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DISSONANCE by Manuel A. Dominguez, Afrofuturist science fiction novel set in Neo New Orleans, book cover

Book I · 84 chapters

A Farbound Union novel

DISSONANCE

A Novel · Book One of the Farbound Union · by Manuel A. Dominguez

  • Afrofuturist Science Fiction
  • Climate Fiction Thriller
  • Science Fiction Noir

About the book

In the Mud of Neo New Orleans, every ward keeps time by its pump. On Sabine Row in Ward 7 the stroke runs forty a minute, and you can feel it through the floor. Above the wards sit the Canopy decks.

The Anvil is a big household on the corner of Palmer and Dauphine: a kitchen, a clinic and a workshop. Yvonne Celestin keeps the clinic lamp and the shrine. Marcel De La Rosa, nineteen, mends whatever the ward carries through the door and lives on a heart with a history of its own. Nox has come home after eleven years with the pockets of his jacket sewn shut.

Then Margaux Abagnale, the mayor’s daughter, finds a line in the city’s oil accounts that should not be there: a care row for Étienne De La Rosa, Yvonne’s partner and Marcel’s father, gone eleven years and still alive. Reaching him pulls the household into the city’s machinery: its notices, its ledgers and the pumps that keep everyone on time.

The story is told the way the Mud remembers things, through tellings, notices and the records of the people who were there, across one year of wet heat, surge, dry and freeze. Kanal, the language of the Mud, is spoken on the page.

Book One of the Farbound Union.

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RECORDS OFFICE CROSS-REFERENCE

Filed with this record: The Fourth Rail, Book 2 of the Farbound Union.

On a rail platform at shift change, three authorities arrive with the same demand in different forms. They want the Car. They want the civic credential. They want the recorder.

The full record: https://mudnewspackage.com/fourth-rail

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Reader questions

What is DISSONANCE about?

DISSONANCE is a novel set in the Mud of Neo New Orleans in Year 19. The Anvil, a big household on the corner of Palmer and Dauphine, learns that Étienne De La Rosa, gone eleven years, is alive on a care row. It is Book 1 of the Farbound Union.

What is the Anvil?

The Anvil is a household in Ward 7: kitchen, clinic, shrine and workshop, and the command post of Rose’s Thorn. Its kitchen fed half the lane on a bad week.

Who is Marcel De La Rosa?

Marcel De La Rosa is nineteen, the Anvil’s repair hand, whose heart has a history of its own. He hears colors in voices, something he has never told anybody but Nel.

How is the story told?

Through tellings, notices and records from the people who were there. Many chapters open with a line in italics that names whose telling it comes from. Kanal, the language of the Mud, is spoken on the page; you do not need to learn it.

Book details

About the author

Manuel A. Dominguez writes the Farbound Union: two novels of work, family, music, faith, and political ambition sharing one fictional world. The books and their covers were developed with generative AI tools under the author’s direction. More about the author

Contents · 84 chapters

Show all 84 chapters

Opening

Engraving for prologue
  1. Ground-level view of the plain gray stone door in the slope, with the brass rack of forty white cards beside it, and a small group of mourners standing before it with their backs to us
    Records One Fatality

