Louise Fabiani

In an episode from the third season of Mad Men, the main character – a man calling himself Don Draper – experiences his greatest nightmare when his real name and backstory come to light. His wife (who makes the discovery) is appalled: “You’ve been lying to me every day,” she says.

Door weaves the journeys of several human characters – Aydee, Lucas, and Sandra – against a fantastical background of altered states of consciousness (and even states of identity), which seem to involve visits to a world of large, menacing creatures – part myth, part machine, part human.

The mid-twentieth-century German writer Walter Benjamin said: “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one: they are, in other words, special cases.” As we lurch into the twenty-first century, one thing that surely connects us to the most change-defined century in human history is invention through the blending of distinctions. Hybridization is not just for rose bushes anymore.