Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

I wrote a strongly worded email today
Broke off a piece of my soul and sent it
On the wings of inconvenienced electrons
Heart beating like we were knife fighting
Weeks in the making, days in the dreading
A digital scream, every 0 gaping open
Through the rest of the day and into night
The echoes of that polite aggression
Still leave my hands visibly trembling

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“Do you deny that you twote in support of D-ah, of Mr. X?” Ojrah said. “Do you deny that you took money from the sales of your books and donated it to Conversion Ministries?”

“Of course not,” Weatherall said. “But those are my deeply held personal and religious beliefs.”

“He admits it! Gentlethings of the jury, Mr. Weatherall admits to holding abhorrent personal and religious beliefs,” Ojrah crowed.

“Now, that’s a value judgment that I-”

“There are goblins in your books,” Ojrah continued. “Goblins not unlike my distinguished peer Muhrot, who performs a distasteful task honorably in defending you. You write them as inherently untrustworthy beings who will not hesitate to kidnap and murder to attain their aims.”

Weatherall glanced at Muhrot, red-faced.

“And you go on to paint them as obsessed with money, finance, and profit, going so far as to own goblin stocks and goblin corporations!” said Ojrah.

“The very idea!” Muhrot sat up violently. “That I would sully my hands with currency, stocks, or publically traded shares!” The fact that he was supposed to be defending Weatherall seemingly dawned on him a moment later, and he sat with a mumbled apology.

“The fact is, gentlethings, a reasonable foolish human reader might conclude that Mr. Weatherall has done his research, and that we fey support Mr. X, reject identities that do not accord with superstition, and cleave to harmful sterotypes of commerce and avarice.”

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“Now, we don’t want to bring any names into this. We don’t want to prejudice the jury, heavens no, nor wind up in court ourselves. So we will refer to Mr. X, Mrs. Y, and the like.”

“Why?” Weatherall cried.

“Exactly,” Judge M’Tusk replied. “Prosecutor Ojrah?”

“Gentlebeings of the jury, Judge M’Tusk, welcome,” Ojrah said, standing and putting its thumbs in its suspenders. It also appeared to conjure suspenders for the sole reason of inserting its thumbs. “Our case is quite simple. By writing books and stories featuring fictional versions of we, the fey, the author Jon Koenning Weatherall is trading in defamatory stereotypes. There’s your libel. Furthermore, the author Jon Koenning Weatherall is giving the appearance that we, the fey, endorse his viewpoints. That’s your slander.”

“What?” said Weatherall. “Now look, I went to law school for a while, and slander does not-”

M’Tusk snapped his fingers. “There will be polite silence in the court until the statement is finished,” he said, in Weatherall’s own voice. Snapping again, he added in his own gnomish voice: “One more outburst and I’m keeping it.”

“Thank you, Judge M’Tusk. Now, I will present evidence that proves this. What say you to that, Muhrot?”

The goblin briefly rose. “I will attempt to cast doubt on it through a combination of cherry-picked facts, doubts that play on the prejudices of the jury, and technicalities.”

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“Now, according to ancient fey tradition, you must be tried by the laws of your own kind,” Judge M’Tusk said. “So we’ve put everything in order. Two lawyers with knowledge of human ways, one to defend you–Muhrot–and another to prosecute–Ojrah.”

“What about a jury of my peers?” Weatherall said, gesturing to the group empaneled–emtoadstooled?–nearby. “There’s not a human being among them!”

“Oh, I’m rather proud of this,” the fairy prosecutor, Ojrah, said. “These are all your peers. They’re all authors! X’xxxgax there writes curses, McWildie is a poet, and of course old Tweat is weaving together the threads of fate that bind the universe together.

“Charmed,” the strange creature said, pausing its knitting for a moment to lift its cap, which was a black-eyed susan. Weatherall might have been imagining things, but he felt like the world stuttered for a moment until Tweat took up its needles again.

“All very above-board and very much done in the human fashion, I’m sure you’ll agree,” said M’Tusk.

“This is ludicrous!” cried Weatherall.

“Thank you,” M’Tusk said. “We really tried to get human justice right, even though it doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

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“Un-sack the defendent.”

Obligingly, the ogre flipped his burlap sack, and out tumbled Jon Koenning Weatherall, the best-selling fantasy author worldwide 1996-present. Dazed, Weatherall looked up at his surroundings and the many stranges voices and visages that surrounded him.

