​Annals of Klepsis

(1983)

 

A novel within a volatile, three-dimensional ellipse universe of four suns and seventeen planets, threatened with extinction by the Doomsday Equation. It follows Long John Tong Tyrone, a self-styled historian who journeys to the planet Klepsis—known as the Thief or Pirate Planet—to seek history. The Doomsday Equation’s tertiary focus is Horseshoe Nail, a more-than-two-hundred-year-old figure who must remain neither awake nor dead to preserve cosmic balance. Tyrone arrives with fellow peg-legs Terpsichore Callagy, Andrew “Gold Coast” O’Mally, and Conchita O’Brian, who respectively seek art, gold, and coded technology, all supported by a fund for one-legged Irishmen. Klepsis is an eccentric world with the only known freshwater ocean that requires added salt, a vividly colored landscape under perpetual daylight, and inhabitants in burlesque pirate costumes who live without towns and travel only by water. Its customs include the hallucinogenic grape “My God What Grapes!”, swift and brutal executions, moneylenders who implant explosive slivers in debtors’ skulls, and newspapers printed on self-destructing sheets, leaving it seemingly without history. At the center stands Ravel-Brannagan Castle, keeper of Klepsis’s past and home to its ruling family: the ghost of its founder Christopher Brannagan, the cruel Prince Henry the Pirate, his gentler twin Prince Franco the Outcast who can “go vague” and vanish, Henry’s wife Princess Angela Gilmartin Ravel, famed as the most beautiful woman on Klepsis, and Tharrala Thorn, disgraced for an unspoken sin. Drawn into the castle’s intrigues, slave markets, and phantoms, Tyrone and his companions navigate a hallucinatory world where questions of history, reality, and existence converge on the mystery of the Doomsday Equation.

 

Themes: Reality and illusion; history and prehistory; identity and twinship; doomsday and extinction; power and authority; freedom and slavery; perception and knowledge; the uniqueness of Klepsis; art and grotesquerie; heroism and villainy.

 

Oceanic: Salt for the Ocean; The Ocean of Klepsis; a little arm of the ocean; oceans of Klepsis lack salt; to pour it into the ocean; a freshwater ocean; freshwater bodies are ever genuinely wine-colored; sea-green; ocean meadows; floating-growing vegetation; floating "cork islands"; ocean ships; ocean-and-space ships; underwater jet; winelike ocean; the oceans are a basic fuel; River-Boat Dancers; Whale-Oil Lamps; dolphins leaping in schools; right whales; whales have filled the oceans; unclogged the oceans of Klepsis; the whale runs; the water rushed out and drenched them; a moisty and pauky situation; the ship burst asunder and began to sink; drown in yourself; awash with midnight salt-water; our waves and wake sloshing against the hot and drafty iron doors; a fine shower of flesh and blood; bright blood running down your withers; a rush of red blood; blood-wakening artifacts; The bloodiest piracy; blood flowed freely; blood from the roots of your tongue; the blood of all your hospitable ancestors would boil in your veins; a waterfall that turned a paddle-wheel; flopped over into the warm water of the ocean pool; roll and float and dive; to boil a lobster; fall forever in a well; its bottom is Hell; down and down into the murky water; long underwater swims; the water drained away; water boiling backwards in the water clocks; Gills and fins and fishy tails; ocean gamins; by the Waters of Babylon; to the sound of the seas; a lapping pool and fountain from the ocean; sweet-water oceans; roiling water; we swam; a calm ocean at night; slow ocean voyage; skip to the oceans of other planets; Crossing the Ocean of Hiatus; Sailing Through the Bushes; My brain it is saltwater; a leaking bucket; Sea's gone strange; the ship rode lighter and higher in the water; dunked the bucket into the ocean; It's salt water; all the seas and oceans of Klepsis are fresh water; I smell salt spray; the whole hull of the ship was bosky, bushy, green-leafed; green goop; poor backwaters; richer waters of another planet; placid waters; hiatus road; the hot doldrums; fishpond; sea-tempests; the winds and the waves, 'Rise and roar'; 'Be calm again'; strange floes were suddenly floating in it; a queasiness, a lightness, a giddiness; a pushing flow to it as if it were being pumped; ocean-scapes; sailing down a rushing torrent; rushing up a torrent, pumped almost vertically; to tell the land from the water, for both of them seemed soft and soppy and semi-fluid; walking quakingly on the water; sinking and screaming into the land; the tide of him; cresting waves; choppy waves; the tidal wave, the world-wave; the gobbling ocean; rampaging oceans; the waters of the saltless ocean; inundated it; rising very rapidly and stormily; Frightened by the rising water; drowned by it; the tidal-world-wave had begun to ebb; the wind and the waves quieted; the water level fell almost to the bottom; Big rocks were floating in the air; shot up many hundreds of meters into the air in narrow needles of water; the fury of the churning water; a quest into the depths of the human spirit; the unvoiced dreams of the dregs of space; his mind has become pretty barren ground lately; my mind has had islands of fog in it; I'm not a man but a sherlocker, a sky-dick, a snuffling hound; a ratter, and they were the rats tracked down; the humanly inhabited universe...is an unstable closed system; the Doomsday Equation; The Introspections of Brannagan; we are introspecting Brannagan; we are in the middle of a giant human brain; Brannagan's Brain!; he really does hold all of us in his brain now; how can we hide from a person in his own brain?; trapped in Brannagan's brain; the cliffs of imagination; the fall from the top will kill you; the big human brain that had contained us; interior valleys and cities; my own mind is solid and not merely sketched out; the ink pot from which the lines are drawn; group-shared thing to be dipped into; a sleeping person who now holds all things and all persons as imaginings in his mind; they are imaginary nonbeings; it is his own imagination that we are all in; a dreaming person does not wake; to go vague; sort of ghostliness about a twin who can go vague; the perhaps-ghost of Brannagan; my own person and ghost; the ghost of him; Prince Franco had disappeared; he disappeared from out of his clothes; what he had meant by "going vague"; water is rising about us here in the darkness; drowned here; fetid darkness; terror of falling, down, down, down, out of the unreality and into the reality; swim in the giant tun; tumbled me into the big vat; I sank; I rose to the surface again; Help, I'll drown!; falling more and more rapidly through the wine; quick fear of plummeting down; spirited ocean of wine; he fell down when he was thrown from the skies; the healing ocean of wine; the wine that heals; I had visions of staying in the big vat of wine till I drowned; I dove deep; in the depths a voice spoke to me; came up with a rush, leaped out of the wine; the wine vat; being healed for a long time; soggy and winy man who came cured out of the big wine vat; dripping man; thrown into the vat of healing wine; a drop of water compared to the time-ocean of pain; the roiling of the crowds; murky water; unconscious and unborn; We build things in our sleep, in our unborn state; completely unconscious; we're unconscious; the deliriums of purgatory; in my own mind, and not as wraiths before our time.

