conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about Chris, Miller with the genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Morlock Night'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Morlock Night
  Stepping outside of Dr. Ambrose's lodgings gave me my first sight of London since those nightmarish scenes of destruction and despair. My heart leaped to see the familiar outlines, whole and unbroken, silhouetted against the setting sun. Lamps were being lit all over the city to show the glowing pulse of a great metropolis in the full stretch of its powerful life. But if Ambrose's words were true, were there not even now dark things moving in the undispelled shadows? The very ground beneath our feet was being eaten away...
  Soon Dr. Ambrose had hailed a hansom and, after giving directions to the river, assisted Tafe and myself inside. "I shall meet you at your destination," he said, standing on the curb. "Circumstances dictate that I follow a more circuitous route." He closed the hansom's door and signalled the driver on his topside ledge into motion.
  How easily Tafe seemed to be taking this all in her stride! Child of a time more than one generation hence, she sat in the hansom's slightly tattered elegance, looking for all the world like some young Continental buck with no greater business to follow than seeing England on a grand tour organised by rich parents. Through the hansom's window she watched the passing cityscape and evening pedestrians with avid curiosity but no signs of being startled or amazed by any of it. Those responses had been denied her at birth by the swift and violent tenor of her own times.
  She turned to face me, her dark, intelligent eyes flashing from her mannish disguise like a young George Sand. There was clearly a keen wit in addition to the fighting spirit I had already had the chance to observe. "Ambrose?" she said. "Might be lying through his teeth for all we know. But what choice do we have except to follow along with him for now? If he's telling the truth about all these Morlocks and stuff then we've got to help him in whatever he's planning. And if he's lying, using us for something evil – aiding the Morlocks, maybe? – we'll have a better chance of fighting him if he thinks we trust him."
  Her calm, unemotional analysis preoccupied my thoughts. I lapsed into silence, mulling over her words to the rhythm of the cabhorse's hooves, while she went back to watching the passing London scene.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me another paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Over everything was the inescapable feel of dampness and rot, as though the vapours of the sewers had penetrated through every atom of things down here. My own skin now felt like that, undergoing a sewer-change down into my bones. I shuddered involuntarily as I drew my clothes, really only relatively dry, over my limbs. What awful metamorphosis would overtake me if I didn't soon return to the surface world's light?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Only a little time had passed when the darkness folded about me like the softest and warmest of shrouds. And then, in that time and place – our Lord's year 1892 in Victoria's England – I saw no more.
  K. W. Jeter attended college at California State University, Fullerton where he became friends with James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers, and through them, Philip K. Dick.
  There is no single English word for "writing the sequels to a classic novel by a conveniently dead popular novelist"; but there ought to be. Plenty of writers have done it, and as an activity ("classicaposthumosequelizing") it has proved particularly popular in the world of SF. After all, more than most genres, science fiction is determined by its backlist of classic texts. New SF novels inevitably written in dialogue – openly or covertly – with the masterpieces of the genre's history. Writers insufficiently knowledgeable about the traditions of SF are condemned to a belatedly tedious process of re-inventing the wheel. Writers less ignorant know that their alien invasion story, or robot story, or generation starship story must deal with the many previous iterations of that theme.
  In Wells's original story the Morlocks are little more than beasts. That won't do for Jeter's more ornate imaginarium, so he postulates a breed of super-Morlock, cunning, dangerous and capable of large-scale military organisation. Wearing blue spectacles to protect their subterranean eyes from the sun, these blanched-skin horrors have captured the time machine itself and are using it to ferry themselves back to late nineteenth-century London, where they are gathering, in the sewers, with grand and terrible plans.
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Only a little time had passed when the darkness folded about me like the softest and warmest of shrouds. And then, in that time and place – our Lord's year 1892 in Victoria's England – I saw no more.
  K. W. Jeter attended college at California State University, Fullerton where he became friends with James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers, and through them, Philip K. Dick.
  There is no single English word for "writing the sequels to a classic novel by a conveniently dead popular novelist"; but there ought to be. Plenty of writers have done it, and as an activity ("classicaposthumosequelizing") it has proved particularly popular in the world of SF. After all, more than most genres, science fiction is determined by its backlist of classic texts. New SF novels inevitably written in dialogue – openly or covertly – with the masterpieces of the genre's history. Writers insufficiently knowledgeable about the traditions of SF are condemned to a belatedly tedious process of re-inventing the wheel. Writers less ignorant know that their alien invasion story, or robot story, or generation starship story must deal with the many previous iterations of that theme.
  In Wells's original story the Morlocks are little more than beasts. That won't do for Jeter's more ornate imaginarium, so he postulates a breed of super-Morlock, cunning, dangerous and capable of large-scale military organisation. Wearing blue spectacles to protect their subterranean eyes from the sun, these blanched-skin horrors have captured the time machine itself and are using it to ferry themselves back to late nineteenth-century London, where they are gathering, in the sewers, with grand and terrible plans.
  All rights reserved.