Fantasy Island Quotes

There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of Tremalking. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm… maybe if I hadn’t gone with Spike… maybe if I could have lived more peaceably… maybe if I’d met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn’t done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done. The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

A man may daydream of how he would spend a million dollars, but playing the same game with a billion dollars sours the fantasy. There are too many possibilities. The house he once wished for with all his heart is suddenly too small. The travel, too cheap. He wanted to visit an island. Now he contemplates buying one.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

The best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is. A woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark ... I go back into the dark! Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who'll ask the dark its name?

The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.

The gems are worth more on the island than off it.

The Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte had been banished to the island of Elba. However His Imperial Majesty had some doubts wheter a quiet island life would suit him - he was, after all, accustomed to governing a large proportion of the known world.

Simon laughed heartily. “I’m afraid the rest of us have to find talents to get our women into bed. Of course once they’re there, I have other talents that keep them right where they are.” “Handcuffs hardly count,” Christian said offhandedly. “If you mean the ladies cuffing me to the bed so they can explore Hunt Island,” he said, rubbing his chest, “…then point taken. These hands are capable of making any female climax by the mere brush of a pinky across her bare breast.” “I must have gone to the wrong island,” I said with a private laugh.

It’s raining,” she said with a glower out the window. He rose and walked around the island to stand next to her. “Shall we spend the day before a roaring fire making love?

Being forced to learn the language of your oppressors is an oppression of the mind. They rewrite your history when you're too young to know what you're giving away, and before you know it, it's too late to reclaim what you've lost,' she had said. 'Patois is your island's tongue, Elara. It's your heritage. It is the true expression of your heart. Don't give it away.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return. He thought: “I’m leaving my ordinary life behind me.” And, smiling to himself, he began to make plans, fantastic plans for the future. He was still smiling when he walked up the rock-cut steps. In

In your life, right here and now, things like mermaids, fairies, witches and monsters are nothing but fairytales told to your grandchildren and stories you heard from your own grandparents as children. They exist only in your imagination. Did you ever think that there is a chance all this was once real, that it all existed? Perhaps yes, but you would then consider such thoughts irrational, that even if you were to believe it and try telling someone they would think you for mad. In my world those creatures are real – I’m real, and I am here to tell you of a story that happened in eons past in the majestic island of Aster." - Queen of Merfolk Asteria - Ninemia

Black holes are a gift, both physically and theoretically. They are detectable on the farthest reaches of the observable universe. They anchor galaxies, providing a center for our own galactic pinwheel and possibly every other island of stars. And theoretically, they provide a laboratory for the exploration of the farthest reaches of the mind. Black holes are the ideal fantasy scape on which to play out thought experiments that target the core truths about the cosmos.

There is no "tropical island paradise" I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more. So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.

When we talk about books…we are talking about our approximate recollections of books… What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion…We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. … What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands.

A refreshing west coast breeze carried a few clouds toward the main door of the car shop by the ocean's rocky beach on the island.

Storm’s coming, boys. Doesn’t bode well, not with the moonrise tonight.

Just as I never wondered what it was like for my mother to be a full-time, at-home mother, I never wondered then what it meant to be married. I took my parents’ union for granted. It was the simple solid fact upon which all four of our lives were built. Much later, my mother would tell me that every year when spring came and the air warmed up in Chicago, she entertained thoughts about leaving my father. I don’t know if these thoughts were actually serious or not. I don’t know if she considered the idea for an hour, or for a day, or for most of the season, but for her it was an active fantasy, something that felt healthy and maybe even energizing to ponder, almost as ritual. I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone. I don’t think my mother announced whatever her doubts and discontents were to my father directly, and I don’t think she let him in on whatever alternative life she might have been dreaming about during those times. Was she picturing herself on a tropical island somewhere? With a different kind of man, or in a different kind of house, or with a corner office instead of kids? I don’t know, and I suppose I could ask my mother, who is now in her eighties, but I don’t think it matters.

Maybe I'd absorbed the capacity to hurt someone by listening to my parents every night, who were under the impression that turning the volume on the television all the way up somehow drowned out the voices, when the truth was and is (and my father, of all people, should have known this about the physical properties of materials, about what goes through walls, what moves through houses, what is muffled and what makes it through): everything gets transmitted. Call it the law of conservation of parental anger. It may change forms, may appear to dissipate, but draw a big box around the whole space, and add up everything inside the box, and when you've accounted for everything you find that it's all there, in one phase or another, bouncing around, some of it reflected, some of it absorbed by the smaller bodies in the house. The edge in their voices and turning up the TV only meant that I listened to them destroy each other to a sound track of Fantasy Island or The Incredible Hulk or The Love Boat.

My face flushed scarlet. I was a stranger in my own skin. I had ever felt this kind of anger in my life. Fort and confusion grew. Its sensation was an overwhelming concoction of hate. The only things I knew - the only things keeping me remotely calm- was the following litany. My name is Eleanora Ada Stone. I was moved from home to home for seventeen years. I am now living on this god-forsaken island in Maine. I was being kept from a world of secrets. I have abilities. I am not human. I do not know what I am.

And here in this other realm she looms over him, vast and sprawling, wildly patchwork and dense. Not just older and bigger. Stronger in many ways: her arms and core are thick with muscled neighborhoods that each have their own rhythms and reputations. Williamsburg, Hasidim enclave and artist haven turned hipster ground zero. Bed Stuy (do or die). Crown Heights, where now the only riots are over seats at brunch. Her jaw is tight with the stubborn ferocity of Brighton Beach's old mobsters and the Rockaways' working-class holdouts against the brutal inevitability of rising seas. But there are spires at Brooklyn's heart, too- perhaps not as grand as his own, and maybe some of hers are actually the airy, fanciful amusement-park towers of Coney Island- but all are just as shining, just as sharp.

