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Please join Adult Contemporary Reading Group for our discussion of Izumi Suzuki’s ‘Terminal Boredom: Stories’, a collection of Japanese science fiction published by Verso Books in 2021.The book is available to purchase in paperback form for $22.99 (inc. GST) from Adult Contemporary (via DM or email) and should be read in advance of the meeting.
ACRG will focus on texts concerning art and culture, including both fiction and non-fiction. The reading group is open to all and meets on the last Sunday of each month (with times and locations subject to possible variation). Suggestions for future texts, either in physical or digital publication formats, are welcome at any time.
Please join our WhatsApp community for additional discussions and content relating to ACRG: https://chat.whatsapp.com/BgoqzBNOacEBoKwLiajiBP
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Translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan
On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia—until a boy escapes and a young woman’s perception of the world is violently interupted. Two old friends enjoy cocktails on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems. A bickering couple emigrate to a world that has worked out an innovative way to side-step the need for war, only to bring their quarrels (and something far more destructive) with them. And in the title story, Suzuki offers readers a tragic and warped mirroring of her own final days as the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanistion of labour bring about a shattering psychic collapse.
At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki’s singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/997-terminal-boredom
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Izumi Suzuki (1949–1986) was a countercultural icon and a pioneer of Japanese science fiction. She worked as a keypunch operator before finding fame as a model and actress, but it was her writing that secured her reputation. She took her own life at the age of thirty-six.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/authors/suzuki-izumi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izumi_Suzuki
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