Welcome Aboard the Ship of Fools
An Introduction to the novel, plus the Table of Contents
Welcome to Ship of Fools, my science fiction satire on conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and false beliefs. I’m happy to have you here! This post will tell you a bit about the novel, but you can also skip it and jump right in with the Prologue. Or scroll down for the Table of Contents.
Ship of Fools is probably unlike any sci-fi story you’ve read before. One minute you’ll be on a cruise ship off Baja, the next in Antarctica or the canyonlands of Utah, and the next in an alternate universe. You’ll meet flat-earthers, moon-landing deniers, an anti-vax yoga instructor and child of Gaia, Young Earth Creationists, a billionaire space tycoon, a couple of philosopher-cowboys, mysterious beings possibly from another dimension, and Elizabeth Dare, the science journalist who’s trying to make sense of it all.
Here’s what one reader said about it: “I haven’t had this much fun reading a novel in I don’t know how long. It’s a romp. From page to page I never know what to expect. I’m having a blast!”
The action begins aboard the Anóitoi, which has been chartered for a Conspira-C Cruise down the coast of Baja California. Liz is reporting on the collection of colorful characters and their fanciful — and sometimes malevolent — beliefs. At the same time, she’s still dealing with fallout from a story she covered the previous summer. It featured a retired film-maker and his outlandish version of the moon-landing “hoax” — a hoax that began to seem too plausible when mysterious figures forced Liz to cut her investigation short.
From the Anóitoi, the story widens out to a lonely desert town outside Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, the canyonlands of Utah, Antarctica, the beaches of San Diego, the Tranquility Lunar Base, and an alternate universe. It all wraps up at the oddly-named Universal Postal Union in Berne, Switzerland.
I call it sci-fi because it’s set at a vague date in the future, there’s a colony on the moon, and there are parallel universes. But mainly it’s sci-fi in the same sense that Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novels fit into that genre: there’s just a heck of a lot of science (but more laughs, I hope!). Some of the science has to do with orbital bodies, but other strands include how we know the shape of the Earth (beyond pictures from space), how we know the Earth’s age, and more.
The novel was free-to-read over the course of its serialization, but is now going behind a paywall, one chapter at a time. When I began serializing it, I promised to also make it available in print and ebook formats sometime this year, so I really need to get off my butt and make that happen. If you aren’t already a subscriber, sign up for a free subscription to hear when it’s released. Or upgrade to a paid subscription to read it right away here on Substack!
The Table of Contents is below, and one reader tells me it makes entertaining reading in itself.
Table of Contents for Ship of Fools
You can use this ToC to navigate the novel. I’ll provide links to the individual chapters as soon as they’re scheduled to post.