The first collection of Macaque detective stories took several years to write. From the first I had no doubt that the Macaque stories were a fantasy, specifically a nonsense fantasy not unrelated to Edward Lear’s The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World or John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, which was first published in 1930 and is still in print. Of course nonsense is a very serious business and I cannot emphasize that enough.
It took some time before I realized that Macaque was science fiction as well. At first the world of Reese Macaque seemed unlikely to be an accurate or literal description of the future, though it certainly felt like a possible one. But eventually I began to suspect that these little tales of mystery and detection were set in a more-than-probable future world—a world we may in fact be hard pressed to avoid. Macaque seems to be on the road to actuality after all.
I must thank Rhesus A. Macaque’s co-creator, my son Edward. In an act of imagination, or maybe just mundane psychic prescience, Edward envisioned and began to flesh out the world of Reese Macaque. Ted and I are its first citizens and in the years to come Macaque’s world may seem less like fantasy.
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