Against the Day

Spanning the period between the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, Against the Day moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the century New York, to London and Gttingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia, Mexico, Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx. As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes its their lives that pursue them. Meanwhile, Thomas Pynchon is up to his usual business. Characters stop what theyre doing to sing, what are for the most part, stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-fact occurrences occur. Maybe its not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two, its what the world might be.