HAUNTED WOMEN: THE BEST SUPERNATURAL TALES BY AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS (EDITED BY ALFRED BENDIXEN)

  Anagrams—all the life's wisdom can be found in anagrams! A lot can be done with a phrase or a sentence, but only the structural competence matters—further within that restriction is upholding meaning related to the words being anagramed. The less to no repetition of words in a phrase, the better a shot at it. Anagrams allow for so much wordplay among the meticulous homophones—here puns become trite and appear like child's play. Taking them this further was a well worth self-challenge beyond previous music reviews—I don't mind my language. . . .

  These are handpicked phrases from each story of the collection—non machine aided re-workings.

 

HAUNTED WOMEN: THE BEST SUPERNATURAL TALES BY AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS 

WHET RUE YEARN EBBS: TRITE SPATIAL HOUNDS WREST MATERNAL ACUMEN

  1. The Amber Gods (Harriet Prescott Spofford)

ALL THOSE VERY GNOSTIC DEITIES WHO ASSISTED AT CREATION.

SISTER COLOURS TOO AIDED WISHES SETTING THY ACT ELEVATION.

      Story First.        Story  last.

        —Flower the peach     —Astra Castra, Numen Lumen

 

—IT IS COLDER THAN IT WAS.—I THINK I WILL GO TO SLEEP.

PLEA—TIE LAIC TWIN IN. ROOK HAS THIS WILED—GLOTTIS.

  2. The True Story of Guenver (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps)

SONG AND STORY, LIFE AND DEATH ARE SO CRUEL TO A WOMAN.

WAN ALMOST DETHRONED, OAR FELONY AS TANGO AIDS CURE.

  3. The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House (Harriet Beecher Stowe)

BUT YOUR GRANDMA SHE BELIEVED IN THE GHOST, AND SO DID LADY LOTHROP.

GHOULY MANSION HOUSED GRIT IDLY. STAB ADVENT PROD ETHER DAB

  4. The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

THIS PAPER LOOKS TO ME AS IF IT KNEW WHAT A VICIOUS INFLUENCE IT HAD!

I WAIT FATEFUL ANT EKES I PREPONE VACATED KIN WHICH IS MOOT SOUL HOIST!

  5. The Story of a Day (Grace King)

SUCH A SPLENDID BLACK HEAD THAT HAD JUST YIELDED BREATH!

ENDURED BULK HATH JADED A HASTY DEATH! BILLED CAST CHIPS

  6. The Little Room (Madelene Yale Wynne)

AND ALL THIS NEVER EXISTED EXCEPT IN HER IMAGINATION?

THEN EMANATING SERIAL INCEPTIONS HID EXTRA IDLE VEXES?

  7. Her Letters (Kate Chopin)

HE VANISHED SILENTLY; SEEMINGLY INTO SOME INKY INFATHOMABLE SPACE.

HEAD ON; FAINT NOSEY HALE BELYING HIS MOSTLY SKIVED IMMINENT ESCAPE.

  8. The Foreigner (Sarah Orne Jewett)

I ALWAYS RUN OF AN IDEA THAT THE SEA KNOWS ANGER THESE NIGHTS AND GETS FULL O' FIGHT.

HEED A SHALLOW FUNK HUGE WAGES SAT AT INTENDN'T TO INGRAIN FAITHLESS GHOST FEAR.

  9. Luella Miller (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman)

SHE'S GOT STRENGTH ENOUGH TO HANG ONTO OTHER FOLKS TILL SHE KILLS 'EM.

GHOULS STROKE H'NGES FOR THE NTH TIME TONIGHT TELLS HEAL SONG'S LOOK.

  10. The Lost Ghost (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman)

SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN VERY BEAUTIFUL IF SHE HAD NOT BEEN SO DREADFUL.

BRIDE WOUNDED BY EERIE HALF LOVE FUELS VESSEL AND BEAU HUNT.

  11. The Bell in the Fog (Gertrude Atherton)

HE SPENT A HAUNTED NIGHT, BUT THE NEXT DAY STRANGER HAPPENINGS BEGAN.

EXTEND AUGUR HANDY BEINGS HATH BESET SIGN STRAIGHTEN BATHING PATENT.

  12. The Fullness of Life (Edith Wharton)

PERHAPS NOW I SHALL REALLY KNOW WHAT IT IS TO LIVE.

WHITELIST KNELL AVAILS WORRY WHIPS ON SHAPE A LOT.

