Pym
Mat Johnson
 Chris Jaynes is the only African-American professor of literature at a liberal Manhattan college. Refusing to limit his teaching to the African-American canon and serve on the college diversity committee, he is denied tenure. The quest is led by the protagonist's older cousin Captain Booker Jaynes, "the world's only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver", who is planning on mining blocks of Antarctic ice to melt and sell as expensive bottled water. with a fondness for Little Debbie snack cakes, joins the team in the hope of finding landscape painter Thomas Karvel, "Master of Light" (a parody of Thomas Kinkade, "Painter of Light"), and in part, Pym is laid out as "a road story/bromance between Jaynes and his childhood pal." Other members of the expedition include water treatment engineers Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter, a gay couple documenting the trip for their "Afro-adventure blog." Angela Latham, a lawyer and Jaynes's "much-pined-for" ex-girlfriend, brings along her new husband Nathaniel, treating the venture as a honeymoon. But instead of the black inhabitants described by Poe, Jaynes and his friends come across "a prehistoric world of giant white people, or 'Snow Honkies', who enslave them."