You are too romantic! We have been dwelling in Arcadia my green girl: the rest of the world is not so golden as this retired spot. Only in fantasy does every circumstance conspire to make it inevitable that two people should fall in love! We should hardly have been more isolated had be been cast on a desert island together.

Magic has a price... and so does paradise." - Pearl Dale, Mermaid Island #1

There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own.

She was a bottomless ocean. The water slipping through your fingers. A mystery caught between fantasy and reality. She was loud, fierce, and invisible.

Stories are like islands, go out exploring and you're bound to get lost fantastically.

Commander Keen, Myst, Doom, Diablo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Leisure Suit Larry, The Colonel’s Bequest, Ultima, Warcraft, Monkey Island, The Oregon Trail,

No one has a perfect life Some of us just hide the imperfections well.

You know, my friend, sometimes we do travel all around the world thinking of finding the happiness. Not only in mind, or in dreams, as I used to do when communism borders enclosed us in a “happy island”, preaching us the benefits of being in such and such powerful state. We do travel in real time and space, pushed by the fantasy of colourful dreams. As real as us. Yet, love, yes, love is one of the most powerful force that could take us from our comfort zone and makes us jump the borders. Which I did. And now, looking at that refusal letter from Home Office, I was feeling all their hatred and abuse slapping my honesty. - Write Like A Girl Anthology

I clung tightly to Kwan’s mane as he propelled his great serpent body through the cloud banks. The cockatrice’s big green head dipped under the clouds, and I spotted an emerald island below, with dramatic peaks jutting up from the jungle. I asked the great cockatrice for the name of the isle, but he only laughed at me, saying that names changed faster than a century’s wind. That didn’t seem very fast to me, but I took his word for it.

A specific new fear—that a whole city could just disappear in an instant—permeated the American consciousness in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Writer E. B. White captured that new fear in New York: “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of a plane no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy,” he wrote. “All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation.” •

Now he understood what it was to be a man: that it was to be weak as well as strong, to be foolish sometimes and wise sometimes, to know love as well as to kill. And he had learned that there were other paths for him, other gods who called in the deep places of the earth, in the lap of wavelets on the shore, in the breath of the wind. He had learned that there were other kinds of courage. He knew, with deep certainty, that the islands held a new path for him. He need only move forward and find it.

A letter from a French cleric to Nicholas of St. Albans, written c. 1178, rehearsed what was already a familiar perception: Your island is surrounded by water, and not unnaturally its inhabitants are affected by the nature of the element in which they live. Unsubstantial fantasies slide easily into their minds. They think their dreams to be visions, and their visions to be divine. We cannot blame them, for such is the nature of their land. I have often noticed that the English are greater dreams than the French.

She was here and the world, for so long ugly and deformed, was all at once itself again. She was taking a glass of sweet wine from one of the waiters. She was smiling. She was breathing. She was here. She was an island of such colossal importance within a sea of inconsequence that it seemed impossible the Ball was able to continue its empty existence.

LOST is often lauded as one of the best fantasy dramas in television history, as well as one of the most cryptic and - occasionally – maddening. But confirmation of just how important it is came with an almost unbelievable communiqué from the White House last week. President Obama’s office reassured Lost fans that the commander in chief wouldn’t move his yearly state of the union address from late January to a date that would coincide with the premiere episode of the show’s sixth and final season. That’s right. Obama might have had vital information to impart upon the American people about health care, the war in Afghanistan, the financial crisis – things that, you know, might affect real lives. But the most important thing was that his address didn’t clash with a series in which a polar bear appears on a tropical island. After extensive lobbying by the ABC network, the White House surrendered. Obama’s press secretary promised: “I don’t foresee a scenario in which millions of people who hope to finally get some conclusion with Lost are pre-empted by the president.

Being forced to learn the language of your oppressors is an oppression of the mind. They rewrite your history when you're too young to know what you're giving away, and before you know it, it's too late to reclaim what you've lost,' she had said. 'Patois is your island's tongue, Elara. It's your heritage. It is the true expression of your heart. Don't give it away.

The message David’s parents unwittingly taught him, completely outside of his own and their awareness, was “don’t have feelings, don’t show feelings, don’t need anything from anyone, ever.” His fantasies about being dead or running off to a tropical island were the best ways he could imagine to accomplish that mandate. David was a good boy who learned his lesson well.

If we are encouraged to read high fantasies like The Tempest and urged to “enjoy a magic island and ‘believe’ in an Ariel and a Caliban,” then why should we not also “suspend our disbelief” and enjoy the invented world of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? Why not enter in and believe also in the magic of barrow-wights and orc-blades, Hobbiton, Tom Bombadil, and the tree-top city of Lothlórien?

She had memories of a quiet pool in the woods, where she'd retreat with her books, hiding from chores that needed to be done around the house. She remembered the sound of her parents after sunset, calling her to come home. The fireflies would flicker around her as it became too dark to read, but still she'd stay, to watch the fireflies over the water and listen to the birds and the squirrels settle in for the night and the night hunters, the owls and and the cats, begin to wake. Once, she'd even glimpsed a unicorn sipping from the pond, but it could have been only a white deer and a trick of the twilight. Another afternoon, her father had come with her, avoiding his chores too. They'd read books side by side, and her mother hadn't said a word when they'd returned. A week later, her mother had been the one to join her by the pond, arriving with lunch in a basket and presenting Kiela with a new unread book, a rare treasure on the island.

