A Blast from the Future

by Maxwell Cody

This essay appears in Issue 2 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007

by Nick Land

Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 680 pp., $20.99

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First, the bare facts: Nick Land is a 60-something British philosopher and ex-university professor. He now resides in Shanghai in what is widely understood to be a self-imposed exile from the West (though he has gone quiet recently, and rumors swirl that the Chinese Communist Party has disappeared him). The large majority of Land’s writings can be found in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, printed in 2011 and circulated widely online.

In the mid-1990s Land helped found the CCRU or Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, where he lectured. Notoriously difficult to describe—according to the CCRU the CCRU never existed—this group was a postmodern occultist collective made up of dissident left academics who were as disillusioned with university life as they were enthralled by the potential of emerging information technologies.