ISBN Paper: 1-887276-23-8
US: $ 12.95, Can: $ 16.95
Fall 2000

THE ELECTRIC COMEDY
by Rolando Perez

The Electric Comedy is a retelling of the ancient epic about the perennial war between the forces of greed, power, ignorance and (virtual) sex on one side and the deployments of generosity, empowerment, love and enlightened example, on the other, brought to life against the backdrop of the inescapable hyper-reality of our digital web. Grave questions emerge from the deep. Who is helping whom? Who is the spider and who is the fly? Is anyone winning in this scenario?

Just as Dante's Divina Commedia dealt with the political and social conditions of Renaissance Italy, Rolando Perez's The Electric Comedy takes the reader through a journey of the soul, in the contemporary global landscape of simulated love, internet capitalism and the new metaphysics of virtual realities. With God dead and Minerva slain, Dante's guiding light is transformed into the artificial light of electricity and a new conception of "vision" with no possibility of redemption. Everyone from Plato to Wired, from Lao-tzu to Bill Gates and beyond end up in the pages of this book. Perez's guide is not Virgil but some old maps left behind by Nietzsche.