‘Incomparable. Post-genre horror, apocalypse theology and the philosophy of oil, crossbred into a new

and necessary codex.’ (China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station and The Scar)

‘Reading Negarestani is like being converted to Islam by Salvador Dali.’ (Graham Harman, author of

Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things)

‘It is rare when a mind has the courage to take our precious pre-conceptions of history, geography and

language and turn them all upside down, into a living cauldron, where ideas and spaces become alive

with fluidity and movement and breathe again with imagination and wonder. In this great novel by Reza

Negarestani, we are taken on a journey that predates language and post dates history. It is all at once

apocalyptic and a beautiful explosive birth of a wholly original perception and meditation on what

exactly is this stuff we call “knowledge”.’ (E. Elias Merhige, director of Begotten and Shadow of the

Vampire)

‘This brilliant and exhilarating work is a forensic journey across the surface territories of the Middle East

and into the depth of its sub-terrain. The earth is produced as a living artifact, gutted and hollowed out

by nomadic war tactics, the practices of extreme archaeology and the logic of petroleum extraction.

Inventing a radical new language and reconceptualizing the relationship between religion, geology, and

ways of war, Reza Negarestani philosophically ungrounds thus the very grounds of contemporary middle-

east politics.’ (Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land)

‘Cyclonopedia is an extraordinary tract, an uncategorizable hybrid of philosophical fiction, heretical

theology, aberrant demonology and renegade archaeology. It aligns conceptual stringency with exacting

esotericism, and through its sacrilegious formulae, geopolitical epilepsy is scried as in an obsidian

mirror.’ (Ray Brassier, author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction)

‘Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia is rich and strange, and utterly compelling. Ranging from the chthonic

mysteries of petroleum to the macabre fictions of H. P. Lovecraft, and from ancient Islamic (and pre-

Islamic) wisdom to the terrifying realities of postmodern asymmetrical warfare, Negarestani excavates

the hidden prehistory of global culture in the 21st century.’ (Steven Shaviro, author of Doom Patrols)

‘The Cyclonopedia manuscript remains one of the few books to rigorously and honestly ask what it means

to open oneself to a radically non-human life – this is a text that screams, from a living assemblage

known as the Middle East, “I am legion.” Cyclonopedia also constitutes part of a new generation of

writing that refuses to be called either theory or fiction; a heady mixture of philosophy, the occult, and

the tentacular fringes of Iranian culture – call it “occultural studies.” To find a comparable work, one

would have to look back to Von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the prose poems of Olanus Wormius,

or to the recent “Neophagist” commentaries on the Book of Eribon.’ (Eugene Thacker, author of

Biomedia and The Global Genome)

‘From the city of Poetry and Roses in Iran comes this bloody bypass surgery on the heart of darkness.’

(David Porush, author of Soft Machine: The Cybernetic Fiction)

‘Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia meticulously plots the occult matrices of an archaic petrochemical

conspiracy that has set the earth on its carbon-cycle feedback loop to Hell.’ (John Cussans, Chelsea

College of Art and Design)

‘Western readers can expect their peculiarly schizoid condition to be ‘butchered open’ by this work.

Read Negarestani, and pray.’ (Nick Land, author of The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and

Virulent Nihilism)

'Partly genius, partly quite mad ... To sum up: a weirdly compelling read.' (Peter Lamborn Wilson Fifth

Estate Spring 2009, Vol. 44 #1)

'An American artist, Kristen Alvanson – out of curiosity or simply boredom, it's not clear – travels to

Istanbul to meet a mysterious online contact. The contact never turns up. However, Kristen, as she

relates in her journal, does find a manuscript called Cyclonopedia, which in turn purports to be based on

the disturbing and disordered notes of an Iranian archaeologist who disappeared while researching a very

eccentric theory about oil's role in history. So begins Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous

Materials (published by Melbourne’s re.press), a nihilistic but fanciful tour de force of meta-fiction.

Kristen, in addition to being a character, is the creator of the book's magnificent cover; she is credited

on the title page beneath Reza Negarestani, who is the book’s author – and also the author of the

manuscript Kristen finds. In this welter of attributions, of course, it becomes doubtful whether

Negarestani really wrote the book at all, but whoever the author is, he or she has a profound knowledge

of, or a profound imagination about, Middle Eastern archaeology and Islamic mythology, to say nothing of

contemporary petropolitics.

Apocalyptic visions and solar catastrophes have been making their way into my own work,

so Cyclonopedia feels especially resonant to me, but its urgency isn't just personal. The text strips away

its own layers to reach a bedrock of premonotheistic symbols and tropes subverting, as it goes, common

understandings of “East” and “West” and the relation of these ideas to each other. Creating its own lexis

via a Deleuzian philosophical constructivism, building a quasi-scientific machine with madly beautiful

illustrations, Cyclonopedia is marked by a peculiar theoretical style. It discovers hidden paths to a kind

of chthonic knowledge; from its speculative abyss issues a horrific “philosophy of oil.” Gazing into this

confounding complexity of groundless grounds thrilled my new awareness.' (Pamela Rosenkranz,

Artforum International: Best of 2009, December)