Silverfish by Rone Shavers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Silverfish by Rone Shavers Phill Provance (bio) silverfish Rone Shavers Clash Books https://www.clashbooks.com/new-products-2/rone-shavers-silverfish#:~:text=Silverfish%20is%20a%20syncretic%20tour,future%20we've%20already%20lived. 114 pages; Print, $14.95 Where's our world headed? Better yet, as Americans, where are we going as a people? The dynamic ontological extravaganza that is Rone Shavers's Silverfish offers one vision, and it is decidedly dystopian. And yet, brilliantly, [End Page 91] the novella takes a refractive approach to conveying the external realities of its characters' ultra-complex, corporatized milieu, which we're told is in a state of constant war threaded with techno-spiritual intervention. As such, Silverfish is a blistering critique of our past and present, producing an especially apocalyptic prediction for these here already shaky United States. Of particular interest is Shaver's use of voices ranging from those of language gods and biotech angels to those of corporate mercenaries, everyone acutely attuned to micro-blips by the Dow and NASDAQ: the narrator is, in turns, Elegba, the West African Yoruba messenger, various humans, and an AI entity, and we the readers are pulled between the poles of divinity and mortality as Shavers establishes a landscape capable of handling the inbetween, networked dialogue of Silverfish's world. What results is a beautifully blurred reality: here is a talented human being (Shavers), impersonating/possessing the minds/wills of gods, the coders (and encoders) of language (history), and communicating (to those who would hear and learn from them) potential futures. For instance, Elegba offers this in the novella's prologue: "Are you lost yet? Good. Confusion is good: it's the first step towards an attempt at understanding what's beyond what you already know. … But still, I'm here to save you, so once again, let's play language." Steven Dunn's introduction to the work pinpoints succinctly the appeal of this approach: "By blurring the binary between gods and mortals, it allows us to become alternative beings who do the work of both." This is a clear invitation to clarity via abstraction by way of humanity's interpretation of the collective consciousness of language, with its successes and failures to communicate, its knowns and unknowns. In a world where only the most extremely financially fit survive, such liminality countervails the novella's hyper-pragmatized externalities, such as financial advisers who work alongside combat associates on the bloody fields of meta-mercenary battle. In Silverfish, changing jobs has become switching "liabilities"; whereas Orwell's Newspeak in 1984 is over-economized, the linguistic medium of Shavers's world is over-economicized: its entire idiom is driven by financial terminology, bringing to mind what would happen if The Wall Street Journal business section reported on Starship Troopers, Battlestar Galactica, and The Matrix. Case in point, one angel entity, more tech than bio, expresses how "The Dow has been below 75,000 for three days, necessitating a permanent crisis [End Page 92] situation." Great violence must ensue, we're told, to prop up world markets. That said, there are no "soldiers" per se, only "combat associates," and the more blood spilled, the better the markets react. Brilliantly, Shavers has boiled the complex interplay between geopolitics and finance down to its bare bones in a way that is no less true for its simplification of investor markets and the global defense industry into what amounts to gladiatorial games writ large. Meanwhile, angels are biotech, or "wetware," a hypothesis of where humanity might be headed: AI in the novella is the result of God-master coders inserting brains into mechanical shells. Souls are sold into screens and injected into a networked cloud existence, even as so many others live paycheck-to-paycheck. There are hardly more apt imaginings of our present transhumanist hybridization—especially amid the Coronavirus pandemic. But, unlike the plugged-in portion of our population today, these entities aren't self-determined because they are distracted by their own doublethink in an endless conversation that suggests an absurdly self-negating academic discourse continuously playing out on social media. As for the eponymous "silverfish" themselves, they are ferocious, swarming consumers, killers of tech and...