In the realm of contemporary speculative literature, few projects match the ambitious scope and philosophical bite of Martin Riker’s Conquistadors, Adventures in Capitalism. As an anachronistic and deeply satirical work-in-progress, Riker’s narrative stretches across half a millennium, tracking the exploits of a five-hundred-year-old explorer named Morales. Recently serialized in literary journal n+1, excerpts from the novel introduce readers to an unsettling, hyper-capitalist society where the ruling class—the "Capitalists"—wage a desperate, grotesque war against biological decay.
Within this dystopian hierarchy, the Capitalists worship youth above all else, maintaining their elite status through a macabre biomedical ritual: grafting their heads onto reanimated, highly efficient, yet ultimately borrowed bodies. The narrative pivots when Morales, through an unfortunate series of compromises, trades away his own young, healthy body to enter the Capitalist ranks. However, rather than achieving instant immortality, his head is affixed to a cast-off, functionally obsolete chassis and cast into a liminal quarantine zone known as "Old Town."
Confined to Old Town, a destitute limbo where aging, discarded bodies slowly rot while waiting for their nominal ascension, Morales spends thirty-five years marooned "among the heads." Bereft of traditional industry or purpose, the residents sustain themselves through an elaborate oral tradition—exchanging stories that reflect the absurdity, moral erosion, and administrative cruelty of the world outside. This comprehensive report explores the architecture of Riker’s fictional universe, examines the historical literary lineages that inform his satire, and unpacks the specific narratives—such as the poignant account of the author’s seventeenth wife, Ninat—that define the existential condition of Old Town.
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Detailed Chronology
To fully understand the narrative weight of Morales’s imprisonment in Old Town, one must trace the chronological trajectory of his transformation and the historical precedents of the world he inhabits.
Phase One: The Pre-Modern Explorer and the Capitalist Encounter
The chronicle begins centuries prior with Morales, an explorer whose historical grounding mirrors the age of expansion. As the centuries press on, Morales encounters the monster-people known as the Capitalists. Unlike traditional feudal or industrial societies, the Capitalists have reorganized civilization entirely around logistical efficiency and perpetual youth. To them, the physical body is merely a replaceable consumer good. Aging is treated not as a natural biological progression, but as a systemic failure to be corrected via surgical grafting and corporate resource allocation.
Phase Two: The Transaction and Downfall
Roughly halfway through the novel, Morales faces an existential impasse. Driven by circumstances left deliberately opaque, he signs a binding contract with the Capitalists, exchanging his vibrant, youthful body for the promise of eventual full integration into their caste. Instead of receiving a pristine reanimated chassis, Morales is deceived by the administrative apparatus of the Capitalists. His head is severed and attached to a discarded, highly dysfunctional shell—a residual body deemed unfit for elite productivity.
Phase Three: Arrival and Confinement in Old Town
Banished from the gleaming centers of Capitalist enterprise, Morales is transported to Old Town. This desolate community serves as a holding pen for the debilitated, the rejected, and the waiting. In Old Town, bodies do not heal; they steadily degrade. Stripped of economic utility, the inhabitants face an eternity of structural inactivity. With no labor left to perform and no consumer goods left to acquire, the inhabitants turn inward, developing a complex, communal oral culture. For thirty-five years, Morales sits among the severed heads, listening to the vast library of experiences brought by his fellow inmates—a period that forms the primary narrative engine of Riker’s literary project.
Supporting Context & Metrics
Riker’s novel does not emerge in a vacuum; it is explicitly constructed as a rich pastiche of historical masterworks, utilizing the techniques of classic travel literature to critique modern economic psychology.
Literary Lineages and Structural Influences
Riker initially conceived Conquistadors, Adventures in Capitalism as a direct homage to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. However, as the project evolved, its focus shifted away from raw macroeconomic mechanics toward a more insidious target: how capitalism warps human values, erodes rational thought, and commodifies the inner life.
To achieve this sweeping satirical effect, Riker weaves together multiple classical traditions:
- The Framed Narrative: Drawing heavily from One Thousand and One Nights, the novel positions storytelling as a literal mechanism for survival against an encroaching void.
- Picaresque Wandering: Echoes of Don Quixote and Bouvard and Pécuchet lend the text a tragicomic absurdity, wherein earnest characters navigate systems far too complex and indifferent for their comprehension.
