Morgan had never visited Buckingham Palace, though he had set many scenes within its walls. As a storyteller, he likes to seize on epochal moments from the recent past and subject them to a kind of imaginative fission, working backward from sound bites and headlines to the raw contingencies that shape history. In “The Queen,” the 2006 movie based on Morgan’s script, it was the death of Princess Diana and the royal family’s ham-fisted efforts to manage the public’s hysterical outpouring of grief. Britain has a long and honorable tradition of treating its rulers with satirical contempt; it also has a less honorable tradition, especially where the monarchy is concerned, of fawning deference. Morgan’s audacity lay in his restraint: He wanted to see the Windsors steadily and to see them whole, as neither pampered half-wits nor infallible deities. “I live with bread like you,” says Shakespeare’s Richard II, disavowing his monarchic singularity. In “The Queen,” we see the sovereign and head of state (Helen Mirren, who won the Oscar for best actress) sitting in her curlers, watching television and preparing a dismal picnic in the Scottish highlands.
When he was invited to Buckingham Palace, Morgan was finishing Season 1 of “The Crown,” a hugely ambitious piece of durational television that seeks to tell the story of Elizabeth’s reign, in all its drudgery and dailiness, from the years before her coronation, in 1953, up to the turn of the third millennium. To date, the show is estimated to have cost Netflix upward of $150 million — about twice as much as the royal family costs British tax payers each year. It is nice to look at (much nicer, certainly, than the real Britain), but what puts Morgan’s saga in a class of its own is not the luster of its surfaces but the daring with which it lifts the curtain on the whole royal enterprise. “The Crown” doesn’t feed public fantasy — it pours cold water on it.
About a decade ago, Seo-Young J. Chu, an English professor at Queens College, published a fascinating and omnivorous book called “Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation.” In it, she argues that, contrary to appearances, science fiction is a mimetic discourse—that the “objects of science-fictional representation, while impossible to represent in a straightforward manner, are absolutely real.” Works of science fiction depict objects and phenomena from our world that are “nonimaginary yet cognitively estranging,” she writes, such as the sublime, or “phenomena whose historical contexts have not yet been fully realized,” or events, such as trauma, that are “so overwhelming that they escape immediate experience.”
Chu notes that the world is becoming more cognitively estranging. “The case could be made that everyday reality for people all over the world has grown less and less concretely accessible over the past several centuries and will continue to evolve in that direction,” she writes. “Financial derivatives are more cognitively estranging than pennies. Global climate change is more cognitively estranging than yesterday’s local weather.” If you’re on board an eighteen-hour flight from Singapore to New York, you have multiple plausible answers for simple questions—where you are, what time it is. Science fiction offers a way for these confounding systems and experiences to “acquire proportions that the muscles, nerves, and sinews of our bodies can recognize kinesthetically.” Chu compares the bloodless term “global village” to Isaac Asimov’s planetary city of Trantor, where forty-five billion people live under a single human-made structure. Science fiction, she writes, can “de-cliché” a figure of speech.
Apparently, Thomas Morton didn’t get the memo. The English businessman arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 with the Puritans, but he wasn’t exactly on board with the strict, insular, and pious society they had hoped to build for themselves. “He was very much a dandy and a playboy,” says William Heath, a retired professor from Mount Saint Mary’s University who has published extensively on the Puritans. Looking back, Morton and his neighbors were bound to butt heads sooner or later.
Within just a few short years, Morton established his own unrecognized offshoot of the Plymouth Colony, in what is now the town of Quincy, Massachusetts (the birthplace of presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams). He revived forbidden old-world customs, faced off with a Puritian militia determined to quash his pagan festivals, and wound up in exile. He eventually sued and, like any savvy rabble-rouser should, got a book deal out of the whole affair. Published in 1637, his New English Canaan mounted a harsh and heretical critique of Puritan customs and power structures that went far beyond what most New English settlers could accept. So they banned it—making it likely the first book explicitly banned in what is now the United States. A first edition of Morton’s tell-all—which, among other things, compares the Puritan leadership to crustaceans—recently sold at auction at Christie’s for $60,000.
For a brief instant before his canoe was sucked over the edge of a hitherto unknown twenty-five-foot waterfall in 2012, Adam Shoalts tasted triumph. For four years, he had been obsessed with the goal of paddling the entire length of the Again River, an obscure and almost unreachable waterway in the Hudson Bay Lowlands of northern Canada that, according to the annals of both historical and modern exploration, had never been navigated before. Now, as he and his battered boat plunged toward the frothing water and rocks below, he could finally confirm that existing maps of the area, derived from aerial and satellite imagery, definitely omitted some significant geographical features. Once he’d dragged himself and his battered canoe from the water, it was a moment to savor.
Shoalts grew up in southeastern Ontario as a would-be explorer who was told repeatedly he’d been born in the wrong century: there was nothing left to explore, no terra incognita in need of mapping. But he eventually spotted a loophole. Yes, the whole world had been mapped—but how well? As late as 1916, the Geological Survey of Canada calculated that the cumulative area of true blank spots on the country’s maps was 900,000 square miles, an area more than three times the size of Texas. The rise of aerial surveying soon filled in those gaps, but at the cost of accuracy on the ground. Mapping landscapes from the air, Shoalts wrote in Alone Against the North, his 2015 account of the Again River expedition, “is no more like exploration than staring at the moon through a telescope in your backyard is akin to the Apollo moon landings.”
It was September 2014, and Pennisi, who goes by Joe, was 50 years old, with four decades of fishing behind him. He had sailed on commercial boats since he was 7; his father and grandfather had towed their nets in the same waters for more than a century. He had never seen anything like the object in the video. Still, Joe sensed immediately what it might be. His net often got caught on the rotting underwater husks of old ships wrecked just beyond the Golden Gate, and he knew that some of those ships — Spanish galleons, Gold Rush-era steamers — had carried treasure.
He rewound the video, peered forward and froze the frame with the yellow rectangular object. It looked for all the world like a gold bar, an ingot. For a few minutes, he stared at it while his wife, Grazia, slept beside him.
Then he started to scream.
Here, bubble tea, as in the material world of boba shops, is more than just a drink. Like other alimentary items that have become tokens of Asian-American popular culture — rice, dumplings, pho, soy sauce, Korean barbecue — it’s an identity. And that, of course, comes with its own complications.