Entropic Orbit / Book Announcement

It was the summer of the universe, and the fruits of the world were ripe. The dust in the sunbeams formed complex webs, and as waves lapped the shore the sand was built up into little palaces; and the waves themselves had the faces of men and women, minds resolving in every twist of the water. And life was fertile indeed—brains grew large in the skulls of the smallest creatures, and every species split apart, peppering the land with their colorful, chanting siblings. And there was war, but where swords clashed the sparks wrote poetry in the air, and wounds were red soil in which new limbs and children gestated. 

Many peoples made cities and filled their larders; and every lamp was lit, and bridges blossomed between the deeply throbbing stars. But the feast could not last.

It was the autumn of the universe, and we harvested the crops of our ancestors, and laid our barrier-tithes at the feet of the encroaching dark, hoping to save our jeweled temples from the buffeting of chaos. Crystals no longer formed in our pools, and our papers did not fold themselves into origami swans. We had to relearn the old ways of making fire, for the creases of our palms forgot their glows. The path was arduous, and we walked through the school of pandemonia, adapting to the increasingly hostile cosmos. We defined new terms: “cold”, “pain”.

It was the winter of the universe. We learned of death, and the corpses piled high. Then we learned of rot. Sickness festered, and the fires we burned to stay warm ate our structures instead of painting them. There was coal heavy in the air, yet it dissipated without a whirl of sentience. Many species, clever or not, died out, and their bodies were buried in corrosive sands and tars. All order collapsed; our hearts beat without hope, and we lived in fear, certain our DNA would unravel next, our skin would drop as the cells that knit it to our bones dissolved in the omnipresent turmoil.

Our world regressed. Elders who had survived the previous winter left instructions, yet in the billion years since then most texts had been lost, or gained the flourish of stories. The art of living through entropy escaped us; we lived in the ruins of our predecessors and pieced together engineering laws through their cryptic, illuminated manuscripts. All around us there was battle, and killing.

It was the springtime of the universe. The dead walked again; we had forgotten they ever would. The door to the world of all possible beings was opened once more, and a torrent of rehabilitative life poured through, order of the past and future reunited by the generative nature our cosmos had regained. I slept, and my dreams were the dreams of a supercomputer; and I remembered the dark years of my childhood, when disorder reigned, and I prepared a guide for those who would see the next winter, a billion years hence. 

Read this, and 51 other stories, in my new book: Talisnam.

Talisnam collects my best fiction from the past six years. Much of it can be sampled here, on Substack. You might enjoy: uplifted mouse music of the 21st century, or a cautionary tale pertaining to autophagic machine learning.

I have always been fascinated by TOCs, which strike me as artefacts of great suggestive power—if the cover is the face, the Table of Contents is a skeleton, a glimpse of subdermal structure. Strange labels, full of potential, hinting at flows in theme and logic. Here’s mine:

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Shrike’s Archive
The Gathomnid Sonnets
Placard at the Maskmaker’s Workshop
Entropic Orbit
The Kenotic Brothel
Macrochimerism in Para Sapiens
Invisible Anthropology
You walk into a faerie glade
Wish-wright
Shrimp Man Elegy
Immortal at the Mall
At Eden’s Gate
Sybil’s Blending
No Light Just Water
Graphing Xenohuman Family Structures
The Umbramost Investigation
Autoparental
Buried in Omelas
Reports of Maternal Neurogenesis
Buying for Baby
Venerable Kawaii Automated Nursing Home
Mining Rig
My Father’s Accident
Application to the Optima Institute
The Man Who Was Babies
Slow Giants
Madgun Phantom
Geriatric Thaumarche
The Count
Seven Ways We’ll Fail to Utilize the Metaverse
Sample Clickbait Workflow
Tooth Bashing
The Dream in Yellow
Hounds of Play
Oikobezoar
Power, power, power
The Throne Room
The Watchers Below
The Sword of Solas Meng
Palindromancer
The Naming Guild
The Six Lepidopteran Wedding Vows
Shardwick Dispatchers’ Manual
Lamberglough’s Lost Tablature
Concerning Milk Imps
The Air-Broken Library
Sphere Music
Tenebruçul
Reassimilator’s Logbook
Meat-washing
Recollections of the Breaking Sky
Daniel Calhoun, Murine Music Author, Dies 

Buy it, read it, tell me what you think.