I am dead inside. The outside’s still in top shape, though.

* * *

Let me preface this by saying smartphones are bad. It sounds like cutting-edge observational comedy from a 87-year-old, but it’s also, unfortunately, the truth.

They stunt your brain, wither your genitals, and turn you into a sad, edentulated turkey addicted to algorithmic dopamine dispensers and with a neocortex cordycepted by propaganda from some Macedonian troll farm. They’ve turned every 14-year-old into a radicalized transgender vegan with the vocabulary of an English Lit grad and the ideological horizons of a Stasi thug. They force me to design sites that can be read on a screen 400 pixels wide. Unbelievable. You know how we handled 400px screens back in the good old days? With the message “this website is best viewed at 1280×720 resolution. Dipshit.”

But smartphones have some redeeming qualities.

They give kids a childhood better than mine.

A week or two ago (inspired by Tom Ewing’s Popular blog) I began listening to a Spotify playlist: Every US Number 1, 1960-2021.

It was fascinating and revelatory, an archaeological dig that began at the bottom. I was hearing hundreds of old songs, the ghosts of music past, and each of them produced a unique reaction in me. Confusion, entertainment, boredom, curiosity, recognition, and white-hot excitement when I discovered something great.

I’ve learned things, and have filled in some empty spaces in my musical understanding. It’s now clearer how Philadelphia soul became disco, for example. It’s also clear that TV always had a deathgrip on the radio star; for decades you can pinpoint the popular TV shows and movies from the titles of #1 chart hits (in 1976-7: “Theme from Mahogany,” “Theme from SWAT,” “Love Theme From A Star Is Born (Evergreen)”, “Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky)”, “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band”), although this trend is less strong now.

It made me more aware of how the sausage is made, and how much the charts (supposedly dictated by buyer taste) are actually shaped by arbitrary engine tweaks of the music business. For example, hit singles now stay on the charts far longer than they once did. In 1975 there were thirty-five number ones, most of which charted for a week. In 2015 there were eight, with each song staying at the top for an average of 6.5 weeks. This is because digital music (which occupies no shelf space, and no FTC airwaves) has removed the external pressure for a song to exit the chart quickly.

Are the #1 charts an accurate reflection of what the public likes? I don’t think so. Much is missed when you only view the tips of icebergs. Important shifts in music (punk rock, heavy metal, grunge) came and went without ever hitting #1, at least not in pure form. The only progressive rock #1 was the disco-infused “Another Brick in the Wall”, released long after both genres’ respective peaks. The first appearance of a massive new genre is often a joke. First they laugh, then you win.

All of this was interesting. But as I entered the 90s, my mood turned sour.

I became irrationally angry at what I was hearing, and had no patience with it. Up until that point I’d hit the skip button on only two songs: “We Built This City” by Jefferson Starship, and “We Are the World” by USA For Africa. I was proud of that. It was nip and tuck for several others: “My Ding-A-Ling” by Chuck Berry escaped the guillotine by a hair’s breadth, but escape it did. Thirty years. Two skipped songs.

But now, I was skipping every fourth or fifth song, usually after a few seconds. I couldn’t stand them. At times I felt something like light panic, as though TLC and Celine Dion were tracking mud through my head. The musical journey had become awful.

I soon realized why: I grew up in the 90s.

These were the songs of my childhood. I wasn’t just replaying old music, I was replaying bad experiences. A song from the 1960s, however terrible, could never be more than a historical curio. I had no personal relationship to it. But imagine seeing a bathroom wall full of profane graffiti and laughing at it…but suddenly you see your phone number, and your address, and a crude caricature of your face. CALL [YOUR NAME] FOR A BAD TIME.

You will no longer laugh. That was what it felt like for me entering the musical 90s.

I hated my childhood. A heap of miserable and worthless years.

To be clear, I was not, exempli gratia, “abused.” I was not, exempli gratia, “interfered with”. I was not, exempli gratia, “forced to perform Wagner’s Parsifal wearing leather chaps in a Penrith borstal”.

