Athens 2004

And Bard Wars is complete! (I expect. I don't know yet. But I am pretty sure.) To celebrate this milestone- and the temporary period of global goodwill and reduced performance-enhancing-drug consumption I would expect to follow such a momentous event- I will not write anything that could be characterised as 'extremist ranting' for a little while. Instead, I will present an Introduction from the middle years of the present century, penned by an older and wiser Entrails X:

‘Bard Wars’ is not a pleasant book to read. It was never intended to be. David Versace’s dystopic fantasy has shocked and appalled readers since it was first written. With brutal clarity, Versace draws a gut-churning image of a society in the final liquefactious stages of moral decay, then grimly but without malice follows its ineluctable descent into madness and death. An early reviewer wrote, of one notorious passage: ‘I realised I could have accepted the description ‘sucks cock like a goat’ without a murmur, but the substitution of the one word ‘fellates’ had achieved a diabolic transfiguration: I was no longer reading pornography, the degradation of man to a mere beast, but had witnessed the civilised and deliberate corruption of man to devil.’
In Versace’s Fellport there are innumerable acts of perversion, in all their joyless and mechanical variety; there are innumerable acts of violence, perpetrated without anger and without ideological purpose. There are no acts of kindness; there are no children; there are no gods. There is not one character whose nature rises above the bestial. There is no beauty, no truth, no light in the darkness.
Fellport reflects the debút-de-siècle decadence of Versace’s own world, unflinchingly dissecting it to display the cancer within. To its first readers, it was like the fabulous mirror of the Ghul, throwing back at the one who gazes in it his own face as the face of a week-dead corpse. This is what you truly are, Versace says. This is what you will become. This is the path you walk, you and the multitudes who blindly follow one another into the quicksands of moral relativism. Long before the barbarian onslaught in Chapter 12, the modern reader is eagerly awaiting the purifying flames of jihad. And yet…
We do not like the lives of the inhabitants of Fellport, but we are shocked by their deaths. The graphic descriptions of the fate of Fellport at the hands of the barbarian horde stretch over many chapters of pillage, massacre, rape, and torture. In meticulous detail, the vengeance of these moral absolutists upon the city-dwellers is presented in all its horror. The modern reader will see himself reflected here, and he will not like what he sees. In the ruin of Fellport are echoes of the recent past of Versace’s world (the nineteen blood-bound captains of Hradakar, perhaps the least objectionable figures of the novel, call to mind the nineteen shahideen of the 23rd Jumaada al Thaany, peace be upon them), and eerie foreshadowings of his future, when the followers of the false Mahdi would lay waste to three continents. Is it any wonder no one can read the novel with comfort? Only one of the characters from the novel’s beginning is left at the end, the outsider Beyda Aldus Chur, fleeing the city penniless by land as he fled to it by sea in the novel’s opening scene. He has no answers. He has not been redeemed by his suffering. The godless world of ‘Bard Wars’ offers him no escape, no middle way between a demonic moral relativism and an insane moral absolutism.
It is good that ‘Bard Wars’ has been preserved from the turbulent years of the false Mahdi, and that it has now been released from the Index by the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue for the study of mullahs and married men of good character over the age of forty. It has much to teach us about the diseased and diabolic moral abyss of the world before Ard-al-Islam, and of the temptations it can engender in the faithful. Read it with fear and trembling, and thank the Lord of the Worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful, that you were not born in such a time.

- Muhammad abd-al-Rahman abd-al-Rahim X, 2nd Thuw al-Hijjah, 1479 A.H.