Wednesday, August 05, 2026
Oddity O'Clock
Except that... Well, my original plans for the trilogy have changed. It's now going to be a thing called a "permutational trilogy" in which there will be many more books (I don't know how many) and readers will select any three books from the total and read them in any order and that, for them, will be the trilogy. It means there are going to be hundreds, maybe thousands of different permutations and therefore a heck of a lot of different trilogies... But in the meantime, here are the first three books:
* TRUMPET FACE, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.
* THE UNFAIR DINKUM, with an introduction by Brian Evenson.
* ODDITY O'CLOCK, with an introduction by Paul Di Filippo.
These books are available here.
Going back to the idea of the permutational trilogy, I can say that it's also a combinational trilogy. There's a difference, of course. Let's suppose there are 11 books in total. Depending on whether the order in which any three books are read counts as a different "trilogy experience" there will either be 165 trilogies available (combinational) or 990 trilogies (permutational).
As far as I am aware, the notion of the permutational-combinational trilogy was invented by me. The process by which a pool of related books exists, but any chosen trio constitutes the actual trilogy, as far as my knowledge of literary history goes, is original to me as a structural model. I don't know it that's worth anything but I like it. Maybe I will add to the series one new book every year.
Last year I wrote three in three months. This year I am writing a new book for the series called THE DANGLE CUSTARD and maybe will write a fifth before the end of 2026. If I can write a dozen in total, that will be 220 different combinational trilogies or 1320 permutational trilogies. Let's see!
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