The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra is a trilogy of novels written collectively on /lit/, the literature board of the infamous message board 4chan. Apart from its highly disparate and disturbing content, the collective approach is most evident in the massive alteration of fonts, font sizes, colors, and formatting, indicating the copy-and-pasting of chunks of text, as well as in the desperate attempts to end the text while someone else always seems to add or edit another chapter, paragraph, or word. An Anonymous stated in 4chan post #7370400 on November 19, 2015: “I didn’t contribute to it, but I did delete all of the writing in the Google doc several times while it was being written.” Typical responses to this are: “This is the true 4chan spirit.”
On the Lulu page for the first volume, the writing and editing process is described as follows: “The very first page made me cringe, the part about him drinking his cum, so I changed it to say a very good drink that he made at home. I then suddenly lost interest. Today I reread the first few pages and saw that my edit remained and also that on the second page the opening scene is revisited and this time it says he is drinking his own cum which was alluded to by me very lazily earlier on in an attempt to edit it out as a very good drink he made at home. When I got to that part I cackled. I’m not sure if anyone else would find that funny but I think it justifies the silliness in him drinking his own cum” (blurb on Lulu).
Many 4chan posts celebrate the release of the book and post photos of their orders. The tenor of the comments is: “It’s indescribable how great it feels to have shitposting in a physical form.” People also recommend each other to use Lulu coupons to save: “Purchasing this book with that coupon code is /lit/ in and of itself.” We found a screenshot of a sales statistic for the first volume on 4chan, which proves the sale of 201 units for September 2014 to January 2015.
There are several versions circulating the web as PDFs, as well as print-on-demand books (hardcover and paperback, black-and-white and color) flooding bookstores, making it impossible to trace down a definite version. However, most of the texts seem to be stable across these editions.
The first volume The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra was followed by two more the following year: The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra II: Miami and The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra 3: Tokyo Drift &Kolsti’s Adventure in the Everglades A Rom-Com, An Neovella SUPER_COMBO.
