The first three stories in The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I., the sequel to The Adventures of Reese Macaque, Private Investigator, are now up on Amazon Kindle. They’re up as individual stories for those who may have bought the first two stories separately, and also as a three-story collection, Macaque’s Progress, on offer for the lowest price allowed (99 cents). I recommend the collection because the first two stories (“President Nero’s Golden Palace” and “Two Terrible Weeks in Tedboro”) have been thoroughly rewritten again alongside the third story, “Danger Is My Alibi.”
The rewrite monkeys. Oh please not again!!!!!
The Macaque tales are science fiction detective stories. Detective stories are generally tales of manners. Science fiction detective stories, then, are about social manners in a future world.
Beautiful cover by Alex and Pohakea.
As an aside, I’d love to see an anime version of the Macaque stories. We don’t ask for backstory in film. As viewers, we tend to accept what we see. Readers, however, have different needs and expectations. We have to be negotiated into accepting what we read. It’s not the same part of the brain.
The Adventures takes the sudden immersion approach and contains little backstory, leaving the reader to absorb details and draw conclusions about the America of the 2300s along the way—including the important question of not just who but what our detective, Rhesus A. Macaque, is. Rhesus says his mother named him after his blood type. He is not a Rhesus, despite the hide, tail and the prehensile feet.
The answer to Reese’s identity, to give the thing away, is the incredible genomic diversity of his Dad combined with his Mom’s full set of robust primate genes. Obviously a case of Planned Parenthood. Reese Macaque and his many, many siblings are not an accident at all.
The Adventures takes the sudden immersion approach and contains little backstory, leaving the reader to absorb details and draw conclusions about the America of the 2300s along the way—including the important question of not just who but what our detective, Rhesus A. Macaque, is. Rhesus says his mother named him after his blood type. He is not a Rhesus, despite the hide, tail and the prehensile feet.
The answer to Reese’s identity, to give the thing away, is the incredible genomic diversity of his Dad combined with his Mom’s full set of robust primate genes. Obviously a case of Planned Parenthood. Reese Macaque and his many, many siblings are not an accident at all.
Macaque’s real Dad, Euler. (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30918973).
The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I. begins with a three-story arc containing lots of references to the immediate past, orienting the unexposed to the new world of Macaque. Gosh, that makes it political. The deconstructed post-Secession-Era America of The Adventures is not just genetically unstable. It’s unstable in every other way too. Yet we easily recognize many things fundamental to American culture or directly descended from Classical Television, the golden era of the Imperial past that the Americans of the 2300s try furiously to base their own societies on.
To some extent the “Tedboro” arc of stories asks, indirectly, What is government? Where do governments come from? Also, where do they go when they disappear? Just to state a fact, whole governments do regularly blink out of existence, some quietly, some with a bang.
It’s a question I keep reverting to. Rockfish bothers to describe at least some aspects of the rise and fall of various political regimes in Virginia and the U.S. over the period of the novel, from the 1750s to 2001. How various forms and levels of government change, at least at the local level, is never neglected. Since it is about groups of people, Rockfish never escapes the question of how groups regulate themselves and how they are regulated by other groups. All individuals in society live in just such webs. Fiction describing this could maybe be called social-realist fiction, and I guess that covers me, for lack of a better critic. The same impulse toward social realism is more obvious in The Southern Skylark, which seems to be about American Slavery in the Romantic Era, and Exemptions, about college life in 1969-1970, a year of revolution. The Macaque saga, in its undercurrents, is in the same vein.
But there’s no reason to be unamusing. I’m told that these new stories are a bit darker than the Adventures, less freewheeling and more serious. It’s 2020. I’m not deaf, dumb and blind, like the three monkeys. I hope the stories are still funny anyway.
To some extent the “Tedboro” arc of stories asks, indirectly, What is government? Where do governments come from? Also, where do they go when they disappear? Just to state a fact, whole governments do regularly blink out of existence, some quietly, some with a bang.
It’s a question I keep reverting to. Rockfish bothers to describe at least some aspects of the rise and fall of various political regimes in Virginia and the U.S. over the period of the novel, from the 1750s to 2001. How various forms and levels of government change, at least at the local level, is never neglected. Since it is about groups of people, Rockfish never escapes the question of how groups regulate themselves and how they are regulated by other groups. All individuals in society live in just such webs. Fiction describing this could maybe be called social-realist fiction, and I guess that covers me, for lack of a better critic. The same impulse toward social realism is more obvious in The Southern Skylark, which seems to be about American Slavery in the Romantic Era, and Exemptions, about college life in 1969-1970, a year of revolution. The Macaque saga, in its undercurrents, is in the same vein.
But there’s no reason to be unamusing. I’m told that these new stories are a bit darker than the Adventures, less freewheeling and more serious. It’s 2020. I’m not deaf, dumb and blind, like the three monkeys. I hope the stories are still funny anyway.
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