That’s part of the problem. What I remember most of all from my early years is…is nothing. A toxic kind of nothing. A very large desert full of bones. Easier to define it by what wasn’t there. Non-events. Non-happenings.

I remember being very bored, almost all the time.

Boredom is a thing we’ve nearly eradicated, like smallpox. Children today don’t know how lucky they have it: they attend nightmarish schools, and go on to hellish jobs, but they seldom have to be bored.

But imagine having literally nothing to do. Imagine having endless free time, and nothing to fill it. Nine or ten differently-painted walls to stare at. A revolving ceiling fan scythes endlessly, reaping harvests of dead air. Morning, noon, evening. Hours stacking up like crushing granite blocks on your chest. On a windowsill a fly twists and turns upon a cobweb strand. Its dying whine fills your horizon. Your stimulus-starved brain amplifies everything; quiet sounds become thunder, specks of dust on windows become impressionistic masterworks. The needling buzz pours out to cover your entire consciousness, and when the fly finally dies, part of the cosmos blows apart and goes dark.

Boredom.

You’ve read and re-read every book in the house, even the thesaurus. That was entertainment. You are a major problem at a Scrabble board; you know words like “syzygy” and “tmesis” because you’ve read the thesaurus cover to cover.

Boredom.

You are kept bored by parental diktat. Videogames are Considered Harmful because they Rot Your Brain. The books you take home from the library are ruthlessly scrutinized for adult content. Thank God you weren’t exposed to the bodice-ripping, throbbing-with-passion novels of Terry Brooks and Jeffrey Archer.

Boredom.

Your memories are of literally having nothing to do for days on end. Every possible plan to entertain yourself is cut down by you’re a child. You can’t drive anywhere, because you’re a child. You have no money to take public transport, because you’re a child. You can’t explore the neighborhood, because you’re a child. You do it once anyway, and a neighbor finds you, gives you a stern talking to, and brings you back home. Kids aren’t supposed to wander around: they’ll get abducted by roving gangs and forced to perform Parsifal etc.

You grow up in the suburbs. Sometimes you visit relatives out in the country, in what is presumed to be an enriching experience for you. But you hate the countryside. Now you’re bored in a place you don’t like. Adults have an odd fascination with nature that you will never understand. The Australian rituals of “bushwalking” and “going walkabout” remain mystifying to you. Hello? What’s fun about this?

Australia is an ugly fucking country. Every tree and plant is a fortress built to resist siege from blazing sunlight and petrifying salt. Our most iconic tree – the Australian eucalyptus – is twisted and pathetic, a scarecrow pleading for water. It ranks among the ugliest trees in existence. Australia’s national plant – the golden wattle – looks like mould growing on expired food in your fridge.

Australian wildlife is contemptible. The wombat, possum, et al all look distinctly off, as though a dim child tried to draw a cat or dog and failed. All of them have mechanical defects. The Australian Coat Of Arms has an emu and a kangaroo. Why these two animals? Because they cannot walk backward, only forward. I appreciate the symbolism, but aren’t these obviously rubbish animals? For fuck’s sake, how many millions of years does it take to evolve reverse gear?

Our mammals are bumbling simpletons without any survival instincts. They’re so maladapted it’s a miracle any are still alive – they’re Dervish savages and it’s a Maxim gun world. Drive along any outback road and see the both shoulders strewn with bloody fur and viscera, where wallabies and wombats exploded like hand grenades. It’s pathetic how weak they are. The cars aren’t even trying to kill them, for God’s sake. Are you an apex predator who’s struggling on its home turf? Here’s a tip: come to Australia. You’ll never go hungry again. All our animals drew a pair of deuces in the Darwinian lottery.

You feel far more respect for invasive species, particularly cats. Like Art Spiegelman, you liken cats to Nazi Germany. Yes, they’re evil. But doesn’t one also admire their competence? Their fearful symmetry? The ease with which they shred the lesser orders? Who isn’t impressed by the feline blitzkrieg?

And where Australian wildlife isn’t pathetic, it’s abhorrent. You have a horrid memory of playing alone at Blackheath, pulling chunks of bark off trees. One piece comes away, and it feels strangely heavy in your hand.  Through cracks in the bark you see eight sickeningly huge legs, outspread like spokes on a wheel. Whatever’s clinging to the other side is at least fifteen centimeters across. You throw the bark to the ground, run away, and hope you never see a tree again.

