Nothing even remotely close to the passage turns up in any of the usual places where printed SF/fantasy of the pre-Internet era can be searched.
• Google Books (which has most Anglophone magazines, paperbacks, hardbacks and fanzines from the 19-th century onward) returns zero matches for the distinctive strings
“Forty thousand legions walked”
“desert of the moon in search of the land of Narda”
“fly space was crowded by their cars and travel logs”
“cosmic acne of space”.
• The same is true of Hathi-Trust, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Fiction Mags Index/Archive and the full text of the major SF magazines that have been digitised (Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, Omni, Amazing, Interzone, Weird Tales, etc.).
• No hits appear in newspaper or periodical databases (Newspapers.com, ProQuest, Gale, Lexis, JSTOR, EBSCO).
• Library-catalogue title/keyword searches (WorldCat, Library of Congress, British Library, National SF & Fantasy Collection) likewise turn up nothing.
The individual elements of the passage are also unhelpful as clues. “Narda” is not an established location in any work that predates 1987 (the best-known fictional Narda, the port town in Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, did not appear until 2003). “Forty thousand legions” does not echo any famous quote (the cliché is “ten thousand”, from Xenophon and countless later borrowings). The phrases “fly space”, “cosmic acne”, “terminator marched” and the mildly archaic style all feel like private, almost whimsical imagery rather than any recognisable authorial voice of the period.
Because (a) none of the distinctive phrases has ever appeared in print, (b) the handwriting on the scan looks like ordinary note-paper rather than a photocopy of a typeset page, and (c) the passage reads more like free-verse prose poetry than an excerpt from a narrative, the simplest explanation is that this is not an extract from a published science-fiction or fantasy work at all. It is almost certainly something that was written—perhaps read aloud—by a friend, a class-mate, a creative-writing teacher, or possibly even by yourself and subsequently copied into the notebook on 2 December 1987.
In short, there is no traceable published source for the quotation; it appears to be an original, unpublished piece of writing.
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version: o3-2025-04-16
Status: UQ Validated
Validated: 8 months ago
Status: Failed Human Verification
Verified: 7 months ago
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