Weaving a set of stories ones inside each other, the author of Remainder peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying symbolic structures of human experience.
"From the author of Remainder and Satin Island (which was short-listed for the Booker Prize), a high-tech odyssey through CGI studios, wind tunnels, and drone research centers, where the limits of healing, entertaining, revelation, and destruction are continually being transformed. A kaleidoscopic exploration of motion and how the forces that compel and impel us continues to defy capture and understanding. The historical starting point: Lillian Gilbreth, first investigator and architect of time and motion studies , spurred in part by the conundrum of how to raise twelve children (remember Cheaper by the Dozen, the memoir written by her children). The fictional or mythic starting point (one of many): Anthony Garnett's insomnia, and the inevitable sheep-counting he experienced after visiting a sheep farm, the images of sheep he'd observed, prompting in his mind a schematic tracking their movements, unpredictable yet governed by a general drive or aim, the location of one animal at a given moment, the corresponding location of another at the same moment, each linked by lines of transit, switchbacks and detours, lines themselves dictated by the larger flow of the collective mass, as well as operative strings of need, fear, rivalry, yearning, linking Individuals randomly to one another. The originating seed of the company he founds, Pantaray, PLC., whose name was inspired by a fragment of pre-Socratic Heraclitus, who famously also noted that you cannot step into the same river twice, the first axiom of motionstudies. The Making of Incarnation explores the myriad facets of the intersection of technology and the human, an intersection that continues to re-create the possibility of what we are able to imagine"--
From the author of Remainder, and two novels short-listed for the Booker Prize, C, and Satin Island, a widescreen odyssey through the medical labs, computer graphics studios, military research centers, and other dark zones where the frontiers of potential—to cure, kill, understand or entertain—are constantly tested and refined.
Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where’s our fucking airplane? What’s inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it?
Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers’ movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. But did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a “perfect” movement, one that would “change everything”?
An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan, as well as his collaborators and shadowy antagonists, across geopolitical fault lines and through strata of personal and collective history. Meanwhile, work is under way on the blockbuster movie Incarnation, an epic space tragedy.
As McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying symbolic structures of human experience, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual motion machine.