Part One: The Wet Heat

Engraving for part one
  1. Eye-level view across the machine pit from one end of the pump floor: the big twin-cylinder pump in the middle, a woman on each treadle at either side of the pit, the round gauge on the wall behind with its needle in the red band
    The Stroke Song
  2. View from across the lane into the open front of the cobbler's shop: awning, bench with the woman at work, shelf behind the counter
    Deck Boots, Day Nine
  3. Looking down the lane from near the eleven-step house toward the pump house and the thunderhead over the flood wall
    Fried Mullet, Boiled
  4. Eye-level view across the corner at the standpipe, the woman with her bucket, and the children in the runoff, with the house window behind
    Prior Requests: Fourteen
  5. Eye-level view across the counter at the two cans, with the crowded office behind and the glare of the open street door at the back
    Two Cans
  6. Close three-quarter view down onto the bench from the side, with the floor grating and the cup at the lower left
    A Sole in Section
  7. View from behind and to the side of the desk, looking past the seated woman to the tall window and the gantries on the slope below
    The Care Row
  8. View from the foot of the cellar steps across the bench to the pavement grating
    Return to Desk Liaison without Action
  9. Eye-level view along the promenade at the fig tree in its stone-curbed bed, with the steel rail at the right and the bowls and the thunderhead beyond
    A Gray Rented Collar
  10. View from the end of the pier looking out across the flat Lake to the line of drowned oaks, with the woman small at the left of the frame
    Twenty-Six and a Hair
  11. Looking up the lane from its top toward the half-built deck: the double row of columns, the gray ribbed underframe overhead, shade below and bright sky at the open end
    A Bed for the Length of the Agreement
  12. View from the open street door at the top of the steps, looking down and across the street into the downpour
    Seventy-Three Tokens
  13. Eye level at the end of the table: the open green ledger under the lamp, one woman standing with a finger on a pencil box, the seated household around her in lamplight
    The Green Ledger
  14. The pier head at noon, seen from the shore end looking out along the boards: an old woman at a brick hearth under a tin roof stirring dry flour in a wide iron skillet, an iron cauldron the size of a washtub beside it, a man watching from a
    The Pier Gumbo
  15. A pale marble family vault seen close and a little from the side: a mason kneeling on a folded sack at its foot, flat chisel set to a chalk line on a blank panel, a column of weathered names rising above him, and a thin steward in a pale li
    Year and a Day
  16. A long, plain, blank wall seen from across the walk, its lower half crowded with short white chalk names, some followed by a small open square, bright new chalk over faded old ghosts, with a small figure kneeling to chalk at it and others s
    The Chalk Would Not Stay
  17. The pump floor seen across the machine: a big iron machine with its flywheel taller than a man, a treadle grate in the foreground where a woman kneels to strap a thick black pad onto the diamond tread, and crew members on the other treadle
    Treadle Pads
  18. The open canal side of a long laundry shed standing on pilings over the water: a row of tall drums on a concrete apron, women at work, and white linen hung on lines up into the rafters like slow weather, with one stiff figure in dark Canopy
    The Linen Under His Name
  19. A squat concrete gate house and the great steel shaft that rises from its roof into the underside of a deck overhead, with the paving sunk and tilted in a ring around its foot and a broad loader leaning on the rail of the loading floor.
    Four Cans a Week
  20. A plain waiting room: a counter with a young clerk beside a pneumatic tube that rises through the ceiling in the corner, and a long bench of silent waiting families under a framed notice, with one tall window letting in the light.
    One Son May Visit
  21. A sinker in a copper-and-glass half helmet kneeling in fine silt, one gloved hand on the curved side of a large old bell lying on its side half buried under fallen belfry rubble, its mouth turned toward him, in brown water lit by one small
    Boilers Don’t Ring
  22. A small walled concrete yard seen from its open side: the weathered base of a very old brick tower in the far wall with a closed steel door in it, a gray-coated guard and a woman in a pale smock holding a slate waiting beside the door, a li
    Third Sump
  23. A low view of a long brick passage: a young man in a cotton gown over his clothes seated on the floor against the wall beside a tall gray steel cabinet with a glass window of small lights and thick cables, a guard standing against the oppos
    What He Sensed, What He Inferred
  24. The long kitchen table seen from its foot: bowls laid at every place and one more at the empty end, a white bowl wrapped in red cloth and tied with a knot sitting in front of the woman at the head, and a silent household around it.
    The Extra Bowl
  25. The headless, handless plaster saint on its blue wooden box behind the plank bar, hung all over with hundreds of cloth rag strips like a tree in wind, with sinkers lining the bar and benches in front and the old woman who runs the place beh
    Down Today, None
  26. A flat tar rooftop filled with rows of big glazed crocks under a rack of drying peppers, a tiny old woman in a folding chair among them, two children at the parapet, planted rooftops beyond, and a rope of swifts streaming from a small squar
    Forty Sacks and a Goat
  27. An old iron bridge arching over a black canal at night, one lamp lighting the near end and a night heron on the nearest piling, a tall man and a woman with a long tube stopped at the top of the span, and a single silver flash on the dark wa
    Provenance
  28. Low side view of the old riveted iron main rising from the ground and running about ten paces along the paving stones; a barefoot child lies alongside it with one ear flat on the iron, a second child sits cross-legged beside it with a chalk
    Proposal

