When—in the course of his cross-border travels in the year 2057 on a radically shattered, war-torn, eco-busted Earth—he presents himself to the Human Control agents of UHU, the United Human Universe, he arouses no suspicions. His cover story—he's a Russian insurance specialist—passes muster completely.

But that's because knowledge of his mission and his consciousness and memories—and possibly his very soul—have been systematically disassembled and hidden away in neural compartments, undetectable by the devices of the all-seeing World Machine. But once he's past the border cops, information begins automatically unpacking itself.

Plotkin is a member of the Red Star Order, a Human Termination System. He's been contracted by the Siberian Mafia to assassinate a politician who's double-crossed them. Not just any politico, but Mayor Blackburn of Grand Junction, one of the devolving Earth's last redoubts, a place where "the entire twentieth century is trying to exist in condensed form, postmortem, to avoid being lost altogether."

Arriving in Grand Junction, Plotkin the assassin takes up residence in Room 108 of Hotel Laika, a nondescript capsule lodging. He begins to scope out the terrain, from Heavy Metal Valley, where secret outlawed Catholics dwell, to radioactive Neon City, with its mutant underminds.

But it's inside the Hotel Laika that the real action is taking place. Several of the tenants are more than they seem. Take, for instance, the two androids: Vega 2501 and Sydia Sexydoll Nova 280. Or a fellow who might be a rival killer: Cheyenne Hawkwind. Then there's the manager, repellent Clovis Drummond, who conceals awful secrets under the hotel's roof.

But most enigmatic is the woman named Vivian McNellis. Plotkin feels a strange connection to her. ...

But he never imagines she might be his creator.

A New Wave/cyberpunk anti-Armageddon

Confronting a title like "Cosmos Incorporated" and a hero with the surname of Plotkin, one initially suspects one is about to experience a satirical romp, such as might flow from the pen of Robert Sheckley or Douglas Adams or Ron Goulart. But the reality is vastly different.

Here we have a book that is at the very least a tripartite hybrid: part old-school New Wave (think Michael Moorcock, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss), part cyberpunk/avant garde (think William Gibson, William Burroughs, John Shirley) and part new-school SF noir (think Richard Morgan, Jeff Somers). Toss in some French philosophers—Jean Baudrillard, et al.—some Euro-SF masters like Stanislaw Lem and metaphysical SF guys like Howard Henndrix and Philip K. Dick, and the result is a unique, heady blend that skitters all over the narrative and ontological map like an ice cube on a griddle.

It's no wonder that Dantec's first English-language appearance came from the transgressive press Semiotext(e), with Babylon Babies in 2005. His publication now by mainstream Del Rey—a bold move that deserves applause—might have something to do with the movie deal that first book garnered, resulting in an upcoming feature film starring Vin Diesel.

In any case, Dantec pulls out all the stops in this novel. First, he constructs a truly dismal and appalling dystopia that strikes one as all too probable. The United States has splintered after a war of secession brought on by the pressures of fighting the Great Jihad. Environmental catastrophes are rampant and mankind has become Unimanity, slaves of the World Machine. Into this scenario Dantec drops his murderous post-human antihero and his surreal identity crisis. Just when you think you've got the plot sussed out, at the halfway mark, Dantec throws the biggest possible spanner into the works, radically shaking the whole paradigm he's established, when he reveals the true nature of Vivian McNellis. From there, the story becomes van Vogt filtered through Terence McKenna.

Dantec's prose is always inventive and challenging (ably translated from his native French by Tina A. Kover), if at times it's a bit straining and over-reaching in its magniloquence. You have to be able to love passages like this to appreciate the book: "The world of Unimanity resembles, feature for feature, this process of infinite division looped back upon its own false infinity. Human UniWorld has not been cut off by anything, even itself, because it is nothing more than a ghostly atomization of a world reduced to a horizontal, underground rhizome, its opening barred by its systematic opening, its total transparency a paradigm of new lies."

But such passages are neatly integrated with the plentiful action and dialogue, resulting in an intellectual thriller that dares to imagine a way out of inevitable destruction.