WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO ZYX?

Doing things the “right” way, the way everybody tells me it’s supposed to be done, often doesn’t work for me. But of course, I have to try it, just to make sure.

Over a year ago, I finished Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin, and figured I needed to shop it around the big, New York publishers. Well, it’s taken this long for a couple of agents to decide it wasn’t their kind of thing and wish me luck in finding someone who could work with me. I figure if I keep sending it around for another decade or two I might find one.

The problem is, I ain’t getting any younger and I’m close to 70. I’m in great health, but who knows how many decades I have left? And my patience has been running low lately.

So, I’m giving up on New York, the big time, Zyx being a bestseller, and making me rich enough to retire from my day job to write all my bucket list novels.

Whenever I mention that I’ve finished another novel to a small press, they ask me to consider them. I’ve decided to give them a try, so I’m making a list, and scanning the horizon.

I’ve also revised my proposal for Zyx, this time, ditching all the advice about being “commercial” and about considering the concerns of the corporate world.

As a treat for your loyal readers, I’m presenting it here:

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ZYX; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin is like a cross between Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas–several simultaneous cross country chases taking place in an apocalyptic time, and oh yeah, there’s an alien invasion. The Singularity is happening but collapsing under its own weight. AIs are trying to take over but are confused by the chaotic nature of humans and civilization. Access to technology has caused governments, big business, and crime syndicates to overlap in alarming and unpredictable ways. Search engines are ready to go to war with each other the way nations used to. Automated kaiju are evolving their own agendas, far different than what was intended by the entertainment industry that created them. Victor Theremin, down-and-out Chicano science fiction writer who has spent his life cultivating chaos as a means of adapting to change, has suddenly become a commodity – or at least his brain has. And now he’s on the run.

Fortunately, Victor is not without his allies, though many of them are more like frenemies – writers, artists, scientists, anarchists— and his female African American “intern.” A powerful network of AIs partnered with him years earlier, dazzling him with their graphene nanotechnology, hoping to adapt his philosophy of life into their strategies for creative problem-solving. Multiple ex-wives and ex-girlfriends are still invested in his survival, even while they’re trying to avoid entanglement in his schemes. When he’s kidnapped then kicks his way out of the prison and goes on the run, it’s a mad dash across the Southwest to see which colliding agendas will produce the biggest explosion. There’s UFOs, sasquatches, chupacabras, ayahuasca, secret black and Chicano space programs, Nazis, neohippies, and a lot of buffaloes. The very thing that Victor is trying to avoid may be the solution – and the salvation of the world. 

TRIGGER WARNING: THE ALIENS DO UNNATURAL THINGS TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!

How is this book similar to other novels? It’s in the spirit of Harlan Ellison and Dangerous Visions Besides Douglas Adams and Hunter S. Thompson, readers may be reminded of Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ishmael Reed. Its On-the-Road qualities may inspire some comparisons to Jack Kerouac and Tom Robbins, and the more psychedelic passages could be compared with William S. Burroughs.  

How is this book different? Unlike Dune and Harry Potter, which take the King Arthur approach to story: a Chosen One suffers through travails, learns lessons, and then saves the day, this novel has more of a Don Quixote approach. Characters stumble around, tilting at windmills and misunderstanding the events unfolding around them, arriving at the solution only after they muster the wit to interpret their failures. The result is funnier than Neuromancer. Hubris is celebrated and chaos gives birth to new possibilities.