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Either this has the longest denoument I've ever read or there is a twist or two still forthcoming.

I have slowed down dramatically on reading this. Not that I'm in a big hurry.

some of the entries are brilliant, some are tedious, some are both.

Now the conflict emerges. It was inevitable that when the species started to learn "too much" about each other that both would become defensive to the point of violence.

I sense that we are heading down into a long, slow, but powerful maelstrom very gradually, at this point, but with increasing velocity.

The re-telling of Poe's "The Raven" may be one of the best feats of literary homage I have ever, ever read. Amazing. Just stunning. I read it out loud to my wife (something which I don't do very often).

Okay, where are the weapons hidden? Are there any weapons? Would this have messed with people more during the Cold War

The best non-Traveller adventure Traveller adventure I've ever read.

Dear German readers: How difficult is Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_ auf Deutsch if I'm at around the A2-B1 level?

The intro alone is worth the price of the book.

Have I mentioned that I just discovered a couple of weeks ago that my biological grandfather was murdered with a baseball bat in St. Louis back in the 1950s? True story.

"The Hag, the Cutthroat, the Amputee" is the musings of a being who, like Charon of Greek myth, ferries the dead across to their final destination, particularly those whose demise is caused by war. He(?) is very adamant to note that he is not Charon, and his thoughts regarding the dead make it clear that he does not share the detached observations of his more famous counterpart.

Transformation of the individual and of the world are the subject of "The Oligomancer". Here a migrant child of an itinerant oil-platform worker watches the world turn inside out from a privileged (so to speak) observation point on the derelict platform. A slowly unfolding apocalypse gives indicators from the horizon about the collapse of the outside world, which can't help but affect his own inner world.

It's interesting that the aliens are not just objects for humans to discover, but the knife cuts both ways. They are trying to figure us out, too, and what appears to us as intelligence might appear to them as utter foolishness. An intriguing flip of the script I wasn't really expecting.

With "Vod the Wrecker," I again find myself as "TOC mates" with Adam in the Raphus Press anthology Ghost Trains. But where I treated the train in question as a haunting presence, here, Vod is the master, a near-god, over the twisted metal entrails of what was once the most powerful force in America. Vod destroys, remakes, and rides the bones of the ur-train like a pyrrhic steed, into oblivion.

In the amber-filtered urine-gray aged-out green glass of insulators, crystallizing dumbly over centuries, he saw an enviable solitude and immobility. The enamel of insignia and livery, some burned to peacock craquelure; the bent-blue of sulking steel glazed over with a million dullnesses of black and charcoal.

The titular story in the volume actually appeared alongside one of my own stories in the Mount Abraxas anthology Frostsigils, an homage to Paysage d'Hiver. As one would expect, it is dark, downright Gothic, and one can feel the cold sink into one's bones while reading. It's all about atmosphere, and it delivers that in shadowed robes with the deep moaning toll of an immense black iron bell.

Originally written for a tribute anthology to Borges, "The Bow, the Arm, the Arrow" echoes the Argentine writer's sometimes-journalistic style, but with a tonal nod to Millhauser, as well. The story reminds me of a long-form vlog I recently watched about the composer Penderecki (a favorite of mine), but with the narrator experimenting with literature, rather than music. Sometimes experiments go wrong.

Starting to get very interesting. Just waiting for the humans to muck things up. I'm not sure if it will be the scientists, the military, or both, but I'm sure there will be plenty of blame to go around when things go awry. And they have to go awry, right? Don't spoil it for me, though!

Just bought the Silver Surfer Parable mini-series (all 2 books of it) with art by Moebius. Been wanting it for a very, very long time, but just got around to actually buying it. Very excited to read this!

"Torso in Shadow" puts the baffled and baffling narrator in the subways beneath NYC, which may or may not be disintegrating above. Surely it is convulsing, socially or physically. Amidst these convulsions, in the underground, the narrator meets a woman. Perhaps this is Adam and Eve witnessing the birthing pains of a new world. Difficult to tell. But the attempt must be made. An ouroboros of a story, eating itself.

"The European Monster Part Two" is dark and obtuse, much like the philosophy of Emil Cioran, the inferred inspiration for the story (first published in a volume of stories dedicated to the Romanian philosopher). Here the narrator finds himself in a labyrinthine situation, becoming a part of a (political? criminal?) machine at the heart of which is the titular monster, perhaps a modern Minotaur.

Profoundly existential, yet hopelessly defiant, "The Chamber in the Universe" examines monuments, devotion, power, hope, and death. The temple representing as empty vessel exposing the hollowness of existence, while being the instrument by which the common-builder nudges the cosmos, even a particle's-width; one of the most human of desires: to matter, even when nothing matters. To make one's mark forever in the void.

"Black Chroma" is set in what seems to be a post-apocalypse, though it may be the structure of the narrator's mind that is collapsing, rather than civilization. Paranoia and agoraphobia combine to expose (him?) to the bright pinpoint lights of the cosmos, a nakedness only occulted by self-burial. Five stars.

My second time reading the novella "Orphans on Granite Tides". This has been revised from the original (which I've read previously). Not sure what changes were made - I should ask Adam - but wow, does that prose POP! The first two paras on P.46 are going to need to be quoted as an example. Absolutely stunning.