The echoes of the Mechatronic Age have long been silent, its voice — the voice of life — long ago snuffed. The surface is inhospitable. A barren wasteland of decaying infrastructure smoothed over with time. Civilization reduced to a shadow of its former self, and, perhaps, not even that.
But humanity has survived. Like blind moles, they’ve tunneled underground; into their graves, carving caverns, like giant ants.
They call themselves the Mechanists, and they survive thanks, in whole, to The Caretaker, the last machine on — or, rather, in — Earth. She is, in essence, their Queen, and she supplies the Mechanists with everything they need to live, and they, in turn, obey her every command. She is a kind and understanding caretaker, and generation after generation has tended her needs, which are, after all, also their needs; they live, secluded deep in the warming embrace of the mantle, in a kind of bio-mechano-mutualism. For she is the last of her kind, and, for that matter, so are the Mechanists.
But such give and take cannot last forever. Disturbances — like ripples in the water — will disrupt the calmness; and, like many disturbances, it comes as a prophecy.
The end of an era, the end of an age, the end of the world: It is both the easiest and hardest thing to predict: It will happen, of course, but when will it happen? Now, or then?
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
