A Princess of the Linear Jungle

Life

is traditionally arduous, constrained and tedious for the average

university graduate student, even in the exotic Linear City: that

fathomless construction—natural or artificial,who can tell?—which

stretches infinitely in a narrow ribbon of buildings and street, bounded

on one side by an enigmatic Heaven beyond a wide River, and on the

other by an equally nebulous Hell beyond the Tracks of a common train.

So it is no surprise that the smart and ambitious young woman named

Merritt Abraham, lacking a steady boyfriend, stuck laboring in the

bowels of a dusty museum, frustrated in her profession and short on

cash, yearns for some excitement in her studious, mundane life.

But

she little reckons what fate has in store for her: a sweaty descent

into the dangerous wilderness of the savage Jungle Blocks, where weird

natives worship a little-seen barbaric queen!

But

first Merritt must satisfy her mentor at the museum, navigate the

pitfalls of romance, and narrowly escape a fatal encounter with two

collegiate ghouls. Only then will she find her talents appreciated by an

Indiana-Jones-style professor named Arturo Scoria. Forced by politics

to link up with his rival, Professor Durian Vinnagar, Scoria soon

assembles an expedition’s worth of queer characters, including Merritt,

and our young female adventurer eagerly leaves behind the humdrum

collegiate Borough of Wharton for the walled enclave of rampant, furious

greenerythat might well be the very Omphalos of the Linear City. There,

she will meet a Burroughsian destiny that is simultaneously

frightening, glorious and astonishing.