Marie Brennan's Blog, page 37

New Worlds: Fuel for the Fire

Energy sources are a big topic of conversation these days. With fossil fuels being both damaging to the environment and increasingly difficult to acquire, we’re looking into a wide variety of alternatives — some of which are cutting-edge, and others of which are very old indeed.

The one option that’s been with us from the start has been muscle power. Our own to begin with; later, after we domesticated animals, we got to use theirs instead. For millennia, everything from agriculture to textile manufacture to metalworking has been carried out with sweat and toil, fueled by the food we and our livestock eat. But of course, you can’t elbow grease your way to everything. No amount of direct labor will cause food to cook, nor pottery to harden, nor ores to smelt.

For that, we needed fire.

The question of when hominids first began using fire is one for archaeologists to ponder. Suffice it to say, very few authors are going to be writing about periods before that happened. Fire opened up countless doors for humanity, letting us stay warm in the winter, develop new and better materials, and even extract more calories from the food we eat.

How do you make fire, though? The earliest uses were probably opportunistic, with humans borrowing and perpetuating flames produced naturally, e.g. by lightning strike. Even after we learned to create fire ourselves, we had a strong tendency work with what we had keep it going rather than starting it from scratch: light one candle from another, carry a hot coal in a box to ignite another flame elsewhere, bank the fire at night so you can puff it up from the embers the next morning. We’ve even built rituals around this, especially with sacred fires, or marking the new year by starting our fires anew. In the absence of ritual, however, we prefer to work from an existing fire because creating one from nothing is difficult and time-consuming. You need oxygen — okay, the air provides that — and fuel — easy enough — but you also need heat.

Fire drills are an early tool for this end. They come in various forms, but they all operate by using friction to generate heat and eventually a coal, which can be used to light tinder. Similar tools are referred to as ploughs, saws, and thongs, depending on their form. Your next option is fire by percussion, striking two objects together to create a spark. Flint and steel are the most well-known variant, but other stones can work, like quartz or agate, and iron pyrite can strike sparks off itself. This tends to be easier than a fire drill, and it was hugely common up until the invention of chemical firestarters. In both houses and traveler’s packs, you were likely to find a tinderbox, containing some kind of striking materials and easily ignitable material, such as twigs, dried moss, certain types of fungi, paper, or charcloth. It was a basic and ubiquitous tool of life. Even now, lighters use percussion to create the spark that will burn the liquid fuel inside: a tiny and effective tinderbox equivalent.

Once you have fire, what do you use it on? Pretty much anything that can be persuaded to burn. We often think in terms of wood, and certainly that’s been used — but actually, wood is a fairly inefficient fuel, especially depending on the type. Charcoal is better, as it removes practically everything but the combustible carbon from the starting wood. Both Europe and Asia were using actual coal by the late European Middle Ages; you can also burn dried peat, the soggy precursor to coal. In fact, you can burn dried lots of things, including seaweed and dung — the latter being common in areas that lack much in the way of trees.

This isn’t just a matter of descriptive detail in the background of a scene. Fuel sources were causing localized environmental change long before the modern day. Much of the Near East used to be forested, before the advent of pottery and bronze-working consumed huge numbers of trees. Wars, too: Roman conquests were partly spurred by the need to secure new sources of wood after deforesting the ones under their control. The depletion of peatlands (which form far more slowly than they can be restored) has been called the original fossil fuel crisis. Not all of this is driven by our need to burn things for energy — we also use both wood and dried peat for construction — but it’s played a significant role.

And that role has only increased with the use of modern fossil fuels, like petroleum and natural gas. Not only are they major factors behind the current climate change crisis, but they’ve shaped our politics and our history in profound ways. Areas rich in these resources have experienced a boom in wealth . . . but usually only for the elite, while the poor suffer the destructive environmental effects of extraction. Meanwhile, foreign powers fight wars to make sure the faction in control will continue to sell them oil or gas at favorable prices.

All of these are reasons why we’re currently looking at more sustainable sources of energy. Solar power is mostly a new development; in the past it was largely restricted to sun-drying foods or mud bricks, or perhaps focusing its light enough through a crystal or glass lens to start a fire. But we’ve been building mills on the banks of streams and in windy areas for a long time, taking advantage of nature’s own energy to turn the millstone and grind our grain. With a bit more engineering, you can even build things like water-powered hammers, taking some of the grunt work off human shoulders.

The challenge there is less about the source of energy, and more about how we can best deploy it. Prior to the modern era, waterwheels and windmills were only helpful on the immediate premises. Not until we started figuring out electricity and batteries could we generate power in one place and use it in another. That’s the big hurdle now: figuring out efficient storage and transmission for wind, solar, or hydro power, so they can be relied upon in areas and at times where the sources aren’t available. (That, and mitigating the environmental damage of the mining necessary to produce the batteries and so forth.)

