Mega-Modello: Not the Great New Zealand Novel

Preface

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240630  

Demonstration of Mega In-Motion-Charging: The fetish for all things wireless is doing at-scale electrification an enormous disservice. Grid-powered vehicles are not perceived as sexy, meaning that a rendering of this Hitachi in-motion-charging dump-truck, without  the catenary overhead, is prone to be that used to promote the vehicle. The dump-truck depicted is currently undergoing trials with First Quantum Minerals, in Zambia. rendering Hitachi Construction Machinery

Principal premise of Mega-Modello: Not the Great New Zealand Novel  is that humankind will only mobilise sufficiently quickly and at sufficient scale to collectively save much of itself, if, and only if, the mobilisation needed is promptly, convincingly demonstrated.

The mission—as I will argue, but only sparingly, elsewhere—is famously beyond urgent. The initial demonstration, therefore, must necessarily be on a relatively small scale—the transformation of a democracy of say of six million people, as opposed to a civilisation of eight billion. Not, of course, is convincing 0.06% of the planet’s population a trivial target.

To do a blind bit of good, of course, word of the demonstration—or modello—must be pervasive. In the 1960s, it was demonstrated, that the word could be spread—the heavy lifting largely done—by three-minute-long pop songs. But movies did much of the work too, from A Hard Day’s Night  to Easy Rider. Moreover, the mission facing humanity, in the 2020s, demands civilisation being completely reengineered, never mind merely walking on the Moon, countering consumerist culture, much less destroying rock ’n’ roll—the movie demands to be mega.

Not fancying for a moment I have either the talent or the industry to write a satirical or otherwise Mouse That Roared, my Mega-Modello  instead is a tiny Grand FenwickianFenwick: Leonard Wibberley’s fictional, Mouse That Roared, Duchy of arrow shot into the air—in the rationally forlorn hope that its release, somehow, ultimately goads a real author into taking on the Megamobilisation-precipitating project—an author with the chops to get their pager-turner optioned as the mega-motion picture so desperately, desperately needed.

The route by which a tyro-novelist activist could, at least semi-plausibly, provoke a fully-fledged mega-motion picture, are myriad. The mega-modello device, however, permits a veritable matrix of plot-plausible routes. The path I choose to take here, in Mega-Modello , is my own, not-entirely-counterfactual one.

An early objective, along the Mega-Modello  road, is to somehow attract the interest a household name. This household name, in a perfect world, would write such a compelling foreword that Mega-Modello: Not the Great New Zealand Novel , in turn, convinced an actual  author to take up the cudgel of writing a truly compelling novel, before too many gained the opportunity to regret having attempted to read the stumbling beginnings of this one.

In short, if this modello gets to be completed, the chances are that it will have in its arguably megalomaniacal mission.

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Disclosure The author of this novel modello is the secretary of both Mahurangi Action Incorporated and the Mahurangi Coastal Path Trust. The work published here, however, is that of the editorially independent, independently funded Mahurangi Magazine.