Bookpost 11

Bookpost Index

Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky

He's done it again, folks! A pitch-perfect sequel, where it builds on both the themes and plot of the first book while expanding the scope AND offering meaningful change to the status quo by the end. That's how you do a fucking sequel. He's building a Star Trek space opera in his own image and I am ride-or-die for it. Unfortunately, being so ride-or-die means that I can't say too much (as you really should read it yourself), but I can say this - over the course of the book, Tchaikovsky manages to play some very standard sci-fi tropes in ways that go well beyond a fresh coat of paint. And the octopi! Not much of a spoiler to say there are octopi in this one, gotta mention the octopi - they are written so well, so simultaneously alien and understandable, empathetic and frustrating, that it has entirely overturned my ideas of how uplift as a concept can and perhaps should work in fiction. It's fucking revolutionary. The man can do a POV from an octopus and present the thought process of an octopus! The brain feels and desires, the arms work automatically to fulfill the directive. I make it sound simple, and it certainly is not.

And as with the first book, Children of Ruin is a very clear declaration that the good ending is possible - not easy, not without incredible difficulty and considerable pain - but it is possible. And that is the kind of meaningful optimism I think we all need in this age.

Something About Eve, James Branch Cabell

DNF 50%

Every Public Domain Day, I scout out the pickings to see what has been freed from the tyranny of Sunny Bono and The House of the Rat. Nothing in particular really caught my eye this year, at least of the lists that I saw circulated, but I remembered an entry in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places of some book featuring a city of wizards and a sphinx with writer's block that that was soon to be liberated from copyright.

Several sessions of flipping through the book later (as I could not remember the city's name, only the image of the sphinx), I was able to track down its source: James Branch Cabell's Something About Eve. Listed in the Dictionary as being published in 1929, I was disappointed to have to wait another two years, and so googled the book for any additional information

Turns out, it was a misprint. It had been published in 1927. Gutenberg had uploaded its ebook version literally the day prior.

So of course I began reading it.

This is a weird goddamn book. It is an immensely frustrating book that shines with brilliance on occasion. it is a very good illustration as to why time has buried Cabell.

Cabell's strain of fantasy is one of near pure farcical allegory, and thus I find that it means nothing. Subtext is and remains a tool for cowards, but Cabell seems to loathe the idea of writing about a place and time with any substance. He has made something less substantial than a dreamscape, for a dream will be content to leave some beautiful images simply because they are beautiful: Cabell sees no value in anything that does not feed back into the Point he is trying to make. He repeats the same subjects again and again. He barely describes things of importance and rambles on about shit that doesn't matter. He will use words that I have never seen before, are never explained, and when I try to google them I end up with a results page of another one of his books - which contains the word only twice, one time being the title! (The word is "Dirghic", used in reference to a mythology - I presume it is some fantastic culture, the one reference I could find that was any help described it as "pre-Ciceronean Latin" so maybe it's fantasy Etruscan?) Some of the wit has remained sharp (if quite groan-inducing), and quite a bit I can't discern if it's even supposed to be a joke.

And what is the point? "Men like chasing the idealized women they construct in their heads and that's pretty silly." It's not even a bad point! That is, indeed, a good point! There's also something in there about spirituality vs materialism but like with the first point it is so ham-fisted and inelegant that it is rendered farcical of itself.

I had wanted to pull some interesting inspirational fuel from it, but the many fantastic lands and mystic portents mean nothing, on the whole, and thus lacking substance I come up empty. What a waste.

Monster vol 1 (Viz Signature Edition), Naoki Urasawa

Monster opens with one of the best ways to make an engaging narrative - have a character with strongly-held ideals get thrown into a situation that directly challenges them. The story is just picking up speed by the point I am at, but it has remained very tense, very tightly plotted, and kept me extremely engaged. Will definitely be continuing. You can tell it's good because the review is very short.

Uzumaki, Junji Ito

I read it months ago and forgot to put it in the prior posts.

Book good. There are many good reasons it is famous - the art, the grotesquery, the pace that starts slow and dreadful and keeps picking up momentum that you can't escape from. You're already in. Cosmic horror gets bandied about a lot nowadays, mostly for stuff that doesn't deserve it. Uzumaki depicts an encounter with the impossible and unnamed, of a power that has no point we can discern. No history, no backstory. Just itself. Just its own existence.

Also it's got that very Shinto thing of "hey this natural feature that has been polluted is now a nexus for Bad Shit" and I am always a fan of that.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

DNF pg 105 / 246 (plus 148 pages of notes and bibliography)

"Ogi Ogas recieved his PhD in computational neuroscience..."

"Sai Gaddamn conducted his doctoral research...on biologically-inspired models of machine learning."

And both of them are excellent supporting arguments for the importance of shoving nerds into lockers at every single opportunity. And / or mandating thorough education in the humanities for everyone.

This book is a fucking wreck. Sloppily collected data, absolute lack of actual science going on, terrible contradictory writing, lots of baseless hypotheses put forth to support some truly wretched essentialist conclusions. Absolutely no space whatsoever given to the social, political, religious, or cultural influences on sex and sexuality. Everything must be biological, but please note how neither of these jackanapes are biologists. Or sociologists. Or psychologists. They have no idea how to talk about people, and thus end up treating people like machines. They presume their data is accurate to reality when they are working with anonymized search engine data and then extrapolating from there on extremely shaky grounds.

And, I will reiterate, they entirely ignore social factors. They cite the Hatfield and Clark research paper where there is an enormous - we're talking like 50% point difference (which, granted, means jack shit because there were only nine participants) between willingness to accept invitations to sex from a stranger. Ogas and Gaddam are convinced, utterly convinced, that the only possible explanation is that men and women must have some innate biological function determining the way they feel desire. And no other factors could possibly apply.

There couldn't possibly be the influence of systematic sexism at play here. Humans are perfectly rational meat machines, right?

(Occam called, he'd like his fucking razor back, because you aren't certainly using it.)

Their conclusions are caricatures, divorced from lived experience or any humanity at all. "Men are like X, women are like Y, and we take it at face value that the porn people search for is a direct representation of how they interact with other people". Major demographics entirely disregarded (Lesbians? fugettabooudem Bi folks? Under the bus. Ace spectrum and demi friendos? Enjoy your new superpower of utter invisibility. Straight dudes who don't like watching hardcore or het women who don't like the dynamics of romance novels? Might as well ask to see Martian bigfoot!)

I know it was 2011 but their choice to quote Louis CK and Joe Rogan is... mildly telling.

Also these dumbasses unironically use the word "alpha" and that was the real breaking point.

Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsay

Reversing the trend of the previous public domain allegorical fantasy, this one is good. It is very much an allegory of the sort-of-gnostic variety, not a narrative, don't expect cause and effect to work as if these are real people.

The book is, in many ways, incomprehensible - but I say that with affection. It is very clearly the work of a man trying to sort out some very Big Ideas of great personal importance, and wonky as it may be I find expressions such as that to be the goal of art. There are moments of episodic profundity or striking image - Lindsay works very well with colors (and not just the famous jale, ulfire, and dolm) and landscapes (well, until the last quarter, which is mostly mountains) and alien life, often in greater vividness than modern sci-fi authors. He had images in his head and needed to share them, and on the whole I think he did very well. The Big Ideas are shared less clearly, but I applaud the attempt. It's art that's fucking weird in ways that don't give a shit about what anyone else thinks, and I'll drink to that.

And for a book from 1920, I find that, while it's got a non-zero amount of old-timey sexism involved, it's less than it could have been, and he gets some bonus points by the inclusion of a character who is not only neither male nor female, but gets neopronouns - ae/aer - In 1920! (He does say that he uses them because no language on earth had the proper form of address, which is hilariously incorrect, but I'll forgive him for not knowing. He was a Scotsman in the early 20th C, we'll grade him on a curve). There's also a point where he mentions that a character's racial prejudices prevented him from seeing something clearly, which is also appreciated. Does help that this is an allegory set on a magical planet far away, difficult to be racist when the entire population of the planet is under 20 people.

Two things entertain me greatly: the use of specific, but entirely inappropriate intervals of time (two minutes is a long time!) and Maskull just saying "Thanks!" instead of the "Thank you" I would expect.

But yeah. I think Lindsay would be a fascinating author to talk shop with over lunch.

