THE GREATER REALITY AREA

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Topic

speculative biology

A collection of 15 issues

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,

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

EXPERIMENTAL TREATMENT

"When I was about ten or so, I swallowed seventeen packets of sea monkeys, all at once. It turned out my immune system was missing an antibody or two, and I had an undiagnosed fistula, so the pleura between my organs turned into a whole sea monkey circus."

ON MALL DREAMS

Somewhere in the mind, or mind of minds, is a grand snarl of escalators, rectangular caves, and an inescapable dim glow, perhaps accompanied by faint, barely intelligible music. Everywhere malls exist, people dream of mallscapes, which, strangely, are remembered as if they are one singular mall, or “Mall World.” Three

TRILOBITE BLUES

In life, your pet trilobite never got to meet you. The little oval spent quiet days scurrying about the seafloor, as its kind had always done for hundreds of millions of years. Sometimes it would curl up into a ball to protect itself from danger; other times, just because it

PIPING HOT SKY MUSHROOMS

When cultivated in darkness, enoki mushrooms spill outward into long, pale tendrils in a sprawl not unlike that of fireworks. At this stand, sponsored by the University Beneath St. Paul, they were being sold-tempura fried, then drenched in all manner of colorful sauces: red-orange calabrianero-chili buffalo, verdant

EAT ALL YOU CAN

The Florida Keys themselves were once alive. Their bedrock formed from the calcified remains of what was once a sprawling forest of coral, strangled of all color and complexity by the sudden onset of an Ice Age. Above this once-living stone is a slime congealed from centuries of rotting

THE MYRMECOLEON EFFECT REVISITED

ALLOCATION

Those who live out of suitcases learn to spend their evenings in bars. An endless tunnel of concourses, fuselages, trams, and front desks creates a dissociative environment where the realm of dreams provides more sure footing than any permanent address. There is no salvation from this state of mind in

A DIABOLICAL INSTRUMENT

It emerges from the Pacific Ocean as a direct jut of rock from the planet's hot mantle, tempered in cool seawater, then thrust towards heaven like a crude dagger. The atmosphere has answered its challenge in kind with never-ending antarctic winds, weathering its edge down to mossy