Hot damn, bookpost #20.
A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics With Special Reference to Indo-European 5th Edition, Allan Bomhard
A text that clearly represents a great deal of time, effort, and research on the part of the author; none of it is convincing evidence for the Nostratic hypothesis, and most of it is compelling evidence against.
[Aside: The Nostratic Hypothesis is a proposed linguistic macrofamily containing most of the languages of Eurasia. As with basically all macrofamily theories, it exists well outside the mainstream of the field.]I understand the appeal: it would be really cool if Nostratic was real, because it fires up the good ol' pattern recognition and puzzle solving parts of the brain and you know how much I love Recognizing Pattern. I wouldn't even rule out the possibility that something of its general shape could have existed at some point in the deep past, but I don’t think that this can ever be proven, barring sudden access to the Pnakotic Library. We simply cannot know the answer, and we are left with an empty space in which to daydream (and, let's be real here, project our own beliefs onto the past: with enough confidence and elbow grease you can make a convincing argument linking PIE to damn near anything, and they can't all be right.)
[Example: This isn't an exaggeration, here's what I can do just off the dome.]
["*gʷé̄n and be'nal both mean 'wife', which indicates that the original Proto-Indo-Euro-Klingon form was **gʷe'nal; PIE dropped the second syllable while the glottal stop vanished and lengthened the **e; in the more conservative Klingon branches **gʷ > b."]
If Nostratic did indeed exist, and it split into the families that this book claims it did, reconstructing it to any degree of accuracy would require hitting a jackpot a dozen times in a row. Every single proto-language included in the theory would have to be reconstructed accurately on its own, and then you would have to accurately place these reconstructions in relative chronology with each other in further second, third, fourth, and so on orders of reconstruction. For each of these layers, even if you had reconstructions of an outright miraculous level of accuracy, you'd still have to be factor in a margin of error for false positives, loan words, semantic drift, and information entropy. Nostratic isn’t just a second-order reconstruction: it’s five, six, seven orders or more, and each and every one of those would need to be damn near flawless in order to get a meaningful result.
You who have read my posts on my failed-for-the-moment pre-PIE project will be familiar with difficult this is. The most thoroughly-studied language family on Earth has produced a reconstructive model held together with duct tape and a prayer, with holes you can drive a bus through. That's the best the field has produced: this book hinges on much weaker models, including two that have minimal evidence for their own existence on a good day (Altaic, Elamo-Dravidian) and one that is so loosey-goosey that no one can even agree on a core phonology (Afroasiatic). The comparisons made between the chosen language families are littered with vagaries, maybes, stretches of imagination, inadequate correspondence-based methodology, cherry-picking, extremely fuzzy semantics and flood-the-zone tactics, and rely wholly on the reader not pushing back against the claims that are being made.
[Example: This book draws a lot of material from the long-range macrofamily proposals of Russian linguist Sergei Starostin: Starostin's proto-language reconstructions are consistently characterized by extremely high consonant counts such that, with the right number of mergers and deletions, you can justify effectively any outcome if you are operating purely on correspondences. I think this is an extremely shaky methodology, given how often consonants change according to nearby vowels: did we start with a series of palatalized stops, or did some stops in some branches just get palatalized thanks to an adjacent front vowel that then shifted? Chicken-and-egg quandaries ahoy.]
If this was a creative effort of speculative conlanging, I'd be more positive on it. Quite positive, honestly, if this was reskinned as someone making an Atlantean language for a fantasy novel I would be all on board; filling gaps in the data and going on one’s merry way is perfectly acceptable in those circumstances. But this book isn't a purely creative work; this was written with sincere belief in the factual truth of its contents, and the end result is a projection into the blank canvas of prehistory that, while it clears the bar of "it doesn't take a hard right turn into bizarro linguistic nationalism", is still an argument in search of data built on a house of cards with a foundation of sand.
The one genuinely helpful thing it presents is that, in pursuit of a Grand Unified Theory, Bomhard cites and compares the theories of basically everyone who has ever published anything in the field of historical linguistics. (For better and worse, as many of them are questionable in their own right. Lookin' at you, Joseph Greenberg.)