Etidorhpa, by John Uri Lloyd

DNF 15%

This book features FOUR PREFACES, followed by a prologue establishing the frame narrative (That the 'author' is one Johannes Llewellyn Llongollyn Drury who entrusted the publication of the account to J.U.L.) Llewellyn meets a strange man who appears out of nowhere, there's a bet or something, strange man disappears for a year, Llewellyn goes to a doctor who spends pages reading excerpts from other books at him all to say "get some exercise". Old Man returns again to say "hey I will now tell you a weird story of my life", and we go into the now THIRD layer of frame narrative, only to get interrupted again as the Old Man recounts a letter he received and we achieve FOUR LEVELS of rambling, senseless, directionless, and utterly dull frame narrative. Lloyd has managed to make a secret brotherhood of alchemists boring.

Leave it to the Victorians to drain any possible excitement out of a story. There's a weird hollow earth story in here somewhere, supposedly, but at 15% of the book I have seen nothing of the sort. Would be a hell of a challenge for editing practice, though.

Some Thoughts About 60 Years in Space

 

[Note from Future Dan from the dark future of 2026: This post was written shortly after 60 Years came out, and isn't really representative of where it's ended up in the three years since - the updates that have happened since I wrote this have radically changed the game and greatly improved it - it's still a mess, but it's a playable mess now and I've pretty significantly changed my tune on the game. So just keep that in mind]

Buckle up folks, we've got a wild ride ahead of us. 

Off Into the Dark Wild Yonder

60 Years in Space is a game prescision-crafted to pander to me, while simultaneously triggering incredible frustration at every opportunity. Here is your white whale, but it is unfortunately dead on arrival.

What is it, you ask? A tabletop adaptation of the notoriously complex board game High Frontier, written by Andrew Doull. It consists of five books at ten bucks a pop:

• 60 Years in Space (Core Rules)
• This Space Intentionally (How to actually play the game. Missions and travel)
• A Facility with Words (Additional travel & combat rules, ecosystem & Species Designer)
• All Errors My Own (Trends in society and technology)
• A Lot of Zeroes (The far future - intersolar missions, planet generation, aliens)

As a work of science fiction and as a source of inspiration, I have many, many good things to say about it. We'll get to those (much) later (like in a different post later), as there is a more pressing matter at hand.

As a tabletop game, it is unfit for purpose. And that's a rough thing to say about something that was a one-man, eight-year project, but despite the fact that I do legitimately love the core idea of this game and many of its components, I can't be handing out passes on what Could Have Been.  

To whit:

• The text arrangement on the cover is...a choice.
• There are no pages devoted to rules summaries or procedures of play in the core book - not a flow chart or bullet list to be found. Directions are located scattershot through the text, and they are often very confusingly worded as to why you are rolling, or on what, or what systems are in play.
• Mission outlines are not included in the core book.
• Key terms are neither bolded nor italicized.
• Reference tables are not numbered.
• Headings and subheadings are not numbered.
  
• Directions are confusingly worded.
• References to other concepts or mechanics will nearly always be made without page reference. Some of these concepts or mechanics will be either actually missing, or so difficult to find that it doesn't matter.
• The index has internal hyperlinks (Good!) There is no way to tell that this is the case unless you mouse over the table and pay attention to your cursor (Not good!)
• The core rules do not contain an itemized procedure of play.
  

While I admit it is not particularly fair to drag a one-man team for an eight year project, these are basic issues here and should not have been an issue even for a one-man formatting job. Not to mention that, if we bop on over to Atomic Rockets and dig around we can find a link to a google doc of the 3rd edition High Frontier rules, compiled by the board game's creator Phil Eklund, which avoids most of these errors and is overall a much better reading experience for it despite the fact that I am missing half the context.

Enough of that. Let's walk through making a crew. The steps here are my doing, the book does not specifically enumerate them.

Step 1: Roll for Space Politics

Space Politics is not your team's politics, but the overall mileau of space at the start of the game. In what is going to become a recurring theme, the table has multiple columns but does not indicate if these columns are meant to be rolled individually, or if the table is supposed to be read across with each row as a single entry. I get 'Red - Authoritarian'; "The space race has effectively been won through military, political or technological superiority - usually through force of arms - and the victor is able to control which colonists are permitted into space."

There is a column for card suits, which is for "randomly generating outlooks" - there is no page number or link to outlooks, explanation for what they are, and a whole lot of white space. I err on the side of caution and read the table in rows, so our suit is Clubs.

Step 2: Mission Control

In which we skip over Chapter 3 (Eras) right top Chapter 4 (Mission control), and find ourselves in the first bad omen. Chapter 3 is all background material - important stuff, mind - common technologies, attitudes, things to remember - for each of the major eras...but those major eras are not numbered. They're named - Baseline, Upported, Colonization, Exoglobalization, Futures, Breakthroughs - but they don't have numbers and they don't include the starting years in the header (ex. Upported starts in 2040, but that's in the body description or at the chart at the end of the chapter.)

Interesting stuff, we will return here, there's good material here especially for Mothership. But it is also in the way of making our crew and that makes me a grumpalumpagus.

Okay, mission control. We get a nice table labeled "Second Wave Mission Control Social Units", where we roll for our what sort of organization will be running our mission. Once again, there is no indication if the table is meant to be read in rows, or each column rolled individually. As with Step 1, I am reading it as rows. There's no roll here,as the recommendation is that we are playing as a National Space Agency, which is politics White (Nationalistic / Conservative), has Spacecraft quality Medium, crew quality High (they have experience in LEO and their crew module is spun at 0.6 G), their Contract Age (not explained here) is 36+3d6 (I get 44), and the mission is science.

Alas, my Green ancoms in space will have to wait for another day.

Now some notes - the explanations for aspects of the Mission Control Social Unit are not provided in the order of the table (giving us Crew Quality first and then Color), and they cut up information that should be put together (ie, there is an elaboration of what colors mean outside of the section with the color heading). Also the important mechanical aspect of having a high-quality crew ("the crew will not suffer Microgravity risks until the crew module is damaged.") is not located in the section headed High Quality Crew. If you are navigating this by headers - an absolute necessity with something this dense - you are fucked. Doomed to miss useful information.

Our White social unit color gives us...

• "White BSUs are religious, nationalistic or family focused organizations"
• "social units are nationalistic, conservative and family oriented and rely on limiting personal freedoms because of their moral beliefs but also in rewarding hard work and limiting the role of the state."

Oh joy. Positively frabjous day. With luck our re-entry capsule will disintegrate.

There is a secondary table for the type of National Space Agency you are, and I get Privatized.

"The national space program has been privatised but still has an implicit government guarantee and monopoly on space travel.

I feel like a mutiny is in order.

I should also mention that the headers for the different types of Mission Control Units are not numbered, and don't contain the color associated with them (if, indeed, there is a specific color associated with each and we weren't supposed to roll for each column)

Skipping the subtables for the other MC types, we move on to Launch Site. There are no tables to determine what country we are, or what non-country we are, or anything else about our organization other than that we are a privatized National Space Agency.

The Launch Site header is located below the table that it is connected to. I end up rolling the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which means my launch corridor is not only complete bullshit and...hrm. Yeah I do not like my options for nationalistic/conservative factions operating out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Next up is Crew Module Design, which splits the tables of Major and Minor Spaceports, despite the Major table having a result that says "roll on the minor table" and the minor spaceports table is absolutely able to fit on the same page as the major table.

Also the Crew Module Design table is not on the same page as the heading.

I roll up...I don't know. It has a Mass of 1 (which is 40 tons of payload), Rad-Hardness of 4, Thruster of 6 * 8 AB 2 (I don't know if that asterisk is mean as a multiplier or a placeholder, the explanation says "thrust * fuel consumption need to enter each burn, with the AB indicating the thruster can afterburn an additional two steps of fuel to increase the thrust by 1." It's also got ISRU 4, which is In-Situ resource utilization, which measures water gathering and resource scouting for building the factories that I keep hearing about but seeing nothing.

There's also a column labeled 'platform', which is additional functions of the module. I get Missile and Raygun. Neither are explained here beyond handwaving at combat applications, and I am referred to the This Space Intentionally supplement (no page number given) or the rules for the High Frontier board game.

Step 3: Other Starting Factions

Now's when it starts getting confusing. To generate other factions, we roll 1d6 for each color not our own, and if the number is equal to era number + 1, so we need to roll a one or a two. I think. I am honestly entirely unsure, because the next heading is "First Wave Crews".

We are, according to the table way up at the beginning of Step 2, a second wave crew. But waves haven't been mentioned before this and what does that mean for era? Are we Baseline, or are we Upported? Back in the Eras chapter it says that Upported contains the tech we need to start playing the game, but if that's the case why is Baseline even mentioned as a starter here, and does that mean that the waves are equivalent to eras? Does this mean that we start at Era 2?