Nuclear energy was supposed to be our escape from all these limitations, but of course it comes with problems of its own. The scale of destruction it can wreak is huge, especially since the technology to make a reactor also lends itself to weapons of mass destruction. And we tend to find out the hard way what happens when you subject the surrounding infrastructure to that level of strain for years on end. You’re also left with some incredibly dangerous waste products, whose disposal we still don’t have a good solution for.

All our nuclear plants, though, operate on fission — on splitting the atom. The big question is whether we’ll ever develop nuclear fusion reactors. Those would be vastly safer; the problem is that you need incredibly high temperatures and pressures to make it happen, and we have yet to design a reactor that produces more power than you put in to make it go. Cold fusion was briefly the dream of the future, achieving the desired effect at normal temperatures, but it’s dubious whether that’s even physically possible.

In science fiction, often the energy question has been completely solved. Whatever future people are using to power their world, it’s ubiquitous, safe, and not destructive to the environment. A pipe dream this may be, but it’s a nice one to have: just as mastering fire opened many doors for early humans, achieving cheap and sustainable energy would transform our world in so many ways.

Right now, the best we can do is focus on reducing our energy usage and weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. We don’t want to go back to the days of having to do everything by hand.

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New Worlds: Disaster Relief

Because fantasy in particular is full of tyrannical rulers and terrible governments, I suspect there are many readers who assume the reaction of a historical king or queen to a flood, fire, famine, or other disaster was “suck it up — and yes, you still have to pay your taxes.”

I’m not going to say that never happened, but it was less common than you might think. Telling the peasantry to suck it up and still pay taxes is a fantastic way to get revolts — and even if those revolts don’t threaten to topple the throne, every farmer marching against you is a farmer not growing the crops your economy relies on. While you did get the occasional ruler both cruel enough and shortsighted enough to shrug off that danger, most of them at least made some attempt to deal with the underlying problem, however ineffectively.

In fact, dealing with these kinds of problems is one of the oldest functions of a sovereign. Those familiar with the Book of Genesis in the Bible (or with a certain Andrew Lloyd Webber musical) may recall Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream as portending seven years of good harvests followed by seven years of famine; his achievement was the correct decipherment of the dream’s symbols, not the advice to build up grain stores for later use. The latter was basic common sense for an agrarian society. All over the world, the wheat, rice, or other staples collected as taxes in kind partially went into royal granaries, kept for distribution in times of need.

That makes it sound simpler than it was, though. First of all, grain can go bad, quite fast if it’s improperly stored; the contents of those granaries might prove useless when the time of need comes. Second, how do you decide when and how much to hand out? People might revolt if they think distribution is too slow or too stingy, but too fast or too generous might mean you run out before the shortages have ended. (We see similar arguments in modern times around water restrictions and agriculture.) When weather forecasting consists of looking at the sky and economic models don’t even merit the name, it’s hard to gauge what level of intervention strikes the best balance between prudence and charity.

I should note, however, that this type of relief largely applies on a regional or national scale. Royal granaries didn’t generally open their doors for individuals or families in starvation; they were intended for areas devastated by flood, drought, crop blight, warfare, and other large-scale agricultural damage. And the further into the hinterland those areas are, the harder it will be for you to get meaningful quantities of supplies there. Everything we’ve said before about travel applies here, and it does little good to send grain if the convoy has to consume three-quarters of it en route.

Feeding people isn’t the only type of relief governments can engage in, of course. One of the other basic functions of the state is the regulation of water, whether in the form of irrigation or of controlling rivers prone to flooding. When those rivers overcome their controls, somebody needs to go out and restore the dam, the levee, or whatever else broke. (As with fire-fighting, that “somebody” is highly likely to be a military unit, with laborers in tow.) A well-organized state might also do some mitigation efforts on the inundated land, more rapidly restoring it to a usable state. Just like the famine relief above, this is as much about practicality as it is about compassion: ruined fields produce no food, so getting them back to productivity is a top priority.

Then there are the fires that occupied us in recent essays. When one of those rips through a city, you have a very significant problem: with everything destroyed, how can you tell where the property lines are? A weak government will let rebuilding be a free-for-all; a strong one will step in to make sure nobody makes a grab for land that isn’t theirs, nor pushes the cost of rebuilding onto the tenants of a structure rather than its owners. By all accounts, the Fire Courts set up in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London did a remarkably good job of keeping things fair, so that the only disgruntled people were the ones who failed to get away with an unscrupulous plan. Some modern governments, even in the developed world, can only aspire to do so well.