The world in general was more boring in the 90s. Turn on the TV, and unless you had cable you had your choice of “shoddy soap opera”, “shoddy movie with cheap licensing rights”, “shoddy show for preschoolers” and “channel whose quality cannot be assessed because it’s in Swedish”. If you were fortunate enough to have cable, your cultural cup runneth over! You now had twenty shoddy soap operas, twenty shoddy movies…

In the latter part of the 90s, the internet enters stage. This ameliorates boredom at the rate of 56 kilobits a second, but again, your usage of it is policed. You are told that the internet is untrustworthy and will pollute your brain with lies. This is entirely correct. Fifteen years later, some of those same people email you links about Hillary Clinton conducting Satanic rituals involving the gargling of fetus extract.

But more. Deeper. Deader.

Imagine you have no friends. Some problems are doubled when shared, some problems halved, and boredom is the latter. Having nothing to do is bearable when there’s someone to commiserate with.

But you have no friends, and it’s because you have a terrible personality. Some folk have a halo effect that casts a positive aspect on everything they do. Their insults come off as witty jokes. Their boasts come off as confidence. They lie or break a promise and it makes them look dashing and romantic, like highway outlaws. Playing by the rules is for scrubs.

You have a negative halo. A black hole surrounds you. Compliments sound false in your mouth, explanations sound like showing-off. You hate the sound of your own voice.

You, like all unpleasant nerds, rewrite the script so you’re the good guy in your social ostracism – you don’t get invited to parties because you’re that much more refined than all of those barbarians. But you aren’t refined. You’re as maladapted as the rest of Australia’s wildlife.

Let’s talk about bullying.

You wouldn’t mind bullying if it was clever and skillful. You think you’d enjoy being placed at the center of Borgia-like power struggles, forced to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Sounds like fun.

But bullying isn’t clever and skillful. Any idiot can be a bully. It takes an order of magnitude more cunning and bravery to resist a bully than to be one.

Here’s a rough guide on how to do it. First, become skilled in some obscure thing that not many people can do. Or learn some obscure fact that not many people know. It might be as simple as the fact that toads belong to the Bufonidae family. Repeat “toads belong to the Bufonidae family…toads belong to the Bufonidae family…” to yourself in bed until it’s firmly in your memory.

Then, go up to the person you want to bully. “Hey, dumbass. What family do toads belong to?” They won’t know. Then, you can say “Bufonidae!” and laugh. Gotcha! You knew something they didn’t! You set them a test, they failed, they’ve lost social capital as a result.

…But this kind of bullying isn’t very effective in the real world. Most people don’t care about general-knowledge trivia items. There’s zero status involved with knowing that toads are Bufonidae (if anything, there’s possibly negative status involved.)

However, there are other types of meaningless skills that are actively rewarded by society. Sports, for example, are socially enshrined as a status marker from middle school onward: it’s something cool people are good at. Not everyone is athletic, or wants to be, so it’s also a perfect, risk-free way of establishing yourself as a success, and others as a failure. You aren’t good at sports, and hence are a failure.

You hate sports. Deeply hate them. They make you feel murderous rage. It’s like bullies hacked the computer simulating the universe and hand-coded a feature that perfectly rewards them.

You don’t recall the moment everyone you knew began caring about sports. One moment nobody did, then everybody did. It was as if they’d taken night classes on how to be normal and you’d had missed out. Soon sports became the big difference between you and others, a gulf that widened with years and exists to this day. Here is CS Lewis:

“Never, except in the front line trenches (and not always there) do I remember such aching and continuous weariness as at (school). Oh, the implacable day, the horror of waking, the endless desert of hours that separated one from bed-time! And remember…a school day contains hardly any leisure for a boy who does not like games. For him, to pass from the form-room to the playing field is simply to exchange work in which he can take some interest for work in which he can take none, in which failure is more severely punished, and in which (worst of all) he must feign an interest…Consciousness itself was becoming the supreme evil; sleep, the prime good. To lie down, to be out of the sound of voices, to pretend and grimace and evade and slink no more, that was the object of all desire–if only there were not another morning ahead–if only sleep could last for ever!”