Well, I rolled for Era 1, because you start counting at one. And the only faction I got was Green, who I guess we are on very poor terms due to the space politics roll. Let's jump ahead to page 317 (it's actually page 319) to look at the faction designer.

The faction designer is a thing I don't like.

So. There are three types of factions. Crews of other ships, factions that want to set up colonies, and social factions for everything else. All three get their own waves, which are not bulleted, and they all use different waves. Apparently you can get third-wave crew factions by emailing the author.

There are only 5 major factions allowed total, and only one per color. Makes sense, it's a crowded game. Everyone else is minor, they build infrastructure but don't have their own dedicated map markers (i think?)

Factions have Origin Stories, Doctrines, Ranks (we haven't even touched on ranks yet so I have no idea how this applies to anything else), an org chart, upgrades (found in an entirely different chapter, but at least it has a page number), encounters, faction missions...and one sample.

Yeah you're making up all that save the type of doctrines they faction has (and even then it says that they'll usually have custom versions), generic rank benefits, and a generic Color-based org chart. There's a list of potential colonist factions in the appendix, which is better than nothing, but it is not mentioned in the Faction Designer. You are on your own.

There's some crunch about colony factions but at this point I am irritated enough that I am ignoring them. We're still making characters, remember?

Step (Checks Notes) 4: Crew Demographics

The fluff for the crew comes before the mechanics. Fair enough.

First heading is "Mission Control Nationalities",and is followed by this paragraph:

"When determining crew demographics, some mission controls will restrict the possible nations that a crew member can come from. If this is the case, roll 2D6 for each crew member. If this number is less than or equal to the Nationality Mix Number for the Mission Control, then roll for the crew’s nationality normally; if it is greater the crew member will have the same nationality as the nationality of the Mission Control. Factions without a Nationality Mix Number use 2 if the faction is Red, 3 if White, 4 if Green, 5 if Purple and 6 if Orange."

But here's the thing. That Nationality Mix Number doesn't exist. It pings three time in the 352-page pdf, and all three of them are in this paragraph. If my faction is White, does this mean my number is 3? Or does it change because I have a National Space Agency? Is the crew nationality table where I actually choose what National Space Agency I am working with? or was that listed elsewhere? Shouldn't the launch site be determined after I figure out which country is involved? Cause it would be really weird to end up as Venezuela and be launching out of Baikonur which is objectively worse than French Guiana let alone halfway around the globe.

I didn't end up as Venezuela, because this is the part where I quit. There are tables for ethnicity, language, pronouns, callsigns, and while on their own they might be worth playing with in the future, for the right now I am stuck with hundreds of pages of directions that don't make sense, mechanics that either don't exist or are very well hidden, and no remaining patience.

Actually you know what, I will roll up a crewmember severed from the rest, just to show you what you can get. Next table is nationality.

"Roll 1D6 twice; except roll 2 is 2D6 on roll 1 result of 5. If roll 1 is a 6, roll 1D6. Use a result of 3-6 as roll 1 on the Colonist Nationalities table on the following page. Otherwise roll 3D6 on this table."

I rolled boxcars and I cannot parse this sentence.

(Deep reading has lead me to this: roll 1d6; if result is 1-4, roll 1d6. If roll is 5, roll 2d6. If roll 1 is 6, roll 1d6, and if that roll is 1-2, roll 3d6; if it is 3-6, use that result as Roll 1 on the colonist nationality table.

(Nested tables, gods above and below)

So Roll 1 is 6, then roll 2 is 6, which means that I go over to the colonist table, go down to 6, and then roll 2d6 to get my actual nationality. 6 + 3 = 9 so my crew member is from Iran.

Sweet baby Ganesha on his cute little rat

I go to the Ethnicity and Language table, roll 2d6 on the Iran listing. Get a 5, so I am Azeri (Azerbajani) and I speak...I don't know, what is this notation?

Ethnic language >= 2. Persian <= 3.

I rolled a 4, so... I think I speak Azerbaijani? Do these ranges overlap? Is it "greater than or equal to 2 and less than or equal to 3",  or the reverse?

Gender table I roll an 8, which is Female. Public pronouns apparently change with every Era influenced by space politics, and if this is indeed Era 2, I suppose I should roll. 1d6 minus 1 for Red,and I get a one, so now zero, and...

"I/Me/My/Mine/Myself, You/You/Your/Your/Yourself and We/Us/Our/Ours/Ourselves merge the first and third person so they are no longer distinguished, suggesting a partial or complete erasure of individual accountability, replace by collective responsibility and identity."

While this, grammatically and socially, sounds like an absolute nightmare, it is our first example of something I actually do like in this book, which is that when interesting cultural things crop up, they tend to be very interesting indeed. This is the public pronoun table, not the personal one, remember.

Though I still find it awkward how all of these are based on English when there are so many languages (including this obscure one called Mandarin Chinese) that get by with something much simpler. I guess it's justified by everyone speaking English as well as their normal language? Or they're more just examples to indicate attidues. I like that option best.

(The gender table is more of a sex table on the whole, but it has a solid selection of options including transhuman ones for later eras. Though the explanations of the results are neither in the order of the table nor in alphabetical order.)

My callsign is Rotor Excellence - PCs only get callsigns (because name tables for all those background options would be extremely cumbersome. I think this is a good move.)

 

Final Thoughts

I'm calling it here, because I ain't making three more of these chuckleheads. I did make an interesting character and the hints at the setting have the imagination running, so it certainly succeeds in that respect. There's a solid section on safety tools at the beginning of each book.  It's all the surroundings that's choking out the brilliance that is here.

There's skills and there's assets and upgrades and risks and infrastructure and travel and other stuff, four entire books that I haven't touched on, but I'm not going to review that. I will certainly write more posts about it, but the review is over, for one reason more egregious than this

There is no rules summary nor procedure of play section in the core book. Indeed, if you want to get an idea of how to actually play the game, you need to piece together a bunch of disparate fragments found across multiple books and that is fucking unreasonable. I am not psychic. I am not immortal. I am not 17 with unlimited time and low standards. If one is writing a game, and the game is intended to be played, it must be written reader-first. Especially when dealing with complex information. Especially when trying to teach complex information. I want to play the game: Let me play the game.

I brought this up in the itch page discussions, and it wasn't productive. I was told that the game both "assumes you have bought and played the board game" and "It is entirely standalone", and that the basic information necessary for play is not even contained in the core rules (it's all in This Space Intentionally, a fact that is exhausting. There is indeed a numerical list of steps to take, and it is not in the core rules), but the fact that the author of the game can pull an entire 180 in the space of two posts wrt the necessity of outside reference material has, if nothing else, confirmed that "standalone" no longer means anything.

Sigh.

There is, I swear, a whole lot of good in 60 Years in Space - it's just that none of it is actually the game. The flavor, especially in All Errors My Own and A Lot of Zeroes is fan-fucking-tastic. And I say that with total sincerity, it's some of the best sci-fi idea work I've seen in RPGs. Steal it for Mothership or Solarcrawl or something else. Or just read it, it's a good time.

But as a game? As a system of rules intended to be read and learned and taught and used at a table to play a game of imagination?

Unfit for purpose. Needs an editor with a keen eye, a red pen, and a hacksaw - at minimum.

Next post I write about it will be positives, because I ain't letting these random tables go to waste. Paid 50 bucks for these books and honestly despite the disaster of the game's presentation.

And it doesn't even have the benefit of Creative Commons.

12 Cultural Relics of the Post-Event Age

The After the End mod for Crusader Kings remains a favorite of mine, and a new version just came out. Instead of playing it (as I do not have CK3 and find those games more fun in concept than in direct experience) I have been digging through the localization files and reading up on all the fun post-apocalyptic religions. I might do something with those later: for now, the result is this.


1. A narrative hagiography of an Old World folk saint; the subject of the text, Saint Heboyé, is a cambion born of a demon father and a human mother, who wanders the world performing many miracles (typically defeating monsters, performing exorcisms, and providing aid to the common folk). Most famously, he is said to have been instrumental in the defeat of a seven-headed dragon and made a journey into Hell for the purpose of releasing souls trapped there. The illustrations in the source codex are striking, their use of color and shadow is rarely well-replicated by other scribes.

