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Conference noted::sf

Title:	Arcana Caelestia
Notice:	Directory listings are in topic 2
Moderator:	NETRIX::thomas

Created:	Thu Dec 08 1983
Last Modified:	Thu Jun 05 1997
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	1300
Total number of notes:	18728

433.0. "Carcosa and the King in Yellow" by VAXRT::CANNOY (A true initiation never ends.) Sun Jan 25 1987 13:10

    OK, so I'm going crazy. It's part of the curse of those who delve
    too deeply into things man was not meant to know.
    
    I *know* there exists an almost complete version of the play that
    isn't supposed to exist--"The King in Yellow". Yes, I know there
    is a collection of stories by Robert W. Chambers which has that
    title. And that he uses brief excerpts from it, but the play is not
    in this collection. I have looked thru every anthology I can find
    in my collection, because I *know* I read this play and have a copy
    somewhere. I think the version I read is complete except perhaps
    for the very last line.

    So, who wrote the story/play and what collection is it in?
    
    Tamzen

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
433.1	The King in Yellow	CGHUB::CONNELLY	Eye Dr3 - Regnad Kcin	`Tue Jan 27 1987 22:37`	5
	beats me, Tamzen...every time i read this story it seems a lot different from my recollection of the previous time i read it ...maybe Chambers was an earlier incarnation of R.A. Lafferty ;-)
433.2	Voorish Powder, Indeed!	INK::KALLIS	Hallowe'en should be legal holiday	`Thu Jan 29 1987 15:15`	12
	I believe James Blish took a crack at it not so many years ago. But that's retrofitting a modern tale to an earlier set of references. Some unscrupulous folk did the same thing by creating a spurious version of _The Necronomicon_, a fictional book first mentioned in H. P. Lovecraft stories. [The spurious version uses corrupted versions of Babylonian ceremonial magic and try to assign the various Babylonian gods to Lovecraftian equivalents. It has little to no correspondense to the quotes "extracted" by Lovecraft in his stories. Steve Kallis, Jr.
433.3	meta-magical self-modifying code	CGHUB::CONNELLY	Eye Dr3 - Regnad Kcin	`Thu Jan 29 1987 22:15`	15
	re: .2 Lovecraft was a good example (that I had forgotten about) of an author of a "self-modifying story". There was no Necronomicon. Lovecraft wrote about one. Then there _was_ one. His act of creation caused its own original premises to be modified. Maybe you can think of some other examples of this. (Seen the original "Book of Shadows" lately, Steve?) Novels within novels and plays within plays (or stories, like "The King in Yellow") seems especially susceptible to this. Lafferty's novels sometimes seem to modify themselves totally within their own context (as does John Crowley's "Little, Big" all by itself). But maybe I'm just hallucinating...:^)
433.4	Eureka!	VAXRT::CANNOY	A true initiation never ends.	`Thu Jan 29 1987 22:48`	12
	Thanks, Steve. That did the trick. It is James Blish. The story is "More Light" and is found in _Alchemy_&_Academe_, an anthology edited by Anne McCaffrey, 1970 copyright, Ballantine edition published 1980. It's definitely a retrofit--one of the characters is Bill Atheling, who is of course, Blish also. But the story does contain the version of the play (never written by Chambers) and includes all those fragments of it floating around. Tamzen