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 Apocalypses

(1977)

 

Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?

 

Constantine Quiche, the world’s best detective, finds himself investigating the sudden, impossible appearance of the peninsula of Sandaliotis off the coast of Monaco. Is this new land a miraculous reality, an elaborate hoax, or something stranger? Quiche is thrown into a disorienting world of beautiful but deadly agents, shifting identities, and a memory that seems to be tampered with. He moves through a landscape where reality itself is fluid, confronting a master forger, a murderous conspiracy, and the threat of a world-bomb in the sky. His investigation leads him from the sunlit shores of the new country to a surreal, thirteen-sided torture chamber where the nature of his own identity and the case itself are called into question.

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Themes: illusory reality; forgery and artifice; psychological manipulation; global deception and blackmail; duality of existence; drama as reality.

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Oceanic: The sea shore; a fog bank; channeled waters; a great mirage; like a cloud bank; unreal elements as of something that had happened underwater; the blue coast; throwing a rock into the pond to see what sort of eddies it can stir up; an under-ocean rock pile; a grotto; a booming tidal cavern; a female dolphin; an underwater echo; we live in caves under the ocean; a low cloud on the surface of the sea; a lavender cloud; land that was always ocean before; the look of being under water; shimmering bridges; a road that was always ocean before; underwater sorts of rocks and shelvings; the ghost of certain underwater strata; the roots of a land touching down to the blue water; the water line of a purple fog; images dredged out of torture deaths; dolphin flesh; a boat-filled and ship-filled canal; a green fog down on the sea; the turtle had just swallowed all the seas; spit part of the water over his shoulder to create again some of the sea; nine times risen from the Sea; psychotic unconsciousnesses seen as islands; a peculiar dew makes land technically under water; the deepest dew in the world; deep fog becomes tolerably deep ocean; Ships and boats have sailed for ages in these waters where this map shows land; Fish have swum for ages in these waters; a sea-mist; the big land intrudes on the oceans; black dew; nightmare things or bad dreams cropping out; our island is never submerged; it would contaminate the sea if it swept over it and would kill the fish; creatures come from the unconsciousnesses or the under-minds; a dolphin whistles under the sea; the sea filled with such a suffusing light; the sea leaping with fish; blind and confused fish swimming in huge underground pools; a flood dam had broken; a bright and shimmering sea; light sources of the seas; the national unconscious under-ocean; unconscious lives in submarine caves; original dungeons were submarine ones; the walls are ocean painted; Hanged with a rope of water; men impaled on the walls were drowned; underground, or underwater; devil fish; the earth is always moist and subterraneously irrigated; an open ocean far below; dredged out of this sea; we come up out of the ocean; pieces of the hypnotic fog, of the veil; like lines drawn on water that we then erect a land upon; air and water and salt, from the local atmosphere and the sea; gas plasmas; swamp fires; cover our designated areas of ocean with oscillating oil slicks; air foam or fog foam; the hair of the ocean standing on end with the electricity in it; meadows of shimmering green goop; people walking on colored air; the mind-casting veil; the shadow fog; the reality cloud; let all the juice leak out of it; it will drift away on the sea; Three great nations have sunk into the sea; out-of-body travel; a fill-in of green goop resting on drifting oil slicks; unsubstantial mountain of air-foam; a Fortean manifestation on the Mediterranean Sea; the Illusion of the Lavender Cloud (a sort of hypnotic cult device); Gushing water; falling screaming to the ocean that was below the false land; underwater meadows and constructions and caves; climbing up night clouds; emptiness all the way down to the Sea; walking on crumbling clouds; the Fountains were still leaping but their pools were all fallen and gone; churning, foaming shoal water; a vortex of water; a maelstrom; a huge flow of water was plunging down into it; the lilac depths of the ocean.

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​​​​​​​​​​​The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny

 

A fractured biography of Enniscorthy Sweeny—a paradoxical figure whose creative works, particularly his “Armageddon Operas,” seem to be bringing about the end of the world. Told through a collage of essays, letters, and a bizarre chronology, the novella presents a world split between two realities: a peaceful “Golden Century” and an ongoing series of catastrophic wars. Sweeny, identified as the key “Crux-Individual” upon whom the fabric of reality depends, finds himself at the center of this conflict, pursued by both friends and enemies—mathematicians and supernatural entities—who either want to kill him to prevent his visions from coming true or protect him to ensure their fulfillment.

