The Empire of California
Hundreds of years in the future, long after the floods and earthquakes have destroyed the former great civilizations of the earth, the island-empire of California merrily languishes in a technological state not surpassing that of the late Hellenistic world.
This is the fictional setting of future-become-past imagined in my first (and still unpublished) novella, a work of great literary precision and comedy. Perhaps, I will make it part of a series, though it is not your typical ‘fantasy’ work.
Background to the Third Emperor
Written in the summer of 2000 in a tiny south Crete hamlet, The Third Emperor of California was inspired in large part by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (which I was reading during the writing process), the text- like many great works of literature – has been rejected countless times.
I relish the fact that for most of these publishers, The Third Emperor of California is just ‘too literary’ to publish. One major publisher even thought it should be completely rewritten as one of your typical formula-fantasy trilogies that sell well… but which is a completely different thing. Yet some more discerning critics and experts on Sterne have, over the years, offered private praise for the book.
Description of the Work
The 40,000-word novella’s sole excuse for a plot (for it is actually largely concerned with philosophical questions of time, narrative, and the physicality and repeatability of text) involves misadventures of a base and bellicose emperor, a kidnapped princess, a scheming and similarly captive courtier-academic, and a blind library-philologist. Their lives are all affected by a singular absurdity; that is, the improbable decision to create a stone labyrinth in which the sole remaining challenge to the all-powerful, yet rather dim-witted emperor (a mysterious adversary known own only as ‘Narrative’) can be forcibly imprisoned.
As the story disintegrates towards its inevitable end, the reader becomes aware that its own narrator is even less trustworthy than the characters are. He cannot be relied upon to tell the tale straight; whole blocks of text repeat, are omitted, and rebound; and, philological exploits become spectacular when an entirely new language is perfected by the otherwise shy and unassuming blind librarian. Action – or, what can pass for it – is derided as ineffective and merely an amusement of errors.
Other Related Texts
The novella The Third Emperor of California is a stand-alone one text, though it is not the only contemporaneous work to populate the general Empire-of-California universe; in fact, a veritable cottage industry of mock-academia surrounding the intellectual history of the bygone future empire had already sprung up before the book was even written. This is both ironic and well in keeping with the concomitant spirit of the anachronistic and future that enliven the work.
The Creation of New Poetic English
A couple months before the novella, in June 200 in Heraklio, I wrote the mock-academic essay, “Some Notes on the Inflection of ‘Lobster.'” A supposed examination of the philology of the created language ‘New Poetic English’ as used by the future Californians, the story was in fact inspired by the author’s own experience with learning Ancient and Byzantine Greek.
Against all odds, the mock-academic essay would actually be published here, about 13 years later by John Amen’s US-based The Pedestal Magazine, an outlet primarily concerned with poetry. Alas, it not longer operates.
Since that version converted the original footnotes to end notes, it is anyway better to present readers with my original 2000 text, with footnotes. Thus, see “Some Notes on the Inflection of ‘Lobster'” in its original 2000 printed form with footnotes.
The intent of using footnotes was aesthetic; to preserve a certain subterranean character to the increasingly bizarre tale of philological disarray and dissolution.
Other mock-academic works, written more recently, include an essay on the California Firing Squad Syllogism, a fun philosophical adventure. It is rather funny and should be published, but it is proving difficult to find an appropriate market for it.
the story Ishows how I react to ideas and process information from other sources in a satirical manner. Thus, the story was created eated after I was requested to edit an academic paper on the scintillating topic of Aristotle’s modal logic.
The inherent inanity of the discourse so amused me that I found it only fitting that current scholarly ruminations on the ancient Greek find a home – however distorted it might be – in the very distant future of the Californian state.