“Writing in the midst of an ongoing blood cancer that has nearly killed him on several occasions, Will Self has given us an incomparable meditation on the contemporary human condition. The inescapable reality of death is on every page; but instead of brooding on mortality, Self offers a deeply subversive reading of our world. Moving effortlessly through philosophy, literature, film criticism and autobiography, he illuminates unseen connexions between the bird-haunted island of St Kilda through Ukraine and Iran, high-frequency trading, universal surveillance and the perpetually changing but seemingly unalterable technological landscape that surrounds and shapes us. The cipher at the heart of it all is the drone, at once a symbol of the displacement of human agency in autonomous weaponry and a practical embodiment of the state of endless warfare into which humankind is drifting. Ghosts of other writers--Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, among others--make their appearances. The voice is uniquely Self's own. A book unlike any other, reading this could change your life.” —John Gray, author of The New Leviathans: thoughts after liberalism.