The Brangus Rebellion: Why this book? Why this blog?
Preliminaries
Welcome, readers, and potential same. If you’ve found this post, you are likely wondering why you should read The Brangus Rebellion, or its soon-to-be sequels, and what you would get if you did. Perhaps, if you follow this line of thought backward, you may want to know why I wrote the book(s) in the first place. Well, if so, then here you are. This post is the minimalist version. If that appeals, read further for more detail. Or even, you know, read the books.
So, what will you get from Brangus et al? Sure, you’ll get an entertaining tale of politico-realist crime, intrigue, and adventure, three centuries from now. But lots of writers could show you that. What’s different in my story is my worldview. The story swims in this worldview like a fish in water, and though parts of the View are commonplace, others are unusual, and I know of no place in the literature that advocates for the whole fishy lot of them.
Mind you, even in the Trilogy you will see only fragments of the View, as the story needs them. Who wants to pause the action in a novel to read the author’s manifesto? Hence this blog, which is really for readers who want to get down in the technical and philosophical weeds. Over time, I hope it will expose the main features of the thinking that motivated me, with more clarity and coherence than is desirable in the novels. To confusingly paraphrase Mario Cuomo, write fiction in poetry; blog in prose. This will take some time. But along the way, we can have fun, and by way of the comments, readers will have a chance to set me straight when I get things wrong.
So, what about the View? What’s in it, anyway? Foremost, it says that because of failings in human nature and our various bad habits, we are now racing toward disaster—a crash to be hastened by climate change (but with many other causes), worse and sooner than you think. But since people are resilient and hard to kill, there will be survivors. And among those, some will consider their lives, and ask what were the origins of the mess, and how might these be avoided? And—maybe—they will correctly identify the trouble spots (causation is always hard) and take the right preventive action.
What might that look like? Well, in the course of three books, I’ll tell you. I’ll mostly avoid the God-ain’t-it-awful aspects of the crash itself (that’s been done) and instead put solutions on display. As a science-obsessed and moderately literate fan of nature, I have done my best to make these adaptations eschew magic, magical technology, and wishful thinking. My telling of changes in the days to come makes no claim to prophecy, but at least there is, I hope, something plausible about it. I will, however, argue that the means to prevent a recurrence of our current pickle will be found in a non-technical improbability: it will require humans to live by different attitudes and values than the ones we now accept as self-evident. In broadest terms, people need to become more sensible and less selfish. Why would they do anything so unnatural? Because they are scared to death by their past.
In the following posts, I will dig into the most important of these “unnatural” behaviors practiced by citizens of the fictional North American Union. By way of the blog comments, you can if you wish insert your own opinions, pro or con. I’m aiming for a PG-rated site here, so please keep your comments clean and civil. With luck, the back-and-forth in this blog may spark a productive conversation about how to manage humanity’s future. If that happens, I will be satisfied. After all, isn’t that one of Sci-Fi’s aims?