Gelpack Allegory is a radically foreshortened history of genre – science fiction compressed at High-G; a psychopathology of entrepreneurial desire; the background clatter of an American Arithmometer Com-pany brand adding machine producing culture; calculus as language as organization as numbers but not just any numbers the numbers we re-member having learned in childhood; the faintest, hopeful whiff of burning gasoline blowing through the corporate lobby’s revolving door. Kiely careens past Samuel Delaney redefining the terms, past Karl Marx riffing on astrophysics, and straight into the titanic vortex of Elon Musk’s Oedipal fantasies. Straight to where we all are anyways but in a crazy, asphyxiating ride. How can something so fast as a capi-tal flow feel so stifling? How come I’m still laughing even after all the oxygen has been sucked out the room? How come something so exhil-arating as the writing in this book ends with a poem which makes it impossible for me to breathe?

— Robert G. Penner, author of Strange Labour

From Aquinas’ requisites for beauty to hypercapital and the internet’s “gated community,” Gelpack Allegory offers a capacious poethics of contested futurity, sifting through lyric debris, mathematics, essaying and speculative vignettes along the way. With Elon Musk as its ur-an-tagonist, this book critiques the diagnostic failures of techno-innova-tion and its rickety escape hatches; offering instead a flickering archi-tecture of satire, story and mise-en-abyme, exposing the “calculus of living and dying” which is writing’s im/possibility. We’re not just cot-toning onto the problem; we’re burning the tumbleweed of hypersti-tion. If, in this “interplanetary allegory” for our fucked modernity, “it is always late” and “[w]e live on fumes,” Kiely yet makes a case for im-agination, hilarity, and strangeness on Earth.

— Maria Sledmere, author of The Luna Erratum

This is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

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