How I Killed the Universal Man separates itself from cyberpunk touchstones past, acting as a breathtaking vivisection of how bad we’ve already let things get.
Some of the worlds in these texts span eons, while others exist in a kind of non-time, unlocatable but tethered just enough to our reality that they can be understood.
Griffith’s work is never not out of conversation with what makes our world so strange as to seem supernatural—and what makes the supernatural so familiar, so imaginable, as to seem real.
Johnson's work offers readers the opportunity not just to try to fill certain emotive or experiential gaps in language, but also to reflect on what it means to try to fill the gaps at all.
This novel’s perhaps unique, and certainly memorable, contribution to time travel literature is: how to face a past we can endlessly relive, but which finds its way nonetheless into our present?