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Themes: Fiction creating reality; prophecy and predestination; multiverse and alternate history; genius and madness; control and resistance; the scapegoat and sacrifice.

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Oceanic: The iron door of hell left open; intruding things from the unconscious; soft mud of legend; swallowing a legend; tampering with the flow of the world's events; a burning brand in a noxious fire; her flesh crawled with living fire; there was an ocean between them; the damnation smell of fire-crawling flesh; setting the world to quaking; the world swallowed by a giant, gobbling fire; propounded his stark and evil dreams; the colossal final and engulfing rotten fruit; the intellectual world is like running water; anything can ripple it; tentacles of a hellish monster that writhed in the background; the world has been blown up before, again and again; a chasm opening under our feet and plunging us into bottomless oblivion; an event grows out of its own shadow; it will first be a shadow or ghost of an event; a shadow that has passed without memory; contradictory history tracks; double validities; one version is reality and the other is unreality; the resolution has been obliterated; the blood-fanged cannibal version will eat up the other one; a head full of smoky dreams; your dark visions; sick-dream stuff; water-worlds; slippery shale-in-formation, mud-earth; the topos or location of the unconscious; the floor of the unformed and the unconscious; dream-bogs; primordial dream-master beast; It belches the dreams out of its stomach; dream-becoming-flesh; deeply buried and primordial strata; the group unconscious has become a thoroughly contaminated and polluted pool; conscious surface life has now become only oil-slick thin on top of the waters; the unconscious depth below is abysmal; huge and prophesying corpses of the three great wars in those depths; mind-swamps; descend into the subconscious; a sea of glass mingled with fire; Raging waves of the sea; the world was destroyed once by water; the steep-down gulfs of liquid fire; great rivers of blood that can sweep down and drown them; All the fountains of blood will be broken open; all the skies full of blood will pour down; the blood overflowing the pictures and running out of their frames and down the walls; the blood was flowing haunch deep on the horses with a super-strong current; It drowned mice and all but the strongest swimming rats with its swirling force; rivulets of blood; they sank down through the ground as if it were water; islands that have sunken or disappeared; some of the fish will not swim over the places; sea raid into the Mediterranean; out of the slough; the waters and wines sprawl and heave and lunge; ourselves in the flooding pattern of our towns; a jug is absolutely water-tight but there may be water outside of it elsewhere in the universe; rivers of words that run like waterfalls; a blue plasmic gas that was his projective spirit; the plasmic spirit of dead Grogg running and coursing; his blue plasmic brains, now hovering; Two Universes may exist simultaneously; a nightmare, that’s what we are in; eye-of-the-hurricane; the peaceful eye of the storm; the psychic storm; Groggs own shadow; I got infested by him to a total degree; a sudden sinking thought; confused by the waves of the present breaking over it.

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Arrive at Easterwine

(1971)

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The first-person narrative of Epiktistes, a sentient composite being born from the “person-précis”—distilled consciousnesses of geniuses at the Institute for Impure Science. Narrated by Epikt from his conception in a gel-cell tank, the novel traces his rapid development as he wrestles with questions of identity, the quirks of his eccentric creators, and the three monumental tasks for which he was designed: to define a Leader, a Love, and a Liaison for humankind. The book is a picture of Epikt’s mind, shaped both by his varied parentage and by a mysterious snake-like entity gestating within his core, as well as a strange sawdust doll, both aspects of his spiritual awakening, while around him his creators quarrel, scheme, and struggle with problems that range from the practical to the meaning of existence and the shape of the universe.

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Themes: machine consciousness and self-identity; the nature of reality and perception; search for leadership; the pursuit of love (essence of love); the nature of communication and liaison; failure and learning; memory, amnesia, and hidden truths; the shape of the universe and being; human peculiarity and greatness; orders of being.

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Oceanic: Infinite blazes a-birthing me; being born from an interruption; detachment from the matrix; my person Gregory was droning in his big voice (imagine a bee big enough that its drone eclipses thunder); overflow into it; slack-water pools; tidal estuaries; primordial oceans; the gell-cell pool in personal action; this was abyss, this was chasm, this was blinding darkness; personality poured out from an electric flask; the subconscious, the unconscious, the paraconscious; gell-cell broth; a jug is absolutely water-tight but there may be water outside of it elsewhere in the universe; sloshed with sour red stuff; the wine from the beginning and it cleaves to me; dreaming of a female dolphin with fish-flesh; an underwater echo; we live in caves under the ocean; the hair of the ocean standing on end with electricity; shimmering green goop; meadows of shimmering green goop; people walking on colored air; the Domdaniel cavern under the sea; the monster waiting for the waters to withdraw; the world's fountain ran dry; the gurgling had softened to a mere dripping; James Bauer was standing ankle-deep in the waters of his lake; the world cliff that is the side of Morada; this cliff has no bottom; plunging through the lake into interior infinity; the bottomless sludge; drowning in the foulness; the annihilating and panic slime; sinking of the world; the little mill down at the bottom of the ocean that grinds out the salt; a wave that hangs against the sky and does not fall back; its curled roaring and churning foaming; fish harpooned from the wave; the water line of a purple fog; land that was ocean before; land looking like it had been under water; the ghost of certain underwater strata; the roots of a land touching down to the blue water; how demiurges and titans build land; nine times risen from the sea; psychotic unconsciousnesses seen as islands in the morning dew; land that is technically under water; deepest dew in the world; deep fog becomes deep ocean; ships and fish have swum for ages where maps show land; sea-mist; the unconscious as a polluted pool; conscious life as an oil-slick thin on top of the waters; the unconscious depth as abysmal; prophesying corpses in those depths; a sea of glass mingled with fire; raging waves of the sea; great rivers of blood that can sweep down and drown; all the fountains of blood broken open; all the skies full of blood will pour down; the intellectual world is like running water.

