Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 5
September 30, 2024
Echoing Stars - Queen Mab
The Kickstarter for my latest book; ‘Queen Mabs Palace’,launches TOMORROW, on the 1st of October at about now-ish UK time. 
Eldritch Serenity by Jesperesh
Bedlam by Jesperesh
So, over October I will be trying to blog and post asmuch as possible. All of my posts will have the ‘Queen Mab- suffix during that periodand all should have an image with a link to the Kickstarter.
They will also be original content!
I will try to focus my posts around Mabbish subjects, ontwo main poles; Autumn, for the Fey and Fantasy aspects of Queen MabsPalace, and Echoing Stars, for the Science Fiction aspects.
None of these are ‘additions’ or content for the book,but could be parallel texts; essays and creations on similar and not-not-canonsubjects.
Echoing Stars is a concept for a dark Science Fictionreality influenced by the background suggested by the Alien films, theiradjacent tie-in fictions, partner stories like Predator, The Ice, byStephen Pyne, the work of Peter Watts, and several other things. It wouldprobably fit in reasonably well with my old setting Cryogenic Rats.
This is not ‘the background to the Alien Universe’ aslarge parts of that are either contradictory, or not very good, but a reality suggestedby those stories. It’s a dark reality, and a gothic one, but a purely secularcreation, without demons, ultra-powerful evil aliens* or any grand conflict togive meaning to existence. In fact, though it has elements of survival,exploration and discovery, its really about finding or forcing meaning uponreality.
(*Though it will have super-scary monster aliens, theyjust don’t have any actual plan or aim, but are more like abandoned gunsdiscovered by savage children.)
About two hundred years from today, explorations in theSolar System confirm that life on earth is the product of an ancient weaponstest.
At around the same time the truth is formally recognised,and becomes common knowledge; that mathematics is not real, and provides onlyan approximate description of reality. The art is fit for engineering, butlittle else.
Eldritch Serenity by Jesperesh
Exploration of our Local Sphere through cryo-sleep andcrude Gravity Drives discovers worlds strewn like poisoned gems. Cryo itselfputs unavoidable stress onto the human form, taking off days, weeks, months oryears of life, inculcating uncurable neurological problems and vaguepsychological distress, depending on the quality of equipment, expertise,length and repetition.
While mankind gains the power to move to other worlds,life does not spread, and worlds do not sustain. No human colony breeds abovereplacement level. Earth writhes and rots. Humanity may spread amongst thestars, but only as water spills across a table, petering out and evaporating,drying to a stain.
The Tomb Worlds seem to prove this is a universal rule.It has happened before, to strange species separated by millions or millennia.They rise, spread briefly, and slowly die away. In all the Galaxy, the onlyLife is the product of ancient weapons, cultic observances or acts of worshipto an unknowable other. The only living worlds are research sites, emptypalaces, regressive, dying colonies, or those things feeding upon them. Theonly aliens are incoherent degenerates who do not understand their own technology,votive species sculpted by long dead sophonts as acts of unknowable ritual,literal weapons, or the effluvia of dark experiments in forgotten wars.
As are we.
Bedlam by Jesperesh
Life won't spread. Technology fails or ascends beyondcomprehension. Mathematics isn't real. Science and the capacity of the humanmind to understand, hit a hard limit; this is known. What persists in man isthe curiosity of a fly as it mindlessly slams itself against a barrier itcannot perceive; alchemy and engineering, though such names are rarely used;divining through complex rules of thumb, but without full conceptualunderstanding, combining and 'experimenting' with recovered tomb-tech, withoutreally understanding what will happen. Sometimes the same exact experiment orcombination produces different results.
There is no Great Enemy, no grand opposing force. Nodrive but shallow greed and fear of personal death. While many things aredangerous, and there are spheres from which none return, they have no interestin us, and seem not to understand the harm their mere attention might do us.
Few hope any more for transcendent meaning, god-machines,post-humanity, alien congress, or escape from this galaxy. Mankind walks thestars, not in hope but seeking trinkets - knowledge, or fragments of portablewealth, curiosities for the Wunderkammer, to return to the solar spheres andperhaps buy a life of comfort on one of the bright, rare pinnacles of natureleft upon a teeming overwritten earth.
Cold worlds and curious flies, rats among echoing stars.
September 14, 2024
Things Alone
Pop-Culture tales of near-human, nonhuman body-sharing sentience.
A mind not yours within your flesh.
I recently finished Hunter X Hunter and Parasyte. Both evolved into surprisingly complex stories about humanity and its Others; non-human minds sharing the human world, and sometimes flesh. How mankind might relate to souls-not-ours in bodies somewhat alike, and what that unnatural mirror might speak.
I will quickly leap through some of the more prominent fictions, at least those with which I am familiar; some works of the ever-recommended Peter Watts, Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwwaki, the Chimera Ant arc of Hunter X Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi and the Genestealer Cults of Warhammer 40k.
SPOILERS BELOW FOR ALL OF THESE, INCLUDING THE BIG REVEAL IN 'BLINDSIGHT'
Thing-Verse Fictions
Peter Watts
Judging by how much 'Blindsight' gets recommended to me, everyone already knows about this so I won't go into too much detail. Peter Watts writes somewhat dark n edgy Science Fiction. I feel like including him here is something of a cheat as the other properties discussed are all much more ‘pop’ and Sci-Fi must be full of many examples of nonhuman intelligence.
Yet as a matter of direct experience; everyone who reads this blog asks me to read ‘Blindsight’, so I did, and Watts works chimes deeply with some of the other fictions I write about below; especially ‘Things’ and ‘Parasyte’, which could almost be parallel texts.
Blindsight
Uncommunicative Aliens show up in the Solar System, earth sends investigators. On the human side we have a resurrected Pleistocene vampire form of 'Homo' with a genius intellect, a precisely induced schizophrenic with multiple personalities, a brain-altered cyber-drone guy, and another cyborg with enhanced pattern recognition but no empathy.
by Naoyuki Kato
The big reveal is that the aliens are intelligent but non-conscious, and see consciousness as a disease or infection they want to wipe out.
‘Blindsight’ is so concerned with human consciousness and its nature that it’s almost a jeremiad against it. In a near anti-humanist reversal of Roddenberrys civic humanism, or Dunes post-Jihad human maximisation project, in ‘Blindsight’, when humanity sends its ‘best’, it sends its least human. ‘tis a crew without normies; everyone is brain-damaged, cybernetic, a computer or literally a predator.
It is a deeply tragic text. Co-Existence is literally inconceivable. The aliens so alien that there is no person, personality, self, soul or mind to even communicate with. Simply a living entity that instinctively, intuitively, absolutely and intelligently, regards mankind and all its products as utterly inimical. The only communication being akin to playing high-stakes poker against a computer holding a loaded gun. Even the intra-human aspects are deeply in-human. Everyone betrays each other at the end.
Though, the presence of a plot-completing antimatter explosion and the sheer feral will of humanity as a collective to survive and prevail, has a lot in common with the doom of the Chimera Ants at the hands of Chairman Netoro.
The view of Mankind as a nasty species in a bad Galaxy fits in reasonably well with the 40k verse as well.
‘Things’
In 'Things' Watts imagines the intelligence of the 'Thing' from the movie of the same name, as it encounters and merges with the, to it, utterly horrifyingly alien, singular and isolated intelligences of humanity. ‘Things’ is a great story. Its short and it works as an addendum or inversion of the events of the well-known film. You can find 'Things' here https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
The being, or sentience, of ‘Things’, is familiar with a galaxy scattered with living worlds made up of unified minds. Biospheres of complexity, but like the water-world of ‘Solaris’ (which perhaps deserves attention here, but I am not made of free time), living systems which are broadly one ‘self’. In simple terms; the planet is a person. When you go to a new world, you meet and merge with a person, sharing unutterable depths of knowledge, selfhood and experience, before separating and going on your way.
Wounded and starving, when the ‘Thing’ meets humanity, it has absolutely no idea what to make of what it finds. The biosphere is mute, seemingly dead in some mysterious fashion, almost a ‘zombie world’, and physically highly aggressive; actively, blindly, mutely trying to destroy the visitor. Has this poor world gone mad? Or is the visitor simply trapped in some plague-hospital, mental treatment centre or zoo? What is going on? Why will nothing communicate and why does everything attack?
Its only slowly, and with mounting horror, that the Visitor slowly comes to understand that the pseudopods it has been trying to talk to, then fighting, avoiding and finally imitating to survive, are each, individual, separate, mutually-antagonistic minds. This world has somehow evolved wrong, creating these ‘intelligent cancers’ which prey and feed upon each other. When the visitor absorbs an exploratory limb of this world, there is a whole other person in the same flesh, emanating desires and commands from the complex knot of thinking cancer in the topmost sensory bone-case.
‘Things’ is not quite as midnight-black as ‘Blindsight’. The two entity-groups can actually communicate, and mutual destruction is not absolutely necessary or inevitable, but each side instinctively loathes and despises the other as being fundamentally wrong, monstrous and inimical.
No-one is even trying to get along.
The Genestealer Cults
The Tyranids; a biological homogenising swarm obsessed with devouring every living thing, digesting it, and turning it into itself. Farming apparently is not enough; they have to strip a planet bare, pipe up the goo, turn it into swarms and on to the next.
What exactly the Tyranid Hive-Mind actually is, is a mystery of the 40k setting. Its represented a little differently each time. Like Watts ‘Scramblers’ it may not even be conscious as we understand it. It doesn’t speak. Seems to have no language. Its only relationship with any form of life is to eat it. Its only relationship with anything else is to move through or around it to get to the life it wants to eat. Its methods for doing so range from massive and brutal to unbelievably sneaky and subtle, but it could just be a problem-solving machine.
Elements or aspects or pseudopods of the Hive-Mind do seem to be allowed something like ‘personality’. It has super-General organisms which it keeps backups of, recreating them and embodying them for different wars or battles. Likewise it has super-infiltrator and super-psychic entities.
When I imagine the Hive Mind I imagine it as treating sentient self-consciousness as something like cancer, or a necessary toxin it has to generate and use to achieve its aims, but one it really doesn’t want to spread; ‘mind’ can grow, spread, infect, create copies of itself, even, like prions, perhaps instantiate flawed or destructive responses in non-mind that can lead to system failure.
The Hive-Fleets of the Tyranids also seem to be allowed a degree of ‘Personality’; distinctive tactics and preferences, complex and unique approaches to problems. Hive-Fleets can even go to ‘war’ with each other, trying to devour one another. This seems less like a war between factions but a conflict between thoughts, or philosophies, within one mind that is not a mind.
When I imagine the Hive-Mind I imagine a woman asleep in the darkness between stars. Vast. Her limbs and hairs and fingers separate and spread out into a trillion trillion pseudopods and tendrils. She is sleep-walking, or sleep-acting. Dreaming yet performing complex actions. Like someone doing the dishes or loading a gun without ‘waking up’. There is no ‘person’ there, and the dream-self fears and hates ‘personhood’.
The Cults
Genestealers are a Tyranid infiltration and subversion organism. Sent ahead of the Hive Fleets, they hang around in sneaky spaces till they encounter some kind of organised life. They then subvert and implant that life-form, turning the will of their prey to the needs of the Hive-Mind, breeding Genestealer/Target hybrids of greater and greater sophistication.
As bonkers as the Genestealer-hybrid cycle sounds, it actually makes more sense than a lot of the scientific, but semi-magical abilities of the Watts-verse or ‘Parasyte’. There is no need for biological super-beings with which every cell is an active and independent part, and where every cell is basically also a neuron, but the organism can still organise itself effectively.
Genestealers start by subverting members of the target species. At first these people don’t know they have been subverted, the incident itself is blanked from memory. To them, it feels like a spiritual or philosophical shift. They gather with likeminded people and gain a form of religion, one like, but somewhat distorted from the standard accepted doctrine. It seems like a pretty fulfilling life.
When subverted individuals breed they produce hybrids in which the genetics of the Genestealer are synthesised with that of the host species, about 50/50. These are monstrosities, but various forms of conditioning kick in and the parents adore and raise their monster-babies.
When the first generation breeds they produce somewhat more-human hybrids capable of more humanlike behaviour. When this second generation breeds they produce mostly-humanoid but still freaky offspring. When that third generation breeds they produce creatures which can pass for human and move in a sophisticated way through human society. The fifth generation includes purestrains who can re-start the cycle.
This can only really work in complex environments with big human populations, with space for the first few generations to go to ground, but enough complexity for the fourth and fifth to perform useful actions in society.
All members of a Genestealer Cult stay loyal in all circumstances. Its not clear how this is achieved. The Hive Mind, and the original Genestealer Patriarch, have a strong and subtle psychic presence. Presumably this combines with highly sophisticated genetic, chemical, behavioural and other methods to create a kind of unbreakable unity, even in highly complex organisms.
Yet. Some books take us deeper into the minds of Genestealer Cultists, and what we find there is a curious blend of delusion, compulsion and an overwriting of basic human drives that does, at times, leave room for something like brief doubt. In ‘Day of Ascension’ a young cult magus is cut off from the psychic presence of the Hive-Mind and, examining her own motivations, doubts for a moment. In ‘Cult of the Spiral Dawn’ a guardsman enchanted by a female Magus is let slip from her influence once he becomes useless, and before he dies suffers a nightmarish dark night of the soul as his certainties fall away. And there are always distaff cult associates on the side of revolution; people working and fighting alongside the membership who share similar goals, or people part of the same social network, but not fully suborned.
In making the ‘Other’ a parallel, insidious society, that runs directly alongside the main human one, the Cults bring the problem of motivation into stark contrast. The Cult is a Cult; it has a religious aim, of union with the perfect Star Gods, and a redemptive ideology. It also feels good to be a member. To be part of a giant family and to be working towards a great purpose. Cult members tend to function better than normal members of society.
What kind of twisted perversity would be needed in a human mind to actively turn against a society in which all the most fundamental drives are met and the most fundamental values and needs answered? More simply; how can we possibly think outside or against our deepest inherent values? These values are not simply ideas we choose and can swap; they form the basic axioms upon which all other thought is built, with which our moral desires are interwoven, and they are the drives which make us live, learn, suffer and grow. The very engines which impel us to action and which make up the matrix of our moral and emotional world. If something can subvert that, it is like a killer code against which Humanity has no meaningful defence.
Parasyte
Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwwaki exists in a variety of forms, from the original Manga to a live-action Netflix adaptation; ‘Parasyte: The Grey’. I am talking about the anime; ‘Parasyte: The Maxim’ which is the only version I have seen.
Our hero Shinichi Izumi is a normal Japanese Schoolboy.
One night curious spores drift down from space. One encounters our protagonist and rapidly consumes and replicates his flesh, but due to a highly unlikely series of events, (he had his own arm in some kind of cord for reasons), it only manages to infect one hand and lower arm.
The Parasyte is an adaptive and infectious distributed cellular intelligence, a lot like the 'Thing'. Every cell is apparently a trachtomrphic muscle and a neuron and it can do a bunch of things human flesh cannot. Its base instinct was first to reach, then absorb and replicate the brain and head, using these to control the body, which would remain human, yet under the control of the Parasyte. But the period of peak-adaptation for the creatures life-cycle is now over and it is stuck as the hand of a teenage boy. It draws its life from his body, from his blood supply and cannot survive without him. The creature cannot transform to adapt to a new host. If the boy dies, it dies.
Every, (or nearly every), other Parasyte that fell succeeded in its main drive and worked its way to a human brain, devouring, remaking and simulating it to control the body, and is now walking around as a simulated human being.
The Parasytes seem to be hard-coded to hunt and consume the living flesh of the species they imitate. They are very highly intelligent, capable of learning highly complex human information quickly enough that they can broadly fake being human within a day or so. (A neat aspect is that they do seem to have a natural variation in intelligence and personality, some Parasytes are highly intelligent near-artists of simulation with a deep intellectual interest in everything human. Others are pretty dumb and just about smart enough to walk about.)
Their intelligence is utterly nonhuman. Their first instinct is ‘I want to eat the brain’. After that their instinct is to hide themselves and secretly feed on the target species. (Humans). Initially, Parasytes have no sense-of-species. They are not inherently social organisms. They have no shared culture. They are not necessarily on the same ‘side’, in fact each could be considered a ‘side’ of its own. Their only collective actions are driven by pure advantage.
We never find out where the Parasytes come from, if they have a purpose or are simple a natural phenomena. We also never learn if simulating an intelligent self-aware species is normal for them. Judging by how things go, it may not be, as simulating humanity brings a towering stack of complexities.
Shinichi calls his Parasyte ‘Migi’ which I think means ‘Right’ for his right hand. Having a name is also not something Parasytes seem to inherently think about. Now the teenage protagonist and Migi are stuck together, both vulnerable to the other, both also learning from each other, in the middle of an alien predation invasion and the secret war being fought against it.
Neutral
If the ‘Scramblers’ from Blindsight are a natural disaster, the ‘Thing’ from things has a near religious disgust for humanity, and the Genestealer Cults are basically a predation/farming technique dedicated to eating humanity, ‘Migi’ and some other Parasytes, are seen surprisingly neutrally by the story. There are almost no ‘Evil’ things in Parasyte. True, some aliens are eating humans, but they need to survive and it’s their basic instinct to do so. ‘Migi’ is an alarmingly rational, even reasonable character who has no hatred or resentment for Shinichi, or humanity, but simply wants to survive, (to the extent of threatening to blind and cripple Shinichi if he goes to the authorities.
The action is not quite anti-heroic, but deeply human. At times various characters bring up the idea of acting the hero, either in the cause of humanity, or some other noble aim. The story doesn’t exactly shit on heroics, but just asks calmly; “Ok, if its really you, and you are really going to die, or your family is going to be hurt, or you are going straight to a dissection lab, how much of a hero are you really willing to be?”
Few people are evil, but most are reasonably self-interested.
The Horror of Understanding Each Other
If Watts and Genestealers breed horror from the failure to comprehend the Other, ‘Parasyte’ has a more subtle nightmare; what if you could actually see each others point of view, but couldn’t change anything?
Because Shinichi and Migi spend so much time with each other, because they learn constantly from each other and especially because they are opposed by everyone, (the government would dissect Shinichi to get to Migi and the other Parasytes see Migi as a massive security risk), they end up becoming more like each other. Confronted with the deception, self-interest and ruthlessness of the Government, and humanities utter ruthlessness to ensure its own survival, Shinichi begins to take a much more distant view of humanity. He doesn’t want people to be eaten or killed, but slowly stops defending his desires in morally absolute terms and has to admit that he takes that view purely because he is human.
Migi never changes their base ‘programming’ but they don’t need to eat people, (they draw all their sustenance from Shinichi’s blood), but they do need to protect Shinichi. Since everything they learn about humanity they get first hand from Shinichi, this is a crash course in an alien thingy adapting to the physical, social and moral needs of a teenage boy.
Migi initially has no sense of species-solidarity, being as willing to kill other Parasytes to survive as they are willing to kill Migi to remove the threat they pose. But over time, with relentless exposure to human culture, human moral arguments, human philosophy and in the middle of an inter-species war, Migi does eventually develop something like a wider species sense of self, perhaps not as intuitive or immediate as the human preference for humans, but more a top-down, perhaps intellectualised discomfort in the destruction of their own kind. Having developed this moral sense, they are intelligent enough to reverse the idea and sense how horrible it is for humans to be hunted, or to see other humans hunted. This creates a deep philosophical and moral problem for Migi.
We can imagine, the Lion being gifted intelligence enough to empathise with the Lamb.
Other Parasytes, the more intelligent, subtle and more deeply involved in human culture, undergo parallel experiences. Only one other is in a similar situation to Migi, attached to a human after failing to eat them. The others have no ‘human half’ on which they are dependant and so are not forced to learn in the same way or at the same speed, but handfuls do seem to stop eating people, (they are strongly instincted to eat us but are not utterly obligate homovores). An intelligent female Parasyte keeps her hosts baby child as ‘an experiment’ and ends up developing quasi-maternal instincts for it. On the other side, the government discovers a nest of Parasytes working for a political candidate. After trapping them and uncovering the conspiracy, they shoot the candidate, to discover he is human. He wasn’t fooled, bribed, tricked or threatened, he knew he was working with aliens. He thought it was good that humanity finally had a predator, that the Parasytes were a gift from nature to restore balance and harmony to the world.
What starts as an alien invasion story, and is always something of a horror story, ends up developing into a kind of moral tragedy. Parasytes are exterminated, some adapt and go into hiding as Parasyte-vegans, some are so driven by instinct and hatred for humanity that they become wilderness-dwelling wendigo monsters. Ultimately Migi goes into a form of permanent philosophical hibernation, partly escaping from the moral anguish of their situation, partly seeking an answer. Shinichi is deeply lonely without his friend.
The Chimera Ant Arc
Hunter X Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi is a Shonen magical-powers-fighting adventure Manga. Half way through its run Togashi comes up with the idea for ‘Chimera Ants’ and writes an arc for them so long that it makes up half the Anime. Hunter x Hunter is nearly ‘Chimera Ants; the Series (starring some Hunters)’.
‘Chimera Ants’ evolve through consumption, qualities, forms and memories from what they eat. The ‘Chimera Ant Arc’ begins when, somewhere, a Chimera Ant nest eats a human being and produces an Ant Queen with a humanoid form and human-level intelligence. She begins to build an ant nation by eating humans and producing generations of humanoid ants.
Hunter X Hunter has a carefully worked out magical powers system called ‘Nen based on something like ‘aura’ or ‘chi’, and which most of its main characters use. Pretty soon the Chimera Ants discover this and begin eating Nen users, producing magical Man-Ants. The Queen begins to breed an ‘Ant King’ who is intended to be the super-powerful leader for the Chimera Ants, and who is made from all the Nen users the ants can find, to create a Super Magical Man Ant.
The visuals and basic dramatic tools for the Chimera Ant Arc are cartoony and very anime (the Chimera Ants emerge from their cocoons in cool costumes), but the way it treats questions of selfhood, identity and responsibility are probably the most subtle and morally complex of all the fictions in this essay.
The Chimera Ants absorb human memories along with human shapes and abilities. They also get a bunch of semi-random animal qualities, all depending on what the Queen was eating when she gave birth to them. So any individual Chimera Ant might be a pure Ant-Minded being, just with a humanoid form and some functional intelligence, an 80% accurate recreation of a human personality, but now with an ant body and ant instincts, a wild combination of animal and human instincts, or anything in-between. Some Chimera ants remember almost nothing of any of their human parts, while some are such singular excretions of particular souls that they feel almost like reincarnations.
Many of the 'Ants' are tortured by their part-human instincts and part-human memories.
As one Chimera Ant says to another; "There's some kind of look in the eyes, I can't explain it, but I know I when I see it and I think 'yeah this one remembers their past life".
Though individually powerful, the ants lose the potency of their unity and singularity of purpose as digested qualities like price, ambition and personal desire start infiltrating their minds. The innovation of ‘Names’, (“What is a name?” asks the Chimera Ant Queen), personalities, independent drives and desires, forms a deep and inexorable conflict between these two forms of consciousness; the primal ant will to power and the human social and moral complexity.
Memory, Reincarnation and Koala
Part of the reason the initial Ant Colony is successful is because it happens inside a micro-nation called the ‘New Green Republic’, a deliberately low-tech state where people live according to a near medieval level of material technology and where everything above that level is banned. Many of the humans the ants eat initially are basically hippie peasants, which has an effect on the next ant generation.
We later discover the NGR is a front. Unbeknownst to most of its residents, the place is run by, and for, a ruthless drug cartel who use the NGR as a base to pedal drugs to the rest of the world. The initial armed conflict of the Ants is with this nest of ruthless gangsters, who they then eat, and these personalities in turn affect the nature of future Ant generations. The gangster memories synergise well in some ways with the Ants ruthlessness and will to power, but the same memories carry deep, primal loyalties and bonds, and a violent resentment that has nothing to do with Ant psychology. In their own ways, both the peaceful minds and memories of the NGR peasants and the ruthless memories of the Cartel gangsters, are toxins, poisons in the clear minds of the Ants they become. Some Ants are friends, or enemies, because of the human memories that formed them. Others are brave, craven or subtle, depending on who they absorbed. The only Ants that don’t seem to have these are the Queen, the King and the three Royal Guards, who were either very well-stirred before creation, or their ant-instincts were so powerful they obliterated any other form of selfhood.
There are many sub-stories of ants and memory, but the most strangely affecting is told through the story of this business-suited Pink Koala;
The Koala carries the memories of a Hit-Man, a ruthless amoral gangster.
"Before all this, my job was to snuff people. I'd get my orders and pull the trigger. The rest of the time I'd yell a lot. It was a job anybody could do. Even when I was reborn, it was the same thing. A stupid cycle. I wanted to let her out of it."
"Before this, I didn't believe in the soul. We're no better than fleas and flies. Life and death, that's all there is. The ego is a glitch, a side effect of a complex brain. You die and it's over. Dust to dust. Get scattered to the wind."
As a Chimera Ant, the Koala is still a seemingly ruthless killer. But the very act of dying, being consumed, and his memories regurgitated in a new form, acts as a bizarre catalyst for spiritual growth.
"Hopeless. "She was a redhead, just like you. And I gunned her down."
The differing cultural perspective is fascinating. On the Western side, the Scramblers in Blindsight were a blank-faced catastrophe, the ‘Thing’ from ‘Things’ was an enemy by nature and culture. The Genestealer Cults are a perversion of religion towards a devouring false god. Then on the Japanese side, the Parasytes are opponents, but also neutral predators, no more ‘evil’ than a Tiger, and their existence has a degree of tragedy, due to the human aspects they absorb. (Perhaps there are elements of this with the Genestealer Cults). Finally, with the Chimera Ants, they are inimical to human flourishing, at least initially, and are obligate predators, but slowly many evolve into ‘people’, ghosts or reincarnations of humanity, or aspects or shards of human nature thrown into sharp relief, each occurring in a different way.
The translation of the ‘Other’ from Absolute, to Threat, to Tragedy to Post-Humanity is fascinating to think about. If part of the subtext for any story of infiltrating nonhuman sentience is; “can inherent ‘Others’ mutually reconcile themselves”, then the wild whacky cartoony Chimera Ant arc is probably the deepest and most ‘Humanistic’ of all these fictions.
Being eaten by a magical super-ant and recombined into something new perhaps isn’t the platonic ideal of reincarnation but if you wake up with your old memories in a new body, it sure would feel like it. Dying to violence and being reborn as the incarnation of that violence, is a strange one.
Meruem and Komugi
The story goes through various, (lengthy) evolutions, with the series heroes trying to prevent the birth of the Ant King, failing, and then battling him again after he takes over a North Korea-style dictatorship.
(A fascinating aspect of battling the ants is that, if the human side lose people, the Ants have the ability to essentially ‘digest’ them, and produce Ants with combinations of their powers, memories or personalities. Meaning if you lose a friend to the Ants, you may be facing an ‘Antified’ version of them later. Depending on how much, or what kinds of memories they have, they may be an ally, a terrifying enemy, or just very confused.)
The ‘Ant King’ (his given name is ‘Meruem’, but he initially has no idea that he has a name, or any desire for one) is hyper-powerful, utterly amoral by human standards and dedicated to the Ants will-to-power and to taking over the world in a classic supervillain style.
He is also only a few days old. Though he has a well-blended cache of inherited knowledge and learns at an accelerated rate, he has no actual experience of human society or human life. After taking over pseudo North-Korea he compulsively learns everything he can, taking on and beating every human expert in every human field, and game. Until he meets the nations best Shogi player, a blind teenage girl who sustains her family by being the world champion in an obscure and complex board game. This is someone he cannot beat. No matter how hard he tries or how much he learns, he cannot win a fair game of Shogi against this girl, and she is learning from him as fast as he learns from her, meaning he may never beat her. There is something he cannot do. He slowly becomes obsessed with this game and this girl, keeping her around and playing her every day, absorbed utterly in a challenge he cannot defeat.
Because he can’t defeat this snotty blind teenager, he ends up having something like a human relationship with her. His mind becomes open to a relationship with another being that is not just a vector of imposing power or destroying a threat. He begins to analyse his own actions from an alien perspective; his compulsive murder of a child to see what would happen – that child might have grown up to be a great Shogi player. If one child might have become a great Shogi player, could there be other things that other humans could do or be that he simply doesn’t understand yet? Who actually is he? This girl has a name. His subordinate Ants have names. (They gave them to each other). Humans have names. Does he have a name? He is the King, which is all that he is, but is the King also a person like other people?
This slow ‘awakening’ or complexifying of the King worries and disturbs his closest guards. Is he starting to question the whole world-takeover thing and treating humans as livestock?
Meruem and Neotaro
The ‘Ant King’ is a being so insanely powerful that only Humanities strongest Nen-User even has a chance of fighting him so that’s who they call, organising an ant-attack to draw out the King to a location where he and Isaac Netero, the Chief of the Hunter Association, and hyperpowered shifty-Bhudda-type will fight Ant King Meruem for the future of humanity.
During this battle, the heart of the tale beats backwards. Meruem Ant-King is on a rising moral arc, gradually discovering and interrogating more of his human half, he is growing. He consistently offers to negotiate, to ‘settle this with words’.
“I have learned what power is for. To protect the weak who deserve to live. Never to oppress the defeated. I will not fight you.”
Netero, the former Granpa-figure, has been getting into fighting shape by massacring Chimera Ants. The bastion of a threatened and overpowered humanity, he has no room for negotiation or compromise. He uses knowledge of the Kings given name, taken from the dying Ant Queen, to force a conflict. In battle he exerts all his energy on destruction. He refuses all offers of compromise and ultimately, unable to win ‘fairly’, he pierces his own heart and activates the micro-Nuke he had hidden in his chest.
“Meruem, King of the Ants... You really don't have any idea, do you...? You know nothing of the bottomless malice within the human heart... I see you in hell... If there is one...”
Even this isn’t quite enough to Kill Merum, though the radiation from this dirty bomb does ultimately infiltrate his regenerating flesh, causing him to die of cancer in the arms of Komugi.
Its beyond curious that we return again, as we did with the Theseus in ‘Blindsight’ to Humanity blowing itself the fuck up with atomic weapons to kill the aliens. Humanity represented as something, perhaps individually weak, but dark and ferocious enough, and with a relentless will to live, that makes it more than equal to the threatening Other
Have We Learned Anything?
The Isolated Mind
Can one kind of intelligence encounter another without horror? All of the situations described above are horrific, though few are only that.
Is it a necessity that to truly encounter the Other within oneself, they must be opposed to your welfare
If one encounters an other, within oneself, and they are not opposed, but neutral, do they inevitably become symbiotic? Without opposition, is union of some sort inevitable?
Where are the stories about an invasive other that is not opposed, not plotting against you, or trying to subvert you, but is fine with living peacefully alongside you, as a non-human part of you? In Parasyte Shinichi’s relationship with Migi, his alien hand, is like this. They have a transactional and oppositional relationship based on mutual survival, with some threats, but over time they become familiar with each other and, though remaining in many ways fundamentally alien in outlook to each other, form some kind of friend-like bond
They even start picking up on each others morality, seemingly entirely by closeness, exposure to each other and shared threat. Migi originally has no race or species consciousness, he doesn’t care if other members of his species die, its literally fine as they are not him. Ultimately he seems to grow into or absorb some kind of group-moral-awareness, which makes his existence more and more difficult as his survival is opposed to others of his kind. Conversely, the protagonist becomes partially alienated from humanity, seeing them somewhat from the outside, not necessarily instinctively siding with humans in all situations and regarding the lives of human and alien with a degree of moral equivalence.
"These humans are definitely foolish creatures. Think as hard as those weak brains of yours can manage. Do you ever listen to the cries of mercy coming from the pigs and cows you slaughter?"
~ Meruem to Ming Jok-ik's dancers when they begged for mercy.
East vs West
Or at least, Japan vs the Anglosphere.
A lot of Japanese popular culture has a moral tone which seems lightly intuitively ‘off-kilter’ to me. At times this shows itself through a cynicism so deep, yet so petty it seems like childish abandon. But it does have another side and the stories of the ‘Parasytes’ and the Chimera Ants allow a moral neutrality, (in comparison to Watts and 40k), that actually opens access to a more complex and interesting field of moral drama.
Anthrocentric Values – Biochemical Morality
The beliefs humanity doesn’t know it has. Beliefs so core they are invisible, until contrasted with another mind within itself. Its hard for us to know what these might be until we imagine ourselves in contact with a deep-Other; something that can communicate with us, but which is so different that we have real trouble explaining ourselves.
Aye your feelings and intuitions are just biochemistry, but that is not much of an answer, (and if you are talking to a human then so is the question – equally an aspect of biochemistry).
The viewpoint prompted by many of these stories is that, through seeing humanity through the eyes of the ‘Other’, our own core values are exposed as deeply biological, programmed, and when the product of culture, are nearly as deeply rooted and immune to reason.
Beyond that, we get a feeling for the .. not just the partiality, but the near-irrelevance of any particular set of values – they feel abstract, cold, like distant laws curiously drawn, like a necessity; of course you must have values, but no more than you must have bones or a tongue.
This shows up distinctly in the Alien films where the humans have one set of messy directly intuited values, the Androids have a strong particular set of directly-coded values, sometimes with secret values hidden from others, and the Xenomorphs have their own purely instinctive survival drive
But, adrift in the blackness of space, all of these ultimately seem much of a muchness, one necessarily no better than the other.
By what right do we live?
What is the vision of humanity that emerges from the Thing-verse
Lonely. Horrifically dangerous. Callous and self-absorbed, with not much of a moral claim on this world, for it was taken and maintained by force.
Without a moral argument for its own existence.
One shadow impulse behind all these fictions might be a version of humanity that is trying to shape a moral argument for its own existence that might work for a non-human mind. Job arguing before God, but now arguing before the imagined Other.
Can you explain yourself to a Chimera Ant?
A mind not yours within your flesh.
I recently finished Hunter X Hunter and Parasyte. Both evolved into surprisingly complex stories about humanity and its Others; non-human minds sharing the human world, and sometimes flesh. How mankind might relate to souls-not-ours in bodies somewhat alike, and what that unnatural mirror might speak.
I will quickly leap through some of the more prominent fictions, at least those with which I am familiar; some works of the ever-recommended Peter Watts, Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwwaki, the Chimera Ant arc of Hunter X Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi and the Genestealer Cults of Warhammer 40k.
SPOILERS BELOW FOR ALL OF THESE, INCLUDING THE BIG REVEAL IN 'BLINDSIGHT'
Thing-Verse Fictions
Peter Watts
Judging by how much 'Blindsight' gets recommended to me, everyone already knows about this so I won't go into too much detail. Peter Watts writes somewhat dark n edgy Science Fiction. I feel like including him here is something of a cheat as the other properties discussed are all much more ‘pop’ and Sci-Fi must be full of many examples of nonhuman intelligence.
Yet as a matter of direct experience; everyone who reads this blog asks me to read ‘Blindsight’, so I did, and Watts works chimes deeply with some of the other fictions I write about below; especially ‘Things’ and ‘Parasyte’, which could almost be parallel texts.
Blindsight
Uncommunicative Aliens show up in the Solar System, earth sends investigators. On the human side we have a resurrected Pleistocene vampire form of 'Homo' with a genius intellect, a precisely induced schizophrenic with multiple personalities, a brain-altered cyber-drone guy, and another cyborg with enhanced pattern recognition but no empathy.
by Naoyuki KatoThe big reveal is that the aliens are intelligent but non-conscious, and see consciousness as a disease or infection they want to wipe out.
‘Blindsight’ is so concerned with human consciousness and its nature that it’s almost a jeremiad against it. In a near anti-humanist reversal of Roddenberrys civic humanism, or Dunes post-Jihad human maximisation project, in ‘Blindsight’, when humanity sends its ‘best’, it sends its least human. ‘tis a crew without normies; everyone is brain-damaged, cybernetic, a computer or literally a predator.
It is a deeply tragic text. Co-Existence is literally inconceivable. The aliens so alien that there is no person, personality, self, soul or mind to even communicate with. Simply a living entity that instinctively, intuitively, absolutely and intelligently, regards mankind and all its products as utterly inimical. The only communication being akin to playing high-stakes poker against a computer holding a loaded gun. Even the intra-human aspects are deeply in-human. Everyone betrays each other at the end.
Though, the presence of a plot-completing antimatter explosion and the sheer feral will of humanity as a collective to survive and prevail, has a lot in common with the doom of the Chimera Ants at the hands of Chairman Netoro.
The view of Mankind as a nasty species in a bad Galaxy fits in reasonably well with the 40k verse as well.
‘Things’
In 'Things' Watts imagines the intelligence of the 'Thing' from the movie of the same name, as it encounters and merges with the, to it, utterly horrifyingly alien, singular and isolated intelligences of humanity. ‘Things’ is a great story. Its short and it works as an addendum or inversion of the events of the well-known film. You can find 'Things' here https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
The being, or sentience, of ‘Things’, is familiar with a galaxy scattered with living worlds made up of unified minds. Biospheres of complexity, but like the water-world of ‘Solaris’ (which perhaps deserves attention here, but I am not made of free time), living systems which are broadly one ‘self’. In simple terms; the planet is a person. When you go to a new world, you meet and merge with a person, sharing unutterable depths of knowledge, selfhood and experience, before separating and going on your way.
Wounded and starving, when the ‘Thing’ meets humanity, it has absolutely no idea what to make of what it finds. The biosphere is mute, seemingly dead in some mysterious fashion, almost a ‘zombie world’, and physically highly aggressive; actively, blindly, mutely trying to destroy the visitor. Has this poor world gone mad? Or is the visitor simply trapped in some plague-hospital, mental treatment centre or zoo? What is going on? Why will nothing communicate and why does everything attack?
Its only slowly, and with mounting horror, that the Visitor slowly comes to understand that the pseudopods it has been trying to talk to, then fighting, avoiding and finally imitating to survive, are each, individual, separate, mutually-antagonistic minds. This world has somehow evolved wrong, creating these ‘intelligent cancers’ which prey and feed upon each other. When the visitor absorbs an exploratory limb of this world, there is a whole other person in the same flesh, emanating desires and commands from the complex knot of thinking cancer in the topmost sensory bone-case.
‘Things’ is not quite as midnight-black as ‘Blindsight’. The two entity-groups can actually communicate, and mutual destruction is not absolutely necessary or inevitable, but each side instinctively loathes and despises the other as being fundamentally wrong, monstrous and inimical.
No-one is even trying to get along.
The Genestealer Cults
The Tyranids; a biological homogenising swarm obsessed with devouring every living thing, digesting it, and turning it into itself. Farming apparently is not enough; they have to strip a planet bare, pipe up the goo, turn it into swarms and on to the next.
What exactly the Tyranid Hive-Mind actually is, is a mystery of the 40k setting. Its represented a little differently each time. Like Watts ‘Scramblers’ it may not even be conscious as we understand it. It doesn’t speak. Seems to have no language. Its only relationship with any form of life is to eat it. Its only relationship with anything else is to move through or around it to get to the life it wants to eat. Its methods for doing so range from massive and brutal to unbelievably sneaky and subtle, but it could just be a problem-solving machine.
Elements or aspects or pseudopods of the Hive-Mind do seem to be allowed something like ‘personality’. It has super-General organisms which it keeps backups of, recreating them and embodying them for different wars or battles. Likewise it has super-infiltrator and super-psychic entities.
When I imagine the Hive Mind I imagine it as treating sentient self-consciousness as something like cancer, or a necessary toxin it has to generate and use to achieve its aims, but one it really doesn’t want to spread; ‘mind’ can grow, spread, infect, create copies of itself, even, like prions, perhaps instantiate flawed or destructive responses in non-mind that can lead to system failure.
The Hive-Fleets of the Tyranids also seem to be allowed a degree of ‘Personality’; distinctive tactics and preferences, complex and unique approaches to problems. Hive-Fleets can even go to ‘war’ with each other, trying to devour one another. This seems less like a war between factions but a conflict between thoughts, or philosophies, within one mind that is not a mind.
When I imagine the Hive-Mind I imagine a woman asleep in the darkness between stars. Vast. Her limbs and hairs and fingers separate and spread out into a trillion trillion pseudopods and tendrils. She is sleep-walking, or sleep-acting. Dreaming yet performing complex actions. Like someone doing the dishes or loading a gun without ‘waking up’. There is no ‘person’ there, and the dream-self fears and hates ‘personhood’.
The Cults
Genestealers are a Tyranid infiltration and subversion organism. Sent ahead of the Hive Fleets, they hang around in sneaky spaces till they encounter some kind of organised life. They then subvert and implant that life-form, turning the will of their prey to the needs of the Hive-Mind, breeding Genestealer/Target hybrids of greater and greater sophistication.
As bonkers as the Genestealer-hybrid cycle sounds, it actually makes more sense than a lot of the scientific, but semi-magical abilities of the Watts-verse or ‘Parasyte’. There is no need for biological super-beings with which every cell is an active and independent part, and where every cell is basically also a neuron, but the organism can still organise itself effectively.
Genestealers start by subverting members of the target species. At first these people don’t know they have been subverted, the incident itself is blanked from memory. To them, it feels like a spiritual or philosophical shift. They gather with likeminded people and gain a form of religion, one like, but somewhat distorted from the standard accepted doctrine. It seems like a pretty fulfilling life.
When subverted individuals breed they produce hybrids in which the genetics of the Genestealer are synthesised with that of the host species, about 50/50. These are monstrosities, but various forms of conditioning kick in and the parents adore and raise their monster-babies.
When the first generation breeds they produce somewhat more-human hybrids capable of more humanlike behaviour. When this second generation breeds they produce mostly-humanoid but still freaky offspring. When that third generation breeds they produce creatures which can pass for human and move in a sophisticated way through human society. The fifth generation includes purestrains who can re-start the cycle.
This can only really work in complex environments with big human populations, with space for the first few generations to go to ground, but enough complexity for the fourth and fifth to perform useful actions in society.
All members of a Genestealer Cult stay loyal in all circumstances. Its not clear how this is achieved. The Hive Mind, and the original Genestealer Patriarch, have a strong and subtle psychic presence. Presumably this combines with highly sophisticated genetic, chemical, behavioural and other methods to create a kind of unbreakable unity, even in highly complex organisms.
Yet. Some books take us deeper into the minds of Genestealer Cultists, and what we find there is a curious blend of delusion, compulsion and an overwriting of basic human drives that does, at times, leave room for something like brief doubt. In ‘Day of Ascension’ a young cult magus is cut off from the psychic presence of the Hive-Mind and, examining her own motivations, doubts for a moment. In ‘Cult of the Spiral Dawn’ a guardsman enchanted by a female Magus is let slip from her influence once he becomes useless, and before he dies suffers a nightmarish dark night of the soul as his certainties fall away. And there are always distaff cult associates on the side of revolution; people working and fighting alongside the membership who share similar goals, or people part of the same social network, but not fully suborned.
In making the ‘Other’ a parallel, insidious society, that runs directly alongside the main human one, the Cults bring the problem of motivation into stark contrast. The Cult is a Cult; it has a religious aim, of union with the perfect Star Gods, and a redemptive ideology. It also feels good to be a member. To be part of a giant family and to be working towards a great purpose. Cult members tend to function better than normal members of society.
What kind of twisted perversity would be needed in a human mind to actively turn against a society in which all the most fundamental drives are met and the most fundamental values and needs answered? More simply; how can we possibly think outside or against our deepest inherent values? These values are not simply ideas we choose and can swap; they form the basic axioms upon which all other thought is built, with which our moral desires are interwoven, and they are the drives which make us live, learn, suffer and grow. The very engines which impel us to action and which make up the matrix of our moral and emotional world. If something can subvert that, it is like a killer code against which Humanity has no meaningful defence.
Parasyte
Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwwaki exists in a variety of forms, from the original Manga to a live-action Netflix adaptation; ‘Parasyte: The Grey’. I am talking about the anime; ‘Parasyte: The Maxim’ which is the only version I have seen.
Our hero Shinichi Izumi is a normal Japanese Schoolboy.
One night curious spores drift down from space. One encounters our protagonist and rapidly consumes and replicates his flesh, but due to a highly unlikely series of events, (he had his own arm in some kind of cord for reasons), it only manages to infect one hand and lower arm.
The Parasyte is an adaptive and infectious distributed cellular intelligence, a lot like the 'Thing'. Every cell is apparently a trachtomrphic muscle and a neuron and it can do a bunch of things human flesh cannot. Its base instinct was first to reach, then absorb and replicate the brain and head, using these to control the body, which would remain human, yet under the control of the Parasyte. But the period of peak-adaptation for the creatures life-cycle is now over and it is stuck as the hand of a teenage boy. It draws its life from his body, from his blood supply and cannot survive without him. The creature cannot transform to adapt to a new host. If the boy dies, it dies.
Every, (or nearly every), other Parasyte that fell succeeded in its main drive and worked its way to a human brain, devouring, remaking and simulating it to control the body, and is now walking around as a simulated human being.
The Parasytes seem to be hard-coded to hunt and consume the living flesh of the species they imitate. They are very highly intelligent, capable of learning highly complex human information quickly enough that they can broadly fake being human within a day or so. (A neat aspect is that they do seem to have a natural variation in intelligence and personality, some Parasytes are highly intelligent near-artists of simulation with a deep intellectual interest in everything human. Others are pretty dumb and just about smart enough to walk about.)
Their intelligence is utterly nonhuman. Their first instinct is ‘I want to eat the brain’. After that their instinct is to hide themselves and secretly feed on the target species. (Humans). Initially, Parasytes have no sense-of-species. They are not inherently social organisms. They have no shared culture. They are not necessarily on the same ‘side’, in fact each could be considered a ‘side’ of its own. Their only collective actions are driven by pure advantage.
We never find out where the Parasytes come from, if they have a purpose or are simple a natural phenomena. We also never learn if simulating an intelligent self-aware species is normal for them. Judging by how things go, it may not be, as simulating humanity brings a towering stack of complexities.
Shinichi calls his Parasyte ‘Migi’ which I think means ‘Right’ for his right hand. Having a name is also not something Parasytes seem to inherently think about. Now the teenage protagonist and Migi are stuck together, both vulnerable to the other, both also learning from each other, in the middle of an alien predation invasion and the secret war being fought against it.
Neutral
If the ‘Scramblers’ from Blindsight are a natural disaster, the ‘Thing’ from things has a near religious disgust for humanity, and the Genestealer Cults are basically a predation/farming technique dedicated to eating humanity, ‘Migi’ and some other Parasytes, are seen surprisingly neutrally by the story. There are almost no ‘Evil’ things in Parasyte. True, some aliens are eating humans, but they need to survive and it’s their basic instinct to do so. ‘Migi’ is an alarmingly rational, even reasonable character who has no hatred or resentment for Shinichi, or humanity, but simply wants to survive, (to the extent of threatening to blind and cripple Shinichi if he goes to the authorities.
The action is not quite anti-heroic, but deeply human. At times various characters bring up the idea of acting the hero, either in the cause of humanity, or some other noble aim. The story doesn’t exactly shit on heroics, but just asks calmly; “Ok, if its really you, and you are really going to die, or your family is going to be hurt, or you are going straight to a dissection lab, how much of a hero are you really willing to be?”
Few people are evil, but most are reasonably self-interested.
The Horror of Understanding Each Other
If Watts and Genestealers breed horror from the failure to comprehend the Other, ‘Parasyte’ has a more subtle nightmare; what if you could actually see each others point of view, but couldn’t change anything?
Because Shinichi and Migi spend so much time with each other, because they learn constantly from each other and especially because they are opposed by everyone, (the government would dissect Shinichi to get to Migi and the other Parasytes see Migi as a massive security risk), they end up becoming more like each other. Confronted with the deception, self-interest and ruthlessness of the Government, and humanities utter ruthlessness to ensure its own survival, Shinichi begins to take a much more distant view of humanity. He doesn’t want people to be eaten or killed, but slowly stops defending his desires in morally absolute terms and has to admit that he takes that view purely because he is human.
Migi never changes their base ‘programming’ but they don’t need to eat people, (they draw all their sustenance from Shinichi’s blood), but they do need to protect Shinichi. Since everything they learn about humanity they get first hand from Shinichi, this is a crash course in an alien thingy adapting to the physical, social and moral needs of a teenage boy.
