Jordan Rothacker is giving out hope.
It’s not a particularly fashionable tack in science fiction today—to try to imagine a utopia amidst the wailing, four-alarm dumpster fire of our peak dystopian times, to try to imagine a better future, rather than simply insisting we’re bound for a worse one.
Set in, but decidedly not around, the newly snowglobular city of Atlanta (not far from which he and I both live) in the year 2220, both The Shrieking of Nothing and its predecessor, The Death of the Cyborg Oracle (2020), are swimming in familiar sci-fi tech, from the cybernetic enhancements that allow for instant, Wikipedic recall of every text a person’s ever read, to Atlanta’s now perfectly functioning, personal-vehicle-eliminating mass transit system (for anyone who’s ever ridden MARTA, this may feel even less plausible than the cyborgs). There is also a citywide Breath/Death system that monitors oxygen levels for any change in the collective life teeming under the dome. In Rothacker’s future, every wall is a touchscreen. Every outfit is a jumpsuit. But most importantly of all, capitalism, having proved a more unifying enemy than any monster Alan Moore’s Ozymandias could dream up, is dead and buried. Indeed, the very memory of it has come to make people physically ill, such that acting in one’s own baser self-interest leads to nausea and incriminating bouts of gastrointestinal distress.
While the doom prophets of hard SF might have Rothacker beat with regards to technological research—to the quantifiable “how” of our civilization’s certain demise—he has arguably outpaced them all with regards to the philosophical “why” of its survival: As his reduced, but resurgent society is always quick to remind us, theirs is a somber hope, but it is a hope nonetheless.
In this post-capitalist future, crime is exceedingly rare, and now separated into “Profane” and “Sacred” divisions so as to differentiate between garden-variety incidents between individuals, and more metaphysical threats to the greater good. Having been spared the ravages of corporate greed and environmental collapse, most people now spend their days in a world of respectful henotheism: the worship (and in the case of dedicated Avatars, full-on emulation) of individual, personally chosen gods from across the diaspora. “We are as enchanted now about our technologies as we are with personalized deification,” we read at one point, “with the fulfillment we can feel with creativity, sanctity, and connection with something beyond ourselves.”
For the first time in recorded history, every person left on Earth is truly free: free from work, free from want, free from envy and prejudice and largely even fear. Finally free, that is, to be you and me (while also, if we feel like it, devotedly cosplaying the storm goddess of the Philippines, Dayang Masalanta, or “Phraya Khan Kaka” [sic], the Toad King of Thailand).
Despite all this, it is a crime that lies at the heart of The Shrieking of Nothing, the kind of tragically unpredictable exception that proves this new world order’s rules—and that’s where the brilliant Detective Rabbi Jakob “Thinkowitz” Rabbinowitz, and his plucky junior partner Edwina Casaubon, come in. The details of their case (a disappearance after an Ego Death Fest—a sort of Silent Disco—atop New Gibraltar, also known as Stone Mountain) are largely secondary to the book’s philosophical worldbuilding, but suffice it to say that in cross-pollinating the familiar beats of the police procedural with the melting-pot futurism of Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (1959) and a dash of Robert Sheckley’s humorously peripatetic Dimension of Miracles (1968), Rothacker has crafted a pair of Sherlockian mysteries brimming with franchise possibility. His intertextual gumshoes chase down every lead—a race against time that culminates in a pulse-pounding festival chase sequence punctuated by tribalist volcanic sacrifice—and in so doing offer him a vehicle through which to stitch together a vast knowledge of mythology and world religions into a highly readable novel of ideas. The Shrieking of Nothing is a sort of crash course in truth-seeking, both as profession and mindful practice. It’s also a grim warning against the existential danger of believing in nothing at all.
In addition to his numerous writing gigs, Rothacker is a teacher of comparative literature, and in tracing the Ariadne threads connecting various continents, traditions, belief systems, and epochs, he reinforces again and again that hope for a future in which we are more united by our similarities than divided by our differences. And, in keeping so much of Atlanta’s current cultural identity intact, even some two hundred years into the future (I was thrilled to learn that beloved rock club The Earl survives the apocalypse), Rothacker makes an even more salient point: that we don’t have to wait to find magic or science fiction in our everyday lives. I was struck by just how many otherworldly undertones Atlanta already bears, hiding in plain sight all around me every day. From the medieval ritual suggested by North Druid Hills Road to the extraterrestrial implications of the suburb of Roswell; from the quixotic questing of Ponce de Leon Avenue to the beastly namesake of the town of Griffin. Of course, Atlanta itself evokes a whole host of phantom etymologies, be it the lost city of Atlantis, or the classical figures of both Atalanta, racing for golden apples, and Atlas, holding up the whole of the Earth. Our gleaming cities and timeworn small towns are already Mos Eisley hives of mystical weirdness, if we’re only willing to look.
And so, as our heroes follow the breadcrumbs connecting ancient Greek seers and modern American surveillance, warring ancestral deities and new age spiritual equality—and sift out clues through both Thinkowitz’s muscular Judaic wisdom and Casaubon’s humble Christian empathy—the beautiful possibilities of Rothacker’s vision bloom ever outward. In other words, The Shrieking of Nothing acts as a balm in these trying times of creeping fascism and rapidly developing AI. It goes against the ominously rising tides, placing a bet on man’s collective humanity to man, but Rothacker’s writing challenges our popular despair, and demands of us a better way. In this sense, his SF might not be hard, but nor is it easy. He may not fully explain how Atlanta’s dome or Thinkowitz’s enhancements actually work (or why MARTA suddenly runs like a dream), but his eternally curious brand of soft sci-fi invites us to keep asking questions outside the safety net of pretense that any one man, or god, has all the answers.