Same Same

1

I was unaware, at first, that I had entered the Institute.

Sure, the dome appeared, briefly, far off in the desert. A bright semicircle, a second sun, perched upon the wavy horizon. I thought it was a business park or the reflective apron of one of the Freehold s honeycombed luxury developments. A stadium? One of those steroidal mega-mosques one reads about in the literature, perhaps. Something. It drifted along for a spell, during that endless drive out, along the rightmost edge of my vision, no matter how many times the car merged onto new roads. I could see it even through the double tint of my sunglasses and the vehicle s windows. The dome, known only as a flare. Other than that, there were the dunes of course dune by dune stuccoed to the sky behind. And these gray superhighways, colonized by sand along their shoulders, giving them lightly ragged edges like monumental pencil marks.

But nothing else, really.

Besides that distant dome. Which was there. Until it wasn t.

It vanished. Could it have been a mirage a trick of the light? Idk.

But: no. No, I can see it again.

Oh, I see the dome, all right. Only I see it, now, from the inside; from underneath, I mean. I didn t notice a security checkpoint, so it will have been unmanned. There were no barriers to raise or lower; no fanfare, no ceremony. I was in the desert, outside of the Institute, and now I am within it. And the Institute is all about me. This uncanny oasis in the middle of a scorch-plain. And atop it all, the great upturned bowl of its metastructure.

The desert and with it, my old life now gone.

Poof.

And so the car hums along, through this entirely new, artificial ecosystem, past the tall palms which line both sides of the straight, clean avenue, casting their tarantula shadows. Off to the sides, parklands, lawns, copses, nature trails, etc. (How many gardeners must be employed here? No sign of them, though; nor of any of the Institute fellows.) The stubble of a few

Peter Mendelsund is a designer and writer. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and two daughters.

Same Same reaches literary heights. . . . Mendelsund s first novel manages to be breezy and profound in equal measure. That balance is as the programmers say a feature and not a bug. . . . In using nonsensical jargon to expose the hollow core of the global Big Ideas industry, Mendelsund has produced or perhaps reproduced something entirely satisfying. Same Same is a substantial book about emptiness. It reminds us that there s no here here unless we create it ourselves. . . . [And it includes] one of the most perfectly tuned passages of fiction I ve read in a very long time. Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review

A deeply inventive and wonderfully strange novel that takes dead aim at the question: does it matter if something's real? Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
 
[Mendelsund] has a grand time serving up what would seem to be an extended metaphor for creativity . . . that would do Brian Eno proud. Mendelsund's novel of ideas makes a neat bookend to Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 as a study of creation in the age of the smart machine. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
Most books aspire to imitate life; this one succeeds in imitating literature. A fractal abyss of copies copying copies, this brilliant and hilarious full-size replica of a novel exposes the limits of conventional narratives by miraculously transmuting repetition into difference and, ultimately, something unique. Hernán Diaz, author of In the Distance
 
Rewarding. . . . Absurdist, uncanny metafiction about the nature of identity, individuality, and authorship in an era of rapid technological advancement. . . . Comically disturbing. Publishers Weekly

Like an ever-shifting Rubik s Cube, Mendelsund s narrative blends influences and genres at will: it begins as an sf dystopia, unfurls like a mystery, and includes some deeply insular sections reminiscent of the late David Markson. . . . Mendelsund has created a dense, complex, and rewarding novel that