FIRST MOVEMENT

Reader: I extend my greetings to the twenty-third century! No, I don’t mean you, who bought this issue of the Believer off the newsstand: you are dead by now. I mean the reader who, perusing a scuffed and faded ancient copy of this magazine, or sifting through whatever sort of unimaginable database they have by then, is passing an idle hour by musing over a quaint old bit of twenty-first-century literature. Yes, you, future reader. If I am not mistaken, then you are Asian-American. Also, you are a woman. This is because—as you, future reader, well know—twenty-third-century America is in fact run by Asian-American women. I think we can establish this with great certainty. Or we can, at least, if Virginius Dabney is to be believed.

I found Virginius Dabney in the usual way: which is to say, by accident. I was pawing through a box of antiquarian books when one old volume fell open and a centerfold fell out. Not that: it was a centerfold of sheet music. I cradled the book in my hand and examined the title page—

The Story of Don Miff,
As Told by His Friend John Bouche Whacker:
A Symphony of Life.
Edited by Virginius Dabney.

It appeared to be a novel, but as I idly flipped through it, more centerfolds flopped out: sheet music again. I thought for a moment that someone had jammed them in there, but no, they were bound in. Then I began to notice the title of each section of the book. Symphony of Life Movement One. Symphony of Life Movement Two. Symphony of…

The book had a publication date of 1886, just the period I tend to favor, and it bore the imprint of J. B. Lippincott Company, a major publisher. Yet I’d never heard of it or its author. And what was more, most—but not all—of the parts in the orchestral score inserted into the book were blank. The whole thing seemed rather curious. Then I started reading, and it got curioser and curioser.

Don Miff is… well, first let me state that I am reasonably sure that I am correct when I say that Don Miff is the only nineteenth-century novel that is addressed to a tenth-generation descendant living in the twenty-third century. Or that this descendant is Asian-American—because, as the narrator muses, even as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was coming into force, perhaps “under the contempt expressed for them as inferiors there lurks a secret, unrealized sense of their real superiority?” And even this grandson faces a superior force to himself: women. With mechanization removing the advantages...