Marie Brennan's Blog, page 36

Bag of Giving: epic Greek adventures for a good cause!

Last week I joined forces with Mike Underwood, Cass Morris, Marshall Ryan Maresca, and Dave Robison for an epic session of Agon as GM’d by Sharang Biswas. This turned out not to be the game I thought it was, not quite; I’d bought Agon many years ago at GenCon, but apparently it’s been significantly redesigned, I think for the better — the original edition looked very “grim ‘n gritty,” while the new version has a stronger aura of fun. We had a blast, and you can watch the results on Youtube.

The impetus behind this was Bag of Giving, a charity fundraising effort that’s pulling people together for interesting one-shots. Each month they pick a charity to support; for March it’s the The Hero Initiative, which helps comic book creators facing things like medical emergencies. But you don’t have to donate to that group specifically; you can choose any charity you like. (I’ll note, given the current situation, that we chose our charity well before the invasion of Ukraine. Donations to help refugees would not go amiss.) Then just send a screenshot of your donation, minus personal information, to contact at bagofgiving dot com.

To provide some incentive, every $5 you donate gets you an entry in a giveaway for a book bundle! The titles on offer for March are:

An Unintended Voyage by Marshall Ryan MarescaDriftwood by Marie BrennanGive Way to Night by Cass Morris (hardcover)Liar’s Knot by M.A. CarrickShield and Crocus by Michael R. UnderwoodWe Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen (hardcover)

We thank you in advance for whatever donations you make!

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New Worlds: On the High Seas and High Roads

The New Worlds Patreon continues its survey of thieves with a look at the glamorous kind — the pirates and the highwaymen! Comment over there.

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ONE DAY ONLY: The BVC Grand Reopening sale!

After much blood, sweat, and tears behind the scenes, Book View Cafe emerges triumphant with a brand-new website and storefront! To celebrate our return, we’re offering 50% off the entire store for March 9th only. We have a number of new books that piled up in the period of our downtime, plus our whole back catalogue on offer. Come and poke around, see how shiny it all is, and load up on some ebooks!

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New Worlds: Sticky Fingers

With this, the New Worlds Patreon officially enters Year Six! The Year Five collection is in prep, and in the meanwhile, we’re starting off in fine larcenous style by talking about thieves. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: Keeping Cool

For the last essay not only of the month but of Year Five, the New Worlds Patreon flips the coin from “how do you keep from freezing” to “how do you avoid sweating to death.” Comment over there!

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Let’s have a chapter on men

I’m starting to wonder what it would be like to read a book on daily life in X place and time that starts out by telling you most people, even among the upper classes, spent their days running their households, engaging in textile production, raising children, or (if they were wealthy enough) overseeing servants who did that work for them, and then has a section describing how men’s lives differed from that norm.

I know there are reasons other than direct patriarchy why such books aren’t organized that way — because men’s lives have historically been more varied, the descriptions of their activities requires more words if you aren’t just going to blow them off with a few sentences, which would make for a hell of a long chapter on the male experience — but I’ve read a lot of works in this informal genre, and after a while you really start to notice how thoroughly that experience is centered, and then women’s lives are a sidebar. It would be an interesting trick to flip it around, highlighting the fact that by far the most common occupation across a given society was “domestic manager,” and most of ’em were women.

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New Worlds: Staying Warm (the actual essay)

(Apologies; once again I neglected to correct for the BVC site rebuild by reposting the essay here. That shouldn’t be an issue for much longer, though!)

I am infamous among friends and family for how easily I get cold. But I maintain that this is only natural: at temperatures below about sixty degrees Fahrenheit (fifteen degrees Celsius, for those of you on that system), human beings can die of hypothermia.

Of course, we’ve created any number of ways to shore up our weakness in that regard. Though we’ve shed most of our body hair, we’ve replaced it with clothing, from furs to wool to high-tech thermal fabrics. We’ve built enclosed structures to keep the rain off our heads and shelter ourselves from the wind, whose interiors can be warmed more easily. We’ve mastered the use of fire. All of these are what my anthropology professors called “cultural solutions”: ways to protect our fragile, heat-loving bodies, evolved for the plains of East Africa, against the very large percentage of the planet that would kill us with cold.

