Bookpost #4

Ah, I've been negligent.

It's been a fallow season for me, TTRPG-wise; I've been going through some drama in my personal life, and my long-running Stars Without Number game has gone on a “hiatus” that will probably prove to be permanent. I had a falling out with one of the players, and nearly all of the others have gone through something major of their own in the past couple months (two had deaths in the family; two are about to have their first kid). Most of the group continues to meet, but sporadically now, and often with only two or three players. We've been trying out Black Sword Hack, which is delightful and great for some drop-in, drop-out adventure-of-the-week action, but after literally years of getting six people together every week, almost without fail, seeing the game come to this is tough. And missing my best, most enthusiastic player—who was one of my closest friends, too—is tougher still.

But life goes on. I'm not doing much TTRPG stuff, but I'm writing poetry and fiction, I'm drawing, I'm playing board games, I'm cooking. And I'm reading a lot! And I haven't done a post about books since January! So now there's way too damn much to go into detail, and I'm skipping over a bunch of things I didn't like or don't have much to say about. But the highlights:

Convergence Problems (Wole Talabi)

The last thing I mentioned in the previous post was, reasonably enough, the first thing I read this year. And it was great! The quality of the stories is a bit uneven, but the best are fantastic, and even the weaker ones are different enough from what's popular in American SF, and offer enough insight into Nigerian society and culture, to be fascinating.

How Not to Network a Nation (Benjamin Peters)

If/Then (Jill Lepore)

Two different 1960s-centric nonfiction stories about the technological futures we didn't have. Lepore is a much, much better writer than Peters (no offense, Ben), and her book infinitely more readable, but the subject matter of How Not to… is, to me, much more interesting. Kinda wish Lepore would write about it!

All for Nothing (Walter Kempowski)

Old Filth (Jane Gardam)

Two great literary novels about some of the darkest corners of 20th-century history that are way, way funnier than they have any right to be.

Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen (Garth Nix)

History of the Runestaff (Michael Moorcock)

The Languages of Pao (Jack Vance)

A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)

A bunch of “Can you believe I'd never read this before?” SFF classics. (Okay, maybe Pao specifically isn't exactly a classic, but it's the first Jack Vance I'd ever read, so that's something.) Love a lot of the worldbuilding detail in Nix's work, particularly the musical magic. Love how clear it is that OD&D was just “let's turn the Runestaff books into a game.” Love a good old SF take on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, Vance's vocabulary, and his eye for environmental detail (his characters leave a lot to be desired, though). Absolutely adore the over-the-top, overstuffed space opera plenitude of Vinge's Zones of Thought setting.

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Stanislaw Lem)

The Two of Them (Joanna Russ)

Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin)

Five Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula K. Le Guin)

A bunch of new-to-me works by beloved favorites. Memoirs isn't the most gripping narrative, but it's a fascinating perspective on American Cold War paranoia from an outside perspective. The Two of Them is vivid, incredibly well drawn, and repeatedly heartbreaking. And both of the Le Guin books, well, shame on me for not having read two of the best works by my all-time favorite author earlier. Five Ways is gorgeous, incredibly moving, far more romantic than you'd expect from her. Always Coming Home is just astounding. A whole world, a whole philosophy, a whole way of living.

Empire of Pain (Patrick Radden Keefe)

Yeah, it really is that good. And they really were that bad.

Godwin (Joseph O'Neill)

Funny, strange, thought-provoking. Wonderful characters; the degree to which the narrators are utterly distinct and different from one another and both absolutely believable is real virtuoso writing.

Total Chaos (Jean-Claude Izzo)

A fun, pacy, trope-heavy crime novel that is so thick with culturally, geographically, chronologically specific detail that it's easy to forgive the many predictable beats.

You Dreamed of Empires (Alvaro Enrigue)

Best thing I've read all year. One of the most memorable, strange, immersive, exciting novels I've read in quite a few years, in fact.

Appendix M for Michael

Illustration for The Tombs of Atuan by Charles Vess (from The Books of Earthsea)

All the creative works that influenced me and my own creativity, I realized as I tried to organize my thoughts for this most auspicious of blog bandwagon occasions, have accumulated in distinct layers, like the stages of a decades-long construction project—the building of my mind palace, if you will, floor by floor. Its foundations were dug in elementary school, its ground floor went up in my teen years, it sprawled out in various directions in my twenties, and in the last decade or so, its shape pretty firmly established, it's seen some fairly minor renovations, a new coat of paint, some interior redecoration.

