A Warning to the Curious
Many years have passed since the detective casebooks of Rhesus A. Macaque and his partner Guy Poisson were first opened to the public, beginning with the Adventures and the Trilogy. Not all the cases were made available until now. It did not seem wise. The future is a different country, to paraphrase L.P. Hartley. The future will be as different as the past. Those of us trapped in the present apparently have a lot to look forward to. But the world of the Complete Adventures is too far in the future to look forweard to--about 500 years, give or take some decades. We may never personally see that world unless we decide to build it ourselves. We should start now, if I may be so bold. This book, in its primal innocence, is quite suitable for children despite the unnecessary use of a small number of curse words. The mild damns are meant to be educational, and they are buried deep in the text where children are unlikely to be corrupted by them. It's usual in forewords to deny resemblances to the living and the dead, but in this case we're centuries too early for the issue to come up. Nonetheless, when our interlocutors from the American Exarchate nearly half a millennium from now refer to historical facts and figures in this work, you may be sure they have been double-checked and are correct. In closing, I can do no better than to quote Rhesus himself: "We have all been very lucky." |
Origins
Science fiction is a way of exploring the future without going there. But science fiction is not all about futuristic machinery. It is a genre of social writing, and often takes the nature and future prospects of civilization as its topic. Building, maintaining, losing, and if necessary rebuilding a civilization is the huge theme taken in hand by countless works of science fiction. Another great theme is an outrageous protagonist surviving in a dysfunctional civilization. It’s a daunting tradition, and I never imagined I would write Sci Fi myself. But about fifteen years ago Edward Mawyer handed me an untitled manuscript, 30 pages long, framing the mad adventures of Reese Macaque. More than a few people saw Ted’s work and thought it was either screamingly funny or seriously disturbing. It was a manuscript ambitious past the dreams of English majors, told within a startlingly real world, a world all too much like our own, and yet backlit with unjustified flashes of hope and aspiration. For a time Ted and I worked on a short story version of his original manuscript, and he produced several more short passages that added to the collection. The main artistic question about Rhesus A. Macaque was not simple. How is it that Macaque is a human? Or is he a monkey? The main artistic question promptly split in half on us, but both halves pointed in the same direction: is there just one Macaque or are they a kind of thing? That was how I found myself writing a science fiction detective novel, The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. Detective novels are generally novels of manners. A science fiction detective novel of manners is (I suppose) about social interactions in a future world—and an obvious way to dissect social behaviors in our world. In the case of this book, the society in question is ours, in the year 2296. There is a certain amount of nonsense in Macaque, but nonsense is a very serious business. Over the last few years, I began to suspect that these little tales of mystery and detection occur in a more-than-probable future world—a world we will in fact be hard pressed to avoid. Though the world of P.I. Macaque didn’t seem likely to be an accurate or literal description of the future when we started, Macaque seems to be on the road to actuality after all. So thanks, Ted. In an act of imagination, or maybe prescience, you created the world of Reese Macaque. We’re its first citizens, but I have a hunch that indeed, we have actually foreseen the real future. |