Part Two: Surge

Engraving for part two
  1. The Kangs' flat roof crowded with ranks of knee-high brown glazed crocks, each lid weighted with a river stone, with a flat basket of broken pottery standing in one empty pale ring on the tar; across the parapet, the neighbor roof with four
    They Put a Clock in a Dead Man
  2. Right foreground: the chest-high brick cabinet with a slate roof and steel door, and beside it the square brick pit with iron rungs where a young woman sits on a stool at the main's flange with a steel horseshoe clamp bolted round it. Left:
    Poling
  3. Seen from the water-level landing: eleven wide stone steps climb to a gate in the refinery yard wall; people sit spaced along the lower steps in the shade, each with a small cup and candle stub; at the landing a low dredge with a man on its
    Fourteen True, Six Loose
  4. A dim night view into the brick pit: a young woman seated on a stool with one palm flat on the flange where the clamp is bolted round the black main, head bent, listening with her hand; the chest-high brick cabinet beside the pit; the empty
    Sound in the Pipe, Moving
  5. Interior of the empty upstairs room seen from the doorway: old dark cypress boards, limewashed walls, two glass windows on the lane, a hearth in the corner, a ceiling hook, a framed certificate on the wall; a woman turns in the middle of th
    The Best Room on Sabine Row
  6. Wide view across the lane: at left the oak bench under its green awning with the cobbler, a visitor seated on the customer stool with a cane across the knees and one pale ceramic lower leg stretched toward the bench, two men standing apart;
    A Notch in the Bench
  7. Inside the leaning shed: a woman in a good blue dress with wrapped hair sits upright and still on an upturned skiff against the wall, a handbag on her knees; four boys on crates with small tins; a young man at a bench with a scale; lamps li
    Three Tellings of Feray’s Leg
  8. The front of the hall seen from across the street: the loft raised a full flight on brick piers, its own stair up to the open door, a hoist beam jutting over the door, a row of long oxblood waxed coats hanging from the beam and the stair ra
    Permit for Assembly in Motion
  9. Street in a white downpour: at left a ground-floor window with a bed turned to face the street and an old man in a white shirt propped on pillows; in the street a big man playing a bass horn, a band behind him, and women in oxblood coats wh
    To Visit a Member
  10. A tall plain mast rising above the rooftops into the pale dawn sky, three flags one above another near its top, two red over one white; in the lane below, a big man seen from behind, head tipped back, two buckets at his feet.
    Two Red Over One White
  11. The long workbench with the running fixture: a clear housing the size of two fists, a pink fluid loop of tubing, a sealed controller box, a copper plate with no hand on it; a woman seated on a low stool beside it, bowed; a young man with a
    Fourteen-Oh-Six
  12. Looking up a narrow stair from the hall: a chain of people passing big brown crocks upward toward a roof hatch; on the half-landing a red paste splash fanning up the wall and flowing down the steps; a boy sitting on a step with arms still c
    Forty Crocks Down
  13. A covered chicory stall seen across its plank counter: a large stall keeper with a towel on her shoulder, grinning, a small wooden radio set on the shelf behind her, a row of customers along the counter with cups, shoulders shaking, and the
    No One Was Hurt
  14. Interior of the outer office at night, seen from the side: an elderly clerk stands at the wall just left of his glass-topped desk with one hand on the brass handle of a braided gray bell cord, his head turned toward a tall closed door at th
    The Bookcase Went Over
  15. Wide interior of the Mayor's office at night in heavy rain, seen from the side: the broad desk at the center with the receipt and a pair of folded reading glasses on it and a small tray with a pot and three cups at one corner; the man aslee
    Receipt with Objection
  16. Interior of the warm underground room, looking across the steel cart at the enclosure: on the cart beside the circuit machine, four handwritten pages held flat under a clean bedpan; a young man in a cotton gown reading at the head of the en
    Form CD-40
  17. Eye level across the long bench: the opened case with its molded tray, the gray-white pump housing the size of two fists with its capped stubs and coiled drive line, and beside it the flat controller case open under the lamp with its bare b
    RC250
  18. Looking into the wash house from the yard side in the rain: a low tin-roofed lean-to with its front edge streaming, a copper laundry tub with a lid, a rain barrel at the corner, a wet plank floor with a drain, and a woman in a plain shift w
    Lena. Wall. All Night.
  19. Looking across a small low room at a woman kneeling with her back to us before a low altar ledge where a white bowl of water stands beside a single lamp; on the patched plaster wall behind, a high shelf with a fold of white cloth and a roun
    Three Red Flags
  20. Looking from the back of a plain ground-floor room toward its open street door: the edge of a small wooden platform with three steps in the foreground; a chair by the door with an old man in it, seen from behind, feet flat on two pale worn
    Thirty-One People Who Did Not Live There
  21. Wide, low-lit view across the pump pit: the heavy iron pump running between two women on treadles, the iron grille at the back with a thick brown rope of water pouring through it and two men heaving a whole door clear, and on the wall the r
    The Gauge Read Higher
  22. Close, low view of the motor side of the pump floor: the gray governor box bolted to the frame beside the motor with one amber lamp lit; beneath it a selector switch thickly painted over in three colors, a lead seal hanging on a twist of wi
    Eleven Minutes to Eleven
  23. Wide night view across the rain-swept lane: at left the cobbler's bench under its green canvas awning with a lamp, a pot and two seated women; rainwater pouring off the awning's edge; across the lane at right the pit under a small oilcloth
    He Said the Pump Was Running
  24. Interior of the underground care room under the hard white lamp: in the foreground a woman on a low stool with her palm flat on a copper plate set on a wooden block, seen from behind; beyond the bed a monitor showing two wavy lines; a woman
    Two Traces
  25. Eye-level view of the Anvil's side clinic door standing open at the top of one stone step: two white notice sheets pasted side by side on the door with a rough line of chalk beneath the left one; on the step a woman sits with an old woman's
    Nineteen Pages
  26. Interior of a small plain back room seen from the doorway: a low pallet under a window with a woman lying under a blanket, her copper-stained hands outside it and her head turned toward the window; an older woman seated on the floor beside
    Same Thing
  27. A long, plain, blank wall seen from a few steps back and low, its lower half crowded with short white chalk names in uneven rows, some followed by a small open square, faint ghosts of older letters under the new ones, and in the middle one
    The Taken
  28. Interior of the long hall seen from one side wall by lamplight: heaps of split cabbage on sheets across the floor, tubs along one wall, and at the two ends of the hall two very old women in chairs facing each other down the length of the ca
    A Pear in Mine