Let’s take a tour.

Earliest Foundations

• My Side of the Mountain
• Redwall
• The Land Before Time (1988)
• The Adventures of Tintin
• The Diamond in the Window
• The Chronicles of Narnia
• The Tripods
• The Earthsea Cycle, particularly The Tombs of Atuan
• The Hobbit
• Aladdin (1992)
• Star Wars (1977)
• Doom
• Magic: The Gathering

The lowest level has a pretty strong thematic orientation, one that’s stuck with me my whole life and in many ways guided me to D&D and thus eventually to this very blog. If you can’t see the pattern, or can’t see how it connects all of these things, know that my favorite parts of the Redwall series always involved old ruins and ancient mysteries (the word “Loamhenge” still excites my inner eight-year-old), and likewise my favorite Tintin adventures; that nothing in Star Wars appealed to me as much (or ever has) as “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age”; that as much as I enjoyed blasting demons and zombies in Doom, I at least equally enjoyed looking out at the misty grey mountains of the Knee Deep in the Dead skybox, wondering what other inscrutable alien relics were buried beyond the horizon; and that my chief interest in MTG, as an elementary school kid, was in art and flavor text. I loved Fallen Empires.

Lost cities? Dead languages? Antediluvian relics? Quests for rumored things or places that the skeptical dismiss as the stuff of rumor and legend? Secret worlds, secret pasts, secret passages? I couldn’t get enough. I still can’t.

Ground Floor

• A Canticle for Leibowitz
• The Postman (the novel)
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (the books, not that the film isn't great)
• The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea
• The Hainish Cycle, particularly The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness
• Dune
• “Guest Law” (John C. Wright)
• Seven Samurai
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Alien (1979)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise
• Akira (1988)
• The Ghost in the Shell (1995)
• Fallout (1997)
• Homeworld (1999)
• The Longest Journey (1999)
• Quake (1996)
• Half-Life (1998)
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert
• Planescape: Torment
• Anachronox
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

You can see how what I loved as a little kid led straight into what I loved as a teenager, even as I churned through vast swathes of culture and went through my most breakneck-paced period of construction. A lot of this is just one permutation or another of the romance of lost worlds and ancient treasures. We’ve got the post-apocalyptic angle: What if our civilization became some future person’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone”? We’ve got the space opera angle, in novels, short stories, and PC games. We’ve got a little historico-mythological revisionism, in Mary Renault’s reimagining of the Theseus myth as historical fiction, based on the best archaeology and anthropology the late 1950s had to offer. There’s Raiders, which is basically the ur-adventure narrative, inextricably racist warts and all.

But I started to pick up on other things, too. I fell hard for cyberpunk and for the charms of a science fiction that focuses relentlessly on verisimilitude and realistic detail: The exhaustively researched and carefully considered alternate-history material culture of Royal Space Force, the gorgeous, tactile production design of Alien and Blade Runner, the shocking viscerality of Akira and Ghost in the Shell. I got way into PC games, too, and in addition to buttressing a lot of my existing fixations, those brought me into the world of mods and custom maps, especially for Quake and Half-Life, which was my first brush with DIY gaming. (I’ve written a bunch about Quake here before, of course.)

Some of these stories and worlds also got me thinking, in an inchoate kind of way, about the course of history, about contingency, about the paths that could lead us to these imagined futures or could have led us into a different present. Royal Space Force, again, was formative, and so in a sillier and much more direct way was Red Alert, but digging into what was by then older science fiction was instructive too. Why didn’t the future turn out this way? Where are the robots? What happened to the Soviet Union? This stuff probably primed me to be a Marxist (and I did first read the Communist Manifesto around this time, although I didn’t really understand what I was reading yet), but it also made me think more deeply about the rules and patterns and, yeah, material forces that drive history, culture, political geography—all the key ingredients in any worldbuilding stew.

