science-fiction-economic-collapse

[Joseph Tracy]

> 
> but just on the flying toward grace passage in general, it's I suppose
> natural that he ended the book with the Chums, since he began with
> them as well.
> So basically the Chums is the frame tale, sort of?  and their
> progression by a commodious vicus of recirculation is from a voyage to
> a specific destination (viz the Columbian exposition) to a generalized
> movement toward grace.  What has changed in them?  Rather than
> exhausting the genres, cutting and drying them, could the tale be
> revivifying them?  and if so, how?  If a Chums-like stance is
> suggested as a reader of the genre fictions, above them and but
> partially involved in the emotions of those tales, the rest of one's
> consciousness involved in aerial maneuvers and missions, how does one
> read the Chums?

As some may recall, I think P projects his vision in 3 dimensions, separate but interactive: 1) complete fiction/myth/imagination existing outside laws of physics and plausibility but true to their own mythos.  ie  the chums, the thanatoids, benny, Vaukanson's Duck, the rats in V, vieshu   2) the plausible fictive and  3)the actual historic :Tunguska, Nixon...
 
The chums are the mythos of the boys adventure fiction from late 1800s to current times. One could trace their origins back to medieval knights and beyond, but there is a distinctively western and Christian quality to this corpus.  What changes in them is their relation to their author. First they are on missions for which they don't question the purpose or morality. They have rivals and enemies but don't ask why this is the relationship.  They are like their readers. They accept the authority and meanings assigned by the author. Male authority figures  with religion and science, age and money. The dominant mythos of the readers is Christian, western, and because sex is not safe for young boys they fly through the hollow earth and burrow through desert sands. Such innocence is fun but sinfully dangerous.  This is, however the world of a great many people; tell us who the bad guys are and we will fight them. By the end the Chums are their own authors, have come into equal relationships with women and are independent contractors .  In other words, after a lot of arguing and exploring and questions and the dark lessons of war  a new mythos has been negotiated and grace, that beautiful, terrifying, loaded word, has become something otherworldly in its humane chance of being normal.