Gelpack Allegory

Author: Robert Kiely

Publisher: Veer Books (2021)

"Gelpack Allegory is a radically foreshortened history of genre—science fiction compressed at High-G; a psychopathology of entrepreneurial desire; the background clatter of an American Arithmometer Com-pany brand adding machine producing culture; calculus as language as organization as numbers but not just any numbers the numbers we re-member having learned in childhood; the faintest, hopeful whiff of burning gasoline blowing through the corporate lobby’s revolving door. Kiely careens past Samuel Delaney redefining the terms, past Karl Marx riffing on astrophysics, and straight into the titanic vortex of Elon Musk’s Oedipal fantasies. Straight to where we all are anyways but in a crazy, asphyxiating ride. How can something so fast as a capi-tal flow feel so stifling? How come I’m still laughing even after all the oxygen has been sucked out the room? How come something so exhil-arating as the writing in this book ends with a poem which makes it impossible for me to breathe?"

—Robert G. Penner