New Release // Fritz Lang’s Destiny

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The thing I serialised for over a year on this site has been wrestled into one giant PDF that you can now read for free.

Using Fritz Lang’s Destiny as a very loose anchor, it’s a picaresque haze crawl across Europe, myth + myth simulacrum, best of all discarded worlds, includes: Slovene Quixote, Asaji in morning light, Krsnik, Cantonese, aswang intrigue, spine demons, ferry succubus, ennui, mania, delusion, sex under a Querelle poster.

Starts with a Slovene guy [plus green knife] talking to a locked cabinet and unravels from there…

It’s pretty long, around 700 pages. Started Chapter One in 2014, left it for a long while then came back to it two years ago [2021] and turned it into something much more unwieldy.

Special mention to Soren Haxan and his brilliant King of Knives, which served as spiritual inspiration for chapters 8-13.

At one point, I did think about submitting, but no one’s taking something this long. And I’m not sure it really fits anywhere. Not experimental enough for experimentalists, and too weird/off the rails for mainstream sci-fi/fantasy presses. Never mind, I still have my death loop thing for those guys. And Dranonika for the experimentalists.

To start reading, click on the pic below [cover looks a bit like a zine, I know]:

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[Void Galaxia] Chapter 58: Powers of Horrorr r

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The murdered dead return as ghosts

Steele burns scientist husband alive while gardener love-toy reduces Solange to skeleton form by draining the blood

in seven minute tour of black and white mansion-scape

Lexi watching rapt

me not far behind

stretched out on our own sides of the bed naked duvet on her not on me

then not on Lexi either as she’s up

hand pulling hair to the left trying to make it stick failing but still trying

if I was back in the 60’s that Italy, she says, I’d have a chance a gardener’s chance

but here

it won’t go left and stay there keeps bouncing back

just wanna show one eyeball

like B

B of no fluent Italian, B of-

maybe it’s the green parts weight of the dye

maybe I need a wig of some kind clip back the under hair then pull left if they have that kind of thing on this base probably not yet

on the screen Steele’s eyeball grew cultivated effortless

attracting me on some level away from Lexi and her Lavinia G Of Death t-shirt

pink and neon

hologrammatic to the promise of

Continue reading

Ubik [Page 107]

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          107

Joe Chip leaned back in the boss chair and thought about what had just happened. Was it possible? Him, a resonator repairman, CEO of the whole company?

On his desk was a note from Pat Conley:

‘Hey Joe, I just want to let you know that, even though I haven’t done much in the first 106 pages, I plan to use my power in a big way starting from now. If anything bad happens to you, if anything dramatic comes along then I’ll just skip back to the past and make sure it doesn’t. Cool?

Pat’

Joe re-read the note and smiled. Everything was going great all of a sudden. But what about Runciter? Was he still on the phone line? Would he want his office back?

He picked up the phone and heard static. Runciter was gone. Great. Well, not great, but okay. Runciter was a good guy, but it’s not like he was the most amazing person who’d ever lived.

Give it a year, thought Joe. Then I’ll be the new Runciter.

The door opened and the wisp-form of Wendy Wright appeared.

“Wendy! You’re alive!” shouted Joe, shuffling off the repairman jacket.

“I hope so.”

“But…last night…you looked like…”

“A mummy? Yes, I noticed that too. Suppose it was…entropy?”

“Yeah, entr-…” Joe paused. “You wanna have sex?”

“With you?”

Joe stood up and started taking off his belt. He wasn’t usually this forward but the pink vibes from his newly-fixed resonator were telling him things might just go his way.

Continue reading

[Void Galaxia] Chapter 57: Revenger Of Crystal

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No morgue at all

And the body wouldn’t decay at -235 degrees

So why not magnetise the lump, dump it outside?

Essentially,

In essence

In the most basic terms possible

becoming lazy, stagnant, we all need to dig in and ski more

goes back upstairs and tries to have an Urdu lesson but ultimately it’s too much noise and beyond the Urdu there was this flickering replicator light that

book was weird cos it was predictive

someone read it, attached their own self to it, made the events within actualised, with a bit of help from the passive AH-bot, which is often the case

and now people think it was written after the events

but actually

which people?

if you look at the dates and the

272nd drama about aliens lurking in the Oort Cloud, don’t they have anything new-ish to mush us with?

Stalinists on Sedna.

Apart from that one.

My Beautiful Talking Laundromat.

Cheap pastiche.

May I Replicate Myself For You?

Shit. Generic. Like drinking from a plasma conduit.

I liked it.