I won’t go into a great deal of detail about clothing because that’s not only a topic we’ve discussed before, but it’s one many of my readers are already familiar with — if not from personal experience of living in a cold region, then at least from having seen movies and TV where characters have to bundle up. Coats, hats, gloves, scarves; you know the drill. And of course we’re familiar with the idea of using fire to warm a space, whether that’s directly with logs crackling in a hearth, or indirectly with a furnace heating air or water which are then piped elsewhere in the building.

But some forms of that heating are less well-known in the modern West. For example, back when we discussed sleeping I mentioned the Chinese kang or “bed-stove,” which draws the hot exhaust from a fireplace through the base of a brick, clay, or concrete platform. This warms the platform, and therefore anyone sitting or sleeping on top of it. Russians have a similar concept, and in Japanese houses you can still find kotatsu, low tables covering a brazier (nowadays usually electric), with a large blanket or futon to drape over the laps of people sitting along the sides.

You can extend this idea either vertically or horizontally. Vertically, it’s a masonry heater: a giant pillar whose material will first absorb and then slowly radiate heat from a fire at the base into the rest of the room. (Because of how it projects into the room, it’s more effective at this than a chimney set flat into a wall.) These seem to be especially common in northern and eastern Europe. Horizontally, you have the Korean ondol or the Roman hypocaust: the floor of a whole room is raised a small distance, and hot air circulates underneath. The latter sometimes even included pipes to raise the heat through the walls and into upper floors, for a very toasty result. Heated floors exist in the modern world, too, and I’ll admit I’m sometimes tempted by the prospect.

All of this works better if you build the whole structure with an eye toward insulation. After all, it does little good to heat your floor if all that nice warmth is just going to dissipate outside! Thick walls can help with this; heck, one of the reasons early humans inhabited caves was because the temperature inside them tended to be fairly stable (albeit not very warm). It also helps to have a buffer zone, whether that’s an “airlock” entry room that keeps winter winds from blowing straight inside, or spaces between inner and outer walls — though far better if that space is filled with something insulating. Asbestos works great! . . . except for the part where it causes all kinds of health problems, and these days you have to hire a hazmat team to remove it if you find it in a building. At Bletchley Park during World War II, the codebreakers stuffed the walls with all kinds of sensitive documents that should have been destroyed, thus providing themselves some much-needed warmth and later historians a gold mine of information.

But one of the most effective moves is simply to limit the area you have to heat, and how many places that heat can escape. Windowless rooms, while noisome in many other respects, make sense when you think about trying not to freeze. Standing screens have been used in many parts of the world to create sheltered pockets within a larger room, and to reflect the heat of a fire back into that space. Big, open rooms are a sign of wealth not only because of the architectural expense, but because making them habitable can be a real challenge.

We’re especially vulnerable to the cold when we sleep. During the day, we get some assistance from the sun, and both eating and moving about help you stay warmer. But lie down in the darkness and go some hours without food . . .

Solutions for this danger go well beyond thick blankets, and I’ve mentioned many of them before, but we’ll recap briefly here. You can place warming items between the sheets to warm the bed itself; these might be heated stones or bricks wrapped in fabric, metal pans filled with coals or hot sand, or rubber bottles filled with hot water. You can have someone else in the bed with you — including animals! English has the idiom “three dog night” to describe a night so cold you need three dogs to keep you from freezing. And while these usually wouldn’t be in the bed, peasants might need to bring their livestock indoors during the winter, putting survival above sanitation.

The “enclosure” idea applies to sleep, too. Bed curtains or box beds mean you only have to warm the air inside, not the whole room. The latter are literally wooden boxes whose doors you close: very practical, but (like windowless rooms) very prone to becoming noisome if the bedding and the interior aren’t regularly cleaned. Of course, while your sleeping area may be nice and warm, you’re likely to get a real shock when you exit in the morning, or if you have to get up to relieve yourself in the night.

