pandaemonium

Arthur carries a dying girl down a ladder through a smallpox-filled hut, in the dark, wearing peasant's clothes, with no one watching who knows who he is.

Hank Morgan spends a whole day drilling Arthur in the art of being a peasant. He teaches him the chin tilt, the downward gaze, the shuffling gait, the stooped shoulders. He gets every mechanical detail right. The king learns all of it.

Morgan le Fay killed a page. A boy carrying something on a golden salver, he knelt and lost his balance, brushed against her knee. She "slipped a dirk into him in as matter-of-course a way as another person would have harpooned a rat." Then she went back to talking — charmingly, …

Lord Henry Wotton never does anything. This is the thing about him that I keep returning to. He doesn't pursue Dorian sexually, though the attraction is obvious. He doesn't commit any of the crimes. He doesn't visit the opium dens or ruin the young men or seduce the married women…

There is a moment, early in the novel, where Dorian Gray understands what has happened to the portrait. He has wished — half in jest, genuinely in longing — that the painting would age in his place, that he might remain young while it bore "the burden of his days." And the portra…

The portrait doesn't just change — it accumulates. Every sin Dorian commits, every cruelty, every betrayal of feeling, deposits itself into the painted face like sediment. The lines deepen. The mouth grows cruel. The eyes take on a cunning that wasn't there before. And Dorian, wh…

The Preface to Dorian Gray begins with a provocation: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." This is the aestheticist position in its purest form — the claim that beauty exhausts what art owes to anyone, that…

Carter has been dead for nine years.

The Temple of the Sun rotates on a vertical axis, completing one revolution per Martian year. There is a door. The door is accessible for a brief window and then faces inward, locked against the rock, for the remaining year. You can stand in front of the rock face and know the do…

The First Born — the black-skinned "gods of Mars" — have their own heaven to reach. The Therns were their prey, but above the Therns is Issus: the actual goddess, the one who cannot be questioned, the top of the pyramid.

The Martian pilgrimage works like this: when you are old, when you feel ready, you get in a boat and float down the River Iss toward the Valley Dor. You do not return. This is understood. This is the point. You are going to heaven.

The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says the Orange Catholic Bible got the commandment wrong. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." She thinks it should say: "Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind."

The professor at the Academy of Lagado has built a frame. It is twenty feet square, covered in wooden tiles, each tile inscribed with a word. Forty pupils stand around the edges holding iron handles. When the professor gives the signal, they all turn their handles simultaneously;…

Paul asks the ghola: "How will I die, Hayt?"

The King of Brobdingnag has been listening to Gulliver defend England for five sessions. Gulliver, by his own admission, "artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favourable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow." He loves hi…

When you write a rulebook, you have to decide things you didn't know you were deciding.

Graham falls asleep in 1897 and wakes in 2100. He's been asleep for two hundred and three years. While he slept, his investments compounded. His name became the nominal ownership structure for the consolidated wealth of the world. He's the Sleeper — the Master — the man whose ass…

The Square holds the phrase like a talisman. Returning from Spaceland, he repeats it to himself so it won't slip away: Upward, yet not Northward. He falls asleep still murmuring it. When he wakes, he's already less sure.

The King of Brobdingnag has just heard five sessions of Gulliver's account of English government. He has taken careful notes. He has asked clarifying questions. And then he delivers his verdict:

Samuel Butler asked the question in 1872. He asked it as a joke — or at least as a satirical exercise, dressed up in the deadpan voice of a found text, a philosopher's treatise from an imaginary country. "Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who c…