I’ve been letting the novel I spent several years researching and writing languish.1 It’s finished, but it needed editing. Most of that is complete, but it needs another round (I always say that, so that won’t change until it gets published).
One advantage to letting a novel sort of drift away for a bit is that it helps me become as close to a second pair of eyes as I can be without actually having that fresh pair of eyes.
The novel is set in an alternative world where the United States is formed not by the illusion of the magnificence of the European tradition we were all taught in high school, but on, instead, a failed Colonial revolution and a subsequent, and immediate, emancipation of North American slaves who nurture a different economic and governing style.
As the historian who annotates the novel says, the emancipation is one “final tax by the crown.” The early emancipation is not an act of kindness. Instead, a bitter King George III considers it a form of enduring punishment in retribution for the revolution.
It’s also an extension of Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 that rewarded slaves with manumission if they fought for the Brits.
A victorious Cornwallis grants the Colonials most of the things they originally asked for, but the Brits are convinced that by releasing all of the slaves, the new nation that eventually emerges will become bogged down, and the existence of so many freed Africans running around on their own will neuter any hopes it might have of becoming a world power.
Instead, the opposite happens. All those newly freed slaves harness their creative resources, and a Black renaissance begins in the majority-Black Carolina Low Country that spreads across the Atlantic to Africa, which never endures stifling European colonialism.2
I bring this up on a Sunday because one of the essential aspects of the novel is that a form of Christian theology quite different than Eurocentric Christianity becomes central to the new nation that eventually forms.
The opening of the novel begins with a Bible passage that represents this profound difference:
And all the believers were together and had all things in common; and they would sell their property and possessions and share them with all, to the extent that anyone had need.
— Acts 22:44-45
A form of governance called congregational economics takes hold. The newly freed Africans embrace theology as a central tenet of government. But it’s not the kind of theology we are used to. There’s no shariah law here. It’s a form of government that believes in the kind of Christianity that was buried by 2,000 years of patriarchy in our timeline.
To give you an idea: One of the new nation’s leaders is a gay high priestess who leads one of the most powerful congregations in North America. Congregations own the means of production and become equivalent to our corporations, but instead of assigning wealth to a few, congregants hold all the money and power.
Is that kind of world even possible? Not to us, it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter much, because the ideas behind the novel aren’t presented as a viable alternative to our world so much as an allegory of complaint about our current system.
In this alternative world, there was no “Trail of Tears” because of a tricky (at first) alliance between the indigenous population and the newly freed slaves who eventually seize power in the South. A different kind of world emerges.
This is presented in a Restive Souls teaser novella set in the modern world. The full novella, a whodunit of sorts, is here (no paywall):
And there’s also this adjacent Restive Souls short story about a guy from our timeline who somehow (the “somehow” is never explained because it’s irrelevant) wakes up in the alternative world of Restive Souls:
Restive Souls is a world that can’t imagine the heroism behind killing a 16-year-old boy carrying a semi-automatic weapon into an elementary school to slaughter children.
The dichotomy of this heroism is part of my fundamental conflict with the society I live in. Yes, I’m glad someone was able to jump into his pickup truck and put an end to what could have been a tragic slaughter similar to Sandy Hook. That should go without saying.
But I can’t celebrate a bullet-ridden 16-year-old boy, either. Such an outcome is one of the many failures of our society.
We are all restive souls seeking to free ourselves from the captivity of oligarchs who are determined to keep us pinned down and divided. They encourage factions to face off against one another because they mistakenly think it will keep them in power.
If I blame you for something, it cuts into my power to blame them.
But restive souls never bargain with their tormentors once they discover they have the power to set themselves free.
That’s what the restive souls in my novel discover.
Oligarchs are poised to discover the same thing. If they someday find the key to life that extends hundreds of years, that extended life will exist in a cloak of misery of their own making, in a soulless world full of nothing but toys and automatons.
The oligarchs are pouring money into the Midterm Elections because they sense the rising tide against them. They think they can win by manipulating society with their social media platforms and money.
But chains can only keep a restive population captive for so long before they’re broken.
Because I’m an optimist, I must believe that winter is coming for the oligarchs.
Hopefully, someday soon, Restive Souls will also be coming… to a bookstore near you, if I can find a publisher not beholden to the oligarchy that owns the vast majority of our media.
Notes
I’m shopping the book again to agents and independent publishers after a major revision.
If you’re an agent interested in seeing a full manuscript, you know where to find me. If I’ve contacted you and you sent me a form letter replying that it doesn’t “fit your list,” well, it doesn’t fit any other list either, and since I need an agent who believes in the concept and who has a somewhat active imagination of her own, I think that it’s fair to agree we aren’t a fit. So, good job!
Thanks for reading!
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Footnotes
This is in stark contrast to my potboiler, Psalm of Vampires, which I wrote during a three month hiatus from Restive Souls.
A crude comparison: It’s a little like how good quarterbacks finally arrived in the NFL!