The insights into the growth of corpocracy that I obtained through reading Blood Meridian filled me with awe and admiration (for myself).

Did blood meridian replace ulysses in the meme trilogy?

I love how this subreddit provides an unlimited supply of content that I can use to torment my more literary friends. (People who haven’t blocked me.) Truly, subscribing was a great idea.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

And of course, each comment about Infinite Jest is longer than the actual novel.

Ah yes, Blood Meridian, my favorite book about corporations

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1pup255/blood_meridian_gravitys_rainbow_cloud_atlas_and/

Postmodern lit fans when woman author 😃❓🔇

One of these is unlike the others...

Whole lotta angry Sanderson consumers in those comments, damn

But how do they compare in this respect to the masters? Collins? Meyer? Maas?

dawg I love cloud atlas but come on who invited my man blud etc

I have thankfully not read any of these books on account of being illiterate, so it was rather difficult to understand what OP meant about combining them. Luckily, ChatGPT was able to help me with this useful short story which she read to me like a bedtime story.

The Payload Falls Laughing

The first man to fall out of the sky did so laughing.

He came down over the salt flats with a sound like torn linen, trailing paper, numbers, a half-burned map of somewhere that might once have been the future. The Kid—though he was not young, and not innocent, and no one had named him so except history—watched from behind a limestone outcrop as the body struck earth and continued laughing for a moment longer, the mouth opening and closing like a clock that refused to stop.

Above them, the sky had learned new habits. It curved, yes, but also footnoted itself. Dark contrails stitched equations across the blue. Somewhere far beyond sight, an object was falling that had been falling for years and would continue falling until someone noticed what it was meant to hit.

They called it the Payload.

They said it carried a story so dense it bent probability. They said if it landed, time would buckle into chapters.

~~

Judge Calyx wore no robe, only a white tennis shirt yellowed at the collar and a smile that explained nothing. He could dance, he could lecture, he could assemble a rifle blindfolded while reciting the names of extinct empires in alphabetical order. He spoke of violence as if it were a natural resource, unevenly distributed, poorly managed.

“All wars,” he said, chalking a circle on a bunker wall, “are entertainments. The trick is to convince the audience they are not watching.”

Around him sat the Converted: soldiers, addicts, statisticians, monks. They were waiting for the Payload. Some believed it would end history. Others believed it would restart it with better pacing.

A woman named Sonmi-Ø, or something like it, recorded everything in a notebook made of recycled missile casing. She believed testimony mattered even if no one read it. Especially then.

~~

The desert remembered other men, earlier men, men who had scalped and prayed and written nothing down. Their ghosts drifted like bad data. At night, the Kid dreamed of a book with no spine, only loops, each page ending where another began. He dreamed he was reading it backward while someone else read it forward and both of them were wrong.

Far away, in a rehab complex shaped like a smile, a boy named Hal Incandenza felt a sudden clarity, like a joke he understood too late. He tried to tell someone that gravity was not a force but a habit, that things fell because they had agreed to. No one understood him. They rarely did.

~~

When the Payload finally arrived, it did not explode.

It embedded itself gently in the earth, humming. The Judge approached it, reverent. He pressed his ear to the metal and laughed.

Inside was no bomb, no weapon, no ending—only a mirror, and behind the mirror another mirror, and behind that a ledger of every choice ever made, annotated by hands that did not agree with one another.

The Judge frowned for the first time in recorded memory.

“This won’t do,” he said. “It requires responsibility.”

The Payload kept humming. Stories began leaking out anyway—into dreams, into footnotes, into the margins of violence. People felt watched not by God, but by future readers.

The Kid walked away at dawn, carrying nothing, unrecorded. The desert closed behind him, patient as ever.

High above, something else began to fall, already laughing.

who wrote the classic tale combine so well together what the heck i have never heard of it before but will avoid it hints forks

Interesting that this is in bookscirclejerk