I have a minor obsession with things that I can’t find on the WWW.
I was recently traveling in Nova Scotia, and I stopped in at a used bookstore in Halifax. My eyes alighted on a strange, thin book that almost appeared to be self-published. Called “Marjorie’s Missile”, it was printed in 1986 and typeset in fixed-width Courier.
It was written by a computer science teacher who was teaching programming to young “Indian” (I guess they were still calling them that then) students on a reserve in Alberta. Envisioning something like Neuromancer meets Dances with Wolves, I was piqued. I immediately searched for it on the web.
I couldn’t find anything. As in, not a single hit for the search term “Marjorie’s Missile”. I suspected that Bing was simply being obtuse (there is the occasional disadvantage to WP7), but the prospect of potentially owning a book that hadn’t fallen under the gaze of the WWW was enough to make me buy the book on the spot.
When I ran the term through Google later, I did turn up a single hit, but it was simply that of an antique bookseller. I just searched again now, and there is an entire page of hits today (including one on Amazon.com), but again, they are only from booksellers liquidating inventory. There isn’t a single review to be found. The author doesn’t seem to have any Web presence, either.
So now, I am a bit curious. What happened to Colin McKinlay, the author? He obviously had an early predilection for computers. Did he die young? Disappear into the North? Publish Marjorie’s Missile under a pen name? I hope that someone who knows the answer will someday stumble across this post and tell me. Until then, all I can do is briefly summarize the book for you.
Marjorie’s Missile reads sort of like a Kurt Vonnegut-style novel, in that the setting is very plausible but the events that occur in that setting verge on fantastical. The main character Marjorie is a computer programmer who works a cushy job for the CIA. When a cruise missile is lost during testing in an Alberta Native reserve, she is offered a field job to retrieve it. If she succeeds, she will be given 1 million dollars and the option to retire. She accepts.
The other main characters in the novel provide most of the interest. Lionel, Marjorie’s “temporary” husband for the mission, is an eccentric white Canadian man who has been accepted by the people on the Reserve. He teaches computer science to the kids there. (Sound familiar?) The main Native character in the book, “Earthman”, lives in a high-tech building that he has built for himself that he has called “High Rez”. He is also the ferryman for the Reserve. He claims to be over 100 years old. The main villain is a prototypical despotic American CIA agent who has gone rogue, and basically exemplifies North American greed and cronyism.
There is a smattering of other Native characters in the book, and they are all quite interesting as well. I found the Native characters and their stories to be the richest part of the novel by far — I’m guessing that a lot of the authors’ personal experience with the Natives on his reserve found its way directly into this book, and even though most of the stories are bizarre, they are believable in that “truth is stranger than fiction” sort of way.
The other white characters and the delivery of the story itself are thin, but still better than I expected. The bulk of the plot is progressed in one giant chunk through flashbacks, which are extracted by Marjorie when she adminsters truth serum to her “husband” and a Native companion of his. After that, the story dashes quickly towards its absurd but comical conclusion, which includes Marjorie falling predictably in love with the Natives she once considered to simply be fleshy obstacles between her and retirement.
The book is short enough and weird enough that I’m glad I read it. The question is, did anyone else? There was a page of reviews printed in the back of the book, the most significant of which was from the Edmonton Journal, but I can’t tell if these were falsified as a self-deprecating joke or not.
Assuming this was a first novel, there was enough potential here that I feel like the author could have made a career of writing. The answer is probably out there on the Internet somewhere…
Comments (0)