Migi initially has no sense of species-solidarity, being as willing to kill other Parasytes to survive as they are willing to kill Migi to remove the threat they pose. But over time, with relentless exposure to human culture, human moral arguments, human philosophy and in the middle of an inter-species war, Migi does eventually develop something like a wider species sense of self, perhaps not as intuitive or immediate as the human preference for humans, but more a top-down, perhaps intellectualised discomfort in the destruction of their own kind. Having developed this moral sense, they are intelligent enough to reverse the idea and sense how horrible it is for humans to be hunted, or to see other humans hunted. This creates a deep philosophical and moral problem for Migi.
We can imagine, the Lion being gifted intelligence enough to empathise with the Lamb.
Other Parasytes, the more intelligent, subtle and more deeply involved in human culture, undergo parallel experiences. Only one other is in a similar situation to Migi, attached to a human after failing to eat them. The others have no ‘human half’ on which they are dependant and so are not forced to learn in the same way or at the same speed, but handfuls do seem to stop eating people, (they are strongly instincted to eat us but are not utterly obligate homovores). An intelligent female Parasyte keeps her hosts baby child as ‘an experiment’ and ends up developing quasi-maternal instincts for it. On the other side, the government discovers a nest of Parasytes working for a political candidate. After trapping them and uncovering the conspiracy, they shoot the candidate, to discover he is human. He wasn’t fooled, bribed, tricked or threatened, he knew he was working with aliens. He thought it was good that humanity finally had a predator, that the Parasytes were a gift from nature to restore balance and harmony to the world.
What starts as an alien invasion story, and is always something of a horror story, ends up developing into a kind of moral tragedy. Parasytes are exterminated, some adapt and go into hiding as Parasyte-vegans, some are so driven by instinct and hatred for humanity that they become wilderness-dwelling wendigo monsters. Ultimately Migi goes into a form of permanent philosophical hibernation, partly escaping from the moral anguish of their situation, partly seeking an answer. Shinichi is deeply lonely without his friend.
The Chimera Ant Arc
Hunter X Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi is a Shonen magical-powers-fighting adventure Manga. Half way through its run Togashi comes up with the idea for ‘Chimera Ants’ and writes an arc for them so long that it makes up half the Anime. Hunter x Hunter is nearly ‘Chimera Ants; the Series (starring some Hunters)’.
‘Chimera Ants’ evolve through consumption, qualities, forms and memories from what they eat. The ‘Chimera Ant Arc’ begins when, somewhere, a Chimera Ant nest eats a human being and produces an Ant Queen with a humanoid form and human-level intelligence. She begins to build an ant nation by eating humans and producing generations of humanoid ants.
Hunter X Hunter has a carefully worked out magical powers system called ‘Nen based on something like ‘aura’ or ‘chi’, and which most of its main characters use. Pretty soon the Chimera Ants discover this and begin eating Nen users, producing magical Man-Ants. The Queen begins to breed an ‘Ant King’ who is intended to be the super-powerful leader for the Chimera Ants, and who is made from all the Nen users the ants can find, to create a Super Magical Man Ant.
The visuals and basic dramatic tools for the Chimera Ant Arc are cartoony and very anime (the Chimera Ants emerge from their cocoons in cool costumes), but the way it treats questions of selfhood, identity and responsibility are probably the most subtle and morally complex of all the fictions in this essay.
The Chimera Ants absorb human memories along with human shapes and abilities. They also get a bunch of semi-random animal qualities, all depending on what the Queen was eating when she gave birth to them. So any individual Chimera Ant might be a pure Ant-Minded being, just with a humanoid form and some functional intelligence, an 80% accurate recreation of a human personality, but now with an ant body and ant instincts, a wild combination of animal and human instincts, or anything in-between. Some Chimera ants remember almost nothing of any of their human parts, while some are such singular excretions of particular souls that they feel almost like reincarnations.
Many of the 'Ants' are tortured by their part-human instincts and part-human memories.
As one Chimera Ant says to another; "There's some kind of look in the eyes, I can't explain it, but I know I when I see it and I think 'yeah this one remembers their past life".
Though individually powerful, the ants lose the potency of their unity and singularity of purpose as digested qualities like price, ambition and personal desire start infiltrating their minds. The innovation of ‘Names’, (“What is a name?” asks the Chimera Ant Queen), personalities, independent drives and desires, forms a deep and inexorable conflict between these two forms of consciousness; the primal ant will to power and the human social and moral complexity.
Memory, Reincarnation and Koala
Part of the reason the initial Ant Colony is successful is because it happens inside a micro-nation called the ‘New Green Republic’, a deliberately low-tech state where people live according to a near medieval level of material technology and where everything above that level is banned. Many of the humans the ants eat initially are basically hippie peasants, which has an effect on the next ant generation.
We later discover the NGR is a front. Unbeknownst to most of its residents, the place is run by, and for, a ruthless drug cartel who use the NGR as a base to pedal drugs to the rest of the world. The initial armed conflict of the Ants is with this nest of ruthless gangsters, who they then eat, and these personalities in turn affect the nature of future Ant generations. The gangster memories synergise well in some ways with the Ants ruthlessness and will to power, but the same memories carry deep, primal loyalties and bonds, and a violent resentment that has nothing to do with Ant psychology. In their own ways, both the peaceful minds and memories of the NGR peasants and the ruthless memories of the Cartel gangsters, are toxins, poisons in the clear minds of the Ants they become. Some Ants are friends, or enemies, because of the human memories that formed them. Others are brave, craven or subtle, depending on who they absorbed. The only Ants that don’t seem to have these are the Queen, the King and the three Royal Guards, who were either very well-stirred before creation, or their ant-instincts were so powerful they obliterated any other form of selfhood.
There are many sub-stories of ants and memory, but the most strangely affecting is told through the story of this business-suited Pink Koala;
The Koala carries the memories of a Hit-Man, a ruthless amoral gangster.
"Before all this, my job was to snuff people. I'd get my orders and pull the trigger. The rest of the time I'd yell a lot. It was a job anybody could do. Even when I was reborn, it was the same thing. A stupid cycle. I wanted to let her out of it."
"Before this, I didn't believe in the soul. We're no better than fleas and flies. Life and death, that's all there is. The ego is a glitch, a side effect of a complex brain. You die and it's over. Dust to dust. Get scattered to the wind."
As a Chimera Ant, the Koala is still a seemingly ruthless killer. But the very act of dying, being consumed, and his memories regurgitated in a new form, acts as a bizarre catalyst for spiritual growth.
"Hopeless. "She was a redhead, just like you. And I gunned her down."
The differing cultural perspective is fascinating. On the Western side, the Scramblers in Blindsight were a blank-faced catastrophe, the ‘Thing’ from ‘Things’ was an enemy by nature and culture. The Genestealer Cults are a perversion of religion towards a devouring false god. Then on the Japanese side, the Parasytes are opponents, but also neutral predators, no more ‘evil’ than a Tiger, and their existence has a degree of tragedy, due to the human aspects they absorb. (Perhaps there are elements of this with the Genestealer Cults). Finally, with the Chimera Ants, they are inimical to human flourishing, at least initially, and are obligate predators, but slowly many evolve into ‘people’, ghosts or reincarnations of humanity, or aspects or shards of human nature thrown into sharp relief, each occurring in a different way.
The translation of the ‘Other’ from Absolute, to Threat, to Tragedy to Post-Humanity is fascinating to think about. If part of the subtext for any story of infiltrating nonhuman sentience is; “can inherent ‘Others’ mutually reconcile themselves”, then the wild whacky cartoony Chimera Ant arc is probably the deepest and most ‘Humanistic’ of all these fictions.
Being eaten by a magical super-ant and recombined into something new perhaps isn’t the platonic ideal of reincarnation but if you wake up with your old memories in a new body, it sure would feel like it. Dying to violence and being reborn as the incarnation of that violence, is a strange one.
Meruem and Komugi
The story goes through various, (lengthy) evolutions, with the series heroes trying to prevent the birth of the Ant King, failing, and then battling him again after he takes over a North Korea-style dictatorship.
(A fascinating aspect of battling the ants is that, if the human side lose people, the Ants have the ability to essentially ‘digest’ them, and produce Ants with combinations of their powers, memories or personalities. Meaning if you lose a friend to the Ants, you may be facing an ‘Antified’ version of them later. Depending on how much, or what kinds of memories they have, they may be an ally, a terrifying enemy, or just very confused.)
The ‘Ant King’ (his given name is ‘Meruem’, but he initially has no idea that he has a name, or any desire for one) is hyper-powerful, utterly amoral by human standards and dedicated to the Ants will-to-power and to taking over the world in a classic supervillain style.
He is also only a few days old. Though he has a well-blended cache of inherited knowledge and learns at an accelerated rate, he has no actual experience of human society or human life. After taking over pseudo North-Korea he compulsively learns everything he can, taking on and beating every human expert in every human field, and game. Until he meets the nations best Shogi player, a blind teenage girl who sustains her family by being the world champion in an obscure and complex board game. This is someone he cannot beat. No matter how hard he tries or how much he learns, he cannot win a fair game of Shogi against this girl, and she is learning from him as fast as he learns from her, meaning he may never beat her. There is something he cannot do. He slowly becomes obsessed with this game and this girl, keeping her around and playing her every day, absorbed utterly in a challenge he cannot defeat.
Because he can’t defeat this snotty blind teenager, he ends up having something like a human relationship with her. His mind becomes open to a relationship with another being that is not just a vector of imposing power or destroying a threat. He begins to analyse his own actions from an alien perspective; his compulsive murder of a child to see what would happen – that child might have grown up to be a great Shogi player. If one child might have become a great Shogi player, could there be other things that other humans could do or be that he simply doesn’t understand yet? Who actually is he? This girl has a name. His subordinate Ants have names. (They gave them to each other). Humans have names. Does he have a name? He is the King, which is all that he is, but is the King also a person like other people?
This slow ‘awakening’ or complexifying of the King worries and disturbs his closest guards. Is he starting to question the whole world-takeover thing and treating humans as livestock?
Meruem and Neotaro
The ‘Ant King’ is a being so insanely powerful that only Humanities strongest Nen-User even has a chance of fighting him so that’s who they call, organising an ant-attack to draw out the King to a location where he and Isaac Netero, the Chief of the Hunter Association, and hyperpowered shifty-Bhudda-type will fight Ant King Meruem for the future of humanity.
During this battle, the heart of the tale beats backwards. Meruem Ant-King is on a rising moral arc, gradually discovering and interrogating more of his human half, he is growing. He consistently offers to negotiate, to ‘settle this with words’.
“I have learned what power is for. To protect the weak who deserve to live. Never to oppress the defeated. I will not fight you.”
Netero, the former Granpa-figure, has been getting into fighting shape by massacring Chimera Ants. The bastion of a threatened and overpowered humanity, he has no room for negotiation or compromise. He uses knowledge of the Kings given name, taken from the dying Ant Queen, to force a conflict. In battle he exerts all his energy on destruction. He refuses all offers of compromise and ultimately, unable to win ‘fairly’, he pierces his own heart and activates the micro-Nuke he had hidden in his chest.
“Meruem, King of the Ants... You really don't have any idea, do you...? You know nothing of the bottomless malice within the human heart... I see you in hell... If there is one...”
Even this isn’t quite enough to Kill Merum, though the radiation from this dirty bomb does ultimately infiltrate his regenerating flesh, causing him to die of cancer in the arms of Komugi.
Its beyond curious that we return again, as we did with the Theseus in ‘Blindsight’ to Humanity blowing itself the fuck up with atomic weapons to kill the aliens. Humanity represented as something, perhaps individually weak, but dark and ferocious enough, and with a relentless will to live, that makes it more than equal to the threatening Other
Have We Learned Anything?
The Isolated Mind
Can one kind of intelligence encounter another without horror? All of the situations described above are horrific, though few are only that.
Is it a necessity that to truly encounter the Other within oneself, they must be opposed to your welfare
If one encounters an other, within oneself, and they are not opposed, but neutral, do they inevitably become symbiotic? Without opposition, is union of some sort inevitable?
Where are the stories about an invasive other that is not opposed, not plotting against you, or trying to subvert you, but is fine with living peacefully alongside you, as a non-human part of you? In Parasyte Shinichi’s relationship with Migi, his alien hand, is like this. They have a transactional and oppositional relationship based on mutual survival, with some threats, but over time they become familiar with each other and, though remaining in many ways fundamentally alien in outlook to each other, form some kind of friend-like bond
They even start picking up on each others morality, seemingly entirely by closeness, exposure to each other and shared threat. Migi originally has no race or species consciousness, he doesn’t care if other members of his species die, its literally fine as they are not him. Ultimately he seems to grow into or absorb some kind of group-moral-awareness, which makes his existence more and more difficult as his survival is opposed to others of his kind. Conversely, the protagonist becomes partially alienated from humanity, seeing them somewhat from the outside, not necessarily instinctively siding with humans in all situations and regarding the lives of human and alien with a degree of moral equivalence.
"These humans are definitely foolish creatures. Think as hard as those weak brains of yours can manage. Do you ever listen to the cries of mercy coming from the pigs and cows you slaughter?"
~ Meruem to Ming Jok-ik's dancers when they begged for mercy.
East vs West
Or at least, Japan vs the Anglosphere.
A lot of Japanese popular culture has a moral tone which seems lightly intuitively ‘off-kilter’ to me. At times this shows itself through a cynicism so deep, yet so petty it seems like childish abandon. But it does have another side and the stories of the ‘Parasytes’ and the Chimera Ants allow a moral neutrality, (in comparison to Watts and 40k), that actually opens access to a more complex and interesting field of moral drama.
Anthrocentric Values – Biochemical Morality
The beliefs humanity doesn’t know it has. Beliefs so core they are invisible, until contrasted with another mind within itself. Its hard for us to know what these might be until we imagine ourselves in contact with a deep-Other; something that can communicate with us, but which is so different that we have real trouble explaining ourselves.
Aye your feelings and intuitions are just biochemistry, but that is not much of an answer, (and if you are talking to a human then so is the question – equally an aspect of biochemistry).
The viewpoint prompted by many of these stories is that, through seeing humanity through the eyes of the ‘Other’, our own core values are exposed as deeply biological, programmed, and when the product of culture, are nearly as deeply rooted and immune to reason.
Beyond that, we get a feeling for the .. not just the partiality, but the near-irrelevance of any particular set of values – they feel abstract, cold, like distant laws curiously drawn, like a necessity; of course you must have values, but no more than you must have bones or a tongue.
This shows up distinctly in the Alien films where the humans have one set of messy directly intuited values, the Androids have a strong particular set of directly-coded values, sometimes with secret values hidden from others, and the Xenomorphs have their own purely instinctive survival drive
But, adrift in the blackness of space, all of these ultimately seem much of a muchness, one necessarily no better than the other.
By what right do we live?
What is the vision of humanity that emerges from the Thing-verse
Lonely. Horrifically dangerous. Callous and self-absorbed, with not much of a moral claim on this world, for it was taken and maintained by force.
Without a moral argument for its own existence.
One shadow impulse behind all these fictions might be a version of humanity that is trying to shape a moral argument for its own existence that might work for a non-human mind. Job arguing before God, but now arguing before the imagined Other.
Can you explain yourself to a Chimera Ant?
August 24, 2024
Queen Mab's Palace is Complete
I wrote a novel by mistake. I am sorry.
How Queen Mab Started
Back in 2020 I conceived the idea of an adventure that "depending on how you orient the page as you read it, it is both a fantasy and a science-fiction adventure."
The original Queen Mab was meant to be a crazy gimmick book where you could read it one way, then turn the book upside down and read it another way, engaging with two adventures;
When you flip the book one way - with the spine on the right, as in western books, then it’s a science fiction adventure.
This was always meant to be, and has remained, a fully-illustrated book.
Right from the beginning, August was the intended artist and I have driven her slowly insane with my relentless over-writing and never finishing anything. I am sorry!
There is not much art in this initial post as we are still working out how much of our load to blow in promotion and how much to save for the book, but expect to see more as we get closer to the Kickstarter.
Inspiration
A key inspiration was Vincent Wards 'The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey' in which Monks from the Cumbrian Middle-Ages, fearing the advancing Black Death, tunnel through time and arrive in a modern city (1980s Aukland).
This is a film I haven’t seen in decades, and I think I only saw it once, but it left an impression, the key to which was the deep visionary strangeness with which its characters encounter modernity. The known made unknown, the familiar viewed through unfamiliar eyes, a great making-strange
Another, less-direct and later inspiration was Shellys 'Queen Mab', a radical pure-freedom anti-monarchist poem full of startling images.
Another was a translated copy of the 'Orphic Hymns'. There are many more! There is a lot of stuff in the book.
How It Changed Over Time
Two things happened as we went on;
First, I kept writing more and more and more and more, adding monsters, characters, concepts, places and so on, breaking them all down to be somewhat workable and part of the same reality
the other is that, as the number of things in Queen Mab grew, the complexity of the arrangement became questionable.
First, we realised that we just couldn't handle the whole two-books-in-one thing.
Then we realised we couldn't handle two actual books.
Ok, so one book only, with one adventure, but we incorporate the pseudo-medieval viewpoint of the adventurer into the text, so that, everything is described as if it is being seen from a medieval/early-modern viewpoint. The reader, and presumably the players, know they are looking at something technological and science-fictional, but the viewpoint characters don't, so that the duality exists in the mind of the user rather than literally on the page.
Then that went on for a while, (with me constantly writing more and more and more), until about June 2023
With so many other books, (I think Demon Bone Sarcophagus, Gackling Moon and Speak, False Machine were all put together and published in the period of writing Queen Mab), and projects stumbling down the track, I had just kept writing and writing and writing.
But once I got a good look at everything I had written - it was just too much. Too many places, process, creatures, characters, courts, crypts, Queens, Knights, Ladies, Fairies, just too much of everything. It was crazy. There was no way I could turn this into a workable game-book. It would be unplayable to an insane degree, or it would take another four years to make it playable.
So instead I took one year, and turned it into a novel! Problem solved.
The Final Version
I did not think it would take me a year to completely re-write and re-arrange Queen Mab. I did think, for each of the 14 months it took, that it would only ever take "a few more weeks", but it took much longer than that.
What does it mean to turn a game into a story? They are not the same thing at all, though they seem to share organs and limbs, these things are differently arranged, so that if you try to turn one into another, without thinking about why and how they work, it will not go well.
So as time went by in the writing of 'Queen Mab', now retitles 'Queen Mab’s Palace', partly to make it a nice classic three-word False Machine name, and partly because there are a LOT of things in our world called 'Queen Mab' and I wanted this one to be searchable.
At first, it was just a travelogue, a report from the Palace of Queen Mab, but as more and more was written, and more and more actual events took place and more of a character came into play in the nameless, and at-first, genderless, Protagonist, and then secondary characters joined the journey, and then secondary and tertiary narrators, it turned into... well who knows what? A historical science-fiction travelogue picaresque adventure tragedy?
I finally finished Draft One around the middle of August and here we are!
Draft one is about 9700 words, (including appendices), and we are budgeting for 400 pages, though hope to have it in well below that.
It might be a work of genius, or at least of peak deluded narcissism. Which is appropriate considering the subject.
This is how the book starts;
..............................................................................................
Queen Mabs Palace
The Missing Children and the Frozen Knight
Let me live in memory for a while, and write with glass within my glass, to the spirit which resides there. May-be in writing and remembering in line, as pearls on string, one upon another, I may escape my dolour, and know again what once it meant to be astounded or surprised. For it was surprising, and most strange.
It came about in the grieving of the year when gold first touched the green that the night, black as sleep, chill as stone, made strange music and some heard voices of beasts who spoke as men.
We barred our doors and hid, trusting to prayer and cold iron. With the sun came silence, and then the wailing of women, my sister among them. All the children fit to work were gone, and their parents mazed and made curious numb, like empty pots. And these were Jory my Sisters Son, the Blacksmiths Child, Ceyln the old Maids helper, the Dog Boy, Haswa, and Dgibert the Fat Squires boy.
Some said was bandits, others fae, but while the sun still halved on the skys rim, a dog found scent and the bravest set forth and doing so, made for me to come, for I could both read and write and had been the teacher of those lost, and also my Sister was grieved and made me go.
We had gone not far but we found a Knight wounded by the path, strangely armoured, fit to die and rimed with frost.
The Knight made gesture for one to come forth and hear him and I was made to by the rest for I might give him Grace, though I am no Priest and did not wish to.
The Knight spoke twice-ways. He whispered words I could not understand, but as I spoke to him and gave him succour, soon came another voice, this like cold iron, but an echo of the first, yet I knew the tongue.
He said; “You seek those taken, as once I so sought.”
I said aye this was so and how came he here.
He said; “They are with Queen Mab. Knowing this, would you still go?”
This name I knew. The Queen of Air and Darkness, Empress of the Eld, timeless and undying whom the wise have called a myth. I asked how Queen Mab might be found and the Knight said; “There is a Door. It is a cut in the air. You do not have long.
Then he said; “Do not go, but if you do, know this; First; never promise, never disagree. Second; speak well and listen more. Third; eat not fairy food or you shall never leave.”
Then he grieved and said;
“Your life is death to me, and mine to you. I do not know where I am. My seals are broken and the stars unknown. I die lost. But I am under a sun and above a land. And I am myself. So ends my story. Put me under stone, far from water, where none go.”
Then he died. I said words from the Book. Then, though I meant first to tell the others with me of what the frozen Knight had said, a madness came upon me and, thinking but to test its truth,
I stepped forth into a haze, like mist, cut like a slice, which hovered close.
This is how I came into the Palace of Queen Mab, and often I wished I had not, for I returned much changed; marked with strange service and cursed with queer passions and wild hungers, that I think none could fulfil, and I am placed here in this cell, and mocked and much wondered at I do not doubt.
But still my mind and my soul are my own, which not all I have seen can say, and I have ventured far, more far than men might dream of. So I make this book within my glass, where none may look upon it less I allow it, for only I have its print and key. And I make it as a warning and confession, so those who read its words will know that I have seen and spoken true, and like that frozen Knight I say; do not go, but I fear some shall, through some Dream or Autumn door, and Mab alone knows if you have or will for in that place there is no other God but Her, Christ have mercy on me.”
..............................................................................................
What Next?
In the words of Joesky; an adventure is on, as the fearful scribe ventures into what they see as the Fairy Palace of Queen Mab, crawling through its Crypt, visiting its Courts, speaking with (gently) its Knights and Ladies, and trying as best he can to get back the missing children and go home.
Well, from the opening text, you know they make it home, but you don’t know how, or what they see, how they are changed and who else makes it back with them.
This is Queen Mabs Palace, an adventure through a decaying, dying space-ship inhabited by crazed transhumanist radicals, through the eyes of a Medieval Scribe.
The main text is done. August is still working away on images. We are getting quotes in and preparing for a Kickstarter which should hopefully start around (or maybe before), Autumn, which seems appropriate for the Queen of Air and Darkness.
Gird your loins and batten down your marketing hatches, expect to here me going on about this for a while!
*not really but whatever what we think of as Medieval is usually early-modern and even writing from a complete early-modern perspective was a challenge so in effect the main point of view is pseudo-early modern masquerading as pseudo-medieval.
How Queen Mab Started
Back in 2020 I conceived the idea of an adventure that "depending on how you orient the page as you read it, it is both a fantasy and a science-fiction adventure."
The original Queen Mab was meant to be a crazy gimmick book where you could read it one way, then turn the book upside down and read it another way, engaging with two adventures;
When you flip the book one way - with the spine on the right, as in western books, then it’s a science fiction adventure.
"BUT - the truth is that these are the same people and places but just seen from different cultural perspectives
"the portrait-images of the main characters are flipped like those of playing cards, one half facing one, direction the other facing the other direction.
The Science Fiction adventurers will see it as a dimensionally-warped ship of perverted biomechanical transhumans.
In terms of adventure design, the context of the information they can get and are given will lead them to see it as a technical and material problem, and the very nature of their inquiry and the way they seen the people in it
will make the *mission* darker and more dangerous for them. Their technical abilities and the power of destruction and opposition that their guns etc give them means they are more likely to start conflicts."
This was always meant to be, and has remained, a fully-illustrated book.
Right from the beginning, August was the intended artist and I have driven her slowly insane with my relentless over-writing and never finishing anything. I am sorry!
There is not much art in this initial post as we are still working out how much of our load to blow in promotion and how much to save for the book, but expect to see more as we get closer to the Kickstarter.
Inspiration
A key inspiration was Vincent Wards 'The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey' in which Monks from the Cumbrian Middle-Ages, fearing the advancing Black Death, tunnel through time and arrive in a modern city (1980s Aukland).
