These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe’s world.

This is the time of myths, Orphan. They are the cables that run under the floors and power the world, the conduits of unseen currents, the steam that powers the great engines of the earth.

This is the time of myths. They are woven into the present like silk strands from the past, like a wire mesh from the future, creating an interlacing pattern, a grand design, a repeating motif....

Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn’t think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books.

For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.

He wanted to run through the stacks, pick at the books, sample them one after the other, climb the stacks to their highest reaches and see what treasures were hidden there.

But it was not real freedom, he realised. It was the freedom that comes from lack of choice and moreover, was the kind that only came with decisions delayed. It was a freedom of inaction.

Destiny is like a book. It needs manufacturing, the pulp process, the glue fixed tightly–and it requires a binding, to hold it together, lest it fall apart.

The fat man looked amused. “What on earth for?” he said. “I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid.

Listen to this. A bomb goes off downtown and the police arrest the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and Osama Bin Laden. They put them in an identity parade and have a witness...