PEACE: Morryster's _Marvells of Science_ (SPOILERS for

Not the 1911 book, apparently, but THE UNABRIDGED DEVIL'S DICTIONARY (2000) ed. David E. Schultz & S. T. Joshi, iirc. Unfortunately my library's copy is charged out, so I can't check the context.

"The Festival" (as the magic Google rapidly revealed).

Perhaps I'm being dense, but I'm not sure how. The Bierce story is about a man so affected by something he reads in a book that it leads to his death; Weer certainly reads a lot, but I don't think his reading was responsible for his life having gone sour. --Adam

Actually I wasn't thinking of that angle! Even though I've often wondered about the relationship between "Life" and "Books" in PEACE, and "Life's true experience missed while reading books" and "Weer's possible attempts to make his life retroactively better by rewriting it as fiction" . . . No, I was just referring to how in "The Man and the Snake," the victim has an authentic experience, including transport back in time, under conditions that are not really authentic. That tradition of ghost stories, where it is all explainable as being some naturalistic thing in the end . . . yet still, something real happened to the victim, if only a hallucination. This ghost-story "which is it" aspect, as well as the implied "power of the book" part (especially as Gold reads to Weer from "The Necronomicon" that he wrote, and it seems to be really working in its weird way), was all that I meant to point toward. (And how did that goofy toy snake get in the room, anyhow? It starts to remind me of the mumble-mumble at the end of DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?, but of course PKD takes the dingus and runs a PKD pattern with it.) (Just a misplaced child's toy? A gag item, left over from some holiday party? I wonder if a story has ever been published about, say, "The Whoopie Cushion of Enlightenment"?) =mantis= Sirius Fiction booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley 31 copies of "Snake's-hands" until OP! http://www.siriusfiction.com/