This is a film I haven’t seen in decades, and I think I only saw it once, but it left an impression, the key to which was the deep visionary strangeness with which its characters encounter modernity. The known made unknown, the familiar viewed through unfamiliar eyes, a great making-strange
Another, less-direct and later inspiration was Shellys 'Queen Mab', a radical pure-freedom anti-monarchist poem full of startling images.
"The yet more wretched palaces
Contrasted with those ancient fanes,
Now crumbling to oblivion;
The long and lonely collonades,
Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks,"
Another was a translated copy of the 'Orphic Hymns'. There are many more! There is a lot of stuff in the book.
How It Changed Over Time
Two things happened as we went on;
First, I kept writing more and more and more and more, adding monsters, characters, concepts, places and so on, breaking them all down to be somewhat workable and part of the same reality
the other is that, as the number of things in Queen Mab grew, the complexity of the arrangement became questionable.
First, we realised that we just couldn't handle the whole two-books-in-one thing.
Then we realised we couldn't handle two actual books.
Ok, so one book only, with one adventure, but we incorporate the pseudo-medieval viewpoint of the adventurer into the text, so that, everything is described as if it is being seen from a medieval/early-modern viewpoint. The reader, and presumably the players, know they are looking at something technological and science-fictional, but the viewpoint characters don't, so that the duality exists in the mind of the user rather than literally on the page.
Then that went on for a while, (with me constantly writing more and more and more), until about June 2023
With so many other books, (I think Demon Bone Sarcophagus, Gackling Moon and Speak, False Machine were all put together and published in the period of writing Queen Mab), and projects stumbling down the track, I had just kept writing and writing and writing.
But once I got a good look at everything I had written - it was just too much. Too many places, process, creatures, characters, courts, crypts, Queens, Knights, Ladies, Fairies, just too much of everything. It was crazy. There was no way I could turn this into a workable game-book. It would be unplayable to an insane degree, or it would take another four years to make it playable.
So instead I took one year, and turned it into a novel! Problem solved.
The Final Version
I did not think it would take me a year to completely re-write and re-arrange Queen Mab. I did think, for each of the 14 months it took, that it would only ever take "a few more weeks", but it took much longer than that.
What does it mean to turn a game into a story? They are not the same thing at all, though they seem to share organs and limbs, these things are differently arranged, so that if you try to turn one into another, without thinking about why and how they work, it will not go well.
So as time went by in the writing of 'Queen Mab', now retitles 'Queen Mab’s Palace', partly to make it a nice classic three-word False Machine name, and partly because there are a LOT of things in our world called 'Queen Mab' and I wanted this one to be searchable.
At first, it was just a travelogue, a report from the Palace of Queen Mab, but as more and more was written, and more and more actual events took place and more of a character came into play in the nameless, and at-first, genderless, Protagonist, and then secondary characters joined the journey, and then secondary and tertiary narrators, it turned into... well who knows what? A historical science-fiction travelogue picaresque adventure tragedy?
I finally finished Draft One around the middle of August and here we are!
Draft one is about 9700 words, (including appendices), and we are budgeting for 400 pages, though hope to have it in well below that.
It might be a work of genius, or at least of peak deluded narcissism. Which is appropriate considering the subject.
This is how the book starts;
..............................................................................................
Queen Mabs Palace
- how I came to the seat of the Queen of Air and Darkness and what I learned there of her Courts, Ladies and Thanes, and her lesser Servants and Rude Rabble that do occupy thereabouts, from one who has journeyed to that Realm overlong and returned, but not unchanged, may God have mercy on my soul.
The Missing Children and the Frozen Knight
Let me live in memory for a while, and write with glass within my glass, to the spirit which resides there. May-be in writing and remembering in line, as pearls on string, one upon another, I may escape my dolour, and know again what once it meant to be astounded or surprised. For it was surprising, and most strange.
It came about in the grieving of the year when gold first touched the green that the night, black as sleep, chill as stone, made strange music and some heard voices of beasts who spoke as men.
We barred our doors and hid, trusting to prayer and cold iron. With the sun came silence, and then the wailing of women, my sister among them. All the children fit to work were gone, and their parents mazed and made curious numb, like empty pots. And these were Jory my Sisters Son, the Blacksmiths Child, Ceyln the old Maids helper, the Dog Boy, Haswa, and Dgibert the Fat Squires boy.
Some said was bandits, others fae, but while the sun still halved on the skys rim, a dog found scent and the bravest set forth and doing so, made for me to come, for I could both read and write and had been the teacher of those lost, and also my Sister was grieved and made me go.
We had gone not far but we found a Knight wounded by the path, strangely armoured, fit to die and rimed with frost.
The Knight made gesture for one to come forth and hear him and I was made to by the rest for I might give him Grace, though I am no Priest and did not wish to.
The Knight spoke twice-ways. He whispered words I could not understand, but as I spoke to him and gave him succour, soon came another voice, this like cold iron, but an echo of the first, yet I knew the tongue.
He said; “You seek those taken, as once I so sought.”
I said aye this was so and how came he here.
He said; “They are with Queen Mab. Knowing this, would you still go?”
This name I knew. The Queen of Air and Darkness, Empress of the Eld, timeless and undying whom the wise have called a myth. I asked how Queen Mab might be found and the Knight said; “There is a Door. It is a cut in the air. You do not have long.
Then he said; “Do not go, but if you do, know this; First; never promise, never disagree. Second; speak well and listen more. Third; eat not fairy food or you shall never leave.”
Then he grieved and said;
“Your life is death to me, and mine to you. I do not know where I am. My seals are broken and the stars unknown. I die lost. But I am under a sun and above a land. And I am myself. So ends my story. Put me under stone, far from water, where none go.”
Then he died. I said words from the Book. Then, though I meant first to tell the others with me of what the frozen Knight had said, a madness came upon me and, thinking but to test its truth,
I stepped forth into a haze, like mist, cut like a slice, which hovered close.
This is how I came into the Palace of Queen Mab, and often I wished I had not, for I returned much changed; marked with strange service and cursed with queer passions and wild hungers, that I think none could fulfil, and I am placed here in this cell, and mocked and much wondered at I do not doubt.
But still my mind and my soul are my own, which not all I have seen can say, and I have ventured far, more far than men might dream of. So I make this book within my glass, where none may look upon it less I allow it, for only I have its print and key. And I make it as a warning and confession, so those who read its words will know that I have seen and spoken true, and like that frozen Knight I say; do not go, but I fear some shall, through some Dream or Autumn door, and Mab alone knows if you have or will for in that place there is no other God but Her, Christ have mercy on me.”
..............................................................................................
What Next?
In the words of Joesky; an adventure is on, as the fearful scribe ventures into what they see as the Fairy Palace of Queen Mab, crawling through its Crypt, visiting its Courts, speaking with (gently) its Knights and Ladies, and trying as best he can to get back the missing children and go home.
Well, from the opening text, you know they make it home, but you don’t know how, or what they see, how they are changed and who else makes it back with them.
This is Queen Mabs Palace, an adventure through a decaying, dying space-ship inhabited by crazed transhumanist radicals, through the eyes of a Medieval Scribe.
The main text is done. August is still working away on images. We are getting quotes in and preparing for a Kickstarter which should hopefully start around (or maybe before), Autumn, which seems appropriate for the Queen of Air and Darkness.
Gird your loins and batten down your marketing hatches, expect to here me going on about this for a while!
*not really but whatever what we think of as Medieval is usually early-modern and even writing from a complete early-modern perspective was a challenge so in effect the main point of view is pseudo-early modern masquerading as pseudo-medieval.
August 21, 2024
Thief and Butterfingered Infinity
In one of my rare excursions into gaming, I recently finished 'Thief: The Black Parade'; a full game of fan-made missions for the 199-something “immersive sim” (before we had that phrase) – ‘Thief: The Dark Project’.
I originally conceived this article as an essay on the concept of ‘Butterfingered Infinity’; something about the uses and limitations of ‘natural language’ as compared to, and revealed by, a complex virtual simulation like Thief.
In the end it became just the meat in a thief burger, with the start being a distaff review of a much-reviewed game and the end being an odd mix of suggestions for D&D.
The Thief-Review is below.
The essay on Butterfingered Infinity in the middle.
Thief’s Lessons for D&D at the end.
Why Thief is Good
Thief was a nearly pure-stealth simulator which, through talent, work and luck, coalesced into perhaps the best stealth game. Other reviewers have talked about why this is in more depth than me; its engine, built specifically around shadow, its first-person nature, its exquisite and carefully engineered sound design, and the integration of that sound into its level design and its relationship with violence and the vulnerability of its main character.
[A brief digression on stealth and violence; they don’t mix. Stealth and murder, (or, if you are batman, stealth and a beating), make an intoxicating combination, such that, if you build a complex immersive sim, where both stealth and violence are available, any sane character build will naturally coalesce around some kind of stealth-archer or stealth-assassin - as this is optimal in-game and feels powerful to the player.
Then, if the game wants to make the now hugely-empowered player behave in a purely-stealthy fashion, to fit the theme and feel of the game, they need to add in extra-diegetic elements, rulings, 'points*' and so on in order to make the player-character behave 'stealthily' and, in the words of one reviewer; ‘you are being stealthy to protect the NPCs from you, not to protect you from them’.
This is a mistake no game in the Thief series ever makes, since the Player Character is always, by Protagonist standards, insanely vulnerable, and sword fights are a nightmare. The structure of the game, without extra-diegetic elements, makes you want to play as a thief. It’s a game where you can snipe people in the back of the head, but won't want to as it would feel unprofessional.
{A digression with a digression on ‘points’; There should be some neo-OSR ruling about points being the opposite of gold as, just as xp for gold is almost always good and feeds dietetically in so many ways into the game, there is a kind of reverse of that, in which, as soon as 'points' are involved in anything, it almost always gets worse, though the means and method of how that happens will vary greatly.}]
The Black Parade
Based on the engine for the original ‘Thief’, Black Parade is large and complex enough to be a fourth game in the franchise. For free. Which is, I think, larger than any of the other games, and might be the best one? At least I think it has more consistently high level design than any other version of the game.
Its staggering really that a small number of talented people could collaborate for so many yearsto produce something both so massive, and so exquisite. Thief was always a distantly OSR-ish game and its fan-mission community is even more so. For ‘The Black Parade’ Melan gets a mention in the credits!
The Paradoxes of Thief Level Design
What defines Thief games more than anything else is level design and it is here that some of the interrelationships between Thief and the OSR are brought into focus
Fear, Desire, Exploration and Investigation
In 'Thief', you think like a thief. You are vulnerable and can be killed easily, so you carefully watch, and LISTEN, to the environment, constantly checking for threats. You also hide relentlessly, moving carefully from shadow to shadow, cursing electric lights and marble floors. Your only real safety is the darkness and so you cling to it instinctively, even when there is no tangible threat, because there might be one; a wandering guard or servant, or something else.
So fear and vulnerability ensure you deeply and constantly search, investigate and utilise the environment, and when these are naturalistic environments, you are deliberately navigating them in a way that feels ‘inverse’ and therefore a little cool. You might be in a kitchen and, instead of doing Kitchen things, be searching for fragments of shadow in the light coming from the stove, creeping behind shelves etc.
You are a Thief, you want to steal not kill. There are no points for killing and increasing the difficulty of the game (usually) only increases the conditions of play, not the substance of the game itself. Maximum difficulty means getting all of the treasure without killing and sometimes even without harming anyone. {Thief does mix this up somewhat with the easy availability of the blackjack, with which you can "knock people out" (irl this would likely mean a lot of brain embolisms), but only if you catch them unawares}.
Desire keeps you fixated on that shiny artefact on the dresser, and carefully avoiding anything sensate or alive. Guards walk regular routes and chat with each other, and this means a chunk of Thief is listening for and measuring the movements of others, so you can avoid them. In almost every case you are searching for a way around anything dangerous. You are continually mapping the physical space in your head and also the routes and movements of any living thing within that space.
The Music of Pseudo-Naturalism
The best thief levels are pseudo-natural. You can intuit things about them from their nature and then investigate based on those intuitions, and sometimes be right, which makes you feel very clever stately home will have a kitchen and cellars, a Cathedral will have a belltower, etc. They are also physically distinct and separate from the surrounding area.
The urban slum levels are slightly less-perfect because the pseudo-nature of the level becomes more obvious; there are unopenable doors and inaccessible areas; PNG’s of doors on buildings that rim the play area. Though you can still try opening them, and discover from the games response if they are actually just PNG doors, or would respond to a lockpick or yet-to-be-found key. A handful will turn out to be functional, as you will discover when you find the right thing to open them, or pop up from the other side after dicking about in a sewer for hours.
Still, it’s curious that in D&D there are no unopenable doors, or at least, there are no simulated doors. The play area, in theory, expands outwards forever, and in practice, only becomes misty, general and improvisational as you move out of whatever the DM has thought about already, (but come back next week and the details will have sharpened up a lot).
But, just like Dungeons’, Thief levels are almost never purely naturalistic. Firstly; they are simulated environments, and can’t match the chaos or complexity of the real world, second; they have locked doors which need keys, sequences of actions needed to progress, certain pieces of intelligence which must be combined to succeed; they have paths, like flow-charts, which lace through these otherwise wide-open environments.
Still they are otherwise very wide open, with a large array of possible ingress points, secret routes and other possible access-ways that strongly reward exploration, investigation and, sometimes, cunning extrapolation from the logic of the depicted world. Nothing is quite as pleasurable in Thief as spotting a chimney, pipe or ledge, wondering if you can get to it, finding a way to, then realising you can find a way inside/across, then popping up somewhere you should never have been able to get to.
There are “weird” Thief levels too, set in ancient magical tombs, lost cities or supernatural netherworlds, but they are never quite as good. Great Thief levels exist at a near perfect synthesis of naturalistic play-space and toyetic, planned sequential-challenge environment. They are levels where the nature of the space provokes investigation and exploration, which it also rewards with naturalistic opportunities, where a complex adventure-flow runs through the pseudo-naturalistic space but where the space always gives opportunities for adaptation, evasion and incursion. A toybox with the lid half-open if you will.
Butterfingered Infinity
Thief is actively trying to give you an experience very like that of an AD&D Thief, and does so, in a curious mirror-view fashion, but the differences between a Thief in play in D&D, and a Thief in Thief, are interesting to consider.
Problem solving in D&D is often related to the concept of ‘tactical infinity’ due to the very wide-open nature of possible approaches to various problems, but its more like a ‘Butterfingered Infinity’ in which the Players can hold and use almost any imaginable, or describable, concept, but carefully, and with blunt inexactness. The infinity of the Word rather than the Vast but Finite potential of the Eye.
An Equation on the Utility of Butterfingered Infinity
A very rough pseudo-equation on the utility of words in roleplaying might be something like this;
[The Descriptive Power of Language] – [[(word concepts the DM actually knows) x [(The Speed of relation) + (what the Player Group can easily understand)]]
The Descriptive Power of Language
There are a lot of words. If you have enough time and a big enough dictionary, you can describe almost anything. It we assume the total potential of words, and look for things they absolutely cannot describe, there is not much, but here we enter paradox, because we are trying to use words to describe what words can’t describe.
(This is a problem which exists continually, as a faint umbra, which sometimes obscures and sometimes reveals, whenever we come to think about the things language can’t do, in almost any situation.)
But, so far as things that could be interacted with in a tabletop game, a computer game or any other form of simulation, let’s assume that words might be able to describe nearly everything necessary to know
How much the DM actually knows
The classic DM is a natural word-hound and Gygaxian Wunderkammer encyclopaedist. Not a few writers have named D&D as a font for their discovery and use of words, and the use of strange or novel words can, with limits, be a pleasurable aspect in itself in D&D.
Lets assume the DM knows a lot of words.
Speed of relation
We can describe anything if we have time. But technical, unfamiliar jargon, and highly precise measurements, as well as large numbers of things or elements, will all take time, which robs immediacy, and in some theoretical cases, perhaps a truly insane amount of time.
How much and how easily the players understand
For a concept to be useful, it has to be known to at least some of the players. A rare word-concept only the DM knows is a near-useless word-concept. It is the Player Group that must understand. I real terms this means, probably (?), at least two or three know it and can easily explain to the rest. If this happens many times in sequence, the game dies.
No-one is paying as much attention to the whole thing as the DM. Every individual has a totally different base capacity for imagining different things, so the words flow out, are half attended toand when they are attended to, are understood differently by almost everyone. In effect, a DM has a relatively small ‘armoury’ of words and conceptual language which is strong, simple, descriptive and already mutually understood by almost everyone, from which they can take excursions into complexity, for short periods and specific problems, but which they always return to. We can think of this as the ‘verbal armoury’ or word-hoard of natural language. The aspects of spatial and physical situations that make up the meat and majority of D&D problem solving are those for which or conceptual language is already well developed and widely shared, and which can be imagined with ease by a wide variety of people.
So: being STUCK to something, being TIED to someone. Being BEHIND someone. Getting a LEG UP. In fact in terms of three-dimensional space, these are all things most of us did as children, which is why we understand them. For many of us who are not athletes or dancers, childhood was our first, last and by a large margin, greatest education in the nature of three-dimensional space and the language of physical problems remains that of the playground.
Responses to ‘The Limitations of Language’
I asked people on Twitter and Facebook about “things and situations you have experienced as a DM, which have proven really difficult to describe quickly and clearly using *only* spoken words?
(The classic is trying to describe a complex 3D environment to a bunch of people but I am interested in other examples.)”
The responses were very interesting!
Tim Samwise Seven Harper; “I sometimes struggle with describing natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals. I always try to picture those scenes from Dark Crystal and that helps, or I default more toward real trees and plants as well as real life animals with a twist.
Big parties with hundreds of NPCs are always a challenge. I tend to use 3x5 cards with a few descriptive words on each NPC card.”
Yuri Zanelli; “PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment. Miniatures can help a lot with that, but I don't like to use them. My game tables tend to be already too crowded with maps, manuals, bottles, snacks, character sheets, dice, notepads and so on. I tend to use a quick sketch on a sheet of paper.”
Greg Benedicto; “Describing liminal elements in a scene WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them.”
Jesse Rooney; “As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell. Hence minis at the table. There are a number of times when playing theater of the mind that Ive pulled out a sketch pad to demonstrate who and what is where.”
John Enfield; “That's why I use gridded maps (either hand drawn or published), minis and occasionally terrain pieces. Having visual aids helps aid in describing environments.”
Ragnar Hill; “A good ambush because players always start squealing and panicking and then I get over excited.”
PARAMANDER @CravenSensation; “Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy. Even if each detail is relatively straightforward/easy to visualize, more details means higher potential for miscommunication + more attention required on the part of the players”
Derek Dees @NihilSineLabor; “Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.
The Great Hall of Durin, as light broke through, but shadows still engulfed so much, for example.”
Bo Banducci @bo_banducci; “I’m struggling to remember one aside from the classic. Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players and I want to intimate this somehow without giving it away.”
Synthesis of Responses
I broke these down into a few large categories as a tool-of-thought, (with the usual effect that many real-life situations involve one or more categories, often in point and counterpoint.)
These provide a very brief idea-map of things with which ‘Words’ are especially butterfingered;
PLETHORALITY
“natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals”
“Big parties with hundreds of NPCs”
“Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy”
We know about these things because we encounter them in life, and the Eye can show them to us easily and immediately – well, if not quite immediately, a scene or painting can give us a very quick general impression of a scene with many things of strange and novel quality in it, which the scanning of the eye-and-mind can ‘fill in’ very smoothly and fluidly, much faster than words could describe. When the eye works with the ear, they can combine, bind and represent a truly complex scene, in but a moment. Nature can present deep, immediate and novel interconnected complexity in-one. Words are slow, specific and sequential, happening one after another, and sometimes blunt. These are two forms of time in conflict.
Thief does well with some forms of ‘Plethorality’; its ‘big views’ where you teeter on a rooftop and get a nice ’Batman’-esque view of a highly vertical city, are exciting and poetic, and also useful as you start planning routes and investigating things with the eye. But Thief, like other virtual simulations, is strongly limited in the number of active, moving, identifiable, people and living things it has going on. Not quite as much as words, but a fair amount. They really eat programming power.
DIMENSIONALITY
“PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment”
“As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell”
Or more prosaically; physical positioning and complex three-dimensional situations. But ‘Dimensionality’ sounds cooler.
In Thief the exact precision of a jump, climb or any other kind of movement, can be demonstrated in the substance of the world with deep subtlety and immediate precision. As in; “*this* I can jump on” to “*here* I can climb on to in a few moments”, “*here* I can climb up to, if I have equipment”.
The assessments are fluid, rapid and immediate, and this is a key part of the game. A patrolling guard is here and going this way, the next pool of shadow is over here and it will take me this long over the loud marble floor to get there. Then a climb of this length, then.. and so on.. Immediate, intuitive, fast.
A similar thing takes place with even small skirmishes, let along larger ones. Close physical positioning matters enormously and is very hard to communicate, accurately, and quickly, to a group. For this were sketch-maps made. Words alone have a butterfingered grasp on three-dimensional space.
LIMINALITY
“WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them”
“A good ambush “
“Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players”
If problems with describing three-dimensional space were what I expected, and problems with ‘Plethorality’ were less expected, but make sense, then ‘Liminality’; secrets, shadows, deceptions and double meanings, in all ways, is an unexpected but quite beautiful problem to face.
It’s the illusionists problem. Or an actors problem. It seems to flow deeply from the situation of the GM or storyteller being the fount of both the reality as-a-whole, and of a deception within that reality.
A simple example; a scene in a visual narrative like a play or film. One character is lying. The actor and director want the audience to know they are lying. But the characters in the fiction are not supposed to know. How to solve this?
The answer depends entirely on the naturalism and subtlety of the fiction, its tellers and its audience. In a pantomime or cheesy melodrama, or a children’s play, its relatively simple, at least in concept; the mustachoed villain twirls their moustache and even cocks an eye at the audience, before saying “of course not! Bwahahaha!”.
The more naturalistic the drama becomes, the more complex and difficult the lie becomes to communicate. For a soap actor, a touch of archness, for a dramatic actor, a complex scene-setting and capturing by the director to prepare the way for the lie and leave the right kind of space around it, for a highly naturalistic ‘spy’ or intrigue drama – almost nothing maybe, but the tone and emotional volume of the scene must be low or even and this might suit best a modernist story where the audience just never finds out what the ‘truth’ is, or at least that ‘finding out’ isn’t central to what the story is doing.
For other kinds of secrets, they have been written about in depth by many people. How, and how often, to portray lying NPC’s, (my last read on OSR culture was that it was generally anti deceptive NPC’s because they were over-used, difficult to get right and crippled the PCs long term relationship with the game-world, leading to more murderhoboism than desired), huge debates and discussions on how to run investigations, (what does or doesn’t count as railroading), and clues, (the ‘three clue rule’),
“Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.”
This was an especially interesting response as, I didn’t even mention Thief in the question, and literal complex environments full of layered shadow is the main thing that Thief does. They built an engine specifically for the game called ‘the shadow engine’.
Though this has strong elements of Plethorality, (the simultaneous number of things and their complexity), and Dimensionality, (its about a large, complex, 3D space), the fact that it is also about the revealed/unrevealed paradox at the heart of Liminality is fascinating to me.
Words find it hard to form reliable shadows and perceptible lies. Words can lie easily, but its very hard to get them to build a lie as-object.
Thief Lessons
Considering the deep differences revealed between the world of the Eye and Virtual Simulation, and the world of the Word, and social, conversational simulation, are there lessons we can actually learn from Thief about how to run D&D? Or are the worlds so different that we might even deliberately not try to transfer lessons between them, as they would lead to bad play?
Here are a handful of concepts from Thief and some comments from me on how and whether they might be useful in D&D.
‘Ghost Missions’
Even the hardest level of Thief doesn’t demand that you be seen by no-one, but high settings often insist you hurt no-one.
In D&D the effects of a difficulty setting or complex level can be delivered diegeticaly by a highly specific quest-giver; a priest or wizard wants something, and insists that you ‘kill no-one’ or ‘hut no-one’ or in extreme versions ‘are never seen at all’, performing a ‘perfect ghost’ Mission Impossible situation where the incursion takes place and no one ever knows it happened at all.
