Anthropocene Rag is a strange and wonderful book. In the late 21st century, the United States is awash in trillions of feral nanomachines called the Boom. These robots remake the world at whim, coldly indifferent to human life. Many are obsessed with American history and folktales. The Donner Party tragedy replays on a loop in the Sierra Nevadas, dinosaurs roam the Louisiana bayou, Mark Twain plies the Mississippi on a steamboat, Henry Ford oversees bustling factories in ruined Detroit--all rendered by tiny machines. Any humans caught in the way are liable to have their atoms "borrowed." Between these capricious reconstructions and general environmental disaster, the United States has fragmented into disparate enclaves separated by anarchic countryside. And somewhere in the Rockies, the scientist responsible for the Boom holds dominion over a semi-mythical place called Monument City.
Prospector Ed, an AI emerging into sentience, travels the country at the behest of a more powerful intelligence in Monument City. Ed delivers Golden Tickets to six lucky recipients, each invited to Monument City for reasons unknown. Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine (A Scattering of Jades) follows Prospector Ed's Willy Wonka-ish distribution of the these Golden Tickets and their bearers' perilous trips across an ever-shifting country: a scavenger in flooded Miami steals his twin brother's ticket, a pious New York mailman living next to a talking playground makes one of Prospector Ed's deliveries himself, a shapeshifting actress leaves a troupe run by a buffalo, and a purchased orphan escapes certain doom. The intertwining stories of this eclectic cast are a hallucinatory voyage into America's fraught past and damaged future. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer