About

The Stepwise Palace is a poem in Spenserian stanzas which I published on my Twitter account FSVO in 2013. It started as a parody of a forgotten genre, the poetic glorifications of natural science which authors such as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of the more famous Charles) wrote in the eighteenth and ninenteenth centuries, and as an exercise in using a mathematical framework as a spur to creativity. Like a lot of my parodies, it took on a life of its own.

It’s best read in the order in which it was first written and published: to do this, follow the links in the right margin. There is an underlying and slightly mad structure, which I’d rather not spell out in detail: that’s what the links at the bottom of each page are about.

If you’ve enjoyed this, why not follow FSVO on Twitter, and there there are more past sequences available at my main website. My personal Twitter account is bombinans.

—Mike Lynch, 2016