Actively heating your living spaces requires fuel, throwing us right back to the issues raised in the first essay for this month, and to our energy problems today. The architectural blog McMansion Hell (run by Kate Wagner, whom I’ve mentioned before) has torn into the modern craze for things like two-story entry halls or living rooms with enormous plate-glass windows: while they may look nice, they’re horrifically energy-inefficient when it comes to heating and cooling. Structural solutions like good (non-asbestos) insulation, double-paned windows, and small rooms that can be regulated individually as needed give a much more lasting benefit. Even for those of us who aren’t ancient peasants living on the edge of subsistence, it makes sense to put thought into how to stay warm without being wasteful.

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New Worlds: Staying Warm

This week the New Worlds Patreon reflects the biases of its creator, as I discuss the human struggle to stay warm when it’s cold outside! Comment over there.

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Books read, November 2021-January 2022

The mad rush to finish the draft of the third Rook and Rose book and then revise it (along with other unexpected crunch times on certain fronts) pushed many less critical things by the wayside. So you get three months’ worth of books at once!

The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World, Guido Majno. This was recced to me by Yoon Ha Lee, and it is fantastic. For starters, Majno is not using “the ancient world” as shorthand for Greece and Rome and maybe Egypt; he starts with Mesopotamia, and devotes chapters to India and China as well. (There is less of China than I might have liked, but that’s owing to the temporal boundaries he set for himself: he’s looking at the foundational text of that system, and the edifice built atop it is mostly from subsequent centuries.) The discussion ranges from linguistic analyses of the words used in ancient medical texts to modern experiments conducted on ancient prescriptions, often with surprisingly good results — though not always, hoo boy, definitely not. Majno is ready and willing both to praise good developments and clever techniques, and to condemn in no uncertain terms the things that killed patients who maybe didn’t have to die. And he’s the first author who’s really made me understand why some of those erroneous theories (like the “pus is good!” school of thought, or bleeding as a solution for everything) formed and were clung to for so long. My only real complaint about this book is its weird form factor: it’s significantly taller than most trade paperbacks, and it’s quite heavy, which made it awkward to hold.

The Embroidered Book, Kate Heartfield. Disclosure: the author is a friend. Historical fantasy novel following two of the children of Empress Maria Theresa, one of whom (Charlotte) became the Queen of Naples, and the other of whom I probably would have recognized faster if I knew the late eighteenth century better, but I don’t, so it took me a bit to twig to the fact that Maria Antonia was the future Marie Antoinette. You can take from that some sense of where the story is going — nowhere good, generally speaking — but the book itself is very good. (And it has a gorgeous cover.)

Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune, Mary Jo Ignoffo. Loaned to me by a friend. This is a biography of the woman behind the so-called Winchester Mystery House, and basically the takeaway is that 98% of what they tell you at the Winchester Mystery House is b.s. The house is weird because a) Sarah was an amateur architect who happily pottered away with additions and alterations and b) chunks of it were destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and never rebuilt, so those staircases that go nowhere in fact used to go somewhere. Construction was not, in fact, nonstop. She had no belief whatsoever that she needed to placate the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester rifles. I might have liked the book to dig slightly more into the development of those myths after her death, but on the whole I was glad to learn about the actual woman, not the complete fabrication that surrounds her.

She Who Became the Sun, Shelley Parker-Chan. Ooof, this book. I don’t know if the sequel is going to put the protagonist on a better trajectory or not; where the first volume ends is, um, rather worrisome, and given that the premise is that the historical Zhu Yuanzhang died and his sister took on his identity, and Zhu Yuanzhang wound up doing some really unpleasant things after he became the first emperor of the Ming dynasty . . . how alternate history are we going, here? I don’t know. But this book is also really good, and it makes me reflect on the ownvoices thing, because there are ways in which I think Parker-Chan can be more ruthless in her critique of the sexism and ableism of the period than a white writer could get away with. (Also: Heh. The second time in one month that I didn’t know the history at hand well enough to realize who I was reading about at first. My piecemeal study of Chinese history has thus far missed the Yuan-Ming transition.)

