Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The object was first noticed by a US early warning system designed to detect intercontinental ballistic missiles; it was flagged as an error as the trajectory, speed, and destination were well outside the parameters for a nuclear strike. What possible use would there be in firing a missile at remote Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic, especially if the telemetry that indicated the object came from a lunar orbit was to be believed.

But remembering the Vela Incident of 1979, which may or may not have been a covert nuclear test, the US government duly warned Norway, which administered the remote and glacial rock in question. Bouvet Island was uninhabited but did feature an advanced weather station complete with a satellite link and video feed; the Norwegian government made this data available to the US as the object approached. It recorded impossible atmospheric conditions, a surge of radiation, and what appeared to be infrared or ultraviolet lights in the sky before the transmission was abruptly terminated. The object disappeared from scopes immediately afterward.

Unable to image the site due to heavy cloud cover, the light vessel USS Eldridge was dispatched to investigate with a hastily assembled American-Norwegian survey team aboard. Upon reaching a distance of approximately 6.2832km from Bouvet, contact with the Eldridge was lost after a few badly distorted final transmissions. A few pieces of debris traceable to the ship washed up on the coast of South Africa some months later. A second ship, the frigate HMAS Darwin, sought to investigate at the request of the American and Norwegian governments after the Eldridge vanished. It too vanished on reaching a position 6.2832km from shore.

With over 300 people now missing near Bouvet, any further attempts at investigation were suspended. Instead, several spy satellites equipped with radar and other advanced telemetry were moved to orbits above the island. In each case, the satellites malfunctioned shortly after arriving on station, as if they had been affected by a powerful electromagnetic pulse. Intense analysis of the fragmentary data seemed to indicate some kind of new construction on Bouvet and a series of bizarre trenches in the glaciers there. The designs and patterns of the structures and glacial trenches, such as they could be discerned, matched no known architecture.

Since that time, despite rampant speculation, no satellites, ships, or aircraft have approached Bouvet by order of the International Maritime Organization. Private vessels have attempted landings, often at the behest of fringe groups, but all have disappeared with only the occasional bit of scattered wreckage to attest their fate.

Whoever or whatever landed on Bouvet has not sought to interfere, but will brook no interference itself.

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As sensational a bestseller as Dalva’s book was, its success was quickly sullied by lawsuits. After its 10th straight week on the New York Times bestseller list, a representative of Kyoto Processed Ricepaper Concerns Press filed a suit claiming that A Lone Red Tree had been plagiarized from Jina Himenashi’s novel 偽翻訳 (roughly “red tree standing among dead chrysanthemum blossoms”), which had been published a full six weeks earlier.

Dalva protested that he couldn’t read Japanese, and his lawyer added that while 偽翻訳 had been a Japanese bestseller there were no records of copies being sold or shipped overseas. Himenashi’s legal team presented a compelling argument, displaying translated excerpts of 偽翻訳 and Lone Red Tree side-by-side. With suitable differences to account for the differences in language structure, the descriptions and events were largely identical.

Particularly damning was the central piece of Dalva’s prose, which told of “a single red tree standing in a dead forest ringed by forever stormfronts.” The comparable phrase of Himenasi’s novel, “いない本物の英語日本語への翻訳,” meant essentially the same thing without definite articles and dead cherry trees where Dalva had conifers. The central thrust of each plot, with a protagonist haunted by the image of that tree until they seek it out and are driven mad in the attempt, was also the same, save that Dalva’s title was set in his native Portland and Himenashi’s tale began in Sapporo.

A guilty verdict and a massive recall of Dalva’s book—to say nothing of a black eye for the press and reviewers behind it—seemed inevitable. But then a representative of Spanish author Cristobal Carminha came forward, claiming that the book Un solitario árbol rojo, which had been a modest seller in Galacia, was a dead match for both 偽翻訳 and Lone Red Tree and predated either by almost a year. The trial broke up in disarray not long after as the judge demanded a more thorough investigation.

Agents for the publishers in question soon found that no less than 150 books had been written in the previous two years featuring the haunting, maddening image of a single red tree standing in a dead forest ringed by forever stormfronts. Most had been rejected by publishers, but over 40 had made it into print in everything from vanity editions to professional bound copies.