Nice hat. Acrylic?

No.

Continue reading

[Void Galaxia] Chapter 56: Pretend Portland

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BREAKING: YU LONG YIU HEADING TO JOVIAN SYSTEM TO RECRUIT, HOPING TO DIAL DOWN USE OF RE-WIRED CORPSES IN FACTORIES

Suni didn’t want to, but clearly did want to, some part of her, possibly a section of the brain that had an understanding with masochism cos she clicked on the link and read the whole article twice in seven minutes.

‘That fucker.’

+

I paused, lowering Moon Prison to look up.

The underside of the bunk above had one wooden plank misaligned but that didn’t matter as Moon Prison was seventeen pages from ending and only now setting up a possible revenge mission against the main antagonist.

Seventeen pages.

For Yu Long Yiu to turn up and Suni & Xaaa & Yu Fei & the Romanian tech guy to initiate their plan and assassinate him.

Or fail to assassinate him.

And die like Rodney, Sankara, Kelli Matrimonical, Tax-Bag…

There was noise on the bunk opposite, the intro sounds of a podcast on the Israeli guy’s phone. Kuso, he’d found another one? After two hours straight of a man with throat issues screaming Mossad Mossad [and some other shit], we were about to get a secondary dose?

I picked up my phone and typed out a message to Lexi.

‘Hebrew rant in 5, 4, 3, 2…’

Her phone beeped on the bunk above, and I saw that she’d read it…but no reply came. Not even the attempted typing of one.

Across the room, the podcast finished its ads and got underway. Surprisingly, it wasn’t Hebrew this time, it was English, two guys with clipped American accents complaining about their housses in Israel being stolen by Palestinians. And how the rest of the world was just sitting back and letting it happen. Twelve housses between the two of them, all leased out and making money at the time of the theft.

‘Fucking adventurists…’

Picking up Moon Prison, I tried to focus on the next paragraph.

Something about rigging the docking hatch and disabling the upper pylon graviton emitters.

But it wouldn’t stick.

The Israelis were too loud.

Gods, if Nick were here…or Reshmi…

Continue reading

The First 106 Pages Of Ubik

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There was once a theory put forward by cultural theorist Skadoj Capper [1871-1812], that all you needed to read of a book was were the first 106 pages. What happened on page 107, unimportant. All other pages, including the ending, unimportant. Most disagreed, but Capper stayed adamant. The only thing that annoyed him was a book less than 106 pages long. Like Automatic Assassin. Or The Brothers Kolinski. These books he would not read.

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Ubik [106 pages]

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1. Joe Chip is introduced in the third chapter, struggling to enter his own apartment. Why the third chapter? Is he not the main character? Yes, but the world must be accounted for first. Then emetised.

World > characters

2. The old Fitzgerald trick is utilised in Chapter Two – instead of following Runciter from the end of Chapter One into the beginning of the next chapter, we are put into the headspace of the moratorium mausoleum owner, who thinks about irrelevant things for two pages before Runciter re-invades the narrative. Then we switch back to that mind. Why?

 – it establishes a world separate from the main characters’ world
 – it gives Runciter a chance to take a break from the narrative
 – it suggests time follows its own track, not the characters
 – the mausoleum owner has no reason to exist as an ‘investigated individual’ in this world so, following the theme of the text, he must exist in that exact way.

Continue reading

[Void Galaxia] Chapter 55: Green Claws Of L’Avenir

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The Salem that had nothing to do with witch hunts [or lots] clearly wasn’t the police station or Portland or the home of the wispy foe Reshmi was allegedly chasing – possibly in her own mind – but it was where we ended up

in yet another template hostel

stretched out curved on the mattress

separate yet twinned

watching Beyond The Rabbit Hole on GENTE+.

Reshmi had paid for two rooms plus pool access [two hours max, each minute after that charged extra] then vanished, the latter part according to Juana, who’d waited all of half a minute next door before slinking dolorously into our room and sandwiching herself between us on the double bed [mercifully no heart cushions this time].

‘Gone to dredge up more corpses no doubt,’ Lexi said, more to the TV pinned to the wall opposite than anything sentient.

‘Some of her skin was green…when she left.’

‘On her face?’

‘Hands, wrists…some on the neck.’

‘Wah…’

‘It was quite noticeable.’

‘…could be skin irritation, allergies. Or paint. Or soul erosion. Skin literally flaking off right in front of us.’

‘Soul?’

‘Probably not paint,’ I said, tucking one arm in to create more space. Not that it mattered. The bed was territory, and territory was fluid, swore Derrida, another philosopher I’d never quite got around to at unii.

