Marie Brennan's Blog, page 13

New Worlds: Lost Cities and Ancient Ruins

The New Worlds Patreon is ending April with a topic near and dear to my archaeological heart: the question of how much ancient sites are ever truly “lost.” Comment over there!

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New Worlds: Lines in the Earth

Not all ancient works take the form of giant rocks. Some of them are carved into the earth itself — so the New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at geoglyphs! Comment over there.

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New Worlds: Megalithic Architecture

The Pyramids of Egypt, the Argonath of Gondor . . . the New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at the wonders of megalithic architecture. Comment over there!

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Total Eclipse of the Sun

When my parents moved out of my childhood home two years ago, I made my goodbyes to the neighborhood thinking there was no reason I would ever go back there.

Then I realized the path of totality this spring would pass right over my old house.

My best friend’s father still lives here, so we got lodgings for the price of some batted eyelashes, a few chores done around the house, me talking to a granddaughter who apparently idolizes the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and some jam and brownies made by my husband. Plane tickets were still expensive, of course (especially since we were uhhhh not on the ball about buying them), but last week we flew down to Dallas in the hopes of seeing the eclipse.

Despite some dire uncertainty, the skies cooperated. Clouds started to drift through around the time the eclipse began and thickened as we approached totality, but just as that phase began, a clear patch opened up, and we saw the eclipse in its full glory.

. . . yeah. In the words of a recent xkcd comic, “A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like somebody broke the sky.”

The light doesn’t noticeably start to dim until about 50%, and up to maybe 97% or 98%, it still only looks like a thunderstorm is about to roll in. Then there’s a sudden and — if you were an ancient person who didn’t know why this was happening — catastrophic downward slide into darkness, your only illumination coming from the ghostly flare of the corona around the black hole that has eaten the sun. The sky becomes an alien place, twilight hovering overhead while the fringes of the horizon turn to ink. For a few minutes you can look directly upward, no protective glasses needed, watching the wisps of corona dance across distances our brains can’t even fathom.

Then a diamond-bright flare piercing the heavens as the sun breaks around the trailing edge of the moon. Within a minute, you’re back to a kind of cloudy-seeming day — an astonishing demonstration of how bright the sun truly is, that even a tiny sliver of it can light our way.

Pictures of an eclipse don’t really do it justice. Most of them are close-ups of the sun and moon, which fail to capture the overall effect. The way the world sinks into night for a few minutes out of the ordinary, the sky inverts and the air goes cold and the light becomes otherworldly. A close-up picture doesn’t convey why ancient people had so many myths around what was happening, so many fears about why the gods had chosen to take the light away and what must be done to bring it back. Even knowing the orbital mechanics involved, even having a precise measurement of how long it would be before normalcy returned, it was an eerie experience.

I am really, really glad my friend’s father took us in, the clouds held off, and I had a chance to witness this.

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Books read, March 2024

Temporarily redacting some of what I read in March, so this is a shorter post than usual.

Legends of Rotorua and the Hot Lakes, A.W. Reed, ill. Dennis Turner. Last of the folklore books my parents picked up for me during their travels in New Zealand and Australia. This one is not only regional but to some extent focused on toponymy, which is to say, the stories behind why certain places have the names they do — which connects it a bit with Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places, though so far as I know the Maori don’t have the same practice of using toponyms in daily conversation as a way of commenting on and influencing each other’s behavior.

A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, ed. Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman. Continuing my efforts to read some of the anthologies that have piled up unread in my wish list . . . this one focuses specifically on writers from South, Southeast, and East Asia telling stories based on folklore from their own heritage, and I really appreciated the explanatory note after each tale. Even when I could recognize the source on my own (which wasn’t all the time), I liked seeing the authors talk about why they chose that one, what it was their brains snagged on and wanted to respond to, etc. My favorite may have been Rahul Kanakia’s “Spear Carrier” — certainly not the only one I liked, but I’m writing this post while out of the house and unable to glance back at the stories, and that’s the one that stands out most distinctly in my memory (in a good way), a really interesting sort of time travel/portal angle on the Mahabharata.

The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal. Second of the Lady Astronaut books. These are interesting to look at from a structural standpoint, because their subject matter — humanity needing to establish colonies on the Moon and/or Mars before the Earth becomes uninhabitable in the decades following a massive meteor strike in the ’50s — means these have much less of the conventional plot shape than most SF/F novels. They have to cover years at a time, in a sphere of activity where progress is made up of incremental advances rather than a solution assembled and delivered in a lump, and so while the ending delivers a milestone, it’s less climactic than most stories. Whether you like these will depend much more on how much you like the journey to that point, with all the technical and political and interpersonal challenges to be surmounted along the way (some of which will, in very realistic fashion, not so much get surmounted as fade into the background). I do like that kind of story, and without getting into spoilers, lemme just say the bag was one of the most effectively horrifying things I’ve read in quite some time.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo. First novella of a series I’ve been reading about for some time. The cover copy made getting into this a little rockier than it needed to be, because it focused my attention in the wrong place for how the story actually begins, but once I got past that I very much enjoyed it. This pulls off the trick of being able to suggest a large and vivid world despite working in a confined length — and I know I will get to see more of it as I continue the series!

An Enchantment of Ravens, Margaret Rogerson. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve largely gone off reading YA for the time being, but this one was on my list and I was in a mood for something about fae. Rogerson does a pretty good job with them, in part because this avoids some of the stereotypical YA feel: yes, there’s a hot faerie prince the protagonist is in love with, but said protagonist is convincingly established in an adult life of her own, and as such, she spends part of this book debating what love even really is, and whether what she’s feeling qualifies for that name. The realm of the fae is compellingly detailed (and avoids the bog-standard Seelie/Unseelie divide), the threat there feels real rather than contrived, and I think my only real quibble is that there’s one detail at the end which I wish had been delivered just a little bit differently. Sadly, Rogerson does not seem to have written more in this world, because I would probably read it if she had.