Part Three: The Dry

Engraving for part three
  1. Street-level view along the front of the depot: a low plain wall with a small ration window, a chalked slate bolted beside it with a small half-rubbed skull in one corner, and a fresh white poster pasted next to the slate; a long line of pe
    Shut the Pipe
  2. Interior of the pump floor from the machine toward the open doorway: the twin-cylinder pump with its flywheel, a small gray governor box with a blinking amber lamp bolted to the frame, and the switch beneath it with its handle at one positi
    The Gray Pipe
  3. Inside the cramped brick chamber, lamplit, looking toward the old gate valve with its wheel as wide as a cart's: a thin young man lying on his side in the mud with his ear against the valve body, two people heaving on the wheel with a pipe
    The Depot Valve
  4. A man in a gray coat sits on the sun-warmed edge of the concrete apron with his back against brick, his tall sealed boots beside him and his bare feet flat on the concrete, eyes closed. Three paces away a small bent old man with a lamp band
    Service to Continue
  5. Interior of the plain upstairs band room in flat noon light: in the middle of the floor a man kneels with a spanner over a square of black, pitted iron grating, bolting it to a pale wooden board; at the window a woman oils the valves of a t
    Nothing Weighs More Than Me
  6. Wide interior view across the Lantern Room from the bar side toward the long glass wall: low tables of guests in the middle distance, paper lanterns overhead, and in the corner by the glass the six-piece band with a barefoot drummer standin
    The Lantern Room
  7. A dark street corner at night with one open, lit window above a ground-floor rope shop; a hanging shop sign on its bracket; a woman seated on the shop step in a coat, another standing in the lane a few paces off with one hand at her throat,
    Residual Resonance
  8. Low view across the Anvil's roof: in the foreground a woman at the wide, low roof cistern with its lid open, lowering a marked wooden stick into it; the ledger open on the parapet beside her under a stone; half-barrels of pepper plants, a t
    A Hand and Two Fingers
  9. The low brick room seen from just inside the doorway: the candle on the lower shelf beside a round-bellied clay jar with a black bloom on one side and a white bowl of water; two women seen from behind, one sitting straight on a folded blank
    The Jar
  10. Wide view up a narrow brown canal toward the pump's brick tower at its head, with fine rings spreading across the water from the tower walls; at lower left the canal steps with a woman filling a bucket and a child drinking from its rim; at
    Ward 19
  11. A small, cold room under the roof in starlight: a narrow bed with two blankets under the one small window of old glass; one woman sitting up in a plain shift with the other's open right hand across her knee, her thumbs working grease into t
    Eight Days
  12. Interior of a quiet Counter office: a long counter with two clerk windows, the near clerk punching the corner off a brass-rimmed card, a woman standing at the counter seen from behind, a tone box on a high shelf, and through a tall window a
    Freely Given
  13. Low outside view of a squat brick hut about the size of a chapel with its door open: through the doorway an iron-lined trench with the old main lying in it and six gate valves standing up from it on tall stems like iron trees, each with a w
    Hours Nobody Would Pay For
  14. Low view across the terrace rows between concrete pillars: tall sorghum with heavy bronze and brick-red heads bent over, nets strung over the best rows, black grackles thick along the tops and sitting on the nets, one flock lifting in a bla
    Treated as Not Existing