  13. Pomegranate Seed (Edith Wharton)

OH, YOU NEEDN'T IMAGINE THAT ANYTHING CAN EVER FRIGHTEN ME AGAIN!

ANY ONE MEAN TACT, OUGHT MENDING THY HIGH FINITE TANG AN' REVERIE!

  Since I don't have mild triskaidekaphobia, I regress from overlooking everything else to pinpoint 13's loom in my life—it's two pithy stories, three outstanding pieces, one obsessive em dash shoaler.

CITY OF THE CHASCH

  Argh! Who put magic in my science fiction? Or rather speculative fiction. Why should sci fi be the place to pit mage work and supertech? No matter how neanderthaly a system or community has relegated or disintegrated in a very likely pessimistic dystopia of an author's portrayal. It is the same inconvenience that puts Brazil at fault despite thr e vigilantly conversant speculation—a slowly forming future, activities being null without headstart from the controlled main organ.

  As a whole, speculative fiction offers a preccint for a given array of magic and sci fi. Only when magic is used as a means to an end rather than a suitable accomplishment—not a mere underdeveloped accompany—does it leave the setting wanting. Besides predisposition to premature magicking, the first fourth of City of the Chasch weighs down on the book's accomplishments. It provides curt espousals that forsake the fun of suspense. Mixed with brutal developments, which align to create a weak passage for the better part of the story. As a first book for the author, I'm tempted to place it more on a developing writing style—given the same section is littered with limitless but escapable thesaurian occupations.

  City of the Chasch is the first of a four serial Planet of Adventure; Tschai—home to warring advanced alien species. The Chasch, Dirdir, Wankh, Phung, and Pnume. Tschai is an Earth-like planet whose natives were Pnume and Phung. The invading alien races were Wankh; the Chasch arrived first, followed by Dirdir with men they had acquired from proto-Mongoloid and proto-Caucasoid tribes. These men metamorphosed by mutation, specialization, re-mutation, re-specialization to adapt to various Tschai environs—while others were enslaved as surbordinates to the alien races by physio-psychological means.

The quagmire was the habitat to many fascionating creatures—

  Following through with the strife of a dystopian wake is the grounds for the first Planet of Adventure tales. Kruthe is a fictitious language that has been developed by one of the myriad species of men—the Kruthe, who capture Reith, the surviving earth-man after a fateful mission to planet Tschai. It is syntactically regular with words generally being the same, although nuances administer it difficult by scores of tenses, moods and aspects. Hath a writing style be beyond personal enjoyment, with characters like Anacho undermining comprehension capacities of mere men, it is more likely the case. A despise that sci fi authors don't fail to elaboratively outline. Like James Blish and Brian Aldiss.

THE MOMENT OF ECLIPSE: THAT UNCOMFORTABLE PAUSE BETWEEN LIFE AND ART . . .

  What happens when science fiction and poetry and art supersede their commingle? A lot. A denigrable botch.  The avant garde. Or Brian W. Aldiss. A master of wayward crafts.

  On this collection are short stories that appeared in magazines and anthologies such as The Year 2000, London Magazine, Galaxy and Nova I. Arrangement is done in such a way that, where possible, there is (even the slightest) links between one story and the next.

  Mixing British English and American English is always disregarded or frowned upon, but an instant of its manifestation in the collection might be more in a way of inter-cultural appreciation/expression. on The Day We Embarked for Cythera . . . , Brian displays his wordsmithing abilities. Here, he comes up with the paradox of imprecision—where word sequence utterly contradicts meaning. The speaker's time-sense gets to be so awry that they negate what they did (or rightly put, said) in one breath. The setting seems to have been derived from Titian's The Concert due to Portinari wearing a red jacket, or the lack of music in Monet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (The Picnic), who influenced a controversial and visionary artist as Aldiss  himself, Edouard Manet. Grotesquely enough, Brian incorporates from both, just like Manet! After this tale, one can only adore Brian.

  Some words used were not available in the current dictionary version. Confluence might have been the ADD answer to The Devil's Dictionary from quipster Ambrose Bierce. The stories are engaging enough to make one forget why 85% of science fiction has been removed from their science fiction; and it is always a delight when his philosophizing starts with characters, who have been set as great conversationalists.

 .  .  .

  Always an amusing, experimental take on his writing and language use other than the ever witty and informative quips, celebrating everything Aldiss; film, art, poetry, and general perversion. Either from describing a generous of flesh madonna painting—or beautiful women with corrupt natures.

THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT

  OTHER EPITHET OFT GOT AMPLE when trying to highlight the brilliance of THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, if not The Place That Time Forgot. Time proves to be an illusion, once the present shifts periodically. Superseding this is when the present time shares two periods with consecutive physicalities. Unofficially, this is a time travel escapade with zero concern to the concept itself—which aids at keeping some perils at bay; while preventing a stray from the set premise.

  The time machine in question is an biplane aircraft with a crew of four, set out to search for a lost naval hero. Embarking for an island located amid a polar enclosure, the mothership keeps their track from semi-frozen waters. Unaware of what to expect, they glide into a tropical isle, well sheltered from view by snow-capped ridges and peaks. Stumbling into a giant pterodactylus, they crash-land and realization sets in—expect anything, except it will be prehistoric.

  They encounter a number of thecodonts, with the props made to be as convincing as possible, given this is an old film—one of the precursors to time travel and dinosaur films recurrent today, such as  Walking with Dinosaurs. Concurrent with other film overarchings, there is a created language for the tribe of Nargas, who are fantastically costumed. Learnt broken English  for the set's Sheena, Ajor, eliminates a lot of misunderstandings between her and the protagonists.

GOT A TITLE PROP. TO HEFT METH...

  Even though adventure prevailed and the mission went awry, it still incorporates to make it a task to pin down satisfactorily. Ah, time travel.

SURFACE TENSION BY JAMES BLISH

   In the Devonian period, life began to earnestly reach the land—395 Million years ago. Plants had began to flourish and managed to stabilize the carbon dioxide-abundant atmosphere by releasing large quantities of oxygen—paving way for land colonization by arthropods i.e. mites and millipedes. Vertebrates followed—lead off by lungfish, advancing to amphibians.

"Are we going to tell them they're microscopic? I'm opposed to it. It may saddle their entire history with gods-and-demons mythology that they'd be better off without."

  Picture this; a miniature wooden spaceship, out to conquer space! So it ensues that whichever race is inside must be microscopic. And as the title of the tale gives away—SURFACE TENSION / SAFE UR-ION SCENT—a liquid that occurs in plenty and of significance to this race, will play a major role. Surface Tension is hard science fiction explaining life from its origins—the sea. 

"Martin, what would you think of our taking to the sea? We came out of it once, long ago; maybe we could come out of it again through Hydrot."

  The tale of a galaxy-trotting, planet-hunting crew on a mission to scatter men, or at least lifeforms very much like men, all over the galaxy. Until they crash-land on a target planet, with zero survival chance. They rush against time to 'create' the new race through pantropy. These creatures (pantropes) are calibrated, with detail that once out of the water, they go through a couple generations as amphibians before breathing through the larynx.

"Those people will be of the race of men, Eunice. We want them to win their way back into community of men. They are not toys, to be protected from the truth forever in a fresh-water womb."

  Ensuing is a description of the lifeforms appearing in the classic novella; found descriptions; and relations to each other.

 .  .  .

 Location: Hydrot—A waterscape, similar to Earth, immersed in water bar a triangular slab. Evolution here seemed to have stopped with the crustacea. Crayfish.

 Star: Tau Ceti—performs the role of Solar System's Sun. 

 

 Man: Was fashioned from the genes of his crash-landed ancestors. 250 microns in size. He had a thermocline to protect them from cold during hibernation, an amniotic fluid produced from a winter-induced protective shell. At this (hibernation) time, he lived in spores. Had webbed extremities, all lead by Lavon."They are creatures that look alike."

 Shar: Knowledge keepers of the race. With each awakening from hibernation, the (new) Shar's responsibility is to drill Lavon of his environment before he (Lavon) embarks on leadership duties. Translates the first words of the corrosion-proof micro-engraved record from the ancestors—'i/terste//are//e/ition.' ...this was as fascinating as the prevalence of sound /ə/ in the same language.

 Protos: Man's accompanies. On the same hierarchy level with Euglena. A family of Paras, Didins and Stent. Could be taught man's language. Their bodies flared regularly with blue-green pulses. Were gleaming mobile cylinders. "Not green and had a visible nucleus, no matter how strange its shape."

 Paras: Man's Proto allies. Communicated with invisible cilia vibration in even, emotionless tones. Each separate hair-like process buzzed at an independent, changing rate. The resulting sound waves spread through the water intermodulating, reinforcing or cancelling each other. "A transparent bubble-filled cylinder, a colourless slipper of jelly, spirally grooved, long as the length of man".

