The elephant in the room is how come more people don't suspect they're living an illusion or, in other words, is it crackpot? The corollary to that is that fantasy writers, and particularly pulps, have visions of places and times that have a mythical realism we have lost. The reality comes from a physical condition that imbues the psyche with flavour, and is on the squalid or sordid side.
This question of kinkyness associated with organic areas of towns that are left to in some way decay or rot was mentioned in Revivalism3 (the Alter Ego essay.) The physical degradation associated with sleaze is common in fantasy.
Thieves' World
Running contrary to this is the cybernetic turn of mind, and here's a very Conanesque cover of Dumarest from Don Maitz.
Dumarest is something like primitive wish-fulfilment fantasy in that he always gets the woman, and that is part of his ethos. In the essay I was saying these pulp books were alongside sleaze so that the sensibility is similar (there's a similar scene in Godard's One Plus One, prev.)
Sleaze and decrepitude or the presence of detritus are all common elements.
Among the ramps and corridors..were patches of darkness and shadowed enigma; narrow passages leading to empty spaces once used now long neglected. Areas made obsolete by the use of new, compact equipment, by-passed in lateral expansion, discovered bubbles which could not fit into the general plan. A world where floors and walls were slimed, thick with encrustations, mottled with pale fungi emitting a ghostly luminescence. Water seeped from spongy rock or lay in dew-like condensation on naked stone. (#20 Web of Sand, page 139)
That passage echoes the scenes from The God's of the Mountain with Conan and Valeria (prev.) So why is it that detritus and fungi and sleaze and lust are bound together? It's the one thing that is missing in a universe of electromagnetic sameness (numbers, probabilities), and that is the lifecycle of the underworld.
It's not that science doesn't know it's there since we have the carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle of decay and regeneration in sea and land and air, but it's that the electromagnetic universe is at the highest echelon of development - as in The Airtight Garage.
Giraud (Moebius) brings-in a psychic component in 'the Nagual' which must exist outside the machine universe. A machine universe replicates with ones and zeros, whereas the psyche depends on a physical condition of degradation that revives. There's a running-gag in Dumarest that earth simply means 'dirt', but dirt is the strong substance that enables revival (from organic mulch, humus.)
The scenes of bloody mayhem in fantasy have that as an undercurrent. In comics, Illyana Rasputin as Darkchilde with the decaying soul.
As was said previously, the animalistic nudity and gross bestiality is the essence of fertility.
Apart from all that, illusions are convincing, and the future way of thinking may be tautologous or a self-fulfilling prophecy (Revivalism3) of engineers.
Sequences of events, by contrast, depend on melody, rhythm, balance and bodily attributes of coordination and strength. In a sense, this is how DNA is able to work, and it's not engineering (see fish swarms, prev.)
The fact that in Darwinism species can change so that, say, the duck-billed platypus is an egg-laying mammal (in between reptile) isn't necessarily a matter of engineering. If there are large-scale similarities of form - in melody, rhythm etc - animals and plants are fundamentally similar even if they appear different (vis Greek myth.)
This is what poetry, simile do with words, natch. The problem is we live in a technical, engineered universe that is very convincing and consists of DNA and algorithms (ones and zeros.) The dual-tone note of Jirel Meets Magic that hypnotizes and confuses (see also They Live!)
It's all very convincing; for example the photo of Sagittarius black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, but is Relativity a form of measurement, a part of the machine universe? The organic universe is itself spiral.
Outside of that is the mythical, poetic universe that is composed of large-scale similarities (of melody, rhythm etc.) That universe has strength, and a lot of it comes from the underworld. It's an unfortunate fact, or in other words, the underworld and the heavenly cosmos are part of the same sequence of events, fertile, primordial.
Web of Sand could be read as a joke along those lines. Dumarest is caught up in a trek to find a fortune in the form of diamond-hard 'tranneks', which are the droppings of 'sannaks', the reptilian sand-worms that feed on precious minerals. The tranneks are used as fantastically precise bearings for machines.
The problem is that in a world that does not take account of primordial rhythms, the numerical/monetary systems are to a large extent illusory (words lose their meaning.) The underworld is half of any living system, really.
So, basically, spinning tops like Earth represent 'old Earth' (invariable time, a physical condition) that Earl Dumarest is forever trying to find in his future state of travail.
