Shadow Ticket

The story opens around the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and spans into the years after World War I. It introduces the Traverse family (Webb, the father, and his sons Kit, Frank, Reef) and a wide cast of anarchists, adventurers, outlaws, mathematicians, spies, and mystics.

• Webb Traverse, a miner and union man, is murdered by industrialist thugs. His sons swear revenge but get pulled into separate paths: mathematics, explosives, mercenary life, and revolutionary politics.
• At the same time, a boy-adventurer group called the Chums of Chance flies in an airship, parodying dime-novel heroes. They serve as quasi-magical observers of events, commenting ironically on history and science.

Key Storylines

The novel is sprawling and interweaves multiple threads:

1. The Traverse brothers:
   • Frank becomes an engineer, entangled in labor struggles.
   • Reef turns to explosives, gets drawn into political violence.
   • Kit studies mathematics and encounters bizarre new sciences of light and time.
   • They each drift across America and Europe, pulled into anarchist and revolutionary movements.
2. Science, Mathematics & Magic:
   • Time travel, alternative dimensions, and “asportation” (objects vanishing and reappearing) thread through the novel.
   • Characters encounter mystics, mediums, and pseudo-scientific explorers in Budapest, Vienna, and beyond.
3. Anarchists and Capitalists:
   • Figures like Scarsdale Vibe (capitalist villain) represent ruthless industry.
   • Revolutionaries, from miners to European radicals, plot resistance but are often infiltrated or destroyed.
4. Side plots:
   • A grotesquely tasteless lamp called La Lampo Plej Malbongusto becomes a recurring McGuffin.
   • Exotic journeys: Trans-Trianon motorcycle rallies, secret nightclubs in Budapest, flying zeppelins painted like watermelons.
   • Romantic entanglements with figures like Dally Rideout and Yashmeen Halfcourt (mathematician tied to Kit).

Major Twists

• The murder of Webb Traverse is central: his sons chase revenge but are repeatedly diverted. They discover his killers were pawns in bigger capitalist conspiracies.
• Science and mysticism blur: mathematicians discover alternative dimensions, and some characters literally cross into other realities.
• The Chums of Chance gradually detach from Earth’s reality, ascending into a parallel dimension, a kind of allegorical escape from history.
• Personal betrayals: Daphne, Bruno Airmont’s daughter, secretly moves between lovers and factions, destabilizing loyalties.
• Historical foreshadowing: capitalism’s rise is tied to looming fascism and world war.

Ending

• The Traverse brothers are scattered, their revenge incomplete. They are changed more by time and history than by vengeance.
• Many anarchists and dreamers are crushed or vanish. The rise of fascism and global war looms over Europe.
• The Chums of Chance, having observed the descent into modernity, sail off permanently into another dimension, symbolizing both escapism and loss of innocence.
• The tone is melancholic: the world transitions from the utopian hopes of the late 19th century into the brutal reality of the 20th.