Some gangs of friends formed subgroups of five, mirroring us, where each friend could have a favorite Duran without stepping on the toes or desires of the other four friends, because if you were an Andy fan, clearly you could not be friends with another Andy fan. That would not work. You could be friends with a Nick fan, however, because there was no conflict of interest. Both friends could live together in harmony with Nick and Andy on that designated fantasy desert island for ever and ever, without a hint of envy.

That evening we sat in the courtyard of the hotel once more, watching the sun sink below the western isles. I told Alexi what had happened that day. I fancied I could glimpse the grey stone wall of Lismore House on its island hilltop, the red light of the setting sun glinting from the windows, and from there the wasted frame of Jonathan Blake gazing out across the sea, on nothing, his boy waiting for him to die. But it was my fantasy, simply the image on my mind, like the image burned on to your eyes when you have stared too long at the sun, the passing footprint of a creature long gone.

Every night, millions of Americans spend their free hours watching television rather than engaging in any form of social interaction. What are they watching? In recent years we have seen reality television become the most popular form of television programming. To discover the nature of our current “reality,” we might consider examples such as Survivor, the series that helped spawn the reality TV revolution. Every week tens of millions of viewers watched as a group of ordinary people stranded in some isolated place struggled to meet various challenges and endure harsh conditions. Ah, one might think, here we will see people working cooperatively, like our ancient ancestors, working cooperatively in order to “win”! But the “reality” was very different. The conditions of the game were arranged so that, yes, they had to work cooperatively, but the alliances by nature were only temporary and conditional, as the contestants plotted and schemed against one another to win the game and walk off with the Grand Prize: a million dollars! The objective was to banish contestants one by one from the deserted island through a group vote, eliminating every other contestant until only a lone individual remained—the “sole survivor.” The end game was the ultimate American fantasy in our Age of Individualism: to be left completely alone, sitting on a mountain of cash! 　　While Survivor was an overt example of our individualistic orientation, it certainly was not unique in its glorification of rugged individualists on American television. Even commercial breaks provide equally compelling examples, with advertisers such as Burger King, proclaiming, HAVE IT YOUR WAY! The message? America, the land where not only every man and every woman is an individual but also where every hamburger is an individual! 　　Human beings do not live in a vacuum; we live in a society. Thus it is important to look at the values promoted and celebrated in a given society and measure what effect this conditioning has on our sense of independence or of interdependence

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

That which is outside exists. That which is within does not. My thoughts, images, and dreams do not exist. If Speranza [this island] is no more than a sensation, or a bundle of sensations, then she does not exist. And I myself exist only insofar as I escape from myself to join with others. What complicates the position is that the thing which does not exist does its utmost to persuade us of the contrary. There is a great and universal urge toward existence among the non-existent. Something like a centrifugal force seeks to spread outward everything that moves within me, images, dreams, projects, fantasies, desires, obsessions. That which does not ex-sist in-sists. It insists upon existing. All the small world contained within me is knocking at the door of the great, the real world. And it is others, those who are outside, who hold the key. In the past, when I tossed in my sleep, my wife would shake me by the shoulders to wake me and dispel the insistence of the nightmare. But now . . . But why do I keep returning to this subject?

Myth is also where the differences lie. Where Crusoe articulates a ‘foundation myth’ that shows Western Man asserting his autonomy and dominance as if from scratch, the Journal charts his encounter with a phenomenon he cannot understand or control. Crusoe celebrates the resourcefulness needed to create a world from new; the Journal, the endurance to watch it fall apart. For that reason it is arguably this book that among all Defoe’s works speaks most eloquently to early twenty-first-century readers attuned to imaginary landscapes of nuclear and environmental devastation, to grim fantasies of alien invasion, to the panic and policies that accompany epidemic disease... Turning an eye on the commercial and spiritual centre of empire rather than an island outpost, it dares to envisage London consumed not just by disease but violent self-interest that tears at the social fabric. It is that very modern phenomenon, an illness narrative, but one in which the patient is a whole city. Works inspired by it—Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Albert Camus’s La Peste—do not so much dismantle its ideology as try to render afresh the uniquely disturbing impact. (David Roberts)

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.

I, Pearl Dale, take on the task of Alton and will honor the Treaty of Atlantis as we will hunt those who bring injustice on the water. With all of you, I will plunder the treasures of those who mock the sea! With all of you, I will bring death to those who think they are above us! With all of you, I will make us legends worthy of songs! We will become immortals! What say you!” - Pearl Dale, Mermaid Island #1

Pearl Dale, the fabled corsair of Atlas who escaped the royal fleet of Sherwood and intervened in the private affairs of the foreign people of Agra to save one Squid crew from being tortured to death... you too have a reputation that is worthy of songs. Let it not draw a line between you and I.” - Claudio Drago da Venezia, Mermaid Island #1

As long as you wear that medallion you are bound by The Order Of Pirates’ rules and trust me, you don’t want any of us against you.” - Pearl Dale, Mermaid Island #1

The entrance archway opened onto the vast rotunda of Hyperboree Hall. Its floor was a circular map of the polar regions, where the Arctic seas were made of white marble and the islands were cut-out slabs of polished granite decorated with little figures in minute mosaics, drawn, if Brentford remembered correctly, from the Olaus Magnus and Nicolo Zeno depictions of the North. It mixed almost accurate cartography with phantom islands, mythological monsters, and imaginary people, among whom New Venetians were prone and proud to count themselves.