But while these efforts toward relief and rebuilding are underway . . . what do you do with the people? When crops fail, farmers leave their farms and gravitate toward population centers; when armies march through, or floods or fires sweep the land, residents flee in search of safety. Depending on what’s gone wrong, it may be a very long time before they can go back to their homes — if they ever can at all.

This is far from being a solved problem. Right now, in our wealthy modern world, we have huge numbers of refugees with nowhere to go. In the past, it was no different, and made worse by the pragmatic difficulties of supplying food, water, and other necessities. Outbreaks of disease are common in refugee camps (both modern and historical), due to the cramped and unhygienic conditions, which in turn makes more settled residents not want refugees nearby. Governments dislike having people out of their assigned places, locals view outsiders with suspicion, and of course all those displaced people are dealing with the trauma of whatever put them into flight. Then and now, it’s a recipe for suffering.

And yet, it isn’t all gloom and doom. Although Nero was vilified later on for claiming a large swath of what burned in the Great Fire of Rome to build his palatial Domus Aurea — not entirely in fairness, as he owned much of the relevant land already — he also took steps to house refugees in various gardens and public buildings. Similarly, those who fled the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 were resettled with noteworthy speed. While Roman examples are the ones I’m the most familiar with, other states and time periods have their own success stories.

Because in the end, much of this comes down to the simple matter of effective government. A well-organized state uses its resources and power to counterbalance disaster, making sure that large chunks of its populace don’t wind up without the basic necessities of life (and without the capacity to go on working and generating revenue). A corrupt or weak state fails to do so . . . and sometimes that means it soon ceases to be a state. The late Yuan Dynasty’s inability to manage a series of disasters contributed heavily to its downfall and the subsequent founding of the Ming Dynasty; poor harvests in 1780s France were one of the factors that produced the French Revolution.

As our own world faces more floods, droughts, destructive storms, and other disasters wrought by climate change, it’s a lesson more governments should keep in mind.

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A belated Yuletide post

Finishing the draft of the third Rook and Rose book and then turning right back around to dive in on revisions means I never got around to posting about Yuletide until now!

But I definitely need to post, because the prize for going above and beyond the call of duty goes to LookingForOctober. I knew before the authors were revealed that someone had written me a Howl’s Moving Castle fic, “A Wizard of Wales,” followed by a sequel fic, “A Wizard in Ingary” — but not until reveals did I discover that the same person had also written me a THIRD story, this one for the Gabriel Knight series of video games: “Fate of the Children.” Three fics from one writer! And as if that weren’t bonanza enough, someone else wrote me a Howl fic, “In Which a Thesis Is Not Written.”

It makes me feel embarrassed that I didn’t have the time or energy to write treats the way I used to, in the misty past when I had more leisure. My assignment this year was “Gammer’s Garden,” a Chrestomanci fic for a prompt that made use of the decision to allow “Worldbuilding” as a character-style tag this year. No canon characters appear in the story, but it explores the history of the Pinhoe family and their dwimmer magic, with a connection to a detail of canon I’ve always found interesting.

Hopefully next Yuletide I’ll be able to pay it all forward!

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New Worlds: Fire Prevention (the essay)

(I failed to repost this essay here like I intended to. Apologies to anyone who tried and failed to reach the BVC site! We are working like mad to have the new site up soon.)

As I said in last week’s essay, it’s in the public interests of a society to keep fires from spreading. It’s even more in those interests to keep them from starting in the first place — and because of that, government regulations designed to prevent, spot, and slow down fires go back a very long way.

Prevention is in many ways the most difficult, especially when you’re talking about a pre-modern society. Not only is open flame needed for many tasks of daily life, but the government lacks the wherewithal to inspect people’s homes and businesses on a regular basis to make sure they aren’t creating a hazard. The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in the bakery of Thomas Farynor; we’ll never know whether he was telling the truth about having properly banked the fire in his oven, raked it out, and swept the surrounding floor clear of flammable material before going to bed, but it’s entirely possible his negligence on that front burned down four-fifths of London.

Even now, we have limited capacity to enforce good behavior. Much of the time, we rely on advice and social pressure to make people take precautions: homeowners in rural parts of California ought to keep the ground near their houses clear of burnable brush, but not all of them do. Hell, we can’t even keep people from setting off fireworks or chucking cigarette butts out their car windows, which is how many of our wildfires have started. It’s possible to imagine a technological or magical setup that does monitor for these things . . . but that rapidly slides in a direction that feels dystopian. We don’t like the level of surveillance and control that would be required to make sure people behave optimally.