2. The common folk revere a panoply of tutelary spirits called poh-geman - brightly colored, simply drawn animals and other more exotic beings, invoked as protectors and spiritual companions of children and the household. They are believed to increase in power when gathered together, and thus it is common to amass large collections of icons, medals, especially in regions where Old World artifacts are still easily found.

3. The Saga of the Wars of the Firmament are a series of oral and written traditions detailing an ancient war and the cosmic conflict that drives it. The heavens have been thrown out of alignment by human sages confusing the powers of light and dark for good and evil, and the resulting imbalance leads to an all-consuming war that lasts for generations. While the main storyline follows the family tree of the Walk-the-Sky Clan, dozens to hundreds of narratives have been dedicated to minor or side characters. It is expected that any decent orator will focus their telling according to their preferences, revealing aspects of the wars in new ways.

4. The gongfarmer brothers Marius and Aloysius are extremely popular stock characters in comedic plays. Most famously they rescue the Princess Persicia of Amanita and her handmaid Bellis from the clutches of the Tarrasque, and are accompanied by a rotating cast of secondary characters: Asinus Conagus the great ape, Bufo the Amanitine majordomo, Catena and Séamus the warriors, and the rival gongfarmers Virius and Valerius.

5. In a tiny village in the hills, it is customary to greet guests with a plate of steamed pork dumplings and the phrase "It is my hope that this meal will not be forgotten."

6. A gorgeously illuminated and perfectly transcribed manuscript of _The Last Unicorn_. Not a period is out of place. Unfortunately, a long period of unpopularity for Old World Nglesh texts has led to the book meant that no copies were made for several generations, and now the book is now so old that it's uncertain if it can survive the copying process.

7. The mystery cult has been appearing in the cities around the Great Lakes in recent years. They wear black robes, black masks, wield swords with no tip, and wear no tunics no matter the chill. They claim to be a penitent order, here to expunge sins from those who submit themselves to their practices. They hold their holy text in extremely high regard, and spend significant time in analyzing it. They are rivals to a school of mendicant knights, who worship the sun and aid those in need.

8. Saint Ripli's hagiography is a simple one; a common laborer, she was shipwrecked on an island with a company of soldiers. Finding a destroyed village, she learns from the single survivor (an orphaned child) that a demon stalks the island. Most of the soldiers are killed by the monster, but Ripli is able to injure it with fire before performing the exorcism that casts it into the outer darkness. Her cult has drawn recent controversy after refusing to comply with decanonization of their patroness (the St. Louis papacy has declared that, as Ripli did not actually call upon any divine aid, she does not classify as eligible for sainthood.)

9. A vast, amorphous, syncretic collection of deities, each representing one or more fundamental Powers of the world and demonstrating mastery of those phenomena. In traditional stories, each of these gods has a human form and name that they use while living among mortals, taking on their epithets only when exercising their Power. Exist in many loosely-defined pantheons and complicated family trees, with the three most popular being the Gods of Justice, the Marvelous Gods, and the Once-Men. Constantly warring against each other and rival villain-gods.

10. Pilgrims from certain rural communities will travel on foot to the center of the Yellowstone Eruption Zone (called "Murder" by this particular folkway). Groups are always nine in number (an auspicious number) and the pilgrimage itself is referred simply as "Going and Returning. If possible, a ring will be thrown into the caldera - symbolizing the breaking of one's oath sworn to the Lord of Worldly Evils.

11. An executable program titled "Dwarf Fortress v1.11" resides on the reliquary computer at St.Brendan's abbey, and it has puzzled the monks there for decades. It is believed to be a complex spiritual practice or meditation aid, wherein one takes the role of a god caring for an uncooperative people. God willing, the monastery's second windmill will be completed soon and the expanded electricity budget will allow the reliquarists more time to unravel its mysteries.

12. Belief in beings from other worlds is commonplace and the source of many cultic practices. It is a widespread claim that these godlike beings arrived in "flying chariots like silver wheels" to witness the wonders of the Old World and pay homage to the great works of the ancestors.

MSF: Kara Koren and the East

To the inhabitants of the Hespermont, everything east of the Magelands tends to blend together. The great plains of Kara Koren, with their herds of megafauna and bison-riding nomads, are treated as a distant monolith; simplified out of practicality in the common fate of far-away things.

But of course, Kara Koren and the eastern lands are just as diverse as their western neighbors, and they shall be our subject today.

(This post is built off of this old setting I had written some time ago. Not initially MSF, but it was easily integrated.)

 

The Lands Under the Sky

In the west, Kara Koren borders the Magelands and the Eostremont. To the east its boundary is the Brown River, past which is Ghan. To the south it touches the Thermodon Plains, the Blackwine Sea, the Heartlands, the Empty Quarter, and the uppermost foothills of the Tiger's Spine. To the north there is the great tundra of Vaal Gahn and the lands of the Udoretz, and further still there are ever-frozen Dhuam and the nameless floes at the crown of the world.

It is singular in neither geography nor climate (possessing in turn steppe, savanna, desert, taiga, forest, riverlands and hill country), but on the whole it is vast and flat. Large cities are found mostly in the Twin Lakes region, along the major rivers, or near those aquifers that can support them. Political alliances and confederations are fluid, often subtlety defined, and guided by the ease and necessity of movement (and thus to the outside world, often either coalesced into generalities, or pulled out of their surrounding contexts and portrayed as more independent than they are. The Twin Lakes and the Hollowhorn are still considered the representative polities of Kara Koren, as leftovers from when the Second Empire extended the status of foreign state to those two parties alone and lumped the rest into barbarians. The malice might have faded, but the issues of categorization's influence on imagination remain)

Regardless. Listed here are some places of note from across Kara Koren.

• The Twin Lakes - Called Dawn and Dusk, the Twin Lakes and the rivers that feed them have served as the basis for the larger sedentary civilizations of Kara Koren for millennia. Presently, the leading confederation is the Belted Hunter Tent (traditionally, chiefs would gather in tents with the stars painted on the interior roof for everyday tasks, and this has carried over to modern governmental practices.)

• The Hollowhorn - A long-dead volcano rising out of the steppe like a sleeping god. A sacred place for all the peoples of Kara Koren, the villages at its base are appointed neutral territory where wars might be ended and differences settled. Here the great Greybeards hold council and the wisest among them are permitted to climb the mountain; few even among those might descend into the dark of the lava tubes and visit with the Last King as he sleeps and dreams.

• Grand Zaratan - A turtle 200 cubits across trawls a lazy circuit around Dusk Lake. He is more ancient by far than any of the peoples now living there, and even the sages who lead his cult say that he descended into misty senescence long ago. A tiny temple is built on his back, and fishermen will pull their boats beside him and light a candle for his intercession.

• The City of Teeth - An ancient walled city with a deep aquifer. Has been used as a trade stop for centuries by travelers on the Long Road. But the wells and caravanserai are all outside the walls, and the traders avoid its ivory-tiled gates even as they hang open. Those who enter the city, naturally, do not come out.

• The Endless River - A river that flows in a irregular loop some fifty miles across, having neither source nor mouth.

• Ödtyqat - An immense canyon system just north of the Heartlands, carved by wind and water over millions of years. Famed for its incredible beauty. Its genius locii, the King of Many-Colored Stone, permits only a few visitors to make the trek down into the bottom of the canyon.

• The Graveyard of the Great-Grandmothers - The oldest and most sacred resting place of the steppe mammoths. Humans are not permitted within miles of the site, an edict enforced by a seven-generation curse. Folktales persist of the Oliphaunt Sage having once paid his respects there.

• The City of 1000 Skulls - For reasons long forgotten, the cliffs and boulders of these hills along the river have been carved over generations into vast skulls. Many are large enough to serve as houses, though the inhabitants have a tendency to carve whatever stones are on hand, down to tiny pebbles, as further decoration.

• The Temple-Mound at Annu-dath - A prehistoric burial complex, covered over with soil and built atop of again and again until it became an artificial hill visible for many miles around. Many long millennia after the complex was sealed, the stone doors opened of their own accord and revealed a pallid, blind creature not entirely alive, that stood in the shade of the gate and declared "All are welcome; come and see". It beckoned to the darkness beyond. Word has spread far and wide. The depths are calling, and their call has been answered. Pilgrims of the blade and torch, delvers and the desperate, trudge towards Annu-dath. There is a command in their souls to go deeper.

• The Sage's Tree - A gnarled desert pine along the roadside, held by tradition to have learned the secrets of the universe from the sage Walks-on-Shells. Whatever secrets it learned were clearly not the ones it was seeking, as it's likely the most bad-tempered tree in the world. A right bastard, that tree. My cousin saw it clothesline a camel once, just because it could.