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While there had been a flourishing trade with the outside world at times in the past, the ascension of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603 gradually put an end to that. The Tokugawa shoguns recognized the need for trade and technology but were deeply suspicious of foreigners, and viewed Christianity in particular as a threat to the shogun’s authority. As such, outside trade was gradually curtailed until the Sakoku-rei or “closed-country edict” prohibited Westerners from entering, Japanese from leaving, and Catholics from existing.

A single area, Dejima Island in Nagasaki harbor, remained open to Portuguese and later Dutch traders, who were able to realize astounding profits of 50% or more at the cost of being confined to the small island and bound by a draconian set of procedural rules. But, as with the rest of the world, there were many adventurers from other areas—England, France, Scandinavia—who were unwilling to abide by those restrictions. After all, Japan had developed a taste for eyeglasses, firearms, astrolabes, coffee, chocolate, and other items that could only be obtained overseas.

The remaining Christians in Japan—persecuted, occasionally in open rebellion, and often driven underground—were a particularly lucrative source of income, as they had nowhere else to obtain crucifixes and weapons (and many of the illicit traders fancied themselves defending the faith in addition to making a profit). Their seamanship and swordpoints honed by the constant inter-European naval warfare of the period, these privateers were formidable smugglers.

Naturally, the Tokugawa shogunate was not helpless in the face of such unwanted foreign incursion. To maintain the fiction that Japan was inviolate, and to exercise the immediate death sentence the law proscribed for unauthorized foreigners on Japanese soil, the shogunate employed a network of coastwatchers and spies. Lucrative rewards were quietly offered for those who discreetly informed upon Catholics or those trading illicitly with outsiders, and specially-trained shinobi-no-mono retained by the shogun from the Iga and Kōga clans were dispatched to deal with such incursions.

During the great siege of Hara Castle during the Catholic-led Shimabara Rebellion in 1637-38, for example, European privateers supplied the rebels and engaged in gunnery duels with both Japanese ships and their shinobi-no-mono crews and Dutch vessels hired by the shogun. Though few records ever existed due to the illicit and clandestine nature of the struggle, quieter and small-scale actions would be contested between smugglers and shogunate mercenaries and troops for over a hundred years until the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the 19th century.

And that, my friends, is how the long-standing enmity between pirates and ninjas came to be.

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Orwell is the man. Nobody writes against the totalitarian left quite like a disappointed socialist!

One thing that I note, while reading 1984, is that most commentators completely overlook the Proles. That’s incidentally a good way to tell the difference between someone who’s actually read the book and someone who’s just absorbed its broad strokes from Cliff Notes or cultural osmosis. Just ask them about the Proles, or listen to them assume that all the citizens of 1984 Oceania have telescreens (they don’t) or are under constant watch by the Thought Police (they aren’t, at least not to the extent of the Party).

But in many ways, since the destruction of all but a few of the old, monolithic Communist evils, it’s the Proles who represent some of 1984‘s most compelling and timely material circa 2012. After all, the Proles don’t have the overt, draconian surveillance imposed on the Outer Party; instead they’re kept satiated with prolefeed, a constant stream of low-quality, mind-numbing entertainment (and of course “Pornosec”).

I wonder what Orwell would think of a few hours of US/UK “reality TV” or supermarket tabloids in that context? It certainly is mindless stuff, on the whole. But you have to ask yourself if our proles–or us, the proles–are simply heaving down our prolefeed either at the behest of an oppressor or, perhaps more chillingly, the behest of no sinister agency at all. To borrow another dystopian metaphor, could the clamshell earphones of Fahrenheit 451 exist if there were no oppressive, external force driving them–nothing but the free market?

Maybe we are have all made proles of ourselves, and no one will realize it until someone or something steps into the vacuum to become Big Brother.

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A few years ago, as a fresh young professor straight out of graduate school, I was excited to be arriving at my new job just as we it was hosting a presidential debate. One of my co-workers at my old job had made me promise to get one candidate’s autograph for her if I met him, and I’d made the same promise to my parents for the other.

To my disappointment, though, many of the events were restricted to students, and faculty were not eligible to participate in the raffle for debate tickets. It seemed that my sole memories of the debate would be the traffic snarls, the high-security cordon set up around the performing arts center, and the endless stream of news media personalities talking about the civil rights era as if nothing had happened at the university in the interim.

