Skip to main content
punctum books

Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans

  • Eugene Thacker (author)
Chapter of: Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium(pp. 173–180)

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
    Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
      Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
      Cannot generate record: Missing PDF URL
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
    • EBSCO Host
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
    • ProQuest Ebrary
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
TitleBlack Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans
ContributorEugene Thacker (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0017.1.11
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/leper-creativity-cyclonopedia-symposium/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightThacker, Eugene
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-12-22
Long abstractIn 1964, the horror and fantasy author Fritz Leiber published a short story entitled “Black Gondolier,” which appeared in the Arkham House anthology Over the Edge, and was subsequently reprinted in the Ace Double volume Night Monsters. In this story, an un-named narrator tells of the mysterious disappearance of his friend Daloway, a recluse and autodidact living nearby oil fields in southern California. Daloway, it seems, began to develop a bizarre and unnatural fascination with oil—not just as a natural resource, and not just as something of geopolitical value, but with oil in itself as an ancient and enigmatic manifestation of the hidden world. Over time Daloway’s conversations with the narrator begin to take on the form of mystical visions, described by Daloway as a kind of gothic, fu-nereal ooze:. . . that black and nefarious essence of all life that had ever been, constituting in fact a great deep-digged black graveyard of the ul-timate eldritch past with blackest ghosts, oil had waited for hundreds of millions of years, dreaming its black dreams, sluggishly puls-ing beneath Earth’s stony skin, quivering in lightless pools roofed with marsh gas and in top-filled rocky tanks and coursing through a myriad channels . . .
Page rangepp. 173–180
Print length8 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Eugene Thacker

(author)