• The Cornflower Bond - A confederation of maize-barons and water-guilds on the Long Road. Relatively new on the scene, having formed after the War.

• The Circadean Papacy - From the carapace-encrusted basilica in Ris Tabol, the pontifex chitinous leads the small and zealous flock in worship of the enormous insects that cyclically rise from the earth. A persistent (if generally harmless) irritation to the Thermodon amazons who fight the fucking things.

• The Nameless Towers - Dozens of square-based towers built of seamless stone. The builders are unknown, as are the inhabitants, if any; wizards of antiquity or monsters, as people presume. There are no doors, save the images of them painted on the east-facing sides in fading blue.

• The Orrery of Ksanesklas - A hilltop observatory commissioned by the great warlord in his waning years. It has been maintained and expanded in the centuries since, and currently houses one of the largest telescopes in the world as well as an animated model of the known solar system, each planet rendered in beautiful detail on stone spheres the size of an ox.

• The Laughing Nation - We cannot stop here. This is clown country.

• The Salt-Bone Sea - An inland sea that dried up long ago. Salt-mining settlements pepper its margins, and occasionally some mad-brave souls will mount and expedition to the islands of the interior. Those that come back often return with carts full of fossils.

• The Burning Place - A mine that caught on fire and simply hasn't stopped burning.

• Land of the Bison Lord - You will know him by his silver mane and enormous horns, and if you are wise you shall pay him homage and back away slowly.

• Sarraganda, City of Tents - A migratory city, a superfluid state. Caravans come and go, nomad tribes might stay for a season or so, the sea of bright-bannered tents crawls slowly across the open grasslands.

 

The Twin Lakes Civilization

Little of this civilization has survived to the modern day: Oral histories from the peoples of the region have thus far lined up with what archaeology has been able to confirm: the Twin Lakes Civilization was a sedentary magocracy, its founder was a sorcerer king most commonly known as Takal Nûn, it collapsed due to unknown reasons (sudden climate shift, mass famine, and rebellion being the most common theories), and that those peoples who migrated into the region after its collapse destroyed many of the remaining traces (considering the remnants to be cursed in and of themselves.

There are ruins to be found through the Great Lakes region and its river system, a few remaining irrigation canals, and some submerged structures beneath the Dawn Twin. From these remains, it is believed that the TLC organized itself around palace complexes - fortified civic and economic hubs with linked agricultural communities surrounding them. The largest palace complex is found underneath the waters of Dawn Twin, and a dozen other major sites have been identified - the largest being those located on the shores of both lakes or at river / canal junctions further abroad.

The TLC had developed writing by the time of its collapse, but the script remains undeciphered. Inscriptions were especially targeted during the post-collapse period, and the TLC language did not appear to have any link to the language families that now inhabit the region. The scripts currently used likewise have no connection.  

Those artifacts that survive are primarily worked stone, bone, or clay. Metallurgy of gold, silver, tin, lead, copper and bronze are relatively common, with bronze implements mostly limited to weaponry and orichalcum devoted to wizardry. Rarest of all and exclusive to weaponry is a brittle crimson metal with veins of black that, when specially treated by magical craft, was equivalent to steel. Shards of this material would be embedded in bone clubs as a weapon for elite warriors, commanders, and government officials.

It is hypothesized, but not yet confirmed, that the Twin Lakes Civilization experienced at least a partial Hell Emergence Event. At the very least there existed a sizable sorcerous class skilled both in biological shaping and the building of devices, which might have lead to widespread industrialization had the TLC not collapsed.

The sorcerous artifacts and arcane detritus of the TLC have traditionally attracted the attention of wizards, who in turn bring their own sorcerous artifacts and leave behind their own arcane detritus, and this (plus some exaggeration in the telling and focus on novelty) is much of why the lands of Kara Koren seem to have so much strangeness within them.

 

Peoples of the East

To the peoples of the west and south, everyone who lives in Kara Koren is buruq. This is technically true, if only because "ruq" is the root word for "person" in the most widespread plains language family; "buruq" is used as an endonym primarily in the Central and Great Lakes regions (the major cultural contacts with the Eostremont and Second Empire), but its wide spread does not mean it is exclusive.

As anywhere, there is great diversity among the peoples of Kara Koren in appearance. Most commonly their skin is brown or reddish-brown, with the shades lighter in the west and darker in the east, and their hair dark and tightly curled. Light hair is uncommon but not unheard of, and more often found in the west near the Eostremont peoples. Descended as they are from neandr and anakim peoples in the distant past they trend towards both height and broadness (enough so that peoples of slim stature are noteworthy for the difference), though they are not so large as the amazons or the wudu-wasa.

There are eleven (generally) agreed-upon culture-regions across Kara Koren, each consisting of many smaller culture-groups. They are very loose categories and typically only used by anthropologists from elsewhere (as the inhabitants of Kara Koren, having more pertinent knowledge of things, divide cultures up according to more locally-relevant criteria). References to "Korenic peoples" should not be used as indications of a singular Pan-Korenic culture: instead, it is used here in accordance with scholars of the region to refer to groups that either have a representative seat at the Law-Calling, have a common institution of Hollowhorn pilgrimage, or practice folkways according to the Horag Chat, the Way of the Great-Grandmother Mammoth, or the Practices of Greater Sky.

But the eleven will do for now. They are:

• Western - Abutting the Magelands, the Eostermeont, and the northern Blackwine Sea. Groups from these regions will typically demonstrate a blend of cultural traits from their neighbors. Mostly settled agriculturalists.
• Central - Those groups that inhabit the central plains of Kara Koren. Most are seminomadic or fully nomadic, living off and with the great variety of megafauna that call the plains home. The common image of a buruq nomad riding atop a bison in his colorful quilted coat and great furry hat is specifically from the peoples of this region.
• Great Lakes - The largest group of sedentary peoples in Kara Koren. The descendants of those who migrated to the region after the collapse of the TLC, merging with the descendants of the remaining survivor-underclasses who remained.
• Southern - Those groups that abut the Heartland. Still carry a certain amount of artistic / architectural / linguistic influence from the Second Empire.
• Southeastern - Those isolated groups that live in the deserts that border of the Empty Quarter. Generally have little overlap with the other regions.
• Mountain Peoples - Confusingly used for two culture families with no connection to each other. The first being those groups that live on and around the sacred mountain, which are the smallest by population. The second being the Korenic inhabitants of the northernmost reaches of the Tiger's Spine.
• Northwestern Taigic - A region inhabited primarily by the easternmost Dayrdani peoples.
• Taigic - General category for all peoples who live south of Vaal Gahn, east of the Dayrdani lands,
• The Long Road - The inhabitants of the city-states that dot the east-west trade network.
• River Peoples - Those groups that live along the Brown River or one of its tributaries. Has become generalized to include most groups that live east of the Great Lakes watershed.
• Isolates - Culture groups with no apparent connection to any of their neighbors; if there are any connections to other groups, they will be greatly diverged in place, time, or both. Nomadic members of this group are occasionally split into their own category

Finally, a brief list of some isolate peoples.

The Hairy Men - They live beneath the hills in tangled earthen warrens. Men and women alike are covered in soft, deep brown hair from head to toe, and they go about unclothed otherwise. Their lives are, as much as can be observed, peaceful and simple - their inner depths remain well-hidden from the outside world.

The Pale Men - Stocky build, pallid skin, hair black and thin. They came from the far north, seeking to introduce civilization to the southern peoples. Their cities of black metal are like cathedrals, like hives of insects, smokestacks vomiting into the sky. The gates are open - come inside, and they will teach you their ways. They are humorless at large, and do not care for the gods or stories of gods.

Enemies of the Pale Men - None know who or what drove them south from their bitter forests; the Pale Men say nothing on the matter, and so we are left with hearsay and supposition.

The Bloody Men - Their bodies are striped with the scars, scabs, gouges of self-flagellation. They strike with violence at all other peoples of Kara Koren, demanding tribute - gold, herds, worked metal, slaves. They have no cities nor villages, nor even domesticated animals - they ride zoanthropes the size of horses, lank-haired man-things with limbs like that of a spider and jutting jaws filled with too many teeth and hands with cracked, blackened claws and yellowing, rheumy eyes. 

The Burned-House People - Perhaps once a generation or so, they will set fire to their villages and move onward, carrying only what they might take with them on their backs. When asked why they do this, the answer has always been "it is to set things right" - though in their dialect, the act of "setting things right" derives from the same root as "exorcism" in neighboring languages. 