Clearly a fan of this theory, Juana shifted her legs into a narrow triangle shape, forcing me out further to the edge of the bed. Mumbling shameless fucking crone in Japanese, I looked right at the bedside table and the chair tucked under it.

Moon Prison was there, face down.

Should I just move and read that? Get stuck on the same bit again, Sunita’s long journey through Uranus Immigration while high on Kan-E.

Or stay on the bed and push back?

Juana’s leg sensed my doubt and nudged my calf closer towards the edge.

I let it happen, waiting till she almost had me off then lifting my whole leg up and draping it full weight over her thigh.

If it were just the two of us, it may have been interpreted as a mimic-owl screech for frenzied sex, but as Lexi was there too, the Yaqui’s leg just gave up and played dead.

Muy cómoda…’ she muttered, picking at the face of the t-shirt spider demon.

On screen, Sato Mark 7 picked up the spanner and told the food replicator that this had been a long time coming.

The machine beeped in response, its three square eyes phasing dark blue.

Dark blue became lake blue became a glitching mass of yellow.

A specific patch of it, with a mop of bleached hair rising up through the ripples.

Continue reading

[Void Galaxia] Chapter 54: Beneath The Glitching Lake

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The drive back to the hostel should’ve been eerily silent.

Would’ve been better if it had been eerily silent

But instead we had to listen to Reshmi explaining in an unsettlingly calm tone how devious it was to charge for bottled water like that and how the waitress had probably snapped because of it, having to push that kind of cunt scam nightly.

Then, walking up to our rooms, she diverted herself to the next day, dealing with the wispy coward, and if we didn’t get enough sleep, that coward would wisp the fuck off again and then we’d be nowhere, abject nothingness.

‘Sleep,’ I said back to the corridor carpet, stopping at the door to mine and Lexi’s room, watching Juana give flare gun eyes as she followed Reshmi further along. ‘Good idea.’

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When we were safely in the room with the door locked, I turned to Lexi [already a lump on the bed] and asked what she thought of the restaurrant incident.

‘Trying not to.’

‘I mean, the way it happened, the suddenness…’

‘We should sleep.’

‘You think it was really the waitress?’

‘Good night, Mark.’

She turned over and left me with my shitty hotel on the edge of an alien-funded abyss. The view told me it was Reshmi…Nick…the alien mesmerist, obviously not the waitress herself cos why would she, and the void below said, yeah, but it wasn’t that traumatic, was it?

And even if it were, what were you gonna do?

Flee to Portland?

She’d catch you and then you’d be the waitress, only worse as it could be Lexi or Juana you end up stabbing with a broken water bottle.

Not that she would do that to you.

Cos she hasn’t yet.

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The atmosphere in the car the next morning was defiantly upbeat.

Juana had adapted to her librarian-style glasses.

Lexi was happy with the new Lavinia Goddess of Death t-shirt Reshmi had somehow found time to buy as a surprise gift.

And I honestly thought the new white dress with pale blue dots riding up my thighs was quite cute.

Continue reading

[De-Con-Struc] Tractatus // Róbert Gál

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Text: Tractatus

Author: Róbert Gál

Translator: David Short

Publisher: Schism Press

Additional material: a guide to Wittgenstein/Tractatus that I got from the library as I know zero [atomic facts] about either.

Note: not a philosopher or academic so there will be reaching/misinterpretations.

Bigger Note: like all pieces in the De-Con-Struc series, this is not a review.

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There’s no getting this, and I’ll go from there.

0.1 Logic must take care of itself.

1.1

I don’t remember the day I died, but it was obviously before I’d had time to be born. And nothing had mattered more to me than that very business of getting myself born. Ideally getting myself born into the me that had been born already, discretely, corpuscle by corpuscle. Born into the ready and waiting, hence painlessly. Not being born, though born already. But what into? Shall we imagine it? Might it not play havoc with the seeming need to have one’s own outer shell, for all that it just keeps on cracking?

Born into one of the wealthiest families in Europe at that time, W’s early life was punctuated by two sibling suicides.

The sense of dying in order to become capable of being born.

Coating for the self.

Beginning of it.

Is that right, R?

Bo    [d]    rn           [ie]       >>>

Continue reading

[Void Galaxia] Chapter 53: Silent Ranning

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The next morning was a little different from the previous one as Lexi was still in the room, had a Fordian monopoly on the duvet and didn’t seem to care that Juana was snuggling up to her from behind.

Me?

