The Familiar, Mark Z. Danielewski Options

[Frisk]

So it looks like the first book (of 27 I think?) is coming out in May. Anyone excited?
I follow him on Facebook, and over the last year or two he's posted a series of random cryptic pictures of a galaxy, each one with a series of numbers attached. When I was looking up info on the new book today, I found out that it was a code, and the code had been broken. The pictures posted so far translate into this:

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"One by one our skies go black.

Stars are extinguished, collapsing into distances too great to breach. Soon, not even the memory of light will survive.


Long ago, our manifold universes discovered futures would only expand. No arms of limit could hold or draw them back.


Short of a miracle, they would continue to stretch, untangle and vanish — abandoned at long last to an unwitnessed dissolution.


That dissolution is now.


Final winks slipping over the horizons share what needs no sharing:

There are no miracles.


You might say just to survive to such an end is a miracle in itself.

We would agree.

But we are not everyone.


Even if you could imagine yourself billions of years hence, you would not begin to comprehend who we became and what we achieved.


Yet left as you are, you will no more tremble before us than a butterfly on a windless day trembles before colluding skies still calculating beyond one of your pacific horizons.


Once we could move skies.

We could transform them.

We could make them sing.


And when we fell into dreams, our dreams asked questions and our skies, still singing, answered back.


You are all we once were but the vastness of our strangeness exceeds all the light-years between our times.


The frailty of your senses can no more recognize our reach than your thoughts can entertain even the vaguest outline of our knowledge.


In ratios of quantity, a pulse of what we comprehend renders meaningless your entire history of discovery.


We are on either side of history: yours just beginning, ours approaching a trillion years of ends.


Yet even so, we still share a dyad of commonality.


Two questions endure. Both without solution.


What haunts us now and will allways hunt you.


The first reveals how the promise of all our postponements, ever longer, ever more secure — what we eventually mistook for immortality — was from the start a broken promise.


Entropy suffers no reversals.

Even now, here, on the edge of time’s end, where so many continue to vanish, we still have not pierced that veil of sentience undone.


The first of our common horrors:"
(and yeah it ends there, with the colon and everything)

If you're interested in the code or the pictures, https://www.facebook.com/MarkZDanielewski
He might have them on twitter or something too, but I don't twitter so I dunno. If you're interested in how they broke the code: http://forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/t...ook-codes/page7

Aaannddd if you're interested in the new series: http://www.amazon.com/The-Familiar-One-Rai...y/dp/0375714944

[Dr Strum]

There are 880 pages in volume one of 27?

Exciting.