Gelpack Allegory

by Robert Kiely

Veer Books

Paperback, 2022

88 pages

Gelpack Allegory is a radically foreshortened history of genre – science fiction compressed at High-G; a psychopathology of entrepreneurial desire; the background clatter of an American Arithmometer Company brand adding machine producing culture; calculus as language as organization as numbers but not just any numbers the numbers we re-member having learned in childhood; the faintest, hopeful whiff of burning gasoline blowing through the corporate lobby’s revolving door. Kiely careens past Samuel Delaney redefining the terms, past Karl Marx riffing on astrophysics, and straight into the titanic vortex of Elon Musk’s Oedipal fantasies. Straight to where we all are anyways but in a crazy, asphyxiating ride. How can something so fast as a capital flow feel so stifling? How come I’m still laughing even after all the oxygen has been sucked out the room? How come something so exhilarating as the writing in this book ends with a poem which makes it impossible for me to breathe? — Robert G. Penner

From Aquinas’ requisites for beauty to hypercapital and the internet’s “gated community,” Gelpack Allegory offers a capacious poethics of contested futurity, sifting through lyric debris, mathematics, essaying and speculative vignettes along the way. With Elon Musk as its ur-antagonist, this book critiques the diagnostic failures of techno-innovation and its rickety escape hatches; offering instead a flickering architecture of satire, story and mise-en-abyme, exposing the “calculus of living and dying” which is writing’s im/possibility. We’re not just cottoning onto the problem; we’re burning the tumbleweed of hyperstition. If, in this “interplanetary allegory” for our fucked modernity, “it is always late” and “[w]e live on fumes,” Kiely yet makes a case for imagination, hilarity, and strangeness on Earth. — Maria Sledmere

Part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College