Chaos! Quincunx

In tribute to the surrealist narrative techniques of André Breton and Robert Desnos, Minor Episodes documents the serial adventures of Minor, the ubiquitous "everymogul" who embodies the economic one percent and keeps musically erotic quixotics on tap. Having entered a "rent in time" that gives each chapter an alternate reality, Minor swaggers through an undersea casino, in-flight blockbuster, bawdy Western, and Kafkaesque job hunt, cavorting with billboard queen Bébé Lala and country-music legend Faith Faith, when not dressing down his shifty sidekick, The Concierge, or haunting the intensely disinterested songstress Miss Sharp. However, danger looms in the form of The Stropper, a serial killer fresh out of a shaving promotion, and an enigmatic ginger-beer icon who has retired from a satisfying life of culinary assassinations. Major Ruckus, a contrapuntal text and parody of the speculative fiction genre, celebrates the stylistic techniques of William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, following a frenzied struggle by various parties to obtain an essential time-travel component, a struggle that includes psychic "dicks," universal call-center operators, aboriginal eroticists, lubricant heiresses, rogue advertisement animations, pornography censors, and alien sperm-bank clones, all to the horrified fascination of hapless meta-writer Oober Mann. But ultimately it is Carl Sagan who creates the most confusion, when his prudish doodle of a woman is sent into space aboard the Voyager probe, triggering a plan to "assist" Earth's declining population through extraterrestrials in the guise of census takers. Minor Episodes and Major Ruckus introduce The Chaos! Quincunx series.

Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour resumes The Chaos! Quincunx novel series and presents two ironically dystopic visions of the speculative future. In Rogue Cells, Oober Mann emerges from his cryobed on high alert in New Haudenosaunee, a "First" nation at war with the mysterious territory Nutella. It is a critical election year when citizens live in dread of celebrities who carry out terrorist actions in defense of their own fundamentalist belief systems. Mixed up in an assassination plot under investigation by ISM (Insurgent Saddo Management) and DNA-specialist cops, Mann begins to wonder about not only the nature of reality but also the new woman in his life, a femme fatale known only as The Librarian. It is the Age of Aquarium in the speculative "green" dystopia of Carbon Harbour. Omni-magnate Cornelius Quartz is overseeing the merger between Bildung Endustries and Foreign Objects despite numerous distractions: a double wedding for himself and his daughter is imminent; he is about to lose his best promoter and lover to his rival Zirconium Bluff; and working conditions are terrible in the rehashing core and on the wind pharms for hardlucks. There bio-material is harvested to produce architecture, clothing, and other swag for a luxury class of hardcore gamers (they pay for "pollution fantasies" with carbon credits while on extended getaways to Putridworld).

In this prequel within a sequel, Diminuenda discovers that she stands to win a vast inheritance from her estranged father, the inimitable Minor, if she travels into the past and collects" a number of objects d'art. The cheeky diva travels to classical Greece, becoming the subject of the very painting she must steal as well as the focus of a Platonic dialogue. In ancient Rome, she dines with Emperor Tiberius and several Latin poets at his notorious grotto in Capri before stirring up more unrest among feuding Icelanders and First Nations as Minordis, the mysterious woman who steals the heart of the troublesome poet Loki. She then appears as a goddess to Botticelli in Renaissance Florence, but is soon toying with the Neoplatonic leanings of Lorenzo de' Medici as they wait out the aftermath of an assassination attempt, sharing a saucy round of Boccaccio-esque tales. In the realm of Louis XIV, Diminuenda lurks behind an unfinished play that explores the tension between Molière and the court composer Lulli, whose operatic innovations sound an ominous note for his cohort's splenetic invectives and social critique. In the most popular era for the epistolary novel, Augusta Ada Byron (Lovelace) is trying to cut down on laudanum, convinced of visits from the enigmatic Enchantress who will not only help her explain Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, but also encourage her opium-fueled hopes to bequeath to future generations a "Calculus of the Nervous System." Then, in WWII Britain, Agent D MINOR moves through a murky nouveau roman seemingly ruled by Alan Turing's theory of contradictions amid ill-fated schemes by MI5, including adaptations of Aleister Crowley's occultism, falcons trained to hunt homing pigeons, and brilliant forgeries of works such as Vermeer's The Art of Painting that will beguile the Third Reich. Minor Expectations resumes The Chaos! Quincunx novel series.