No one in the near future is very likely to look back on 2020 as an inconsequential moment in time—not in the United States, anyway. Some of my suspicions about the world of the future are on display in the third edition of The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. and its ongoing sequel, The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I. But before turning to that topic, I would like to mention something more important: Karen’s and my 49th Anniversary last week.
One of my favorite pictures of Karen. We started dating in the tenth grade.
Back now to literary news: another winkle has washed up on the beach. There is now a 3rd Edition of The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. I found some glaring imperfections in the second edition, unsurprisingly. Also, the increasingly detailed features of the world of Macaque in the sequel, The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I., made textual reconciliation in the Adventures necessary.
The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I. is now represented on Kindle by two finished stories: a tidied-up new version of “President Nero’s Golden Palace” and the all-new “Two Terrible Weeks in Tedboro,” a sideshow so dryly funny that readers will wish they could be there now. But no hurry. We will all get to Texas soon enough, in God’s good time.
“Two Terrible Weeks in Tedboro” incorporates a good deal of backstory for the world of P.I. Macaque in the Adventures and Casebook, and it’s a little eerie to watch parallels forming in real life. I would have supposed only nonfiction writers get this much reality. Fortunately, the world of P.I. Macaque is in some ways not as disconcerting as the world of the present.
The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. needed historical underpinnings to clear up how the post-Federal world got the way Reese finds it. I would never have realized this myself. My coauthor Ted worked more on this point than I did.
Composition is a ghostly business. The composer is in many ways not unlike a phantom, and the composed world is entirely made of shadows. Rather than trying to describe how that works, I’d just recommend watching or rewatching Carl Laemmle’s 1925 film, The Phantom of the Opera. The patent for creation is almost all in there. The parts that aren’t covered, and much else, can just as easily be found in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film, Vampyr.
The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I. is now represented on Kindle by two finished stories: a tidied-up new version of “President Nero’s Golden Palace” and the all-new “Two Terrible Weeks in Tedboro,” a sideshow so dryly funny that readers will wish they could be there now. But no hurry. We will all get to Texas soon enough, in God’s good time.
“Two Terrible Weeks in Tedboro” incorporates a good deal of backstory for the world of P.I. Macaque in the Adventures and Casebook, and it’s a little eerie to watch parallels forming in real life. I would have supposed only nonfiction writers get this much reality. Fortunately, the world of P.I. Macaque is in some ways not as disconcerting as the world of the present.
The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. needed historical underpinnings to clear up how the post-Federal world got the way Reese finds it. I would never have realized this myself. My coauthor Ted worked more on this point than I did.
Composition is a ghostly business. The composer is in many ways not unlike a phantom, and the composed world is entirely made of shadows. Rather than trying to describe how that works, I’d just recommend watching or rewatching Carl Laemmle’s 1925 film, The Phantom of the Opera. The patent for creation is almost all in there. The parts that aren’t covered, and much else, can just as easily be found in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film, Vampyr.
But back to the Adventures and the Casebook—in the first place the world of the North American Exarchate circa 2400 C.E. is not post-apocalyptic. A full-on apocalypse (thermonuclear annihilation for instance, or something like that) would be too definitive to yield up the world of Macaque. However, things more in the Mommsen-Gibbon-Carlyle-Toynbee-Hobsbawm line, a coherent historical theory of the fall of the Federal Empire and the rise of the North American Exarchate, would be too advanced for fiction. Ted and I, as we conjured up the world of Macaque, weren’t looking for a theory—just for some explanations.
After we put theory and apocalypse aside, the most self-evident remaining list of likely causes for the fall of the Federal Empire were individually more trivial—things that would rock society to its foundations, force a belch out of it and then be digested. In the Macaque series, we’re positing—or glancing back at—four centuries of unexplained history. A drowned coastline and a few economic crises is not enough to collapse a world-empire like Federal America. It just isn’t.
So, like a gamer sorting playing cards, Ted put some options aside and collected others into a really great losing hand. In the world of Reese Macaque, it was no one thing that slew the Empire; it was all the things. And very stupid things they were. I suppose few of our Macaquian conversations were very memorable, but this is my chance to say to Ted, I was listening carefully.
So, like a gamer sorting playing cards, Ted put some options aside and collected others into a really great losing hand. In the world of Reese Macaque, it was no one thing that slew the Empire; it was all the things. And very stupid things they were. I suppose few of our Macaquian conversations were very memorable, but this is my chance to say to Ted, I was listening carefully.
Piranesi’s quaint human figures.
There’s a lot of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall lurking in the background of the Macaque stories, like the quaint human figures in Piranesi’s Roman prints. A greater influence generally, in this case, is John Julius Norwich’s Byzantium Trilogy.
John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich (15 September 1929 – 1 June 2018) (Source: Wikipedia).
One of the tremendously fun things about Norwich’s three-volume history of Byzantium is the sheer smallness, and often the silliness, of the vast ocean of real-world minutiae in which the Eastern Roman Empire floundered for so many centuries before finally drowning. While Gibbon practically viewed Byzantine history as a volumes-long crime story, the point of Norwich’s history is not Byzantium’s crimes; rather, to me his larger point seems to be the stark reality of a “tide in the affairs of men”, and the blunt fact that governments unable to swim in those tides will drown forthwith.
The polities and dukedoms of the American Exarchate that Macaque knows—Cascadia, Tenn-O-Tucky, the Grain Republic, the Wisconsin Economic Zone, Carolina, Dixie, New Virginia, Texas, California, the rump Federal Territories and so many others, large and small—are the fruit of Byzantium in a way. Politically and culturally this is the sort of thing history’s ‘Byzantiums’ tend to produce. No sense panicking about it—but we might all be a trifle better off if, like Reese, we still had our tails!
The polities and dukedoms of the American Exarchate that Macaque knows—Cascadia, Tenn-O-Tucky, the Grain Republic, the Wisconsin Economic Zone, Carolina, Dixie, New Virginia, Texas, California, the rump Federal Territories and so many others, large and small—are the fruit of Byzantium in a way. Politically and culturally this is the sort of thing history’s ‘Byzantiums’ tend to produce. No sense panicking about it—but we might all be a trifle better off if, like Reese, we still had our tails!
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