 Generation XVI Para: Has cilia and hover with a muted whirl. "Slipper-shaped organisms, nearly transparent except for the thousands of blue and silver granules and frothy bubbles which packed its interior. 

 Didins: Shared hierarchy level with Para and Stent, all Protos. "Barrel-like creatures ringed to rows with cilia, and bearing a ram-like prow."

 Euglena:  On the same hierarchy level with Protos.

 Vortae: From one level with Paras. "Placid and murmurous."

 Eaters: Man's number one foe/predator. Occurred either as Rotars or Rotifers. Rotars only locomoted by swimming. "As beautiful as the fruiting crowns of water-plants. " All had the whirling crown of cilia which could suck quarry into the incessantly grinding mastax in a moment."

 Dicran: Man's foe. They were Eaters, Dicran. Their method of locomotion was leaping. Have an armour plate for defense, a mastax and cilia which make a rhythmical pulsation to create an illusion of rotating corona. They are poisonous. Means of locomotion; leaping. "The armoured trumpet-shaped body".

 Notholka: They are leapers just like Dicran. They are Eaters.

 Diatoms: Same hierarchy level with Desmids. Beautifully marked, oblong, pillbox-like shell swarming with greedy bacteria. "Everything which was green and had an engraved shell of glass."

 Desmids: Flexible shells which could not move. Was the food source for Man before he started growing his own. 

 Syn: Fronds in the water. Plants that communicate with Paras. Refused to help men as they expected them to be dead before the Eaters awake (they rise the last from hibernation/awakening).

 Bacteria: Was visible to Man. Appeared in rods, globes, and spirals.

 Noc: A flagellate with no natural weapon against rotifers. Drifts like star-shell. Of the same size with Dicran. Produces a blue light in flashes when excited.

 Caddis-Worm: Live in sand-built houses—a masonry tube with everything in form of a conical bore differing from the next tube only in size—clinging to mountainous slopes of under-water rock. This was the first City of Man—once the Caddis-Worm was exiled.

 Stephanost: A predator of Man, but is easy to avoid. A trapper, but not a hunter.

 

 Flosc: They live in castles; which are all tunnels and exits and entrances. They are colony-builders. Man fought them out of their castles, which were much better than the worm-houses.

 .  .  .

SAFE UR-ION SCENT / UR+ION SAT FENCES (so undecided)

  

DOPPELGANGERS VIII

  Not much in the doppelgänger style availed by this site, but it's compelling enough to grant a feature. Because yes, English.

—Looper
—Deathgasm trailer.

FANTASY'S LITTLE DELIGHTS

 Language as we know it today, has come to morph into the most diverse and easiest means of expression. It is through it that communication systems of various people have found the best, if not the easiest way to convey the current state of play. From Tin Pan Alley to internet underbellies and all the span in between.

 In the world of Science Fiction, alien languages have more or less served a similar role. Even better, the lighthearted side is effectively sheened in daylight as seen in Confluence.

  Being a fictional language, it is well more than eleven million (Earth) years old, which is the figure for the time-period of Myrinian culture. Confluence has become of interest to the mortals of earth now that they have 'discovered' the Myrin planet. The inhabitants have so much to endure from the earthmen, in in regard to this parlance. With an etymological team headed for Myria, they sure make a good effort for a non complete, but still smile inducing (at the expense of the Myrinian way of life).

Excerpt.

  They found that Confluence is a language-cum-posture, and that meanings of words can be radically modified or altered entirely by the stance assumed by the speaker. There is therefore, no possibility of ever compiling a one-to-one dictionary of English-Confluence, Confluence-English words.

  Nevertheless, the list of Confluent words that follows disregard the stances involved, which number almost nine thousand and are all named, and merely offers a few definitions, some of which must be regarded as tentative.

  BIT SAN: A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a blasphemous nature

  BI TUSI: A reverie lasting more than twenty years on cosmological themes

  KARNDOLI YON TOR: Mystical state attained through inaction; feasting; a learned paper on the poetry of metal

  NUT LAP ME: Dying of laughing

  SHE AN DORL: Gazing at one's reflection for reasons other than vanity

Even though on some definitions, Brian W. Aldiss seemed to pat himself on the back with smaug graces, the other thing to be taken away from this was the Dictionary-ish disregard for period.