Sensation
by Nick Mamatas
2011
Sensation is narrated in the first person plural - 'we' - by a global collective of sentient spiders, who work as a conservative and stabilizing force on human history.
'We' observe Julia, who gets stung by mutant parasitic wasps, the kind that change the behavior of the spiders they sting, and who turn Julia into a very charismatic agent of chaos. Allegedly, the wasps are responsible for a number of such individuals throughout history - human culture is defined by the war between the spiders and wasps.
'We' also follow Julia's husband as he haplessly attempts to catch up with her and keep track of what she's doing. What Julia is doing is inspiring an unnamed social movement that resembles a cross between Dada and Occupy Wall Street.
The spiders briefly catch Julia and put her in 'the Simulation' - a Potemkin village imitation of human society that hides in various marginal social spaces - but between the movement, the fumbling chase given by her husband, and Julia's own supernatural wasp-fueled charisma, she keeps giving them the slip.
Mamatas has a cool idea here, a kind of Matrix story that takes place entirely in the real world, although the plot kind of gets away from him in the final third of the book. After the movement shuts down the internet for a month, he no long seems to know what should happen next, and even the proofreading and copy-editing get noticeably worse.
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