| Title | : | White City |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1942712022 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781942712022 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 156 |
| Publication | : | First published January 12, 2015 |
White City Reviews
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I don’t write reviews.
This isn’t normally the kind of story I’d enjoy except for the fact there’s no beginning and no end, just a middle. That’s highly satisfying. It’s political, but not nasal annoying whiny political like modern activist politics. Honestly I enjoyed learning about the world and the characters. I didn’t get too attached to anything or anyone, which is good considering the ever-changing fabric of Viborg City. Doubinsky has a real talent for naturally flowing characterization in the short form. The story is separated by diary entries and poems which cleverly help with the show-don’t-tell style of exposition. -
Seb Doubinsky's White City is a little hard to categorize. Published by Bizarro Pulp Press, it isn't really that Bizarro at all. Its story is fairly straight forward even if spiced up by a few poems and diary entries that gives us subtle hints of what is happening. It may be called slightly avant-garde but only to those who haven't delve into the more adventurous areas of science fiction. While reading it, I could not help comparing it to some of the works of Phillip K. Dick, not because of style but because Dick dealt with many of the same themes of government and authoritarian rule. Few writers since Dick and in the related genres have really dared to seriously explore these areas. I would say Seb Doubinsky's book handles class and racism better than any work I have read in speculative fiction in a long time.
So here is the basic idea. The story happens in an alternate reality, The Nordic Alliance. It sounds a lot like ours, having been through World War II with Hitler and the Third Reich. The Nordic Alliance seems to have kept many of the antiquated and dangerous ideas of World War II and before. It seems to be a divided and loose alliance of city-states that are ruled and governed by various factions. White City is a wealthy district of the North Alliance capital, Viborg City. It is a haven for the rich and privilege without the racial and class conflicts of the other districts. It is dull and boring and everyone wants to live there. Again, not too different from some of our own upper 1% areas of wealth and privilege. Yet violence happens in this favored district when the brother of a powerful industry heiress is killed. Three people are brought together in this event; Leila Bogossian, a reporter who sees this story as her catapult to success, Lee Jones Jr., a young writer in his father's shadow who find in the event an inspiration for his own novel, and Sigrid Wulf, a skilled but sometime insubordinate detective who isn't taken in by the red herrings and propaganda that follows the crime.
The reader follows these three protagonists in brief alternating chapters sprinkled with those previously mentioned short poems and partially revealing diary entries. One of the intriguing things in this novel is that the author isn't so much interested in fleshing out his characters as in creating a three dimensional society and city. Viborg City with its three classes of Cash, Credit, and No-Credit manages to be a distinct alternate universe yet all too often sounding like our own. The author's characters work primarily as ones who are trying to find meaning in a world with a stagnant society and a decadent ruling class. Their individual methods of finding that meaning both define themselves and lead to their different fates at the end of the novel.
Getting to that end is half the fun. The big reveal is not really that difficult to figure out. Doubinsky aims for bigger game. White City is a quiet read. There is only one really violent catalytic event and no real fireworks of the type one might expect in a novel that is half speculative fiction and half mystery. It may be part sci-fi and part crime noir but it is 100% socio-philosophical exploration. The fact that you may not realize this until the end is a credit to Doubinsky's quiet but deep style. The author has a way with words but doesn't fling them around gratuitously. Every phrase has a meaning, even those little poems. When Lee Jr. sips Cognac and the Doubinsky writes "Lee found his tasted strangely bitter. But maybe it his soul he was tasting", you know actually what is going on in Lee's mind.
Seb Doubinsky is now on my list of writers to watch. This is the first book of his I've have read but it is a quiet little revolution. if this is typical of his writing, it will not be long before others also add him to their "Ones to watch" list. -
Wow. Just wow. The genius of this novel doesn't necessarily lies in its literary merits, but rather in its keen understanding of the inner workings of tyranny: nationalism, culture of secrecy, the power of images and simple narratives. Tyranny has been exiled from the cultural discoursed and banned to the land of cocktail party discussions, but Seb Doubinsky's deliberately low key novel brings it back into a frighteningly real territory. Of course, the tragedy of this novel is that for most people, tyranny is not even remotely close to a preoccupation and it is why tyranny is allowed to exist.
WHITE CITY will never be a best-seller and it's not because it lacks readability. It is because it discusses ideas most of us aren't ready to accept. -
Viborg City is the setting for this powerful, politically tinged sci-fi noir. It proved to be even better than expected after reading the early rave reviews that popped up upon it's release. I was fully engaged in the creative ways Doubinsky uses issues of class, race, and oppression here, akin to a more expressive Orwellian narrative, for lack of a better description. The format was refreshing. It follows each of three main characters in separate chapters as their stories cross. There were diary entries and randomly placed poems that added innovative breaks in the progression of the story.