(Of course the Party get paid a lot for fulfilling these conditions.)A mission like this already implies a very different kind of D&D, a quest based around planning, surveillance, mapping and intelligence gathering, and then a quick and complex incursion full of distractions.
Difficult to pull of in D&D, but far from impossible,
Sketchy Maps
Thief usually provides a map for each mission, and it is always a vague map. A sketch map with some useful information, but a huge amount of things it doesn’t tell you. Its usually enough for you to orient yourself in the play area and tell where the major sections roughly are, but absolutely insists you explore to find out what you need to know.
More sketchy dungeon and play area maps before games might be a good idea. Diegetic literal ‘sketch maps’ by previous thieves and adventurers. Maps good enough for you to form the bones of a plan, but clearly vague enough that you know going in that they won’t describe everything.
Monster PATROLS, not Monster ROOMS
God damn patrols are hard to manage in D&D without a lot of extra shit. No wonder monsters in D&D just really like their particular rooms. Its easy to simulate one or two from the encounter table, but a key element of Thief is timing the patrols. If patrols are regular or even mostly regular and predictable, then they become part of the environment you can learn about and plan for, and evading or subverting them makes you feel very clever as a player.
Arranging a full system of patrols for a dungeon or wizards tower would probably require an entire sub-system, but it might be fun to give it a try.
Clumsy Monsters with Keys
There should be more clumsy monsters carrying VERY OBVIOUS keys through the darkness. Big, dumb stupid but dangerous ogre guards who could easily one-shot a PC if they see them, with huge gold or silver keys hanging by their sides.
I’ve spoken at length before about how the big, dumb, dangerous ogre is the perfect low-level opponent for D&D.
Helix Views/Verticality
Dark-Souls helix-like atriums. In terms of dungeon design, this would be a game where there is more up and down. A dungeon arranged around a step well, inside a tower, down a mountains slope or similar.
Tempting Treasure
Would being able to SEE the treasure really have the same effect in a described game as in a virtual simulation?
For the main treasure, the idea is that, from most points of ingress, the main treasure the PCs are here to get is very visible, in a revered-panopticon style, but very hard to actually get to. I imagine it poised on the top of a tower, itself at the bottom of a vast cylindrical step-well or similar. You have to infiltrate all the way down, and then all the way up to get to it.
Thief has a lot of visually obvious, but very hard to reach, small and light treasures. So many in fact that it becomes hard to believe you have fit them all in your Thief-sack. Rather than having lots of mixed, hidden treasures in a dungeon-equivalent, what if instead, there were a small number of very gold and shiny very visible treasures, each in the centre of a complex, shadowy environment with guards patrolling, traps and other hidden obstacles, so it was easy to see where the treasure was, but very hard to work out how to get to it.
Discoverable Pseudo-False Alarms
A ‘ghost’ mission which demands perfect, or near perfect, stealth, (from a group), and pseudo-naturalistic patrolling guards, suggests a very binary result to mistakes. Which is; you make one, are discovered, alarm raised, mission a dead loss and now you are just fighting to get away.
In D&D you have a group who all need not to fuck up, and there is no quicksave, so some of the binary, complex and difficult challenges of Thief just won’t work.
An idea might be a way of artificially cancelling a general alarm. Or several ways, but each one only works once and is specific. This would be the equivalent of modern Thieves calling in to the police station with the password to tell them it’s a false alarm.
If the guards are big dumb ogres, and other things with less adaptability, like ghosts or constructs, then its not impossible there might be some kind of code or sign to get them to stop banging the Big Bell, blowing the alarm horn or whatever it is. Ideally, each of these methods would be completely different, and you would need to actually do the incursion and poke around to find some of them out. There would also likely be a max-usage, where, if you trigger the alarm three times, even if you have methods spare, even the Ogres are going to keep ringing the bell.
Visual Verticality
One of the most fun and engaging elements of a Thief level, if its pseudo-natural, is getting up really high, maybe somewhere you had spotted earlier, and climbing about, pulling a batman, looking down at the streets and tenements, the little guards scurrying about, and having a Cid Kagenou moment as you cackle to yourself about all the SHEEP below you!
For all the reasons give above in ‘Plethorality’ – this would be hard to make use of.
One method would be to combine the ‘Coms Snails’ idea below, with an ‘Eagles Perch’ position. Some hidden spot far above the play area with a big view that allows one person to sit there and whisper information to their fellow PCs as they buzz about below, each on their individual missions.
Comms snails
My old teen players got a bunch of silver-shelled telepathic snails and ended up using them as in-ear comms. In a Noisms game, we tried using psychic shrimp as a radio base in a similar way.
Why? Because comms are super-useful in D&D and once you have seen them in a film youjust naturally want to use them in group mission situations.
I know this is CRINGE as FUCK from a low-fantasy OSR perspective, BUT – it’s so deeply and desperately useful in doing meaningful physical GROUP stealth storytelling and problem-solving. It turns a knockabout fiasco into a heist.
For a purely-stealth mission where you actively don't want violence to happen, having the party split up is actually good it makes much less sense if they are all together, huddled together as a ‘stealthy gang’?, since stealth as a group always starts to feel more ridiculous than is useful. The social dynamics of play push against it and a tragedy of the commons situation happens where one impulsive player ends the mission.
Around the table, everyone can hear everything the everyone is saying and doing, so the extra-dimensional player-entities that pilot the PCs always have more of a global awareness than the PCs themselves, which, even with very disciplined play, often communicates itself to the PCs via shadowy tubes.
Allowing Comms-Snails for stealth-only missions might actually be a good idea that would improve play. Perhaps the stealth-obsessed wizards who hired you will loan them out.
Less-Lethal Falling
In these levels with-verticality, there should be more falling, and it should be less lethal. More bits where you fall into water, or something similar, but it doesn't kill you, and you end up at a different spot in the dungeon, separated from the group, and can explore and maybe find new routes to what you want, or just to link back up.
If being noticed is a fail state, then non-lethal separation is more interesting in play than HP loss.
Sound-Encounters
I think Brendan and others (possibly many others), have considered this will the ‘overloaded’ encounter die, but more encounters when you things or people coming, would be interesting.
In standard D&D being surprised is a reasonable punishment for dicking about and not paying attention, but in a stealth-only game, the threat of being discovered is more useful – the PCs have maybe one or two actions to hide or try something.
Stealth via Diegetic Sound
This isn’t directly from Thief, but I do think it would be a fun idea for stealthy D&D, which is; the sound you make around the table is the sound your character is making in the game.
So, if you want your PC to be stealthy – SHUT THE FUCK UP, and get WHISPERING! I think this would be a fine addition to the game. It would give all PCs access to some form of silence, and would encourage the players to actually fucking concentrate and think for once in their lives.
The ‘Mission Turnabout’
One possible useful import from Thief might be the ‘turn’ that happens in a lot of missions, for its is a way of involving liminality and deception that might be useable in D&D.
The classic ‘questgiver turns on you when you are done’, is rightly abjured in OSR circles, for reasons well-known. (Although Thief, does in fact use this trope a lot). But the idea of a delve having a clear set of objectives, and then, right in the middle of the adventure, something is discovered or something changes, and suddenly the goals and nature of the mission change, and change a lot, leaving you to improvise a new plan and work with the same space you had previously, but towards entirely new goals, this could work in D&D I think.
Things that happen in Thief include;
Shalebridge Cradle – you sneak through the haunted asylum, but to complete the mission you have to turn the electric lights on, then somehow sneak past all the terrifying things again, in bright light.
Ghosts – You sneak past some dumb zombies and animals, but grabbing the target means a supernatural event and oh fuck actual high level ghosts and wraiths are now patrolling about.
Rescue to Heist or Heist to Rescue – You are going in to get someone out, but can’t and end up having to re-plan to grab an item, or the opposite is true.
Guards Guards – getting in is easy but the alarms go off and now the
The entire axis of a mission might alter and now you are trying to do a very different thing, a theft becomes a rescue, an assassination becomes a theft, an exfiltration becomes a sabotage. This might be do-able in D&D.
NPC Conversations
This was one charming Thief method that sadly I could find no way to use. In Thief, guards and servants commonly mutter and complain to themselves while wandering around, they also have sometimes long, informative or just whacky conversations with each other in pairs. Just two guards chatting in the middle of the night. Coming upon these conversations and sneaking around behind them while they yap is quite charming, and listening to them often provides intel. But I couldn’t find a way to reproduce, or even use, this in D&D as long intra-NPC convo’s are a damned nightmare when the DM has to deliver the whole thing. Maybe if you are a massive ham it could be fun.
A Thief-like Dungeon
So, what do we have?
Powerful and wealthy wizards hire the PCs to do a heist. They offer to pay a LOT and have strong conditions;• Grab this one particular thing and bring it to them.• You don’t kill anyone or the missions off• Ideally, you swap the thing for a fake they will give you. This raises your pay.• Even better – no-one has any idea you were ever there. Perfect Ghosts.• They will give you these comm-snails to help, but they don’t live long.• They have some sketchy maps and a handful of ideas about where to get more intel.
The mission is a mansion-tower, maybe in a deep valley, or an ancient terrace mine, or somehow part sunken into the under verse. There are layers to go down, they are arranged as gardens or mazes or other somewhat-knowable patterns.
At the bottom is the mansion/tower/castle.
You have to sneak all the way down, then get inside, then sneak all the way up to get the thingy.
There will be locked doors, gates, traps and hidden problems.
There is an overwatch position somewhere where one person can see a lot of the area. If a PCs can get there and hide, they can whisper a lot of useful info to the others.
Its guarded by a clan of strong ogres. They are pretty dumb. They walk in regular patrols with lanterns. If they have a key they have it tied to their big belt with a label saying KEY, so they know what it is. The keys are also large.
There is a big gong or bell the Ogres bang on if they think something is up. There might be some kind of counter-signal or password or spell to convince them to stop this, but your patrons don’t know what it is, though it may be discoverable in the area.
There are sewers and fast-flowing water. Several of the falls, drops and traps dump you into these and will wash you up somewhere, or wash you against a grate you can climb up.
If you do get the actual treasure – surprise, it’s the only things holding the Vampire/Lich/Ghost in place. You now need to get out, but instead of, and sometimes as well as, dumb Ogres, you will now be dealing with clever, dangerous ghosts or vampires with keen senses.
I originally conceived this article as an essay on the concept of ‘Butterfingered Infinity’; something about the uses and limitations of ‘natural language’ as compared to, and revealed by, a complex virtual simulation like Thief.
In the end it became just the meat in a thief burger, with the start being a distaff review of a much-reviewed game and the end being an odd mix of suggestions for D&D.
The Thief-Review is below.
The essay on Butterfingered Infinity in the middle.
Thief’s Lessons for D&D at the end.
Why Thief is Good
Thief was a nearly pure-stealth simulator which, through talent, work and luck, coalesced into perhaps the best stealth game. Other reviewers have talked about why this is in more depth than me; its engine, built specifically around shadow, its first-person nature, its exquisite and carefully engineered sound design, and the integration of that sound into its level design and its relationship with violence and the vulnerability of its main character.
[A brief digression on stealth and violence; they don’t mix. Stealth and murder, (or, if you are batman, stealth and a beating), make an intoxicating combination, such that, if you build a complex immersive sim, where both stealth and violence are available, any sane character build will naturally coalesce around some kind of stealth-archer or stealth-assassin - as this is optimal in-game and feels powerful to the player.
Then, if the game wants to make the now hugely-empowered player behave in a purely-stealthy fashion, to fit the theme and feel of the game, they need to add in extra-diegetic elements, rulings, 'points*' and so on in order to make the player-character behave 'stealthily' and, in the words of one reviewer; ‘you are being stealthy to protect the NPCs from you, not to protect you from them’.
This is a mistake no game in the Thief series ever makes, since the Player Character is always, by Protagonist standards, insanely vulnerable, and sword fights are a nightmare. The structure of the game, without extra-diegetic elements, makes you want to play as a thief. It’s a game where you can snipe people in the back of the head, but won't want to as it would feel unprofessional.
{A digression with a digression on ‘points’; There should be some neo-OSR ruling about points being the opposite of gold as, just as xp for gold is almost always good and feeds dietetically in so many ways into the game, there is a kind of reverse of that, in which, as soon as 'points' are involved in anything, it almost always gets worse, though the means and method of how that happens will vary greatly.}]
The Black Parade
Based on the engine for the original ‘Thief’, Black Parade is large and complex enough to be a fourth game in the franchise. For free. Which is, I think, larger than any of the other games, and might be the best one? At least I think it has more consistently high level design than any other version of the game.
Its staggering really that a small number of talented people could collaborate for so many yearsto produce something both so massive, and so exquisite. Thief was always a distantly OSR-ish game and its fan-mission community is even more so. For ‘The Black Parade’ Melan gets a mention in the credits!
The Paradoxes of Thief Level Design
What defines Thief games more than anything else is level design and it is here that some of the interrelationships between Thief and the OSR are brought into focus
Fear, Desire, Exploration and Investigation
In 'Thief', you think like a thief. You are vulnerable and can be killed easily, so you carefully watch, and LISTEN, to the environment, constantly checking for threats. You also hide relentlessly, moving carefully from shadow to shadow, cursing electric lights and marble floors. Your only real safety is the darkness and so you cling to it instinctively, even when there is no tangible threat, because there might be one; a wandering guard or servant, or something else.
So fear and vulnerability ensure you deeply and constantly search, investigate and utilise the environment, and when these are naturalistic environments, you are deliberately navigating them in a way that feels ‘inverse’ and therefore a little cool. You might be in a kitchen and, instead of doing Kitchen things, be searching for fragments of shadow in the light coming from the stove, creeping behind shelves etc.
You are a Thief, you want to steal not kill. There are no points for killing and increasing the difficulty of the game (usually) only increases the conditions of play, not the substance of the game itself. Maximum difficulty means getting all of the treasure without killing and sometimes even without harming anyone. {Thief does mix this up somewhat with the easy availability of the blackjack, with which you can "knock people out" (irl this would likely mean a lot of brain embolisms), but only if you catch them unawares}.
Desire keeps you fixated on that shiny artefact on the dresser, and carefully avoiding anything sensate or alive. Guards walk regular routes and chat with each other, and this means a chunk of Thief is listening for and measuring the movements of others, so you can avoid them. In almost every case you are searching for a way around anything dangerous. You are continually mapping the physical space in your head and also the routes and movements of any living thing within that space.
The Music of Pseudo-Naturalism
The best thief levels are pseudo-natural. You can intuit things about them from their nature and then investigate based on those intuitions, and sometimes be right, which makes you feel very clever stately home will have a kitchen and cellars, a Cathedral will have a belltower, etc. They are also physically distinct and separate from the surrounding area.
The urban slum levels are slightly less-perfect because the pseudo-nature of the level becomes more obvious; there are unopenable doors and inaccessible areas; PNG’s of doors on buildings that rim the play area. Though you can still try opening them, and discover from the games response if they are actually just PNG doors, or would respond to a lockpick or yet-to-be-found key. A handful will turn out to be functional, as you will discover when you find the right thing to open them, or pop up from the other side after dicking about in a sewer for hours.
Still, it’s curious that in D&D there are no unopenable doors, or at least, there are no simulated doors. The play area, in theory, expands outwards forever, and in practice, only becomes misty, general and improvisational as you move out of whatever the DM has thought about already, (but come back next week and the details will have sharpened up a lot).
But, just like Dungeons’, Thief levels are almost never purely naturalistic. Firstly; they are simulated environments, and can’t match the chaos or complexity of the real world, second; they have locked doors which need keys, sequences of actions needed to progress, certain pieces of intelligence which must be combined to succeed; they have paths, like flow-charts, which lace through these otherwise wide-open environments.
Still they are otherwise very wide open, with a large array of possible ingress points, secret routes and other possible access-ways that strongly reward exploration, investigation and, sometimes, cunning extrapolation from the logic of the depicted world. Nothing is quite as pleasurable in Thief as spotting a chimney, pipe or ledge, wondering if you can get to it, finding a way to, then realising you can find a way inside/across, then popping up somewhere you should never have been able to get to.
There are “weird” Thief levels too, set in ancient magical tombs, lost cities or supernatural netherworlds, but they are never quite as good. Great Thief levels exist at a near perfect synthesis of naturalistic play-space and toyetic, planned sequential-challenge environment. They are levels where the nature of the space provokes investigation and exploration, which it also rewards with naturalistic opportunities, where a complex adventure-flow runs through the pseudo-naturalistic space but where the space always gives opportunities for adaptation, evasion and incursion. A toybox with the lid half-open if you will.
Butterfingered Infinity
Thief is actively trying to give you an experience very like that of an AD&D Thief, and does so, in a curious mirror-view fashion, but the differences between a Thief in play in D&D, and a Thief in Thief, are interesting to consider.
Problem solving in D&D is often related to the concept of ‘tactical infinity’ due to the very wide-open nature of possible approaches to various problems, but its more like a ‘Butterfingered Infinity’ in which the Players can hold and use almost any imaginable, or describable, concept, but carefully, and with blunt inexactness. The infinity of the Word rather than the Vast but Finite potential of the Eye.
An Equation on the Utility of Butterfingered Infinity
A very rough pseudo-equation on the utility of words in roleplaying might be something like this;
[The Descriptive Power of Language] – [[(word concepts the DM actually knows) x [(The Speed of relation) + (what the Player Group can easily understand)]]
The Descriptive Power of Language
There are a lot of words. If you have enough time and a big enough dictionary, you can describe almost anything. It we assume the total potential of words, and look for things they absolutely cannot describe, there is not much, but here we enter paradox, because we are trying to use words to describe what words can’t describe.
(This is a problem which exists continually, as a faint umbra, which sometimes obscures and sometimes reveals, whenever we come to think about the things language can’t do, in almost any situation.)
But, so far as things that could be interacted with in a tabletop game, a computer game or any other form of simulation, let’s assume that words might be able to describe nearly everything necessary to know
How much the DM actually knows
The classic DM is a natural word-hound and Gygaxian Wunderkammer encyclopaedist. Not a few writers have named D&D as a font for their discovery and use of words, and the use of strange or novel words can, with limits, be a pleasurable aspect in itself in D&D.
Lets assume the DM knows a lot of words.
Speed of relation
We can describe anything if we have time. But technical, unfamiliar jargon, and highly precise measurements, as well as large numbers of things or elements, will all take time, which robs immediacy, and in some theoretical cases, perhaps a truly insane amount of time.
How much and how easily the players understand
For a concept to be useful, it has to be known to at least some of the players. A rare word-concept only the DM knows is a near-useless word-concept. It is the Player Group that must understand. I real terms this means, probably (?), at least two or three know it and can easily explain to the rest. If this happens many times in sequence, the game dies.
No-one is paying as much attention to the whole thing as the DM. Every individual has a totally different base capacity for imagining different things, so the words flow out, are half attended toand when they are attended to, are understood differently by almost everyone. In effect, a DM has a relatively small ‘armoury’ of words and conceptual language which is strong, simple, descriptive and already mutually understood by almost everyone, from which they can take excursions into complexity, for short periods and specific problems, but which they always return to. We can think of this as the ‘verbal armoury’ or word-hoard of natural language. The aspects of spatial and physical situations that make up the meat and majority of D&D problem solving are those for which or conceptual language is already well developed and widely shared, and which can be imagined with ease by a wide variety of people.
So: being STUCK to something, being TIED to someone. Being BEHIND someone. Getting a LEG UP. In fact in terms of three-dimensional space, these are all things most of us did as children, which is why we understand them. For many of us who are not athletes or dancers, childhood was our first, last and by a large margin, greatest education in the nature of three-dimensional space and the language of physical problems remains that of the playground.
Responses to ‘The Limitations of Language’
I asked people on Twitter and Facebook about “things and situations you have experienced as a DM, which have proven really difficult to describe quickly and clearly using *only* spoken words?
(The classic is trying to describe a complex 3D environment to a bunch of people but I am interested in other examples.)”
The responses were very interesting!
Tim Samwise Seven Harper; “I sometimes struggle with describing natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals. I always try to picture those scenes from Dark Crystal and that helps, or I default more toward real trees and plants as well as real life animals with a twist.
Big parties with hundreds of NPCs are always a challenge. I tend to use 3x5 cards with a few descriptive words on each NPC card.”
Yuri Zanelli; “PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment. Miniatures can help a lot with that, but I don't like to use them. My game tables tend to be already too crowded with maps, manuals, bottles, snacks, character sheets, dice, notepads and so on. I tend to use a quick sketch on a sheet of paper.”
Greg Benedicto; “Describing liminal elements in a scene WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them.”
Jesse Rooney; “As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell. Hence minis at the table. There are a number of times when playing theater of the mind that Ive pulled out a sketch pad to demonstrate who and what is where.”
John Enfield; “That's why I use gridded maps (either hand drawn or published), minis and occasionally terrain pieces. Having visual aids helps aid in describing environments.”
Ragnar Hill; “A good ambush because players always start squealing and panicking and then I get over excited.”
PARAMANDER @CravenSensation; “Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy. Even if each detail is relatively straightforward/easy to visualize, more details means higher potential for miscommunication + more attention required on the part of the players”
Derek Dees @NihilSineLabor; “Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.
The Great Hall of Durin, as light broke through, but shadows still engulfed so much, for example.”
Bo Banducci @bo_banducci; “I’m struggling to remember one aside from the classic. Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players and I want to intimate this somehow without giving it away.”
Synthesis of Responses
I broke these down into a few large categories as a tool-of-thought, (with the usual effect that many real-life situations involve one or more categories, often in point and counterpoint.)
These provide a very brief idea-map of things with which ‘Words’ are especially butterfingered;
PLETHORALITY
“natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals”
“Big parties with hundreds of NPCs”
“Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy”
We know about these things because we encounter them in life, and the Eye can show them to us easily and immediately – well, if not quite immediately, a scene or painting can give us a very quick general impression of a scene with many things of strange and novel quality in it, which the scanning of the eye-and-mind can ‘fill in’ very smoothly and fluidly, much faster than words could describe. When the eye works with the ear, they can combine, bind and represent a truly complex scene, in but a moment. Nature can present deep, immediate and novel interconnected complexity in-one. Words are slow, specific and sequential, happening one after another, and sometimes blunt. These are two forms of time in conflict.
Thief does well with some forms of ‘Plethorality’; its ‘big views’ where you teeter on a rooftop and get a nice ’Batman’-esque view of a highly vertical city, are exciting and poetic, and also useful as you start planning routes and investigating things with the eye. But Thief, like other virtual simulations, is strongly limited in the number of active, moving, identifiable, people and living things it has going on. Not quite as much as words, but a fair amount. They really eat programming power.
DIMENSIONALITY
“PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment”
“As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell”
Or more prosaically; physical positioning and complex three-dimensional situations. But ‘Dimensionality’ sounds cooler.
In Thief the exact precision of a jump, climb or any other kind of movement, can be demonstrated in the substance of the world with deep subtlety and immediate precision. As in; “*this* I can jump on” to “*here* I can climb on to in a few moments”, “*here* I can climb up to, if I have equipment”.
The assessments are fluid, rapid and immediate, and this is a key part of the game. A patrolling guard is here and going this way, the next pool of shadow is over here and it will take me this long over the loud marble floor to get there. Then a climb of this length, then.. and so on.. Immediate, intuitive, fast.
A similar thing takes place with even small skirmishes, let along larger ones. Close physical positioning matters enormously and is very hard to communicate, accurately, and quickly, to a group. For this were sketch-maps made. Words alone have a butterfingered grasp on three-dimensional space.
LIMINALITY
“WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them”
“A good ambush “
“Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players”
If problems with describing three-dimensional space were what I expected, and problems with ‘Plethorality’ were less expected, but make sense, then ‘Liminality’; secrets, shadows, deceptions and double meanings, in all ways, is an unexpected but quite beautiful problem to face.
It’s the illusionists problem. Or an actors problem. It seems to flow deeply from the situation of the GM or storyteller being the fount of both the reality as-a-whole, and of a deception within that reality.
A simple example; a scene in a visual narrative like a play or film. One character is lying. The actor and director want the audience to know they are lying. But the characters in the fiction are not supposed to know. How to solve this?
The answer depends entirely on the naturalism and subtlety of the fiction, its tellers and its audience. In a pantomime or cheesy melodrama, or a children’s play, its relatively simple, at least in concept; the mustachoed villain twirls their moustache and even cocks an eye at the audience, before saying “of course not! Bwahahaha!”.