He’d landed on soft moss in a forest glade, bisected by a small creek. Before him, behind a great stump that had been lopped off cleanly, a wizened gnome with reddish whiskers peered down, an acorn clutched in one hand. Across the creek, seated on three lines of heavy toadstools, was an assortment of other fantastic creatures. Some, like the pixies, Weatherall recognized; others, like the stick insect that appeared to be on ablaze, were totally alien.

Jon Weatherall had landed in front of a green-skinned little being with pointed ears and a suit, seated at another stump who appeared to be looking through a series of elm leaves with notes written on them. Across the creek, a similarly besuited fairy was doing the same with maple leaves.

“That’s enough, bailiff,” the gnome said, shooing the towering, warty figure away. “Stay at the glade’s edge until called for, yeah?”

“Aye,” the ogre croaked, stomping off.

“What…what is going on here?” Weatherall groaned, still not entirely convinced he was awake.

“Quiet,” the goblin in front of him snapped over its shoulder. “You’d best speak when spoken to, or this is going to go badly for you.”

“What is going to go badly for me?” said Weatherall, wondering if it wasn’t some sort of bad trip, a flashback to the time he’d taken acid in 1987.

The goblin turned around. “Did the bailiff not tell you?”

Weatherall shrugged helplessly.

“Ogres are admittedly not the best messengers, I suppose,” it said. “Very well. You, sir, are on trial. My name is Muhrot, and I am defending you.”

“On trial?” Weatherall bristled. “On what charge?”

“Defaming magical creatures, slandering the magical world, and libel against the same,” Muhrot said. “At least, those are the gravest of the 160 charges, anyway.”

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Title: Acer Racer
Developer: Carbide
Publisher: UK Silver
Platform: Musjido Multi Media System
Release Date:
NA: November 5, 1992

Infamous as one of the worst, but also one of the rarest, games ever produced for the Musjido MMS, Acer Racer commands prices of around $2500 for a loose cartridge and close to $5000 for a complete-in-box copy. This is because developer Carbide had been contracted on spec to make the game for a local businessman interested in breaking into the video game market; once they had ordered the cartridges for the first 500 units from Musjido, the contract was canceled, leading to three years of legal wrangling. Carbide went out of business during the protracted legal fight, which lasted over a year, and its creditors seized the 500 copies that had been manufactured. Notorious bottom-feeding developer UK Silver purchased the lot, printed cheap packaging and manuals for the game, and sold it by mail order in 1992-1993. The new Musjido UMMS meant there was little interest, and the remaining unsold copies eventually surfaced in Canadian discount stores in 1996. Fewer than 250 are rumored to still exist.

Ironically for a game that commands such a high price, Acer Racer is a poorly designed racing game with little to recommend it other than a soundtrack by future industry legend Jasper Oldman and a title screen drawn by legendary surfer-van airbrush painter Cal Summerisle.

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The h’Tath and the e’Arae were both designations given by a later civilization; in their tongue, h’Tath roughly means men of battle while e’Arae is women of death. It’s thought that one was a patriarchy, the other a matriarchy, both struggling for hegemony over a divided world in the face of limited and dwindling resources.

The traditional narrative is that the h’Tath were great warriors but undisciplined and backwards, while the e’Arae were less martially skilled but had superior organization and subtlety. The conflict between them played out over millennia, with other smaller factions as pawns, from their mutual origin on 0660-2112 to their eventual expansion to local galactic powers to their collapse and ultimate extinction. Indicative of this disunity is the fact that the denizens of 0660-2112 were never able to agree on an appellation for their own planet or species, nor was the gu’Tath’le or gu’Arae’le tongue ever able to establish supremacy. If a name is needed beyond the Sector Survey number, they are occasionally referred to as the Araetath of Tatharae (or vice versa).

It was the species’ reliance on their home planet for reproduction that doomed them to extinction, ultimately; they were never able to replicate the precise environmental conditions off-world, so the empire was limited by the need to return to Tatharae periodically, which was time-consuming even at trans-relativistic speeds. The exact cause is unknown, but it appears that a final war between the h’Tath and the e’Arae broke out during one such gathering, when the better part of the species had returned to their homeworld for reproduction. The conflict that followed was so violent that it cracked the crust of the planet, exposing the molten mantle and rapidly rendering it uninhabitable.