Later Extensions

• The Blue Sword
• Roadside Picnic
• The Incal and The World of Edena
• Hyperion
• The Lathe of Heaven
• The Fall
• Lonesome Dove
• Firefly

Some of these offered new ways of looking at old fascinations—Roadside Picnic is a kind of dark mirror of portal fantasy like Narnia; Firefly offered a blueprint for turning the roguish charm of Han Solo into an entire universe—and others just proved to be indelible. The orange groves of The Blue Sword, the Nesters of Edena, the cruciform from Hyperion, the Augmentor from The Lathe of Heaven, and the whole fantasy setting of The Fall live rent-free on the upper stories and mother-in-law apartments of my mind palace, always popping up in one form or another when I put pen to paper. And Lonesome Dove, well, you’ve gotta have a little room in your heart (and your imaginary mansion) for the greatest Western ever written, even if you’re not really a big fan of Westerns in general. (Likewise Seven Samurai, which I didn’t touch on above; it doesn’t really connect to anything else here, but it’s such a damn good story and framework for RPG adventures, and it’s just printed onto my brain at this point.)

Recent Renovations

• Machineries of Empire
• Always Coming Home
• Woman on the Edge of Time
• The Book of the New Sun
• The Employees
• Brigador
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker
• Heaven's Vault
• Disco Elysium

These too showed me a bunch of new perspectives, cynosures that point toward more interesting science fiction settings and fresher ideas. The Brazilian- and Korean-inflected futures of Brigador and Machineries of Empire; the fragile, imperiled utopias of Always Coming Home and Woman on the Edge of Time; the workaday zero-G labor of Shipbreaker. Wolfe and Ravn are beautiful, challenging, uncompromising writers and authored irresistible images (and Wolfe expanded my vocabulary like nobody else). Disco Elysium and Heaven’s Vault are inspiring realizations of a whole bunch of my favorite stuff at once: Dead languages, ancient ruins, class conflict, wildly inventive alternate material cultures, beautiful writing, paths not taken, hope in the dark.

I still remember the day I found The Tombs of Atuan on the bookshelf in my sixth-grade classroom (I read the series out of order). Nothing else, before or since, ever fired my imagination or rewired my brain to quite the same extent. A few things have come close, though, Always Coming Home not least among them. It is pretty wonderful that Le Guin has been with me at every step, from Earthsea to Anarres to Portland to the Valley of the Na. You could do a lot worse, as mind-palace architects go.

Housekeeping

So, as apparently happens every August now, I'm experiencing a little personal-life turmoil. Maybe it's my incipient middle-agedness—each time my birthday comes around now, some unconscious drive pushes me into one minor drama or another, raging against the dying of the light or whatever. Also, my country just keeps going more and more dangerously insane; that's not helping.

The upshot is that I've exiled myself, for a little while, from my home computer, most of the software I'm accustomed to using, the digital drawing tablet I recently got (with grand ambitions to flex my long-dormant art skills a little), my cats, and every bit of my usual routine. My plan to post twice a week, every week, to this blog went to pieces almost as soon as I implemented it. Maybe I'll get back to it in September…or maybe in October. We'll see.

What I have managed to stick with is most of the game jam stuff I committed to! I just put the last little touches (at least until I reread it tomorrow and catch a bunch of typos and have to make another round of edits) on my entry for Anne's second Summer LEGO RPG Jam, which I've posted on itch.io and which, if I do say so myself, turned out looking not half bad considering I cobbled it together in Google Docs, half on my work computer and half on my decrepit old MacBook.

Next up is finishing at least a rough draft of my adventure for the FIST Anniversary Jam, and then my voluminous ramblings for the Appendix N bandwagon, which are threatening to turn into a full-blown autobiography, and then the Build a Better World jam, and I've got some Cairn stuff I've been tinkering with that I want to lay out and post, etc. etc. I'm writing and doodling plenty the old-fashioned way, in notebooks and sketchbooks, and reading books I'll need to blog about it, and watching movies I'll need to blog about, and generally staying busy and generating a tremendous backlog of stuff to blog about whenever I do force myself into a proper routine. Which I'm looking forward to!