The kind of book that gets better after some reflection, I will be re-reading this, due to it's impact on me and the way it is still embedded in my memory one month later. I have only recently begun to read Doubinsky and already plan on devouring every bit of his work I can get my hands on. -
I’ve come to rely on Doubinsky’s books as guaranteed good reads. And every reader needs those, something reliable in a generally unreliable world. I love knowing what to expect and still being pleasantly surprised each time with something new.
Doubinsky’s books take place in a ingeniously imagined world of city states, each seemingly modeled on a well known city with New added on, but each is actually so much more than that, with complex social structures and politics specific to each one.
These worlds are so awesomely imagined, so intricately crafted, so well built that they leaves realism completing with surrealism as you read them. They are almost but not quite recognizable, like a digitally aged face of your future self.
This novel takes place in a Nordic Alliance’s Viborg City. It’s a funhouse mirror of a Scandinavian country…and also not, at the same time. Mainly it is known to be safe, if unexciting. Very strictly striated social system of Viborg City has three levels with eponymous White City being at the top of it. The safest, the whitest, the most prosperously sedated place to be. Until a murder of a cosmetics company’s scion throws the proverbial wrench in the works.
The narrative is a three way split (with cleverly inserted asides) between a genre author researching his latest book on Nazis and the occult, an ambitious reporter desperate to make her name with this case and a career detective investigating it. They start off as individual separate threads, but eventually are seamlessly woven into one cohesive narrative.
So if the first rate world building and terrific writing aren’t enough for you, you do also get a murder mystery.
I loved this book and loved how cleverly the Nazi and occult themes (always fascinating, mainly because so much of it is preposterously real and historically factual) are utilized in it. Bet the book within the book here would have been fun too.
At any rate, this city state universe visit was briefer than most, but just as excellent. Love the writing, the precision and succinctness of it, the slightly surreal realism, the character development. It’s a strikingly complete adventure for such a slim volume. And well worth a read. Recommended.
This and more at
https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/ -
Racism Without Borders.
This is a very enjoyable political thriller of sorts involving the murder of a prominent right wing figure with familial ties to Hitler. The story is definitely pontificating on racism and shows that there universal aspects to it across borders and cultures. Despite the success of the characters in the book Doubinsky makes the reader feel the claustrophobia of oppression and xenophobia that exist In European and .Nordic cultures.
There are also some interludes in the story that are poetic and existential. These were some of my favorite parts, especially the "Theories of Power".
This is the second book of Doubinsky's i have read and enjoyed. I consider myself a fan now. His writing seems to have a lot of range, and I look forward to reading more of him In the future. -
“White City” is the rich district of the Nordic Alliance capital, Viborg City. Nothing ever happens in White City, even though everybody dreams of living there. When Niels Kepler, infamous brother to the Phoebus Industry heiress Marta Kepler, is murdered at his home, the shock wave is tremendous, sending jaded Detective-Inspector Sigrid Wulff, ambitious local journalist Leila Bogossian and best-selling horror writer Lee Jones Jr. into a chaos of corrupt politics, family secrets and bad craziness from the past, from which none of them will come out intact
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Doubinsky takes us on yet another surreal jaunt into the abyss, this time showcasing the interlinked denizen of Viborg City - an artless and decadent principality on the edge of nowhere. Its ideals are antiquated and the people living there are empty vessels stuck in perpetual melee, desperately trying to find something meaningful (specifically, a news reporter, a writer and a recently transferred cop).
WHITE CITY is Doubinsky’s pragmatic approach to the surreal noir novella, a Babylonian parable about success, greed and, ultimately, loss, all executed with a measured hand and structured with his trademark palpable intelligence – Seb’s take on the nature of a wealthy, spoiled writer is particularly enjoyable, self-effacing and poignant. As is often the case with his work, Doubinsky confronts notions of the gender politic, immigration, nationalism, tier systems and, of course, the subjective devices used in dealing with regret.
I wholeheartedly believe it to be a master work of bizarro science fiction and should be read as widely and emphatically as his more sprawling efforts.