The later observers made some efforts to assist offworld survivors, but colonists from the h’Tath and the e’Arae refused to work together, and in the end little progress was made beyond a few genome sequences.

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The Sirris Tenet, as promulgated by V. K. Sirris in his manifesto, is as follows: I must turn the activities and purpose of whatever I am involved with to my own ends. It’s sometimes glibly rendered as “would thoust like to live selfishly” or “corruption is a moral imperitive,” both interpretations that Sirris himself rejected.

In an interview with NBS news and journalists from Liberty magazine, Sirris claimed that the Tenet was morally neutral. “If I wish to do good, and I am a member of a group or organization, I must turn that group or organization toward my purpose, which is good. If I am selfish, then yes, I do it out of coruptness or greed. But either way, it must be done. To be within a group, an organization, and to not seek to turn it in any way whatsoever–to be neutral, is to merely concede power and initiative to others. While they may do good, they may also do evil, so it is of the utmost importance that the individual concedes nothing, either for their own sake or for that of others.”

Those who follow the Sirris Tenet are often compared with devotees of the Objectivism philosophy espoused by Ayn Rand, despite the well-known enmity between Sirris and Rand themselves. In a letter to a follower in Chicago, Sirris declared that his philosophy was “an inherently neutral tool, like a pistol, aimed by its user and fired at a target, while Rand is peddling naked selfishness in a cellophane wrapper.” For her part, Rand was recorded via a hot mic at the 1971 Objectivism Summit in Geneva saying that Sirris was a “deluded old fool” whose philosophy was “obsessed with neutrality at the cost of intelligibility.”

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CARL: This is Carl Drake, play-by-play commentator for NBS Broadcasting, coming to you live from the AFA Janitorial Recreation National Championships!

TOM: That’s right, Carl. This is Tom Hicks, color commentator for NBS Broadcasting, and I am also coming at you live from the JRNC. Using only the tools of their day jobs, these fine sanitation engineers are duking it out today for a chance at eternal glory.

CARL: But not for prize money, because they’re not getting paid.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. It’s all for love of the game, and to keep their corporate overlords happy.

CARL: While we wait for the first event to begin, who do you like in Mop Jousting, Tom? I’m thinking Austin Markovian, who unseated fan favorite Anita Planter in the regionals.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, Markovian is the man with the mop to beat and along with his steed, a gelded Rubbermaid 1221-B Utility Cart, he’s going to be tough to unseat.

CARL: Though the plunger duel is going to be a weak spot for him, I think. Very poor performance at regionals against Bob Tabman.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, fans at home forget that this isn’t a bunch of single sport athletes, it’s a modern pentathalon, with skiing and shooting being replaced with bag binning and sop slipping. After all, who in this postmodern hellscape can even afford to ski even where there’s snow to be had? No, the only course is to dance, dance for your corporate overlords and hope that your capering earns some sort of favor.

CARL: Not unlike us, Tom.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. Not unlike us indeed.

CARL: Who do you like in the plunger biathalon? I think Tabman is the better duellist but Gillespie can unclog faster and more furiously.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. It’s gonna be a photo finish.

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Programmed by Sybil Byrnes, Sybby’s Fruitware was a popular shareware title released in 1991. It was a collection of minigames–Peach Pitfall, Marine Apple Core, Appealing Bananas–along with a fruit-themed sticker maker, notepad app, and barebones art and music programs called FruitArt and FruitSound. Everything was usable without registration, but with a 20-minute time limit and the ability to save disabled.

Sybby’s Fruitware wound up being the first introduction many young computer users had to games, graphics programs, and music composition, and a number of workarounds existed to save pictures and musical compositions without registration. For example, images made in FruitARt could be copied and pasted into Microsoft Paint, and sound files could be copied and pasted into Microsoft Sounds. This led to the 20-minute time limit being easily bypassed and serving as little more than a save check in many cases.

While remembered fondly, Sybil Byrnes saw little success from Sybby’s Fruitware. Registered copies were rare, and the high cost of duplicating, boxing, and shipping the copies meant that her windfall was minimal. Eventually, Sybil Byrnes was diagnosed with ALS, and released the source code for Sybby’s Fruitware and her other programs. A fundraiser to help fund her treatment was eventually held, with a number of industry figures contributing, but she nevertheless passed away in 1999 at the age of only 47.

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