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.