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Aurelia

(1982)

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Centered on the fifteen-year-old Aurelia from Lafferty’s planet Camiroi, where fourteen-year-olds are assigned to govern minor worlds as part of a World Government school program, the novel follows her as she embarks on this rite of passage. Though she excelled at starship building, Aurelia slept through celestial navigation and forgot to create key components like a Monitory Chronometer and a Compensating Contingency Grid, leaving her landing site to random chance. She arrives on what she dismisses as a “little back-water dump,” where her natural abilities appear miraculous to the locals, causing some to hail her as the Messiah and others to fear her as the Devil, even as she herself struggles to identify the planet. Seen as awkward and deficient compared to her peers, Aurelia undertakes this mission—regarded as both a “purging” and a “romantic episode” that transforms Camiroi’s “Shining People” into adults. Her trial is further complicated by the arrival of a “Dark Counterpart” who lands soon after her, and the novel follows her as she faces the reactions of the inhabitants, the burdens of her assignment, and the confrontation with her shadow double.

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Themes: alienation; clash of worlds and ideals; reality versus illusion and perception; duality and counterpart; knowledge, ignorance, and truth; inherent powers and vulnerabilities; pervasive violence and inevitable death; the pursuit of happiness and morality; cultural critique and satire; transformation and sacrifice.

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Oceanic: back-water dump; slept through celestial navigation; we are the wave; a purging of yourselves; traits to be jettisoned; fall through the seive; Children of the Penumbra; sailing with the ship; deep-space; wailed in fluty frustration; unbottled feelings; melt into their spheres; vaporized in flight; flew on sudden impulse; rendered unconscious; follow the instructions of your unconscious; your death-mind; swooned; horror-sickness of falling; land-fall; space-net; fly out of that net; gravity flesh-crawl; landing sickness; surfacing in the memory; blind destruction rises up and gobbles one up; River Boat on the lake; fishful part of the mountain lakes; inhabiting the land and water; wrapped in night; skittish sleep; came down like black lightning; acrid and acid clouds; I hear water running there; mind is so boggled; intuition would flow into those gaps and fill them up; completely intuitive person; came down in a flame of darkness; instant ghost; lines between life and death had been eroded; floating world. Come float with us; on Sea or Lake or Sewer; pool of Aurelia's eyes; crawling apprehension; reflecting pools of Aurelia's eyes; channel blood; staunch any bleeding; hull of the orbit ship; split-wit on board; lodging...that was Blaise's own body; drink on deck; flask of blood; drink your blood; drinking it off; nations of strength singing in her blood; great draughts of fish; Lake fish; moved quietly and like a shadow; people of the 'floating world'; live on the indestructable fish; people of the swamps and rivers and lakes; forgotten river-banks; trolls who live under the bridges; troll fish to live; one foot in the floating world; He talks to fish; throw her off the River Boat and into the churning water; drowned; recurrent dreams; wiped her stele clean of all immediate memories; fuzzy tongue; we're on water; water slide under us; we tie up to land; assimilate great globs; information simply slipped away; throw Aurelia overboard...into the churning water; natatorium; moat filled with carp; tarn filled with croppie; trout stream; fountains full of fountain fish; dream planet; unclear whiff; skinny dip; whole Universe would have to be pulled through the loop; smeared and blurred with still fresh blood; everyone flowing in; wave of the Future; dream of urinating on his grave; draw bright blood on him; nibbled at space a little deeper; a drop of water; disappear into the hole; play in the mud; Floating-World Connections; grain of sand introduced into the topo-oyster; unconscious stand-in; unconscious 'doubling before the fact'; Unconscious Writing; tongue-in-the-bugle-mouthpiece; plateau; drop out of the bottom of the world; falls into discord; wash our hands in joy as we drink from the fun fountain; swim alongs; spilling a great crockful of blood; spate of 'Aurelia's Wake' stories; poured full wherever their level falls; invisible depths; sea-serpents in those depths; murk; her very flesh is aerated; a 'Shining Mist' of the alchemists; River Boat; bled blood-like fluid; smelled waxy; left the River boat and came onto shore; splashy shore of the lower lake; poured out of both of the horns; clouds of delirious content; a cloud and a fog; sea-stallions and sea-cattle; deep-sea tigers; Sea-serpents; creatures still being born out of the slime; the whole universe swarmed out of a horn; dipped in red wine; mare-milk; shakes all the fog out of the world; road through a swamp; standing on the edge of the river; river between the upper and lower lakes; on a lake-shore; The River Boat was on the River; come down from the upper lake by locks; In the deeper water; depth between the deep and the shallow; loomed large and deep in the water; fish asked from deep water; fish maintains its own depth; written on the water; a-swimming in the various waters; crying deeply as he looked at the water; watered by one's news leaks; serpents began to gush great streams of water; dying of this-world sickness; dumped them in the river; the fish rose to them.