An astute man, that Clive Staples. If it’s not clear from context, “games” means organized sports such as rugby and cricket.

Another memory. You’re kicking a soccer ball against a complete dipshit in a sea of dipshits. He’s two years younger, has a prissy little rat tail, and is almost laughably better: the ball seems to flow and weave around him, as if it’s metal and his Nikes contain neodymium.

He clearly practices for hours every day. And why wouldn’t he? He might not have any love for soccer, but he loves the status, the fact that soccer gives him power over other boys. What king will not fight to keep his crown?

The adolescent asshole stops toying you with you and trips you up, taking possession of the ball. “And I was going easy on him!” he hoots, earning laughs from some other boys. Every level of what’s happening feels ludicrous (“I won against a kid who doesn’t know how to play, and get this…I was going easy on him!”) but to the others it seems completely normal. Just another way of sorting the hackers from the non-hackers.

Everyone is staring at you now, waiting to see if you’ll do something funny like cry or piss yourself. Something odd is happening at your core. You feel rigid, but there’s a sense of volatile emotions underneath that rigidity, like magma flowing beneath a hardened crust. Explosion or paralysis. Explosion and paralysis. You don’t know where you are or what you’re doing. Your body is no longer under your control.

One impotent thought shudders along failing mental telegraph lines. If I had a Stanley knife in my hand, I would put it in him. Without hesitation, I would do this.

You can see it, smell it, hear the screams. You would snap it open and drive it so deep into this ratfucker’s face that the mark stays on him forever, that his very skull will bear your handiwork when he’s buried. You want to destroy him. You want to write hieroglyphics into his bones. It’d be easy to inflict unbelievable pain on this kid – soccer is all he knows. He’s not a survivor anymore than the wombats killed on the freeway. But what would happen after that? You might as well go right on stabbing, because there’s no going back.

Instead, You mutter something and walk off with a shrug, as if it’s no big deal. Clearly it was, though, because you remember it.

Have I been dishonest in the above accounts? Have I persiflaged? Meandered? Lied? Traded in the coinage of cliche, self-pity, or banality? Perhaps. It’s logical that a negative halo would persist over my writing, too.

But childhood and I didn’t agree. It seemed it would never end, and I’m glad that it finally did.  It was a tedious mass of days, both for reasons unavoidable (bad) and avoidable (worse). They weren’t the best years of my life, they were prison years in which I was not my own master.

“The future wants to steal your soul and vaporize it in nanotechnics” – “CyberGothic”

This philosophy book is intended for readers with four years of training in continental philosophy; I have 0 years and found it hard going. But then again, Nick Land belongs in the company of Sam Harris, Slavoj Žižek, and Jordan Peterson – rogue thinkers who have amassed a following outside of academia.

Nick Land was once a teacher at the University of Warwick, but he did not flourish beneath the scholar’s cope. He published just one book – 1992’s The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism – and his time as a lecturer was marked by vicious academic infighting. His interdisciplinary research group CCRU earned a reputation as a disruptive force, and his 1998 “resignation” might not have been entirely voluntary.

A divisive, polarizing figure, he provoked both adulation and execration. His jabs at the holy trinity of ‘continental philosophy’ – phenomenology, deconstruction, and critical theory – drew enmity from his more orthodox peers; and while his virulent anti-humanism affronted philanthropic conservatives, his swipes at institutionalized critique earned him the opprobrium of the academic Left. Marxists in particular were outraged by Land’s aggressive championing of the sociopathic heresy urging the ‘ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field’ – the acceleration, rather than the critique, of capitalism’s disintegration of society. – Ray Brasser

Mainstream philosophy finds him unacceptable. Unacceptable the way tall poppies are to lawnmowers? As economist Garrett Jones observed, “read the room” is often an argument against the room.

