This week we review Pandemonia by Tortugan Centaur Write Satyr, PhD, who joins us as guest.
Then, from far-flung corners of the world, there arose an unlikely quadrumvirate of heroes. Sir Alexander Jones, a rebel who fell from the sky with no memory, armed with a pair of magic sunglasses that peeled back the veil of illusion. He wielded the holy partisan and fought for freedom.
For the benefit of the listener who has been so foolish as to not yet read Pandemonia: it is a satirical, fantastical retelling of the events of 2020 - basically from March of 2020 to January 6th of 2021 - but in a magical, steampunk fantasy kingdom, with many fart jokes. Sort of Discworld meets South Park meets Alex Jones. And we don’t mean that in a bad way.
We all know basically what happened: there was a guy on the radio in Austin, and then he was on the internet, and there was a president who was completely mind-melted, and there was this creepy little guy who suddenly was in charge of the country, and nobody knew why. It ain’t healthy to stay mad forever about something like that; ridicule is a more effective weapon on your enemies anyway. Laugh at them, and they lose their power.
Fauci deserves more than a stern talking-to, but we can write books about pissing on his face.
What’s the easiest way to structure this? Zelda. Japanese RPGs, right? Most Zelda games are basically a fetch quest: you go to a place, get a thing, you power up, you uncover a little bit more of the mystery. All the relics the main character Pickle and his party recover are part of Christian Apocrypha, so it’s like, cool, let’s put that together to seal the Demon Corona and put it behind us.
The book was written around several scenes and set pieces. Riggs knew that he wanted to see Anthony Fauci get his face melted away by a stream of holy urine, and then he wrote backwards from that. Who’s gonna do that? A wizard. If Pickle’s an everyman surrogate, then The Wiz, Lord Barrington Goldwater, is a surrogate for the author. Endless puns, sort of not taking accountability.
The prose is deliberately Anglo-Saxon - blocky, Beowulfian terms instead of flowery Latinate language, with a couple of 25-cent words sprinkled in. “Pickle leveled the spear to his eyeline, torqued his hip, and hucked.” Accessible to chuds. Written at a 13th grade reading level.
Mentioned in this episode: Alex Jones, Waking Life, Out of the Silent Planet (C.S. Lewis, 1938), Dungeon Crawler Carl, Blood Meridian, and Riggs’s next book, working title Petrichor - a weird western with zombie hippies at Burning Man. CJ Heath’s hate-review.
Join us next time for The Last Human by Isaac Young.
