Apocalypses

Matthew King · 29 Mar 2014, 01:06 · from 2014-March.txt.gz

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From: automatthew at gmail.com (Matthew King)
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 20:06:23 -0500
Subject: (urth) Apocalypses
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References: <CAM0v-i7x=05_ZapOiVhtjqU4wV7az7JrKbKoDCPqhtnAhiWGig at mail.gmail.com>
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On Mar 28, 2014, at 7:56 PM, Antonin Scriabin <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm having trouble translating, finding anything on, or making sense of the term "kalo pisicho" in Lafferty's Apocalypses. Can anyone point me in the right direction? All I know for sure is it is the being the Detective, Captain Nemo, is more afraid of than anything in the world.

"kalo" would be close to the Greek for "good".  "Pisicho" doesn't seem Greek to me; more like greekified Latin.  Because it's Lafferty, I'd place a strong guess that he means us to understand "fish".  Cf. his "queer fish" in "And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire".

http://greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/RALafferty.php

The ichthyans or Queer Fish are the oddest species to be found in any of the worlds. They are pseudo-human, perhaps, but not android. The sign of the fish is not easily seen on them, and they pass as human whenever they wish: a peculiarity of them is that they often do not wish to pass as human even when their lives depend on it. They have blood in their veins, but an additional serum as well. It is only when the organizational sickness is upon them (for these organizing and building proclivities they are sometimes known as the Queer Builders or the Ants of God), that they can really be told from humans. . . . Their threat to us is more real than apparent and we tend to minimize it. This we must not do. In our unstructured, destructed, destroyed society, they must be counted as the enemies to be exterminated. It's a double danger they offer to us: to fight them on their own grounds, or to neglect to fight them. They'd almost trick us into organizing to hunt down their organization.

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