Generation P

Generation P story line

GENERATION P, adapted from the iconic bestseller by Viktor Pelevin, is a rude and funny dispatch about Moscow in the ’90s, ground zero to the money, terror, and image-driven logic which replaced the Cold War.

The story details the parallel rise of poet-turned-copywriter Babylen Tatarsky through both a nascent advertising business and the shadowy Cult of Ishtar, whose acolytes control the media. Along the way, we meet, among others, Che Guevara, a fiery dragon with very bad news about TV, and a chauffeur with a marked resemblance to Vladimir Putin, who is elected president of Russia.

When Babylen was a “Young Pioneer,” his generation received a gift from the decaying Soviet State in the form of a bottle of Pepsi, made in Russia. Not just a beverage, it was also a symbol of hope that someday a new, magical life would arrive from the other side of the ocean and transform their lives. The arrival of this new magic, and what it did and did not transform, is the story of Generation P.

Though delivered in the rapid-patter style of a classic Thirties screwball farce, the mordant and ironic humor of GENERATION P has more in common with the metaphysical modernities of Williams Burroughs and Gibson. Set in the ground zero of gangster globalism and driven by a truly manic energy, GENERATION P is at once a comedy, a tragedy, and a documentary fantasy about the disappearing lines between above and below, government and business, legal and illegal, reality and its digital double….and a joke about the end of the world.