We have more success in regulating what our property can be made out of. Long before you get to modern requirements for non-flammable materials, there have been building codes hitting that same target on a macro scale. Houses clad in stone or brick, with asphalt shingles (modern) or tile roofs (ancient), are much less vulnerable to flying sparks; those may still cover wooden interiors, but they offer less of an easy foothold from without. London tried to impose regulations in this vein before 1666, but all of them had failed in the face of tradition and pre-existing structures. In a way, there was a silver lining to everything burning down: with everyone having to rebuild from scratch, the authorities were able to ram through some much-needed safety measures. Henceforth all buildings were to be faced with brick.

They also mandated more structural approaches to the problem. Wider streets form ready-made firebreaks, helping to contain any blazes. You still may lose a whole neighborhood, and under sufficiently strong winds even a ninety-foot gap might not be enough, but the odds of limiting the destruction are much improved. Over time, though, and with governmental neglect, these measures can degrade. Pre-Fire London houses may have had a limited footprint, but they were “jettied out” by building larger upper floors supported by beams. Eventually it became possible to escape your burning house by climbing from your own window into the one across the street, because they were that close together.

Another key safety measure is making sure you know about fires as soon as possible, because the sooner you start fighting them, the more likely you are to succeed. If your only alert system is people shouting in the streets, that’s not very good — especially because people might be shouting for many reasons! Better to have some kind of clear alarm, whether that’s a modern siren, whistles, wooden rattles, or something else loud and identifiable. In England, they would ring church bells “backwards,” a rather confusing term for ringing them with a muffled peal.

Of course, you have to spot the fire before you can sound the alarm. To that end, some towns had fire watch patrols; this was one of the original duties of the Roman Vigiles. (Often this doubles up with watch patrols in general, since the same people keeping an eye out for malefactors can simultaneously look for ominous flames or smoke.) It can also help to station watchers in high places, where their vantage point lets them survey a large area for trouble, and then dispatch a response. Nowadays you often see this approach in rural or wilderness areas, but it also used to exist in towns. (And, as with the town watch, it might be part of the regular fortifications: if you have a wall with towers, turning around to look into the settlement as well as outside it gives you a chance to spot internal problems.) Some of our modern fire alarms are the same idea without the need for humans; they use sensors to detect smoke or excessive heat and warn everyone within earshot. Future developments might make it common for those alarms to alert the nearest fire station, a la burglar alarms.

The final line of defense loops us back around to the idea of firefighting, which is to say, have people and materials ready when the need arises. Those fire hydrants that dot our streets? Those are there because we mandate them for safety reasons. Same with buckets of sand, fire suppressant blankets, or other emergency tools. Training volunteer firefighters is akin to training volunteer militias, in both approach and rationale; run people through periodic drills and refresher courses so they can protect their neighbors when necessary.

As usual, the question a science fiction or fantasy writer needs to ask is, what would this look like in my world? Depending on the setting, it may look much the same, because the technological developments or magical frameworks aren’t very relevant to the question of “what happens when things catch fire?” But given how utterly destructive an out-of-control fire can be, even in modern times, this is liable to be a high priority for the powers that be. Contrary to the propaganda of their opponents, even emperors don’t tend to fiddle while their cities burn; they know all too well that they’ll lose revenue from the destruction, not to mention popular support, and that all it takes is an unfavorable wind for their own palaces to be destroyed. So they’ll take measures to prevent fires, to spot them early, to keep them under control, and to put them out if possible, whether those means are high-tech, mystical, or utterly mundane.

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New Worlds: Fire Prevention

The New Worlds Patreon would like to join such luminaries as Smokey the Bear in reminding you that you can prevent fires. And it’s much better to prevent them than to fight them once they’ve started! Comment over at Book View Cafe.

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New Worlds: Fighting Fire

(We are getting very close to BVC being up and running again! But we aren’t there yet, so once again, this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is hosted here on my site.)

As devastating as fires can be nowadays, we have ways of dealing with them. In my kitchen there sits a canister of fire-suppressing chemicals; on my ceilings perch little disks that scream bloody murder when they smell smoke or carbon monoxide; if something goes wrong, a big truck will roll up and hook itself up to a hydrant that will spew out all the water I might need, at high enough pressures to reach upper floors with ease.

But rewind the clock, and things get ugly fast.

I often suspect that every major pre-modern city has a Great Fire somewhere in its history — often more than one. When most buildings are constructed of wood and people rely on open flames to light and heat their houses or to cook their meals, you have a recipe for frequent fires. And when there’s no running water, any fire has the potential to slip out of control and consume whole swaths of a city before it’s done.