The more naturalistic the drama becomes, the more complex and difficult the lie becomes to communicate. For a soap actor, a touch of archness, for a dramatic actor, a complex scene-setting and capturing by the director to prepare the way for the lie and leave the right kind of space around it, for a highly naturalistic ‘spy’ or intrigue drama – almost nothing maybe, but the tone and emotional volume of the scene must be low or even and this might suit best a modernist story where the audience just never finds out what the ‘truth’ is, or at least that ‘finding out’ isn’t central to what the story is doing.
For other kinds of secrets, they have been written about in depth by many people. How, and how often, to portray lying NPC’s, (my last read on OSR culture was that it was generally anti deceptive NPC’s because they were over-used, difficult to get right and crippled the PCs long term relationship with the game-world, leading to more murderhoboism than desired), huge debates and discussions on how to run investigations, (what does or doesn’t count as railroading), and clues, (the ‘three clue rule’),
“Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.”
This was an especially interesting response as, I didn’t even mention Thief in the question, and literal complex environments full of layered shadow is the main thing that Thief does. They built an engine specifically for the game called ‘the shadow engine’.
Though this has strong elements of Plethorality, (the simultaneous number of things and their complexity), and Dimensionality, (its about a large, complex, 3D space), the fact that it is also about the revealed/unrevealed paradox at the heart of Liminality is fascinating to me.
Words find it hard to form reliable shadows and perceptible lies. Words can lie easily, but its very hard to get them to build a lie as-object.
Thief Lessons
Considering the deep differences revealed between the world of the Eye and Virtual Simulation, and the world of the Word, and social, conversational simulation, are there lessons we can actually learn from Thief about how to run D&D? Or are the worlds so different that we might even deliberately not try to transfer lessons between them, as they would lead to bad play?
Here are a handful of concepts from Thief and some comments from me on how and whether they might be useful in D&D.
‘Ghost Missions’
Even the hardest level of Thief doesn’t demand that you be seen by no-one, but high settings often insist you hurt no-one.
In D&D the effects of a difficulty setting or complex level can be delivered diegeticaly by a highly specific quest-giver; a priest or wizard wants something, and insists that you ‘kill no-one’ or ‘hut no-one’ or in extreme versions ‘are never seen at all’, performing a ‘perfect ghost’ Mission Impossible situation where the incursion takes place and no one ever knows it happened at all.
(Of course the Party get paid a lot for fulfilling these conditions.)A mission like this already implies a very different kind of D&D, a quest based around planning, surveillance, mapping and intelligence gathering, and then a quick and complex incursion full of distractions.
Difficult to pull of in D&D, but far from impossible,
Sketchy Maps
Thief usually provides a map for each mission, and it is always a vague map. A sketch map with some useful information, but a huge amount of things it doesn’t tell you. Its usually enough for you to orient yourself in the play area and tell where the major sections roughly are, but absolutely insists you explore to find out what you need to know.
More sketchy dungeon and play area maps before games might be a good idea. Diegetic literal ‘sketch maps’ by previous thieves and adventurers. Maps good enough for you to form the bones of a plan, but clearly vague enough that you know going in that they won’t describe everything.
Monster PATROLS, not Monster ROOMS
God damn patrols are hard to manage in D&D without a lot of extra shit. No wonder monsters in D&D just really like their particular rooms. Its easy to simulate one or two from the encounter table, but a key element of Thief is timing the patrols. If patrols are regular or even mostly regular and predictable, then they become part of the environment you can learn about and plan for, and evading or subverting them makes you feel very clever as a player.
Arranging a full system of patrols for a dungeon or wizards tower would probably require an entire sub-system, but it might be fun to give it a try.
Clumsy Monsters with Keys
There should be more clumsy monsters carrying VERY OBVIOUS keys through the darkness. Big, dumb stupid but dangerous ogre guards who could easily one-shot a PC if they see them, with huge gold or silver keys hanging by their sides.
I’ve spoken at length before about how the big, dumb, dangerous ogre is the perfect low-level opponent for D&D.
Helix Views/Verticality
Dark-Souls helix-like atriums. In terms of dungeon design, this would be a game where there is more up and down. A dungeon arranged around a step well, inside a tower, down a mountains slope or similar.
Tempting Treasure
Would being able to SEE the treasure really have the same effect in a described game as in a virtual simulation?
For the main treasure, the idea is that, from most points of ingress, the main treasure the PCs are here to get is very visible, in a revered-panopticon style, but very hard to actually get to. I imagine it poised on the top of a tower, itself at the bottom of a vast cylindrical step-well or similar. You have to infiltrate all the way down, and then all the way up to get to it.
Thief has a lot of visually obvious, but very hard to reach, small and light treasures. So many in fact that it becomes hard to believe you have fit them all in your Thief-sack. Rather than having lots of mixed, hidden treasures in a dungeon-equivalent, what if instead, there were a small number of very gold and shiny very visible treasures, each in the centre of a complex, shadowy environment with guards patrolling, traps and other hidden obstacles, so it was easy to see where the treasure was, but very hard to work out how to get to it.
Discoverable Pseudo-False Alarms
A ‘ghost’ mission which demands perfect, or near perfect, stealth, (from a group), and pseudo-naturalistic patrolling guards, suggests a very binary result to mistakes. Which is; you make one, are discovered, alarm raised, mission a dead loss and now you are just fighting to get away.
In D&D you have a group who all need not to fuck up, and there is no quicksave, so some of the binary, complex and difficult challenges of Thief just won’t work.
An idea might be a way of artificially cancelling a general alarm. Or several ways, but each one only works once and is specific. This would be the equivalent of modern Thieves calling in to the police station with the password to tell them it’s a false alarm.
If the guards are big dumb ogres, and other things with less adaptability, like ghosts or constructs, then its not impossible there might be some kind of code or sign to get them to stop banging the Big Bell, blowing the alarm horn or whatever it is. Ideally, each of these methods would be completely different, and you would need to actually do the incursion and poke around to find some of them out. There would also likely be a max-usage, where, if you trigger the alarm three times, even if you have methods spare, even the Ogres are going to keep ringing the bell.
Visual Verticality
One of the most fun and engaging elements of a Thief level, if its pseudo-natural, is getting up really high, maybe somewhere you had spotted earlier, and climbing about, pulling a batman, looking down at the streets and tenements, the little guards scurrying about, and having a Cid Kagenou moment as you cackle to yourself about all the SHEEP below you!
For all the reasons give above in ‘Plethorality’ – this would be hard to make use of.
One method would be to combine the ‘Coms Snails’ idea below, with an ‘Eagles Perch’ position. Some hidden spot far above the play area with a big view that allows one person to sit there and whisper information to their fellow PCs as they buzz about below, each on their individual missions.
Comms snails
My old teen players got a bunch of silver-shelled telepathic snails and ended up using them as in-ear comms. In a Noisms game, we tried using psychic shrimp as a radio base in a similar way.
Why? Because comms are super-useful in D&D and once you have seen them in a film youjust naturally want to use them in group mission situations.
I know this is CRINGE as FUCK from a low-fantasy OSR perspective, BUT – it’s so deeply and desperately useful in doing meaningful physical GROUP stealth storytelling and problem-solving. It turns a knockabout fiasco into a heist.
For a purely-stealth mission where you actively don't want violence to happen, having the party split up is actually good it makes much less sense if they are all together, huddled together as a ‘stealthy gang’?, since stealth as a group always starts to feel more ridiculous than is useful. The social dynamics of play push against it and a tragedy of the commons situation happens where one impulsive player ends the mission.
Around the table, everyone can hear everything the everyone is saying and doing, so the extra-dimensional player-entities that pilot the PCs always have more of a global awareness than the PCs themselves, which, even with very disciplined play, often communicates itself to the PCs via shadowy tubes.
Allowing Comms-Snails for stealth-only missions might actually be a good idea that would improve play. Perhaps the stealth-obsessed wizards who hired you will loan them out.
Less-Lethal Falling
In these levels with-verticality, there should be more falling, and it should be less lethal. More bits where you fall into water, or something similar, but it doesn't kill you, and you end up at a different spot in the dungeon, separated from the group, and can explore and maybe find new routes to what you want, or just to link back up.
If being noticed is a fail state, then non-lethal separation is more interesting in play than HP loss.
Sound-Encounters
I think Brendan and others (possibly many others), have considered this will the ‘overloaded’ encounter die, but more encounters when you things or people coming, would be interesting.
In standard D&D being surprised is a reasonable punishment for dicking about and not paying attention, but in a stealth-only game, the threat of being discovered is more useful – the PCs have maybe one or two actions to hide or try something.
Stealth via Diegetic Sound
This isn’t directly from Thief, but I do think it would be a fun idea for stealthy D&D, which is; the sound you make around the table is the sound your character is making in the game.
So, if you want your PC to be stealthy – SHUT THE FUCK UP, and get WHISPERING! I think this would be a fine addition to the game. It would give all PCs access to some form of silence, and would encourage the players to actually fucking concentrate and think for once in their lives.
The ‘Mission Turnabout’
One possible useful import from Thief might be the ‘turn’ that happens in a lot of missions, for its is a way of involving liminality and deception that might be useable in D&D.
The classic ‘questgiver turns on you when you are done’, is rightly abjured in OSR circles, for reasons well-known. (Although Thief, does in fact use this trope a lot). But the idea of a delve having a clear set of objectives, and then, right in the middle of the adventure, something is discovered or something changes, and suddenly the goals and nature of the mission change, and change a lot, leaving you to improvise a new plan and work with the same space you had previously, but towards entirely new goals, this could work in D&D I think.
Things that happen in Thief include;
Shalebridge Cradle – you sneak through the haunted asylum, but to complete the mission you have to turn the electric lights on, then somehow sneak past all the terrifying things again, in bright light.
Ghosts – You sneak past some dumb zombies and animals, but grabbing the target means a supernatural event and oh fuck actual high level ghosts and wraiths are now patrolling about.
Rescue to Heist or Heist to Rescue – You are going in to get someone out, but can’t and end up having to re-plan to grab an item, or the opposite is true.
Guards Guards – getting in is easy but the alarms go off and now the
The entire axis of a mission might alter and now you are trying to do a very different thing, a theft becomes a rescue, an assassination becomes a theft, an exfiltration becomes a sabotage. This might be do-able in D&D.
NPC Conversations
This was one charming Thief method that sadly I could find no way to use. In Thief, guards and servants commonly mutter and complain to themselves while wandering around, they also have sometimes long, informative or just whacky conversations with each other in pairs. Just two guards chatting in the middle of the night. Coming upon these conversations and sneaking around behind them while they yap is quite charming, and listening to them often provides intel. But I couldn’t find a way to reproduce, or even use, this in D&D as long intra-NPC convo’s are a damned nightmare when the DM has to deliver the whole thing. Maybe if you are a massive ham it could be fun.
A Thief-like Dungeon
So, what do we have?
Powerful and wealthy wizards hire the PCs to do a heist. They offer to pay a LOT and have strong conditions;• Grab this one particular thing and bring it to them.• You don’t kill anyone or the missions off• Ideally, you swap the thing for a fake they will give you. This raises your pay.• Even better – no-one has any idea you were ever there. Perfect Ghosts.• They will give you these comm-snails to help, but they don’t live long.• They have some sketchy maps and a handful of ideas about where to get more intel.
The mission is a mansion-tower, maybe in a deep valley, or an ancient terrace mine, or somehow part sunken into the under verse. There are layers to go down, they are arranged as gardens or mazes or other somewhat-knowable patterns.
At the bottom is the mansion/tower/castle.
You have to sneak all the way down, then get inside, then sneak all the way up to get the thingy.
There will be locked doors, gates, traps and hidden problems.
There is an overwatch position somewhere where one person can see a lot of the area. If a PCs can get there and hide, they can whisper a lot of useful info to the others.
Its guarded by a clan of strong ogres. They are pretty dumb. They walk in regular patrols with lanterns. If they have a key they have it tied to their big belt with a label saying KEY, so they know what it is. The keys are also large.
There is a big gong or bell the Ogres bang on if they think something is up. There might be some kind of counter-signal or password or spell to convince them to stop this, but your patrons don’t know what it is, though it may be discoverable in the area.
There are sewers and fast-flowing water. Several of the falls, drops and traps dump you into these and will wash you up somewhere, or wash you against a grate you can climb up.
If you do get the actual treasure – surprise, it’s the only things holding the Vampire/Lich/Ghost in place. You now need to get out, but instead of, and sometimes as well as, dumb Ogres, you will now be dealing with clever, dangerous ghosts or vampires with keen senses.
July 29, 2024
A Review of 'From Dawn to Decadence' by Jacques Barzun
The War for Humanities
Five Hundred years of Europeans doing cultural stuff! Jacques Barzun was here for nearly a hundred of them and spent ten of those, from 84 to about 94 years of age, writing this book in which he tells us; this is what has been going down.
What the book is, is a slightly deeper question, with no absolute answer, though Barzun does have a crack at it several times.
‘Dawn and Decadence’ is a burning brand for the Humanities. Barzun is against scientism and technocracy, partly even against theory, partly against what he might call the cult of analysis. Neither History or Politics can be called a Science. The do so it a product of a jealousy and envy.
The problem is that Science and the Humanities, though they have many parts in common, are much more different in total than one might think. They are not even different meals made from the same ingredients, one is a meal, the other a useful adhesive employed in building walls.
A mirror universe version of Dawn and Decadence would recount the same events, go over the same writers and ideas, but would be upside down and inside out in comparison. It would begin with an analytical need to understand causes and in doing this, would perform similar deeds of chronicle, expansive view, personal asides, brief summations, lists, events and perhaps small personal digressions. In the full calculation of its substance it would be made of the same things, but it would be a fundamentally different text, fulfilling fundamentally different aims, through a different system.
To argue one must reason and analyse and abstract. To reason, analyse and abstract, one enters the realm of scientific, systematic thought, and so the battle for the humanities always takes place on “enemy” ground. Is always a defensive battle, for it cannot argue in its own tongue in its enemies court. In the jury of sciences, the Humanities have no case. They cannot argue for their lives. They can only be. The mute appeal insensate to the incurious and unread. They are not about attaining goals and only partly about choosing which goals to attain and how. The main and primary essence of the Humanities is the life, colour, emotion, distinctiveness and very texture of human life. It is like a pencil asking a pot of paint; “So, what exactly do you do around here?”
What Barzun is trying to do is to imbue meaning. To do this he must analyse and understand, even argue within himself. But this is not a work of analysis, or argument. His book is personal, human, tragic, as much an intellectual biography of Jacques Barzun as a book of History. It is a pot of paint. It is high art.
High off Barzun’s Supply
This is a book that makes you want to buy more books. (I bought three; in total, nearly equalling its length on my shelves, and that was with active repression of my biblio-Id).
Barzun mentions many of them, not only as events, or parts of a list, but as streams and forests in his vast geography of time – a sense of pastoral exploration and personal connection with this book or that; “oh over here, behind this small war, is a hidden genre not many have seen”.
Tried to control myself but as a direct result of Dawn and Decadence I purchased;
The Book of Common Prayer; its often claimed that the KJV Bible had the greatest single impact on written and spoken English – Not So! Says Barzun. The KJV was always odd and pseudo-archaic, was designed to be so from the start. The book you actually want to read is Cramners Book of Common Prayer – read from the pulpit every Sunday for 400 years, this is the text that really binds and influences modern English Prose.
Hazlitt – Selected Writings; “… out of favour today because it follows no system, lacks a jargon, and affords pleasure when read. How can it be “rigorous”? It is “impressionistic.” These and other strictures must be understood as part of the competition between art and science. To be up-to-date and acceptable nowadays, any mental activity must use principals couched in special abstract terms and forming a system. What is poured into the mould other than impressions drawn from the work is not stated. But one has only to read Hazlitt without preconceptions as to what he ought to do to see that he is both rigorous and exhaustive. His practice is to describe and define and describe again, adding a line, a touch, developing the complete image. You see a draftsman, a painter at work. He persists and insists that you shall see the way he perceives – not that he is trying to persuade you of an idea, only to make you as good a reader as he is. And that means one who not merely knows more than the careless or unguided but enjoys more.” Halzitts was also amongst the best of all the reviews of Spencers ‘The Fairy Queen’, back when I was reading the whole thing.
Flaubert - The Temptation of St Anthony; I knew well of Salambo, thanks to Noisms, but imagine my utter WRATH when I discovered in Dawn that Flaubert had written a hypnogogic dream vision novel about St Anthony in the desert, then his shitty realist friends had dumped on it, so he had burnt it! I nearly threw my soul across the room. Thankfully, a page or so later I discovered that later on he had re-written it, better. I was so happy I bought a copy.
The Upset West
But think of the weight, and of what just happened. I bought Dawn to Decadence, read it, and was so inspired that I bought a handful, a pittance, only a trickle of the huge number of mentioned, reviewed, discussed imagined and considered books in that great meta-book. My shelf of things to read.. did not go down at all.
Barzun straight up spent nearly an hundred years reading and writing, across multiple languages. He has read the European canon. How many other people can or could do the same? Few. The weight of books I will never read, of arguments I will never be able to counter, (as I have not read the source), of ideas I will never share, nooks left unexplored. There is too much and the very weight of such knowledge makes Dawn both a gift and a burden.
Dawn like a solid brick of compressed gold leaf, each leaf inscribed with fine verse, which smacks you right in the head. It hurts, it’s an assault, you may be bleeding, it’s too heavy and will take untold time to unpeel these layers like volcano-baked scrolls and work out what they said, it also seems to have been wrapped around a small core of spite, however, it is ALL GOLD, and now ALL YOURS.
As with Barzun, so with the West. One deep theme of Dawn, is European culture having a fucking meltdown due to how much of it there is. Dawn is both a diagnoses of that but also an expression of it.
Dawn begins around the end of the ‘Middle Ages’ when Luther phones Erasmus and tells him; “Those things in the distance aren’t small, they are very far away. Now start the Renaissance!”
The world made sense. Then we began to investigate it. Our philosophy was already orientated
to a grand source of values outside this world, and sometimes in conflict with it. The rituals and bureaucracy of Confucius were not enough, polytheism was not enough, neither the Hero cult of perceived barbarism. The West slowly put less faith in God, but still sought something outside itself - from then, increasingly, the question in art and science, (originally not far apart), was Nature. Nature delivered, in spades, but not the thing we want; the secret of what is good and bad and how to tell - we had to work it out for ourselves.
The West became upset. At some point, Barzun would probably say the very end of the 19C and definitely by the Great War, the West had become troubled by itself. "Western Civ Has Got to Go" has roots not just in the 60s, but deeper in the birth of modernity. There is a kind of psychic anguish to the Western Mind which no degree of material knowledge or land conquest can fix. We are chasing something. More - we labour under the weight of European achievement. There is a lot. Records have been kept. It’s hard to live. We cannot measure up.
A subdued theme of Dawn, but at the end in its final chapters, the main theme, is the West slowly turning, and then revolting, against its own history and high culture, from which Barzun predicts a bright dark age; lots happening, but death for culture and the soul. He is writing Dawn, not for the present, but for a deep future, long after this bright-dark age, when elements of culture he respects might be born again. This is a book written for the Library in Name of the Rose, (itself written by someone who had ‘read the canon’), though hopefully it wont burn down this time and will be rediscovered later.
Blind Spots
Because this is a book about everything, Barzun may have got a few bits wrong, here and there. Many educated reviewers who know a bit about their subjects remark that they disagree with Barzun, often in implication, sometimes in fact. Well, its unavoidable if you are going to just keep writing, and even necessary, and by Barzun’s standards, good, as it makes the text more human and gives you something to argue against.
A key element is that Jacques is a Pure Boy. He has no dirty mind, he is not a window-creeper or eavesdropper, let alone a pervert, deadbeat dad, race cultist, arms dealer, drug addict or megalomaniac. But he is writing often about people that are these things, and, being pure and decent, he either leaves these elements out or doesn’t know about them at all. This means there is a strand or channel of history he does not discuss, which makes his picture incomplete, and leads to surprises and astoundment.
We hear much of Rousseau, but nothing about the five children the great educator abandoned to the orphanage. We hear of Rimbaud, but not the African gun-running. Barzun reluctantly admits the Dark Ages might have happened if you insist on calling them that. Nietzsche receives a good report but his incel vibe gets no mention.
This perv-blindness makes WW1 more of a surprise than you would expect.
It is only through the eyes of Barzun and as part of this grand story that I see how utterly apocalyptic, transformative, unusual and disastrous the Great War was, along with the Second World war, here even more evidently, just a savage sequel. It’s so much worse when you are directly involved in the story of Europe and have seen all these little nations grow up and fight a bit - from a cultural perspective it is annihilation and the death of a World, and madness, a derangement of the intellectuals seemingly coming out of nowhere.
But it would take Barzun to find this such a genuine surprise- for he is a pure boy. There is (relatively) little here about the growing race cults, Germanys low self-esteem meltdown, (the Kaiser “worked for peace”??), nothing about the savage little wars, sometimes of extermination, which had marked the borders of the European diaspora, and little about the transportation, mutilation, rape and murder of several millions of Africans.
True, from the perspective of a history of European high culture, maybe there is little to say about these things, but only by not thinking about them can you genuinely be surprised by the Great War. Tell a Nigerian prisoner, or a Native American, or a Balinese lord, or a Tasmanian Aboriginal or Australian Aboriginal, or an Emu, that the whites have started machine-gunning and massacring each other in great heard. I doubt they would be very shocked to hear it.
Barzun is not stupid, weak or deluded, but he is fine, and crucially, not a creep or a weirdo. Creeps and weirdos are not surprised when the dark self gets its dick out and starts ejaculating bullets.
He is a child of the Church and the haves to the bone. Genetically French-Catholic, even if not that French. The one things he kept in common with the French 20C pederast-left is a deep disenchantment with Anglo supremacy and especially the effects of Demotic Life on cultural life. In its aesthetic, its structures of power, the art it encourages, its fashion, relationships, the feel and texture of society, he really does not vibe with it at all. The leftists react with Marxism and wokery, two things that have little in common apart from their anguished superior alienation. Barzun goes deep into reaction.
More on this later
The Garden Stroll
One of the greatest pleasures in Dawn is the wandering, strolling pointing out and interest in themes and genres, writers and artists, otherwise ignored, or just utterly forgotten, except for Barzun. There is much, of which, nine fragments here;
1. Burning Instruments"It is only fair to add that music in the Renaissance had its enemies, some merely censorious, some radical. Among the latter, Savonarola was prince. His bonfire reduced to ashes all the instruments he could collect."
2. The Commonwealth Of Oceania By James Harrington"Oceania is a republic whose instigator resigns after he sees it well established. it has a written constitution, a legislature of two houses, rotation in office, and a president elected indirectly, as in the later Constitution of the United States, by a secret ballot of all citizens."
3. Cartouche"An innovation, an idea with a very great future, made its appearance at this time. A very young man named Cartouche, trained as a soldier, gained immediate renown for his daring and success as a thief. He was arrested, escaped, and next invented the role of mastermind in crime. He organised bands of fellow professionals, male and female, recruiting even young noblemen who had talent and inclination. At a dinner party, a man who had been robbed on the way recognised the pair of practitioners among the guests. Cartouche was soon a hero to the populace. Adept at disguise, he was able to hold his own in good society. He headed a delegation to greet the Turkish ambassador and relieved hi of the gifts intended for the court. While one band was working in Paris on the foreigners about to invest in the Mississippi scheme, another robbed the mail coach from Lyon that carried treasure."
4. On The Romance"One of the attractions of the genre was its length, which guaranteed pleasure. The most highly prized in the mid-17C were the narratives of Madeleine de Scudery, two of which were 20 volumes each; her trifling ones ranged from four to eight." ....... "But to enjoy them now one must be a practiced skipper, for what has denied all these works permanent shelf life is the long stretches between oases."
5. Political Ability"To govern well requires two distinct kinds of ability: political skill and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it. Anyone who has served open-eyed on a committee knows how many "good ideas" are proposed by well-meaning members that could not possibly be carried out, because what is proposed consists only of results, with no means in sight for getting from here to there. After serving on a local government body, Bernard Shaw guessed that perhaps 5 percent of mankind possess political ability."
