The Embracer – A Book Review
By David Huntwork (05/24/04)
I found The Embracer by Gary Wolf to be a strangely disturbing book in many ways. Set in a future eerily devoid of marriage, relationships, or genuine human emotion, much of humanity limits itself to self-indulgence and attaining the ultimate high.
From its earliest embryonic form, writers of speculative fiction have shared their version of what a future society might look like. The explosion in the last fifty years of mega corporations, sexual freedom and experimentation, genetic manipulation, the disintegration of traditional values, and a heavily medicated society opens new windows into what society and culture could become.
The Embracer vividly portrays the ultimate shallowness of humanity and takes the philosophy of selfishness, self-pleasure and sexual excesses to its inevitable conclusion.
The result in The Embracer is an amazingly complex and advanced technological civilization completely devoid of warmth, family, morality or conscience. In a world ran by corporations, humanity is reduced to compulsively satisfying the most basic instincts of pleasure, mood enhancement, and crude entertainment. All intellect, technology and human advancement are focused towards perfecting the highest form of emotional and physical ecstasy.
The heart of The Embracer is a plot by The Cult of the Dome to transform human experience to the ultimate act of sexual pleasure. That goal is reached through the perfection of genetic and physical alterations designed to erase the traditional genders and create the ability for a person to experience the pinnacle act; sexual copulation with oneself. The characters surrounding this plot are all too human in their needs, reactions, and roles that they play in this drama. The inherent strengths, weaknesses and failings in the genetic code of humanity, and therefore in each and every one of us, are exposed mercilessly throughout this techno tale.
In a story devoid of exaggerated heroism or fairy tale ending, Gary Wolf leads us down a unique troubling road into a future that I can only hope I never see. If you are looking for a book that doesn’t easily fit into a genre and is probably unlike anything you have ever read, then The Embracer is for you.
This stinging indictment of the end results of political correctness and the ideologies of the Left is a self-published book by a former analyst and commentator on international and strategic affairs. Author Gary Wolf currently works for a major global software company. Raised in New York and London, he now lives in Paris.
The Embracer is available for sale at all the major online stores (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, etc.). You may also visit the publisher’s website at www.jeptathia.com which contains direct links to the book's page at the various online stores, as well as providing the opportunity to read the book online via the publisher's website. The Embracer is a reading experience you won’t forget any time soon.
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