‘The Expansion Project’

We’ve all been to The Expansion Project, an ordinary day in the office when you feel like you’re not really there. Maybe you aren’t?

The Expansion Project is a literary science fiction novel by Ben Pester. It explores the unreality of the workplace as a metaphor for life. It’s David Graber’s Bullshit Jobs expressed in a work of fiction. The workplace as a simulation in a Philip K Dick novel. A liminal space in Backrooms or Exit 8. It’s the alien world of Annihilation. The ‘zone’ from Stalker. Whatever The Expansion Project is… it’s a bizarre and surreal place that’s been archived at some point in the distant future by an archivist who also isn’t ‘feeling it’.

There is no satisfying explanation telling us what it’s all about. This is literary science fiction, after all, not genre fiction. So, it’s the experience of the narrative and the language that is the destination rather than a story arc with a conclusion to the journey.

Literary science fiction seems to be having something of a renaissance. Much like the death of the Western genre spawned literary Westerns like Blood Meridian – the current stasis of the science fiction genre has seen the rise of literary science fiction novels like Klara and the Sun, Machines Like Me, The Second Sleep, and now The Expansion Project.