Torn, Rowenna Miller. Political fantasy with a seamstress main character (and another really good cover). This takes much of its inspiration from the French Revolution, but — especially since I’d read The Embroidered Book shortly before — it is a much nicer version thereof, with royalty and nobility who are mostly good people.

The Writer’s Book of Doubt, Aidan Doyle. Collection of essays about the writing life. For me the most valuable ones, unsurprisingly, were the ones at the end, which look at the doubts which arise in the long haul rather than the ones you face when you’re just getting started.

The Lies of the Ajungo, Moses Ose Utomi. Upcoming novella sent to me for blurbing. I happily gave a quote because this was fantastic — a folkloric tale that, for a change, felt perfectly sized as a novella. I frequently feel that the novellas I read are too much plot to fit in that sack, or sometimes not enough, or both a different points, but this was Goldilocks-level just right.

The Obsidian Tower, Melissa Caruso. I have not read the previous series in this world, but you don’t have to have done so. This one takes place in a part of the setting where the people with magic powers rule everything, and that’s . . . yeah, not always a good thing. Even within the protagonist’s family, some of them are better at being benevolent dictators than others. The main character has a non-functional magic gift — in a family whose power involves control over living things, she kills everything and everyone she touches — and when her grandmother (the ruling lord) goes missing and the protections around the thing they’ve been guarding for literal thousands of years start to fail, things get complicated very very fast.

Working IX to V: Orgy Planners, Funeral Clowns, and Other Prized Professions of the Ancient World, Vicky Leon. This is the author of the “Uppity Women of History” series, so as you might expect, it has that breezy, pop-culture tone. But actually, orgy planners and funeral clowns are just the clickbait; most of the jobs described here are the kinds of practical things that genuinely kept society functioning. And I give Leon kudos for starting right off with the tasks slaves usually performed: she shoves your face straight into the fact that Rome relied heavily on slaves for many things.

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons, Ben Riggs. Sent to me for blurbing. This is really more a secret history of TSR, though I see why it’s titled the way it is (and there’s a suggestion of a possible follow-up, as this volume ends with the sale of TSR to Wizards of the Coast). It’s very inside baseball, but interestingly so: TSR went from the basement invention of a handful of nerds to a HUGELY profitable company attempting to dip its toes into all kinds of waters, cratering once along the way and then again, more catastrophically, at the end. I wish Lorraine Williams had agreed to talk to Riggs, since she’s the one who fished it out of the first crater and then drove it into the second. But I’m not surprised she didn’t, since it seems unquestionable that she bears quite a lot of blame for the end of TSR and highly likely that she’s historically received more of that blame than she deserves. (The combination of “not really a gamer” plus “female executive” created some really hostile attitudes toward her, as Riggs acknowledges.) But it’s a pity we don’t get her perspective on why she made certain decisions.

The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel, Edward Gorey. The traditional re-read after finishing a novel draft. It’s short and very true.

Spirits Abroad, Zen Cho. Short story collection in three sections: tales set in Malaysia, tales concerning Malaysians in other parts of the world, and tales that go entirely off into the realms of folklore and fantasy. These made a very pleasant diversion while I was biking, and my favorite was probably “Monkey King, Faerie Queen,” where two very different parts of the world collide.

The Winter of the Witch, Katherine Arden. Last of the Winternight trilogy. I’ll admit I stalled out for a couple of months halfway through this one: it was starting to feel like the characters’ lives would remain bleak and painful forever, and also the conclusion of one of the conflicts felt really disappointing. Fortunately it turns out that the latter wasn’t the conclusion — other characters called Vasya out on her unsatisfactory solution to that problem — and while the ending is not sunshine and puppies, it wasn’t as dark as I feared.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, trans. unknown. I was annoyed at first that my copy, which has been on my shelves since the film with Jim Caviezel came out, doesn’t name the translator. Turns out that’s because nobody knows who it was: someone on my Discord did a bit of sleuthing and helped me discover that this is what’s known as the Standard Abridged Edition, created in the nineteenth century by some unknown author and republished a lot because it’s public domain. I guess I should have known this was abridged, because it’s only five hundred pages long? Mostly the cuts weren’t obvious, but there are a couple of places where it creates howling discontinuities. Someday I should read the whole thing.

