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Margie and the Atomic Brain, Volume I
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Exactly eight years after the novel’s conception, the first volume of the Margie and the Atomic Brain trilogy is here. In the way it embellishes the implications of quantum physics in a narrative context, I consider my trilogy to be literature’s first true multiverse novel, existing as a superposition of ever-bifurcating and contradictory moments lived and relived within a greater web of experience that, I hope, cumulatively suggests the macro-/micro-cosmic nature of our own universe. The story is also my attempt to situate fully-developed characters believably within a schlocky 50s B science fiction plot. I was inspired by movies like The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), and Donovan's Brain (1953), which are all pretty campy looking back on them, but I thought there was this potent, untapped metaphor if one would use fiction to explore what exactly the consciousness of one of these villainous super-brains was like. It's a trope, sure, but one that has never been explored and drawn in its full poetic potency by cinema because of certain limitations of form and industry, one that I thought I might like to tackle in a serious way in a gigantic mega-novel. I've been writing it since March of 2015 and with this publication of the first volume in 2023, volumes two and three are largely unfinished. Featuring a cast of over 200 characters, the mise-en-abyme structure is sustained by a rich bricolage of subplots, among them the Nevada Test Site-born rivalry between a USAF Lieutenant Colonel and the German Marxist astrophysicist, Dr. Karl Bunsenberger, inventor of the time machine around which the narrative conditions are initiated, Bunsenberger’s midlife struggle to adapt to his wife’s open relationship with his future-self-come-back-from-the-future, a forbidden love affair between WAC cadets on the Boeing assembly line, an organist’s fifty-year struggle to perfect Bach’s Goldberg Variations (a metafictional element emblematic of the novel’s own structure as variations on a theme), and the unforgettably baroque eroticism of a band of libertine filmmakers on their quest to exploit the chaos unleashed by a giant brain monster, dubbed the Petacerebrum, as they shoot a monster movie within a monster movie novel. Though this grand tale in the ebullient manner makes use of a century’s worth of kitsch, I see the novel as having more in common with Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling or Joseph McElroy’s Plus than with a book like Stephen King’s IT or the vintage pulps I have mined for archetypes and thematic material. At first we talked about doing the six books in pocketbook, but ultimately it seems most feasible for the press to bring out a 725,000-word novel as three large-format paperbacks, so here we are with the first.
“I remember reading that first excerpt you sent me way back, and though obviously a lot has changed, the bubble-gum brightness (I seem to recall specifically cotton-candy clouds over the kids) and sinister sci-fi/horror promise is all still here. Going into Margie I was expecting some major references to Heinlein and Pynchon and no doubt many other writers I wouldn’t (and no doubt didn’t) pick up on, but I was very happy to find quite strong tones of Heller (both in how funny parts of it were and the WWII emphasis) and Nabokov (the time-bending and globe-hopping reminding me fondly of Ada). Lots of Austen as well in the domestic scenes revolving around Ellen and Yvette. Your rosy rendition of south Louisiana almost makes even a terminal excommunicant like myself want to repatriate for the steady rotation of indulgent swamp-heavy, boozed-out evenings among the azaleas, which says a great deal about the clarity and vivacity of the world you’ve evoked here.”
-Jonathan Trosclair, author of Purple West
Exactly eight years after the novel’s conception, the first volume of the Margie and the Atomic Brain trilogy is here. In the way it embellishes the implications of quantum physics in a narrative context, I consider my trilogy to be literature’s first true multiverse novel, existing as a superposition of ever-bifurcating and contradictory moments lived and relived within a greater web of experience that, I hope, cumulatively suggests the macro-/micro-cosmic nature of our own universe. The story is also my attempt to situate fully-developed characters believably within a schlocky 50s B science fiction plot. I was inspired by movies like The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), and Donovan's Brain (1953), which are all pretty campy looking back on them, but I thought there was this potent, untapped metaphor if one would use fiction to explore what exactly the consciousness of one of these villainous super-brains was like. It's a trope, sure, but one that has never been explored and drawn in its full poetic potency by cinema because of certain limitations of form and industry, one that I thought I might like to tackle in a serious way in a gigantic mega-novel. I've been writing it since March of 2015 and with this publication of the first volume in 2023, volumes two and three are largely unfinished. Featuring a cast of over 200 characters, the mise-en-abyme structure is sustained by a rich bricolage of subplots, among them the Nevada Test Site-born rivalry between a USAF Lieutenant Colonel and the German Marxist astrophysicist, Dr. Karl Bunsenberger, inventor of the time machine around which the narrative conditions are initiated, Bunsenberger’s midlife struggle to adapt to his wife’s open relationship with his future-self-come-back-from-the-future, a forbidden love affair between WAC cadets on the Boeing assembly line, an organist’s fifty-year struggle to perfect Bach’s Goldberg Variations (a metafictional element emblematic of the novel’s own structure as variations on a theme), and the unforgettably baroque eroticism of a band of libertine filmmakers on their quest to exploit the chaos unleashed by a giant brain monster, dubbed the Petacerebrum, as they shoot a monster movie within a monster movie novel. Though this grand tale in the ebullient manner makes use of a century’s worth of kitsch, I see the novel as having more in common with Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling or Joseph McElroy’s Plus than with a book like Stephen King’s IT or the vintage pulps I have mined for archetypes and thematic material. At first we talked about doing the six books in pocketbook, but ultimately it seems most feasible for the press to bring out a 725,000-word novel as three large-format paperbacks, so here we are with the first.
