Normal, Warren Ellis
Normal, Warren Ellis
List: $10.99 | Sale: $7.70
Club: $5.49

Normal
A Novel

Author: Warren Ellis

Narrator: John Hodgman

Unabridged: 3 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/29/2016


Synopsis

A smart, tight, provocative techno-thriller audiobook straight out of the very near future--by an iconic visionary writer

Some people call it "abyss gaze." Gaze into the abyss all day and the abyss will gaze into you.

There are two types of people who think professionally about the future: Foresight strategists are civil futurists who think about geoengineering and smart cities and ways to evade Our Coming Doom; strategic forecasters are spook futurists, who think about geopolitical upheaval and drone warfare and ways to prepare clients for Our Coming Doom. The former are paid by nonprofits and charities, the latter by global security groups and corporate think tanks.

For both types, if you're good at it, and you spend your days and nights doing it, then it's something you can't do for long. Depression sets in. Mental illness festers. And if the abyss gaze takes hold there's only one place to recover: Normal Head, in the wilds of Oregon, within the secure perimeter of an experimental forest.

When Adam Dearden, a foresight strategist, arrives at Normal Head, he is desperate to unplug and be immersed in sylvan silence. But then a patient goes missing from his locked bedroom, leaving nothing but a pile of insects in his wake. A staff investigation ensues; surveillance becomes total.

As the mystery of the disappeared man unravels in Warren Ellis's Normal, Adam uncovers a conspiracy that calls into question the core principles of how and why we think about the future--and the past, and the now.

About Warren Ellis

WARREN ELLIS is an author, graphic novelist, columnist, and speaker. His novel, Gun Machine, was released in January 2013, and is being developed for television by Chernin Entertainment and FOX.Crooked Little Vein, his first novel, was described by Joss Whedon as "Funny, inventive, and blithely appalling . . . Dante on paint fumes."His graphic novel RED was made into a successful film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. His other graphic novels, including Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Ministry of Space, Global Frequency, Gravel, and Freakangels, have won multiple awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Eagle Awards and the NUIG Lit & Deb’s President’s Medal in recognition of support for free speech.He lives mostly in Britain.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jon

Love his work in comics; so when I saw this book I snapped it up. Very interesting story about technology and the rift between inception and application - what happens when you are part of something that is used for evil - you did not see it coming (or did you just ignore the bigger questions becaus......more

Goodreads review by Ray

I could listen to Warren Ellis riff about End-of-the-World/apocalypsism scenarios all day... and I'll take any narrative excuse at all to explore these Big Ideas. In true Ellis fashion, it's mind-boggingly smart and at once too short. Much to ponder. Also, often funny in that charming yet fucked up......more

Warren Ellis’ brain is a very, very strange place; I never really know what I am in for when I pick up any of his work, and “Normal” fits Ellis’ pattern of bizarre, unexpected, funny and disturbing. When your job is to think about the future, whether as a strategic forecaster (the kind employed by co......more


Quotes

"[John] Hodgman grabs listeners with the surreal opening line--"Hand over the entire Internet now and nobody gets hurt"--and infuses an appropriate blend of sarcasm and bemusement throughout. It's not all played for laughs, though. Hodgman also captures the sinister atmosphere bubbling just below the surface." -AudioFile Magazine


Awards

  • Amazon.com Best Books of the Year