Why do we have to be invaded in order to exist as a collective entity? It is a remarkable question for the leader of a state that had not in fact been successfully invaded since it was formed in 1707, and of an island that had not suffered any serious external invasion since 1066? Implied in the question is an existential terror: without invasion do ‘we’ really exist at all? In this light, novels like SS-GB and Fatherland are not just masochistic fantasies, they are symptoms of a much deeper pathology in which pain is an existential necessity.

Sure, I would have enjoyed buying that private fantasy island. Yes, I would have enjoyed legally changing my first name to Gilligan and starting my own perfect civilization on that uncharted desert isle—but Mom and Dad knew better. They had foresight to realize I would handle my money better once I was older. Mom became my manager when it was clear we couldn’t afford the costs related to acting unless she got a full-time job. Someone needed to take me to the studio daily and stay there, because it was required by law that every underage kid have a parent or legal guardian around all day. It seemed silly to pay someone else to do that, so she took the job.

The breeze carried my hair off my shoulder, a shiver ran down my spine, and goose bumps unraveled across my arms when I sensed a presence nearby. I turned to spy a man as pale as ash with a beard as white as snow watching me. Black veins stretched throughout his exposed flesh. His eyes nothing but two black pieces of coal.

Fantasy island before

You know, my friend, sometimes we do travel all around the world thinking of finding the happiness. Not only in mind, or in dreams, as I used to do when communism borders enclosed us in a “happy island”, preaching us the benefits of being in such and such powerful state. We do travel in real time and space, pushed by the fantasy of colourful dreams. As real as us. Yet, love, yes, love is one of the most powerful force that could take us from our comfort zone and makes us jump the borders. Which I did. And now, looking at that refusal letter from Home Office, I was feeling all their hatred and abuse slapping my honesty.

Mosscap pointed. "Crown shyness is so striking, don't you think?" Dex had no idea what Mosscap meant. "Sorry, what's striking?" "Stop," Mosscap said. "Look." Dex sighed, but they hit the brakes, put their feet on the paving below, and looked up. Mosscap continued to point, tracing lines in the air. "Look at the treetops," it said. "What do you notice?" "Uh," Dex said. They frowned, not knowing what Mosscap was getting at. There were branches, obviously, and leaves, and... "Oh, they're..." They fell quiet as their perspective of the surrounding landscape shifted in a way they'd never unsee. Despite their number and close proximity, none of the treetops were touching one another. It was as though someone had taken an eraser and run it cleanly through the canopy, transforming each tree into its own small island contained within a definitive border of blue sky. The effect reminded Dex of puzzle pieces laid out on the table, each in their own place yet still unconnected. It wasn't that the trees were unhealthy or their foliage sparse. On the contrary, every tree was lush and full, bursting with green life. Yet somehow, in the absence of contact, they knew exactly where to stop growing outward so they might give their neighbors space to thrive.

That's what matters, isn't it? To be a person you're proud of, regardless of the judgment of others.

I wanted to be in Pawnee or on the Rocinante headed toward a space station or in Hyrule with a Great Thunderblade or on my Animal Crossing island (which I named “Doom”).

Millions of lights blazed in the sky, brilliant and bleak like splintered ice. They blinked in and out of focus with an otherworldly syncretism, leaving Talon speechless. Stars. I’m looking at stars.

The passion of these newly rich Americans for industrial merger yielded to an even more insistent passion for a merger of their newly acquired domains with more ancient ones; they wanted to veneer their arrivisme with the traditional. It would be gratifying to feel, as you drove up to your porte-cochère in Pittsburgh, that you were one with the jaded Renaissance Venetian who had just returned from a sitting for Titian; to feel, as you walked by the ranks of gleaming and authentic suits of armour in your mansion on Long Island – and passed the time of day with your private armourer – that it was only an accident of chronology that had put you in a counting house when you might have been jousting with other kings in the Tournament of Love; to push aside the heavy damask tablecloth on a magnificent Louis XIV dining-room table, making room for a green-shaded office lamp, beneath which you scanned the report of last month’s profit from the Saginaw branch, and then, looking up, catch a glimpse of Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan and flick the fantasy that presently you would be ordering your sedan chair, because the loveliest girl in London was expecting

Alas for the folly of these days!' said Legolas. 'Here all are enemies of the one Enemy, and yet I must walk blind, while the sun is merry in the woodland under leaves of gold!' 'Folly it may seem,' said Haldir. 'Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him. Yet so little faith and trust do we find now in the world beyond Lothlórien, unless maybe in Rivendell, that we dare not by our own trust endanger our land. We live now upon an island amid many perils, and our hands are more often upon the bowstring than upon the harp.

Escape was always possible; in every Indian town there was a corner of comparative order and cleanliness in which one could recover and cherish one's self-respect. In India the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore was the most obvious. The colonial mimicry is a special mimicry of an old country without a native aristocracy for a thousand years who has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul; tomorrow it might be Russian or American; today it is English. The Indian lavatory and the Indian kitchen are the visitor's nightmare. The attitude of the foreigner who does not understand the function of the beggar in India and is judging India by the standards of Europe. Physical effort is to be avoided as a degradation. Every man is an island; each man to his function, his private contract with God. This is the realization of the Gita's selfless action. An eastern conception of dignity and function, reposing on symbolic action: this is the dangerous, decayed pragmatism of caste. Symbolic dress, symbolic food, symbolic worship. India deals in symbols, inaction. Inaction arising out of proclaimed function, function out of caste. India, it was said, brought our concealed elements of the personality. It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written. Respect for the past is new in Europe and it was Europe that revealed India's past to India and made its veneration part of Indian nationalism. It is still through European eyes that India looks at her ruins and her art. The virtues of R.K. Narayan are Indian failing magically transmuted. Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life, yet it permitted a unique human development to so many.

