Next Fool City is taking shape. This is transmission 1 from the shores of the Bay of Mango. Some of you may remember that we built the novel Antique Bastards in full display. We just let it happen as it would. We’re going to do the same thing with Next Fool City. I don’t know where it’s going, or even if it will work. I am working with a brand new way of thinking about the technology, at least from my own perspective. So roll with me, let’s see what happens.
By the way, Ruth Callahan has moved to Next Fool City, and is running a gallery on First Street. I understand that Danny and Angie are soon to follow.
Next Fool City – Origin
It began with a dream. A man was walking beside me on a beach, carrying a tube of something with the letters NFC on the side, and he said, “I can’t wait to get back to Next Fool City.” I woke up, thought that was very odd, and went straight to the computer to look for the domain. It was available. I bought it. I had no idea what it was or what to do with it.
Over the next couple of weeks it dawned on me that I had forty characters sitting in other stories, all of them needing a place to live. So they would move to Next Fool City. What follows is what happened when they did.
Next Fool City sits on the island of Marengo Mango, across the Bay of Mango from the original Fool City, a harbor city with a huge skyline and multitudes of people. For years nobody lived on the island.
Then Herbert Washington, George’s long lost brother, looked across the bay from Fool City where he was running a tavern, and noticed the large and empty island. Never one to let his brother one-up him, he built a raft, named it Marengo Mango, floated over, and founded a city.
The Fool City name isn’t about fools, though the founders probably qualified. In the proto-language of Earth, “fool” comes from feueueul: life energy. Fool City has a lot of it. Next Fool City has more.
Where the raft landed became the Old Town District: a quick dock, a store selling boating goods and mangoes of all sorts, then farmers, hunters, merchants, and a village with everything from a mercantile to a citadel to a brothel. It thrived for years. Then people moved inland, and Old Town ran down a little, then a lot, until it was a ramshackle relic.
That’s when the new crowd started moving in, the hipsters and the gentrifiers, and that’s where our story begins.
Welcome to Next Fool City.