“I remember reading that first excerpt you sent me way back, and though obviously a lot has changed, the bubble-gum brightness (I seem to recall specifically cotton-candy clouds over the kids) and sinister sci-fi/horror promise is all still here. Going into Margie I was expecting some major references to Heinlein and Pynchon and no doubt many other writers I wouldn’t (and no doubt didn’t) pick up on, but I was very happy to find quite strong tones of Heller (both in how funny parts of it were and the WWII emphasis) and Nabokov (the time-bending and globe-hopping reminding me fondly of Ada). Lots of Austen as well in the domestic scenes revolving around Ellen and Yvette. Your rosy rendition of south Louisiana almost makes even a terminal excommunicant like myself want to repatriate for the steady rotation of indulgent swamp-heavy, boozed-out evenings among the azaleas, which says a great deal about the clarity and vivacity of the world you’ve evoked here.”
-Jonathan Trosclair, author of Purple West
559 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 20, 2023
This book was not at all what I expected…but I loved it and it’s killing me to have to wait for volume 2! What a beautiful portrait of small town America, zooming in on a smaller scale we see human suffering in the everyday family home. My favorite aspect of this book has to be the children, something I usually dread in books. It’s so hard to accurately write through the perspective of youth and Zachary Tanner has done it better than I have ever read. The writing on unrequited love specifically was so real and perfect, every little thought and movement going through Elliot’s obsessed mind. Of course, what first drew me to this book was the 50’s B-movie brain monster… and I can’t wait to read more about it, but I’m just as excited to see what happens to these characters and their everyday struggles.
June 26, 2024
wow wow and WOW again ... I am no James-Adalbert Quinn so I won't attempt to write some eloquent review. I just want to say WHERE THE F*** IS BOOK 3+4? Is Commandante Generalo Harsch sleeping at the wheel again?
No seriously: damn awesome achievement Zach!
Maybe humanity is not doomed to eat breathe and s*** AI crap when them young folks like yourself produce good work that alt pre-geriatric old peeps like me-self enjoy so much!
No seriously: damn awesome achievement Zach!
Maybe humanity is not doomed to eat breathe and s*** AI crap when them young folks like yourself produce good work that alt pre-geriatric old peeps like me-self enjoy so much!
May 25, 2023
The first 351 pages are terrific. I will attempt a review once I finish the last 200 pages or so.
Review:
I first heard the term meta-fiction in a workshop reference to something I myself had written. The term was not used pejoratively, rather as a sort of desperation to classify. Next, some twenty years later, I learned the term maximalist when it was used to describe large metafictional novels, and again it was in reference to a novel I myself had written. Since then I have come to learn that as the author of a maximalist novel, I am either in a group that includes Thomas Pynchon, or a larger one of pretentious writers who think they are Thomas Pynchon. This was enough to get me to read Gravity’s Rainbow in 2021, I think. I loved it. I had already read The Recognitions, which I loved. Zachary Tanner’s Margie and the Atomic Brain is probably a maximalist novel. I just finished the first volume of what I will abbreviate as MATAB, the first of a trilogy that has been well-conceived but is expected to require two years for each of the next two volumes. If I have to subcategorize the novel I would put it more in the Gaddis group than the Pynchon, but I am pretty sure Tanner would prefer it be set in a separate category. If any of this is relevant it is because of my expectations as I was reading and thinking hard about how I would review this book. The first third or so displayed no meta hijinks if you don’t include an occasional authorial aside; in fact delivered an astonishingly adept examination of core US American values, thought, and economics from WWII to the early post-war period in what is perhaps most aptly referred to as high melodramatic register—insights keen enough to make compelling the friendship between two women in small-town Louisiana who work at a bomber factory while their husbands make what they can of the war they’ve been drawn into. This includes some amazing sky war fiction and is grounded in a realistic, detailed approach to storytelling. Here is where I feel compelled to offer realism as a term to describe the works of Pynchon, Gaddis (and myself, pretender or no), though inviting a preceding adjective, such as intense or hyper or even metaphorical (surely there are dozens more, particularly if the vast array of novels included in the maximalist pantheon are included in my classification scheme [America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: a Diagnostic perhaps fractal realism?]).
But that was just the first third of volume 1, or the first ninth of the whole. After that, time the narrative begins to fragment, the novel moves back and forth in time, the narrative voice is relinquished on occasion, exhibits A through something like H are introduced, the last being La Philosophie dans la Douche, by a local generous host and drug benefactor. The largest portion of prose continues the tale of the neighbor ladies through their children, examining with painful exactitude the unrequited love of one for the other. At the same time, a great deal more is happening: a time ‘machine’ has been successfully been created, the atomic age is examined from the angles of innumerable anglers, a film crew has set up in bayou country to film a monster movie, a pulp style monster has begun to wreak misunderstood havoc around town, Lester Nubile, a priest for fuck’s sake, is feeling horny, and so on. And if you are like me and don’t much care generally for coming of age novels, don’t worry, for the adults are carrying on with enough gusto to make up for any teen timidity, as orgiastic activities are well describe among characters involved in the film.
