I’m not as well-versed in many of the worlds that I’d need to be a bona fide card-carrying geek these days. As far as today, I’m certainly friendly to that world, with my affinities, but I would probably get kicked out of the national convention for being a bit of a poser. It was just sort of something you were or were not. As a kid, I was unquestionably a nerd, but it wasn’t really a culture you could opt into or out of. The definition has changed over the years. This book is total geek-bait, but how big of a geek are you? Having Colbert suggest that I was a fiction was pretty much one of the highlights of my writing career. Stephen Colbert doubted whether you were real. ( Spoilers follow for those who haven’t, as well as a lot of dissection of plot points that will make little sense to the uninitiated.) While Dorst won’t give up his secrets, he was willing to chat with Vulture about the S phenomenon, for those who’ve already read the novel. Even if the communications within S are decidedly analogue - down to the inserts of postcards and a hand-scrawled map on a napkin - the readership response has expanded into the digital world, with websites like the S Files helping lost fans decode the book. It’s a labyrinth of story-within-story, especially when you consider the footnotes are ciphers. Along comes an undergrad named Jen who picks up Eric’s copy of the book, reads his notes, and starts writing notes to him in the margins as she gets pulled into Straka’s work and the mysteries surrounding both him and Eric.
Straka, his author, is said not to exist and may be a pseudonym for a number of candidates Eric, a grad student studying Ship of Theseus, is hoping to solve that question of authorship for his dissertation, but he, too, doesn’t officially exist, as his university has expunged him.
There are issues of identity on all fronts - S, the protagonist in Ship of Theseus, has amnesia, and doesn’t know who he is V.M. Straka’s nineteenth and final novel, Ship of Theseus, are two readers who’ve found each other in the margins. Abrams), the book is a singular experience: Within a worn library copy of fictional author V.M. Written by Doug Dorst (with inspiration from concept creator and “novelrunner” J.J. Fans of S don’t just ask each other if they’ve read the book - they ask each other how they read it.
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