Then, a stroke of luck: one of my friends, who was a grad student with Health and Nutrition, told me that the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease needed volunteers to work the “Evening with Tom Brokaw” event in late September. The Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease might just be the least objectionable, least controversial charity ever—who in their right mind is actually in favor of chronic disease?

Best of all, volunteers would get free tickets to the event if there were any left.

So I donned the provided purple-and-white Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease t-shirt, one size too small, and took up a plastic placard with the Partnership’s URL. I worked the Brokaw line in the muggy dusk, urging anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn’t) to Fight Chronic Disease and flashing the placard for good measure. Most people agreed that there was merit to Fighting Chronic Disease; a few even asked to get involved. All I could do, as a mercenary draftee volunteer, was lamely point them to the URL.

I like to think that peoples’ awareness was piqued, if not about the need to Fight Chronic Disease then at least about what Chronic Disease was (I explained several times the difference between chronic and acute diseases as best a former English major could). And my friends and I were given tickets to see Brokaw, still clad in purple-white and clutching placards. His talk was illuminating, and it was the closest I’d come to seeing someone of importance during the debate. Neither candidate cared to spend more than the minimum time necessary for the debate in town or to waste even one iota of their precious time meeting anyone from the community.

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This post is part of the July 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “independence and slavery”.

Like a river winding from its headwaters to the sea, you come from whatever little burg gave you your spark and shake off its dust on the threshold of the city. The big city. The biggest city. It’s always been there, open, inviting, but you’ve only just now taken the time to meet it for longer than a visit.

You’re in the city to stay.

It’s like declaring your independence from circumstance and geography. “I don’t care that I was born in a place where nothing substantive has ever happened,” you’re saying. “I don’t care that it’s impossible to earn a living here as a writer or an artist or a singer. I’m moving to a place where things happen and talent can be rewarded.”

And then you go. You take everything that you’ve been given, from your parents, your friends, your school, everything. You take it and you go.

Suddenly you don’t have to worry about finding something to do tonight. The night is lit up, always, forever with a thousand neon signs and peals of hushed laughter. You’ve declared your independence from boredom, from shyness, from envy: if you feel those here, it’s your own fault for not taking deepest advantage, for not inhaling the sweet acrid city vapors to their fullest.

But even in this independence, deep and full, new chains take hold where the old scars have scarce begun to heal.

Even the city runs on money, on gossip, on superficialities concealed behind bright and inviting smiles. You must still make the rent, only it’s harder now with a thousand hands in your pockets. What so and so did with such and such is exchanged as freely and tenderly as the most bitterly mundane comings and goings back in your small town. People smile more here because it’s expected of them more, at least if they want to get noticed and get ahead. But the dagger in the small of the back is just as sharp when it connects.

The subway, the bus, the tree-lined parkways…in many ways they are new chains, shackling you as surely as distance and time and indifference do in cities that are small enough to walk across. The expectations are still there, hemming you in, only they’re different this time. You must still move a certain way, act a certain way, be a certain way if you want what others have to give. Disappointment is perhaps all the keener because there are so very many opportunities.

The city is independence and slavery made one, just as is the village.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
knotanes
meowzbark
Ralph Pines
randi.lee
writingismypassion
pyrosama
bmadsen
dclary (blog)
Poppy
areteus
Sweetwheat
ThorHuman
Tex_Maam

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The Cascadia Company had had plenty of accidents over the years, and much as the tried to maintain a high standard for community theater some mishaps were bound to occur.

There was the time that the fire escape set had collapsed during dress rehearsals for West Side Story, largely thanks to Debbie Hannover’s insistence that it be made out of real metal. No one was injured, but the scene wound up being played on a stepladder opening night.

Then there was the Cascadia Festival performance of Twelfth Night where the swordfight between “Cesario” and Sir Andrew Aguecheek ended with Bryan Culbert getting swatted with a blunt prop sword and breaking his nose. To his credit, he delivered his subsequent lines even as fresh blood soaked through his white gloves and even worked references to the injury into his dialogue. The show must go on, after all, even if you must be rushed to the hospital afterwards.

And who could forget the time that the pyrotechnic charges in Godspell (don’t ask) accidentally caught Harry Plover, playing Jesus Christ, on fire. They stopped the performance for that one, even though Harry escaped with only second-degree burns and managed to get off a very funny line about knowing how the burning bush felt.