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Dark Shine

(1977)

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The novel introduces a central group of eight figures—Rolo N.B. Danovitz, Brendan Michaels, Beth Barabbas, Chrôna Lorngold, Norbert Hardcore, Hornblende Michaelson, Nelly Mercury, and Felicity Octave—who arrive in the Outer Winds Area amid coin-rattling fanfare, metallic clamor, and the backdrop of May earthquakes linked to the fabled “Earthquake Gold.” Awaiting a figure named Tart, who questions their motives, the group—particularly Brendan Michaels—focuses on the ambition of “making a world tomorrow” by replacing the old with the new. Each character embodies a distinct function: Rolo, an eleven-year-old prodigy and ruthless natural dictator called “the present King of Babylon”; Brendan, a master mathematician and magician who fabricates new realities; Beth, a “brilliant” and “audacious” ex-centurion and battle technician; Norbert, the natural strong-arm maintaining the “Illusion of Spontaneity”; Chrôna, Rolo’s genetically enhanced mother, hailed as a “surpassing genius”; Nelly, a visionary in synthetic entities and the “illusion business,” with an “explosive lattice” of ideas; and Felicity, entirely synthetic, affiliated with the Spaciousness Unlimited Group and recruited by Nelly. The narrative revolves around their vast world-expansion project, in which they serve as “world-creators” or “world-expanders,” speaking in terms of realities, illusions, and quantum shifts, all while under the watchful eye of the Cocked Eye BAM, a sub-group of SNUFF.

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Themes: world creation and transformation; illusion versus reality; power, control, and dictatorship; genetic engineering and synthetic beings; mathematics and magic in world-building; destruction and renewal; surveillance and oversight; social hierarchy and class structures; consciousness and the unconscious; the conflict between the old world and the new world.

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Oceanic: ruddy and sparkling with dew; unconscious of his own cruelty; planet-blanks floating around; grain of salt; lodged in the unconsciousness of us all; a hundred sheets deep; belly-full of tapes; the poison of garrulity; blood poured into them; blood and offal that gushed out; torrents of black blood; equations are very bubbly; before they go flat; dipped into it; in my sleep; O'Crocker's Crock of Gold Tales; Gold Falling; new germinal ideas; interior shouting and tumult; poured onto the floor in a banging and wheezing cascade; dream-tapping our unconscious; gush out some strange residue; Beaver and Sappa Creeks flow into the Republican River; playing in the mud; cleanse and drain the fens and bogs; repair the fountains of the deep; basins of holy naphtha; monkey-shine; swings the delicate balance; emanated from the unconscious; the world has been running out of food; The old way has been emptied; overflow this plot; a slowing, and then a hiatus; reality was allowed to crawl back in; illusion out-pouring; Rainfall depends on subjective causes; strato-winds that blow; on the unconscious level; the unconscious contribution; the unconscious illusion; the real world underneath the artificial illusions; a big balloon that we are all continually blowing up; a personal turmoil; that I had in the womb; the strato-winds; an intuitive flash; the Tellurian Stew; building has always gone on unconsciously; quantum jumps; the gold runs out of the cracks and fissures; it spouts up, and falls back again; it runs out like water; it gathers into pools like water; all the gold of the world is spilled gold; expansion of emptiness; public backing eroded; reservoirs of ill-will; we will tap later; it has been running through all our mathematics; Albright's Algebras for the Unconscious; our awakening to consciousness; a massive advance and awakening; far in arrears; we did almost all of this in our sleep; Every new thing arrives complete with fossils of itself; rocks run like water; Body functions work best when they are subconscious or unconscious; forcing consciousness upon a subconscious body function; These world forces work unconsciously; unconscious processes; hurry the flow; violent recoil; a richer and larger mantle; lifting of brain-waves; a running blood-sugar-level record; the 'hidden room'; we are not able to penetrate; a small-group-consciousness; drawing on mysterious and unaccountable energy; a tightening spiral that will never run down; burst like bubbles; the including ooze that may grow into a flood; a sideways scamper and dance (like a crawfish); an iceberg in that only one eighth of it is visible; the 'Intruding ooze'; adrenalin flow; brain-wave patterns; make stars pig-out of mud; a shower of falling stars; a wake-eyed and watching state; pushing folded through the ground; Spirits of the Earth; Genii came out of their bottles and jugs; Behemoths erupted out of the earth; the rising sun shined blue from the strange smoke; some of the rocks had melted, and they flowed like brooks; Loamy pumice was welling up from fissures; oozing up with the fantastic ooze; our wits are welling up; real material may wash away again in the next torrent; the dead rose, and issued out of their earth; manifestations of the unconscious earth-building; classifying of everything as conscious or subconscious or unconscious; time flows again now; this new world...overlapped into that non-topographical space; welling up out of the earth; floating people; the inrush of people; atmosphere as a fluid medium; I am the pat-fish of the organization; in the newly welled-up areas; the complex swelled out; voices from underground; the surging expansion; old matrix world; mud-flat and seed-bursting fecundity; sewers and aquaducts; the baths; built by ourselves...while we were asleep; after we wake up from it, we do not remember; ruled by our unconscious; a pseudo or assumed unconscious approach; The Floating World People; the nose of the iceberg; they can emerge at any moment; a ship turns over; They are like quicksilver; a wrenching hydraulic-hammer effect; they go to expand a world at a welling-up point; sudden cultural flowering; that burst through the Spacious City soil; The Fountain; crawling innovation; a child being spun around and around; becoming conscious; they play their parts with their eyes closed; state of churning, delirious, composing unconsciousness; their interior turmoil; That one is wide-awake. He is not in the unconscious; a turmoiled world of rock-flow expansion; the flesh pots of some earlier world; primordial prosody fresh from the fountains of the seismic unconscious; coming up out of the ground; coming up out of the unconscious to the conscious; moaned in her underground prison; recoil and splash of it now; out of such depth of feeling; coalesce about a court; court pools and fish ponds; a shimmering mirage; in this underground prison; My primary is feeling unease; needle will float on water; billows or choppiness; dwell on the crusts over abysses; if we emptied the prisons; a bottom below the crust; echoes from that bottom; there is always a bottom; reality is crumbling; plumbing our own depths; what is quicksand; the tide of affairs; things rising and other things sinking in the water; a concomitant tide; a strong swimmer rejoices when the tide begins to turn; swim against the turning of the tide; I love contrary tides; swimming against the tide; kingfishers...begin to dive into the water; the turning is at hand. The water and the world will be upset; a way-station on a stormy road; It shines like jelly; the tide has just turned against you; an excellent swimmer; command the tides; the tide had turned; The Dam has burst; The Tide has Turned; clouds from the pipes of the seven dreamers; we are wrapped in a soiled cloud; swept a few complete persons along with me; When a bubble bursts; the whole world was alive with pulsing fire and blood; Have we been asleep or have we been mad?; followed into this crumbling nightmare?; a strong-gravity vortex; escalating shock; unreal meadows; We'll rise and hover; roots...will be left to dangle in the air; volcanoes began to spit and spew; a whirlwind or whirlpool or water-spout that sucks up fish and frogs; a churning and sloppy cloud; a dream-town; fragments of them are off on a bad-dream cruise; bowels gushed out; the dream this morning; a group dream; a pre-vision of hell; dream-town; We swept here; they could tell which waters of the River Elbe were real water; the bog; it might be sampled and imbibed; beer-foam unreal; Rolo was pouring the remnants of his now finished childhood, the rancid and rotten dregs of it; mountains puffed up with unreality; less swampy; fungus at its river corners; from Arles to Boulogne-on-the-Sea; the soggy and smoking surface of the land; the contagion of the World; a deep and pungent green valley; hot lava pushing itself along; red mist in the air from atomized blood; introducing...unauthentic memories into the mind; the bright green frog with a shine on it; wet-brain-syndrome people; the Lush Lounge; wet-brains; squirm loose.