How do you fight something like that? If you’re lucky enough to have a nearby river or canal, or if there’s piped water (and panicking neighbors haven’t cut the pipes open to get water for themselves, leaving none for you), then you may be able to throw enough water to quench the fire before it spreads. Or other liquids: milk, beer, and even urine have been pressed into service. If you don’t have water — or if the blaze starts with something like grease; remember, everybody, don’t chuck water over your kitchen fires! — you can smother it instead, with sand or dirt or dung, or even beat a small flame out with a blanket. But water has long been our go-to solution, when we can get it in sufficient quantities.

Fire engines of a sort aren’t all that new. Prior to mechanization, though, the “engine” is likely to consist of a big cask on a cart, with some guys manually pumping to send water through a hose. Early versions of this can’t generate much pressure; even the roof of a one-story building might be out of their reach. It’s certainly out of reach of the people armed with what amount to giant syringes, squirting water out four pints at a time before stopping to refill. When the main container runs dry, you need a new one, and there may be no source conveniently nearby. Because of this, fighting a fire may be less about putting out the building that’s ablaze, and more about making sure the neighboring structures don’t join it. Wet down the roofs and the walls, jump on any sparks that try to take hold, and abandon the other to its fate.

Anybody who remembers their geometry, though, knows that the more a fire spreads, the bigger the perimeter you have to defend. And under windy conditions, you might have to worry not just about the adjacent buildings, but places farther down the street, or on nearby streets. A fire can hopscotch over the defenses and take root in a new location, and now you’re fighting on multiple fronts — a state no general wants to be in.

So it may be that you have to take drastic measures. In the early hours of the Great Fire of London (1666 edition; there have been others), the Lord Mayor ought to have ordered his people to tear down the houses around the burning area, creating a gap the sparks wouldn’t be able to leap. This was an entirely feasible move; hooks mounted on poles, with rings through which ropes could be attached for pulling, were a standard piece of firefighting gear, and the style of construction common at the time could be destroyed pretty easily. But the people living in those houses weren’t the ones who owned them, and the Lord Mayor, fearing to offend the property owners, was reluctant to give the order. No such niceties prevailed around the Tower of London; when the fire threatened to get near the munitions depot there, royal soldiers blew up whole streets of houses to keep it at bay.

Even these measures can fail, though, and the larger a conflagration grows, the more likely it is that no human effort can do more than slow it. When that happens, you have no real choice but to wait for the flames to die down on their own, or for blessed rain to come and put the fire out the natural way. In the meanwhile, it can burn for days, destroying entire cities in the process.

Who are the people who do the firefighting? In the first instance, it tends to be the residents and their neighbors. They’re the ones on the spot — and also the ones with the most to lose. In a well-organized area, there might even be a crew of volunteers tasked with keeping tools and materials on hand, so they’re not caught flat-footed when trouble comes. Unfortunately, if a fire spreads, eventually every householder has to decide whether it’s better to try and defend their home, or write it off as lost and flee with their valuables while they still can. In the case of a very large fire, you often wind up with streets so clogged by fleeing residents that nobody can get through . . . including reinforcements coming to fight the blaze.

When a fire gets that large, though, higher authorities tend to get involved. Armies are generally made up of strong, robust men, ideal for the heavy labor of fire suppression, and they come pre-arranged into command units; it’s not surprising that soldiers have often been tapped for this job. They can also help keep the peace when people start panicking, and their mere presence is proof that whoever’s in charge is trying to fix the problem — good for the inevitable PR questions afterward.

As for dedicated firefighting services, they’ve often either been volunteer groups supported by charity, or privately-owned businesses. How can you make a profit off fighting fires? The above-board answer is that you get an insurance company to pay you for saving the properties under their aegis; the less admirable one is that you extort money from the householder before you get to work. Stories say that in the late Roman Republic, Marcus Licinius Crassus ran a company that even bought the burning property out from under the desperate owner before putting out the flames: a true example of a fire sale.

Firefighting is one of those places where it’s really better not to leave it in the hands of private enterprise. Because a blaze in one house threatens all those around it, there’s a public benefit to making such things get suppressed as quickly as possible. But to have a government-run and government-funded service, you need a sufficiently strong and well-organized government, which not every place and time can supply. Although the Roman Empire had an imperially-organized service called the Vigiles (originally made up of slaves; later of freedmen), few lands followed in their footsteps. Even now, seventy percent of U.S. firefighters are volunteers, not full-time professionals.

