Mole Mann

“Train held up the head of the statue, the priceless Primavera of Florence, the seventeenth-century prize created by the Great Frenchman Pierre Tranqueville, which he'd found in the gutter next to the Arno and couldn't unload for fifty dollars. In the dim light of the barn loft, the dirty piece of marble looked like a piece of whitened shit.”
― James McBride, Miracle at St. Anna

“Western culture is undergoing a process of transition from guilt-oriented, with a conscience, to shame-oriented, with a morbid fear of being found out.”
― John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit

“Fire and sword laid waste the Earth. Darkness stalked the land. From the ashes of
defeat and the smoke of despair, the people of Earth, searching for a future,
plundered the past. It was the time of the Great Concoction, when the world was
remade.
In the thirty-first century of Our Lord, the Europe of the past rose again in the
shape of Europa. In Europa, history was reborn.
The geologic upheavals of Europa's formation resulted in an acute psychic
backlash, manifested in periodic shifts in reality and embodied hallucinations. Spatial
dimensions became mercurial in their behaviour. Entire counties could be crammed
into a field. These anomalies were exacerbated by advances in psionics which
produced dream worlds that were as close to the notion of a real supernatural as
makes no odds. Spectres, poltergeists, fallen angels, unfallen angels, trolls,
hobgoblins, vampires, werewolves and suchlike entities sprang into pseudo-being.
It was upon this ontological quicksand that the Dominions of Europa were
founded, recreations of ancient European countries, each containing several time
periods. Within each of these historical eras there existed a small percentage of
'Reprises'; clones of famous figures from history artificially encoded with the
appropriate personality matrix. These Reprises were prone to severe identity
confusion. Yet more acute was the confusion of the fictional Reprises, clones of
actors who became identified with particular roles: in these cases, it was not the
actor's personality that was encoded into clone-body, but the role he played.
By the thirty-third century, Europa was plunging into chaos. Reality unravelled. It
was a time of heroes, whimsical worlds, blood and thunder, and general Byronic
excess. Dark powers arose. Fearful villagers locked their shutters at night. Fire and
sword laid waste the Earth. Darkness stalked...
Excerpt from The Tenebrous Testaments of the House of Rue. chapter XIV. volume
CLXVII
[From Count (Baron) Dracula and Baron (Count) Frankenstein]”
― Stephen Marley, Perfect Timing

“Excitedly, Leela pounced on a fragment the Doctor had thrown her earlier. 'Are these your lands? The Doctor said you lived here.'
'He was probably talking about the Penacooks,' Kristal explained quietly. 'They were of the same nation, the Algonquin. These lands belong to a larger nation now, Leela. Not necessarily a better one, whatever my captain tells you.”
― Simon A. Forward, Doctor Who: Drift