  15. View across the swept concrete floor at the ramp head: a hand-deep layer of cut sorghum heads, two facing lines of men and boys swinging flails over it, grain bouncing like hail. Beyond them at the low parapet a woman tosses grain and husks
    Died Peacefully, Surrounded by Colleagues
  16. Street-level view of the plain front of a grain depot: a canvas awning over a counter window, a door beside it with a paper notice pasted on it, and from the awning's edge a big brass hook scale with a plate-wide dial and a pan on three cha
    They Ate It
  17. Looking up from the refinery yard at the old refinery building, and on its roof a long two-story house made entirely of reject glass in clear, red and smoky brown panes set in iron frames, with a glass room on top blazing in the sun and lay
    Tomorrow or the Day After
  18. Along the length of the brick room, across the iron grating floor toward the manifold wall: in the foreground the back of a great upholstered chair on a steel base, a very small seated figure barely showing over its top; a thick bundle of p
    The Red Lever
  19. Interior of the glass room looking along a long wooden table: red and clear panes all round, sun laying blood-colored light across the table and floor; at the head of the table one heavy chair, empty; along the side two plain wooden chairs
    Two in the Seat
  20. Dark quay seen from the water: wide stone steps going down to black water, a dense silent crowd along the quay above them, six men carrying a long linen-draped board down the steps to a flat barge, a line of small boats with lamps in the fo
    Marcel on the Board
  21. Interior of the kitchen seen across the table: a closed work case of soft brown leather with brass corners and worn gold initials on its lid, a folded yellowed letter lying on top; a man at the window with his back half turned; a woman at t
    The Inventory Pass
  22. The whitewashed face of a brick tomb standing on a raised plot of packed shell and clay: three shelves high and fourteen long, a grid of small sealing bricks each with a painted name; in front of it a long board on two trestles covered by a
    A Name in the Mud

Coda: The Freeze

Engraving for coda
  1. Wide low view over gray water: white steam lying knee-high on the surface, a flat-bottomed boat gliding through it so that only a man poling and the heads of two children show, one child leaning over with a net; hundreds of silver fish floa
    Snook on Their Sides
  2. View along the wall walk at night: the old brick-and-stone wall bending away, two small bundled figures standing close at its edge seen from behind, an unlit lamp at their feet, an old man far along the crest walking away with a long pole;
    The File
  3. Interior of the room: a long clear-walled enclosure in the middle, a faint mist from a humidifier beside it, a very thin white-haired man lying inside on his side under a sheet with his face turned away, a woman seated on a low stool beside
    Other: None I Would Swear To
  4. Low side view of the old riveted iron main rising from the ground and running across the stones: a child lying alongside it with an ear on a folded scarf laid against the iron, a second child sitting cross-legged beside it with a chalk tin
    The Storm Key
  5. Under a worn arcade beside a fish shed, a long table of old oak; at its near end a woman bent over a sheet of paper, writing; across from her another woman setting one small coin on the wood; farther along the table a few other writers bent
    Cora’s Account

The covers and the part and chapter engravings are AI-generated illustrations. They were made on 1 October 2026 with OpenAI gpt-image-2, from briefs written from the novels, checked against those briefs and approved by the author. The covers were enlarged with Real-ESRGAN.

AI was used for prose, editing, and artwork in this book.

Also in the union

The other novel: The Fourth Rail Read its chapter 1, free Places and institutions The Notice Board The languages Research and fiction