6. Equality"There is but one conclusion: human beings are unmeasurable. It follows that equality is a social assumption independent of fact. It is made for the sake of civil peace, of approximating justice, and of bolstering self-respect. it prevents servility, lessens arrogant oppression, and reduces envy - just a little. Equality begins at home, where members of the family enjoy the same privileges and guests receive equal hospitality without taking a test or showing credentials. Businesses, government, and the profession assume equality for identical reasons: all junior clerks, all second lieutenants, earn so much. In other situations, as in sports and the rearing of children, equivalence based on age, weight, handicap, or other standard is computed so as to equalise chances. That is as far as the principal can stretch."
7. ImaginationWhat links myth with literature is the Romanticist faculty par excellence, the Imagination. As we saw, the faculty regained resect, but the world remains ambiguous. Coleridge pointed out that it is not mere fancy; little effort is needed to put together in thought bits and pieces of experience - say, a talking animal. To imagine is not to fashion charming make-believe. But it takes imagination to write a fable in which the talking animal satirizes with insight and wit some feature of society. Out of the known or knowable, Imagination connects the remote, reinterprets the familiar, or discovers hidden realities. Being a means of discovery, it must be called "Imagination of the real." Scientific hypotheses perform that same office; they are products of the imagination."
8. Novels, Balzac And History"The sense of 'how things go' presupposes that people and their habits, speech and costume vary wonderfully from place to place and time to time. Change is seen to come in curious ways from the interaction of leader and led, coupled with accident and coincidence. History reads like a novel and a novel is a history - almost."
9. Romanticism".. in Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked - egagé, as the 20C Existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more complex than any set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensable. They rise out of the people, whose own heart-and-mind provides the makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy."
There is more. Much much much more, from a brief pen-portrait of a mid 20C humourist who wrote several books in a cod Irish brogue (“the equal of any humourist since Twain, and utterly ignored”), to the forgotten creatives of Napoleons Empire, always in the shadow of the Giant and tainted by his tyranny, to the fallen world of Stephan Zweig (who you will remember from ‘The Great Budapest Hotel’, to great tranches on music that I didn’t have a strong intuition for, (did you know there was a universally applauded period of English madrigalists?) William James inventing ‘stream of consciousness’ (I had to work hard not to buy any of his books). Barzun is a cornucopia, its his most engaging, honourable, life-giving but also frustrating qualities. This is a book written out of love. Literally a romance.
The West and the Rest
The thought occurs that to say anything meaningful about the 'West' it would help to compare it to literally anywhere else. This, in detail, we cannot really do. The equivalent peninsulas, half-continents and archipelagos, each for different reasons, fail to put out.
India, ever-absorbed in Big Loops of Being, didn’t write down much.
China did write a lot of stuff down, but every now and then, (recently; Mao), would burn the lot and re-write memory (which sounds nutty but if we look at the difficulty the West has had in living with its own memories, maybe there is a point to it).
South America – we melted its gold tongue.
The Rest of South East Asia is hot, wet and surrounded by sea, and any land with all those things will find it hard to hold a deep written history – the rocks will crumble and be overgrown; the rest; rot.
Barzun talks of the themes of Europe. Are they simply human themes written in a specific way? It is hard to say. We will have to wait for some kind of assembling-super-robot ultra-mega-mecha Barzun.
Goes Off On One At The End
At almost any point in Dawn, Barzun seems in love with history but vaguely annoyed that it has happened. He loves the world he describes but there is always pain and loss, offset, for him, by whatever funky new cultural stuff these penninsularies are getting up to now.
This fades towards the end of the 19C, staggers around the Great War, and collapses utterly when coming into modernity. There is a horror to being Jacques Barzun, which is that he was raised in a cultural time machine, a direct expression of a culture that was slowly perishing even as he was born. It is because he is this; a man from the time machine, that he can come forth and bring us wonders and lay out the rich incredible tapestry of the last 500 years before us, to reawaken the dreams and passions of our forgotten past and let us briefly walk amidst the ghosts of our ancestors. Also because of this, he must have been, intellectually if not socially, an inestimably lonely man - he reminds me of Gildas, the Welsh priest who wrote one of a few scraps of record we have from the British Dark Age - a list of the failings of his people and their doom and how they let him down. Barzun is a bit like that, a lone Priest, echo of a lost culture, sitting out on a rock watching a dark age rise and coping his tits off about it.
He is not wrong just not completely right. He doesn't talk about popular music, cinema, (good) television, comics, games - well they are utterly alien to him and so irrelevant. He is barely aware of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but even if he were could he actually bring himself to like any of it? Maybe Gene Wolfe - as catholic, complex, and full of difficult mysteries and subtle thought.
High culture should be no more elitist than science, and probably less elitist than the high sciences of mathematics and physics. More people can probably understand an opera than can easily learn calculus. But it certainly feels more elitist, and the rule of High Culture seems to mesh more neatly with and spring more rightly from, an older, more hierarchal, more conservative culture , while science, despite its deep difficulty, and the rare and elite nature of its finer practitioners, gets along broadly happily with the Demos and the Demotic, while Barzun could not. He hates modernity and hates being stranded here, alone, which, I suppose thankfully for him, he no longer is.
The Long Quote
I opened with the question of what Dawn actually is, and if or how it could be defended in the Court of Reason and Analysis. What is the book for? And can it even be regarded in those terms?
Primarily; no, it should not be regarded in those terms at all.
However, Barzun being Barzun, he has at least considered the question of analysis, of ‘teachable lessons’, of things to be gleaned, which, while not at all the main point of Dawn, (it is not an argument), he considers what its arguments might be;
[This is long, its why I put it at the end.]
"Not a science and not a philosophy, history is bereft in an age like ours, which wants at least theory when science is not attainable. Can a case still be made for Cinderella? One line of advocacy might be that even if history were simply a story recited in various versions, it would be worth having as a vast mural full of action and colour. But as pointed out earlier, when presented by a thinking historian, history does more: it shows patterns that recur with a difference, dramas in which one follows exposition, complication, and denouement, while continuity in aims suggests themes. In all these ways knowledge of man is enhanced. History moreover includes energetic lives, no two alike, that show creatures as characters.
These elements need no theory to earn respect. And a further possibility exists. At times in the present work, the narrator threw in the remark; "This is a generality." The dictum meant that a conclusion just reached applied mutatis mutandis to other broad ranges of fact. These fruits of reflection, like history itself, are interesting as well as useful; here is a round dozen to show how scanning the last five centuries in the West impresses the mind with types of order:
- An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or two pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide.
- A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom.
- "An Age of ---" (fill in: Reason, Faith, Science, Absolutism, Democracy, Anxiety, Communication) is always a misnomer because insufficient, except perhaps "An Age of Troubles," which fits every age in varying degrees.
- All historical labels are nicknames - Puritan, Gothic, Rationalist, Romantic, Symbolist, Expressionist, Modernist - and therefore falsify. But "renaming more accurately" would be effort wasted. Coming from diverse minds, it would re-introduce confusion. All names given by history must be accepted and opened up, not defined in one sentence or divided into sub-species.
- The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relative strength.
- Neither of these propositions is true by itself; "Ideas are the product of society." "Social change is the product of ideas."
- The denial just stated applies also to heredity and the environment; great men and the masses of mankind; economic forces and the conscious purpose; and any other pair of commonly invoked coordinate factors. The exact course of their respective action cannot be understood and consequently cannot be stated.
- A class is not a homogeneous group of people marching in step but a sort of labelled platform populated by a continuous stream of individuals coming from above and from below. Once settled, they acquire the common traits.
- The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care _after_ it has done its work.
- In art, influence does take place and when strongest is least literal. When it is literal it must be called plagiarism and the fact should not be concealed by the eminence of the thief.
- In biography, systematic explanation by unconscious motives defeats the purpose of portraying an individual character. It turns him or her into a case, which then belongs to one of the types in the literature of psychology.
- Progress does occur from point to point along a given line for a given time. it does not occur along the whole cultural front, though it may appear to be throwing into shadow the resistant portion. The sciences are no exception.
To these dogmatically stated rules, some modifications or contrary cases will no doubt occur to the student and the reader. That is one use of the rules: to sharpen the sense of difference in similarity. The other is to guide reflections on the facts met with in any account of a past or present scene. Testing a generality makes for precision in remembrance, which is knowing history. To be remembered also is that these twelve are not exhaustive; others might be framed, and few or none may fit times and places other than those which suggested them.”
Five Hundred years of Europeans doing cultural stuff! Jacques Barzun was here for nearly a hundred of them and spent ten of those, from 84 to about 94 years of age, writing this book in which he tells us; this is what has been going down.
What the book is, is a slightly deeper question, with no absolute answer, though Barzun does have a crack at it several times.
‘Dawn and Decadence’ is a burning brand for the Humanities. Barzun is against scientism and technocracy, partly even against theory, partly against what he might call the cult of analysis. Neither History or Politics can be called a Science. The do so it a product of a jealousy and envy.
The problem is that Science and the Humanities, though they have many parts in common, are much more different in total than one might think. They are not even different meals made from the same ingredients, one is a meal, the other a useful adhesive employed in building walls.
A mirror universe version of Dawn and Decadence would recount the same events, go over the same writers and ideas, but would be upside down and inside out in comparison. It would begin with an analytical need to understand causes and in doing this, would perform similar deeds of chronicle, expansive view, personal asides, brief summations, lists, events and perhaps small personal digressions. In the full calculation of its substance it would be made of the same things, but it would be a fundamentally different text, fulfilling fundamentally different aims, through a different system.
To argue one must reason and analyse and abstract. To reason, analyse and abstract, one enters the realm of scientific, systematic thought, and so the battle for the humanities always takes place on “enemy” ground. Is always a defensive battle, for it cannot argue in its own tongue in its enemies court. In the jury of sciences, the Humanities have no case. They cannot argue for their lives. They can only be. The mute appeal insensate to the incurious and unread. They are not about attaining goals and only partly about choosing which goals to attain and how. The main and primary essence of the Humanities is the life, colour, emotion, distinctiveness and very texture of human life. It is like a pencil asking a pot of paint; “So, what exactly do you do around here?”
What Barzun is trying to do is to imbue meaning. To do this he must analyse and understand, even argue within himself. But this is not a work of analysis, or argument. His book is personal, human, tragic, as much an intellectual biography of Jacques Barzun as a book of History. It is a pot of paint. It is high art.
High off Barzun’s Supply
This is a book that makes you want to buy more books. (I bought three; in total, nearly equalling its length on my shelves, and that was with active repression of my biblio-Id).
Barzun mentions many of them, not only as events, or parts of a list, but as streams and forests in his vast geography of time – a sense of pastoral exploration and personal connection with this book or that; “oh over here, behind this small war, is a hidden genre not many have seen”.
Tried to control myself but as a direct result of Dawn and Decadence I purchased;
The Book of Common Prayer; its often claimed that the KJV Bible had the greatest single impact on written and spoken English – Not So! Says Barzun. The KJV was always odd and pseudo-archaic, was designed to be so from the start. The book you actually want to read is Cramners Book of Common Prayer – read from the pulpit every Sunday for 400 years, this is the text that really binds and influences modern English Prose.
Hazlitt – Selected Writings; “… out of favour today because it follows no system, lacks a jargon, and affords pleasure when read. How can it be “rigorous”? It is “impressionistic.” These and other strictures must be understood as part of the competition between art and science. To be up-to-date and acceptable nowadays, any mental activity must use principals couched in special abstract terms and forming a system. What is poured into the mould other than impressions drawn from the work is not stated. But one has only to read Hazlitt without preconceptions as to what he ought to do to see that he is both rigorous and exhaustive. His practice is to describe and define and describe again, adding a line, a touch, developing the complete image. You see a draftsman, a painter at work. He persists and insists that you shall see the way he perceives – not that he is trying to persuade you of an idea, only to make you as good a reader as he is. And that means one who not merely knows more than the careless or unguided but enjoys more.” Halzitts was also amongst the best of all the reviews of Spencers ‘The Fairy Queen’, back when I was reading the whole thing.
Flaubert - The Temptation of St Anthony; I knew well of Salambo, thanks to Noisms, but imagine my utter WRATH when I discovered in Dawn that Flaubert had written a hypnogogic dream vision novel about St Anthony in the desert, then his shitty realist friends had dumped on it, so he had burnt it! I nearly threw my soul across the room. Thankfully, a page or so later I discovered that later on he had re-written it, better. I was so happy I bought a copy.
The Upset West
But think of the weight, and of what just happened. I bought Dawn to Decadence, read it, and was so inspired that I bought a handful, a pittance, only a trickle of the huge number of mentioned, reviewed, discussed imagined and considered books in that great meta-book. My shelf of things to read.. did not go down at all.
Barzun straight up spent nearly an hundred years reading and writing, across multiple languages. He has read the European canon. How many other people can or could do the same? Few. The weight of books I will never read, of arguments I will never be able to counter, (as I have not read the source), of ideas I will never share, nooks left unexplored. There is too much and the very weight of such knowledge makes Dawn both a gift and a burden.
Dawn like a solid brick of compressed gold leaf, each leaf inscribed with fine verse, which smacks you right in the head. It hurts, it’s an assault, you may be bleeding, it’s too heavy and will take untold time to unpeel these layers like volcano-baked scrolls and work out what they said, it also seems to have been wrapped around a small core of spite, however, it is ALL GOLD, and now ALL YOURS.
As with Barzun, so with the West. One deep theme of Dawn, is European culture having a fucking meltdown due to how much of it there is. Dawn is both a diagnoses of that but also an expression of it.
Dawn begins around the end of the ‘Middle Ages’ when Luther phones Erasmus and tells him; “Those things in the distance aren’t small, they are very far away. Now start the Renaissance!”
The world made sense. Then we began to investigate it. Our philosophy was already orientated
to a grand source of values outside this world, and sometimes in conflict with it. The rituals and bureaucracy of Confucius were not enough, polytheism was not enough, neither the Hero cult of perceived barbarism. The West slowly put less faith in God, but still sought something outside itself - from then, increasingly, the question in art and science, (originally not far apart), was Nature. Nature delivered, in spades, but not the thing we want; the secret of what is good and bad and how to tell - we had to work it out for ourselves.
The West became upset. At some point, Barzun would probably say the very end of the 19C and definitely by the Great War, the West had become troubled by itself. "Western Civ Has Got to Go" has roots not just in the 60s, but deeper in the birth of modernity. There is a kind of psychic anguish to the Western Mind which no degree of material knowledge or land conquest can fix. We are chasing something. More - we labour under the weight of European achievement. There is a lot. Records have been kept. It’s hard to live. We cannot measure up.
A subdued theme of Dawn, but at the end in its final chapters, the main theme, is the West slowly turning, and then revolting, against its own history and high culture, from which Barzun predicts a bright dark age; lots happening, but death for culture and the soul. He is writing Dawn, not for the present, but for a deep future, long after this bright-dark age, when elements of culture he respects might be born again. This is a book written for the Library in Name of the Rose, (itself written by someone who had ‘read the canon’), though hopefully it wont burn down this time and will be rediscovered later.
Blind Spots
Because this is a book about everything, Barzun may have got a few bits wrong, here and there. Many educated reviewers who know a bit about their subjects remark that they disagree with Barzun, often in implication, sometimes in fact. Well, its unavoidable if you are going to just keep writing, and even necessary, and by Barzun’s standards, good, as it makes the text more human and gives you something to argue against.
A key element is that Jacques is a Pure Boy. He has no dirty mind, he is not a window-creeper or eavesdropper, let alone a pervert, deadbeat dad, race cultist, arms dealer, drug addict or megalomaniac. But he is writing often about people that are these things, and, being pure and decent, he either leaves these elements out or doesn’t know about them at all. This means there is a strand or channel of history he does not discuss, which makes his picture incomplete, and leads to surprises and astoundment.
We hear much of Rousseau, but nothing about the five children the great educator abandoned to the orphanage. We hear of Rimbaud, but not the African gun-running. Barzun reluctantly admits the Dark Ages might have happened if you insist on calling them that. Nietzsche receives a good report but his incel vibe gets no mention.
This perv-blindness makes WW1 more of a surprise than you would expect.
It is only through the eyes of Barzun and as part of this grand story that I see how utterly apocalyptic, transformative, unusual and disastrous the Great War was, along with the Second World war, here even more evidently, just a savage sequel. It’s so much worse when you are directly involved in the story of Europe and have seen all these little nations grow up and fight a bit - from a cultural perspective it is annihilation and the death of a World, and madness, a derangement of the intellectuals seemingly coming out of nowhere.
But it would take Barzun to find this such a genuine surprise- for he is a pure boy. There is (relatively) little here about the growing race cults, Germanys low self-esteem meltdown, (the Kaiser “worked for peace”??), nothing about the savage little wars, sometimes of extermination, which had marked the borders of the European diaspora, and little about the transportation, mutilation, rape and murder of several millions of Africans.
True, from the perspective of a history of European high culture, maybe there is little to say about these things, but only by not thinking about them can you genuinely be surprised by the Great War. Tell a Nigerian prisoner, or a Native American, or a Balinese lord, or a Tasmanian Aboriginal or Australian Aboriginal, or an Emu, that the whites have started machine-gunning and massacring each other in great heard. I doubt they would be very shocked to hear it.
Barzun is not stupid, weak or deluded, but he is fine, and crucially, not a creep or a weirdo. Creeps and weirdos are not surprised when the dark self gets its dick out and starts ejaculating bullets.
He is a child of the Church and the haves to the bone. Genetically French-Catholic, even if not that French. The one things he kept in common with the French 20C pederast-left is a deep disenchantment with Anglo supremacy and especially the effects of Demotic Life on cultural life. In its aesthetic, its structures of power, the art it encourages, its fashion, relationships, the feel and texture of society, he really does not vibe with it at all. The leftists react with Marxism and wokery, two things that have little in common apart from their anguished superior alienation. Barzun goes deep into reaction.
The Garden Stroll
One of the greatest pleasures in Dawn is the wandering, strolling pointing out and interest in themes and genres, writers and artists, otherwise ignored, or just utterly forgotten, except for Barzun. There is much, of which, nine fragments here;
1. Burning Instruments"It is only fair to add that music in the Renaissance had its enemies, some merely censorious, some radical. Among the latter, Savonarola was prince. His bonfire reduced to ashes all the instruments he could collect."
2. The Commonwealth Of Oceania By James Harrington"Oceania is a republic whose instigator resigns after he sees it well established. it has a written constitution, a legislature of two houses, rotation in office, and a president elected indirectly, as in the later Constitution of the United States, by a secret ballot of all citizens."
3. Cartouche"An innovation, an idea with a very great future, made its appearance at this time. A very young man named Cartouche, trained as a soldier, gained immediate renown for his daring and success as a thief. He was arrested, escaped, and next invented the role of mastermind in crime. He organised bands of fellow professionals, male and female, recruiting even young noblemen who had talent and inclination. At a dinner party, a man who had been robbed on the way recognised the pair of practitioners among the guests. Cartouche was soon a hero to the populace. Adept at disguise, he was able to hold his own in good society. He headed a delegation to greet the Turkish ambassador and relieved hi of the gifts intended for the court. While one band was working in Paris on the foreigners about to invest in the Mississippi scheme, another robbed the mail coach from Lyon that carried treasure."
4. On The Romance"One of the attractions of the genre was its length, which guaranteed pleasure. The most highly prized in the mid-17C were the narratives of Madeleine de Scudery, two of which were 20 volumes each; her trifling ones ranged from four to eight." ....... "But to enjoy them now one must be a practiced skipper, for what has denied all these works permanent shelf life is the long stretches between oases."
5. Political Ability"To govern well requires two distinct kinds of ability: political skill and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it. Anyone who has served open-eyed on a committee knows how many "good ideas" are proposed by well-meaning members that could not possibly be carried out, because what is proposed consists only of results, with no means in sight for getting from here to there. After serving on a local government body, Bernard Shaw guessed that perhaps 5 percent of mankind possess political ability."
6. Equality"There is but one conclusion: human beings are unmeasurable. It follows that equality is a social assumption independent of fact. It is made for the sake of civil peace, of approximating justice, and of bolstering self-respect. it prevents servility, lessens arrogant oppression, and reduces envy - just a little. Equality begins at home, where members of the family enjoy the same privileges and guests receive equal hospitality without taking a test or showing credentials. Businesses, government, and the profession assume equality for identical reasons: all junior clerks, all second lieutenants, earn so much. In other situations, as in sports and the rearing of children, equivalence based on age, weight, handicap, or other standard is computed so as to equalise chances. That is as far as the principal can stretch."
7. ImaginationWhat links myth with literature is the Romanticist faculty par excellence, the Imagination. As we saw, the faculty regained resect, but the world remains ambiguous. Coleridge pointed out that it is not mere fancy; little effort is needed to put together in thought bits and pieces of experience - say, a talking animal. To imagine is not to fashion charming make-believe. But it takes imagination to write a fable in which the talking animal satirizes with insight and wit some feature of society. Out of the known or knowable, Imagination connects the remote, reinterprets the familiar, or discovers hidden realities. Being a means of discovery, it must be called "Imagination of the real." Scientific hypotheses perform that same office; they are products of the imagination."
8. Novels, Balzac And History"The sense of 'how things go' presupposes that people and their habits, speech and costume vary wonderfully from place to place and time to time. Change is seen to come in curious ways from the interaction of leader and led, coupled with accident and coincidence. History reads like a novel and a novel is a history - almost."
9. Romanticism".. in Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked - egagé, as the 20C Existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more complex than any set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensable. They rise out of the people, whose own heart-and-mind provides the makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy."
There is more. Much much much more, from a brief pen-portrait of a mid 20C humourist who wrote several books in a cod Irish brogue (“the equal of any humourist since Twain, and utterly ignored”), to the forgotten creatives of Napoleons Empire, always in the shadow of the Giant and tainted by his tyranny, to the fallen world of Stephan Zweig (who you will remember from ‘The Great Budapest Hotel’, to great tranches on music that I didn’t have a strong intuition for, (did you know there was a universally applauded period of English madrigalists?) William James inventing ‘stream of consciousness’ (I had to work hard not to buy any of his books). Barzun is a cornucopia, its his most engaging, honourable, life-giving but also frustrating qualities. This is a book written out of love. Literally a romance.
The West and the Rest
The thought occurs that to say anything meaningful about the 'West' it would help to compare it to literally anywhere else. This, in detail, we cannot really do. The equivalent peninsulas, half-continents and archipelagos, each for different reasons, fail to put out.
India, ever-absorbed in Big Loops of Being, didn’t write down much.
China did write a lot of stuff down, but every now and then, (recently; Mao), would burn the lot and re-write memory (which sounds nutty but if we look at the difficulty the West has had in living with its own memories, maybe there is a point to it).
South America – we melted its gold tongue.
The Rest of South East Asia is hot, wet and surrounded by sea, and any land with all those things will find it hard to hold a deep written history – the rocks will crumble and be overgrown; the rest; rot.
Barzun talks of the themes of Europe. Are they simply human themes written in a specific way? It is hard to say. We will have to wait for some kind of assembling-super-robot ultra-mega-mecha Barzun.
Goes Off On One At The End
At almost any point in Dawn, Barzun seems in love with history but vaguely annoyed that it has happened. He loves the world he describes but there is always pain and loss, offset, for him, by whatever funky new cultural stuff these penninsularies are getting up to now.
This fades towards the end of the 19C, staggers around the Great War, and collapses utterly when coming into modernity. There is a horror to being Jacques Barzun, which is that he was raised in a cultural time machine, a direct expression of a culture that was slowly perishing even as he was born. It is because he is this; a man from the time machine, that he can come forth and bring us wonders and lay out the rich incredible tapestry of the last 500 years before us, to reawaken the dreams and passions of our forgotten past and let us briefly walk amidst the ghosts of our ancestors. Also because of this, he must have been, intellectually if not socially, an inestimably lonely man - he reminds me of Gildas, the Welsh priest who wrote one of a few scraps of record we have from the British Dark Age - a list of the failings of his people and their doom and how they let him down. Barzun is a bit like that, a lone Priest, echo of a lost culture, sitting out on a rock watching a dark age rise and coping his tits off about it.
He is not wrong just not completely right. He doesn't talk about popular music, cinema, (good) television, comics, games - well they are utterly alien to him and so irrelevant. He is barely aware of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but even if he were could he actually bring himself to like any of it? Maybe Gene Wolfe - as catholic, complex, and full of difficult mysteries and subtle thought.