BARTON CENTRE, 912, 9th Floor, Mahatma Gandhi Rd, Bengaluru, Karnataka - 560 001 Phone Number +91 8884400919 Investigate the Best with Surfnxt Might it be said that you are searching for an extraordinary tropical escape? Look no farther than Bali! Known for its perfect sea shores, rich scenes, and energetic culture, Bali has turned into a fantasy objective for voyagers around the world. With Surfnxt's selective bali tour package from bangalore, your fantasy excursion is only a booking ceaselessly! Why Pick Bali? Bali is a heaven that takes special care of each and every kind of explorer. Whether you're an ocean side darling, nature devotee, experience searcher, or culture buff, Bali offers something special for everybody. From the notorious sea shores of Kuta and Nusa Dua to the quiet rice patios of Ubud and consecrated sanctuaries like Tanah Parcel, Bali has everything. On the off chance that you're hoping to loosen up, the island's extravagant hotels and elite spas will spoil you unimaginable. For the experience addicts, exercises like surfing, scuba jumping, and traveling anticipate. Advantages of Picking Surfnxt's Bali Visit Bundle Surfnxt furnishes you with a consistent travel experience intended to guarantee a problem free occasion. Here's the reason you ought to pick Surfnxt's bali tour package from bangalore: Thorough Agenda: Surfnxt curates point by point schedules that cover Bali's top attractions and unlikely treasures. You'll encounter Bali's rich culture, investigate stunning scenes, and get the ideal mix of unwinding and experience. Reasonable Bundles: Surfnxt offers cutthroat evaluating, guaranteeing you get the best incentive for your cash. Browse financial plan amicable to extravagance bundles custom fitted to your requirements. Adaptable Customization: Surfnxt comprehends that each explorer is unique. You can without much of a stretch modify your Bali visit bundle to incorporate the objections, facilities, and exercises that suit your inclinations. Advantageous Takeoffs from Bangalore: With simple takeoffs from Bangalore, Surfnxt simplifies it for you to leave on your Bali process. You can sit back, unwind, and let Surfnxt handle everything — from trips to inn appointments, air terminal exchanges, and touring visits. Master Neighborhood Guides: With Surfnxt, you gain admittance to educated nearby aides who offer shrewd insights concerning Bali's set of experiences, culture, and secret spots. Their skill adds profundity to your excursion, making it more significant. What's in store in Your Bali Visit Bundle? Here is a brief look at what you can expect in a commonplace Bali visit bundle from Bangalore: Full circle Flights: Bother free departures from Bangalore to Bali, guaranteeing an agreeable excursion. Convenience: Look over spending plan lodgings, store stays, or extravagance resorts, all halfway found. Touring Visits: Visit notorious milestones like Uluwatu Sanctuary, Tegallalang Rice Porch, and the delightful sea shores of Seminyak and Jimbaran. Experience Exercises: Choices to enjoy surfing, swimming, jumping, and social studios. Social Encounters: Appreciate conventional Balinese dance exhibitions, visit craftsman towns, and investigate old sanctuaries. Book Your Bali Visit Bundle from Bangalore with Surfnxt Today! With Surfnxt's Bali visit bundles from Bangalore, your fantasy occasion is nearer than you suspect. Whether you're arranging a heartfelt escape, a family get-away, or a performance experience, Surfnxt guarantees an outing loaded up with critical encounters. Try not to pass up the tropical heaven of Bali — book your visit bundle today and prepare for an experience that could only be described as epic!

BARTON CENTRE, 912, 9th Floor, Mahatma Gandhi Rd, Bengaluru, Karnataka - 560 001 Phone Number +91 8884400919 Investigate Bali with SurfNxt - Your Fantasy Get-away from Bangalore Is it true that you are prepared to set out on a remarkable excursion bali tour package from bangalore? With SurfNxt's selective Bali visit bundle, we offer a consistent and magnificent travel experience customized only for you. Find Bali's stunning scenes, energetic culture, and perfect sea shores in a well-organized schedule intended to give you the best that this tropical heaven brings to the table. Why Pick SurfNxt for Your Bali Experience? At SurfNxt, we focus on your solace and fulfillment. Our bali tour package from bangalore is created to suit both independent voyagers and families, with adaptable choices to investigate this colorful island. From air terminal exchanges to directed visits, we deal with everything about you can zero in on partaking in your excursion. You can anticipate this: Bundle Features: Agreeable Air Travel: Your get-away starts the second you load onto your departure from Bangalore. Partake in an issue free travel insight with premium carriers presenting in-flight diversion, open to seating, and dinners. Rich Convenience: Remain in Bali's best hotels and estates, found near popular attractions like Ubud, Kuta Ocean side, and Seminyak. Whether you lean toward ocean facing pieces of land or quiet withdraws encompassed by rich plant life, we guarantee you experience a definitive solace and unwinding. Social Inundation: Find Bali's rich legacy with visits to holy sanctuaries like Tanah Part and Uluwatu. Our neighborhood guides will take you through the island's set of experiences, customs, and otherworldliness, permitting you to see the value in its one of a kind culture genuinely. Invigorating Experiences: Whether you're a daredevil or searching for a tranquil retreat, our Bali bundle takes special care of everybody. Enjoy water sports like surfing, swimming, and scuba plunging, or unwind with yoga meetings and spa medicines. Try not to miss the well known Bali Swing, offering shocking perspectives on the wilderness. Fascinating Cooking: Enjoy the kinds of Bali with conventional Indonesian dinners. From delectable road food to high end food encounters, we guide you to the best diners and neighborhood eateries for a real taste of the island. Day Visits and Outings: Investigate Bali's famous spots, including the rice patios of Tegallalang, Mount Batur, and the tranquil sea shores of Nusa Dua. Our directed visits will take you outside of what might be expected, guaranteeing you experience the unlikely treasures of Bali. Shopping and Nightlife: Bali offers a dynamic nightlife and phenomenal shopping encounters. Investigate neighborhood markets, craftsmanship exhibitions, and shops in Ubud and Seminyak. At night, loosen up at one of Bali's sleek ocean side clubs or partake in a night out in Kuta. Customized Administration: At SurfNxt, we trust in customizing your movement experience. Whether you're praising a special first night, arranging a family excursion, or leaving on a performance trip, we tailor our bundles to meet your inclinations. Our movement specialists are generally accessible to help you, guaranteeing a smooth and pleasant excursion beginning to end. Bali Looks for You - Book Now! With SurfNxt's select bali tour package from bangalore, you should simply gather your sacks and prepare for an important escape. Whether you're attracted to Bali's peaceful sea shores, profound culture, or courageous exercises, we have everything covered. Book your fantasy excursion today, and let SurfNxt take you on an excursion that could only be described as epic!

