Zachary Tanner - In a series of increasingly-disorienting psychotic episodes, Cletus attempts to ethically navigate the Zoroastrian sex politics of this kinky new world and learn to love more perfectly before going insane, not understanding that love is the madness madder than the rest

 

Zachary Tanner, Oskar Submerges,

Corona/ Samizdat, 2021.

Oskar Submerges is the first true sea novel ever set on a Jovian satellite. The interplanetary year is 2193. With the help of a massive inheritance, Cletus II of Luna, aspiring kapellmeister, has taken a job as a janitor in an infamous brain health clinic on Europa, ice world of entheogens and polysexual cyborgs, seeking inspiration and artistic actualization in the abjection to be gained from proximity to end-of-life patients. Cletus soon befriends Oskar, an aged paper architect who suffers from an endemic neurological disease, aka "french maids," which is contracted by those exposed to the bioluminescent blue-green algae native to the subsurface ocean. In a series of increasingly-disorienting psychotic episodes, Cletus attempts to ethically navigate the Zoroastrian sex politics of this kinky new world and learn to love more perfectly before going insane, not understanding that love is the madness madder than the rest.

I haven’t read many sci-fi authors, but “Oskar Submerges” evokes two I have, Samuel Delany and Ursula LeGuin, in its treatment of pansexuality and utopianism. Set in the 2190s, the novel has a 1960s vibe—drugs, free love, self-actualization, “a hint of incense and peppermints” (p. 177)—but the quest for love and artistic fulfillment dramatized here is timeless. It’s a treat for music lovers: the bildungsromantic protagonist is a composer, so music references abound. (In fact, “Cletus at the Clavichord” would have been an apt, Wallace Stevensian title for the novel, though it can’t beat Tanner’s original, Kilgore Troutian title, “French Maids of the Conamara Chaos.”) Another treat is Tanner’s prose, which, like Cletus’s taste in clothes, “blended the sleek latex sensibilities of today with the excessive rococo frills, spotted fir, and peacock plumes of baroque times” (p. 403). Add cosmic vistas and a guitar-slinging bisexual cyborg named Ophelia and you have a winning novel. - Steven Moore

Zachary Tanner has authored a synesthesia-induced, musically kaleidoscopic, artfully imagined, cosmological novel packed full of transcendent exotic nebula, cyborgs, interplanetary cognitive hysteria, aspiring composers, non-binary high-camp intergalactic erotica, madness-inducing bioluminescent holotropic algae blooms, as well as an entire new possible world of ideas populated by artists and dreamers, all brilliantly nested within the pure vibration of the unified field that will not only ask you, the reader, to re-imagine your own perception of the world, but it will also have you asking… What does it mean to be a human being located deep within the cold, existential, dark center of a vast and mysterious universe?

Tanner’s euphoric, kink-boiled, radically speculative, cosmogenic, high-camp aesthetic is beautifully composed with a brilliantly sprawling, hyper articulate, literary-minded erudition which, as it unravels the preconditioned expectations of the reader’s traditional imaginative potential of the operational mechanics of our cultural designs on the world, Tanner also—in a rich, compulsively readable, deconstructive process—prepares the reader for launch into a newly mapped distant world far beyond our own, where the antiquated norms of civilization begin to loosen in the potential of their omnipotence in which only then are we capable of immersing ourselves fully into the much freer, less limiting world of Oskar Submerges.

In the existentially fractured ideological political constellations of a deeply divided America, which in this novel we quickly leave, light-years behind us, in the frenetic, dizzying, axial precession of the equinoxes, on a strange planet called Earth, in which it seems that an anthropologically grand devolution of the innate forms of prosocial behavioral altruism has begun to occur, which once, in theory, not only hoped to unify individuals, but also sought to bind communities together in a utopian expression of categorically transcendent plurality, if such an ideal were possible, inclusively illuminated by the imagination inspired by diversity as well as a fascination for, rather than a fear of, “otherness,” that has now mutated into a cultural dystopia, fueled by bigotry and tribal ostracism, which has obscured our social imagination from empathizing with the many possible intersectional formations existing beyond the ever present primary sense of self.

