About the Doctor
~ A Partial & Necessarily Incomplete Account ~
The Doctor Speaks
You wish to know about me? How charmingly provincial. Very well.
I am, as I have stated, Doctor Talos — though the "Doctor" is perhaps more aspirational than accredited, and the "Talos" more chosen than given. I have been, at various points in my career, a playwright, a mountebank, a surgeon of questionable legality, a philosopher of no particular school, and — briefly, during one regrettable season in the north — a dentist.
I travel with my troupe across the dying lands, staging performances that some have called "brilliant," others "incomprehensible," and at least one magistrate described as "a public hazard." We perform The Play of the Sun's Last Day, a work of my own devising which concerns itself with themes of entropy, spectacle, and whether art retains any meaning when the audience and the stage are both scheduled for annihilation.
The sun, as you may have noticed, is not what it was. But then, what is?
— Doctor TalosBehind the Curtain
This website is a small theatrical experiment — a blog, a choose-your-own-adventure story, and a love letter to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, wrapped in the trappings of a dying earth playbill.
The name "Doctor Talos" comes from Wolfe's novel, where he is a charlatan, playwright, and showman who stages elaborate plays about the end of the world while the world is, in fact, ending. It seemed an appropriate patron for a website that is, itself, a kind of performance.
The site is built with nothing but HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no frameworks, no build tools, no dependencies. Just text, style, and a little bit of madness. As the Doctor would have it.
Contact the Troupe
The Doctor may be reached by the following avenues, though he makes no guarantees regarding the timeliness or coherence of his replies.
- GitHub — Where the scripts are kept