This is the yardstick of quality ladies and gentlemen. -
Some writers predict the future. Those working in fantastical, dystopian, and science fiction have been doing it for years. Jules Verne foresaw the development of advanced submarine technology. H.G. Wells saw much, including atomic weaponry, tanks, motion-sensor doors, voicemail. Arthur C. Clarke wrote about the rise of electronic media, virtual reality video games, the reliance upon communication satellites, and space tourism. George Orwell, the proliferation of NSA spying on its citizenry. William Gibson, the creation of cyberspace and Internet hackers. Ambrose Bierce concocted a chess-playing robot in 1910, a futurism completed by the prediction of an IBM computer beating the best human chess player by Raymond Kurzweil in 1990 ("Big Blue" defeated Garry Kasparov seven years later in 1997). Numerous writers, including E.M. Forster, Gene Roddenberry, and the Grand Seer Verne posited that video conferencing would be a boring reality many decades before these Skype and Facetime years of the early 21st century.
Either by careful study of technological innovations, or just a keen imagination, possibly informed by something creeping back in time from the ether, these writers saw our present as their future, and were proven right, often when they had no reason to believe the things they saw crawl forth from the corners of their minds. But somehow, they did.
Sébastien "Seb" Doubinsky doesn't make such grand claims of precognition, as - by this own admission - what he has sketched out in White City (Bizarro Pulp Press, 2015) is not a near-future, but a current-now. Maybe we are living our future, and many of us just don't have the right set of eyes to see it.
In White City, Doubinsky sets his novel in a Europe that has been re-segregation along class, wealth, nationalistic, and racial lines. In short, character-specific chapters (reminiscent of Faulker's As I Lay Dying), we meet a trio of citizens: VCTV 2 journalist Leila Bogossian, her boyfriend Lee Jones Jr., a writer trying to live down his father's considerable literary shadow, and Detective-Inspector Sigrid Wulff, newly arrived to her post at Kong Kristian district after bouts of insubordination at her last job. All are resident of Viborg City, both mockingly and proudly nicknamed "White City," which is a bleached-out, ivory tower Scandinavian hack of Beverly Hills sure to be an Alt Righter's dream zip code. This contrasts with New Babylon, where Leila and Lee first met, a gritty, lively cultural melting pot looked down upon by anyone privileged enough to take up residence in White City.
The plot centers on the strange murder of Niels Kepler (aka "White Power Niels"), younger brother to Marta Kepler, the obscenely wealthy heir to the Phoebus Cosmetics empire, which - we later learn - was founded by her father Hans Kepler, the personal perfumer to Adolph Hitler. Leila fights for the story, and uncovers far more than she expected, while Sigrid deals with bureaucracy and unstable balance of the entitled and the marginalized during her often thwarted investigation. Lee Jr. conducts research into this next novel that unknowingly ties everything together, loosely binding the three protagonists with a threadbare tether while they make their way through the thin societal air that remains tainted by the rot of the past. They each learn that in order to achieve their goals, to get what they want, risks and rationalizations must be made in a world that has no conscience, leaving them forever altered.
To me, the well-crafted, interwoven storylines are secondary in interest to the foundational underbelly of the overall work, and what is happening around the edges of Doubinsky's quasi-fictional Europe that is certainly grounded in a history all too real. Indeed, what I enjoyed most about White City was what the book takes on in the process of telling a solid crime tale, as it tackles topics of terrorist fear mongering, immigrant bans, racialist laws and credit obstruction, caste systems, police corruption, the price of beauty and the invoice of power, maintaining relationships across barriers of ethnicity and geography, black magic, and the sinewy reach of a slow-pumping vein of Nazi secret society that courses just under the skin of the Continent (and it's satellite land across the Atlantic - but that's for another novel). This is the tale of an outsider viewing a new, slightly hostile land from the inside and living to tell about it. In a macro sense, this is a story of what is happening RIGHT NOW in the United States, in Europe, and in other areas of our planet. As an American, I see this as a Post-Trumpian narrative conceived and written during the the Obama Administration, several years before anyone could or would have possibly conceived of a Presidential run by the clownish huckster, failed businessman, reality show hack, and running punchline since the Robin Leach 1980s named Donald J. Trump.
In that spirit, Doubinsky, a self-professed anarchist, is writing prophetic Protest Lit in the classic tradition of Orwell or Huxley. White City is a Contempo-Future Noir tale meted out through spare deconstruction down to the formatting, with elements of free-form expressionism, poetry, cultural longing and a quest for unique place in a world that will not abide it, all riding on a sea of social and political commentary. It's Burroughs without the bile. Well, without some of the bile. This isn't sci-fi (or socio-fi?), this is the present-day, with a veneer of manners peeled back by the scalpels of surgical social justice, exposing a raw wound that is growing while left untreated. Most of all, this novel is prescient and ultimately interesting, providing a darkly knowing take on current issues, which is important in these weird times. We need to see what's coming, those of us who don't have the Sight.