Land cuts a disquieting and even apocalyptic figure – a human lightning rod, channeling power from the outer dark. Whether he’s is writing fiction or philosophy or indistinguishable meshings of the two, reading his prose can be unnerving experience – as though you’re inviting a shadow to hang over your head.

Fanged Noumena gathers up his writings from 1987 to 2007, a period that encompasses his academic career, mental breakdown, and move to Shanghai. In brief, Land is an accelerationist: a piece of jargon that means different things to different people.

It might reflect a goal to bring about a technological singularity, or it might reflect a realization that this process has already begun and is now too late to stop. Human bodies evolved over millions of years. Human society, over tens of thousands. But capitalism, catalyzed by technology, moves still faster, faster than anything we’ve seen before. More importantly, it’s becoming faster faster than anything we’ve seen before. It’s picking up speed like a gale-force wind, howling and sucking things off the ground, causing humanity’s mooring lines to snap one by one. Some people want to slow down capitalism via things like government, centralization, and tradition. We were never made to go this fast. We have to slow down. Nick Land’s response is “cut the lines. Let’s ride.”

Accelerationism became a topic of some discussion in the late double zeroes. The notion of increasing speed was an appealing one. Silicon Valley buzzwords like “disruption” and “growth-hacking”, and Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous “Move fast and break things” quote are accelerationist in outlook. Then the word began showing up in the manifestos of mass murderers. Since then accelerationism has become a shibboleth: having an interest in it makes you ideologically suspicious. The thing about accelerating is that it’s undefined what you’re accelerating toward. To some it’s a techno-singularity, to others it’s race war. Both Charles Manson and Elon Musk were (and are, respectively) in accelerationists in some sense.

As is typical for Land, Fanged Noumena isn’t straight philosophy, and sometimes not even slant philosophy. “Narcissism and Dispersion” begins with a discussion of Heidegger’s analysis of George Trakl’s poems. “CyberGothic” is a reverie on William Gibson.

Other sections are brutal flamethrower attacks that leave huge swathes of mainstream philosophy blazing. “Making it with Death” features caustic tirades (“If Deleuze is to be salvaged from the inane liberal neo-Kantianism that counts as philosophy in France today…”) that couldn’t have earned Land many friends, and it might be intentional strategy that his point is often obscure.

I’m not able to offer cogent analysis of anything here. There are some fictional prose pieces, such as Ballardian/Burroughsian pastiches . “KataqoniX” is a work of poetry seemingly created while watching Apocalypse Now on acid – it predates Kenji Siratori by years but treads over the same ground. There’s an interview with one “Daniel Charles Barker” who is almost certainly a nonexistent person, perhaps a collective identity for the CCRU.

“Delighted to Death” was particularly of interest, in the way it doesn’t just point to accelerationism’s future, but traces the movement’s opposite.

Cioran quotes Lao Tsu’s maxim ‘the intense life is contrary to the Tao’ and compares the tranquility of the modest life with the thirst for annihilating ecstasy that has possessed the Western world. However, acknowledging the compulsion of his Occidental heritage, he remarks ‘I can pay homage to Lao Tsu a thousand times, but I am more likely to identify with an assassin’. Our culture, he argues, is essentially fanatical.

Is Taoism reversed accelerationism? And does it follow that Eastern philosophy is reversed western philosophy? Their slow to our fast? It might all be a game of speed, and identifying the plus and minus modifiers. One the main concepts in accelerationism (particularly the part of it Land dwells in) is “deterritorialization” – a windy word that basically means unwriting and uncodifying outdated concepts that exist to hold back the hand of history. Or something. As Land himself “explains”.

For accelerationism the crucial lesson was this: A negative feedback circuit – such as a steam-engine ‘governor’ or a thermostat – functions to keep some state of a system in the same place. Its product, in the language formulated by French philosophical cyberneticists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is territorialization. Negative feedback stabilizes a process, by correcting drift, and thus inhibiting departure beyond a limited range. Dynamics are placed in the service of fixity – a higher-level stasis, or state. All equilibrium models of complex systems and processes are like this. To capture the contrary trend, characterized by self-reinforcing errancy, flight, or escape, D&G coin the inelegant but influential term deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is the only thing accelerationism has ever really talked about.

