Concord: A Serialized Novel
Join me on a drifting world
We at Rarebit Fiend Headquarters are thrilled to announce our latest project: Concord, a serialized science-fiction novel about a man set morally and literally adrift. What is Concord? A corporate seastead, a high-tech floating replica of an idyllic village, created by libertarian billionaires fleeing the collapse of society—a collapse they helped to bring about. For its residents, Concord is a place of harmony, safely removed from the chaos of the mainland, preserving the best of humanity. But not everything as it seems.
Saul Klein is a disillusioned teacher, haunted by the ghosts of his past. Once he was the right-hand man of Marco Vespucci, the founder and CEO of the Concord Corporation; he was also the secret lover of Marco’s wife, Suzanne, a one-time activist seduced by Marco’s wealth and power. When the time came for them to abandon the mainland, Suzanne stayed behind, leaving Saul with an unbearable burden of guilt and the task of watching over Suzanne’s alienated young daughter. After years of suspended grief, a chance encounter with a desperate migrant awakens Saul to the secret tensions that threaten to tear his floating world apart. He must decide whether to save the only world he knows—a world built on lies—or his own soul.
Part dystopian saga, part small-town drama, Concord will take its readers on an thrilling journey through illusion, rebellion, and the quest for redemption.
I’ve been writing and publishing books for more than twenty years; last year was the twentieth anniversary of my first. Every book I publish, in whatever genre, vanishes into a void that only sometimes, at unpredictable intervals, beams a signal back. After the initial radiance of having a book accepted, a more or less endless interval follows while I waited for it to appear (sometimes there’s collaboration with an editor, more often not). One day a cardboard box arrives with books inside. Sometimes you throw your book a launch party, sometimes you don’t. A few reviews appear here and there. Someone drops you an email, months or years after the fact, to tell you what they thought. If you’re a professor, as I am, it’s another notch in the professional belt: colleagues and administrators don’t actually read the books, but they do take note of their existence, and use them to judge whether one is worthy of tenure and promotion, et al.
Other than that: the void.
Substack, like the blog I used to keep, is different. Writing here is more like conversation. I don’t hear back from all of my readers, or even know necessarily how many readers I have (as opposed to subscribers, who are probably deleting at least every other email they receive from me and other Substackers), but people do sometimes like and comment and share, and I get to feel that some kind of circuit of communication is actually being closed. And it feels like there’s some room on this platform for eccentricity (c.f. my Patrick O’Brian obsession) and not just hot takes; there’s exciting writing being published here, much of it cultural commentary, along with bits of fiction and poetry, and a quantum of the unclassifiable. It feels fun again—not writing, that’s always been fun, if sometimes migraine-inducing. Publishing is fun again! One even gets paid, a little bit. (If you’re one of the folks who pay for these scribblings: thank you.) As Naomi Kanakia says, “this is the book, right now.”
Still, I’m old-fashioned enough to want to be published traditionally; I long for the sort of editorial relationship that might challenge me to go deeper or to discover new possibilities of expression. In the recent debate on Substack vs. traditional publishing, I lean more in becca rothfeld’s direction than in Sam Kahn’s. As a poet and recovering academic1 who has only ever written for assorted coteries, I admit to a guileless fascination with the possibility of writing something for which there’s a market. It’s not that I want to make a zillion dollars (though I have no objections whatsoever to being paid for my work!). I just feel ready to connect with the wider universe of non-specialized readers. People who want a great story—people like me and you. And if it has a few ideas rattling around inside it about the moral and social consequences of the sort of libertarian utopia our tech overlords are hurrying to create for us—well and good.
The idea for the novel first took shape in 2012, when I could already feel the rumblings of ressentiment rumbling underneath the surface of the second Obama Administration. But it began very simply with a twist on a hoary old SF idea: the generation ship, a spacecraft upon which a group of elite travelers (or exploitable suckers) is sent on a centuries-long mission to a new world, usually because the old one is kaput. What would such a ship look like in a world without the infrastructure for that scale of space travel, I asked myself? It might look like an actual ship. Or a floating island, whose inhabitants would live a simulated small-town existence, a kind of time capsule on which to wait out the collapse of a corrupt civilization.
So I dreamed up my floating Galt’s Gulch, a few years before the same figure would be floated (so to speak) by would-be seasteaders like Peter Thiel or the creators of Próspera. But my villagers are less interesting evading the taxes imposed by the state than they are in evading the consequences of their own culture’s denial of human limitation, up to and including death. Thus Concord, a floating fantasy, perpetuating the illusion of self-reliance. I named it of course after the Concord of Emerson and Thoreau, of the Alcotts (more the sublimely irresponsible Bronson than his defiant daughter—though she too plays her part), and of Hawthorne. Mg Concord is a kind of heroic misreading of their texts, perpetrated by Marco and facilitated by Saul, who in the novel’s present now stands appalled at his handiwork and his own life of quiet desperation. Will he succeed in unraveling the illusion of independence that he himself did so much to weave? You’ll have to read the story to find out!
Coming soon to an inbox near you.
By which I don’t mean I’m quitting my job—I love teaching—but I am in a long process of recovery from the arcane habits of mind and expression that a solid decade of graduate school (1997-2007) instills in a person.
I'd love to read it. Any way to get it on a Kindle?
Looking forward to it!