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East of Laughter

(1983/1988)

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The novel centers on The Group of Twelve, individuals chosen to provide “extraordinary and onerous service to the world,” who continually wrestle with the question of whether their reality is genuine, tested against the “one-hundred-and-one” dream trials created by the ancient Roman Scribbling Giant Atrox Fabulinus. Though dead for over fifteen hundred years, Atrox’s work inexplicably continues to receive new chapters, reinforcing the suspicion that their world is a dream. This world rests on the Twenty-One Pillars—Seven Saints, Seven Technicians, and Seven Scribbling Giants—with the Giants proving especially crucial and nearly irreplaceable during the “Changing of the Aeons.” The group’s members are as extraordinary as their purpose: Hilary Ardri, a Computerized Fish Tycoon whose machine miraculously draws fish from empty waters, and his wife Jane Chantal Ardri, an artist and “fuzzy huntress” with an invisible, computer-crafted hunting horn housing her female computer, Joyeuse Vice-Reine; Solomon Izzersted and John Barkley Towntower, who share one body, with John publicly renowned as a mathematician though Solomon, the grotesque growth on his belly, is secretly superior and has legally taken over his identity; Laughter-Lynn Casement, a laughing artist and genealogist who insists she was “born twice” from a goose egg; Leo Parisi, a “Boy Wonder” nuclear scientist disillusioned by atoms as “empty boxes,” and his wife Perpetua Parisi, a logician who uses “Behavioristic Logic” to forecast events; her father Gorgonius Pantera, a piano-maker who has lived across three centuries with undiminished youth, and her mother Monika Pantera, overseer of their vast Klavierschloss (Piano Castle); Caesar Oceano, a shipping magnate partnered with Prince Leonardo the Great, a golden panther from the “Exterior Darkness” who speaks with piercing insight; Drusilla Evenrood, a biologist advancing “para-biology” for a dream-world; Denis Lollardy, the world’s greatest forger whose creations eclipse their originals; Mary Brandy Manx, mayor of Port Saint Mary with her resonant “brandy voice” and the ability to appear as a youthful goddess; and Hieronymous Talking-Crow, a pan-scientist who claims humans live in a “larvae-state” or “Shoga” of rapid development. Traveling together through Sora, Gaire Castle, and East Sussex, the Twelve piece together the enigma of their existence, their collective journey deepening the mystery of whether they inhabit reality—or dream.

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Themes: reality versus illusion; authorship of existence; fluid and multiple identities; mortality, immortality, and time distortion; cosmic decline and the need for renewal; the nature of creativity and genius; subjectivity of perception; humor and absurdity; the power of narrative and metaphor.

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Oceanic: Are We Dreaming?; life as a dream; living in another's dream; one hundred and one tests for dreaming; unreal world ambient; computerized fish from fishless lakes; green-eyed when gazing at the ocean; Caesar Oceano; World-Wide Shipping Company; Price-Cut-Throat of the Seven Seas; North Sea people; sea-farers and fishers; island on the Wadden Sea; Ireland floating alone in the World Ocean; Isle of Man the last thing afloat; the ocean speaks in a brandy voice; shouting at flying fish and whales; becoming a sea goddess in the Spanish Depths; antediluvian larvae; God washing the world of them; sound of gently falling waters; a giant afraid of crossing running water; floating moat; river flowing from Lake Como; cellars with passages to the Ocean; Drowned Ghost Cellar; drowned-man ghosts; ghostly SeaCaptain; stairway from the Monsters' Den below the booming ocean; sea-level floor; one level under the sea; Drowned Man Shoal below the booming sea; sea-wracked dead people; Okeanoids and Ocean-Nymphs; Ocean-Giants; Ocean-Goblins; the depths of the Ocean; sea monsters who never reach the surface; music played under water; breathing salt water; the churning World Ocean; Mighty Ocean Mill powered by deep-currents; gold piling in the depths; lottery in the middle depths; Governors of the Ocean meeting in deep Domdaniel Castle; washing sins in the tide; Earth and Ocean paintings; Sea-Goblins; Fountain of Youth in a narrow throat; striking new springs from rocks; wading in the treacherous waters of reality; chin-deep in waters of survival; we must drown; strangulation nightmares; subconscious libraries that manifest themselves; half-underground house; subjective wine; quest for reality.

