Against the Day

Set between the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition and the aftermath of World War I, this sprawling novel follows dozens of characters across the globe as they navigate the violent transition from the 19th century into the 20th. Its storylines move among anarchists, mathematicians, spies, aeronauts, dynamiters, and wanderers, all caught in an era of technological upheaval, labor warfare, and imperial ambition. The narrative unfolds through interlocking threads anchored by recurring families and obsessions, particularly the properties of light, the mysteries of time, and the human costs of unchecked capital.

The novel opens with the Chums of Chance, a crew of boy aeronauts aboard the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, arriving at the Chicago Fair. Commander Randolph St. Cosmo leads a team that includes Lindsay Noseworth, Miles Blundell, Chick Counterfly, Darby Suckling, and their literate dog Pugnax. At the Fair they cross paths with Merle Rideout, an itinerant photographer traveling with his young daughter Dahlia, called Dally. Throughout the novel, the Chums receive mysterious orders sending them to the Arctic, through the Earth's hollow interior, to Venice, and into Inner Asia, their adventures blurring into the novel's more grounded storylines.

At the Fair, Wall Street financier Scarsdale Vibe hires Professor Heino Vanderjuice of Yale to build a device that would neutralize Nikola Tesla's plans for free wireless power transmission, which Vibe sees as a mortal threat to capitalism. Vibe is accompanied by Foley Walker, his lifelong enforcer. During the Civil War, Vibe purchased Foley as a substitute to serve in his place; decades later, Foley reappeared claiming the old obligation, and his uncanny investment advice made him indispensable.

The Traverse family of Colorado forms the novel's emotional backbone. Webb Traverse, a miner and secret anarchist dynamiter in the San Juan mountains, lives a double life, sabotaging railroad property by night while raising his children: Reef, Frank, Lake, and Kit. When the Vibe Corporation offers Kit, the youngest, a scholarship to Yale, Webb furiously opposes it, seeing the offer as the mine owners trying to buy his family. Kit goes anyway, and the two never reconcile. Webb is betrayed and murdered by Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, hired killers working for the mine owners. Reef recovers his father's body from Jeshimon, a lawless town in Utah, and buries him in Telluride's miners' cemetery.

The murder scatters the Traverses. Reef takes up dynamiting and drifts west, meeting Estrella "Stray" Briggs in Nevada; she bears his son Jesse, though Reef's restlessness pulls him to Europe as a tunnel blaster in the Alps. Frank tracks down and kills Sloat Fresno in Mexico, then joins the Mexican Revolution. Kit, at Yale, discovers that Vibe almost certainly ordered Webb's death; he departs for Göttingen, where Vibe cuts off his funding, confirming his exile. Lake enters a tormenting marriage with Deuce Kindred, inexplicably attracted to her father's killer. Mayva, Webb's wife, departs after a bitter confrontation with Lake over the marriage and never sees her daughter again.

Dally Rideout's journey parallels the Traverse saga. After growing up on the road with Merle, she travels to New York City, where she reunites with her mother Erlys, now married to the magician Luca Zombini. Dally sails to Europe with the Zombini family and settles in Venice, working as a street performer and becoming romantically involved with Andrea Tancredi, a Futurist painter whose rage against capitalism foreshadows a violent end.

Lew Basnight, a detective haunted by a transgression he cannot remember, moves from Chicago to Denver to London, where he joins the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys (TWIT), a neo-Pythagorean mystical order. His investigations draw him into the rivalry between Professors Renfrew and Werfner, academics eventually revealed to be a single person bilocating between Cambridge and Göttingen. This doubled figure has devised the "Interdikt," a line of weaponized light installations across the Balkans designed to be triggered during a European war.

Yashmeen Halfcourt, the brilliant mathematician ward of a British intelligence operative in Central Asia, connects several storylines. At Göttingen, she and Kit develop a charged intellectual relationship, but political pressures from the TWIT and competing intelligence agencies pursue her across Europe. In Trieste, she enters a passionate affair with Vlado Clissan, a neo-Uskok revolutionary inspired by the Uskoks, the legendary Adriatic raiders. She is eventually drawn into a ménage à trois with Reef and Cyprian Latewood. Cyprian, a young Englishman recruited from Cambridge into espionage, is transformed by a harrowing winter mission through Bosnia from a dissolute dandy into a figure of selfless courage. The three settle on the Riviera before accepting a mission to neutralize the Interdikt.

In Venice, Reef and Kit's planned assassination of Scarsdale Vibe fails when Tancredi approaches Vibe and is gunned down by bodyguards. Vibe recognizes Kit, and the brothers separate bitterly. Kit flees eastward into Inner Asia, journeying through Silk Road oases to Lake Baikal and into Siberia, where the Tunguska Event of June 1908 detonates in a mysterious explosion that reverberates through every storyline. The blast appears to make the hidden city of Shambhala briefly visible and tears the veil of invisibility that has protected the Chums.

Scarsdale Vibe's death comes not from the Traverse brothers but from Foley Walker, who shoots his employer dead during the 1914 Colorado miners' strike, repaying a debt that stretches back to the Civil War. Frank, who has been tracking Vibe, arrives moments too late. He then joins the strikers at the Ludlow tent colony, where Stray and Jesse are living. When the Colorado National Guard attacks on April 20, 1914, Frank helps Stray and Jesse escape as the tents are set ablaze.

In the Balkans, Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian locate the Interdikt but discover it projects destructive light of unimaginable intensity rather than poison gas. Unable to disarm it and unwilling to risk Yashmeen and their newborn daughter Ljubica, they conceal their findings. Cyprian, profoundly changed, enters a remote Orthodox convent descended from the ancient Bogomils, a medieval dualist sect, taking vows as a "bride of Night" in a ritual of spiritual surrender. Reef and Yashmeen flee westward through the First Balkan War until they reach Corfu, where Yashmeen is reunited with her father, who has deserted British service.

After the War, the Traverse families converge in the American Northwest. Reef and Yashmeen return through Ellis Island; Frank and Stray raise their children nearby. Kit and Dally, separated during the War, reunite by chance on a Hungarian train. In Los Angeles, Deuce Kindred is arrested for a string of murders, while Lew Basnight works as a private detective. Merle Rideout and his former mentor Roswell Bounce have invented the Integroscope, a device that brings photographs to life. It uses optical principles from Iceland spar, a mineral that produces double refraction of light. When Merle uses the Integroscope on a photograph of Dally and the image synchronizes with a live radio transmission from Paris, father and daughter speak across the dimensions.

The Chums of Chance, having broken from their National Office, encounter the Sodality of Aetheronauts, five young women who fly on wings powered by the luminiferous Aether, the hypothetical medium once believed to carry light. The women join the ship, and Inconvenience grows to the size of a small city, incorporating light itself as a source of power. In the novel's final image, the ship's ascents become effortless. The Chums fly toward grace.