Samak the Ayyar: A Tale of Ancient Persia, trans. Freydoon Rassouli, adapted by Jordan Mechner. I felt less self-conscious about the fact that I’ve never heard of this historical epic when I learned that it was thought lost for centuries, and only published for the first time in Iran in the 1960s. I’m not sure if it’s been in English at all before. You could get seriously hammered by drinking every time Princess Mahpari changes hands, every time somebody breaks into or out of a place that’s supposed to be impregnable (empty your glass if the text says “even birds don’t dare fly over it”), and every time someone cross-dresses. For a change of pace, men dress up as women more often than the reverse, though both definitely happen. Be aware that this is only the first volume of a prospective five, and, uhhh, it does not end at a place of conclusion. But if you want swashbuckling Persian ninja doing their thing, here ya go!

(By the way, regarding that “adapted by” thing: Mechner’s introduction talks about how the manuscript is clearly recorded from oral storytelling, meaning that the different episodes begin and end with lots of prefatory prayers or encouragement to click the like button and subscribe pay the storyteller, plus there are shrieking continuity errors where characters act like they’ve never met before, etc. So it’s not purely a translation, though that’s the text Mechner was smoothing out into something more like a novel-shaped piece of fiction.)

The Bookseller’s Tale, Ann Swinfen. First of the Oxford Medieval Mysteries. I started out as a mystery reader and still enjoy the occasional dip into that genre; this one isn’t especially impressive for its twisty plot, but the historical setting lends it some freshness of material. It sat on my shelf for two years because I wasn’t ready to read a book set a few years after the Black Death, but now I am, and I liked this enough to pick up the next in the series.

The Medieval Underworld, Andrew McCall. “Underworld” here in the sense of crime, though it’s appropriate to the medieval period that this very much bleeds over into the various fringes of society, such that there are chapters on heretics, prostitutes (who weren’t actually criminalized), and Jews — and also that chunks of it are more about nobles and clergy behaving badly. On the other hand, although this book apparently was published in 1979, I would have believed 1879 on the basis of comma usage alone. It was kind of an odd read.

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New Worlds: A Light to Live By

I’m a night owl. If I’m up to see the sun rise, something has gone horribly wrong at one end of my day or the other. And while I’m theoretically there to see the sunset, in practice I hardly pay attention to it, unless I’m outside for some reason.

This luxury is brought to me by ubiquitous artificial lighting.

As we just did with fuel sources, let’s rewind the clock. For most of human existence, our main source of light has been the sun. When it went down, we pretty much had to close up shop. Even if the moon was full and the night was clear — which can produce remarkably bright light — we were exceedingly vulnerable to nocturnal predators, who can see vastly better in dim conditions than we can. Safer to stay in the cave, or wherever you’ve taken shelter.

Fire changes that equation. Fire makes it possible to keep going after the sun’s headed to bed, continuing your unfinished work or relaxing after a hard day’s toil. And that changes our behavior quite a lot.

The initial form of this was the campfire or hearthfire, but burning enough wood, turf, or dung to see by is a flagrant waste of fuel. Torches, that ubiquitous feature of fictional dungeons and handy tool for explorers, do better — at least when they’re not just a stick burning at one end, the way they’re sometimes depicted. A proper torch has one end wrapped with some kind of material, often fabric soaked in a flammable substance; nicer ones have a collar below the burning end that helps keep droplets or burning fragments from falling onto the holder’s hand. How long they’ll burn for, though, depends on the size of that wad, and what it consists of. And either way, you’ve got a big open flame, which can be pretty dangerous.

