Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus

In tribute to the surrealist narrative techniques of Andr Breton and Robert Desnos, Minor Episodes documents the serial adventures of Minor, the ubiquitous "everymogul" who embodies the economic one percent and keeps musically erotic quixotics on tap. Having entered a "rent in time" that gives each chapter an alternate reality, Minor swaggers through an undersea casino, in-flight blockbuster, bawdy Western, and Kafkaesque job hunt, cavorting with billboard queen B b Lala and country-music legend Faith Faith, when not dressing down his shifty sidekick, The Concierge, or haunting the intensely disinterested songstress Miss Sharp. However, danger looms in the form of The Stropper, a serial killer fresh out of a shaving promotion, and an enigmatic ginger-beer icon who has retired from a satisfying life of culinary assassinations.

Major Ruckus, a contrapuntal text and parody of the speculative fiction genre, celebrates the stylistic techniques of William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, following a frenzied struggle by various parties to obtain an essential time-travel component, a struggle that includes psychic "dicks," universal call-center operators, aboriginal eroticists, lubricant heiresses, rogue advertisement animations, pornography censors, and alien sperm-bank clones, all to the horrified fascination of hapless meta-writer Oober Mann. But ultimately it is Carl Sagan who creates the most confusion, when his prudish doodle of a woman is sent into space aboard the Voyager probe, triggering a plan to "assist" Earth's declining population through extraterrestrials in the guise of census takers.

Minor Episodes and Major Ruckus introduce The Chaos Quincunx series.

Garry Thomas Morse is a Governor General's Award-nominated poet and fiction writer.