Nearly 4,000 years ago, when Assyrian women wove fancy cloth for their menfolk to sell hundreds of miles away in what is now Turkey, the problem was already there.

Within Hutt society, those rare individuals that were capable of growing hair on their bodies were considered mutants and were seen with rarely-disguised disgust.

All normal cats are also replaced with “dervish cats”, which spin in a manner similar to that of Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, attacking any nearby character when agitated.

More from Clute’s Appleseed:

Flitting from the stories that held them, other masks exfoliated themselves for the nonce to become memes, hiked themselves through the grouting slots, janiform and doppenganger-pale from the prison of the dance of tiles, and into the gimbal-shot free space of Glass Island, where they loured over the scene from fittings atop brass herms, shot antic bat glances around toggles, crouched over a braced scroll beaded with the sweat of attar, through which the Prime Copy of the Universal Book might be accessed ceremonially and at points of crisis.

Mind you, this is what ordinary events sound like in this book.  Unusual events sound more like this:

–Upsydowndaisy lamentoso, death-bound froggies! whispered the transitus tessera out of the mouths of all the magi and the sages and the kings and queens and lower cards of conclave space in one single voice as though they had all suddenly remembered at the one same time the one same thing to say. The memory theatre of the conclave space of Tile Dance had not spoken ensemble for a Trillion Heartbeats, since before homo sapiens began to talk right, since before the Caduceus Wars.

He spoke then of the almost acoustic barrier erected around the sensorium of any homo sapiens, a barrier which bristled and clawed and ponged and twirled its knives of noise, so that no download from beyond, no lachrymae rerum of the bath of being, could reach the homunculus inside – perhaps as an evolutionary response to the nearness of God to Human Earth.  Encountering a homo sapiens while unprotected was like landing in Babel: the myth of Babel being unique to homo sapiens.  Communications between homo sapiens were like encryptions punched through plaque (he said).

‘Therefore, even though they are murderers, even though they are so deafened by proximity to God that they kill other species at sight, we revere them.’

All species in the Spiral Clade revered homo sapiens for their involuntary sacrifice of the shared world all others bathed in, and for their deafness to God.  All other species, therefore, trusted homo sapiens – whom the Alzheimer juices could not digest – to answer them back when the time came.  All other races free of plaque understood that homo sapiens, wounded though they were, and impossible to live with in harmony, constituted a chivalry: a chivalry whose guerdon of recruitment was that great wound all homo sapiens bore, as though their heads had been torn off, and harlequin masks substituted for real faces.  For the very wound of homo sapiens – that which caused their deafness to a universe of light and to the song of lachrymae rerum and to the jacuzzi (said Johnny Appleseed, sniffing his armpits) of pleroma – was that which enabled them to talk back to the God.

(Appleseed by John Clute)

I need to get more people to read this book.  It doesn’t even have an especially interesting plot but John Clute is one of the only SF authors I’ve ever read who really knows how to use language to make you feel you’re in a qualitatively different future

“Unschooling” should not be confused with “deschooling,” which may be used to indicate an anti-“institutional school” philosophy, or a period or form of deprogramming for children or parents who have previously been schooled.^{[citation needed]}

Bloom’s first book, The Occult Experience and the New Criticism (1986), was greeted with a review claiming that it “mentions every orifice except the arsehole from whence [it] emerged”.

Upworthy’s stated mission is to host the intersection of the “awesome”, the “meaningful” and the “visual.”

Outside, beyond the house, the great rivers of blood still fell with unchecked force over the black cliffs, filling the swirling lake where cryptic monsters swam and on which obsidian islands still bobbed, their dark green fleshy foliage rustling in a hot, sweet wind; but Mrs Amelia Underwood's pièce de résistance had been abandoned long since by her forgotten guests.