Incomparable.

Post-genre horror, apocalypse theology and the philosophy of oil, crossbred into a new
and necessary codex. (China Miville, 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 middleeast 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 Negarestanis 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 preIslamic) 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 Junzts 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)
Negarestanis 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 Melbournes 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 books 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)