The Chaos! Quincunx Series

In Rogue Cells, Oober Mann emerges from his cryobed on high alert in New Haudenosaunee, a nation at war with the mysterious territory Nutella during a critical election year. Citizens here live in dread of celebrities who carry out terrorist actions in defence of their own fundamentalist belief systems, including Stratford-upon-Avonists, whose guerrilla conflicts stem from slight variations of Shakespearian texts; Drumhellerists, whose discovery of some dinosaur bones results in a polygamous sect; and Chaos!tologists whose divine teachings are to be found in an obscure book with questionable authorship. Mixed up in an assassination plot being investigated by ISM (Insurgent Saddo Management) and DNA-specialist cops, Mann begins to wonder about the nature of reality and even about 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, but is distracted by an imminent double wedding for himself and his daughter; by the loss of his best promoter and lover to his rival, Zirconium Bluff; and by working conditions in the rehashing core and on wind pharms for hardlucks who harvest bio-material to produce architecture, clothing, and other swag for a luxury class of hardcore gamers (they pay for “pollution fantasies” with carbon credits on extended getaways to Putridworld). Threats to these halcyon days include a new religion publicized by Minor and his daughter Diminuenda that is “Old Testament-style,” Mr. Goo’s long-awaited release of the “MeMeMe” device, an interstellar pipeline project, the proliferation of aquacukes and giant composting worms that are rapidly running out of garbage, a word virus cultivated by the last carbon-based poet, and the controversial awarding of the Ignoble Prize. Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour resumes The Chaos! Quincunx novel series.

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 1% 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, 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-centre 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 via the Voyager probe, triggering a plan to “assist” the earth’s declining population through extraterrestrials in the guise of census takers. Minor Episodes and Major Ruckus introduce The Chaos! Quincunx series.

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 objets 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-fuelled 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.