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New Worlds: Kilroy Was Here

For April the New Worlds Patreon is taking a jaunt through ancient relics in the landscape — though as long as we’re talking about prehistoric rock art, I figured we might include modern graffiti as well! Comment over there . . .

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Peter Wimsey on the screen

Lately I’ve been working my way through the old TV adaptations of the Peter Wimsey mysteries, both the Ian Carmichael ones (most of the books that don’t have Harriet Vane, leaving out Whose Body? and Unnatural Death) and the Edward Petherbridge ones (most of the books that do have Harriet Vane, leaving out Busman’s Honeymoon).

The folklorist in me is generally fascinated to see adaptations and to compare different adaptations against one another. In this case the two sets of miniseries are working with different texts, but it’s still possible to compare them more broadly. Edward Petherbridge struck me as a touch too muted for how I imagine Peter’s dialogue and behavior, but he’s a vastly better physical match than Ian Carmichael. By contrast, I think Petherbridge’s Bunter (Richard Morant) seems far too young? He looks like he would have been about twelve in World War II, though Wikipedia tells me he was nearly forty at the time of filming. He also doesn’t quite manage Bunter’s self-effacing manner the way Glyn Houston does with Carmichael — and while I sort of like the character visibly having a mind of his own, it didn’t quite feel like Bunter to me.

(I do wonder if Petherbridge was incapable of horseback riding, or at least of bareback riding, since they gave that bit of Have His Carcase to Bunter instead of Peter. Or maybe they just wanted Bunter to have a chance to show off.)

There’s no doing comparisons on Harriet Vane, since she’s only in one set of the miniseries, but I liked her quite a bit. I would have liked to see those books get four episodes, though, the way the Carmichael ones generally did; three felt cramped, especially on Gaudy Night — not surprising, given that’s by far the longest of the novels. Mind you, I wonder what a modern adaptation could do with three episodes, since our approach to pacing is a good deal faster than it was in 1987. How much more of the story could you have fit in if not as much time was spent on a character coming into a room, setting down their things, walking across the room, etc?

I wasn’t watching these shows super closely; they were serving as background entertainment while I did things like sort papers for taxes, since I remember the plots well enough not to get lost if I wasn’t paying close attention. Between that and my less-than-perfect recall of said plots, though, I can’t say a great deal about the adaptations on that front — I welcome thoughts from those of you who have seen these! The only thing that truly jumped out at me as a flaw, because I had re-read that section not long before, was the very end of Gaudy Night. They shaved down Peter’s conversation with Harriet much too far, I think, transforming the culmination of their romance into merely “Harriet gets over her hangups.” Gone is Peter’s apology for his earlier behavior, where I can never help but wonder if it doubles as Sayers meta-textually exhibiting hindsight on her own authorial choices: it would not surprise me in the least if she wrote Strong Poison thinking she had a great setup, then got to Have His Carcase and realized she couldn’t steer them toward a HEA with the situation she’d created for them, then had to write Gaudy Night (in which Peter barely even appears) before she could untangle her own narrative knot. Maybe not; maybe she always planned for them to travel that long and thorny of a path. But Writer Brain can absolutely imagine her painting herself into a corner and then having to paint a way out. And if so, I don’t mind: it produced a much more interesting result than a more conventional romance — the latter being more what the adaptation gave us.

But like I said, thoughts welcomed from those of you who have watched any of these!

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New Worlds Theory Post: Be a Goat

Year Eight of the New Worlds Patreon is going to be a busy one for theory posts, as there are five months with five Fridays in them! To start us off, I recommend the merits of being a goat — comment over there!

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New Worlds: Atheism

Lack of belief in gods is not solely a modern concept, as this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay explores. Comment over there!

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the incident at Booker’s Club

Those of you following me on Bluesky or Mastodon may have already seen this, but I’m sufficiently chuffed that I have to come dance about it here, too.

In The Tropic of Serpents, after Isabella cuts up her skirts to resew as trousers and mentions that this was the start of her always wearing such clothing in the field, she drops this little pair of parenthetical comments:

(Whatever the scandal-sheets may claim, I do not wear them at home, though I have considered it once or twice.) (The incident at Booker’s Club should not be counted; I was extremely drunk at the time.)

In the more than eleven years since I wrote those lines, I have not figured out what she was referring to. Not for lack of trying, either; it sounded highly entertaining! But I’m the kind of writer — especially in this kind of viewpoint — who will toss out things like that without having the faintest flipping clue what they refer to. I wrote “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review,” and I wrote “On the Impurity of Dragon-kind,” and in all that time, “The Incident at Booker’s Club” remained my white whale, the story I was sure existed but couldn’t write.

UNTIL YESTERDAY.

Yesterday, while making tea, I caught the fluttering edge of a wisp of an idea. I was walking down the same mental path as before — “really, drunken hijinks don’t feel like Isabella’s style, even when she was younger,” followed by “and I can’t really see Tom dragging her into something like that” . . . and then a previously unseen fork in that path caught my eye, whose entrance bore a sign saying “BUT ANDREW TOTALLY WOULD.”

I will say no more of what lies down that path. But I will say that two hours later, I had a complete draft of the story. It needs significant revision and then, y’know, I need to find an editor that will buy it, so t may be some time before anybody can read it — but! “The Incident at Booker’s Club” officially joins the ranks of the Lady Trent short fiction!

I am so pleased by this, y’all have no idea.

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