In Oskar Submerges, Tanner euphorically erects a literary, utopian, space-opera superstructure, where we, as human beings, may once again experiment with imagining a world in which “otherness,” in this case, is possibly experienced as an extraterrestrial, transhumanist, science fiction game theory, where the long unknown, culturally distanced “other,” once again through the experimental vision of this novel, instead becomes a sphere of pure love, and beauty, whereas individual readers or we, as a species, bear the responsibility to once again learn how to transcend the often times fearful isolation of our own primitive singularity to discover that truth, and real human connections often arise in complex forms other than our own.

Tanner’s novel explores the oppression of the potential of our collective imagination, which may be the result of a vast, culturally hegemonic, immersive, all-occupying cultural rapture, which may be what constricts and conforms our general human perceptions from daring to imagine the potential of human expression, transcendent of the traditional historical patterns of our antiquated, dominant power structures. In some regards, our failures of imagination on behalf of the human species to collectively dare to constructively dismantle the various, seemingly omnipotent tyrannical power structures, that occlude the conventional pathways of upward mobility relative to the evolution of the human imagination, must not obstruct the foundation for the human species to experiment with new models of creative thinking and combinatory play, which may help us imagine new possible worlds for our species to euphorically inhabit , not only ten years from now, but one hundred years from now. These dangerous ideals, if left unchallenged, may be just the type of limitations that constrict our human flirtation with someday possibly one day inhabiting a far more vast, hierarchically elevated level of collective consciousness.

In Oskar Submerges, Zachary Tanner achieves, in many ways, what only great speculative literature allows us to explore, and that is a panoptic view of the world that resonates with a scope of a novel that includes the reach of the entire species as well as the birth and death of the universe, which is interested in entropy and collapse by placing the urgency of these themes in the context of not only the sustainability of the species, but also the grand prospects of the durability of a grander evolution, which may include progress and transcendence at the level of pure consciousness beyond the limitations of both our biology and technology.

Psychologist, author, and psychonaut Timothy Leary has stated in Musings on Human Metamorphoses: that, “Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.” At the center of Oskar Submerges, we, the readers, find an author daring to argue for a new metaphysical ontology which not only strives to dismantle the traditional “defensive orthodoxies,” but the book also asks us to not only reinvent the alignment of our individual perceptual orientation to the world, and it also asks us to explore the intellectually creative abundance of ideas packed into this novel, so that one day, we may create a future, possible world, that, in so many ways, improves upon the antiquated traditions that we have for too long relied upon to inhabit the world of today.

In Oskar Submerges, Zachery Tanner asks the question, “What is life without love like dancing in dreams?” The beauty of Oskar Submerges—, as I experienced it and as, I hope that you will too also experience it—, is to blissfully move forward into your reading of the novel, knowing that you will unquestionably leave behind you the rigors and limitations of the world around you, to submerge your imagination into a book, that strives to achieve what all great books strive to achieve, and that is to offer the reader entry into a new possible world that maintains a love that feels so much like dancing that the energy of such joyful literary arabesques will leap off of every page of this book in such a way that you won’t ever want to put it down, for by the time you finish this book, a small part of both your heart and mind may forever drift curiously within the unique, phantasmagorical, beautiful orbit of a place we collectively once dreamed, known only as Europa. - Phillip Freedenberg

You know that feeling you had as a young reader? Loving a book so much that you spoke to your friend about it, you told your parents. You maybe picked up other books that the author wrote. I had that feeling with Oskar Submerges. One of the most original and incredible first novels ever. Ever.

I personally felt the influence of Le Guin for its otherworldliness. Richard Powers for the musical and “humanist” aspects. Vollmann for its shear creative output and research. And Pynchon for well, everything. Its astounding dialogue and vocabulary. Its playfulness in the writing. And as I’m sure you’ll all aware theses are some of the greatest writers ever. Zachary Tanner is on the way of joining these writers. I was amazed and the novel could’ve been 1,000 pages. And I hope the author continues to write. Highly recommended!!!

Special shout-out to Corona Samizdat Press. Rick continues to provide the world with outstanding literature and writers. The world is in great hands with these books. - Kevin Adams

Zachary Tanner (they/s/he) earned a degree in moving images from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Zachary lives with a spouse and two children in a small house in Louisiana and will soon rewrite a gigantic multiverse book titled Margie and the Atomic Brain. Their three essays on Chandler Brossard (“Zen and the Art of Buggery”; “This Book Kills Fascists!”; “Sure, Christ Fucked, but Was He on Top?”) accompany the corona\samizdat reprints of Wake Up. We’re Almost There, As the Wolf Howls at My Door, and The Wolf Leaps.