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The Elliptical Grave

(1977/1988)

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Professor Pioneer J. Reventlo has a radical theory: mankind did not evolve from simplicity, but has devolved from a state of immense primordial complexity. To prove this, he and a team of academics, students, and quasi-mythological beings launch an expedition to the “White Goat Valley” in Calabria, Italy—a place that is itself a time machine and a nexus of illusion. Their goal is not a mere archaeological dig, but a metaphysical excavation of the earth, the “haunted air,” and the “mind-sphere.” As they begin to uncover evidence of a lost golden age, they are hounded by supernatural enemies and drawn into a reality that is increasingly unstable. The expedition culminates in the group becoming trapped within a mysterious pavilion that shifts into a state of temporal stasis, a cosmic cocoon where they must confront the true, terrifying shape of the universe and await their own mutational jump.

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Themes: human mutation and evolution; lost primordial perfection; erosion of language and thought; reality versus illusion and perception; time as a physical and fluid entity; knowledge, intuition, and ancient secrets; confinement and transformation; adversaries and obstruction; dreams and shared experience; identity and belonging.

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Oceanic: ambient light washing over everything; time stream; submerged buildings; uncharted ocean; raiding the unconscious; time-excavations; turtle soup; sinking boat; sea-changed; North Sea Monster; bread cast upon the waters; underwater explosions; caverns of the folk unconscious; fluid sea-medium; under-seas dreams; fish drowning in the air; pounding of the ocean; Life In the Grave; Death By Drowning; entombed below the city; the land of the dead; the black Charon; splendors that appear in the grave; Three Days In The Belly Of A Fish; depth of the sea; The Cradle of The Deep; sperm whale; deep-water etchings on basalt stones; a 'sea change' in the unconscious; the unconscious is always a sea; grass in the middle of the sea; plague out of Egypt; tadpole in the cocoon; cocoons made out of water; walls and lids of water; buried alive; Fountains of The Deep; creatures in cocoons traveling on a voyage; cocoon-grave; the crashing ocean; a coffin, a grave, a cocoon, an ark, a pavilion, a world; the ark and the grave and the whale and the pavilion; a voyage in an elliptical grave.

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Fair Hills of Ocean, Oh!

(1979)

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A novel with an inciting incident: the arrival of the “Boat People” at every port worldwide, their hundreds of green-gray-blue boats—seemingly alive and without visible power—appearing suddenly along the docks. The Boat People themselves are robust and ruddy, with carrot-orange or red hair and buckskin-colored skin, declaring themselves “conquerors and occupiers” rather than refugees. Though armed only with daggers, short swords, and spears, they display astonishing powers such as walking on water, skiing across the surface on cockle shells, and fluently speaking local languages. Their swift takeover of municipal and national governments is marked by paradoxical behavior: tolerant enough to pay with ancient gold coins, yet ruthless when ignored, as seen in Calcutta, where they slaughtered those who disregarded them. Later, it is revealed they possess throat gills, enabling them to breathe underwater. At the same time, the Matamoros Chapter of the Informal Committee for Advising Directors of Corporations and Nations, a secret society of global influence, assembles at Emmet Briny’s Dunes of Hell resort to weigh this unprecedented crisis. Figures like Frank Voigt and Globbe Balena argue over whether the Boat People represent a true menace or a diversion, until their session is interrupted by the flamboyant Robert Al-dolphin Liffy, a super-intelligent bottlenose dolphin, double agent, and would-be “Emperor of Domdaniel.” Speaking rapid Spanish and English through a translator and throat microphone, Robert dismisses the arrivals as a cyclical “swarming” that recurs every few centuries, though he later hints that the real answers lie with the “smart dealers” of Domdaniel Fortress. Five members of the Chapter—Oscar Judgement, Esther Scarlet, Carol Medusa, Jorge Medusa, and Margret Kirkestol—undertake a balloon voyage to Domdaniel with Robert as their guide, arriving at a sprawling underwater stronghold said to imprison captured world leaders and ruled by the enigmatic Emperor Carmody Overlark. There, the group is confined to one of Domdaniel’s dreaded “Masterpieces of Death Rooms” and forced to confront Overlark, whose seemingly human presence conceals sinister depths.

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Themes: alien invasion and occupation; hidden worlds and realities; perception versus reality; manipulation and deception; global existential threat; heroism and perilous adventure; fluidity of identity and species; tyranny and power struggle; ambition and political intrigue; art, spectacle, and performance; technological and biological innovation; the absurdity of existence.

