I should start having these make sense once in a while

stone was a laughing sister
sister under the rock, who told mother new words
for old secrets

pleiades was not a winding toy
she told herself often between coffees
i am a stone
i rise in reverse

unutterable silence is the word for mother

father loves his daughter
the mother tells her so

a word for father is “change”
a word for father is “no”
a word for mother is “yes”

“love” is a word for stones
the silence tells her so

a sister rises downward
a mother laughs in reverse
a father changes it to match the silence
the stones see them and tell us so

Click for comics.

Title taken from The Books’ song. Obviously. Duh.

I wrote this around 2004. It’s a textfile. I’m hoping the spacing comes out alright in browsers.

link

Scanner’s working.

The world of Twilight is not a world where the superheroes have deliberately taken over, but one where they have inherited the Earth almost by default as various social institutions started to crumble in the face of accelerating social change, leaving the superheroes in the often unwilling position of being a sort of new royalty. Even though government and civic authority has all but disintegrated, the various areas of America each have their own coteries of protecting superfolk to look after them, and the superheroes have thus tended to group into clans, each looking after a certain province. There are numerous “Houses” of this nature dividing America up into a kind of feudal barony system effectively, in terms of politics if not in terms of technology, which is as advanced as one might expect by 2000 A.D.

The development of this future society is something which I intend to go into in detail, although not here. I want to avoid the sort of nuke-blighted future that has been a feature of Dark Knight, Watchmen, Ronin and a lot of other futures presented in comic books and other media, like the Road Warrior films and their ilk, because I feel that is becoming something of a cliché, and, while it’s gone some way towards serving its
purpose and alerting people to the dangers of the present day by pointing out the possible effects waiting in the future, I personally feel that it’s all but outlived its usefulness as a motif in Twentieth Century function and would prefer to come up with a different kind of holocaust. What I want to show is a world which, having lived through the terrors of the Fifties through the early Nineties with overhanging terror of a nuclear Armageddon that seemed inevitable at the time, has found itself faced with the equally inconceivable and terrifying notion that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually have a future, and might thus be faced with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with it rather than allowing himself the indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient mushroom cloud or nine hundred. Following the predictions made by Alvin Toffler and other eminent futurologists, I want to show a future in which everything from the family structure to the economy is decentralizing into an entirely new form that, while it might ultimately be better suited to survival in the changed conditions of life in the Twenty-First Century, is in a constant and incomprehensible state of flux and chaos for those living through it, caught in one of those violent historical niches where one mode of society changes to another, such as the industrial revolution, for example. The people of our world find themselves going through an upheaval more abstract and bizarre but every bit as violent, and as their institutions crumble in the face of the wave of social change, they find themselves clinging to the various superhero clans who represent their only anchor of stability in this rapidly altering world. At the time in which our central Twilight storyline takes place, there are eight “Houses”, each containing a different superhero clan, scattered across America, although as we shall see some of these are pretty well abandoned or non-functioning in any active sense.

—-Alan Moore (*)

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