In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic – and, of course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed – schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what ‘positive feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.

I’m not sure how sensible this is. “Negative feedback circuits” aren’t necessarily inhibitory forces: they might hold one part of a system at stasis, but that might be necessary for another, larger part of the system to function. I am writing this using a computer that’s powered by electricity. The electricity first passes through a series of op-amps, rectifiers, and transformers to shape and regulate its power – ie, negative feedback processes. A PSU made of positive feedback voltage draws wouldn’t “exhibit ever greater autonomy”, it would instantly draw 220 volts from the wall and kill itself.

And it seems that much of Land’s “deterritorialization” requires reification of other sorts of territories. Capitalism might be an awesome disruptive force. However, it relies on laws, rules, concepts, codified language, etc. Are these not territories? What’s a dollar? How do you verify that I own this dollar? How do you stop me from spending my dollar twice? Unless you have fast and legible answers to these questions, the whole system falls down. A hundred thousand years ago, humans had absolute de-territorialization. It was an interesting period. But it wasn’t a technological singularity.

It’s possible these are stupid objections that would only be raised by a naïf. It cannot be emphasized enough that Fanged Noumena is not for the casual reader. Land will accuse something of being a “grotesque recapitulation of Kant’s compromise with onto-theological tradition” and it’s like a game of tennis where I can’t see the net – what compromise did Kant make? Where would I begin looking? Someone with more than a casual interest in philosophy would get more out of these essays.

Land would later become grouped into the “alt right” by journalists, but he doesn’t seem to take conservatism very seriously. He mocks religion and traditionalism frequently, and almost nothing in the book seems to fit into a left/right schema. Either his views changed, or he moderated them to avoid total censure at Warwick.

He opposes many fruits of the enlightenment – such as egalitarianism, democracy, and feminism and so forth – largely because he identifies them as the aforementioned “negative feedback”.   He lives in a world where technology itself is an agent. Technology itself as the agent. Or rather, the everything. The entire system. The soul. Can we decode? What does it want? What is it propelling us toward, if anywhere? Wherein lies the aggregate trend? Is there a point to understanding accelerationism? By definition, it’s moving too fast to understand.

Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing? It is this thought alone that has differentiated it from the shallow things of the earth. Yet the glory and also the indignity of philosophy is to have sought the end of knowing, and no more. And what if empowerment was a means to deepen weakness? – “Shamanic Nietzsche”

What if indeed.

That would be a funny fate for humanity. Groping around in the dark, looking for a light…and finally everything becomes bright. It’s a train rushing down on us. Inescapable. Land wants to rip the bandaid off, and get it over with. If that’s what’s going to happen, then let’s let it happen. He wants those realities to become real.

The nice thing about accelerationism is that it doesn’t turn you into a drudge for any particular philosophy or social movement. I once read about an avowed communist who voted for George W Bush in the 2000 election. His reasoning? Bush would hasten the fall. That’s smart. Sociopathic, but smart. It’s also accelerationist.

Among the most personal pieces of writing in Fanged Noumena is “A Dirty Joke”. Nick Land relates a series of anecdotes that maybe give the strongest sense of where he’s coming from. The world of today isn’t much to write home about. Land’s allegiance is to the world of tomorrow. He wants the sky to go dark as soon as possible, by this or any means, and he doesn’t care what it takes to draw down the sun.

According to public opinion Richard Adams wrote just two books. Guess the first one, don’t win a prize. The Plague Dogs is his other one. It has parts that are audacious, tense, exciting, and well-written, but it has no parts as good as Watership Down. Read it for a greater appreciation of Adams’ debut, because it shows some of the ways Watership Down could have gone wrong.

Rowf and Snitter are laboratory dogs subjected to horrible medical research. After a careless janitor allows them to escape, they take refuge in the hills of England’s Lake District, preying on sheep to survive. Rowf is a weary, cynical mutt who’s given up. Snitter is a fox-terrier driven insane by experimental brain surgery. Combine their parts and you would have a single healthy pedigree animal. Their chances of survival aren’t good, but Snitter (who is a visionary similar to Fiver) has an idea that he might have once had an owner. Is it true, or another ghost from the crack in his head?