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Oceanic: A deep oceanic mind shimmering with intelligence; a soul brimming full; leaping and sounding spirit; boats growing out of the ocean; walking on the water; the roughest and choppiest water; we come from the ocean; something fishy about them; intellectual net-man casting his nets into stranger waters; a well connected by deep side channels to the river and the Gulf of Mexico; thousand-kiloweight fishes pulled from the well; fishy-rubbery unreal flesh; the Spirits of the Deep; a double agent out of the ocean; the salt-and-sulphur water of the Devil’s Well; the Empire of Domdaniel; the ocean is full of such metamorphies; the ocean bottoms are the plains and low lands; the mountains are the high waters; the ocean depths, the underwater world, all was opened up to them; down to the sea channel and the sea current; the ‘green darkness’ of the night-time deeps; light dropped and dribbled down, shattered and liquified; they rose to the surface, to the waves, to the living and fast-running hills of the ocean; they didn't need to surface to breathe; drowning in a bottomless pool; a fishy smell on that sea wind; a taste of ocean-dream-thought; the oceanic element added to their thoughts; the life-flow that was older than dry land; the notion mill that used to grind the salt for the Ocean; Ocean Rumor; First Fish Night; a sinking feeling; the oceanic pulse of the entire world; the Dolphin comes on storm and squall; swimming in purgatorial waters; a soul-sick dolphin in the North Atlantic waters; a waste of shame; incoherent shores and fens and slack waters; broken purgatorial reefs; a bright wake over all the oceans; the hills of Ocean skip like lambs; great hopping whales; the tide will turn.

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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Fourth Mansions

(1969)

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The novel throws readers into a reality shaped by hidden forces manipulating humanity, centering on Fred Foley, a newspaper reporter with “good eyes but simple brains,” whose unusual perceptiveness allows him to glimpse truths invisible to others, including his skeptical editor Tankersley. Foley’s investigations draw him into the struggles of four clashing factions: the Harvesters (also called Pythons or Brain-weavers), seven psychically potent figures such as Bedelia Bencher (“a cinnamon cookie full of arsenic”) and Salzy Silverio, who gather at Morada to play the perilous “seven-bladed sword” game of brain-weaving, generating seismic shocks and mind-control in pursuit of a privileged mutation into “Overpeople of the Third Testament”; the Returnees (or Toads), exemplified by government official Carmody Overlark, who live for centuries, reappear through history under new names like Khar-ibn-Mod, and reveal their nature through “archaic ears,” using mimicry to manipulate humanity, with Overlark notorious for soaking his head in brackish water; the Patricks (or Badgers), an ancient order of guardians such as Bertigrew Bagley and O’Claire, keepers of mystical fountains and believers in alternate worlds, who command invisible, ape-like servitors called plappergeists; and the emerging Unfledged Falcons, embodied by Miguel Fuentes, a fervent “snake-eater” determined to raise an army from the bottom to cleanse the world of “elegant dogs” and bring radical change. Foley is drawn into their power games when the Harvesters use him as a pawn, making him “goof gloriously” and turning him into a “message center” for competing forces, witnessing lethal rituals such as the one that apparently kills Letitia Bauer. As his awareness sharpens, he begins noticing the archaic ears of Returnees on passersby, causing others to doubt his sanity until he is confined to “The Bug,” a mental institution meant to silence him. From within, Foley perceives the world unraveling into “unprecedented advances that somehow left us far in arrears,” plagued by unrest and strange new diseases, until the novel closes with the mystery of his own transformation.

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Themes: nature of reality and perception; cycles of history versus evolution and mutation; identity, reappearance, and substitution; control, power, and manipulation; the four archetypal creatures and monsters; the role of the simple man; good versus evil and morality; danger, agony, and the desire for more; psychic connection and the weave; the loss and redefinition of humanity.

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Oceanic: danger of serpents; seven-tentacled lightning; thunder-snakes; snake-bit; sucking out blood or ichor; draining of fluid; a net cast over us; hegemony of spiders; hillside above a lake; color of snakes in shade; brain-weaving; a wave of sticky evil; felt him flow through our minds; Klee fish; my own depths and caverns; artesian fountains of water bursting up; lost in a swamp; white froth of accommodation; down deep under the water; crouching in the secret mud; shimmering descent into a catfish castle; catfish bubbling; flesh-fountain; coiling passions; serpentine shale; water trickled down on her; deepest hole on earth; water in the bottom of the pit; a boy had drowned there; bogs; woods with streams; honeycombed caves; a laughing swamp; black and full of water room; revenants are the toads; they sleep under stones; toad with a jewel in his head; unconscious remnants; Python symbol is illicit wisdom; Octopus and Hydra symbols; Badger symbol is the cave or burrow; swam into the weave with a billow of underwater excitement; waters that are under the world; ancient fish-serum instead of blood; poured himself like quicksilver; a firm fish-body; snake-strong body; snakes’ eyelids; ashen weeping in waste places; the world's great snare; Life In the Grave; Death By Drowning; entombed below the city; the land of the dead; the black Charon; splendors that appear in the grave; 'in-the-belly-of-a-fish' memories; a 'sea change' in the unconscious; the unconscious is always a sea; the Eden Archetype, a fine pitcher going to the well; Fountains of The Deep; creatures in cocoons traveling on a voyage of immeasurable importance; cocoon-grave; the crashing ocean; a coffin, a grave, a cocoon, an ark, a pavilion, a world; one may voyage equally in any of them; the pitcher is shattered at the fountain; Broken Cisterns and Living Waters; dry up our interior fountains and they gush out again; subterranean beaches; a sinking world; a sudden dampness and slickness; the darkness began to gulp him down; final tomb humiliation; the old man's fountain ran dry; the gurgling had softened to a mere dripping; standing ankle-deep in the waters of his lake; the world cliff that is the side of Morada; this cliff has no bottom; plunging through the lake into interior infinity.

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