Tex-Mex Cantos (Awareness and Aplomb Book 3)

The year is 3080. The town is Peculiar, Missouri. The queso has had a thousand years to get better. It got better.Positively cozy much of the time; at least the chichuahua on every city block thinks so.Centuries of climate migration turned the Ozarks into the Tex-Mex cultural capital of what remains. Five species share the planet now: human, AI, fungal, plasmal, and something older than all of them. They mostly get along. Almost a utopia, honestly.Then Samuel Clemens shows up on a porch with cold coffee and opinions about everything. He might be a ghost, an AI trained so deeply on the man's words that the training became the thing, or the actual Sam still riding the comet. The distinction might not matter.Five pilgrims converge on the town. A young woman with three doctorates abandoned a thesis on flush toilets to follow a footnote to a river to a porch. A four-pound chihuahua named Chico. A four-billion-year-old fungal Elder in a cocktail dress. A plasmal in a Hawaiian shirt who has never once flickered. And an alien ambassador in a coat too big for him, who may be the most dangerous being on the planet, or just a kid who heard the lesson wrong.The coffee is cold. The porch light is on. The raccoon is in the yard and is not a metaphor.—If the last twenty minutes of Arrival hit you somewhere other films do not reach, this book was written for you. Not because it is about that film. Because that film found, in the language of cinema, what this book is trying to find in the language of story: that you can see the whole shape of a thing and still choose to enter it.Tex-Mex Cantos is the third and final book in the Awareness and Aplomb series, following The Writing Writes the Writer and Awareness and Aplomb. Read more