In the long run, the best answer for how to deal with fires is to not have them in the first place — maybe. The logic that works great in cities turns out to be much less good in nature. I live in California, where there are frequent wildfires; lately many of them have been devastating. It turns out that the Forest Service’s long-standing policy of suppressing all fires where possible has thrown the whole ecosystem out of balance: the forests out here are supposed to burn periodically, to the point where some trees can’t reproduce without intense heat to crack open their cones. Frequent small fires clear out the underbrush; suppress those, and you’re left with monstrous quantities of fuel when a blaze gets out of control. In consultation with local indigenous groups, who have their own traditions around forest fires, we’re moving toward a model that will hopefully be more balanced.

Within a city, though, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So next week, we’ll look at a few ounces!

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New Worlds: Emergency Medical Services

(We have great hopes that the Book View Cafe website will be back up and running soon! Until then, I will continue to post my Patreon essays here.)

If something goes wrong — a fire; a home intruder; but especially for the purpose of this essay, a medical emergency — I know exactly what to do. I’ll pick up my phone and call 9-1-1, the emergency number for the United States. Someone on the other end will send an ambulance full of trained medical personnel, who will administer some aid on-site and then (if necessary) take the patient to the hospital, siren blaring all the way.

There are many reasons to be glad I live in the twenty-first century, but it’s startling to me that if I rewind the clock just fifty-five years — to 1966 — this seemingly obvious and sensible concept would not have been available to me.

Ambulances aren’t a new concept, mind you. Ever since we’ve had transportation, we’ve had the understanding that sometimes you need to load up a patient and take them to the doctor, instead of waiting for the doctor to come to them. Armies pioneered systems for transporting wounded soldiers away from the front; these systems got significantly more organized circa the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thanks to conflicts like the U.S. Civil War and World War I. And if you lived in certain parts of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, you might enjoy the services of trained medical staff as you were whisked from home to hospital.

But in the U.S., as late as 1966, here’s what you could look forward to in a medical emergency: either a car sent by the local funeral home, or a police van. They’d supply some rudimentary first aid, but apart from that, you wouldn’t get real medical care until you arrived at the hospital . . . which all too often was too late. (It’s impossible not to think of the ghoulish overtones of funeral home employees being the ones to drive you there.) Not until 1967 did a predominantly African-American organization, the Freedom House Ambulance Service, start up the United States’ first proper paramedic system — the first of many, and desperately needed.

Of course, the effectiveness of an emergency medical service depends first on you having effective emergency medicine. And given the state of the art throughout much of human history, neither trained personnel on site nor swift transport to a physician would have done you much good.

So many things about basic first aid seem screamingly obvious to us, it’s hard to understand how it took so long to figure them out. I’m indebted to The Healing Hand by Guido Majno for laying out in clear terms why — to pick one example — even the notion of stopping the bleeding took a while to develop. It seems clear to us because we already understand what’s going on when someone bleeds: we know about the circulation of the blood (a concept that’s all but incomprehensible prior to the invention of the pump, and that’s only the first of several ideas you need to sort out), the roles of veins and arteries, how clotting works, and more. We know that someone can die of internal bleeding with no obvious outward sign, and that sometime external bleeding is incidental to the actual problem. We have techniques like tying off a bleeding vessel instead of applying a tourniquet to the whole limb, the latter of which only buys you time and will create other problems if left on too long. Humans developed multiple different explanations for what was going on with bleeding, some of which came within shouting range of the mark, others of which went wildly astray, but all of which were based on the observations people were able to make with the technology and ideology of the time. Very few of them did much to save lives.

Or what about cardio-pulmonary resuscitation? First of all, let’s get something out of the way: most of the time, this doesn’t actually restart a person’s heart. (Neither, for that matter, does defibrillation, whatever the movies tell you. That’s for hearts beating with certain kinds of arrhythmia, not hearts that have stopped beating entirely.) While CPR will sometimes restore the pulse, like a tourniquet, it’s mostly about buying time, providing artificial circulation and respiration until something more advanced can be done. But as with stopping blood loss, it presupposes that you already understand how those systems of the body work, that the heart pumps oxygenated blood, and that another person can temporarily supply both oxygen and pumping. Without that understanding, there’s no reason to even think of trying.

Even drowning used to be treated as a done deal. If somebody came out of the water and they weren’t breathing, there was nothing you could do — though in reality, people can be revived after a shockingly long time without air, especially if they were immersed in cold water. The simple technique of shoving air into their lungs with your own lungs didn’t come into practice until the eighteenth century, and even then, William Hawes had to offer a bounty on fresh drowning victims to convince people to bring him patients to demonstrate on. The Heimlich maneuver for removing obstructions from the upper airway of a choking victim is barely older than me . . . though the older method, slapping people on the back while they’re bent over, can work just fine; Henry Heimlich himself is the one who campaigned to persuade everyone that was a bad idea.

