Literary science fiction and historical romance, in Autumn, in Carthage
Autumn in Carthage
Autumn in Carthage
emerged from two sets of interests. First, since I’m a hopeless romantic, it is
very much a love story. Well, more than one, in point of fact. Both the male
and female protagonists are people with enormous burdens, broken by life. The
entire plot revolves around their journey to each other, and the sanctuary they
have the potential to build together.
Second, this book was written at the intersection of “hard”
SciFi and historical romance. So…what does that mean? Well, it takes both an
analytic and a descriptive approach to humanity’s trajectory. The descriptive
part came easily. I’ve always been a history buff—playing truant from work to sink
into online material on the emergence of social structure in Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, the Late Bronze Age Collapse due to the arrival of the Sea Peoples, or the
exploits of the Hapsburg tercios. Much of the action, then, occurs against the
backdrop of Colonial America and King
William’s War, itself part of the worldwide struggle against the Sun
King. The conflict strongly influenced the emergence of the colonies that were
to become America, as well as that of French Canada. On a larger scale, it was
a time of cataclysmic change, when the old religious and civic orders were
giving way to a more “rational” one, and unprecedented links were being forged
between Europe and the civilizations of Asia and Africa. The Salem Witch
Trials—the microcosm within which the historical action occurs—unfolded within
that macrocosm, a fact that is often overlooked.
But while these descriptive parts coalesce into subplots,
the analytic theme pervades the narrative. Simply put, the book is a vehicle to
explore the social nature of time. And this is where “hard” SciFi comes
in—specifically, the classic works of Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert. I
remember the first time I read Dune—the original, the classic, not the shallower
works that followed. There’s this crucial scene early in the novel where young
Paul Atreides, the future Mentat Emperor, lost in the unforgiving deserts of
Arrakis, first glimpses time itself—the probabilistic course of human events—and
understands his role in its evolution. The conception of history as a
structured-but-stochastic process that could be predicted and shaped fascinated
me. And, of course, like every other nerdy kid on the planet, I’d read and
reread Asimov’s Foundation series.
This book is partly about fleshing out the vision of time nascent in his notion
of “psychohistory,” or the mathematics of human social process.
In the years since Herbert and Asimov wrote, we social
scientists have learnt much about how history flows and is structured by human
institutions, how temporal nodes emerge and are utilized by informed actors,
and what an authentic mathematics of social evolution could look like. Hence
the intertwining in this novel of historical events—thirteenth century eastern
Europe, Germany during the Holocaust, seventeenth century Salem—with chaos
theory and computational social science.
To summarize, then, the book falls squarely within the
boundaries of genre fiction—but of the more cerebral kind. At the same time, it
is rawly human, plumbing the murky depths of human experience to layer emotional
flesh over the cognitive bones. It is about flawed individuals making difficult
choices under immense pressures—and the outcomes, both beautiful and terrible, of
those decisions. Above all, it narrates one man’s physical and spiritual
journey through a difficult lifescape toward serenity. It is that human
dimension, ultimately, that I hope readers will respond to.
Thank you Christopher, and now I'm even more intrigued. I remember reading that scene from Dune and being thoroughly hooked--such a powerful and beautifully rendered idea. The Foundation series fascinated me too, but never quite convinced me the way Atreides' visions did.
About the book:
Nathan Price is a college professor with crippling
impairments, seeking escape from his prison of necessity. One day, in a package
of seventeenth-century documents from Salem Village, he stumbles across a
letter by his best friend, Jamie, who had disappeared six months before. The
document is dated 1692‹the height of the Witch Trials. The only potential lead:
a single mention of Carthage, a tiny town in the Wisconsin northern highland.
The mystery catapults Nathan from Chicago to the Wisconsin
wilderness. There, he meets Alanna, heir to an astonishing Mittel-European
legacy of power and sacrifice. In her, and in the gentle townsfolk of Carthage,
Nathan finds the refuge for which he has long yearned. But Simon, the town
elder, is driven by demons of his own, and may well be entangled in Jamie¹s
disappearance and that of several Carthaginians. As darkness stretches toward
Alanna, Nathan may have no choice but to risk it allŠ
Moving from the grimness of Chicago¹s South Side to the
Wisconsin hinterlands to seventeenth-century Salem, this is a story of love, of
sacrifice, of terrible passions‹and of two wounded souls quietly reaching for
the deep peace of sanctuary.
About the author:
Christopher Zenos is a pseudonym. The author is a
well-published university professor who has contended with mental illness all
his life, and knows the beastie well. Hence the mask: As this novel’s
protagonist puts it, successful Passing is now a survival imperative for crazies
like him. Autumn in Carthage developed,
in large part, from his need to sing of this world he inhabits: The realm of
the stranger, the odd one. The man standing at the window, bracing against the
wind as he gazes in wonder at the light and comfort on the other side.
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