THE DOYCE.

Jan 05, 2026

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

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THE DOYCE.

I didn’t write anything new for this week, and was planning to again recycle an old story. (I’m trying to work on a book.) However, last night I slept poorly and, uncharacteristically, remembered a bit of my dream. So I’ll jot it down for you.

The dream ended with me rushing into a room because through the doorway I noticed my little boy dragging his mother’s dress across the floor. She had laid it out on the bed because she needed it for a performance later that day; it would be disastrous for it to get messed up. I ran into the room, but the boy was already tangled in the dress’s fine material. The louder I scolded, the more entangled he got. Finally the stress of it woke me up. It seemed kind of hard to be woken up by a dream of wrangling the boy, when I needed to be well-rested in order to wrangle the boy in real life.

Before that, though: I was in a house, and I hurried onto the covered porch to see something in the sky. (It was a bucolic, leafy, restful neighborhood, with quiet, well-spaced houses and no traffic.) Passing overhead, sailing through the unbroken blue, was a doyce. A doyce was a large gray metal craft, roughly shaped like a quadruped; like a fat, stubby version of the walkers in Empire Strikes Back. Its main body was a massive breadbox shape, with rounded corners. Affixed to its front was a structure obviously meant to resemble a head, but also doubling as a cockpit. (Except wasn’t it too big to be a cockpit? The doyce wasn’t near anything that I could compare it to, for scale. Even so, I knew it was big enough to contain hundreds of people, if people were indeed inside it.) Attached at the four bottom corners of the breadbox torso were four stubby paddles reminiscent of limbs. Absurdly stubby limbs, though. Flippers, maybe. They clacked silently back and forth, like the flippers in a ping-pong machine. I had an idea that, according to the logic of a toy, they were paddling the doyce along through the air. But of course I could see there was nothing aerodynamic about the doyce. Nor did the motion of the flippers make rational sense. Even if you could row yourself through the air with something like oars (well, actually, I guess that’s what wings do), these weren’t shaped like oars. Besides, they were making back-and-forth motions, so even if they had moved the doyce forward by scooping back the air, they would have moved it an equal distance back in the next motion.

Still, I had to admit that the doyce was moving. I stepped further out onto the porch to follow its progress—it impressed and befuddled me by continuing its ascent. You couldn’t call its pace stately, only because it looked too ridiculous for such a word. Despite its slowness, I wondered if it had been launched by, say, a catapult. How did it keep going? Perhaps it would fall back to earth and kill a bunch of people. But at least that seemed unlikely to happen near the house I was in. And who knew? Maybe it really would make it to the moon.

I started googling for info on the doyce. Lots of anti-Trump commentators deplored its use: it was dangerous, untested; it might fall out of the sky on people; it was a performative show of ingenuity, when the old methods of air travel had needed no ingenious reimagining. (This is where my dream decided the doyce was linked to Donald Trump.) I found a Niall Ferguson article extolling the doyce as a bold innovation in moon travel.

Another reason folks on the left disliked the doyce was its environmental impact. Turns out doyces run on kerosene. I found a headline proclaiming that the kerosene necessary to power a single doyce is equal to the amount needed to kindle two thousand suns; in my dream, I pursed my lips into a dubious grimace; could that really be true, I wondered?

* * *

Thanks for reading. It was only a fragment; on the other hand, it didn’t take too long. Right?

My actual dream, of course, is that you buy my books. Why, if everyone receiving this newsletter would buy just one of my books, that would be enough to … well, it would certainly be enough for me to buy groceries for a while, anyway.

The Switch: https://tinyurl.com/mtmbtmcp

The Man Who Fed Myagg’daggeth: https://tinyurl.com/a46r2nv5

Ironheart: https://tinyurl.com/bddm7epd

Tusk: https://tinyurl.com/4vjrjjmn

Resilient Creatures: https://tinyurl.com/mvnkxvde

Stewart and Jean: https://tinyurl.com/ywmmtuea

Daughter Of the Damned: https://tinyurl.com/3hx2bt27

Raw Flesh, Cold Air: https://tinyurl.com/3vvrpa2p

The Sexbot: https://tinyurl.com/yncc8a2v

The Unkillables: https://tinyurl.com/5x83d6t4

Brothel: https://tinyurl.com/3dv8st3k

Ray Takeshi: https://tinyurl.com/msh7bhrt