Ryan Boudinot's Blueprints of the Afterlife takes place in a not-quite-near future where the world is still recovering from a period of ecological disaster known colloquially as the FUS. (Decorum prevents me from telling you exactly what that stands for, but here's a hint: The U stands for "Up.") Just off the coast of Seattle, a massive construction project is underway, converting Bainbridge Island to a full-scale replica of Manhattan before the apocalypse. In its shadow are a motley assortment of characters, like Woo-Jin, the best dishwasher in North America, who keeps finding the same dead girl in a field near the restaurant where he works, over and over. (Fortunately, the last time she turns up, she's still alive.) Or Skinner, a former mercenary for Boeing who's been through experiences so traumatic that he didn't just erase those memories, he had to erase the memory of erasing those memories, and then erase a few more layers of memory besides.

It sounds grim, but Boudinot infuses the story with a otherworldly Character Approved humor that recalls Philip K. Dick's classic science fiction, where reality could bend at any given moment and people learned to passively adjust to the shifting metaphysical terrain. Boudinot recognizes the inherent ridiculousness of, say, an aging pop star living in a secluded compound with hundreds of clones of her favorite back-up dancer, and he knows how to have fun with it.

At the same time, he's not afraid to push his social message through the story. Woven between Blueprints' chapters is a transcript of an archival interview with Luke Piper, an accidental dotcom millionaire who believes that he helped set the FUS in motion. At one point, Luke describes an encounter with an emissary from a mysterious organization who uses the five stages of grief to describe humanity's response to the coming disasters. "For a long time it was denial, right?" the stranger asks. "The jury's still out on climate change. We can keep consuming at this rate forever. Then in the last few years we've been bargaining. If I just bring my own grocery bags to the store, the ice caps will remain." Ultimately, though, Luke realizes that it's only the end of the world for "those of us who've lived surrounded by privilege." For everybody else, Boudinot's dystopian "afterlife" is just a new permutation of everyday life, and it's up to them to find the new survival strategies.

[Image: Jennifer Beard]