("Lights over The Maghreb", photo taken 31 December 1999)
Harry Hardiner never referred to the Rosewire works together as a series: instead he called it a "system". That seems as good a place to start as any.
What kind of a system was Rosewire, though? Well, Hardiner's thought processes were actually laid bare, for once. In his Shattered Goblet interview, Hardiner lays out the tenets of what he calls Expansionism, or what we today might call Explosionism.
First, an Explosionist work must choose and lay out its subject: Hardiner called this the wholecloth.
Once the wholecloth was adequately established, it must be burst into its individual constituent moments, "little evental particles" that Hardiner called icons.
These icons must be expanded, or moved apart from one another to more readily view all sides of each individual icon—one might imagine this as an exploded view of the wholecloth. (For me, it always reminded me of an old Star Wars visual encyclopedia, where the Death Star was seen whole and entire on one side, but the other hemisphere sprawled across the page, each satellite dish, hallway, nut and bolt, taken apart and spaced so that arrows and labels could fit between them more easily, and so that this globe of sinister metal, when taken as a whole, could still be imagined as a vast hive of flawless—ish—engineering.)
After the expansion (or the explosion—Rex Patch's term, not Hardiner's, but it's gained more traction), these icons, these constituent parts, must be recombined ("mortared") into something "which roughly shares the silhouette" of the wholecloth, or in other words, a new but familiar form containing the same elements.
And lastly, Hardiner describes what he calls the kettle as "an invitation", which is why usually people will refer to it as the invitation rather than the uncomfortable "kettle". (I had always imagined that "kettle" referred to what you boil water in, to suggest the distillation of the wholecloth into its purest iconic phase, but according to Rex Patch, Hardiner's "kettle" is actually a sewing or bookbinding term to refer to a looping backstitch which connects one signature of folded pages to the next. That actually makes more sense than evaporation in terms of "invitation": the kettle is a little loop that finishes this work but leads you on to more.)
Perhaps most importantly, Hardiner believed that this process happened at all scales—in the spaces between words, as well as across an overarching throughline.
When viewed in these terms, Rosewire takes on a firmer shape than its sprawl would first lead you to believe. While you start off in the high school at Rhodes Rush for the first three books, you're suddenly catapulted into fictionalized fiction with the "legend" of Stavra Starvos, and from there to a collection of plays where characters like the Senator, the chorus-like Board, and the Neuron discuss political theory, and from there into "a graphic novel without graphics" (Zachary Osgood in The Rosewire Companion) about superheroes without superpowers, then into a fictionalized version of the Middle East that Hardiner calls the Maghreb, and finally into... whatever Rise is. Johnny Kite appears in all of these books, with the exception of Green Stone Story and the possible exception of Jettison Jemison, but otherwise, you'd be hard-pressed to find "the skeleton" of Rosewire—
Unless you're thinking Explosionism.
And suddenly you see that 5-fold pattern everywhere.
If you look across the whole series, the Rhodes Rush entries might be considered the wholecloth, Green Stone Story the burst, Election Day through Conquest of Algiers (or at least to its midpoint) would be your expansion, and Rise is almost certainly your mortared icons, leaving a gaping hole for Rosewire 10 and its kettle.
Or how about we look at just the Rhodes Rush entries? The wholecloth is the situation presented by the anonymous online users in Hunt and Peck (although the argument could be made the entire book is the burst of "Johnny Kite and Friend"'s wholecloth), the burst coming at the end of the novel where [spoilers redacted]. The huge amount of information we get about Rhodes Rush, all the people in it, and the alternate histories and timelines presented by the class projects in Lights Low would be our expansion or explosion; the weird stream-of-consciousness of the Friend in Halides represents our mortaring of a familiar situation into a very strange and uncomfortable new form—and the last lines of that novel give us a kettle and an invitation to read on. After all, the novel cuts out mid-sentence.
So Harry Hardiner sits himself down to write the Rosewire series—excuse me, "system"—and insodoing identifies or codifies or creates a literary movement that we see repeated all around us, every day, in some form or fashion. Truth be told, as much as some Hardiner fans (myself included) would like to say that Harry thought this up, wholecloth (get it?), he was really responding to the culture which surrounded him—comic books, television series, and the advent of the internet and hyperlinking had awakened in him his overwhelming Crater-sized urge to tell as much of a story as he could. And tell he did.
The immense Rosewire system sprawls nearly 2.5 million words—the ponderous ninth entry Rise by itself comprises 524,288 words. That Hardiner put out these nine books in roughly nine years—and more—is staggering. That's verging on some Stephen King shit. It leads me (and many, many others, so I can claim no originality here) to believe that he had been working on these books his entire life, and when the time came to publish, most of his active work was in polishing first drafts or transcribing the details of notes.
To go into each novel in turn would require additional primers, and perhaps in the future that will be more feasible. As it stands now, The Rosewire Companion, edited first by Rex Patch and now in later editions by Zachary Osgood, does a very good job laying out the intricate connections between the books and explaining Hardiner's complex mythology. I advise, if you find your curiosity piqued, you first seek out the books themselves, or, barring a lucky day on the internet, picking up a copy of Osgood's excellent (and beautifully presented) critical work. For now, we'll only touch briefly on each entry in turn: