While I was at my grandfather’s house in between viewings, my mom and I were sitting on the big sofa that faces the TV. I had my book open and on my lap, but I wasn’t reading because I was soaking in family stories and tid bits of information about those who are related to me. She turned to me and asked what I was reading, then told me to describe what it was about and whether or not I thought she’d like it. Most of her reading tends towards romance paperbacks, so I told her she probably wouldn’t like this one. It’s “smart” fiction, I said, but I didn’t really mean that in an insulting way. It makes you think, wonder about possibilities; it made me want to separate the functions of my left and right brains and see what I could figure out about each.

The chapters in this book alternate between the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (hence the title). In the first world, the narrator is a “Calutec” – a human data processor/encryption system. He works for the System, which as far as I could tell was a government agency, and he spends his time trying to avoid the Semiotics who work for the Factory and try to steal information from the Calutecs. The narrator is hired by a genius scientist who is experimenting on sound waves; he can remove sound from certain items (not least his granddaughter’s speech) and can enhance sound far beyond the realm of human tolerance. The narrator is asked to encrypt some data vital to the research so that the scientist’s findings cannot be misused.