Dreams of Amputation by Gary J. Shipley

Dreams of Amputation Reviews

• 
  S̶e̶a̶n̶

  So Mr. Shipley dreamt up an amputated posthuman horrorscape and decorated it with pus-filled sacs of prose-poetic philosophical hash that is still congealing in my rusted brainpan. How to even explain this to someone...I thought if William Gibson and J.G. Ballard had cowritten the screenplay for the film Idiocracy with consultancies from Samuel R. Delany, Dennis Cooper, and the disembodied spirit of William Burroughs perhaps that would provide a starting point...or maybe just imagine—to pilfer the words of Shipley's Sage—'a clot of masks, of minds dissected by the vehicle of days, of time leaning into its own perpetually shifting dead-end'... as described by 'the prototypical anhedonian captured in some dark viscid frieze'...
  
  Speaking of viscid friezes, though, (and if we can presume [but can we?] that Shipley intends the architectural meaning of the term 'frieze' as opposed to the textile-related meaning [which also could weirdly apply in context]), Shipley may in fact be constructing his own viscid frieze across multiple textual artefacts, for there are definitely some commonalities here with
  Terminal Park. But the anhedonia suffusing this moment precludes me from parsing those clotted threads of ooze...
• 
  ipsit

  I’m not sure how to tell what this book’s about-or even what exactly happens—but that doesn’t really matter because it’s less about plot and more about amassment and shape. There are characters and recurring set pieces, but much of the pleasure comes from Shipley’s great array of authorial control. The plot’s trajectory alters over and over, even in mid-stream, providing the reader with more of an experience than a narration, and one designed to pull up a hidden layer of the world, shedding wicked light not on who we are, but what is right underneath us.
• 
  Angie Dutton

  I think this maybe wears its influences on its sleeves a bit too much, in terms of basically just playing off pulp, Burroughs, Ballard, and all the blood and cum soggy edgelords of the 1950s onwards, I was wondering whether to give a three star, but I enjoyed it immensely.
  
  Not sure if I'd recommend it though, especially as it's all been done elsewhere, but if you like that kind of thing and want a slightly more VICE magazine style take on it then probably try this out.
• 
  David Peak

  Shipley's most straight-forward work to date--and also his most tightly focused. This is an immensely weird and disturbing piece of cyberpunk head-fuckery.
• 
  Thomas

  this book is ostensibly 'cyberpunk' but the guy is a philosophy academic so it isn't really concerned with plot and has a lot of sentences like these:
  "Trickery's unblinking progress sending and receiving messages to and from remote corners of the globe - flailing worm-holed bodies and the wool of abstract faces approximated from a conglomerated parasite clearing their minds with city dreams of submerged truths hidden in a fetus yet to be conceived."
  
  "Rows of eyes like swollen full stops trained on bowls of black glass and slim chambers of white spiralled smoke: FOCUS, focus inside the disorder of stilled lives, lives free of paraphernalia: time without its equipment, thinned time, pure time; the sanguine liquidity of unencumbered duration, of hearts eaten by their beats inside twitching ghosts mincing anxiety into coiling worms of tenseless time."
• 
  Cast Asunder

  An amalgamated mess of hanging wires, broken glass and the sound of dragging bodies. At once, it is literal, metaphor, prophecy and something else entirely; Shipley has a uniquely ominous way of speaking in a language that at surface level seems understandable, but upon further inspection is inconceivable. If you’re worried about the TV static that you hear off in the distance when reading this book, fear not— your brain is just short circuiting from the experience.
  
  I don’t necessarily feel inclined to categorize this, but I recall seeing another GR reviewer call Shipley’s writing “weird bummer fiction”, which seems apt.
• 
  Benoit Lelièvre

  This is one of these books fulls of fun and original ideas, but that doesn't tell them in a very compelling way.
  
