Sumana says:
Jim Theis's horrible sword-and-sorcery tale, "The Eye of Argon," has inconsistent characterization, turgid pacing, and sentences like, "Hence, he may have been imprisoned for ten minutes or ten years, he did not know, resulting in a disheartened emotion deep within his being." Its only saving grace: the plot does in fact go somewhere, eventually.Leonard Richardson destroys that distraction by randomly rearranging its sentences in "The Cut-Up Eye," so you can better appreciate Theis's unique diction. Changes every 5 minutes, "the wench stated whimsicoracally."
Note about "The Eye of Argon" (From UKSFA):
"The Eye of Argon" was published in 1970 in OSFAN, the journal of the Ozark SF Society, issue number 10. Photocopies — invariably with the last page missing — circulated for decades, and it became a regular sf convention challenge to read Jim Theis's mangled prose with a straight face. This HTML document is based on the standard ASCII text of the story, widely available on line. In the January 2005 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction it was revealed that a complete copy of OSFAN #10 had been unearthed in the Jack Williamson SF Library at Eastern New Mexico University… Jim Theis himself, who was 16 when "The Eye of Argon" first appeared, reportedly died circa 2001 at age 48. He will be long remembered in sf fandom.
