can entertain even the vaguest outline of our knowledge.


In ratios of quantity, a pulse of what we comprehend renders meaningless your entire history of discovery.


We are on either side of history: yours just beginning, ours approaching a trillion years of ends.


Yet even so, we still share a dyad of commonality.


Two questions endure. Both without solution.


What haunts us now and will allways hunt you.


The first reveals how the promise of all our postponements, ever longer, ever more secure — what we eventually mistook for immortality — was from the start a broken promise.


Entropy suffers no reversals.

Even now, here, on the edge of time’s end, where so many continue to vanish, we still have not pierced that veil of sentience undone.


The first of our common horrors:"
(and yeah it ends there, with the colon and everything)

If you're interested in the code or the pictures, https://www.facebook.com/MarkZDanielewski
He might have them on twitter or something too, but I don't twitter so I dunno. If you're interested in how they broke the code: http://forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/t...ook-codes/page7

Aaannddd if you're interested in the new series: http://www.amazon.com/The-Familiar-One-Rai...y/dp/0375714944

[Raijinili]

There are 880 pages in volume one of 27?

Exciting.

[Raijinili]

One month left! I'm pretty stoked.

[Raijinili]

I have this in my calendar for like, two weeks from now. Even though I haven't been reading anything lately, I think I will get this when it actually comes out so I can stare at it next to all these other books and wonder what kind of story he wrote this time.

[Raijinili]

I have this in my calendar for like, two weeks from now. Even though I haven't been reading anything lately, I think I will get this when it actually comes out so I can stare at it next to all these other books and wonder what kind of story he wrote this time.

Or you could break your reading fast with it :D

EDIT: I read somewhere that one of the voices/pov's is written like computer code. There. That should make you quiver with excitement. Or it won't.
BUT MAYBE STURM?

[Raijinili]

Official Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6H1TRr2NhA

[Raijinili]

Finished it today.

Me likey.

The only part of the story that really makes sense to me thus far is that narrated by the family. I have very little comprehension of what was going on in the other narrators' lives, though all of them had such unique and well-developed voices, prosodically and signiconically.

And I will probably have none of the answers to my questions until fucking volume 27.

[Raijinili]

I didn't read or buy past volume 1, but for those who have kept reading, how is it? WHAT'S UP IN THE STORY IN SPOILER TAGS? I want to be spoiled, it may interest me in trying to keep going.

[Raijinili]

I stopped at volume 2 because of money, but it got cancelled after volume 4 or 5 or something

[Raijinili]

Yeah I was kinda skeptical that it would be marketable through a whole damn 27 eight-hundred-page volumes, and I gave up part way through volume 2, but was still said to hear that :(