Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Frogfly
Avius Anuran

This strange creature appears to be at least semi-intelligent and is often mischievous, though rarely malicious. They have been known to steal small items from intruders, and to set simple snares designed to deter intrusion into their habitat in temperate forests. The frogfly fuses small leaves into small cups to collect dew, and lays its eggs in the ensuing tiny pools. The call of the frogfly is noteworthy for being far higher and slower than terrestrial frogs, and it has often been mistaken for human laughter…

Frog O’Lantern
Curcurbita Anuran

Found primarily in squash fields, the Frog O’Lantern has evolved a thick carapace to mimic natural gourds and feast on the bugs that inhabit them.

“The curcurbita anuran itself does not glow, but forms a symbiotic relationship with bioluminescent bacteria that shine around its eyes and mouth during mating season, which is typically late October. Studies indicate that the relative brightness of the glow plays a part in courtship, though this is currently unverified.” – Dr. Phineas Phable

Volksphibian
Veedubyus Anuran

One of the major causes of swamp pollution. Some would have us beleive that this is a light truckphibian, but this is simply not the case. Be very wary; Volksphibian kidnappings are not unheard of. Once you get in, there’s no telling where you’ll end up.

Clockwork Frog
Beethovus Anuran

This normally-motionless amphibian springs to life when you wind it, gears spinning and churning on its back.

“Beware that it doesn’t unload a bit of the old ultrahopping on you.” – Anonymous

Frogcat
Felis Anuran

A rare breed of amphibimammal, the Frogcat inhabits extremely limited areas of western Michigan. Identifiable by its distinctive cry (“croew” or “meak”), it is a reclusive animal that shuns contact with all but selected homo sapiens, frogs, and felines. Extremely intelligent, but also quite shy. Sightings should be reported to your local DNR at once.

Hourglass Frog
Tempus Frogit Anuran

Refines naturally-occurring chroniton particles from its diet of swamp much and high-powered quantum neutrino fields. Approach with extreme caution.

“Near the edge of all things
In the Swamplands of Time
A curious creature sings
Without reason or rhyme

The Hourglass Frog
Bounds through the grass
Dimly through the fog
You’ll hear it pass

From it shy away
And do not disturb
For a high price you’ll pay
If it you perturb

The sands inside it
Reverse their fall
And within a moment
You were never born at all”
–Traditional

In time, the kingdom was forgotten and its people dispersed or driven off. Through it all, the Weeping King remained on his throne–unable to leave, unable to die.

The rich waters surrounding the kingdom became a vast and arid sea, littered with the hulks of sunken or abandoned ships preserved by the hot, dry air. No rain ever falls there, and the many leagues of sand lack even a single oasis. All who have sought to cross it have run out of water and been forced to turn back…or died among the dunes.

At the center of the sandsea lie the only water, deep carved moats that are the only remnants of the great city that once flourished on the island. These pools of sorrow are said to be fed from the Weeping King’s tears, and many hold that a wanderer who somehow crossed the arid sea would find themselves replenished thereby.

The pools ring a vast and ruined keep, long forgotten even by its builders. This forgotten keep was once the dwelling place of the Weeping King, and is as an oasis, overrun with life that has been stained by the dark sins of an entire people. It’s said one risks being torn to pieces by horrors only dimly reminiscent of the royal garden and menagerie from whence they sprung.

Beneath it all..the magnificent sepulcher prepared by the Weeping King himself, before death no longer held dominion over his mortal life. Scholars hold that he rests in his tomb to this day, ever living, and ever watchful for intruders.

Editing Omnipedia was, for me, a gateway into a much wider world: a world of pedantry, nitpickery, teapot tempests, molehill mountains, and vicious olog-hai trolls.

This was seldom noticeable at the surface level, aside from the occasional contradictions in spelling, form, and content that one would expect from an encyclopedia people made up out of whatever happened to be within arm’s reach of their computer. No, to get to the real juicy meat of the Omnipedia, you had to look at discussion pages, where people fought each other WWI-style over anything and everything.

Names and spellings were particular bones of contention, especially when there was a choice of American or British varieties. Being a former history geek, I would have been more apt to side with the British had their beloved spellings and words not been so hilariously quaint (subjectively, of course, but such was the case to the other people squabbling over it).

We’re all used to British spellings and their use of superfluous and supernumary letters, but it was the battles over vocabulary that were truly intense. Should it be called ping-pong or whiff-whaff, for instance? The sillier the words, the more passionate the argument:

“We should call them thumbtacks!”

“The accepted Commonwealth term is fidgy-divots!”

“I’m from Austrailia and we call them swopdobbers or swoppies!”

“In Canada we spell it theumbetacke!”

“Philistia, Light of the Navigators, the crown jewel of the Eastern Sea.” It was difficult to see the khan’s face from where Jel was crouched, but the tone of his voice was loving, even grandfatherly, as he recited from Ypsion’s poetry. “He who would master it must first master himself.”

The generals crowded around the map table exchanged uneasy glances.

“Poetry, my friends, from the great Philistian poet of this or any age. You would do well to read it.”

“Great khan, about our assault…” one of the generals stretched out his hand, indicating a point on the map. Probably the Gate of Thorns, where there had been rumors of heavy fighting.

