The World Snake

"Oh, that." I showed it to him. "It just looks like a wedding ring; I wear it to keep women off." That ring is an antique I bought in 1985 from a fellow operative—he had fetched it from pre-Christian Crete. "The Worm Ouroboros...the World Snake that eats its own tail, forever without end. A symbol of the Great Paradox." —Robert A. Heinlein, "All You Zombies—" (1959)

Forgetting the frame

The Guardian's Alison Flood reads (and likes) The Worm Ouroboros. (Via Jenny)

There are many odd things about The Worm, not least the beginning, which sees a man, Lessingham, fall asleep and dream – or is it a dream? – that he has travelled to the plane Mercury (which is very Earth-like). He arrives in the court of the Demons, observes for a while – and then is never heard of again. Either Eddison became bored with him, or forgot about him (poor Lessingham though – how'll he ever get home?).

Here was my take, on Astral Weeks, a while back. (Verdict: good stuff!) Excerpt:

In a brilliant miniature, an Imp tells some shipwrecked Demons how he has observed three great warriors locked in a static plan of vengeance -- the first in pursuit of the second, the second hot to kill the third, the third chasing after the first. They have been like this for nine years.

Bringing home the Bacon

Some gorgeous "pre-Golden Age" science fiction covers illustrate Dzyd Josh's latest transmission at i09 , including Harold Steele Mackaye's The Panchronicon (1904):

I'm informed that The Panchronicon concerns a pair of New Hampshire spinsters who are given the opportunity to travel through time via a solar-powered airship-thing from the 27th-century. See, first you fly the Panchronicon to the North Pole; then you orbit the Earth widdershins (anti-sunwise, like Christopher Reeve does in the 1978 Superman); and presto, you're in 16th-century England, where you're able to disprove the Bacon-was-Shakespeare theory.

And there's an Ouroboros, linking back here, to boot!

7. E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922). More admired than read, Ouroboros is a linguistically adventurous saga recounting the infinite war between the king of Witchland and the lords of Demonland... on the planet Mercury. Call it Nietzschean SF: somewhere out there, the author would have us believe, another world is possible, one in which the self-overcoming values and worldview of Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, and Scandinavian Vikings will never be corrupted. (As Lord Juss puts it: "For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.") The end of Eddison's novel is also its beginning, hence the title and Keith Henderson's heavy-metal jacket illustration — a snake devouring itself tail-first. Like they so often do in medieval engravings, Celtic sculptures, Egyptian scrolls, Aztec glyphs, and on Agent Scully's lower back. Wish I could afford a 1st edition.

(Here's my take on the book at Astral Weeks.)