Duration 3.30

Leasting Fallvo wrote plots, fictions, lyrics and narratives. Among his clients were second offenders, alibi hunters, newspaper editors, confidence tricksters, dramatists and bored children. The audience, the pay and the state of the Fallvo imagination naturally dictated the swing of each narrative and its outcome.

Before the Violent Unknown Event, an Earth reconstructed from Fallvo's entire imaginative output would have been populated only by homo sapiens and a few scraggy bushes. The VUE changed all that. 

Fallvo was in Bavaria in a ski-lift at 11.41 on the evening of the VUE. In an ensuing accident he lost the use of both his legs, but as to actual VUE symptoms, Fallvo was slow to be affected. A year after the Event, Fallvo began to speak Os-leet-ter, a plain rhythmic language suitable for the telling of an uncluttered narrative and an Earth contructed now from his output would be populated by birds and a few piles of brick. However, he lost his English-speaking audience and his earnings slumped. To earn some money he approached the VUE Commission with a proposition to establish a library contributed to solely by those afflicted by the VUE. Eventually, there were sufficient VUE products to demand a catalogue, and Fallvo volunteered to put it together. The Commission agreed, provided that Fallvo produced the catalogue in English. The fiction section was poorly represented and Fallvo himself saw to it that the nearly empty shelves looked more respectable.

Among his works in English are: The Madras Lemonade Glass, The Tyddyn Corn Clout, Bird Tales of the Eiffel Tower, A Walk Through H, A Turkey for a Wife, The House of the Two Palms, The Dogs on Bardsey Island, The Tulse Luper Suitcase, Protest at the Golden Egg, The Missing Composer, The Making of Hartileas B, The Wash-House Corpse, The Red Chair, and many others.

It was said that if the VUE had not happened, then Leasting Fallvo could have invented it.

With the preposterous Violent Unknown Event receding in everyone's minds, an increasing need for new fiction persuaded Fallvo's former clients to reemploy him. Seven years after the Event, Fallvo was more prosperous than he had ever been, but there were two penalties. First, the slowly encroaching influence of the VUE on Fallvo was affecting his eyesight. And second, the VUE was persuading him he had no memory worth preserving. Both these facts improved his standard of living further. The first because he could rely less on observation and the second because he was forced to keep reinventing. Fallvo's circle of contacts and clients continued to increase. Whether they treated his plots and narratives as allegories or as metaphors of their own difficulties as yet to be researched.

The Falls