Sunsphere

by 1978- Farkas, Andrew Everett

iii This is a short story collection centered around the Sunsphere (the structure in Knoxville that was built for the 1982 World’s Fair), utilizing various concepts of energy as its central metaphors. Containing seven short stories, Sunsphere is in the tradition of such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Jorge Luis Borges (among others). The concepts of energy covered herein are “work,” in “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?,” “potential energy,” in “Chekhov’s Shotgun,” “kinetic energy,” in “No Tomorrow” and “The Physics of the Bottomless Pit,” “internal energy,” in “Everything Under the Sunsphere” and “Wordsworth’s Volcano,” and “heat transfer,” in “The Colonization of Room 313.” There is also an Intro which states the author’s aesthetic beliefs, and an Outro which discusses his intent in each of the stories. Preface iv This preface is actually a note on the text, an explanation of the order and what you will find herein. First, the section called “Intro: Various Monologues in Assorted Locales” is the statement of my aesthetics. As its title suggests, it is not a straightforward article, written, say, like William Wordsworth’s “The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” It is, instead, a collection of fictional situations wherein characters deliver my ideas for me. The Intro does not talk at all about the short stories in this thesis; it gives background on the way I approach literature and the way I approach writing, expounding upon my feelings having to do with said topics. Following the Intro are my short stories. The way I envision the collection Sunsphere, it includes fourteen stories and six fragments. At this time there are only seven because of time constraints. In the Outro I will better explain what my intent was in putting this chrestomathy together. Regarding the Outro, the way I understand the traditional “introduction” of a thesis, it is akin to the director’s commentary track on a DVD. Since I view introductions thusly, and since I would never listen to a commentary track during my first viewing of a film, I have decided to put the usual introduction fare in a section called “Outro” at the end of the thesis. Here I talk about the beginning of this project, how it was conceived, where the stories came from, the stories included in this collection, a brief overview of the stories not yet completed, and what the final project will look like.