Lacrimi de Chiciură
15th June 2015, 01:52
A while back I finished writing my first novel. I submitted the manuscript to some publishers, but after a number of rejections, my hunch is that it stands little chance of getting picked up by anyone at this point. Not because it's badly written, but because it's taboo (maybe also: a bit long for a first novel, not marketable/commodifiable enough?). The important thing for me though is that it gets a chance to be read, so I decided to make a blog and start publishing it in installments, a chapter every now and then. I've posted one so far & I'm about to put up another soon. Please do take a look, and also I'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions.
The text could aptly be described as a satirical geopolitical thriller which combines elements of science fiction, indigenous folklore, young adult fiction, and the picaresque.
It's called Raving Radicals Bathed in Blax and it's premised on the observation that the world could use more (entertaining) political fiction written from a left perspective, but also the realization that the unabashedly propagandistic proletarian novel of the 1920s-1940s has become antiquated. In the present period of disenchantment and disillusion with revolutionary politics, working class-generated radical systemic change is oft-perceived to be at, if not beyond, the frontier of the realm of the possible. Envisioning this type of change thus necessitates a fogging of the boundary between feasible and infeasible. Bolstered by the quasi-magic realism of afrofuturist ‘myth-science’ and a pervasive postcolonial ethnological lens, Raving Radicals exhibits the infusion of proletarian literature with new elements.
The core story follows Paty, Tisha, Franky, Pedrocco, Izzy, and Witherslapt: six twenty-somethings who share an interest in raves and radical literature. Together, they are the Radical Book Club: an informal faction operating within an activist group called Socialist Alliance, whose leader suspects the club of being little more than a cover for recreational drug use and partying. In short, a serious liability. When a deadly stampede breaks out at a rave, those concerns seem vindicated. It doesn’t take long for the Homeland Intelligence Agency to connect the dots and seize the incident as a pretext to quash social movements. After losing one of their own to the H.I.A.’s domestic rendition program, it’s clear peaceful protest just won’t cut it. But it isn't until Marxists are designated terrorists and the Radical Book Club is forced to team up with Santa Muerte-worshipping drug cartelists and Rromani clans, that they realize what it really means to go down the path of revolutionary armed struggle: a path that leads to strange sojourns in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa . . . and outer space.
As a leftist riposte to the society that produced films and books like The Turner Diaries (1978), Red Dawn (1984, 2012), those of Tom Clancy (1984-2003), or even Patriot Dawn by Max Velocity (2013), Raving Radicals aims to reinvigorate the long dormant proletarian novel and infiltrate this reactionary literary landscape.
Link:
Blurb + Table of Contents (https://danielkbuntovnik.wordpress.com/raving-radicals-bathed-in-blax/)
Chapter 1 - Blazin' (https://danielkbuntovnik.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/1-blazin/)
The text could aptly be described as a satirical geopolitical thriller which combines elements of science fiction, indigenous folklore, young adult fiction, and the picaresque.
It's called Raving Radicals Bathed in Blax and it's premised on the observation that the world could use more (entertaining) political fiction written from a left perspective, but also the realization that the unabashedly propagandistic proletarian novel of the 1920s-1940s has become antiquated. In the present period of disenchantment and disillusion with revolutionary politics, working class-generated radical systemic change is oft-perceived to be at, if not beyond, the frontier of the realm of the possible. Envisioning this type of change thus necessitates a fogging of the boundary between feasible and infeasible. Bolstered by the quasi-magic realism of afrofuturist ‘myth-science’ and a pervasive postcolonial ethnological lens, Raving Radicals exhibits the infusion of proletarian literature with new elements.
The core story follows Paty, Tisha, Franky, Pedrocco, Izzy, and Witherslapt: six twenty-somethings who share an interest in raves and radical literature. Together, they are the Radical Book Club: an informal faction operating within an activist group called Socialist Alliance, whose leader suspects the club of being little more than a cover for recreational drug use and partying. In short, a serious liability. When a deadly stampede breaks out at a rave, those concerns seem vindicated. It doesn’t take long for the Homeland Intelligence Agency to connect the dots and seize the incident as a pretext to quash social movements. After losing one of their own to the H.I.A.’s domestic rendition program, it’s clear peaceful protest just won’t cut it. But it isn't until Marxists are designated terrorists and the Radical Book Club is forced to team up with Santa Muerte-worshipping drug cartelists and Rromani clans, that they realize what it really means to go down the path of revolutionary armed struggle: a path that leads to strange sojourns in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa . . . and outer space.
As a leftist riposte to the society that produced films and books like The Turner Diaries (1978), Red Dawn (1984, 2012), those of Tom Clancy (1984-2003), or even Patriot Dawn by Max Velocity (2013), Raving Radicals aims to reinvigorate the long dormant proletarian novel and infiltrate this reactionary literary landscape.
Link:
Blurb + Table of Contents (https://danielkbuntovnik.wordpress.com/raving-radicals-bathed-in-blax/)
Chapter 1 - Blazin' (https://danielkbuntovnik.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/1-blazin/)