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Saturday, May 18, 2019
Reading List: Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves
- Wood, Fenton. Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2018. ASIN B07H2RJK8J.
-
This is an utterly charming short novel (or novella: it is just
123 pages) which, on the surface, reads like a young adult
adventure from the golden age, along the lines of the
original
Tom Swift
or
Hardy Boys
series. But as you get deeper into the story, you discover clues
there is much more going on than you first suspected, and that this
may be the beginning of a wonderful exploration of an alternative
reality which is a delight to visit and you may wish were your home.
Philo Hergenschmidt, Randall Quinn, and their young friends
live in Porterville, deep in the mountain country of the
Yankee Republic. The mountains that surround it stopped the
glaciers when they came down from the North a hundred thousand
years ago, and provided a refuge for the peace-loving,
self-sufficient, resourceful, and ornery people who fled
the wars. Many years later, they retain those properties, and
most young people are members of the Survival Scouts, whose
eight hundred page Handbook contains every thing a mountain
man needs to know to survive and prosper under any circumstances.
Porterville is just five hundred miles from the capital of
Iburakon, but might as well be on a different planet. Although
the Yankee Republic's technology is in many ways comparable
to our own, the mountains shield Porterville from television
and FM radio broadcasts and, although many families own cars
with radios installed by default, the only thing they can
pick up is a few scratchy AM stations from far away when the
skywave
opens up at night. Every summer, Randall spends two weeks
with his grandparents in Iburakon and comes back with tales
of wonders which enthrall his friends like an explorer of
yore returned from
Shangri-La.
(Randall is celebrated as a
raconteur—and some of his
tales may be true.) This year he told of the marvel of
television and a science fiction series called Xenotopia,
and for weeks the boys re-enacted battles from his descriptions.
Broadcasting: that got Philo thinking….
One day Philo calls up Randall and asks him to dig out an
old radio he recalled him having and tune it to the usually
dead FM band. Randall does, and is astonished to hear
Philo broadcasting on “Station X” with amusing
patter. It turns out he found a book in the attic,
101 Radio Projects for Boys, written by a
creative and somewhat subversive author, and following the
directions, put together a half watt FM transmitter from
scrounged spare parts. Philo briefs Randall on pirate radio
stations: although the penalties for operating without
a license appear severe, in fact, unless you willingly
interfere with a licensed broadcaster, you just get a
warning the first time and a wrist-slap ticket thereafter
unless you persist too long.
This gets them both thinking…. With the help of
adults willing to encourage youth in their (undisclosed)
projects, or just to look the other way (the kids of
Porterville live free-range lives, as I did in my childhood,
as their elders have not seen fit to import the vibrant
diversity into their community which causes present-day
youth to live under security lock-down), and a series of
adventures, radio station 9X9 goes on the air, announced
with great fanfare in handbills posted around the town.
Suddenly, there is something to listen to, and
people start tuning in. Local talent tries their hands
at being a DJ, and favourites emerge. Merchants start
to sign up for advertisements. Church services are
broadcast for shut-ins. Even though no telephone line
runs anywhere near the remote and secret studio, ingenuity
and some nineteenth-century technology allow them to
stage a hit call-in show. And before long, live talent
gets into the act. A big baseball game provides both a
huge opportunity and a seemingly insurmountable challenge
until the boys invent an art which, in our universe, was
once masterfully performed by a young Ronald Reagan.
Along the way, we learn of the Yankee Republic in brief,
sometimes jarring, strokes of the pen, as the author masterfully
follows the science fiction principle of “show, don't tell”.
Just imagine if William the Bastard had succeeded in conquering England. We'd probably be speaking some unholy crossbreed of French and English…. The Republic is the only country in the world that recognizes allodial title,…. When Congress declares war, they have to elect one of their own to be a sacrificial victim,…. “There was a man from the state capitol who wanted to give us government funding to build what he called a ‘proper’ school, but he was run out of town, the poor dear.”
Pirates, of course, must always keenly scan the horizon for those who might want to put an end to the fun. And so it is for buccaneers sailing the Hertzian waves. You'll enjoy every minute getting to the point where you find out how it ends. And then, when you think it's all over, another door opens into a wider, and weirder, world in which we may expect further adventures. The second volume in the series, Five Million Watts, was published in April, 2019. At present, only a Kindle edition is available. The book is not available under the Kindle Unlimited free rental programme, but is very inexpensive.
Posted at
14:52
