S.L. Harris

@slharris.bsky.social

849 Followers 1285 Following

Writer, educator, sometime archaeologist | husband & dad | roots and beginnings | fiction website: ifchanceyoucallit.wordpress.com

Map of the Continent of Zothique
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A copy of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #52, and a chocolate bar.
Maps of Discworld, by Terry Pratchett. Map by Stephen Player, directed by Pratchett and Stephen Briggs.
The Cheese Map of Europe
4 maps of The Pilgrims Progress, by John Bunyan.
Power. That was it. Everywhere, everywhere the strong were riding roughshod over delicate subjectivity, everywhere the toadies and the timeservers were paying back those who had thought themselves their betters; the powerless were gaining a share in power by joining the haters and the hunters. This Ayatollah in Iran. Sun Moon and his zombie herds marrying one another at his command. And Dr. R. O. Walter, whom Pierce had never seen and would never see but who was vividly present to him anyway—the jug-eared head, the potato nose on which his glasses, bound in pink plastic, balanced; the Midwestern caw, the brutal certainties, the little loud jokes. His nasty cult, nothing at all really-unless (no it couldn't be, to think so was to surrender to them somehow) it was allied with those others, at a deep underground level, despite their superficial differences and (phony) mutual hatreds. War in Heaven. A war of all against all; if you are not of one party they will make you of another. No. No.
Turnip snowman
Network map of pioneering women in archaeology, paleontology, and geology from TrowelBlazers
Red to purple serviceberries hanging on a tree.
The Humanist
A map of Impland and surrounding lands, from E.R. Eddison's Worm Ouroboros, by David Bedell, 1978
Tunnel
Very early, coercive powers were devised that could impose superstructures, amass wealth and redistribute resources. However, these powers did not foster, and may even have precluded, the development of corresponding plans and powers to promote continuity. Short-term maximization of benefits by and for urban elites regularly superseded the maintenance of a differentiated regional, social and subsistence base. This was so even though it must always have been apparent to some that the latter could better have endured a wide range of real, unavoidable, but always unexpected perturbations and threats. At the same time, rationalized, coherently expressed strategies of management are hardly to be expected, especially because of the uncertain powers and duration of tenure of successive elites and holders of office
a friendly cartoon basking shark from freepik.com
Map of Marvel's Manhattan, from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (Vol. 2) #8, 1986
And Eve says, “You look tired, Cain. Are you alright?” And Cain says, “God asked me to do some stuff, and I don’t know about it.” And Eve says, “Oh that guy.” And Cain doesn’t ask her to elaborate, because his mother is using that tone she uses when she talks about the cows having escaped the pasture, the rain having ruined the drying laundry, the dog having shit inside. Which is to say, when she talks about a natural phenomenon that she can’t argue with, only able to deal with in the aftermath.
A mockup of an old internet style webring footer that reads "Under Construction!" and then "This Awesome SFF Fiction Webring Site is owned by Your Name Here. Want to join the Awesome SFF Fiction Webring?"
Quack attack meter
A burning bush plant in which some of the leaves have turned orange and yellow.
A still from the animated film The Pagemaster, depicting a child with a red shirt and a wand and three anthropomorphic books - Horror, Adventure, and Fantasy.
The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.
Charlie Brown: Where’s my calendar? Sally: It’s over there on that little table. Charlie Brown: Good! I like to check out the week. I like to know if there’s anything I have to dread.
Pope Leo XIV admires the Borso d’Este Bible, a jewel of Renaissance art, at the Vatican on May 7, 2026. | Credit: Vatican Media. I've added the word "READ" as in the classic ALA library posters.
Europe-wide map of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, from LiteraryMaps.com
The Obama Presidential Center rises like a friendly cartoon whale over the Midway Plaisance
Sanders dark chocolate sea salt caramels, described as “small batch wonders”
Map of the Earthsea Series by Urusula K. Le Guin. Ruth Robbins, artist.
Lego ice planet mini figure
Map of the South-West Palace of Sennacherib, Nineveh.
Cover of the book "Lost in Dinosaur World," by Geoffrey T. Williams; Illustrated by Borje Svensson.
A map of William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
Oops! All alliums!
A large poster map labeled "Charles Dickens' London" by David A Purdue.
Note: “other” includes responses of archaeopteryx, spinosaurus, plesiosaur, ankylosaurus, allosaurus, parasaurolophus, dilophosaurus, diplodocus, iguanadon, and pachycephalosaurus, as well as responses of “other.” We know pterodactyls and plesiosaurs aren’t dinosaurs.
The cover to the "Nightcrawler" comic book from Marvel, by Dave Cockrum, featuring the superhero Nightcrawler in a dashing, swashbuckling pose.
Luke Skywalker saying, "I'm ready for anything."
A map of “mythical beasts of Italy,” by Neil Parkinson
Map of the fictional Castle Amber and its Surroundings, by Roger Zelazny, from Galaxy Magazine #39
A map of Jack Vance's Dying Earth by Doug Kovacs
A map labeled "History of the United Federation of Planets" showing the galaxy from the Star Trek franchise, with insets of major planets and central area.
You have saved $1,052.50 this past year and $37,652.93 since you began using the library!