- Cosmological Satire: Elements of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics inform the work’s playful yet biting approach to institutional history.
- The Chaucerian Framework: The vignettes shared within Old Town draw directly from Geoffrey Chaucer’s structural approach in The Canterbury Tales, utilizing distinct character voices to anatomize societal follies.
The Economics of Celebrity and Precarity
Within Old Town, social status is inverted. While traditional celebrity in the outside world is manufactured for actors, politicians, and public figures who have accomplished nothing of substance, Old Town has its own hierarchy based entirely on narrative output.
Consider the statistical reality of Morales’s marital history during his thirty-five years in limbo:
- Total Marriages: 27 distinct marital contracts.
- Context: While modern readers might view this frequency through the lens of romantic instability, marriage and divorce in Old Town function as fluid, temporary social arrangements designed to facilitate the exchange of information and companionship.
- The Outlier: Morales’s seventeenth wife, Ninat, eclipsed all metrics by cycling through 52 spouses prior to their meeting, and an estimated hundred more afterward. Her extraordinary turnover rate was not a symptom of infidelity, but a direct consequence of her unique societal role as the community’s ultimate vector of narrative capital.
Official Statements and Authorial Intent
In notes accompanying the publication of these excerpts, Martin Riker has provided crucial commentary regarding the philosophical underpinnings of his work. Addressing the intersection of commerce and art, Riker notes that the novel form has been inextricably bound up with market forces since its historical inception.
"Yet novels are also rare sites of cultural self-awareness, not to mention humanity and joy," Riker explains, framing his literary pastiche not merely as a cynical exercise in dystopian world-building, but as an affectionate tribute to the resilience of narrative itself. By embedding classic literary structures within a hyper-capitalist nightmare, Riker interrogates the ways in which human beings retain their empathy and intellectual curiosity even when reduced to literal fragments of bone and tissue.
The Case of Ninat: The Ultimate "Temp"
To illustrate the grinding machinery of the Capitalist labor market, Riker highlights the role assigned to Ninat. While the other residents of Old Town are left to stagnate in fixed states of decrepitude, Ninat is conscripted by the Capitalists for daytime labor. Her official designation is simple yet harrowing: Temp.
Because the Capitalist economy demands instantaneous adaptation to shifting market demands, Ninat’s professional obligations require her to occupy a different physical profession every few days. This operational reality demands a grotesque physical toll:
- Surgical Rotation: On practically a daily basis, Ninat’s head must be uncoupled from one chassis and grafted onto a differently configured body to match the physical requirements of her current assignment.
- Psychological Resilience: While Morales admits that he would find such constant bodily upheaval deeply disorienting and would have "held out for something more permanent," Ninat possesses a robust disposition. She thrives on variety, absorbing the shock of perpetual biological displacement and translating those harrowing shifts into an inexhaustible supply of stories.
However, Ninat’s prolific output creates a distinct aesthetic challenge. As her supply of stories expands exponentially, she suffers from a tendency to overpack her narratives. A single account delivered by Ninat often contains multiple nested sub-narratives packed so densely that listeners struggle to untangle them. Among these dense tapestries, Morales singles out his favorite—a deceptively simple tale involving a Prize Administrator, a Cultural Influencer, and a mediocre Head of School—as a masterclass in Old Town oral history.
Future Outlook
As Conquistadors, Adventures in Capitalism continues to take shape as a completed manuscript, literary critics and readers of n+1 are left to anticipate how Riker will resolve Morales’s thirty-five-year purgatory.
The structural brilliance of the novel lies in its refusal to offer easy redemptive arcs. Old Town is not a staging ground for a heroic rebellion; it is a monument to endurance through art. By framing the atrocities of hyper-capitalism through the intimate, conversational medium of the campfire tale—or, more accurately, the head-in-a-jar gossip circle—Riker suggests that storytelling remains humanity’s final, uncommodifiable refuge.
Whether Morales will ever escape the limbo of Old Town, or if the novel will culminate in an exhaustive catalog of the heads’ collective memories, remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that Riker has constructed a piercing satirical mirror for the modern age—one that asks us to examine what pieces of ourselves we are willing to trade away in exchange for the empty promise of perpetual productivity.
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