The Fourth Crown Princess of the blue Cresent Islands had sixteen rituals to observe from the moment of waking to when she broke her fast.

West was remote in the minds of most New Yorkers during the holiday season of 1948. But, despite the new wealth that was flooding into the city, and the self-confidence that victory naturally brought, there was a generalized sense of anxiety about the future. “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible,” the essayist E. B. White had observed that summer. “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.” White was writing at the dawn of the nuclear age, and the feeling of vulnerability was quite new. “In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning,” he observed, “New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

The raven – Asker – immediately cawed. It sounded suspiciously like laughter. “Not... be afraid of Asker.” The raven’s button eyes gleamed. “He only eats worms… you are not worm.

The villagers had removed their masks. They displayed their true faces. And they were dreadful, diabolic visages. Blasted skin hung from shrunken mouths and red veins burst from their skin, leaving pronounced contours akin to miniature rivers. Each throbbed and pulsed, at home on scabby foreheads. I balked. The eyes drew all attention. Silver coins replaced eyeballs. They glinted with the same alluring lustre as the ones I had coveted in the chests. Instantly, dreadfully, I knew they were one and the same – accursed treasure used for nefarious sight, a symbol of the damned. And yet, the more I stared, the more I coveted them.

A crush of bodies surrounded the featureless monument. The enraged dead clambered atop their ghastly kin. Caiaphas tucked his knees to his chest and hugged his legs tightly, staring at the scores of ragged, flailing hands as they scratched for purchase over the edge of the cylinder. Metal thrummed and thunder roared, filling his head. Now there were words within the deafening roar. “Straaaange,” they seemed to say. “Daaaace…” “Straaaangerrrr…” Then a quick, awful chant: “CAIAPHAS! FOREVER! CAI—” And with a piercing whistle it ended as his eardrums burst.

All seizures of power, no matter how ‘strong or well-meaning’ the seizers, will go the same way. That’s what power does. Meanwhile, at exactly the same time as the publication of The Lord of the Rings William Golding was bringing out his fables, Lord of the Flies (1954), and The Inheritors (1955), the meaning of which Golding conveniently summarized for commentators in a later essay, ‘Fable’, in his collection The Hot Gates: I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. (Hot Gates, p. 87) So the English choirboys, marooned on an idyllic desert island, invent murder and human sacrifice and create the ‘lord of the flies’ himself, Beelzebub; in The Inheritors our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, exterminate the gentle and friendly Neanderthals and create an entirely false legend of ogres and cannibals to justify their actions. A very similar if more complex argument was put forward, one might add, by the other great fantasy of the 1950s, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a work which began like Tolkien’s with a children’s book, The Sword in the Stone (1937), but took even longer than Tolkien’s to reach termination, appearing as a whole (though still unfinished) in 1958. White’s points are too many and too self-doubting to summarize readily, but there is at least no doubt that White saw in humanity a basic urge to destruction, expressed in a work written like The Lord of the Rings, nationibus in diro bello certantibus, ‘while the nations were striving in fearful war’. Orwell, Golding, White (and several other post-war authors of fantasy and fable): the thought that they expressed in their highly different ways was that people could never be trusted, least of all if they expressed a wish for the betterment of humanity. The major disillusionment of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led only to gulags and killing fields. That is why what Gandalf says has rung true to virtually everyone who reads it – though it is, I repeat, yet one more anachronism in Middle-earth, and the greatest of them, an entirely modern conviction.

Anyone who knew the recipe of the alchemists could make gold, but only the artisans of Murano could make glass so fine, one could nearly touch one's fingers together on either side; cristallo without an imperfection or blemish, clear as the sky, with a sparkle to rival that of diamonds.