The questions I asked myself going into the reading were 1) whether the novel came to a satisfying end that yet did not leave readers frustrated that they would have to wait for two years for the next ‘installment’. Surprisingly, I was very satisfied on this account. The other [that would be 2)] was whether the book did what Tanner said it would on the copy of the first flap, deliver “..literature’s first true multiverse novel, existing as a superposition of ever-bifurcating and contradictory moments lived and relived within a greater web of experience that, I hope, cumulatively suggests the macro/micro-cosmic nature of our own universe.” First, I wanted to see if by reading this first volume whether I could understand what he meant, and then see if it succeeded. I do actually understand now, and there is every indication that he will by the end pull it off.
Further observations: this is an extremely beautiful book, given the cover, and the typography, and including a spine that (and this was my idea) will display a coherent picture once the three volumes are together on the shelf. This is where the book may fail, though, for I want that now. I don’t want to wait four years for that. So I am going to suggest to the author that we produce and sell, cheaply as possible, replica covers so readers can look at that final spine-in-thirds while awaiting the next actual volumes.
Review:
I first heard the term meta-fiction in a workshop reference to something I myself had written. The term was not used pejoratively, rather as a sort of desperation to classify. Next, some twenty years later, I learned the term maximalist when it was used to describe large metafictional novels, and again it was in reference to a novel I myself had written. Since then I have come to learn that as the author of a maximalist novel, I am either in a group that includes Thomas Pynchon, or a larger one of pretentious writers who think they are Thomas Pynchon. This was enough to get me to read Gravity’s Rainbow in 2021, I think. I loved it. I had already read The Recognitions, which I loved. Zachary Tanner’s Margie and the Atomic Brain is probably a maximalist novel. I just finished the first volume of what I will abbreviate as MATAB, the first of a trilogy that has been well-conceived but is expected to require two years for each of the next two volumes. If I have to subcategorize the novel I would put it more in the Gaddis group than the Pynchon, but I am pretty sure Tanner would prefer it be set in a separate category. If any of this is relevant it is because of my expectations as I was reading and thinking hard about how I would review this book. The first third or so displayed no meta hijinks if you don’t include an occasional authorial aside; in fact delivered an astonishingly adept examination of core US American values, thought, and economics from WWII to the early post-war period in what is perhaps most aptly referred to as high melodramatic register—insights keen enough to make compelling the friendship between two women in small-town Louisiana who work at a bomber factory while their husbands make what they can of the war they’ve been drawn into. This includes some amazing sky war fiction and is grounded in a realistic, detailed approach to storytelling. Here is where I feel compelled to offer realism as a term to describe the works of Pynchon, Gaddis (and myself, pretender or no), though inviting a preceding adjective, such as intense or hyper or even metaphorical (surely there are dozens more, particularly if the vast array of novels included in the maximalist pantheon are included in my classification scheme [America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: a Diagnostic perhaps fractal realism?]).
But that was just the first third of volume 1, or the first ninth of the whole. After that, time the narrative begins to fragment, the novel moves back and forth in time, the narrative voice is relinquished on occasion, exhibits A through something like H are introduced, the last being La Philosophie dans la Douche, by a local generous host and drug benefactor. The largest portion of prose continues the tale of the neighbor ladies through their children, examining with painful exactitude the unrequited love of one for the other. At the same time, a great deal more is happening: a time ‘machine’ has been successfully been created, the atomic age is examined from the angles of innumerable anglers, a film crew has set up in bayou country to film a monster movie, a pulp style monster has begun to wreak misunderstood havoc around town, Lester Nubile, a priest for fuck’s sake, is feeling horny, and so on. And if you are like me and don’t much care generally for coming of age novels, don’t worry, for the adults are carrying on with enough gusto to make up for any teen timidity, as orgiastic activities are well describe among characters involved in the film.
The questions I asked myself going into the reading were 1) whether the novel came to a satisfying end that yet did not leave readers frustrated that they would have to wait for two years for the next ‘installment’. Surprisingly, I was very satisfied on this account. The other [that would be 2)] was whether the book did what Tanner said it would on the copy of the first flap, deliver “..literature’s first true multiverse novel, existing as a superposition of ever-bifurcating and contradictory moments lived and relived within a greater web of experience that, I hope, cumulatively suggests the macro/micro-cosmic nature of our own universe.” First, I wanted to see if by reading this first volume whether I could understand what he meant, and then see if it succeeded. I do actually understand now, and there is every indication that he will by the end pull it off.
Further observations: this is an extremely beautiful book, given the cover, and the typography, and including a spine that (and this was my idea) will display a coherent picture once the three volumes are together on the shelf. This is where the book may fail, though, for I want that now. I don’t want to wait four years for that. So I am going to suggest to the author that we produce and sell, cheaply as possible, replica covers so readers can look at that final spine-in-thirds while awaiting the next actual volumes.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews