Alan Moore has also written a novel. It wasn’t enough for him to be the world’s greatest comic book writer? He must put authors to shame as well?

Yes. Yes, he must.

The stories in Voice of the Fire span 6000 years, but only a small geographical area. It’s sort of a mystical history of Northampton, told by odd and abnormal people: a retarded boy, a sociopath, a decapitated head, a witch, two madmen. The stories are unconnected, except through common themes such as cripples, detached heads, people burned alive, and the magic attached to the place itself. The events of one story become the legends of the next, echoing through dreams and visions. And the final narrator is Alan Moore himself, another odd and abnormal Northampton resident.

Moore doesn’t make it easy for us. The first story is written in a strange, but consistent, grammar, so that every sentence is a riddle. As in, 50 pages of “Fire’s black bout of he’s eyes. Fire’s blood on of he’s horns.” First-time readers of Alan Moore will give up, and should first get to know him through his comics. (No, the movie versions don’t count.) Fans will know that it’s worth it, because Alan Moore is a genius.

Jack Vance’s Dying Earth novels are set in the last years of the Sun’s life, when technology has given way to (or become) magic.

The series begins on a dark romantic note with The Dying Earth (1950). Earth’s remaining people live a capricious fairy tale existence, subject to wizards, monsters, and random cruelty. One moment you’re happily torturing some unlucky traveller. The next you’ve had your eyes gouged out for use in an art project.

With The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) and Cugel’s Saga (1983), Vance turns the end into light farce, which suits it better. The protagonist is Cugel the Clever, a trickster who travels the world in search of revenge. The joke is on everyone, both Cugel and the people he cheats, robs, or accidentally causes the brutal death of. Everyone is a fool or a crook, and deserve whatever they get. At least Cugel thinks so.

The satire in Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) is more subtle, and less funny. At one point, thousands of youths are preserved in capsules, to awaken in an expected Golden Age a hundred centuries later. As the time of awakening approaches they’re discovered by cannibals, who treat them as a convenient source of freshly preserved meat. Yum!

Vance’s characters find little to admire in the end-times. Nations, fads and True Religions (And We Mean It This Time) have come and gone for aeons, but people remain the same. What then is there left to believe in? Vance’s attitude is that when everything is past, everything is farce.

Shikasta by Doris Lessing is the refined version of her earlier Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. She has stripped away the visionary excesses, and improved on the core idea: Cosmic forces look with frustration on the state of the Earth, and send emissaries to be born onto it to make it better. But they often get distracted and lose their way, trapped by human corruption and confusion.

The Earth was once psychically linked with Canopus, our cosmic superiors, and everything was bliss. But the link broke, and all went bad. Canopus creates religions to guide us, but they always deteriorate. As the 20th century ends, Earth’s diseased materialist culture collapses in a nuclear holocaust.

Shikasta is humanity seen through the glasses of the worst of 60’s/70’s theory and spirituality. Western culture is explicitly inferior. Science is just a religion. Material well-being is pointless. Canopus often comes across as arrogant, ignorant and, through association with all religious founders, evil. Unintentionally, I think.

But I don’t care. This is brilliant. I can’t mock it, I would feel small. It’s as if Lessing deliberately plays the part of a New Age mystic, saying “you’ve seen what others have done with this role, now look what I can do with it”. And she uses this premise to explore the missed potential in all of us. To dissect, reprimand and inspire.

Shikasta is not a novel. It is prophecy, in the Old Testament sense. Doris Lessing is Jeremiah. And Jesus. And the Buddha. I’m in awe.

Pacemaker, eng., person som ved trening e. konkurranse holder sig foran en løper, syklist o.s.v. for å lette hans arbeide e. opmuntre ham.

Paraply (fr. parapluie, mot regn), regnskjerm.

Parykk (fr. perruque), en tettsittende lue utvendig forsynt med hår (tagl, ull, e.l.)

Pedagogikk, den videnskaplige behandling av opdragelseskunsten.

Pedofili, se Perversjon

Perversjon [..] Den viktigste p. er homoseksualiteten.

Piken fra Norge, navn på Margrete, skotsk dronning

Plattenslager; i da. har ordet fått bet. “bedrager”, likesom uttrykket “slå en plade” i da. betyr “narre, bedra”.

Pollusjoner, ufrivillige sæduttømmelser, i alm. under søvnen. [..] Ved seksuell overirritabilitet kan p. bli meget hyppige og være ledsaget av nevrasteniske forstyrrelser; den eneste rasjonelle behandlingsmåte er da et regelmessig og hygienisk liv, særlig i seksuell henseende.

Positi´v. 1) Mindre orgel som bare er forsynt med labialstemmer, – 2. Lirekasse.

Pote´ter, urt fra Andesfjellene i Chile, Peru og Ecuador.

Promiskuitet, kjønnslig samliv i fleng.