MEGAN PIERCE WAS LIVING THE ultimate soccer-mom fantasy and hating it. She closed the Sub-Zero fridge and looked at her two children through the bay windows off the breakfast nook. The windows offered up “essential morning light.” That was how the architect had put it. The newly renovated kitchen also had a Viking stove, Miele appliances, a marble island in the middle, and excellent flow to the family-cum-theater room with the big-screen TV, recliners with cup holders, and enough sound speakers to stage a Who concert. Out

Much later, my mother would tell me that every year when spring came and the air warmed up in Chicago, she entertained thoughts about leaving my father. I don’t know if these thoughts were actually serious or not. I don’t know if she considered the idea for an hour, or for a day, or for most of the season, but for her it was an active fantasy, something that felt healthy and maybe even energizing to ponder, almost as ritual. I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone. I don’t think my mother announced whatever her doubts and discontents were to my father directly, and I don’t think she let him in on whatever alternative life she might have been dreaming about during those times. Was she picturing herself on a tropical island somewhere? With a different kind of man, or in a different kind of house, or with a corner office instead of kids? I don’t know, and I suppose I could ask my mother, who is now in her eighties, but I don’t think it matters.

Chapter Six Abigail’s secret “Open up,” Abigail mouthed from outside the window, gesturing toward the latch. Behind her, the fog rolled in the darkness. Hal opened the window and leaned out as an icy breeze pushed past him into his room. “What are you doing here?” he whispered. “It’s late. And freezing.” Abigail frowned and rubbed her arms. She wore only a light red dress despite the thick cold fog. “I told you I was coming tonight to tell you something. Did you forget?” “Oh,” Hal mumbled. “Yeah. I’ve had a lot on my mind.” Abigail rolled her eyes. “Come out. Bring a lamp and meet me in your garage.” “But—” Without another word, Abigail tiptoed off across the gravel driveway toward the squat brick building that stood alone at the front of the lawn, next to the road. She had no lantern so faded into the darkness almost immediately, lost against the black silhouette of the garage. Hal

We ride over the cliffs and then the sea, watching mermaids leap in the spangled waves and selkies rolling along the surf. Past the fog perpetually surrounding the islands and concealing them from mortals.

Not everyone can have Richard Branson’s private island.” VR is the new solution to climate change—or maybe the ultimate surrender to its inevitability. As resources vanish and economic conditions worsen, technological simulations can fill in where real wealth has disappeared. “The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted.

With a clattering of chairs, upended shell cases, benches, and ottomans, Pirate’s mob gather at the shores of the great refectory table, a southern island well across a tropic or two from chill Corydon Throsp’s mediaeval fantasies, crowded now over the swirling dark grain of its walnut uplands with banana omelets, banana sandwiches, banana casseroles, mashed bananas molded into the shape of a British lion rampant, blended with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry nozzle across the quivering creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to spell out the words C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light Brigade) which Pirate has appropriated as his motto . . . tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead . . . banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year from a cellar in the Pyrenees also containing a clandestine radio transmitter. . . .

They whispered threats, cried for loved ones. They begged for mercy and asked for help.” The spirits of the grey Island, in The Curse of the Crow.

Sunlit bazaars in exotic cities thronged with faces that were transparent masks for insectoid countenances; moonlit streets in antique towns harbored a strange-eyed slithering within their very stones; dim galleries of empty museums sprouted a ghostly mold that mirrored the sullen hues of old paintings; the land at the edge of oceans gave birth to a new evolution transcending biology and remote islands offered themselves as a haven for forms having no analogy outside of dreams; jungles teemed with beast-like shapes that moved beside the sticky luxuriance as well as through the depths of its pulpy warmth; deserts were alive with an uncanny flux of sounds which might enter and animate the world of substance; and subterranean landscapes heaved with cadaverous generations that had sunken and merged into sculptures of human coral, bodies heaped and unwhole, limbs projecting without order, eyes scattered and searching the darkness.

Maelstrom Rock by Stewart Stafford O, obsidian jagged island, This playground of the gods, Distant white novice waves, In warhorse slam into rock. Be this witchcraft or wit's raft? Conducting the vast elements, With lava-hot passion mustered, Spinning whirlpool shipwreck tales. A walker between the winds comes, Both Nature and shaman within it, Of coral and shell and weed growth, Compassion at flaying whip's end. Bid goodbye to the demi-paradise! On the gloomy prow, watch it flee, An aria's dreams of magic ebbing, Freed thralls clasp earthly chains. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

Castaway… Cliff Notes version, a guy gets shipwrecked on a desert island for four years. I watched the video with a girlfriend. Afterward, she described it as a nightmare. I was surprised, because I’d been thinking of it as a fantasy.

He was gorgeous but in a devilish way." "Gorgeous but devilish?" He heaved a sigh. "Can you be more descriptive? Hair and eye color. Weight. Height. Clothes." "Leather jacket. Very worn. Boots. Also worn. His hair was tousled like he'd just got out of bed. It looked good on him. Sexy." I licked my lips, imagining Oliver in place of Garcia in my tropical island fantasy. "He was about the same height and build as you, but leaner. I don't think he spends as much time in the gym as you probably do..." I trailed off when Riswan shook his head. "Or not. It's nothing to do with me how much time you spend in the gym. Or don't. Or whether you even like gyms. Maybe you were born with biceps the size of watermelons---

from my island I see no boundaries I detect infinite horizons

Lady Ramkin drawing herself up haughtily was not a sight to forget, although you could try. It was like watching continental drift in reverse as various subcontinents and islands pulled themselves together to form one massive, angry protowoman.

