On the authority behind the Chums?; from Democracy in America, Chap 5

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

"First of all, because it is beautiful."          

          Monte Davis:

          What you said.

          And very well, too.

The asana that enables one to pat oneself on the back is not all 
that difficult, it only requires practice and a certain degree of 
co-ordination—but for Miles Blundell it might take a bit longer, it
might never even happen. . .

Anyway, here's a translation/regurgitation. One of the chief features 
of Against the Day are the multiple plots and multiple modes of
storytelling. Most of those modes are genre fictions of one sort or 
another. A lot of those genre fictions are early versions of genre
fictions that now drive the market for publishing and marketing—
the Harry Potter Series, the Dan Brown Series, various Young
Adult fantasy novels, borrowing heavily and riding on the coat-tails
of J.K. Rowling's juggernaut. There's all the different flavors of 
"Mystery" novels now crowding the shelves from Tristero-like
doublings of heresy as mystery/Supression of the Gnostics,
to cute invocations of Victorian murder, or murder with recipes,
to good old dependable Hollywood back-lot murders. These are 
all storytelling machines, simulacra designed solely for our 
amusement.

You ask what invisible hand moves the Chums, I say it's the 
conventions of the Young Boys Adventure Series, one can see 
the Chums as much like the central clique of Hogwart's plots,
but also other notes from other "Gee Whiz!" adventures for kids—
Tom Swift, "The Secret Integration", The Wizard of Oz, but also
steampunk, and bits picked up from Star Trek and maybe even 
Futurama come into play. And don't forget the role of "Cricket", 
as in "that's just not cricket", the convention of old genre fiction
playing the good guys [who play by certain conventions] vs. 
Manichean bad guys [who flout the conventions while pretending 
to be standard bearers.]

Of course, one poster noted the concept of World War One 
becoming the pit that so many plunged into, thinking it was just
another "Young Boys Adventure Series", much as the lives of so 
many in Vineland are determined by fantasies about life the 
characters picked up from the "Tube."

The Boys will fly on forever, the potential stories are infinite. . . .

If you go to the last quarter of "Dimensions 6E"* there is a fractal
[Mandelbrot set] that is, for all practical purposes, infinite, 
containing worlds within worlds. The same hand that guides
that fractal guides the Chums. That fractal is a representation of
chaos, of chance.

http://www.dimensions-math.org/Dim_regarder_E_E.htm

* Thanks to Lawrence Bryan