Prylestraff, legemlig revselse, kan nu bare anv. i opdragelsesøiemed overfor barn av deres foreldre e. andre som står i foreldres sted, samt av skolen (dog ikke på piker over 10 år), hvis de av skolestyret fastsatte regler for skolens orden og tukt gir adgang dertil.

Pumpernikkel, en slags grovt, kliholdig rugbrød som opr. brev brukt i Westfalen, Preussen.

Pyøng-yang, by i det n.v. Korea, ved jernbanen Søul-Mukden.

Med inspirasjon fra Kjetil Johansen.

In the Pyat quartet, Michael Moorcock gives a voice to the fascist Europe we left behind. The voice is a Russian engineer, a conceited techno-utopist who escapes the Russian civil war with a hatred of Bolsheviks and Jews. To make Pyat merely a fascist follower would be too simple. He’s rather a sibling of the fascists, like the Italian futurists, an independent thinker whose emotions find resonance with the fascist movements when they arrive, without falling in line behind any particular leader.

Byzantium Endures took Pyat through the Russian revolution and civil war. In The Laughter of Carthage he wanders through Europe a rootless emigrant, eventually landing in the US, where he makes friends with the Ku Klux Klan. With all Pyat’s faults, it may be excessive of Moorcock to also give him a cocaine addiction and a 13-year old lover, but what’s impressive about these novels is how reasonable Pyat appears in his own voice. And his voice is all we hear, apart from Moorcock’s introduction. The real story is a puzzle for observant readers to solve.

The novels are narrated by Pyat as an old man, a shopkeeper in London. This gives his story a melancholic slant. Pyat’s life has been a failure in every way. The stories he tells of his glorious youth are merely the rants of a bitter old man. The reader pities him. But it’s a cautious pity. Moorcock’s achievement is to show that the Europe Pyat personifies is neither remote nor fully dead.

The only self-help book I need: The Discourses of Epictetus. Stoicism has been out of favor for a while. It’s seen as emotionless and puritanical, which is true, but avoidable. You’re allowed to pick the parts you like. The Stoics wouldn’t approve, but they’re dead. The parts I like in Stoicism deal with the power of choice, the one thing nobody can take away from you. Place your happiness and self-worth in things that are within your sphere of choice, and you will never be anxious or bitter. Doing your best is up to you, being rewarded for it isn’t. It’s not up to you to avoid illness, but it is up to you how you deal with it. It’s an ideal: Not possible, but something to aim for.

The greatest flaw of the Stoics was fatalism. Changing the world was not an option to them, so they turned inward. They would have mocked the last 200 years of political and social progress. Again you can pick the parts you like.

Epictetus imagines himself before the emperor and says: “Chain me if you like, but my will is free!” This is a posture, but an inspiring one. Epictetus is not for everyone. Some may find him cold, others depressing. For me he’s a safety net. I’m an Epicurean when things go well, a Stoic when things go wrong. The Stoics wouldn’t approve, but again, they’re dead. All that is left of them is a handful of fine ideas that lie forgotten in a ditch.

Those who have learned precepts as mere theory want to vomit them up immediately, just as people with weak stomachs do with their food. Digest your precepts first, and you will not vomit them up in this way; otherwise they really do turn to vomit, tainted matter unfit to eat. Then show us some change that results from those precepts in your own ruling faculty, just as athletes can show their shoulders as the results of their training and diet, or those who have learned various arts can show the result of their learning.

A builder does not come up and say, “Listen to me lecturing on the builder’s art”, but acquires a contract to build a house and shows by building it that he knows the art. And you should do likewise; eat as a man, drink as a man, adorn yourself, marry, sire children, play your part as a citizen; put up with abuse, bear with an inconsiderate brother, bear with a father, bear with a son, neighbour, fellow-traveller.

Show us these things so we can see that you have in truth learnt something from the philosophers. No; but “Come and listen to me reading out my commentaries.” Away with you! Look for someone else to vomit over.

- Epictetus, The Discourses

But god has introduced man into the world as a spectator of himself and of his works; and not only as a spectator, but an interpreter of them. It is therefore shameful that man should begin and end where the irrational creatures do. He ought rather to begin there, but to end where nature itself has fixed our end; and that is in contemplation and understanding and a way of life in harmony with nature. Take care, then, not to die without ever being spectators of these things.

- Epictetus, The Discourses

But you are wretched and discontented, and if you are alone, you call it desolation, but if you are with men, you call them cheats and robbers and you find fault with even your parents and children and brothers and neighbours. Whereas you ought, when you live alone, to call that peace and freedom, and compare yourself to the gods; and when you are in company, not to call it a crowd and a tumult and a vexation, but a feast and a festival, and thus accept all things with contentment. What, then, is the punishment of those who do not? To be just as they are. Is a person discontented at being alone? Let him be in desolation. Discontented with his parents? Let him be a bad son, and let him grieve. Discontented with his children? Let him be a bad father. ‘Throw him into prison.’ What kind of prison? Where he already is.

- Epictetus, The Discourses