Herald’s Watch rose several hundred feet above the waves of Purdonis Bay, with a great tower at its pinnacle, but its majesty didn’t keep her eye; hundreds of vessels, ranging from fishing boats to cogs, surrounded the island, masts swaying as they packed tight throughout and around the tiny harbor. People moved to and fro, tiny from this distance, bringing to mind maggots swarming a crumpled corpse, the tower a dagger in the dead island’s back.

Many of the things Heyerdahl claimed were simply not true. Polynesians were not sun worshippers; the Tahitian word pahi did not translate as “raft”; the moai of Easter Island were not identical, or even very similar, to the megalithic sculptures of Tiwanaku; the languages of the Pacific Northwest were not related to those of Polynesia. And then there was the cringe-making problem of the “white god” Kon-Tiki. Much of Heyerdahl’s argument rested on the need, as he saw it, to explain the presence of sophisticated megalithic masonry and sculpture on the islands of eastern Polynesia. His solution—the arrival of a mysterious white civilization that then inexplicably vanishes, leaving behind evidence of its superior know-how and taste—is a familiar European fantasy trope of the 1920s and ’30s. Among professional anthropologists of the 1950s, it was impossible to take seriously, and a few were prepared to concede what is now obvious: that it was difficult “to avoid reading racism from this work.

The sky is diluted scarlet. It is an oddity, a noticeable wound in the fabric of our world. In specific areas, like Solange’s island, it stands out like a blooming flower in a dying garden.

Fort is amongst the most rare category of writers who are "political" because they make us aware of what is happening to us in the deepest sense. He points to a rediscovery of the waY THat fantasy -processes dtermine the perception of time, change, and indeed the creation and growth of fact and product in themselves. Thus he demonstrates the workings of that operational cargo cult which is modern techno-capitalism, and whose fuel is engineered mystique. The belief that the new experiments in the new laboratories will be an improvement on the old experiments in the old laboratories is a millenial promise worthy of any island cult of New Guinea, worshipping, as many there do, the skeletal rusting parts of the corpse of the American military machine of over fifty years ago. In this sense, Fort cautions us about scientific promises and expectations. No matter how hard the islanders try visualising the world that manufactured their "magical" bits of B-29 wings, they cannot visualise technological time and it's cost/resources spectrum. For them, any day scores of B-29s will land on the long-overgrown strip with tins of hamburgers for free. But the apple pie America that made the B-29 is gone with Glen Miller's orchestra , the Marshall Plan, and General McArthur's return to Bataan, while the far fewer (and much more expensive) B-52s of our own day are only seen as sky-trails in the high Pacific blue. In any case, landing on a grass strip in a B-52 would be suicide for the crew, and certain death also for many fundamentalist believers. If such a thing did happen, it would seem to be a wounded bird in great trouble, and if the watchers below were saying their prayers as it approached, so too would be the captain and his crew. As for the hamburgers, well, there might be some scorched USAF lunch-tins available after the crash, and when they were found, whole cycles of belief could be rejuvenated: McDonald's USAF compo-packs might become a techno-industrial packaged sacrament, indicating that whilst times might be hard, at least the gods were trying. Little do the natives know that some members of the crews of the godlike silver vehicles wonder what transformation mysteries the natives are guarding in their turn. The crews have some knowledge that is thousands of years ahead of the natives, yet the primitives probably have some knowledge that the crews have lost thousands of years ago, and they might wonder why these gods need any radio apparatus to communicate over great distances. Both animals, in their dreaming, are searching for one another

Home of the Staten Island Yankees,

Thunder, lightning, rain, hail, anxious fog and all the other things that accompany an iconic horror movie or damn fire tale about Tea, Cake, and lashings of Untimely Death, were occurring all over the little island known colloquially (and everywhere else) as The Skull.

All that mattered was for investors to be able to recoup investments that were largely driven by the knowledge that Puerto Rico’s bonds were triple-tax exempt and that it had no bankruptcy protection.

Puerto Rico was out of time wasn’t because it had no remaining strategies to continue trying to negotiate down the debt; severely limited as it was by the lack of bankruptcy protection and lack of sovereignty, it still could have lobbied the US government on humanitarian grounds. What Puerto Rico had run out of time for was the illusion that it had autonomy over its affairs, that its residents had full US citizenship, that it had anything resembling a self-directed economy.

• But these weren’t clouds. These were sails. Four beautiful white sails tied to the upper yardarms of a brigantine. I rushed to my window to get a better view of its golden honey stain and light blue trim. At the front, a figurehead of two wolves bounded toward the shore beside a half-naked, Greek huntress. Her bow by her side as she reached for an arrow from her quiver, further exposing her breast.

In her heart, she felt she was caught in the lull between tides. The waves had crashed over her on their journey to the land, but they had not yet receded. The ebbing tide had slithered past her on the dragon rock, silently, without waking her. In this way, her soul was still surrounded by water. She was stranded on the island, with no safe passage to shore.

Life could only be lived to the full by the instinctive or unconscious denial of death, otherwise nothing would ever be achieved

MAGIC ISLAND, fantasy juvenile serial. BROADCAST HISTORY: 1936, transcribed syndication, 15m continuation: the fictionalized search by Mrs. Patricia Gregory for her young daughter Joan, shipwrecked in the South Seas and missing for 14 years. CAST: Rosa Barcelo as Joan Gregory. Sally Creighton as Mrs. Patricia Gregory. Tommy Carr as Jerry Hall. Will H. Reynolds as Capt. Tex Bradford. AUTHOR-PRODUCER-ANNOUNCER: Perry Crandall. This serial survives in its entirety, 130 chapters.