  Mostly centered around the idea that the self is a virus (which is kind of cool), Dreams of Amputation alternates between non-narrative body horror scenes and very straightforward (and unorignal) cyberpunk storytelling. Some writers are stylists. Some are storytellers. Truly great writers are both. Shipley is not one of them. He's a thinker and a creative mind, but he struggles telling a compelling story out of uniquely jagged pieces.
• 
  Jim Ivy

  Imagine William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Phillip K. Dick infiltrating and infesting a film noir detective story... yeah, pretty cool.
• 
  Fede

  One of the characters is Lucinda the Equine Toff, a transexual horse/human living in a penthouse as a concubine. Thoroughbred racer's hind quarters, human penis, large female breasts, horse head and a posh English accent.
  He/she dies early on in the story, but no worries - the other characters are much worse than that.
  
  Still, this one of the most complex novels I've ever read, a philosophical allegory in the form of a cyberpunk tableau.
  I bought it just because I liked the cover art and, of course, the title, so I was quite willing to see my money go down the drain for the sake of it. I found myself dealing with a mind-blowing work of unexpected depth and remarkable literary value instead, by an author I was shamefully unaware of. The writing is amazingly good and the imagery (violent, obscene, extreme and poetic) left me utterly speechless on several occasions.
  
  What can I say? If authors like G.J. Shipley and B.R. Yeager (
  Amygdalatropolis) are the new trend in Anglo-American fiction, there are good reasons to feel optimistic about the future of literature.
• 
  Thomas Hale

  Ultra-grim, gore-soaked hellscape after a post-Ballardian societal collapse. Cyberpunk screen-addiction, rampant murder and sexual assault, animal and child abuse, etc etc. There are some pretty cool body modifications that (apart from the main protagonist) are largely forgotten after being introduced. The plot takes half the book to get going, after thoroughly desensitising the reader to the grotesqueries of the awful, awful world it's set in. It's a shame, because there are a handful of scenes and Burroughs-style skits that were actually impactful. I don't know how the author identifies, but this felt like a very hetero book, too, with the worst and most pathetic fates saved for the female characters. (There are two trans women featured, briefly: one is a serial killer's sidekick, and the other is a giant horse-woman with a giant penis who is murdered in a spree-killing after maybe three lines of dialogue.) It all felt rather shallow and try-hard-edgy, like if Charlie Brooker wrote snuff porn for a China Miéville fansite. I certainly got through it quickly, but every time I think about the book since finishing it I feel more disappointed.
• 
  Sean

  I think this book may have changed the way I think about reading. Generally speaking I don't particularly enjoy reading abstract stuff where I cant follow the plot thread, I'm okay with things being abstract, but I generally want to be able to tether myself to an actual progression of some sort.
  
  Well I'm going to re-think that about myself now, because for at least the first 1/4 of this book I couldn't grab on to anything that's what made me like it so much. I was sort of just being thrown around in this books insane post-cyberpunk babble and I loved it. Everything about this book is accelerated and amplified to insane levels. Its extremely grotesque and beyond nihilistic
  
  The only reason why I'm not giving this 5 stars is because that feeling went away as a plot slowly revealed itself. It continues to be more and more plot driven as the book goes on. I'm probably being unfair here though since I've never felt that feeling with any other book, and honestly the plot is quite good.
  
  I'm going to follow this writers work for sure because he definitely has a unique voice and I want more.
• 
  Chris Cabrera

  This is a solid book and one I didn't appreciate fully until the end. With its visceral imagery and cybertech-y descriptions, it will require more attention to digest and may impact its readability. However with that being said, this book is undoubtedly "cool" (if I may use the word from one of the major reviews I saw in Goodreads that lead me to the pick this novel) and is a great, dark addition to the genre.
• 
  Judy Jo

  I think I may be an idiot for not getting it but honestly it seemed like perversion for perversions sake at times. At other times it was just unnecessarily confusing. I think it may be a good book just not for me.
• 
  D Lyons

  the COVID19 stuff made me push through and finish this bad boy today. insane prose, all about the body and mind torn apart, reassembled, worse every time. made me come to a moment of great peace with the virus, i am the virus, we are all the virus.
• 
  Adam Hudson

  A true delight to read. I’ll be thinking about this one for a good while.
• 
  Jesse Zabel

  3.5 really well written but hard to follow. Very cool imagery and idea. Will read more from this author.
• 
  Harry

  Wanky, cynical cyberpunk. What's new?
• 
  Cara Marie

  Uhm. Okay.