Yamnaya - A people that live in the place called Eight Pits, located in the north-west of Kara Koren (that is, a little ways northeast of the Magelands). The pits are smooth-walled and seem bottomless, though their sides are pockmarked with hidden chambers and secretive passages carved out over generations. it is said that in the distant past the Yamnaya emerged from the pits to the surface world; now it seems that they have begun the gradual process of returning to their subterrene complexes.

Pan-De - The baluchitherium is the greatest of all Kara Koren's beasts, and it is the Pan-De alone who have learned how to domesticate the king of all creatures upon the earth. They are a nomadic people by necessity, following the migration paths of the great creatures they tend. They are merchants, mail-carriers, bearers of news both good and ill. If you find yourself in need to translation or safe passage, seek out the Pan-De; they might provide both to you.

Kûnnurat - Takal Nûn's empire is the earliest civilization known to practice the guided breeding of slave-soldiers (a practice which wizards have returned to with depressing regularity). All of Takal Nûn's warrior castes either died during the collapse of his empire or further mutated into more divergent forms (both outcomes from the sudden loss of the sustaining enchantments that kept them bound and shaped), save the Kûnnurat. The ages have softened many of the tendencies that they were once engineered with, and cultural outlets have handled the rest (diverting the advanced aggression and musth periods of the men into grand sport-wars fought amongst their clans).  

Beast Men - They wear the heads of goats and the hides of dogs and have forgone the speech of man entirely. They kindle no fires and build no houses. There are no women among their number, nor children, nor do they sire by rapine: Instead, it is said that they couple with demons of the earth during the dry season, and new among their number rise full-grown from the mud come the rains.

Men of the Moon - Silver-skinned and hairless, taller than a strong man by half. Their eyes are like obsidian, their voices are like flutes. They are accompanied by short, four-eyed men swaddled in extravagant silks.

Those Who Are Not Men - Seen only ever at a distance in the twilight: dark forms thrice as tall as an ordinary man, standing in groups of two or three, their eyes like the last embers of the sun. That is all that can be said.

MSF: Growing Up in The Hespermont

"The first breath ignites the soul. Hear the infant's war cry against this unjust world!"

The path through life is a thing of infinite fractal complexity, and anyone who says there is only one means of traversal between birth and death is a fool. And so this is only a general summary of one corner of the world, but it will suffice for our purposes now. I will be referencing Pen & Tam and their lives throughout.

Birth

You arrive in the world in the typical manner - screaming your lungs out. This will be at home, under the watchful eye and careful hands of the local midwife or witch. The latter will be able to provide more intensive care and is called in to assist with more difficult births (a caesarean section is called a witch's door for this reason). Thanks to thousands of years of refinement in the midwife's craft, complications are rare and mortality for both infant and mother is low.

The first name you'll be given is a temporary one - something intimidating, ugly or unpleasant, so as to scare away any demons that might be lurking around the home. Tam's birthname was "She Bites Off Fingers" and Bo's was "Rotting Meat Heavy With Maggots", for example; Pen never got one, as the practice isn't held in Pelai and she was several months old when she was adopted.

Naming

Seven days after you're born, you'll have your naming ceremony. This will be held either at home, the local church, or at the town lodge, and will be presided over by the community priest and one of the local folkway practitioners. Naming marks your initiation into the Great Dûn (the manudûn; the kinship community encompassing of all humanity) and the Compact (the agreement between humanity and the Folk). Naming records are typically held in the parish of your birth with a copy kept and at the county seat, though in more remote rural areas they will be hard to come by (as we saw with Maggie).

There is typically a large party in celebration.

Childhood

Your early years will be spent under the watchful eyes of a network of parents, grandparents, extended family and family friends. Multigenerational households are common, and it's expected that at least one of the children (and sometimes more) will take on the home and care for their aging parents. It is common to find elephants employed in childcare (at least, when there are elephants around), as they are infinitely patient, good at leading herds, and forget nothing (We see a glimpse of this with Pen and Tam, where there is reference of Waterseeker bringing a band of children around for storytime).

Schooling - Even in rural regions it's an expected thing for everyone to have some basic literacy and numbers. Schooling is not nearly as rigid or formal as what we are put through here in our own world: the teaching-storytelling tradition of the Hespermont is extremely robust and so those who never set foot inside a schoolhouse will still find themselves on a solid foundation. Generally, pedagogy focuses on helping students understand the connections among aspects of the world, and views such knowledge as holistic instead of a series of differentiated subjects - to understand the history of a place you need to know the people of a place, the soil and the spirits and the water and the plants, and the care of it all. And to understand any of those topics, there is even more to learn.

Youth

At 11 or 12 or so, you are considered a youth - no longer a child, but not yet officially an adult. It is a time of greater responsibility and you'll undergo two major changes in your life.

First will be the official beginning of your apprenticeship - while you've likely helped out with the family trade before, this is when you are officially taken on in training, whether by your parents or by a mentor. The actual specifics of an apprenticeship vary with the trade, but whatever the field this is a period for developing skills and knowledge.

Secondly, you will be able to accompany a parent or other adult family member to meetings of the local lodge. You won't have an official vote, but you do get to participate in the discussion and you may serve as a representative for your family if no one else is available.

(Additionally, those who feel the call of Tongsi and wish to change their bodies may present themselves at the temple to begin the process.)

There is typically a large party in celebration. Your apprenticeship and schooling will continue, sufficiently blurred so that there is no real border between, for the next several years. 

Elevation

As the beginning of your apprenticeship marked the transition between childhood and youth, its end now marks the arrival of adulthood. You will be charged with completing a sizable task, chosen by your mentor(s) according to what is deemed a fitting challenge for your skills (though you will generally have a hand in proposing it). For those in crafting trades this will be a capstone project, for those in other fields it will generally be working without any outside aid or guidance. The task doesn't have to be completed alone, though if it is a multiperson job you will have to take a leadership & planning role.

At completion, there will be a final appeal in front of a board of judges (your mentor, plus other adults from the community who can properly judge both you and your work.) You will make your case and answer their questions to satisfaction, you're sworn in as an adult. A party commences.

(It is possible, though uncommon to fail at the task, in which case you can re-apply after half a year to a year. The task might be repeated, a new one might be done, or the original might be continued and improved. The task itself, and even its outcome, is of lesser importance to how you conduct yourself during it - if your capstone work is a failure, but you show that you understood how the failure happened during the appeal, you will be judged satisfactorily.)

(I don't know what Tam did just yet, but Pen went out and hung out with the spirits in the deep woods.)

Adulthood

As an adult you may now form or join a household, marry, and have a vote in the proceedings of your local lodge. But before all of that, you are probably going to spend some time traveling around. These are the wandering years, a time to see more of the world and find your place within it.

There are generally three ways to go about it

First is the simplest - even if only for a summer, you pack a bag, take the cash your parents saved up for you, and head out. Sometimes by yourself, sometimes with a friend or two. It's often used as an opportunity to go on pilgrimage to the shrine or temple of a god you favor, or just to do a bit of touring. You'll do odd jobs to support yourself on the trip (and thus often find yourself in the company of the hobaretori

For those with a trade to practice, it's expected that you'll go and learn from masters out in the field and practice your trade on your own.

The third way is through enrollment in a university. University education is highly specialized and often tied into magical arts (not full wizardry, but certainly beyond what most people practice), and contains the least amount of travel (though most programs will involve field study of some sort).

(Pen did a pilgrimage plus some folk-work field practice, Tam did a program on wizarding studies at the university in Bensael.)

Marriage

Marriage in the Hespermont is an incredibly complex topic, and in trying to write this section I find myself diverging almost immediately into discussions of tax collection, inheritance law, views on sexuality, and religious traditions. I will save all that for an upcoming post on social worldbuilding, and focus here (briefly) on the interpersonal aspects.

Marriage in the Hespermont does not have much of an economic or legal role (more on why in the forthcoming post), and is instead nearly entirely geared towards the realms of the personal, social, and spiritual.

On the personal level, it's simple as it tends to be; human beings long for emotional and physical intimacy and build ways to celebrate that on a broader social scale.

On the social level, its a function of family / clan / tribal dynamics - these things were vital in the past and are still very important in the modern day. Marriages form and strengthen alliances between groups, and increase understanding between them (exogamy has traditionally been common for this very reason - it's practical to be on good terms with the clan over the hill when the swine-things start attacking.)