That’s why torches have been less common in reality than they are in fiction. Vastly more common are lamps, reservoirs of flammable oil with a textile wick. These let you control the size of the flame by controlling the length of the wick, and you can keep refilling the oil without having to extinguish the flame or get a new lamp. Making a primitive one is dead easy; you just need a shallow dish and something to keep the wick from falling in completely. And the list of oils you can burn is practically endless: plant sources like olive, sesame, flax, castor, or various nuts, or animal ones like fish oil, butter, ghee, or blubber, which was incredibly common during the heyday of whaling. Fancier designs include things like glass shields to shelter the flame from being blown out, and to prevent things like people’s sleeves or hair from accidentally catching fire. (That danger used to be very real.)

Go from liquid to solid, and you have the basic concept of a candle: still a wick inside a flammable substance, but this time in more vertical form. Much like parchment vs. papyrus, the increased use of candles in Europe seems to have been driven by the loss of Mediterranean olive oil after the collapse of the Roman Empire. People turned instead to tallow, i.e. rendered animal fat. The very cheapest candles were rushlights, the pith of a rush plant soaked in fat or grease; they burned incredibly fast and not very bright, but were also so inexpensive you could make a ton of them. Tallow dips with cloth wicks were usually better, but pricier, and both they and rushlights stank of the animal fat used to make them. The very best candles were made of beeswax, whose scent is quite pleasant, but generally only the nobility and the church could afford them. The rise of whaling led to spermaceti candles, which burned brighter and were less prone to bending on hot days; with the Industrial Revolution came other alternatives, like modern paraffin wax. But until we started making braided wicks, which basically self-trim, it was necessary to regulate wick length with scissors to make them burn well.

In Europe, the introduction of gas lighting was a huge advance — but also a short-lived one, as electric light bulbs followed not long after. China had it about two thousand years earlier, using bamboo pipes to convey natural gas supplies for heating and lighting, though I’m not sure how widespread that was. Probably, as with most things, it was more often found in the homes of the elite than the common masses.

But our approach to lighting hasn’t only been about finding things to burn. Remember the sun? We’ve often used structural solutions to maximize our use of its light. Lightwells are spaces within a building left open to the sky, bringing not just sun but much-needed fresh air to interior areas. It’s also common to carry out lots of daytime activities in rooms that face the south, which will get the most light throughout the day. If you can afford windows, supplying a room with many of them will make it brighter — though also harder to regulate in temperature, which we’ll look at in upcoming essays.

We even have ingenious tricks for getting light from where it is to where it’s needed. In antique stores you’ll sometimes see heavy glass prisms; these were set into the top decks of ships to refract light into the spaces below. Lightwells might have mirrors at the top, redirecting the sun into a narrow shaft that would otherwise receive little of it. Even dim, indirect light is better than none.

Tricks like those have the advantage of being something you install once and keep using. Torches, lamps, candles, gas, electricity — all of those are consumable things, meaning that if you want a room bright enough for activities like reading, sewing, or dancing, you’re going to have to pay for it. So the rich have more leeway to keep their own schedule, while the poor make do with the sun, or strain their eyes working by insufficient light.

I should note before we end that this isn’t just about lighting homes. Public lighting is also a thing, and many cities have taken steps to implement it for reasons of safety and crime reduction. Street lighting became much more widespread with the advent of gas, but even before that, there were public services hanging lanterns in the streets, or regulations requiring the residents of street-facing property to put out their own lanterns or light candles in their front windows, at least during certain hours. Where that’s absent or inadequate, you have servants or hired link-bearers carrying lanterns for their employers through the nighttime streets.

The downside to this, of course, is light pollution. I didn’t realize until I was nearly twenty how bright the full moon could be, because I’d rarely been far enough away from artificial lighting to notice its effect. When I look up at the sky and think I see a lot of stars, it’s the merest fraction of what’s actually up there. Unlike other forms of pollution, this one’s relatively easy to reverse, and some places are taking steps to implement dark-sky policies. In a world of ubiquitous light, it’s the smallest and most wondrous of them all that we must work to regain.

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