Meanwhile, scientists at the laboratory try to contain the story of the escaped dogs (and instead throw gasoline on the blaze at every turn). Soon Rowf and Snitter are mistakenly believed to be carrying a superplague, and half of Cumbria is out hunting them with rifles.

The Plague Dogs is indecisive, never sure of what it’s doing. At once it’s a grim satire, anti-vivisectionist propaganda, a “naturist” ramble through rural England, and a thrilling animal adventure. The parts sometimes work on their own but don’t become a harmonious whole.

The satirical scenes are as subtle as a gunshot to the face. The laboratory is called Animal Research, Science and Experiments (ARSE), the dialog between government bureaucrats sounds like Yes, Minister, muckraking journalist Digby Driver makes Rita Skeeter seem like Truman Capote, there’s a fat Fleet Street magazine editor whose name is Hogpenny because he’s fat, etc. It echoes Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop at times.

The ARSE scientists are comically evil, torturing animals on behalf of makeup and cigarette companies.^[1]I was reminded of the Onion: New Ted Nugent Cologne Tested On ‘Every Goddamn Animal We Could Find’. The place is clearly intended as Pawschwitz: some day animal rights activists might abandon the Holocaust as a comparison, but not this day. Rowf and Snitter receive identifying numbers at the lab, which was alread troweling on the subtext, but Adams also can’t resist telling us that ARSE’s Dr Goodner used to be Dr Geutner and came to England via Buchenwald, at which point it stops being “subtext”, transcends being “text”, and becomes “clubbing the reader across the head”.

Digby Driver is implausibly lucky; always at the right place at the right time, always getting the right person to say the right thing. He should ditch journalism and buy lottery tickets. He’s also stupid: after unmasking Goodner’s identity, he blackmails him for information on the lab escape, as if a Nazi war criminal on the government payroll wouldn’t be a far greater scandal than two dogs running across the countryside.

It’s probably that most of The Plague Dogs’ readers wanted another animal adventure, but The Plague Dogs has little of Watership Down’s optimism. Adams’ rabbits were as capable as Navy SEALs and that book’s happy ending felt deserved, because Hazel and Bigwig and Fiver had earned it through their courage and cleverness. Rowf and Snitter are just helpless mutts by comparison, relying on luck and a helpful fox to survive. The Plague Dogs contains a lot of “the dogs are in trouble again, deus ex machina coming in 3…2…”

This might be The Plague Dogs’ big problem; the protagonists are animals in a story that only has room for humans. Rowf and Snitter can’t even understand (let alone influence) their circumstances, and this thrusts them into a passive role. To advance the plot Adams has to draw back the camera onto the human cast, almost to the point where Snitter feels abandoned by his author as well as his master. The Plague Dogs ends up being a cynical, dark, and sometimes funny book about human politics…between scenes of dogs huddling under a bush feeling scared.

Watership Down had the right idea by only giving us the rabbits’ point of view. Humans existed as supernatural forces akin to Greek titans: terrible monsters that left devastation in their wake. We didn’t need scenes of Berkshire politicians taking bribes and authorizing a construction project in Sandleford. That would have thrown the spotlight in too many different directions and onto too many characters, instead of the ones that mattered. The Plague Dogs commits this error, and becomes an extremely murky book.

And it lacks the largeness of its predecessor, its mythical heft. There’s no equivalent to the lapine language, no counterpart to the El-ahrairah stories. The only fantasies are the ones coming from Snitter’s damaged prefrontal cortex – and these aren’t thrilling, they’re sad, because we know what caused them. Animal experimentation is dreadful, and Adams’ show-offy allusions to classical literature seem out of place. The Plague Dogs is no epic in the mold of Virgil and Homer: it’s a bleak book about a bleak world where heroes don’t exist.

In 1982 Martin Rosen “adapted” The Plague Dog to film in his inimicable way. I remember a TV screen full of endless gray. It might be the most miserable film ever made about dogs (or tetrapods in general). At least Old Yeller spent most of his film not getting shot behind a barn.