Empire V

Victor Pelevin’s eighth novel, published in 2006. A young Moscow man is turned into a vampire and inducted into a hidden order that secretly runs human civilization — not by drinking blood, but by harvesting “bablos,” a substance distilled from human attention and desire. Under the vampire wrapper is a study of money, advertising, and consumer identity as a system that feeds on human minds.

A few lines worth keeping:

We live not among objects, but among the sensations supplied by our sense organs. What we take for stars, fences and burdock is simply a set of nerve impulses. We’re locked inside our bodies, and what seems like reality to us is just an interpretation of electrical signals arriving in the brain.

A man thinks he’s mining money for himself. But in fact he’s mining it out of himself. Life is arranged so that he can get a little money for his own use only if he produces significantly more for someone else.

People chase after visions that arise inside their own heads. But for some reason they chase them not inside the head, where the visions appear, but through the real physical world onto which the visions are projected.

Money doesn’t exist outside the mind, and yet you can’t get it straight from the mind either — someone still pays it out of some place beyond your own mind.

A modern office cubicle looks, even from the outside, like a stall for cattle. Only instead of a feed trough in front of the office proletarian’s muzzle there’s a monitor, showing the same feed in digital form.