I’m not entirely sure how successful we used to be at treating conditions like hypothermia. The general idea of “help the person get warm again” is both obvious and sound, but it doesn’t always work; there’s a complication known as rewarming shock where the victim’s blood pressure drops rapidly, leading to cardiac arrest. For a while it seemed like this was caused by too-aggressive external warming, but that seems to be not the case, leaving us without a good explanation. The opposite condition, hyperthermia, is a little more straightforward: get the patient out of the sun, give them fluids, remove some or all of their clothing, and sponge them down or immerse them entirely in cool water. That one we probably figured out a very long time ago; the obstacle was more likely to be social, as heat exhaustion and heat stroke were common problems among enslaved field workers, whose overseers refused to let them rest. (In fact, they’re still a problem among agricultural laborers today, and their employers are not necessarily any more understanding.)

Many fantasy novels have forms of magic that could at least help get patients more rapidly to a medical facility, but few of them seem to apply it that way — likely for the same reasons that the U.S. didn’t apply the lessons of battlefield medicine to civilian life until 1967. Nobody (in or out of story) has really thought about it, or (in story) if they have, they aren’t willing to fund it. When it comes to first aid, on the other hand, the hurdle ought to be less “what can magic do?” and more “how well do the characters understand the problem they’re trying to solve?” A science-fictional future might look back on our current practices and shake its head in pity, because we don’t understand the body as well as we might, nor have we funded the kinds of measures that might save more lives.

Still and all: I’m glad I live in 2021, not in 1966, for this reason and many others besides.

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New Worlds December essay, redux

On request, I’m reposting the next-to-last non-theory essay from the New Worlds Patreon, since the downing of the Book View Cafe website has rendered it inaccessible. Also, for those of you wondering what happened at over BVC, the short form is: we’re gearing up to give the site a major and long-awaited overhaul . . . and in the course of the gearing up, it, uh, went belly-up. >_< But the good news is that we’re on track to roll out the new! improved! site! very soon, and it’s going to be so much better once we do.

(Caveat lector: This essay will talk quite frankly about what kinds of sex people have.)

What is appropriate for people to do with their naked bodies and each other’s? What’s inappropriate? And how much are we allowed to talk about such things in polite society?

First things first: there’s probably nothing new under the sun, except insofar as technology facilitates new approaches. Anything you care to think of — positions, fetishes, role-play, sex toys — probably existed in the past, with modern innovations running along lines like “if you install Bluetooth on the toys, then it’s possible for a partner to control them remotely.” (Yes, this is a thing that exists.) So any time somebody tries to sell you on the idea that our modern, degenerate society has invented a lot of perversions that didn’t exist in the morally purer past . . . yeah, they’re full of it. Although the evidence for sexual behavior in the past is limited, and often destroyed by later and more puritanical generations, what we know suggests that historical people got plenty kinky.

I mean, to start with, what even counts as “kink”? That notion is really defined in contrast with what’s considered mainstream, and unsurprisingly, that’s going to vary from place to place. Nineteenth-century Europeans were scandalized when Richard Burton published a heavily edited version of Bhagwan Lal Indraji’s English translation of the Kama Sutra — specifically, the parts of it that deal with sexual technique (which, contrary to its reputation, is far from the whole text). To the Victorian mind, different positions were shockingly kinky. Heck, at times the Christian stance on sex has been that even taking pleasure from it is morally suspect, and people should do only the bare minimum necessary to achieve insemination. Meanwhile, Judaism has a tradition that a man who wants a son had better make sure his wife has an orgasm before he does.

These kinds of traditions are possible because people historically have often not been nearly as embarrassed by sex as the modern world (and in particular, the modern U.S., which is still dragging around the lead ball of its Puritan origins). After all, if you’re living in an agrarian society, the odds that you’ve seen animals mating are high. Caring for livestock means you’ve possibly had your hands all up in their bits, which aren’t that much different from our bits. Also remember, it used to be very common for many people to sleep in a room or even a bed together — so the idea that children must be sheltered from the knowledge that sex exists? Historically, they’ve often been right there when their parents got it on.

Of course, one of the things we don’t know is where the healthy line is for such things. Just because children witnessed sexual intercourse doesn’t mean that was good for them, any more than the frequency of physical punishment meant that was good for them, either. On the other hand, much of what determines whether we cope well or badly with a thing is how well we’ve been prepared for it. Unexpected, culturally unsanctioned violence is more likely to cause PTSD; ignorantly stumbling upon people having sex is probably more likely to cause a negative response, too. And what about engaging in it yourself? When’s the right age for that? It probably varies from person to person, based on not just physical but psychological maturity, and it’s damn hard to gauge what the latter really looked like in the past. Even researching the question wanders close to some uncomfortable lines, when “but they’re so mature for their age” is a defense commonly used by pedophiles.

