The stories that appear in Terminal Boredom, her English language debut published in April in translation by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan, also highlight her deft handling of technology’s relationship to human life. Like Butler, Japanese writer and actress Izumi Suzuki had a remarkable ability to depict technology in ways that remain startlingly prescient decades after her death in 1986.

Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), are seen, decades later, as prophetic. The delicate balance between remaining grounded in the present and having some foresight into technological advances seems to be what causes some works to flounder while others, like Octavia E. Part of this struggle is practical: there are countless examples of writers trying to organically integrate technology into their work only for that technology to painfully age what they’ve written when it’s revisited years later. Some writers, like Lauren Oyler in Fake Accounts (2021) or Patricia Lockwood in No One is Talking About This (2021), tackle technology and social media head-on, making it key to the plot, while others decide to omit any mention of social media or even smart phones in their work altogether. Technology can be a difficult topic to handle within fiction.

If you have any questions about a shipment, send a note to our bookstore staff at. Please allow 1-3 weeks for your book(s) to arrive. Books purchased for events will begin shipping out the day after the event, unless otherwise noted. Thank you for supporting our nonprofit-run indie bookstore! Your purchase will help support our KidsRead programs for NYC Public Schools, Emerging Writer Fellowships, and public programming. Panelists Sam Bett, Morgan Giles, Daniel Joseph, Margaret Mitsutani, and Helen O’Horan will discuss the timeliness of these themes as well as the widening body of Japanese-to-English translations.

The late author was a countercultural icon, centering her writing on themes of gender and the danger of technological attachment.

Terminal Boredom is a collection of unique, speculative short stories that capture Suzuki’s singular voice. A panel of Japanese-to-English literary translators joins us to celebrate the launch of science-fiction legend Izumi Suzuki’s first English-translated book.

Terminal boredom suzuki