The day is cool and grey. The solemn cuckoo haunts the damp limbs And recesses of the sour woods next door;Her tone sucks summer from the air.
Christopher Nogy’s Passion for Medieval Instruments
“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’” Quoth the raven. Why not quoth the curlew? Quoth the grackle? Quoth the—well, the crow?
Whereas the proto–science fiction of a century past (H. G. Wells, Octavia E. Butler, Edgar Rice Burroughs) looked to a bright if complex future, we can now scarcely imagine one that’s not irredeemably awful.