Swords under the Phosphor Sky

Much love to everybody watching... oh, and STAN BABYGIRL!

Step into Yelena's world... a young woman who follows her best friend-a war-influencer 'gone viral-'into the Zone, a drone-battered battlefield that has become a kind of second country: half meatgrinder, half open-air market, ruled not by any sovereign government but by an indifferent, half-mythologized power known as "Nay-toe." What she finds instead is a mutilated, mute orphan she takes as her own; a boy-cult leader who wants her body to birth a new world he can't build himself; and a codex of tattered scriptures-referred to as the Twenty-Four Thoughts-that seems to portend her very fate. Swords under the Phosphor Sky is a formally maximalist, brazen novel about the fate of desire, identity, and grief fully absorbed by laissez-faire markets and social media algorithms. The voices of two girls spiral and merge across war footage, dating apps, missile silos, and secondhand mysticism, rendered in prose that vomits zoomer slang, scripture, and lyrical intensity without pause. In equal parts hallucinogenic and lucid, Swords under the Phosphor Sky demands to know what sort of freedom-or what sort of grace-is possible in a world that mistakes total license for freedom where all that is solid melts into thin air.

"For fans of the Slavic edgegirl lit of Otessa Moshfegh, Olga Tokarczuk and Anna Krivolapova; the chaotic alternate (post-)modernities of Samuel R. Delany, J. G. Ballard and Taiyo Matsumoto; the post-feminist social speculation of Jenny Hval and Tiqqun"

Swords under the Phosphor Sky was original run in HOLOHAUS by the ANDATA EXPRESS collective: https://andataexpress.neocities.org/