#The Book of Elsewhere

[isbergillustration]

Started reading The Book of Elsewhere by China Miéville & Keanu Reeves. Had to take a break and paint B/Unute about whom I have a totally regular normal amount of feelings.

[eightypercentjack-blog]

Whoa dudes.... just met Keanu! 😎😊🥳

[rubedeckillerofficial]

Keanu Reeves teamed up with China Mieville, one of the greatest living authors of the New Weird movement, to write a novel about his edgy self-insert OC who’s an 80,000 year old immortal warrior who was born because his mom fucked lightning. Cringe culture is dead and John Wick himself killed it. Write your goddamn stories and don’t let anyone tell you they’re cringe.

[briabooknerd]

[discoscoob]

This might sound like a silly question but are the BZRKR comics and The Book of Elsewhere set in the same universe? Bc I plan to read both at some point but I don’t know if I should read the comics or the book first, I need help 😭

[keanuquotes]

Reeves tends not to get involved in politics. When I ask how he’s feeling about the US election, he responds, “God bless democracy” – to which Miéville says, “I can’t wait to see the beginning of democracy in America”.

“I think it’s fantastic,” Reeves continues. “And I think it’s really great – illusion or not – that people can cast a ballot… I’m just glad there’s an election and people get to make some kind of choice.”

[petricalore]

[johnwickb1tsch]

neone reading the book of elsewhere?

keanu narrates at least the first chapter, its pretty dope...

[zimtlove]

I'm so sorry, I'm too much of a bookworm not to discuss this here.

So I saw the news that on 10/22/24 Keanu Reeves and China Mieville presented a joint novel at the London Book Festival. It's called "The book of elsewhere" and it's set in the world of BRZRKR.

I just want to know if any of you guys are going to read it? I'm dying to read it, but I'm not sure I'll be able to buy it in my country

[neonwingedstar]

Question, do I need to read Brzrkr before Book of Elsewhere because I’m struggling to follow along with this story? Maybe it’s just how it’s not written linearly? Or I just might need to get further in? I’m enjoying it though, so far.

[lavenderdreams7]

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[silverbooklamp]

[hunter-djura]

So I finished reading The Book of Elsewhere. Not a bad read, although it's easy to tell how Reeves influenced and determined the course of the story, the adolescent throughline.

More than that, is the frustration. This is, in a sense a spoiler, but how it fits in for those that care, will not be obvious or that important.

Entropy is not the opposite of change. It is not anti-change, stillness, death. It is not a force, or anti-force, or anything at all. It is a metric by which we might quantify change. It is change. We say 'it' gives Time's arrow direction, but this language is misleading - there is no it. It is the term we use to comprehend why Time's arrow has a direction, not the other way around.

All interactions create (in a sense) and transfer information. Two billiard balls strike, and in their new paths they hold some information about that strike, and the path that other ball took to reach it. And the path another ball took to strike that first other ball to richochet into the most recent strike. Less information, harder to discern; more possible strikes and paths that could result in that path that caused the most recent strike. But some.

And that information, the way it slowly spreads out, is made inaccessible, yet remains? That's Entropy.

The complexity of that journey, from the pool cue striking to the end of that game, ever growing, even as the balls leave the board - that's Entropy.

You can't make the journey less complex, because to touch that path is to add information about your journey, to take information away from it, each of your stories adds the others, and all the stories they took from others too. The complexity can only grow. Time moves in one direction, because to reduce the complexity is to reduce Entropy is to move backwards in time.

Which is, of course, the ugliest and most reductive metaphor for the complex system of our reality. Which I wield so crudely to make the point: Change is not the opposite of Entropy, Entropy IS Change.

And this false dualism is terribly frustrating because I am not that learned in science or math and I understand this well and it is really not that hard to think about googling this before you go to the effort of writing an entire book.

[andsotheuniverseended]

started reading the book of elsewhere and trying so hard to figure out if me envisioning Unute as Keanu Reeves is, like, intended by the authors or not

[keanuquotes]

via KeanuWorld

December 2024 London

[rhetoricandlogic]

THE BOOK OF ELSEWHERE by Keanu Reeves & China Miéville

RELEASE DATE: July 23, 2024

n which the Angel of Death really wants to take a holiday.

“Memory is a labyrinth.” Or perhaps a matrix. Actor Reeves teams up with speculative fictionist Miéville to produce a tale that definitely falls into the latter’s “weird fiction” subgenre. The chief protagonist is the demi-divine Unute, known as B. He’s not nice: “That man does not kill children anymore, when he can avoid doing so, but still, leave him alone,” warns one of the narrators, whose threads of story are distinguished by different typefaces. B is a killer—early on, he explains to a psychiatrist, “I kill and kill and kill again,” adding that he’d really rather be doing something else. B is also curious about the way things work, which leads him to experiment on unfortunate deer-pigs, the babirusa of Indonesia, to try to suss out what allows him to die but then come back to life, learning that he’s not so much immortal as “infinitely mortal.” B, as one might imagine, isn’t the life of the party—and the reader will be forgiven for being a little grossed out by his experiments, which are infinitely grisly (“A gush of cream-­ and rust-­colored slime sopped out and across the gurney and onto the floor to mix with soapy water”). The structure of the story is both metaphorical (albeit B professes little patience with metaphor), with Unute morphing into Death itself, and rather loose, the plot picking up hints dropped earlier. It’s not always easy to follow, but it’s clear that Reeves and Miéville are having fun with the tale and its often playful, even poetic language (“the huff-­huff of horny hard feet on the scuffed corporate carpet, a stepping closer, an incoming, a meeting about to be”).

A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.