The khan unsheathed a dagger and drove it into the map–through his general’s intervening hand. “You would do well to read it!” he snarled, his voice taking on the tenor one might expect from a ravisher of empires. “Philistia is the key to the Eastern Sea, and without it our campaign stops at the shore!”

Whimpering, the general made no reply. Jel had to restrain a shocked gasp.

“But the coordination of our attacks has faltered. We’ve fallen victim to sortie after sortie. Spies infiltrate our lines at every point and the countryside welcomes us not as liberators but as conquerors. Until we have overcome these problems–mastered ourselves–we will never take the city. We must, if our empire is to grow and our message is to spread.”

“We see this sort of thing all the time,” Mostow said. “Every time a new technology’s invented, it causes a boom of self-published pamphlets and newsletters. See these lines here, and the way they cut off some of the cells? This was made pre-Microsoft Office, probably using Lotus 1-2-3. Whoever made this designed the individual pieces on a computer, then cut and taped them to sheets for double-sided photocopying.”

Sandy nodded. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it’s a complete run–see the little blurb in the first issue and the last issue?–and I bet there aren’t a lot around.”

“Just because something is rare doesn’t mean it’s valuable,” Mostow replied. “Ephemera like this…we collect it sometimes, and would certainly accept it as a donation, but in order for me to write a check, you’d have to find evidence that these poets are, well, noteworthy.”

“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” Sandy growled, glaring at the stack of faded and forlorn poetry newsletters .

“There’s a list of subscribers in the back, and the publisher–well, xeroxer–has his address on the front cover. Picayune stuff that no real publisher would do. But if one of those anonymous poets was noteworthy…I think we could make a deal on behalf of the archive.”

“We can’t make anything of it, and maybe you can.”

The note, handwritten, was composed on a page of the Gibson family bible–blank on one side with the family name in gold leaf on the other:

To all of my children,

Read this and remember: all will be well in the end. Those who are with us and those who have already left are all threads in the same tapestry. I know that someday you will read what I have written and rejoice.

“Seems like an ordinary enough note,” Dr. Amberton said. “What did his children say? And what about ‘what he has written?'”

“That’s just the thing. He had no children. Never married, never even left the city. And his writing? Close to eight thousand pages of jumbled manuscript pages. Not a single clue.”

Ramon examined the car on the precipice before the void with a steely gaze. In his eyes, the cladding and accents were of an IKA Carabela.

“My stepfather was so damned proud of that car,” he growled. “A big, shiny, American automobile to show the world that he had made his grand entrance, even if he was only a civil administrator in Córdoba. We could hear him coming from a half-kilometer away, riding that big engine block, and he’d bring in the hubcaps every night for my sisters and I to polish.”

“Why not just have you polish them outside?” Stennis asked, feeling that he should say something.

Ramon turned the full force of his baleful glare on Stennis. “He didn’t trust us to touch it. A fingerprint on that car was grounds for a beating. Knocking a branch into it got my sister Isabel a crown on her front tooth. That man wouldn’t even allow us to ride in it; the five of us were crammed into my mother’s old Model T, a prewar import! All the while he rode in his great, shining four-door coupe!”

It was all nonsense, of course. Katyushev knew how to play chess, but was nothing more than a mediocre player, without the ability or mathematical mind to visualize more than two moves ahead. That’s why he refused all offers of play outside his home town and contented himself with being the peak of a smaller pyramid.

His winning strategy came down to a keen understanding nevertheless. While most chess players sought to be like human computers, efficient and analytical, Katyushev had perfected the use of psychology in his games. He excelled at creating a complex board situation and then forcing his opponent to play against the clock, for example. In trying to puzzle out a board layout generated strictly to confuse them, his opponents would more often than not run up against the timer and have to make a snap decision–one that often led to a disastrous move, opening the way for even a mediocre player to vanquish them.

Bert snorted loudly. “French orthography may be internally consistent, but it’s terrible suited for writing any language but French.”

“That seems a rather…shallow and nationalistic position to take,” countered Otis. He washed his words down with a swirl of sherry, as if to give them that extra touch of conviction and class.

“Not at all. English is rubbish when it comes to consistency, but by adopting sounds from other languages it can pronounce anything. Just look at what French did to the places they colonized. The capital of Laos is Wiang-chan, which the French naturally spelt ‘Vientiene’. And poor Wagadugu in Central Africa…thanks to the lack of a hard ‘w’ and ‘d,’ it’s butchered into ‘Ouagadougou.”

“And what about English’s total inability to conform to the demands of tonal languages?” Otis replied. “Do let’s bring up the Peking/Beijing imbroglio.”

The reach of the clique went far beyond its members. There were “Earliest Texans” clubs in the elementary, junior, and senior highs which served to crowd out many of the more common, and less exclusive, service groups like Scouts and 4H.

The junior and senior branches of the organization elicited howls of protest from both sides of the aisle, with people muttering for years that ancestors arriving in town in 1837 instead of 1835 were needlessly excluded or that there were dozens of groups of “Texans” that had inhabited the area before the club members’ ancestors.

Only a few changes resulted from that. Juan Nogales and his family found themselves unexpectedly inducted one April, and a few people whose ancestors had arrived as scandalously late as 1840 were admitted by a unanimous vote.