Capital CIty Book {Paperback}Signed Copy
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KIRKUS REVIEW (CLICK HERE)
Sent back in time three decades to an alternative version of North America, an engineer sets about transforming a territory into a major power.
This debut sci-fi novel’s first-person protagonist is Mark Anglin. At the outset, he’s dying at age 52 in the 21st century of a heart ailment after a long, illustrious career as a technical engineer for the U.S. government. Suddenly he awakens in the 1980s as a strapping, virile 23-year-old Mark. But this is somehow a parallel-universe variation on the past. The U.S. sidestepped the Civil War (because Thomas Jefferson abolished slavery); however, the continent is now a patchwork of nations. “Texans Territory” (the former Texas) has gone its own way after the victory at the Alamo. Plastics were never invented, and microcomputers haven’t entered the workplace. Young Mark is a laborer supplying lumber to the territory’s vast, domed Capital City. Leaving his day job and hooking up with the local corporate government, Mark embarks on a crash course in modernization based on his technological expertise and a sense of urgency he can’t define. Vodrey’s lively, ambitious alternative-history tale deftly takes a page from the antics of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s era. But it is up to readers to determine how much of this may be meant satirically or as utopian instruction/inspiration. Or as a pretense for sex scenes. Mark’s improvements stretch readers’ credulity, as they include perpetual-motion generators, flying cars, laser-type guns, and his own body’s ability to use “energy” to cure a rising local cancer epidemic in women that has doctors baffled. Mark continues to make a good impression, whether performing a hit pop song from memory that is unknown in this world. There is a comment on class structure implicit in the repeated idea that Mark is a literal self-made man, not some heir or entitled college graduate. Also incidental to the sketchy narrative are populist notions of municipal planning, work ethic, rough justice, strong defense, the inferiority of welfare states—and that it’s nice to have women with great bodies who never complain while their alpha-male lover juggles several babes. The ending promises a sequel without resolving the basic hows and whys of Mark’s double life.
A male (and Texas) wish-fulfillment stew of sex, success, and Manifest Destiny in a parallel universe.
Sent back in time three decades to an alternative version of North America, an engineer sets about transforming a territory into a major power.
This debut sci-fi novel’s first-person protagonist is Mark Anglin. At the outset, he’s dying at age 52 in the 21st century of a heart ailment after a long, illustrious career as a technical engineer for the U.S. government. Suddenly he awakens in the 1980s as a strapping, virile 23-year-old Mark. But this is somehow a parallel-universe variation on the past. The U.S. sidestepped the Civil War (because Thomas Jefferson abolished slavery); however, the continent is now a patchwork of nations. “Texans Territory” (the former Texas) has gone its own way after the victory at the Alamo. Plastics were never invented, and microcomputers haven’t entered the workplace. Young Mark is a laborer supplying lumber to the territory’s vast, domed Capital City. Leaving his day job and hooking up with the local corporate government, Mark embarks on a crash course in modernization based on his technological expertise and a sense of urgency he can’t define. Vodrey’s lively, ambitious alternative-history tale deftly takes a page from the antics of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s era. But it is up to readers to determine how much of this may be meant satirically or as utopian instruction/inspiration. Or as a pretense for sex scenes. Mark’s improvements stretch readers’ credulity, as they include perpetual-motion generators, flying cars, laser-type guns, and his own body’s ability to use “energy” to cure a rising local cancer epidemic in women that has doctors baffled. Mark continues to make a good impression, whether performing a hit pop song from memory that is unknown in this world. There is a comment on class structure implicit in the repeated idea that Mark is a literal self-made man, not some heir or entitled college graduate. Also incidental to the sketchy narrative are populist notions of municipal planning, work ethic, rough justice, strong defense, the inferiority of welfare states—and that it’s nice to have women with great bodies who never complain while their alpha-male lover juggles several babes. The ending promises a sequel without resolving the basic hows and whys of Mark’s double life.
A male (and Texas) wish-fulfillment stew of sex, success, and Manifest Destiny in a parallel universe.
