Neutron Picasso

The copy on the back cover nicely encapsulates the premise of this romance-essay (somewhat like William Morris's News From Nowhere).

Descendants of the original forty-four emerge to an hospitable Earth nearly four centuries after the Bomb. They are met with the ruined artifacts of a once mighty civilization and find no clue as to why the pre-Bomb people committed global suicide. Only after the works of four pre-Bomb artists (Picasso, Pollock, Moore and Beckett) are unearthed can the descendants begin to grasp what went wrong. [...] But when a fringe element of the post-Bomb society gets possession of the works [...]

I have one quibble. In this fiction, the Moore sculpture is described as a bronze in an intro to an interview where the discussion is all about stone and carving rather than modelling and casting. Nonetheless, it is a satisfying little book given the range of voices it contains. It invites the reader to stretch imagination and it helps with such descriptions of the annihilation of all traces of culture:

Suffice here to reiterate that the charnelization of the world consumed every device and medium of human expression and memory. Every data bank, archive, gallery, library. No music survives, no painted or sculpted artifact, no written word. Only a melted, congealed detritus that yields, ever more intriguingly, mute witness to all-engulfing catastrophe.

Michael Carin. The Neutron Picasso. 1989.

And so for day 776
27.01.2009