From what he says on his blog, those single-page installments shaped his approach to the bit of Dune that you can see full-size here.

Among the things that I particularly liked are Lovern Kindzierski’s desert sky colors and the ornithopter’s squiggly shadow on the rocks, and the way Pope’s paced the anecdote. Great stuff.

For example:

This video of Cold, Haily Windy Night.

This video of Hard Times in Old England

They seem to do a pretty good job of it in Tucson, witness this picture.

And what’s in the photo isn’t half as interesting as the context as described in the caption:

…An undulating snake of skeletons, bogeywomen and the deceased wend their way beneath a phalanx of stilted, Ram-headed giants glowing red with roadflares. When the train passed everyone screamed with glee. To the right you can see the gynormous pumpkin of wishes pulled by the Horned Man.

(More cool stuff on their gallery.)

Wikipedia explains, and here’s a site by an enthusiast.

I tried to summon one up via interlibrary loan, but (alas) the only copy in Maine is apparently non-circulating.

However, a Google image search turns up lots of scans of random pages. (Including some by someone much luckier at the interlibrary loan game.) It seems like the kind of book that fits well with seeing only a random assortment of pages, and I think I’ll be doing some random paging over the next few days.

I came across the Codex via a comment on Boing Boing to a John Hodgman post on gnomes. Which I mention because of the inherent humor value of Hodgman+gnomes and because the post contained the following great quote: “Like the best books, it is unclear exactly who it was meant to reach.”

Hodgman, of course, is known for being a PC, a resident expert, and the author of The Areas of My Expertise, which won the Sidewise Award in all the more enlightened alternate universes (as I’m sure his new one will as well.)

Or, say, the end of October.

This story originally appeared in issue 11 (fall 2001) of the print magazine Conduit. The painting in question is The Temptation of St. Anthony (left panel), a nice large image of which can be found at this online poster store. Our hero is in the lower right corner of the painting, and is the only one of my characters who has been made into an action figure.

I am a small, bird-headed demon, skating.Gliding up a frozen river, I totter from side to side to side; my legs are short and my crotch is low. In my crossed beak, I carry a letter. I have not read the letter.

I am coming to a bridge. I will pass under the bridge and go on.

I pass fields mummified by winter, all snowless rows of frozen mud and broken stalks of grain. A town is nearing on my right, an abandoned place, curtains flapping from the windows. Smells like plague to me. The evening is clouding up, bringing an unhealthy damp, and I skate a little faster.

This story appeared in issue 5 of the print magazine Electric Velocipede. Back in 1995, it appeared in Shadowdance, a magazine that isn’t around any longer. It’s set in the same world– same city, even– as both “Sunfast” (see below) and the novel I’ve been working on for the past couple years.

From the hour of the chase through the hour of the triple queen, I tended the shadow garden. I directed the visitors. I explained the hard to see parts. I kept the children on the paths and out of the mirrors. Between these shepherdings, I pruned and tucked the wild edges, mulched the echoweed and forged a few entries in the guestbook. The hour of the kingdom seemed forever in coming.

Later, I changed. Osier found me and we talked of the day, of Magda, the kite, the morning’s crowd on the common, and the evening’s. He had been trying to understand what he’d written the night before. I’d been there, I’d watched while the muse rode him and I’d felt the frenzy like a storm charge in the air, but I couldn’t help him. I had iced and reasoned; I was not the same.

When she finally got though the door, Moonhead Lunes knew her heart was gone: she could see fragments of broken candy-box still melting into the shag. The jagged blue edges of gluco-glass were only slightly softened, but she doubted she’d find any prints. Someone had been careful enough to carry the box over to the rug before breaking it. Barely a smudge of amnion syrup left– the carpet had soaked up the rest and quivered now with waves of sugar rush. If Moonhead hadn’t happened to come home early, the floor would have digested all the evidence– could have been weeks before she’d missed her heart. Someone had known what they were doing.And they’d taken her soul: that explained the trouble with the door. She could see where they’d trenched into the plaster to find the sensors and then followed the wires, pulling the whole rhizome out of walls, ceiling and floors, leaving a web of slit-trails in the plaster. That left the house deaf to her movements, blind to her body heat and unresponsive to her touch. The air was cold, the lights dim, all the settings defaulted out the way they were when the house thought it was empty. Moonhead felt abandoned, alone, annoyed. She had half a dozen hearts, but only one soul, and she never seemed to back it up often enough.

I mixed historical information about the Khan with images and ideas from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem, but the mummy is based on a real one, and you can see some pictures of him at this website.

We reached an immense bubble in the ice, a room floored with rich carpets and hung with lamps and incense braziers which were suspended by long chains so that they would not melt the chamber’s domed ceiling. Still, a slow, quiet rain fell, freezing into instant pearls on our heads and shoulders as we followed Khubilai toward a body that lay on a heap of cushions in the center of the floor.It was a man. A tall man, with some kind of design in yellow paint on his sunken cheeks, just above the line of his red-brown beard. His white deerskin boots seemed to have rotted while he still wore them–the leather had opened up to reveal socks striped in red, blue and yellow, and his wine-purple coat seemed to have hardened into its clumps and folds. The cold air held the smell of warm mare’s milk and fish grease.

I had almost convinced myself that he was a corpse, when he lifted his eyes and opened his smoky-pupilled eyes.

Spirits Uwrapped is a little hard to find, but I believe you can still get copies from Project Pulp.
Vortigern

This story, offering a behind the scenes look at preparations for King Arthur’s eventual return, appeared in the December 2004 issue of the online magazine Ideomancer.

The spiders come and go. They bring me the bricks with which I build the castle. From the silk litter they leave behind on the grass, I knit a dragon. So far, all I’ve got of the castle is a shin-high parapet sketching out the footprint of the walls-to-be. And of the dragon: no more than one clawed and gnarled foreleg. By the time the castle’s finished and furnished, I hope to have the beast complete as well, a giant balloon-skin. I plan to hold it over a bonfire on top of one of the towers I’m envisioning, let the silk swell with hot air and blood-colored light.With any luck, I’ll have all this completed before the king comes back.

One September morning, Sophie and her father found a clockwork man in their courtyard, curled up in the far corner where the iron fence met the house wall. His ceramic skin was wet with last night’s rain and cold to the touch. He wore two heavy cloth coats and had a note pinned to his shirt: If found dead or wound-down, please place body in a Firedrake Model IV Furnace for two hours. He had barely enough energy left to hold up his own head when they brought him inside and laid him on the fire. They piled wood on and around him and left him to bake for a few hours.He sat up around lunchtime.