Those had all entered the lore of the Cascadia Company, passed down as older members retired and new high school seniors or starry-eyed Osborn University undergrads rose up to take their place. No matter how badly someone missed their cue or how sour that last note of Oklahoma! sounded, they said, it could never get any worse.

Of course, that was before Carl Weisschrift died of a myocardian infarction onstage as King Lear.

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Vic Savage was born into a prosperous merchant family in a major regional center. However, his parents’ business was ruined by an outbreak of plague and they were essentially forced into the street, winding up with relatives in the bad part of town. He spent a large part of his late childhood and adolescence on the street, running with urchins and impromptu thieves’ gangs. Those pursuits resulted in an athletic and dexterous temperament, while his family’s fall from grace meant that he slipped easily into the role of a rogue and sometime thief, though their former station means that he prefers to steal from people he believes deserve it.

Somewhat impulsive, Vic tends to speak before he thinks, and often rushes into situations as well. While he’s quick to claim that he has a silver tongue he actually stumbles somewhat with words and has a hard time convincing anyone of his point of view. He’s also easily distracted and prone to daydreaming. His prosperous background means that he had a relatively good education as a youngster; he also tends to prefer gaudy and expensive clothes for that same reason.

Vic wears his dark hair short (to keep anyone from getting a handhold) and tends to be unshaven despite his pretensions to a more noble appearance. He is of average height.

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Gravelines link all cemetaries, charnel-houses, catacombs, mausoleums, ossuaries, and tombs, and are the primary method by which the Pale travel from place to place. Be they Pale of substance, like ghouls or ghasts, or Pale lacking substance, like ghosts and banshees, all Pale may use the gravelines by their very nature. To the living, they represent a mystery that cannot be plumbed.

Travel is not instantaneous, and the Pale may be tracked or the course of a particular graveline mapped (though they tend to be difficult to follow, proceeding ramrod-straight through bush and earth, rock and house). The most reliable way is to obtain a togdove, a bird only born in a textile fire that claims at least one life. Togdoves by their nature are half of the Pale and are sensitive to the charnel smell and lambent ectoplasmic glow of a graveline. One may provide a trained togdove with a bit of the Pale to be tracked or simply turn it loose and hope that the graveline it follows be the correct one.

The togdove will soar along the graveline as best as it is able, and is often bound by a fine and flameproof chain around one leg. It will signal that the destination has been reached by bursting into sudden flame, which (again due to their nature) is neither painful nor fatal.

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I even tended to refer to him with the informal pseudo-affectionate nickname “Teddy” even though I knew through a little bit of research that he’d hated being called that by anyone who wasn’t a close family member. Then again, Theodore Marlowe was the sort that knew the value of a name: born John Theodore Marlow, it had taken the judicious dropping of a too-common first name and the addition of an unnecessary vowel to make his a name fit for literary immortality.

Deerton held its annual Marlowe Days events at the same time as the county fair as the only vestige of tourism a tiny burg like that was able to eke out. After all, Teddy had been born at what was then Deerton General (now Infrared Health Systems Mid-Michigan Campus no. 27) and attended what was then Deerton Elementary (now John T. Seymour Elementary) until the age of 10, when his family had moved to Grand Rapids and thence to Detroit. He’d been shortlisted for a Nobel, his novels and stories were still in print, and film adaptations had made millions of dollars over the years.

I prickled a little under the management role I had in Marlowe Days, though, for the simple reason that Theodore Marlowe hadn’t been all that find of Deerton at all. Biographies tended to give us a sentence, if we were lucky, before going into exhaustive detail on Marlowe’s days in Grand Rapids and Detroit. I had been through reams of interviews, and all the man ever had to say about us was negative. There was the CBS interview from 1969 where he talked of “escaping the stultifying atmosphere of small-town mundanity,” for instance, or the 1978 radio talk where he said “everything that made me who I am is of the furniture and automotive cities.”

As in not Deerton.

After moving away, he hadn’t visited once despite plenty of Marlow and Higginsfield relatives. Invitations to speak at DHS commencements or other events were returned unopened. His books, powerful as they were, spoke to the salad days of Michigan industry giving way to the rust belt.

Big city problems.

Only in death, it seemed, did Teddy have anything for us. His estate agreed to Marlowe Days less than two months after the author died in 1980.

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