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WHY GOTHAM ?

Intellectually and emotionally ,un-superheroes is a 'frequent flier' to the far-off times of early 1940s Gotham  --- because that is where and when our whole world first changed.

A change far too many of us (climate deniers in particular) still have a hard time accepting. 

And if they don't learn to accept that change, I fear they will destroy this planet's climate -- hence my interest in events 75 years ago is spurred by my concern for events 75 years from now.

The adults of the Modern Era (1875-1965) mixed its childhood fictions with its grownup facts and acted as if only superheroes with chiseled chins and violent fists could keep the world from 'dissolving into chaos' .

Their world was one of quick, simple, plenticidial solutions to complex problems that they saw only as simple black and white cases of  'us versus them'.

By contrast, today's un-superheroes fully accept the plentitude of existence and that 'all life on Earth dines at a common table in open commensality' --- meaning no earthly solutions will ever be quick or easy  - or permanent.

My aim : 

To give fair play to ALL the crucial events thrown up by the 'clay-footed' reality of 1940s New York's Janus-like city.

Not just to comic book stories about quick - simple - violent solutions from hunky men in tights.

 So, writing that fully includes the wartime Manhattan Project,  with Dr Robert Oppenheimer as a Superman wannabe 'doing good' via atomic violence.

But also a detailed recounting of the untold story of Dr Henry Dawson and his Agape medicine project during that same war.

One that tells how Dawson's 'unfit' doctors, 'unfit' black and Jewish patients and 'unfit' natural penicillin rebuked wartime Allied eugenics and changed our whole world for the better in the process.

Writing fairly about a city that was both the birthplace of Biology's negative eugenics and the home of some of its fiercest critics.

A city that saw saw the failure of its Norden bombsight and the success of its Grumman close-in fighter bomber re-define the limits of Newtonian physics -- albeit at great cost in human life.

A city that was consumed with chemical visions of man-made 'synthetic everything' - and yet with its pioneering mass production of natural penicillin , also leading the microbiological counter revolution to that 'living better chemically' vision.

For this was a city that with its 1939 World's Fair was the very apex of Modernity and yet the very same city that also birthed Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment , presciently predicting Modernity's downfall.