On the spiritual level, marriage is tied to the gods; those getting married are assuming the mantle of the gods (usually Lu and Tubalkhan, but there are many different patrons available for those who are spiritually drawn to different dynamics) To act like the gods is a core part of the worship of the gods, and so marriage is part of this.

There's always a party. Folks in the Hespermont love having parties. 

**

These are the first four age-grades of your life - infancy, childhood, youth, adulthood. When your children have themselves grown to adulthood, you will be an elder, and when their children are grown you will be among the great elders.

Book Review Special: Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart

Bookpost Index 

This was originally just going to be one of my bookpost shotgun reviews, but it swiftly became apparent that I had a lot of things to say about this frustrating, aggravating, obnoxious book.

Innana Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

trans. Betty De Shong Meador
DNF 107/191

The author opens the book with a description of a prophetic dream. A prophetic dream of Meador's, not Enheduanna. This was the first warning. It gets worse.

For those unaware: Enheduanna is, to the best of current historical knowledge, the earliest named author in human history (There's some dissent on this point. For cleanlinesses' sake I will be sticking with the attestation being accurate). She was the daughter of Sargon, high priestess of the moon god Nanna in the city of Ur, and lived in the mid 2200s BCE. She wrote dozens of hymns (that we know about), all widely circulated throughout the empire and copied down regularly by temple scribes. More known nowadays are her devotional poems to the goddess Inanna, found under the titles Inanna and Ebih the Hymn to Inanna, and The Exaltation of Inanna.

Betty De Shong Meador is a second-wave feminist and a self-described "Jungian Analyst". She is not a historian, nor an archaeologist, nor an anthropologist. And it shows (oh, does it show). She couches the works of Enheduanna (a more skilled writer by far) in her own interpretive brackets, spending over half the book giving extremely questionable historical context and following it up by placing the lens of a second-wave feminist writing in 2000 over the works of a temple priestess / government official / daughter of Sargon McMotherfucking of Akkad who lived over 4000 years earlier. It is both aggravating and embarrassing: Meador will bend the text over backwards to support her narrative of "once there was idealized matriarchal stone-age one-with-nature goddess worship but then patriarchy happened and Enheduanna's hymns to Inanna are representative of her personally rebellion against the patriarchy" and I will direct readers two sentences back to the part where I mention that Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon "King of War Crimes" of Akkad, and was appointed to her office by her father, and whose work was widely distributed and copied en masse throughout the empire and for centuries afterward. Enheduanna was many things, many of them cool and many of them impressive, but a revolutionary against The Man is not one of them.

In light of this, Meador's translation of the poems feels incredibly shaky. Every artist comes into a work with an intention to fulfill, and Meador is at the very least upfront that she has taken liberties with the source text, but her attached commentary and its authoritative tone remove any benefit of the doubt that might have been achieved.

Example: In her brief translation of Dumizid-Inanna P, Meador uses "peg" instead of "plough", which is enlightening: few are the people with the wrong-headedness necessary to remove the agricultural metaphors from Sumerian erotic poetry (spoilers: it is all farming metaphors, because it's Sumerian erotic poetry, they loved fucking and they fucking loved farming. Lines 18-27 of Segment C are entirely focused on making butter-churning as horny as humanly possible.)

In less damning but still disappointing news, she elected to translate the chorus of HE-ZU-AM in the Exaltation as "Proclaim!" instead of "It is known!" or "Be it known!", thereby stripping the translation of the punchy matching syllables.

But the translation is of lesser importance for this review than Meador's actual words (rather than the words she put in Enheduanna's mouth) Here are some quotes. Page numbers are all from the 2000 U. Texas Press edition.

"The image of a goddess or a god taking a person's hand that appears in many cylinder seal carvings from this era conveys the notion, heretofore unknown, of an individual's personal relationship to a deity. The world is altered by this new recognition of the value of the individual human being." (76)

Now the first sentence might have some weight to it, but the second is a hell of a claim to make. Sumeria was many things, and a humanist utopia was assuredly not one of them.

"At the beginning of a new millennium, humanity still suffers as a result of the separation of spirit from matter that took place in antiquity. Yahweh's split and Greek-influenced Christianity's additions to the separation of good and evil provide divine sanction for the dark/light oppositional mentality that pervades our psychology. Dominant monotheistic religions effectively taught generations that evil is outside ourselves, with Satan over there, in others. We learned to deny our own potential for evil. The splitting of good and evil by the Hebrew, and the subsequent Christian, god was persuasively supported by the Greek system of logical, rational thought that eventually superseded the primacy of nature and myth." (85-86)

ZOROASTRIANISM HAS ENTERED THE CHAT.

[inhales deeply]

Satan started as a lawyer. He didn't become the adversary of God until after the Babylonian Exile, because that's when cosmic dualism got introduced via Zoroastrianism (plus a whole lot of other ideas!), which was later emphasized (but not introduced) by the influence of the Hellenic world and its philosophers. Like the ideas that went into the development of Christian hell are primarily from popular non-canonical sources like the Acts of Pilate and the Apocalypse of Peter.

Meador's retroactively applying theological stances to contexts separated from those ideas by centuries. And that's not even going into the audacity of trying to say that all Abrahamaic monotheism has the same ideas about evil. It'd be absurd to claim that all the denominations of a single one of the brothers would have the same worldview (Why you gotta do my friend and brother Pelagius dirty like that, Meador? Spinoza too.) Doubly absurd when you consider how Judaism and Islam treat the subject of personal responsibility and repentance wrt moral offenses (spoilers: it's nothing like Christianity)

(Meador makes no mention of Islam at all in this book, of course, though I suspect that's a blessing in this case.)

This is someone trying to score a slam dunk against Christianity but, instead of using the many, many legitimate avenues that already exist, has decided to try for something special and new against a target they know nothing about.

Also featured a bit before this segment - taking at face value the idea of Abraham as a historical figure she can conveniently use as the thru-line between the Sumerian pantheon and the Abrahamaic traditions, which is almost as absurd as "Moses was a priest under Akhenaten". I did not include a quote because I was tired of looking at the book and wanted to return it to the library as soon as possible. But she really does hinge an argument on the least-critical literalism I've seen outside of Christian fundamentalists.

"After Enheduanna's death, the superiority of her goddess was eroded bit by bit. the disregard for the fundamental primacy of nature and the increasing centrality of conquest, war, and armies in Mesopotamian culture glorified the conquering hero and diminished the role of goddesses in the pantheon." (109)

Let me remind you that, of the three poems dedicated to Inanna as featured in this book, the first one involves her choke-slamming a mountain named Ebih. Inanna murders a geographical feature because it exists and isn't currently groveling before her. That's it, that is the entire justification. In what conceivable universe is Inanna not associated with war and conquest? Inanna is Ishtar is Astarte is Asherah is Aphrodite is Venus Genetrix the mother of fucking Rome. Sargon (you know, Big Murder McGee?) specifically gave her credit for backing his ascent to the throne and his conquering of Mesopotamia! With an army!

"Enheduanna is caught between two vast ages, the ancient one dominated by the feminine principle of the divine in matter and the emerging new age dominated by the masculine spirit in a god that eventually existed entirely separate from matter as a result of Greek-influenced Christianity." (105)

Fuck right off with this gender-essentialist spirituality bullshit. Whatever point that could have been made about the changing of  spiritual worldviews that comes with drastic technological leaps like agriculture, metallurgy, organized states, organized warfare etc gets thrown right out the window because just like a romance language, Meador insists on gendering things that have no intrinsic gender to them. And conveniently ignores the fact that Inanna was not worshipped exclusively by women (Sargon "I got here thanks to Inanna's blessing" of Akkad, remember). She was an incredibly popular goddess.

And wasn't she decrying dualist morality systems where evil is an outside force earlier?

"The story of Ebih echoes the creation accounts in the Book of Genesis" (109)

Genesis was written two thousand years after Enheduanna lived, and furthermore drew inspiration from / was a response to the Enuma Elish, which was the primary creation account of the Babylonians during the time containing the Exile. And Babylonia =/= Sumeria.

"In the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden the author..."(109)

Authors. The Documentary Hypothesis first cropped up in the 1880s, this is not new or revolutionary information. This is literally week 1 of any decent collegiate biblical studies course.

"...attempts to grapple with the problem paradise poses. Like Mt. Ebih, the paradise where [YHWH] places Adam and Eve in is eternally abundant...A snag in the plan develops when Eve is drawn to the theriomorphic goddess, Snake, who, like her Neolithic snake sisters, carries the wisdom of the sacred in the natural world. Snake beckons Eve back into their ancient alliance where cyclic dark and light are held in a unifying round. Snake in this story plays the role of Inanna, the goddess who upholds the fundamental processes of the natural, material world." (109)

HEY. HEY, LISTEN.

