MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: Fiction

  • Clean Break

    I don’t buy that clean break bullshit, man. That’s for squares with lobotomized emotions and hearts stuffed with excelsior. No, the good stuff, the real fallout? That’s a compound fracture, a jagged mess of splintered bone and raw nerve. It throbs with a dull ache that creeps into your dreams, a constant reminder of the…

  • Crumbs

    You see, it’s the small things that damn a man. Not the great sins—they’re too obvious. It’s the quiet compromises, the clever validations, the glimmering, idiotic comforts we make with the world. It begins so modestly—so innocently. The shopkeeper who nods approvingly at your coat, the way his eyes soften when he sees you’ve chosen…

  • Cyberpunk

    Lately, I’ve been thinking about cyberpunk’s jagged grip on the collective id, its knack for haunting the edges of our digital decay like a rogue algorithm stuck on loop.  Cyberpunk isn’t just about dystopian futures—it’s about the failure of successive belief systems, each of which once promised order, progress, or salvation but collapsed under their…

  • Doppelgänger

    The Zone was all wires and rot, a place where the buildings sagged like the bones had been sucked out, where people’s faces blurred, like the heat had warped their features into something barely human. A place where reality skipped like a bad film reel. Jack Tully pulled his collar up against the sting of…

  • Enchantment

    “…when he returns to what was once the USSR but is now Ukraine to do a dissertation on Russian Mythology and Tales and whether they conform to Propp’s Functions of Folktales…” https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Enchantment… The arc of history bends toward the Book of Mormon. Ima try this, see what happens. Ender’s Game, speaker for the Dead, Xenocide,…

  • Exilios

    A man named Eugenio Valenzuela had always believed that he possessed a peculiar gift: the power to make others fall asleep simply by speaking. It was not something he had ever sought; indeed, it was something of a curse—yet, as with many such peculiarities, it was an enigma he had long since accepted with quiet…

  • Flaming Pie

    ORIGINS “Well, I had a vision when I was twelve. And I saw a man on a flaming pie, and he said, ‘You are the Beatles with an A.’ And so we are.” John Lennon’s tongue-in-cheek origin myth, delivered with his signature blend of scouse wit and cosmic irreverence, is more than a punchline—it is…

  • GASPAR DE LA NUIT

    There are accounts—fragmentary, contradictory—of a man by that name. A minor poet in the salons of Paris, a soldier lost in the Napoleonic wars, a condemned prisoner who vanished from his cell before the executioner arrived. In each case, the same detail: he was last seen at dusk. A manuscript surfaced once, bearing his name…

  • Gravity’s Rainbow

    In the shadowed realms of thermodynamics, where entropy’s whispers echo and the laws of nature weave their intricate tapestries, we encounter a parade of concepts that dance on the edge of information asymmetry:

  • I Bought a Little City

    Donald Barthelme’s 1974 short story “I Bought a Little City” is a surreal and satirical take on the American Dream, consumerism, and the power dynamics of ownership. The story follows an unnamed narrator who, upon hearing that the city of Galveston, Texas, is up for sale, decides to purchase it on a whim. From the…