THE GREATER REALITY AREA

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folklore

A collection of 19 issues

SIREN BLUES

“Mother, why do we kill sailors?” The elder siren paused, surprised she needed to have this discussion so soon, but her daughter was getting older, and the barbs on her talons were getting sharper. “To eat them, of course, dear. That’s the purpose they serve in our ecosystem.” “We

SCHEHERAZADE NUMBERS

In Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics, there is a section titled “Numerology,” serving as a strange appendix to the compendium of his knowledge and beliefs. In this section of the book, he preserved several of his more unusual speculations about humanity’s past. He was fascinated by the possibility of lost

AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE BLACK VOLGA

It was after three in the morning in Chicago, probably a Thursday, when that vintage Soviet car pulled up alongside me, its exhaust sweet with sulfur. I knew the old tales from Eastern Europe during the Cold War: the Black Volga swallowed up those wandering alone at night, and visited

PLACES TO BE

There are zones within Wyoming’s midsection where the sky is too slippery for satellites to hold steady, and even the most detailed surveyors made errors which were copied from one cartographer to another. While driving across those moonscapes of green and gold, there are no other cars to pass,

A DEADLY CONCOCTION

IN PERPETUITY

“Installing a bottomless pit in a modern building is a complicated engineering task, but also, a serious legal one. They’re not naturally occurring phenomena, after all. Given the general shape of the Earth, there’s only so much planet to dig through, and if you did fall through the

MANKIND'S HOSTAGE

“Is there anything to actually see in Toledo?” Ohio, that was to say. “Nothing to write home about. Well, there was one weird thing I’ve never stopped thinking about in one of the Metroparks. Can’t remember which one. There was a hut that looked like a warming house

THE KAMCHATKAN LIVING CAULDRON

The “living cauldron” is a cryptid first described in the journals of seventeenth century Russian expeditioners to the Kamchatkan peninsula. One such Cossack explorer described a disintegrating reindeer corpse in what appeared to be a hot spring, posed as if it died struggling to escape, reeking terribly of rot and

FOR NO EYES ONLY

CROW'S FOOT

In the mid-20th century, humanity exhibited a strange habit of ceding even its leisure activities to machines. Following a prophecy by Alan Turing, chess-playing computers began proving their ability to defeat even professional human opponents. A number of apocalyptic scholars iterated on these designs, building increasingly competitive chess