Overflight at Troynovant:
inspirations and novels,
reviews & miscellaneous;
listed by Type and Title
  

So as not to clutter various Review and Strata indexes with Overflight series novels, their reviews are listed here separately; along with whatever else seems appropriate.

The series chronologically begins with Sphinx Daybreak. The pioneering The Shadow of the Ship was written first solely because it stood alone more than other planned and potential novels, and I was sure it would be far simpler to attempt — which (albeit a tremendous effort) was correct. In retrospect, though, despite my daunting plethora of ideas for the series, I had only a sketchy idea of what was in front of me. — RWF
  

It is just the fact that we know no more about the ether than its form of elasticity which makes the conception of it somewhat unsatisfactory; and led the late Lord Salisbury, in his Presidential Address to the British Association at Oxford in 1894, to say of it that it merely 'furnishes a nominative case to the verb to undulate'.

H. W. B. Joseph
"Of Non-Reciprocating Causal Relations"
An Introduction to Logic  (1906; 2nd edition 1916)

  
              Eleven pass, and then
Athena takes Achilles by the hair,
Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,
Because the hero's crescent is in the twelfth.

William Butler Yeats
"The Phases of the Moon", 44-47
The Wild Swans at Coole  (1919)
The Poems, Second Edition

  
The unnamed creator of an unknown sphere,
Unknown as yet, unknowable,
Uncertain certainty, Apollo
Imagined among the indigenes
And Eden conceived on Morningside,
The center of the self, the self
Of the future, of future man
And future place, when these are known,
A freedom at last from the mystical,
The beginning of a final order,
The order of man's right to be
As he is, the discipline of his scope
Observed as an absolute, himself.

Wallace Stevens
"The Sail of Ulysses", IV  (1954)
Collected Poetry and Prose

  
illustration, top right:
The Decked Flag of the Luftmenschen

four horizontal stripes, from the bottom upward:
tan, sky-blue, cloud-white, and sky-blue again.

Tan for the ground of Troy whence their forebears came,
Blue for the sky of the Middle Air,
White for the Walking-Deck cloud-land they lived upon,
and Blue again for infinite sky above all.