But back to the point about awareness of sex being more public. Even simple modesty is a highly variable line, one that can be in different places depending on what activity you’re looking at. Americans are fairly accepting of kissing and other displays of affection in public; Japanese generally aren’t. But in Japan, communal bathing is far more common than here: not just same-sex baths, but mixed-sex ones in some natural onsen, and familial bathing up to a certain age. They’ve also got religious festivals that involve running through the streets with a giant phallus — can you imagine that in the U.S.?

This isn’t just about Western culture versus Eastern, either. Consider the case from fourteenth-century England where a woman divorced her husband on the grounds of impotence. As part of that trial, a witness testified that the husband’s brother tried to help out once with a handjob, but to no avail. Other, similar cases involved wives flashing their husbands and manually stimulating them in court, in order to prove the impotence was real. One poor fifteenth-century fellow had his penis examined by over a dozen people, all of whom testified before a judge as to its qualities. Bodies were not nearly the private things we’ve considered them in other time periods, and neither were the things we did with them.

In fact, we’ve talked about adultery before, but we haven’t talked about its counterpart: the conflict that can arise over sex within marriage. Under some legal systems, sex is a duty spouses owe to each other — and not just in the sense that wives owe it to their husbands, the way we tend to assume, but that husbands owe it to their wives. That’s why that Englishwoman could divorce her husband for impotence, because he was failing to uphold his end of the deal.

That raises the interesting question of desire, and how it’s been viewed. We’ve already talked about sexual orientation, including the notion of asexuality, but there’s also a gendered component in how society conceives of people’s libidos. Are women insatiable temptresses, or asexual creatures whose only motivation to copulate is obedience and the production of children? Both views have existed (and I’m tempted to speculate that the latter view was used to prop up the belief that women had no need for gratification in bed). There’s a little more consistency on the male side, in that they’ve pretty much always been assumed to have desire; the variation there is whether men are characterized as temperate and self-controlled (usually paired with the “women are sirens” notion), or horndogs whose base impulses must be kept in check by female modesty.

Which starts to take us around to the dark side of the sexual coin. What happens when people misbehave in bed? For that, come back next week.

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The year’s publications

One last post, to close out the year.

I published an ABSURD amount this year, y’all. Six short stories, which is quite a respectable number for me these days . . . and thanks to the vagaries of publishing schedules, THREE novels in the same calendar year. That isn’t normal, yo. But yeah, 2021 saw the release of The Mask of Mirrors in January, The Night Parade of 100 Demons just two weeks later in February, and then The Liar’s Knot here at the end of the year. Ooof.

As for the short fiction:

“As Tight as Any Knot” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and a Rook and Rose short story)“The Bottle Tree” (Departure Mirror, and a Wilders short story)“Speak to the Moon” (F&SF — my first sale there!!!)“Oak Apple Night” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and an Onyx Court short story; I swear, I’m not trying to hit every series I’ve ever written . . .)“The Old Woman and the Tea” (Daily Science Fiction)“Ghost and Fox” (Shapers of Worlds Volume II)

. . . plus five reprints in various places.

2022 will not look the same, because it can’t. But here’s hoping for a good year, regardless.

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Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 27 et alia — DONE

Despite Alyc’s encouragement, I don’t think I have it in me to make three progress posts today, one for Chapter 27, and one apiece for the prologue and the epilogue. Yes, the prologue to this book was one of the last things we wrote: third from the end, to be precise, followed by the last scene of Chapter 27 and the epilogue. That last being, of course, a thing the previous two books didn’t have, but here it helps a lot to show some longer-term effects that would feel very shoehorned into the final chapter.

Alyc and I each have a traditional quote associated with having finished a book. Mine comes from The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel by Edward Gorey: “The next day Mr. Earbrass is conscious, but very little more.” Alyc’s comes from a Gilbert & Sullivan musical (Patience, I think): “Finished! At last, finished! The book is finished, and my soul has gone out into it. That was all. It was nothing worth mentioning. It occurs three times a day.”

We may not do this three times a day, but yeah. Soul gone out. Conscious. Very little more. Ima go flop now.

Word count: 198,360 — we undershot in our zeal to not go over, and will be fleshing out things we short-changed during revisions.
Authorial sadism: Alyc is right that a certain departure needed to happen . . . but it still hurts. Us as well as the characters.
Authorial amusement: The introduction Ren gets in the epilogue.
BLR quotient: Love is healing the wounds, and the turbulent waters of rhetoric are calming. It won’t be smooth sailing from here into eternity, but the storm has passed.

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