YOU KNOW WHAT TEXT HAS A SNAKE THAT PREVENTS HUMANS FROM HOLDING ON TO IMMORTALITY?

YOU'LL NEVER GUESS, IT'S VERY OBSCURE, IT'S BY THIS GUY NAMED 'ANONYMOUS'. YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF HIM.

It's called THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH. A story that everyone in Mesopotamia would have known - including a bunch of exiled Israelite scribes and nobles currently living in Babylon. The Serpent in Eden is the same genre of literary trick as someone using a Darth Vader voice for the Devil when he's tempting Jesus in the desert.

Instead of using that rather reasonable stroke of Occam's Razor (again, literally week 1 of Intro to Theology), Meador is projecting the snake and lizard-headed goddess figurines of the Ubaid Period (~6700-3700 BCE) forward thousands of years while simultaneously projecting backwards her own belief in an idealized matriarchal one-with-nature goddess-worship that never existed because human beings are complicated. She's manufacturing a mythos whole-cloth and has the gall to claim that it has support from the archaeological record. Write a fantasy novel like the rest of us.

Lilith is a great character and all but she was invented to fill an editing mistake.

"None of the four directions Enheduanna depicts - warrior, priestess, lover, androgyne - represent traditional female domesticity [...] [Inanna] is not the tamed wife and mother, heavy with child, her fury cooled and softened by impregnation, her protective instincts raised to shield a child." (151)

LU HAS ENTERED THE CHAT

Joke aside...actually no, no jokes aside. This bit's just bad. I had flipped ahead just to see if there was any reason to continue, found this passage, and decided that there was not.

I could almost see what she is going for with the pre-ellipsis bit... but what the fuck is "traditional female domesticity"? Traditional to whom? To an American audience in 2000? To the Akkadian Empire in 2250 BCE? To medieval Hungarian peasants? To Martians? There's going to be shit tons of variation within culture groups, both geographically and over time! Meador's making an argument by appealing to the idea of monolithic cultural legacy and setting up Inanna as a counter to those quote-unquote "traditional gender roles", which are spurious fabrications to begin with. People are complex! Culture is complex! Life is complex! "Traditional female domesticity", "traditional masculinity", that shit doesn't exist, it has never existed - it's branding. It's motherfuckers trying to sell you a past that never was. "Inanna is the opposite of this thing that has no basis in reality" is not a home-run argument - it self-undermines and turns right around to say "this image I have constructed of Inanna also has no basis in reality." (which, as we have seen, it doesn't)

And then post-ellipsis (the ellipsis is a brief mention of the Sumerian mother goddesses) we get...that. And perhaps I am blind to the rhetorical device Meador is using, but it certainly sounds like a casual dismissal of great swaths of human experience and I cannot tell if she is clumsily attempting to evoke the voice of a misogynist or if she does indeed hold that position. Considering the incredible conceptual stretches Meador makes throughout the book, I don't have enough benefit of the doubt to spare for the presumption of good faith at this point.

"I'm going to combat patriarchal oppression by replacing their needle-eye restrictive view of femininity with my own, equally restrictive view of femininity" is masterclass in hypocrisy and emblematic of this book's total failure. In trying to force Enheduanna and her work into the mold of a turn of the millennium American feminist, Meador has managed to blindly and clumsily argue for the point-of-view of the patriarchy she so fervently attempts to strive against - that there is only one correct expression of gender, that personhood is intrinsically tied to the capacity to do violence and everyone else is a kind of livestock. 

Inanna is cool. Enheduanna's poems are cool. I find the whole thing inspiring. But Inanna is also portrayed in those poems as violent to the point of psychosis and Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon "I have run out of variants of this joke" of Akkad. We can appreciate without idolizing. I might channel the Exaltation when writing about Lu, but the whole smashing-the-foreign-nations-and that's-a-good-thing bit maybe isn't what I want to port over for that particular character and theme, you know? If the current spiritual landscape is unfulfilling, by all means make your own gods - but don't try to prune the past into shape so you can claim the benefits of an imaginary legacy.

Maybe Meador was just incapable of writing clearly, in which case the book is still bad, just for different reasons.

If you want better, freely available translations, look 'em up on ETCLS. Their version of the Exaltation is more proselike, but still pretty good. My favorite remains the Hallo / van Dijk 1968 translation, which is easy to find with a wee bit of snooping.

 

POSTSCRIPT EDIT: It occurs to me just now that if Meador really wanted to make a case of an ancient goddess getting gradually transformed and then erased through the influence of the Mediterranean powers, she should have just written about Cybele.

500 Posts: Reflections and Escape from Bluebird Hellsite

Pages, Spreads

And so here we are. Half a thousand posts, five and three-quarters years into this enterprise. As I say every time one of these milestones comes up, I thank all of you for your continued support and readership. Through all the ups and downs - of the world, of the scene, of my personal life and my own mental health - this blog has been, on the whole, something of great importance to me.

500 is not a small number, and yet when I look at it, I can think only of what remains yet to be written. So much left to do, so much left to say. And while that is not inherently wrong, it is perhaps a bit misguided. I've written a great deal of things I am very proud of, seen ideas bloom into glories I couldn't possibly have imagined when I started. Six years ago, there was no Lu and Tubalkhan. Pen and Tam remained locked in a draft I never thought I would finish. Unicorn Meat was a series of dead-end drafts. There was very little creative output at all in those years before the blog, a long dead-dark night of the muse. And now there's no stopping it, which is much more to my liking (save the burnout of running too hard for too long - can't have it all, unfortunately)

There's been A Lot in the last six years. G+ in its heyday and its death. The Disc Horse cometh, and the Disc Horse returneth. Those once thought pillars have rightfully been turned aside. Twitter was never good and is now dying as well. Friends and acquaintances come and go and return and remain, and I know half of you half as well as I'd like and I like half of you half as well as you deserve. The world outside is a spinning plate, precariously balanced. I got a book published. I have made friends that it seems unimaginable that I ever lived without. I've gone through five jobs, four moves, two spates of unemployment, over a dozen foster cats. The plague continues. We endure. I look at what I've written and I see a mirror of my own face, and I can look at it and say "Yeah. This is good."

**

I turned 30 recently. Neither my father nor his father lived to see 60. (ed: I have been informed that my memory was faulty - my paternal grandfather did not smoke. It seems that side of the family has a history of cancer. Enough so that the death-before-sixty stretches back at least two more generations), and so while I might (if I am lucky and careful) be spared from that trend, it has been on my mind of late. The turning over of the year (and the prescription drugs that put my brain into better working order) has put me in a reflective mood of late. It's made me consider where I am in my life - as a person, as a person in the world. And there are some things that need put in order, I think. The inventory needs taken, the shelves need re-arranged. Time seems to slip away with such speed in its flow that I need to stop myself and really think about what all has happened in the last six years - a great deal has changed.

I do not know if these reflections will ever make their way here, or if they will remain private revelations. The future eludes us all.

My father died before I had written anything truly worth showing to him. He'd say otherwise, of course, more focused on the fact that I was devoting myself to something I enjoyed than the quality or lack thereof the work. I wish I could show him what I've been able to do.

**

Escape from Bluebird Hellsite is a very, very large scrapbook zine, and one that entailed considerable creative frustration - Twitter, as should surprise no one, is a terrible fucking website, and there are very, very few means of archiving the few things worth keeping on it (did you know there are two secret, completely incompatible types of pdfs? I know that now, and I hate it).

But archive I did; EBH is a curated collection of those threads and posts I had bookmarked. Not all of them, as quite a few have been lost to the ether, many did not fit in with the rest, and by page 145 or so I was sick of looking at the damn thing and just wanted to get it out the door.

Reducing Twitter usage to bare minimum has provided a significant and noticeable mental health improvement since November. I highly recommend it.

**

As the months settle in and my new job just becomes my job, I find myself in the grips of a creative burst that I have not felt in a long while. (46 notebook pages filled since November!) There are good things on the horizon - not definite plans (Have you read this blog? I am nothing if not incredibly consistent in not following through with anything), but the shapes of plans, that should they come to fruition will be very good indeed.

I will continue to write until I am rendered incapable of doing so. There is so much yet to do, and I am thankful for the company along the journey. Onwards to 1000.