Premature Antifascism Redux

The DTRPG thing that happened a few weeks ago has since sunk beneath newer waves of controversy and internet turmoil and far-right activist chicanery, but I keep thinking about it. It touched a nerve with me, obviously, provoking me to bleat (or skeet, if you insist, you degenerates) more in one thread than I think I'd done in all my prior days on Bluesky. I've since lapsed back into relative social-media quietude, but I keep thinking about punching Nazis (and being told not to).

As I said then, I don't think it's crazy for small businesses to err on the side of caution in cases like this (I'm also sympathetic to itch.io in their recent mess; of course they could have communicated better and more promptly, but when somebody threatens essentially to cut off your revenue entirely, what can you do?). It is plausible, in these benighted times, that you might be brought up on terrorism charges, or God knows what else, for having committed (or abetted, or financially benefited from) “hate crimes against Republicans,” never mind that they aren't in any sense a protected class. Hate crimes against Christians, maybe. Against white people. Who knows!

At any rate, I stand by the rest of what I said too. DTRPG's defense of their actions was weaselly and dishonest, pretending that the preface to Rebel Scum was far more violent and inflammatory than it actually was. “We didn't want to get sued or prosecuted for hate crimes,” unfortunately, would be a valid position; these are bad times. But pretending that the whole thing was obviously dangerous and unhinged and beyond the pale sidestepped the real question. Another comprehensible response might be “We personally thought that the level of vitriol in this material was more than we were comfortable with.” Hard to argue with a personal opinion, right? And I'd rather have seen that answer than a dishonest one. I still wouldn't have liked it, though.

The crux of the issue, and the question they dodged: Is it time to take a stand against fascism, and if so, what does that look like? If not, when is the right time? Does it ever come? (The corollary, of course: Can you talk about it on the internet? Hopefully, yes, as long as you keep everything vague and hypothetical.)

* * *

It's easy for me, a semi-anonymous schmuck with a blog that 40 people read, to call for people to be ready to man the barricades. People whose livelihoods depend on selling stuff from their small-business storefront? I understand why they'd prefer to keep a lower profile. But I think there's a broader cultural phenomenon at play here, something that's not easy to grapple with.

If you’re anything like me (i.e., the kind of nerd who’s been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War since he was a child), you are surely familiar with the concept of “premature antifascism.” In case you're not, though: American leftists who had gone to Spain to fight for the democratically elected government between 1936 and 1939 got tagged with this label even as, during the Second World War, leftism and antifascism were partially rehabilitated. The Soviet Union was an American ally and we briefly thought—or asserted to the public, at any rate—that communism was A-OK after all. But we still didn't trust people who'd been sympathetic to communism even back when the mainstream of American opinion leaned more toward sympathy with fascism and Nazism.

Somebody whose principles or internationalist political allegiances are stronger than his conformism and willingness to just do whatever his government tells him, right or wrong, is a problem. Somebody willing to break the law, whether for the purposes of revolutionary terrorism or good old American nonviolent civil disobedience, is a problem.

To wit: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, when would be appropriate? We have the old “would you kill baby Hitler?” conundrum, of course. Nobody could believe how dangerous this baby would become; you'd be seen as a monster. But forget baby Hitler. What's the youngest adult Hitler you could step out of a time machine to bump off and not be tarred as a cold-blooded killer and commie terrorist? In 1940, sure, you'd be a hero—if you could get away alive. Even just two years earlier, though, in 1938, you'd be a much more ambivalent figure. Maybe it was for the best, people would say, but assassination? How uncivilized. What about 1933? What about 1928? You'd hang, of course.

We can't really talk about political violence, of course. I'm not going to propose that anybody break the law, and I'm certainly not going to propose that anybody do harm to anybody else. But we can at least talk about how we find ourselves in a cultural moment that demands ideological purity in art, but excuses the gravest moral cowardice in our real-world politics. And I don't mean the way we self-interestedly tiptoe around these real-world questions (and delist shit we might get sued or deplatformed over). I mean the way our ostensible opposition party dismisses everything the government does as a “distraction” while taking no action, the way our supposedly liberal media flatter our would-be dictator and downplay the enormity of his actions.

