Pynchon's latest novel, AGAINST THE DAY, opens at the 1893 World's Fair, then proceeds through an additional one thousand pages of international intrigue and strange goings-on, from anarchists in Colorado to magic totems in Iceland and all points in between. It's a fascinating book that is as complicated as history itself, weaving a complex narrative that tangles the historic with the intimate and defines the times through an imaginary geneology. But back to the beginning -- a dirigible festival, taking place just outside the grounds of the fair, with hundreds of airships arriving and departing. While 1893: A World's Fair Mystery does not contain such a festival, it does contain a tethered balloon that was a ride attraction on the Midway. And quick-thinking players may even find a way to board the balloon and ride over the lagoon during one particularly dramatic action sequence in the game.
When a few of Pynchon's airship crew make it to the Midway, here's what they find:
...the farther from the alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery. To the boys it seemed that they were making their way through a separate, lampless world, one beyond some obscure threshold, with its own economic life, social habits, and codes, aware of itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair...As if the hlaf-light ruling this perhaps even unmapped periphery were not a simple scarcity of streetlamps but deliverately provided in the interests of mercy, as a necessary veiling for the faces here...
Pynchon conceives of the Midway as the "dangerous" part of the fair, and the exposition the "civilized". I've never been entirely comfortable with that conception. Another way to look at it: the Midway is a riot of entrepeneurs with their American dreams and schemes, trying to earn a profit in down times. While the exposition itself demonstrates the savagery of the European powers is their display of power, their giant cannons that would soon blaze murderously in the fields of France, the minerals torn from the earth, the giant machines fouling our air and water.
Or then again, that's probably a bit extreme on the other side. It was my intention when writing 1893: A World's Fair Mystery, to refrain from injecting any value judgements about the Fair, for good or ill. I leave the metaphoric implications of the Fair to the novelists, and sociological studies to the professors. My goal was to capture the spectacle and the grandeur, two facets any visitor, whatever their predisposition, would no doubt have been blind not to see and feel. And I leave it to the players who wander the grounds and solve the puzzles and seee what there was to see to do the interpretation. 1893: AWFM is not complete, until you play it.
Come to think of it, Pynchon uses a similar tactic in other places, especially in conversations half explained. He places a lot of the interpretation on the reader. Several times while reading I thought his work would be well suited for adaptation to Interactive Fiction.