Black Amazon of Mars, Leigh Brackett
[I had listened to this story in audiobook form via Librivox quite a long while ago, so this is technically a reread - eagle-eyed readers may remember that I swiped the "black amazon" name for the human servants of Orca in an equally long-ago post, though in hindsight that was probably not the best name.]
Sword and planet high adventure. Has some good imagery and the prose is solid. Also contains one of my least favorite tropes of all time: the cool masked warrior is revealed to be a woman and then immediately gets sidelined to a passive role so the inevitably less-interesting male main character can finish the plot. What a waste. The character was already doing cool things, just let her keep doing cool things!
Also contains potentially the weirdest example of pulp sci-fi racism I have ever encountered: the bending over backwards this series pulls to avoid having an actual black man as the protagonist - despite invoking all the signifiers of the colonialist imaginary - would have every chiropractor in the hemisphere breaking down the door to schedule an appointment. Our protagonist Stark has dark skin, excused as being from Mercury, and I could almost buy that as an interesting explanation were it not for the fact that his name in his youth was "Nchaka" (evoking sub-Saharan Africa by way of a prenasalized consonant; the only hit I can find on that name in a cursory search is a festival held by the Ogba of Nigeria which I doubt was the actual source) and much is made of his "wildness", "primal nature" or vaguely defined "instincts" (sigh). But he's definitely not black, guys!
Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
I don’t know if that was Brackett’s doing, the editor’s doing, or if it was Brackett trying to get around the editor through malicious compliance. Literally just stick a population of Bantu speakers on Mercury and give him an appropriate name, this isn’t difficult.
The Lost Continent, C.J. Cutliffe Hyne
An unexpected treat. I had picked this on a whim and ended up with a thoroughly enjoyable rip-roaring adventure that repeatedly surprised me with how modern it felt. Took a full 50% of the book before the old-timey sexism reared its head, and I've read worse from much more recent books. It would take very little effort to make a modern adaptation
The premise is solid: Deucalion, career philosopher-soldier-priest and former governor of the Yucatan colony, is recalled to Atlantis by direct order of the empress Phorenice as part of a greater plan to bolster her rule in the midst of economic crisis and civil war. The kicker here is that Phorenice isn’t portrayed as stupid. This is a pulp novel from 1899 and the ambitious woman in power is portrayed as canny and competent. She’s blinded by hubris to the real dangers threatening Atlantis, but she’s not portrayed as the idiot running things into the ground where it was once already perfect - the rot was already there, Phorenice took advantage of it for her own benefit, and the narrative is very clear that this is the case. Her sins are the sins of the nobility.
This isn’t even mentioning Nais, who I described to my partner as “a second baddie has entered the narrative” and honestly don’t want to spoil why. You’ll know it if you read it. She does, unfortunately, get hit with the “demoted to passive character” beam later on, but her arrival is fucking strong. Deucalion himself is more interesting than I expected because of what I think is a bit of intentional unreliability in his steady 1st person POV - he regularly says or thinks things that are at odds with what is being depicted on the page, and a whole lot that is clearly biased by his aristocratic-Stoic leanings.
I had wondered while reading if the author had socialist leanings, but
couldn't find any real info - his descriptions of the excessive wealth
of the Atlantean nobles, the squalid conditions of the common people, and the casual cruel indifference Deucalion, Phorenice, the priesthood, and aristocracy aim at the underclasses. This could all be me pulling an unintended reading from the text, but it feels intentional in a way that other works of the time would treat this state of affairs as just the way of things.
Also: I haven’t even mentioned the dinosaurs yet! We got antediluvian monstrosities left right and center! No science here, no sir. You’re going to have plesiosaurs attacking boats right off the bat. Somewhere along the line fantasy authors decided they were too cool for dinosaurs, and that's a fucking shame.
Omniligual, H. Beam Piper
Short story about a team of scientists cracking the Martian language during their excavations of one of their ruined cities. There are, of course, some serious handwaves underpinning the exercise just for the sake of practicality, but it holds up pretty well (and doesn't have to do with Sapir-Whorf, which is the only linguistics 99% of sci-fi authors have ever heard of). It's on Gutenberg, you can zip through it in an afternoon.