Meanwhile, art that asks people to sympathize with or identify with people who are morally compromised or who have done, or are planning to do, terrible things has never been met with more discomfort, even outright hostility. Each of us wants to believe that we're pure and good and uncompromised and would never countenance doing awful things nor admit any kind of ambivalence about the cause of righteousness. And yet here we are, watching the country sink into Nazism, and our resistance is haphazard, bewildered, ambivalent. Many people—many of the same people who want our movies, our games, our literature to outline a black and white morality, to present only flawless, pure-of-heart protagonists, are also dismayed that fascist politicians should be harassed in public or that awards shows taking blood money from war criminals should meet mild, measured censure.

“Games about punching Nazis are good, but when you start to talk about punching Nazis in real life, you've crossed a line” is a morally deranged position. In make believe, we should be comfortable trying on all sorts of positions (we murder and steal on the regular, in TTRPGs). It's in real life that we need to draw a line.

Hell Is Other People's Misconceptions

New Delhi from space, photographed by the ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites

Spend enough time on Reddit, and you inevitably learn odd things about other people. I've learned, for example, that if you put an unlabeled map of a fictional world (or even the real one) in front of a bunch of nerds and ask them where civilizations should develop and where large cities should appear, the vast majority of them will point to the mouths or deltas of that map's largest rivers. Which is wrong! And who can stand to see other people be wrong on the internet? Not I.

* * * 

You can get pretty far into the weeds trying to define “civilization” and pinpoint the places where it independently arose, but it's not much of an oversimplification to say that it happened, at least on our planet, in river valleys. In valleys along the Mexican Gulf Coast, the Olmec civilization emerged; in valleys along the Peruvian Pacific Coast, the Caral–Supe civilization. (These were actually pretty close to the sea, with cities like La Venta and Caral being within a day's walking distance of the shore, but still: river valleys.) The Egyptian civilization, famously, emerged in the Nile valley, far upstream of the river's enormous delta. Where exactly civilization first appeared in the Fertile Crescent is kind of an open question, but all of the likely sites are, you guessed it, river valleys, and of course the famous city-states that went on to invent writing, math, the wheel, and boots appeared along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. Likewise, the exact spot where civilization first appeared in China, insofar as you can identity such a thing exactly (you can't), is disputed, but basically: the Yellow, Yangtze, and Liao valleys. And the Indus Valley Civilization? It's right there in the name.

So, okay, they form upstream, but then they move down to the shore, right? Well, yes and no. Mostly no, at least until modern times. River mouths were generally unsuitable for ancient cities both because of a lack of fresh water (estuarine water is brackish) and because river sedimentation caused floods and led the watercourse to shift regularly, which could drown a settlement or leave it stranded inland. Dredging, canal-building, and aqueducts (among other technologies) made it feasible to put large cities near river mouths, but even then, a city like Alexandria is actually well to the west of the river. (And of course Alexandria was a classical-era Greek city, not an ancient Egyptian one; every major ancient Egyptian city was built above the Nile delta, and even Canopus and Heracleion, the much smaller predecessors of Alexandria, were just west of the delta.)

Many major ancient port cities, like Carthage and Constantinople, weren't built anywhere near major rivers, but rather on peninsulas that controlled sea lanes; they depended on huge rainwater cisterns and aqueducts to sustain them. Few major Mesoamerican cities were built on the coast, and fewer still along large rivers. The one urban civilization in North America that built along a major river, the Mississippians, did so 1,000 kilometers from the ocean.

Even today, most of the world's largest cities are not coastal. Delhi, São Paulo, Mexico City, Chengdu, Cairo, Beijing, Dhaka, Tehran, Kolkata, Guangzhou, Moscow, Paris, Seoul, London, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Wuhan, Riyadh: all inland. Most of the major coastal cities today have colonial-era foundations (Karachi, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Chennai, Mumbai, Lagos, Manila, etc.) or are otherwise recent developments (Tianjin, Shenzhen, Saint Petersburg, Dubai, etc.).

There are some interesting exceptions (most big Japanese cities, and particularly Osaka, which has been a major port for almost 2,000 years; Jakarta; Shanghai and Hangzhou; and of course Istanbul), but they are unusual. Even with centuries of colonialism and globalized trade having driven the development of huge ports on every populated seaboard, and in spite of a colossal population boom in the last hundred years, the vast majority of the world's population still lives inland; fewer than 30% of us live within 50 kilometers of the coast.