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Softcover, 88 pages
9 inches x 9 inches | 22.86 cm x 22.86 cm
Editor-in-Chief Hélène Le Goff

We confess that the precise nature, intent, and genre of The Oort Cloud Review remain unknown to us. Even its Editor in Chief Hélène Le Goff, who seems to have stepped in as a late-game replacement, describes the project as “utterly inscrutable”. On first glance, the work appears to revive some of the vitality of the little-magazine scene of the early 2000s. Yet, on closer inspection, this strange volume turns out to be doing much, much more than that.

Its various contributions consistently blur the line between criticism and fiction, transmission and invention. So blurred do things become, in fact, that the editorial team, under Le Goff’s uncertain guidance, ultimately takes recourse to AI tools in order to determine the authors’ intentions — all of whom have, for some unstated reason, cut off contact with the editors.

It might seem hasty for an editor to turn to AI to resolve the interpretive difficulties of a text, but these are not just any texts. They include, for example, a contribution from Kristen Roupenian that may or may not be an excerpt from her personal journal. Sam Kriss, in his piece, draws disturbing connections between jellyfish consciousness and an unspeakable tech-world murder. Josefina Massot unveils a death-bed poem by Borges hinting at a deathbed conversion. David Lamb documents a secretive order of bibliovores who ingest rare texts to induce divine visions. Edwin-Rainer Grebe reviews Cetacean Philosophy, a book made possible by AI-assisted communication with sperm whales, and that appears to have been published three years after the volume of the Oort Cloud Review in which it is reviewed. Eugene Lim’s “Nighthawks” is a florid literary hallucination in which history and fiction phase in and out of alignment. And so on.

With contributions like these, it is not hard to see why the editors felt constrained to turn to AI with their doubts. But the answers that AI gives to their several queries turn out only to deepen the editorial uncertainty, not to mention their sense of foreboding. For the ultimate explanation of the mysterious texts Le Goff has been charged with delivering to the world lies in what the AI describes as a “massively intensified barrage of narratons” emanating from the Oort Cloud — an information-bearing halo at the edge of the solar system.

Under Le Goff’s stewardship, The Oort Cloud Review invites readers into an uncanny reading experience — forcing them to reconsider the source of our imagination, and the porous boundary between the human, the digital, and the cosmic. A work of criticism that is also a work of fiction, a magazine that reads like an intercepted signal from another world, The Oort Cloud Review is bound to unsettle and to excite.