Vaganto

The next book after Mirror Men that I want to write (other than a couple of Mirror Men sequels which are endlessly entertaining in their possibilities), is Vaganto. The idea started during a conversation with him about the various unforeseen forces which could affect our global future. At first it was about the future aesthetic, how, instead of the sleek metallics, we reverse into a sort of nostalgic wood-finished look. New things made to look old. Maybe as a ramification of technology gone awry, maybe as a result of a crumbling infrastructure, who knows. But function, not just form, would be on the chopping block. It's interesting to imagine a world in which incredibly advanced technology exists alongside antiquated tools, tools resurrected out of history because Marxist alienation reached its breaking point, or because exponentially advancing scientific discoveries stratify society to a point where one man's basic is another man's unattainable, or some trendsetter revitalizes pre-industrial rev. "utopia", or some man-made catastrophe decimates mankind and creates a Japanese-style fear of technology which results in the opposite extreme. Any of these things. But Vaganto won't be about any of that. It will take place in a future world in which all of our hot topics have been said and done. That isn't the story.

The reason I bring this up is trivial. I can't find my notebook. The crux of Vaganto (which means wanderer in Esperanto), is that an inestimably large portion of people renounced their citizenship at some point a few generations ago, and it continues to be a common occurrence. Not just US Citizenship. People from all countries collectively - yet separately - decided that alignment with a city-state is not only useless, but actually contrary to their own interests.

The notebook (which I lost and am now trying to find again) had all of my random thoughts about such a global society, or non-society. These people are called Non-Citizens, and they are both collective and staunchly individual. Many of them are wanderers. By sheer number alone they force changes in immigration and travel legislation. People with no paperwork can't be catalogued. There are myriad ways in which established countries deal with this problem. The United States, surprisingly, is one of the more accommodating. But that's too much to get into now.

In my notes I also had a list of the groups of Non-Citizens, loosely formed around particular ideologies. There are, for example, extremely militant Non-Citizens who not only against citizenship, but against any sort of organization at all, even among themselves. There are native-non-citizens, people who were born to non-citizens, many of whom don't even know their country of origin. There are native-non-citizens who wish to re-integrate, 1st generation elective non-citizens, non-citizens who wish to form some sort of alliance, and so on. They all have their own names, but I can't remember because I can't find my notebook.

And the trains. Trains are a big deal. They are not only the primary mode of transportation, they are a hub of contention and violence. Because non-citizens make up something like 85% of of train traffic, trains can't even be partially supported by federal taxes. Trains become completely privatized and are near monopolies, with only two or three companies controlling the entire world. It's the Gilded Age all over again, but bigger. Trains are the biggest and baddest example of corporate rule, as corporations now wield more power than governments, and in some cases this is the ironic result of the non-citizen movement. There are those who wage war against the train system by forcing their way on with violence - hijacking and destruction are common along train routes, clusters of makeshift non-citizen camps collect alongside them like river silt.

There are so many things in my notebook. This notebook describes this world in a level of detail I can't possibly recreate. They have their own mythology, their own aesthetic, their own language, their own rules. Globalization moves East to West. There are stories of "Tragi-villa" that are never explained. The geography is different. The main character is a man with a made-up name and vague, non-descript features. He doesn't know where he's from. He just keeps walking.

I'll find it. Grr.

After that, I have a screenplay to write that goes in the opposite direction. The two main eponymous characters are Abaddon and Abednego, a pair of arch angels livings alongside man in an ancient civilization.