A wealthy man named William Stendhal meets with Mr. Bigelow, an architect who has finished building a strange house to Stendhal’s explicit specifications, most of which are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Bigelow is unaware of the story of Poe due to an intellectual purge thirty years previous on Earth called the Great Fire during which all creative works of the imagination, including Stendhal’s 50,000 title library, were destroyed by political and religious groups. Stendhal is pleased with Bigelow’s work on the house (which he calls the House of Usher) and the property but is disgusted by his ignorance and angrily dismisses the man.

Stendhal is next visited by a man named Mr. Garrett, an Investigator of Moral Climates from an administrative body on Earth. Stendhal distastefully greets the man, and Garrett informs him that the “Dismantlers and Burning Crew” (142) will be there in a couple hours to demolish the House of Usher, quoting a law against books, houses, and anything “produced which in any way suggests ghosts, vampires, fairies, or any creature of the imagination” (143). The only permissible artistic works, Stendhal reveals, are those which deal in

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