A wide bowl in beige ceramic with detailed black paint decoration. Halaf period, Tell Arpachiyah, Iraq, ca. 5600-5200 BC. (British Museum)
A prehistoric “chalice” of black obsidian with a marble base from Tell Brak, Level 19. Image from: https://www.tellbrak.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/images/urbanism/chalice.jpg
The gestation period of the vampire has not been fixed with accuracy, but it is almost certainly a very long one—possibly as much as a decade. The young are very tiny at birth, weighing, as a rule, no more than half a pound, and they bear little resemblance to the adult creature. They resemble, as a matter of fact, tadpoles with rudimentary limbs, or perhaps fetuses. (There is a theory, with a certain amount of evidence to sustain it, that the remote ancestors of vampires were marsupials.) The most noticeable feature of these vampire pups is their teeth. They are born fully dentate, and at first glance a newborn pup appears to be all mouth. After they are born they wriggle to a rest and attach themselves to it by means of the pose extraordinary teeth, and there they remain for a period of two years or more, during which time the dam is nourished by human blood carried to her by one of the males, which may or may not be the sire of the litter. This nourishment is fed her by the same method that birds use to feed their young, a procedure that requires a strong stomach to contemplate.
We go to the village. We enter the village, we pass the main place. No one sees us; we are in mist, we are invisible.
Golden Mask from the State Hermitage Museum. https://hermitagemuseum.org/what-s-on/bb431b4ce76744c2cebbfa2b7c9cddeb?lng=en
Cover of the computer game: The Legend of Kyrandia, Book One, in which the evil jester Malcolm looks down on the hero Brandon from a tree branch.
Within a day or two, these disembodied, misty forms are to assume what for the Trobrianders seems marvellous shape and enormous bulk. They are to surround the Kula traders with their solid walls of precipitous rock and green jungle, furrowed with deep ravines and streaked with racing water-courses. The Trobrianders will sail deep, shaded bays, resounding with the, to them unknown, voice of waterfallsl; with the weird cries of strange birds which never vist the Trobriands, such as the laughing of the kookooburra (laughing jackass), and the melancholy call of the South Sea crow. The sea will change its colour once more, become pure blue, and beneath its transparent waters, a marvellous world of multi-coloured coral, fish and seaweed will unfold itself, a world which, through a strange geographical irony, the inhabitants of a coral island hardly ever can see at home, and must come to this volcanic region to discover. In these surroundings, they will find also wonderful, heavy, compact stones of various colours and shapes, whereas at home the only stone is the insipid, white, dead coral. Here they can see, besides many types of granite and basalt and volcanic tuff, specimens of black obsidian, with its sharp edges and metallic ring, and sites full of red and yellow ochre. Besides big hills of volanic ash, they will behold hot springs boiling up periodically. Of all these marvels the young Trobriander hears tales, and sees samples brought back to his county, and there is no
Fiction 2025 S.L. Harris “Half Drowned,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies #423, January 9, 2025 “The TimeCop and the TimeSocialWorker,” Analog March/April 2025 “The Horses of Pazyryk,” Intergalactic Rejects, ed. Storm Humbert, June 2025 “Dark Sacred Night,” Phano 7, July 2025 “The Pelican in its Piety,” Reckoning 9, 2025 “The Harrowing of Hell (Third Circle, Sausage Counter, Contracts Office),” Flash Fiction Online, July 2025 “The Island at the End of the World,” The Dark, October 2025 “The Hunting of the Phoenix,” Kaleidotrope, Autumn 2025 “Root Hog or Die,” Fusion Fragment #26, October 2025
A map of Robinson Crusoe’s island
A good dog tries to distract from the newly arrived short story collection, Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha.
A framed map of Babel from the R.F. Kuang novel.
Map of Beleriand and the Lands to the North
"The Temptation of St. Anthony" by Joos van Craesbeeck. A small St. Anthony resists the temptations of multiple phantasmagoric demons, while an enormous screaming head with figures slicing their way out of its brow dominates the left side of the canvas.
...and here was a woman walking past his very grave, and saying she knew nothing about him. "How do [you] know I said that?" asked Mrs. Chindle. And I must say it was very bold of her, speaking up like that to a ghost, all alone with the thing at midnight; but I trust every word that she said to me. And the ghost had said, "How do I know? How do the dead know? Do you think that those that work for posterity, who give all their lives to the service of posterity, don't know what posterity says of us, and tonight in particular?" But I told you I set no store by one night more than another. That's superstition. And then Mrs. Chindle was frightened. I wonder she wasn't before. But a vehemence seems to have poured from the ghost, which frightened her then, and she had said to it, "I'll do what I can, sit." And the ghost seems to have known that she really meant it, probably reading her sincerity more clearly than words, and had vanished. And Mrs. Chindle had gone to our little library, where of course we had no book by any Poncet or Pincing; but she got in touch with reference books and one day she found his name and somehow or other she hunted out this old book, which she got for a few..."
The racing snail from the Neverending Story
A map of Watership Down and surrounding areas.
Mark Knopfler in the band Dire Straits
The Land of Nehwon, map by Doug Kovacs for Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar.