He seems to have evolved a bit over the last few years - where in the past I felt his voice was only his own, at times here he sounds a bit like Miéville (via his earliest works or maybe Embassytown), Eco (via Foucault's Pendulum), and a bit like a less theory driven (not as versed in Deleuze, Guattari, Brassier) Negarestani - but the evolution suits the story he's trying to tell, so it's difficult to tell if he has a writer has changed or if he only adapted for the needs of the narrative.

Truthfully, only Reza Negarestani is higher, and he has still not followed up Cyclonopedia yet, so he might not actually count for these purposes.Īnd even with Cisco being high on the list I've still got his last three sitting unread on a shelf - this sounded too good to skip though, so I gave it a shot.Īs the rating belies, I greatly enjoyed this, though I will say that I still feel The Narrator is his best work. There are a few authors I still pay attention to, and Cisco is high on that list. But I will say that the general speculative scene has over the years become progressively less interesting and compelling to me, to the point that it receives little of my attention or passion, and that has been the case for at least a few years now. As far as I can tell, Cisco is the best of all authors currently active in the long-form Weird Fiction / New Weird space.Īnd there are a ton of qualifiers and retractions and specifications that go along with that, most of them actually unimportant. It is immediately obvious to us that animal money does not refer to the age-old practice of rating wealth in head of cattle or otherwise using livestock as money there is something new in our minds. It really is only a chance coupling of two words, but they seem to call to each other. The idea silences us for a while, as we try to grasp it, each within ourselves.

None of us can account for it, none of us can take credit for it.

In the criss-cross of our conversation the idea of animal money appears.

Animal money by michael cisco