At some point during the night, I’d made it back onto the bed, but now…I was on the brink of floor again, one foot planted like a Kubrick tripod on the carpet, the other tilting over the edge of the mattress…brain still trying to figure out which town we were in.

I looked opposite, at the TV propped up on the wall. It was frozen on the GENTE+ menu screen, the highlighted box prodding me to watch Void Galaxia.

In terms of layout, it looked almost identikit to the last place we stayed at…the WinterMute hostel…but the décor was absent, and there was no narrative voice feeding me lines that may or may not have been from Neuromancer…which meant…

Bend?

The lava cave place?

I got off the bed and grabbed my phone, checking the internal map.

Yup, Bend.

The bungalow hostel, after the bus from the lava caves, where, for some reason none of us could recall, we had all decided to take an outdoor nap and Nick had…gone through some kind of fit…lost his mind…spasmed like a schizophrenic up into the clouds.

Kuso. That was real.

And he still hadn’t returned. At least not to this room.

Putting on the only t-shirt I had left – a very creased, not so great smelling Don’t Get Cyber, MAN – I headed to the door then swerved right to the window when I remembered the beeping noise from the night before.

No car outside. No grinning alien prick standing next to it.

So he really had pissed off with all our luggage?

Kasu

I turned back and looked at the snapshot on the bed. Lexi being sucked dry by a Mexican cannibal and sleeping through it. Or Juana covertly cupping Lexi’s tits and nibbling on her shoulder blades. Both were man-centric and should’ve produced some reaction, but all I really felt was exhibit grade curiosity. Where exactly were Juana’s hands? How did they get into that shape, with the duvet in such a skewed position?

Lexi moaned and rolled onto her back, forcing reflex activity.

I picked up the remote and pressed play on Void Galaxia, skipping past the childhood frames – the loss of Kazy, the weird lake scheme – and straight to the wormhole appearing at the Pluto Lagrange Point.

The humming noise of the ship woke Lexi and provoked her body up into a sitting position. Juana stayed with both hands flat in the same place until Nakagami shouted that the wormhole was emitting blue orbs of light, and then she was up too.

Void Galaxia?’ asked Lexi, after a bit of swaying and eye massage.

‘Wormhole scene.’

Continue reading

[Void Galaxia] Chapter 52: Dig Less Cope Land

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A giant trout with eyeballs on the side of its dirty yellow face.

Disheveled grass.

The back of Juana’s head.

Nad of her Nadja tattoo.

Greying sky grey track no bodies no cars.

Stone mattress, skinny trees.

Mild autumn breeze.

None of it made much sense until I felt my legs move, rolling in the idea that I did in fact have a body and there were insects making clicking sounds around me.

I stood up and quickly realized I’d been sitting with my back against a stone wall, with Lexi and Juana lined up on either side.

‘Did we…’ started Lexi before ending it with a battle cry yawn.

‘Is this the lava cave?’ asked Juana, prodding a fist into the back of her neck.

It was a familiar name…lava cave…but I couldn’t remember why. Last not-so-blurry image in my head was a hand sticking out of the car window, trying to catch those weird green streaks of light in the air outside.

‘The sign says it is,’ said Lexi, on her feet now, walking with a slight stagger across the grass. ‘Lava Caves – Temporarily Closed.’

‘We were going inside,’ muttered Juana, getting as far as her knees, face seemingly puzzled by her own line. ‘I remember…we were going inside and…’

‘…decided to take a nap?’ I finished, gesturing at the state of the terrain we’d just used as a mattress.

…that is strange…’

‘With rocks as pillows…all of us, at the same time. Yeah, very strange.’

‘What the hell’s he doing,’ muttered Lexi, drawing my attention to the forest on the left and getting an immediate, ‘huh?’

It was well-deserved. Our whimsical alien tour guide was standing in the middle of the road [or Heavenly Nature Trail according to the nearby sign; twenty dollars for free roam, forty-nine for VR tour]…holding one arm up in a crooked tree pose, while the rest of his body got struck by continuous, low-level electric shocks.

That’s what it looked like anyway.

Thank the nebulous gods there was no one else around to see it.

‘Nick,’ I called, following Lexi over to him, but stopping a metre short in case his jerking movements evolved into alien-powered spasms with deceptively long reach.

He didn’t respond.

Or appear to even notice his name being called.

I could hear jagged whispering sounds that could’ve been attempts at communication [or a relapse to his native tongue] and, visually, there were these little whisps of faint lilac, kind of insulated in a darker lilac fog…shooting off his head like angry static.

The sane professor getting fried in Resonator 2.

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