Qoholeth, Madison Scott-Clary
DNF 45%
I know the author on Discord, she had the series on sale and I grabbed this and its sequels in a bundle. They are, from the outset, a conjunction of elements normally outside my wheelhouse, but I figured it's good to go stretch the legs on new routes once in a while.
Premise: it’s the future, our main character is a furry who hangs out in VR and ends up comatose with their mind trapped in a simulation for reasons unknown.
The fundamental issue with the book, and what got me to DNF, is that it’s just kinda dull.
There’s no real antagonist; the conflict is wholly based in the mystery of the people lost inside simulations, but there’s no urgency, no tension, no forward momentum. The three POV characters, at least by the point I stopped at, not only hadn’t interacted with each other but barely interact with anyone else:
- RJ / AwDae has one conversation with a friend, and then wanders aimlessly in a simulation with no one else around to interact with.
- The doctor, whose name I have forgotten by the time I write this, technically has her research team, but none of the members have any distinguishing features and they’re basically as interchangeable as the members of a Greek chorus. At the time I dropped the book, she was just beginning to investigate RJ / AwDae's case.
- Ioan, who is from a plotline set in the future of the other two but had not been connected by the time I DNF'd, only ever speaks to the character that hired them to do this investigation.
The short chapters feel like a hamster wheel after a while, moving speedily along to nowhere. The plotline with Ioan and Dear is especially hurt by this, as even the "why" any of this is happening is lost beneath cryptography, data structures, and Dear being immensely unhelpful in that “never ever give a direct answer” fairy chicanery sort of way (on top of being a story about What Art Means and What It Means to Be An Artist, a genre I have never been particularly fond of.)
By the time AwDae has 'eir first revelation wrt the simulation (pg 123 / 44%), the conclusion ("the call is coming from inside the house") is something that should have been top 3 potential options since 'ey got stuck in it seventy, eighty pages ago. The way 'ey realized it was neat (the contents of books in 'eir simulated childhood home reflecting 'eir memory rather than what they actually were), but the realization is so delayed that it paints AwDae as just kind of a dunce. It's not really a twist, it's a moment of "wait, why didn't you consider that"?
Additionally: for a book by and about people with animal-based alter egos, there’s a noteworthy and disappointing lack of variety when it comes to the virtual world at the center of the story. Nobody rolls up with a custom-built anomalocarid rig, or is chilling as an orangutan, or a manta ray, or a slime mold, or a colony of cordyceps-infested wasps, or a giant crab with a house on its back: your options are order Carnivora and nothing else. We’ve got a fennec fox, a skunk, and a cat. This restraint extends beyond the characters to the environment; the functioning simulations we’re shown are a London pub and an apartment, and the anomalous broken one is a high school and surrounding neighborhood. The fully-immersive VR tech that somehow avoided getting subsumed directly into the Torment Nexus is wholly unweird, in total opposition to the actual real-life examples of VR Chat and Second Life. (My bias towards overwhelming weird detail is in full effect here, so take that as you will.)
There are, I think, four sequels; I don't know how or if any of this changes with later installments.
Note: RJ / Aw Dae uses ey / em pronouns in the book, which makes the narrator in my head sound like The Fonz. This was extremely distracting while reading the book, but is an issue with the reader rather than the text.
Three Imposters, Arthur Machen
A fixup novel of some otherwise unconnected short stories, and while I don’t know how much the frame narrative was doing for me, Machen’s got a richness to his language that I appreciate. It’s fun seeing where HPL picked up some of his bad habits, though saying that makes it seem like I had a worse time than I did. I think Machen is better than Lovecraft at just dropping a “man, look at this inexplicable fucked-up thing” (though there were some clunky ad-hoc explanations in these stories, don’t get me wrong), though he’s never met a paragraph he can’t extend for three to four pages. Much less concerned with building up any sort of world or setting. I didn’t have any strong feelings of “oh damn I want to write something with this”, but I also have a small sample size.