After enjoying Seb Doubinsky's poetry for years, given away in true Leftie fashion on social media, it is a real treat to see him sink his mind into a larger work like White City. And now that I have that taste, that glimpse of the grim future that is now, I want to see more. Fans of the dark stuff, the real stuff, always do. -
This was my first incursion into the world of Seb Doubinsky. I wholeheartedly intend to go back for more.
White City in set a world seemingly different, yet so similar to ours; a world enveloped by racial tension and all the vices that come with it. The plot revolves around the murder of a far-right figure, and how this changes the lives of our main three characters.
In my opinion, the major strength of the novel is the exceptional characterization, which feels astoundingly realistic. This makes for a very compelling read, a haunting gaze into the deepest recesses of the mordern socio-political world. White City is the kind of thought-provoking book that will make you question your place and your role in society. God knows we need more books like this. -
Felt nice after reading this book. It left me a little confused at first, looking for a purpose or plot, but that's not what the book is here for. The lack of dialogue made everyone feel so isolated. The characters existed almost as singular entities that each tried and failed in their own way to accomplish what they tried to. What solidified this work was the dog poems. We are all just animals and no matter how we go about trying to solve life, we really don't end up that different from the dogs.
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The best thing an author can do after entertaining you is leaving you wanting more.
Seb Doubinsky does both in White City, a horror narrative that brings to the table superb pace, a historic/political angle that’s rarely seen in horror, and a bizarrely oppressive atmosphere that is at once uncomfortable to inhabit and slightly addictive.
You can read Gabino's full review at Horror DNA by
clicking here. -
This is a dark, political thriller in which a high-profile homicide takes place in Viborg City. Detective-Inspector Sigrid Wulff, journalist Leila Bogossian and best-selling writer Lee Jones Jr. are tangled up in the murder mystery and trying to find out the truth. The truth will shock you. Each page left me wanting more. I liked the writing style and the diary entries and poems were an interesting addition. I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
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Book II of my chronological read-through of Sebastien Doubinsky’s City-States cycle (though I have correspondence from the author saying technicallySong of synth—also published in 2015–comes first, however i read that one some years ago and for my own reader’s purposes felt obliged to pick up this novella first before rereading a Song of Synth in my quest to map the topography of Doubinsky’s grand alternate dystopia populated by utopian poets, which shares a history with our own by the opposite expression of a narrative mechanism by which it diverges from the same reality—speculating by distorting our familiar reality and supplanting it with one such as provided by the media, except where the news gives us Death, fiction like Doubinsky’s gives us Life.) The action of this book takes place a generation removed from the action of the final panel of the pilot triptych of the series, The Babylonian Trilogy, linked to the story we read by characters, history, events, and family drama- Doubinsky exploiting, quite playfully, the mechanisms of Balzac or Zola. As it is a suspenseful plot-driven literary detective fiction such as Auster or Charyn, I will give no spoilers in my review. But if you have found some truth of life in any of Doubinsky’s other bizarre punk novels, there’s a likelihood that you will find that same undeniable stamp of the enigmatically multilingual here as you do there, as these books are different from one another, each like the other, and ponderously unlike most contemporary genre fiction in their politicization of image, cliche, story structure, etc. Next up, Song of Synth!
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“Beauty is a deadly virus. Maybe the deadliest of all.”
Seb Doubinsky does a great job with this noir, written smoothly enough to keep you reading and your mind churning to keep up without noticing it. I won’t be hesitating to read more of his work. -
The purpose of a writer is indeed, to make life seem more complicated than it actually is.
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Many interesting characters and an interesting world they live in.
Wish these stories were longer, really good reading. -
A perfect addition to Doubinsky's City-State storyline. Giving us insight into the world beyond New Babylon, or one part of it anyway. More is hinted at throughout this book and I know there is more to come in later books. But I loved the story used to explore Viborg, the multiple points-of-view and how they eventually come to intertwine, the way Doubinsky subverts the old author-as-protagonist trope (surely verging on meta-fiction), the strong female characters so much more than damsels in distress or femme fatales. He addresses the issue of race with all the seriousness that it deserves without ever getting on a soapbox or preaching. The ending isn't all tied up in a neat little bow, and that's the perfect way to end the book. Issues and situations in life hardly ever come to a definite conclusion. Not to mention the possibility of future installments in the City-State Cycle... I cannot fault this book. It's a perfect five stars for me.