Oomphel in the Sky, H. Beam Piper
I have complicated feelings on this one. On the one hand, I generally have very little patience for “let’s use aliens as an obvious stand-in for indigenous peoples of Earth”; on the other hand, this story takes that and builds it to the lesson of “you know you should probably actually listen to people and meet them where they are.” Specifically in this case, the aliens believe that there’s an immanent apocalypse due to the orbital weirdness of their world mixed with contact with humans, society is beginning to break down in the mass hysteria, and it’s ultimately avoided by taking a bunch of cunning men up on a rocket so they can see things for themselves and then cook up an explanation for why it isn’t the end of the world that functions within their pre-existing worldview.
Piper’s 60s libertarianism is very front and center with this one, and I feel similarly complicated feelings about that. The “practical rugged individualism solves everything” element (which was present in Little Fuzzy and Omnilingual, but is strongest here), is quite pronounced, and while he did get it right about liberalism’s shortcomings vis a vis “it’s all fun and games and kumbaya until you have to actually acknowledge complicated cultural differences that aren’t easily sanded down”, there’s a non-zero amount of complaining about strawmen (he’s got a stand-in university for Berkeley and starts sounding like Hannity every time it’s mentioned). Plus there's the elephant in the room of Piper’s 60s libertarianism playing a sizable role in his suicide. So yeah, complex feelings.
The Sundering Flood, William Morris
DNF 5%
The first (c.1897) fantasy novel to include a map of the secondary world at the front, or so the summaries go. It might be a perfectly fine adventure story (William Morris seems like an interesting fella, old-timey socialist and proponent of the arts-and-crafts movement) but it’s written in some truly unbearable faux-archaic language. No amount of historical curiosity will make me think that “meseemeth” is an acceptable thing to inflict on a reader. The map’s nice, though.
Green Antarctica, D'Valdron
DNF 6%
A novel alt-history / speculative evolution prompt (Antarctica never fully glaciates) undercut at every opportunity by the eye-rolling excesses of performative online edginess. I skipped all the way to the end and can confirm that the incessant torture, rape, cannibalism, bestiality, necrophilia, genocide and assorted other crimes against humanity does not even have the decency to end with “The Aristocrats!”
Also worth mentioning is that this text leans very heavily on both Poe and HPL, and certainly honors the legacy of both by being outrageously racist in that very specific online way of skipping the slurs and going straight to “I've invented an elaborate rational justification for why these dark-skinned people eat babies, isn’t that shocking?”
Come off it, mate. Tsalal deserves better than this shit.
**
Gameable Content Bonus
The Gold Tiberius (City encounter, via Three Imposters)
While passing through an alley towards their destination, the party is startled by the sudden appearance of a man sprinting down a perpendicular cross-alley and throwing a small object in their general direction.
The Gold Tiberius: A large golden coin, resting nearly on top of the bars of a sewer grate.
Face: head in profile of a famous emperor of antiquity.
Reverse: a faun with his euphemistic flute, splashing around in a reed-lined pool beneath the word VICTORIA. Pure gold and in perfect condition.
A bit of historical research (or just having a classically-trained wizard in the party) will identify this as a semi-legendary coin, the only survivor of coins cast to commemorate a grand orgy hosted by the emperor on its face. Vanished from its last known whereabouts over a century prior.
Should the players take the coin, they will soon encounter a young man with glasses while traveling to your intended destination. He's tall, thin, brown-haired, sideburned, and has a nervous look about him. This is an encounter at a distance, or maybe he bumps into a PC; it's something that characters will notice in the moment and forget immediately afterward, and they won't get a chance to speak to him. This is the Young Man With Spectacles that had startled the party in the alley - he is on the run from parties out to kill him for stealing the coin from them, and one of them will, perhaps a couple days later, approach the party trying to suss out the Young Man's whereabouts.
The Imposter will whip up a story about how they need to find the Young Man - a lost family member in trouble, an unexplained occurrence in his presence, financial matters that need resolved. They aren't going to mention the Tiberius at all, but they will cold read the players for all their worth.
From this point it's something that should be tailored to the game at hand, with the following constants:
- The Imposters will kill the Young Man if they find him, and without the PCs intervention they will find him within a week or so.
- The Imposters will not go after the PCs unless they are given reason to believe that the party has the coin; if so, they will try to social engineer it out of the party's hands before resorting to force.
- The Imposters have access to ritual magic
- The coin is worth holy shit GP; taking it to an official assessor will not go without notice and will put the Imposters on the party's trail.