High culture should be no more elitist than science, and probably less elitist than the high sciences of mathematics and physics. More people can probably understand an opera than can easily learn calculus. But it certainly feels more elitist, and the rule of High Culture seems to mesh more neatly with and spring more rightly from, an older, more hierarchal, more conservative culture , while science, despite its deep difficulty, and the rare and elite nature of its finer practitioners, gets along broadly happily with the Demos and the Demotic, while Barzun could not. He hates modernity and hates being stranded here, alone, which, I suppose thankfully for him, he no longer is.
The Long Quote
I opened with the question of what Dawn actually is, and if or how it could be defended in the Court of Reason and Analysis. What is the book for? And can it even be regarded in those terms?
Primarily; no, it should not be regarded in those terms at all.
However, Barzun being Barzun, he has at least considered the question of analysis, of ‘teachable lessons’, of things to be gleaned, which, while not at all the main point of Dawn, (it is not an argument), he considers what its arguments might be;
[This is long, its why I put it at the end.]
"Not a science and not a philosophy, history is bereft in an age like ours, which wants at least theory when science is not attainable. Can a case still be made for Cinderella? One line of advocacy might be that even if history were simply a story recited in various versions, it would be worth having as a vast mural full of action and colour. But as pointed out earlier, when presented by a thinking historian, history does more: it shows patterns that recur with a difference, dramas in which one follows exposition, complication, and denouement, while continuity in aims suggests themes. In all these ways knowledge of man is enhanced. History moreover includes energetic lives, no two alike, that show creatures as characters.
These elements need no theory to earn respect. And a further possibility exists. At times in the present work, the narrator threw in the remark; "This is a generality." The dictum meant that a conclusion just reached applied mutatis mutandis to other broad ranges of fact. These fruits of reflection, like history itself, are interesting as well as useful; here is a round dozen to show how scanning the last five centuries in the West impresses the mind with types of order:
- An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or two pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide.
- A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom.
- "An Age of ---" (fill in: Reason, Faith, Science, Absolutism, Democracy, Anxiety, Communication) is always a misnomer because insufficient, except perhaps "An Age of Troubles," which fits every age in varying degrees.
- All historical labels are nicknames - Puritan, Gothic, Rationalist, Romantic, Symbolist, Expressionist, Modernist - and therefore falsify. But "renaming more accurately" would be effort wasted. Coming from diverse minds, it would re-introduce confusion. All names given by history must be accepted and opened up, not defined in one sentence or divided into sub-species.
- The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relative strength.
- Neither of these propositions is true by itself; "Ideas are the product of society." "Social change is the product of ideas."
- The denial just stated applies also to heredity and the environment; great men and the masses of mankind; economic forces and the conscious purpose; and any other pair of commonly invoked coordinate factors. The exact course of their respective action cannot be understood and consequently cannot be stated.
- A class is not a homogeneous group of people marching in step but a sort of labelled platform populated by a continuous stream of individuals coming from above and from below. Once settled, they acquire the common traits.
- The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care _after_ it has done its work.
- In art, influence does take place and when strongest is least literal. When it is literal it must be called plagiarism and the fact should not be concealed by the eminence of the thief.
- In biography, systematic explanation by unconscious motives defeats the purpose of portraying an individual character. It turns him or her into a case, which then belongs to one of the types in the literature of psychology.
- Progress does occur from point to point along a given line for a given time. it does not occur along the whole cultural front, though it may appear to be throwing into shadow the resistant portion. The sciences are no exception.
To these dogmatically stated rules, some modifications or contrary cases will no doubt occur to the student and the reader. That is one use of the rules: to sharpen the sense of difference in similarity. The other is to guide reflections on the facts met with in any account of a past or present scene. Testing a generality makes for precision in remembrance, which is knowing history. To be remembered also is that these twelve are not exhaustive; others might be framed, and few or none may fit times and places other than those which suggested them.”
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July 1, 2024
A friendless, fingerless mind.
It’s difficult to imagine a concept of ‘vestigial intelligence’, of intelligence, as we understand it, evolving in a creature that uses it as we use it, and then persisting even a the creature in question, or its descendants, change shape, form and niche so much that there seems little use for it.
In humans the brain is utterly ravenous, gorging itself on perhaps a quarter of the bodies energy. For something so proportionately hungry to persist, it better be putting out some obviously useful abilities to make up for its cost.
Of course, so far as we know, intelligence has only evolved once on this planet, so it might be too early to be making strong laws about it. A creature might enlarge and change habits, making intelligence less directly useful but reducing its proportionate cost, so it ends up something like an appendix; a philosophical, intelligent creature that really doesn’t have any particular need to be, but is just kinda vibing. Or an intelligence that works on fundamentally different properties, so that it costs less overall, and so persists. Or a life form that is intelligent when it is small and social, but needs that intelligence less as it grows, yet retains it.
The closest thing I can think of is the Law of the Tongue; a group of Killer Whales forming a symbiotic relationship with a group of fishermen in which they herded prey for the Fishermen and were rewarded with the tongues of the prey – which was the main thing they wanted all along. The ritual of the Law of the Tongue seems to have ended with the death of a particular alpha female Orca, increasing the likelihood that it was an expression of intelligence, rather than just a working out of instinct and happenstance into an accidental symbiosis.
Corvids having weird relationships with particular people; recognising them by face, harassing them, or rewarding them; one man reported a group of grows he regularly fed in the park, waiting at his house when he got back from holiday. Somehow they had worked out where he lived, and when he went missing from his regular feeding stop, had gone to his address to see what’s up.
Our understanding of what intelligence is, is very strongly moderated by speech, the manipulation of objects, and complex social relationships. To the extent that if something can’t, or doesn’t speak, doesn’t, or doesn’t need to, manipulate objects and doesn’t have complex social relationships, we would have a hard time saying to ourselves precisely if or how it was intelligent.
Thence we come to the subject of this essay, an analysis of the intelligence of Dragons from a somewhat speculative-evolution influenced point of view.
Curious HabitsObsessive Cleanliness
Prey cool when they die, and with that, all the fleas, nits and gribblies that lived on them try to migrate to the nearest warm thing, which is often whatever killed them. Thence; the Mod Predator/Hippie Scavenger dichotomy, where predators tend to look cool while scavengers tend to look homeless. Why? Because predators clean and groom themselves a lot to get rid of the FUCKING FLEAS, while Scavengers arrive after the body has cooled and can support a more rustic drip.
Social animals groom each other. Creatures with fur or feathers bathe, either in water or in dust. (In ‘The Peregrine’ J.A. Barker speaks memorably of the falcons daily, and exquisitely careful baths in a nearby stream before it begins to hunt). Lizards are a bit more basic but even they will bathe for moisture and cleanliness sometimes, and groom their own sensing organs. At the far end of the scale, Komodo Dragons are famously indifferent to whatever is in-between their teeth but even crocodiles have groomer-birds.
What does a Dragons behaviour resemble? A bird, Croc, Lizard or something else?
A Dragons fire would help it deal with many parasites, as would its scales, but it couldn’t rely on those entirely, and would have to take care of its wings, where even a small infection or fungus would be a massive issue.
A Feathered Dragon would likely bathe itself daily, and any period or place of grooming would be one of deep vulnerability. Finding a lair with an equally useful but isolated and secure grooming spot, like an inaccessible mountaintop tarn or glacial stream, might be a key factor in choosing where to settle.
Dragons having subspecies of carrion-eating ‘Grooming Birds’ to eat the bits of raw or burnt meat from between their teeth or spaces in its rear claws, seems like an interesting possibility. One case in which a bird-watcher might be useful is in tracing this rare species; they will likely nest wherever the Dragon goes to groom or bathe itself. If you can find these birds you may be able to find that spot.
Something rarely mentioned in Dragon-Hunting stories is the enormous vulnerability of a Dragons wings. Those wing-bones may be very strong but are still likely the weakest bones in its body. If even a single one snaps, it will likely be unable to fly, or at least fly well.
Its still a big fire-breathing Bird/Lizard thing, but will be much more vulnerable on the ground, not to mention the loss of pride and status caused by loss of flight.
A Dragon is not going to stick around for attritional warfare against anything big or strong enough to damage its wings, nor will it willingly get into tight environments where something can be dropped on it. If it feels like its wings might be damaged it will simply fly away.
Retreat to the air is one of a Dragons most powerful abilities. It can simply leave combat and circle, or just fly off to heal and think, returning at a time or place of its own choosing. This core advantage and willingness to simply run away is not remarked on in Dragon-slaying stories.
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Considering their intelligence and access to materials, a dragons lair may well have more 'built' elements than we might suppose. Big mountains generally don't have massive caves of the kind a dragon likes at their peaks so the Dragon will need to claw, magic, or craft the holes it wants, and will probably bring up stuff to add; spars of timber etc.
One key element of a Dragons raids might be light yet strong building material that it can carry off. Parts of ships and boats especially, with their lightness but tensile strength, might be favoured.
Though it lacks manual dexterity and its human-level crafting may be a bit rubbish, it has a high intelligence, so its structural engineering would probably be quite good. A Dragons lair might be more like some kind of crazy log-cabin/palace/aircraft hanger built into a partial cave system, rather than just a bare cave. It would at least be able to wall off parts of the cave if it wanted, and would be able to build some kind of nest or platform to sleep on as both stone and gold will absolutely drink heat away from its body.
Being largely asocial, singular, very-long lived, highly individual beings, as well as being by our standards, insanely narcissistic, and also having a very high degree of intelligence but, compared to humans, relatively little to *do* with that intelligence, Dragons may be highly vulnerable to ... queer behaviour and curious states of mind.
The closest things we have to them are Kings, Dictators, top Generals, Catwalk Models and Celebrities. I guess; if Kanye was also a fighter jet, how would he act? Or if General McArthur was combined with Naomi Campbell and an aircraft carrier, how would that act?
Singular as they are, it would be hard to us to judge; just what is 'crazy' for a dragon, but they do have a LOT of time on their own, (in a sense, they are always alone), as well as being magical and living across a much greater range of time, and having senses we don't understand. If the Dragon is seeing ghosts or hearing voices, who are we to say how real they are? Or if it is starting to have some crazy theories about reality - I suppose it might be right? Or if its hoarding twine, or the bones of humans inner ears, or just spends a week staring at a tree or something...
Where exactly does the border of madness lie for a Dragon?
The idea of a genuinely mentally ill, conspiracy theory, Alex Jones/Howard Hawks/Kanye Dragon is utterly tantalising and somehow more worrying than just a regular predictable Dragon. What if it wants to marry a local maiden, and wants an actual marriage ceremony? Or starts acting like something it’s not, like a boar or a mountain? Or if it starts saying its 'The wind' or 'is fire', which generally Dragons say stuff like that all the time but now it’s crossed some invisible kind of Kanye line where it genuinely seems like its disassociating and *actually* literally thinks it’s 'The Wind', or it’s the Sun. Or what if it gets religion, or wants to join one, or starts talking about Jew-Tunnels hidden under the earth? Wtf do you say when a Dragon starts going on about the secret rulers of the world?
The very intense pride of a dragon, obsession with status, and need to occupy the top of a hierarchy, means that if defeated, but not killed, or endangered, publicly humiliated, it might decide to burn everything around it alive and make ruin, but there is at least a reasonable percent possibility that it might just run away, or fly away somewhere very far that no-one has heard of it and either pretend it didn't happen or strew on it for centuries.
If a Dragon just waits long enough it can kill many of its mortal enemies with Time. In a way, they don’t matter much because, to it, they will be gone in the blink of an eye.
Perhaps we can add this to the capricious just-leave aspects of a Dragon that make sense in a pseudo Evo-Spec sense, and in a Fairytale sense, but don’t fit its role in Epic Fiction of a final last Boss and ultimate challenge. Imagined in this new way, they are much more tricksy, capricious, hard to predict, but also much more indifferent; genuinely part of a different world, only somewhat interacting with ours.
A dragon can take nearly any ground, but cannot hold it, it is singular and its enemies many. It is a little like an imperial power that rules by a combination of terror, buying off elites and managing the local economy and tech level so it can't get too high, but offers some actual benefits in that at least it occupies the top of the dominance hierarchy and is (hopefully) a relatively stable weapon of mass destruction.
Certainly in the area of a Dragons control, it wouldn’t allow any other Alpha-Predator, or anything dangerous enough that it might threaten the Dragon itself. If Sauron sets up shop in a nearby valley He is getting torched. If a chunky enough Giant arrives on the scene it is getting ambushed at night, with a bite to the back of the neck from above.
Humans are useful to a dragon as they cut down forests and keep them low. The Dragon probably thinks of Humanity as a form of ‘growth’. Likely it barely thinks of them as individuals, in the same way that if our garden gets moles, we don’t individually think about this mole or that mole, we just think, ‘Damn, I got too many moles, need to reduce the numbers’.
Let the man piles reach a certain height but burn them when they get too far above it, big densities can be dangerous. Likewise, a human population is stable and controllable. They keep the Orcs out and generally occupy a useful spot in the food chain. They are also a social and hierarchal organism, and so can be dominated from the top. Once there is an Alpha-Human, you only really need to dominate that one human with the gold top, and that one will govern the rest for you, making them quiescent. Very useful, and hard to govern Orcs like that.
A Dragon might be in some sense, a reasonably good 'Governor' of a large reach of land. Though they have no interest in human flourishing, they do in the survival of human agriculture. From a human perspective - a Dragon *probably* (it might) won't eat you personally, as you are too small and scrawny to make a good meal. It might bankrupt you by eating your livestock, but if its smart it will farm you sustainably.
Like the U.S.A., a Dragon is a dangerous Air Power, with incredible destructive potential, that really does not want to get bogged down in complex environments. The biggest threat for most bands of heroes trying to scale a dragons lair has got to be literally the whole population around that lair.
If someone tries to kill the dragon and fails, the Dragon will simply burn every available farm, village and town, maybe giving enough warning for people to escape, but breaking them all back down to poverty and starvation, so they have the strongest possible motivation to prevent anyone from trying that, and it will be pretty obvious if you are going to try that as you are approaching the dragons lair with climbing gear and weapons.
Dragons have a deep sense of time that actual humans lack, and a direct very long term investment in their local environment remaining sustainable (for them).
Though, just because Dragons can be wise custodians of their resources, and it would be to their direct advantage to be so, that doesn't mean they actually will. Humans can be wise, but often aren’t, and Dragons would have no innate sympathy with human life, or intuitive understanding of it, a village meaning to them about what a chicken does to us.
And they can leave at any time, and arrive at any time. So periods of stability might be long, when they happen, but rare in total number. Young Dragons moving in, Older Dragons becoming unstable, disputes between hyper-predators, changes in political system, like a new King or religion, environmental changes leading to famine and stock-loss or famine brought about by war, all could result in rapid disordering and a more conventional Maker-of-Ruin situation where the Dragon just burns and eats everything within wing-range before moving on or just going to sleep.
The world seen from above - a world of landscapes, rivers, food, ocean and weather, herds, whales, schools of fish, rising thermals, rain shadows and dangerous storms.
They would favour flat lands with not too much forest, and definitely not Jungle, and singular inaccessible peaks. Deserts would be good as they are totally accessible from above, everything moving is easy to spot, food clusters round rare oasiies, and caravans and herds will move along set routes. However, even if a Dragon can fly a long way, a Desert may just not be productive enough in terms of Protein, considering how far the Dragon has to fly to get it, then fly back home. If a Dragon did rule a Desert I imagine it would be a rule of 1 Desert = 1 Dragon.
They would favour pastoralism (more food on the hoof), over crop-growing (what use is Grain to a Dragon?).
So; pastoralists, in terms of their impact on other food sources, hunter-gatherer humans are preferred, but in terms of managing developed resources, limited settlements are better, as it locks the humans in place and makes their life and development dependent on something quite easily destroyed from above. A town or small city, from a Dragons perspective, is a 'human-pen', it concentrates them, makes them accessible, and vulnerable, and exploitable.
Like many empires throughout history, Rice cultivation is good, if you can get it, as it massively concentrates populations and makes them intensely vulnerable to hydraulic despotism, but again, Rice might be too efficient. Too many humans and not enough big cows. You really probably want a lot of big cows. Like the Mongols, Dragons might just destroy complex hydraulic systems; they don’t really need intensive agriculture, its much better for them to have a lower population so long as they are all herding goats out in the open or something.
Even letting humans occupy lesser mountains might be considered a challenge to dominance hierarchy.
However; Kings on Mountains - this might work out. Letting or even insisting Kings occupy mountaintop palaces, on much smaller mountains, separates them from their people, impoverishes them, and brings them into a system of Hierarchy which re-affirms your own place at its unreachable height - Kings are only petty lesser dragons, or you can let them think they are if it keeps the cattle quiet.
The mountaintop palace in this case becomes a kind of Dragon-Versailles, a means of controlling and containing tributary nobility, doling out useless but prized fragments of dominance hierarchy symbology while strongly limiting their actual power.
The ocean has a lot of protein, but it’s hard for a Dragon to reliably and safely get. It would be quite vulnerable out to sea, with no guarantee it could land on the surface and easily get back up, and if it did, such a brutal flailing, wet, take-off, might involve a murderous expenditure of calories.
And the things in the Sea are BIG; whales, Kraken etc. Good to eat if you can usefully get one, but how do you lift it up without risking its flailing smacking a wing-bone. Perhaps you could swim back to land - but again, this would be a personal disaster.
Fishermen however, make a business of floating about, gathering Protein which is usually inaccessible to you, then concentrating it in big heaps, which, furthermore, are isolated and vulnerable to fire.
In a way, Fishermen might be so valuable to a Dragon that lives near the sea that it would actually be quite protective of them, in a limited sense. Permanently damaging a fishing fleet, breaking them to the point where they can no longer sustainably fish and gather protein, would be like shooting your Uber Eats driver. It would be wise to only take as much as the economy can stand, vary your predation between different ships, (probably the Dragon can at least remember the ships even if the individual humans are a bit indistinct), and leave the ship intact when you eat its hold full of fish, so it can get back to port and go out again.
A Dragon understands dominance hierarchies, high-status stuff, things that gleam and shine and have unusual textures, (an actual dragons horde might be full of rotted silk, embroidered cloth and other rare but beautiful textiles).
It would probably think more about gems and gold than many other treasures, partly due to status and gleam, but also because they are as eternal as the dragon themselves, and so are one of few things that would last as long as the dragon in a world where everything else passes after a couple of centuries.
Horded would be more like a bower-bird display than just a pile of stuff. If Dragons are intelligent and have a lot of free time they are going to spend a lot of effort arranging things. The arrangement and visual display of a Dragons Horde would be a work of art in itself, a show of astonishing beauty, arranged with mind-blowing complexity regarding the patterns of colour and lustre, but without a humanlike organising intelligence or sense of object hierarchy.
The Dragon may also collect things which are notable to it but don't seem like much to mortal men
either because it can see across a wider range of vision and these things have a lustre in the ultraviolet, or because they have magical properties it can perceive directly, or simply because of some unique element that dragons would perceive as relating to their life-world, or simply from personal preference - they would be highly individual creatures. Its possible to imagine Dragons as deranged, eccentric collectors par-excellence, filling their Bond-Lairs with more curiosities than a Wunderkammer, arranged in wild mosaics that make sense only to itself.
Theft of even a single object from a Dragons Horde would be immediately noticeable on an autistic and aesthetic level; not only is every individual element collected and considered according to its own nature and thought of as part of a ‘set’, but within that, everything is arranged in an unrelentingly specific kaleidoscope of counterpoint and form so that if a single piece goes missing, EVERYTHING IS RUINED! Not only an autists wrath when their hyperfixation is disturbed and disordered, but an artist or aesthetes rage at their long-considered patterning of form being wrecked and made ugly.
Also these are status objects of course. But really, a Dragons absolute, unrelenting RAGE, and even deep personal wounding, at the theft of a single fragment of a massive horde, is perfectly understandable.
The key unheimlich, or even horror-like element of speaking with a Dragon would be the combination of its evident intelligence and complex reasoning, with an utterly non-human perspective, and even indifference to things humans intuitively understand, and a voice and speaking pattern also utterly unlike most other living things. It would be very distinctly weird and scary to speak with a Dragon.
Humans learn word-sounds and their meanings bound up with human expressions, patterns of behaviour, posturing, verbal tone and so-on. Babies who don’t even understand words can sometimes still kind of ‘argue’ in a gabbly way, or be sassy or winsome; they grasp crudely the emotional complex behind the worlds long before the words themselves have specific meanings. So for humans, words are a little like pieces slotted into a complex pre-grown structure of relationships and situations, the abstract meanings clearing, defining and making things more specific.
Then, when humans are much older, they can use words alone to try to deal with abstract concepts that may have no physical referents, (though they are not good at it).
A Dragon will have no intuitive humanlike understanding of what those sounds mean, to a human,
but it has a high intelligence, so can work out complex arrangements of appropriate sound according to circumstance. Yet, in conversation, would be nothing like talking to an actual person.
There may be apparent fluency and perfection of repetition, and even simulation, but riding between that and the deep level abstract intelligence, would be a general incomprehension of language as it is spoken by men and manlike things. It doesn't live a manlike life in a manlike body, or have a manlike society, it would be more like a very adept Minah bird, that can associate signal to utility with great skill, knows what inputs will lead to what outputs, but from an utterly Other perspective. It might be a little like when a Chat A.I. starts to break down, or exposes that it doesn’t really understand what it is saying, but is just ‘making sounds’. This would be pretty terrifying coming from something that big and predatory.
It might be impossible to have a casual conversation with a dragon, or crack a joke, since these things are closely related to the human lifeworld and play no part in anything the Dragon is interested in.
This would help account for Dragons Spellcraft since they can probably remember and replicate anything they have heard and, with innate magical potential and a high intelligence, can probably iterate and learn to approximate the mental models the spell language is meant to mirror and support - so a Dragons spells, like its language would be an echo of those used against it.
I imagine that it would probably be better at mimicking the models of more elemental spells, less attached to the human lifeworld, since I imagine the mental models used in more 'human' spells would be intuitively alien and difficult for a dragon to grasp.
The Dragon also doesn’t have a humanlike throat or mouth. Like a parrot or Minah bird, it can mimic, duplicate and remix highly complex and subtle sounds, and would have complex birdlike trills and repetitions, and its own use of language would be consistently unheimlich; speaking in 'recorded' strands of language from different voices.
Its vocal structure would be like talking to a bunch of tape decks - the dragon knows highly complex words and phrases (can probably repeat entire songs and conversations verbatim, and these might be hundreds, or even thousands of years old). The Dragons 'tape deck' might include many ancient languages long forgotten because, to the Dragon they were not that long ago.
These might be bent towards the statements of Kings, Heroes, Mages etc, because these are the kind of people the Dragon actually meets and at least listens to somewhat
Many of these voices would be angry or scared, threatening, defying or pleading, since that’s most of what a dragon hears from manlike things, (or negotiating, it probably understands negotiation), or might be strands of distant conversation heard from ordinary people at night, far away, as the dragon heard this when flying above them, or church bells or other church songs, as these will be regular and will probably drift over the countryside and the Dragon will have heard most of them a bunch of times, though it would sing or replicate them with the usual bell or instrumental accompaniment, and/or in full chorus, as that’s how it heard them.
So, imagine this; the core voice is Birdlike, with the slight squarks and chirps and trilling you might expect from a bird, but way, way, way too deep. Deeper than any bird you have ever heard. And it comes from deep within the throat and chest, not from the mouth, which is lipless, and only opens slightly, and not in synch with its words in a human way.
Above this mouth, regardless of what it is currently saying, the blank lizardlike stare of the Dragon.
And what it says, its ‘calls’, come as a kind of ‘madlibs’ or hyper-complex overlaying of ancient sounds. You are in a D&D setting so have never heard of DJ’s or seen ‘Bumblebee’ from Michael Bays ‘Transformers’, so have nothing to compare it to; voices in ancient languages, cries of ancient kings, fragments of chanted spells, the sound of crowds or singing, but heard as if far away, as the Dragon heard it, natural sounds like waves and wind, secret sounds like those animals make, flowing and overlaying of words, arranged not by precise meaning but in a kind of instinctive modernist collage of sounds.
But clearly this thing, (and it is most obviously a thing when it speaks, not a person as you understand it), understands you. It responds to what you say. Its collages of screams and cries, of sentences, and chanted poetry and old songs and muttered conversation, make some kind of sense, both emotionally, in terms of whether it means weal or woe, but also perhaps in the specifics, because it feels like there are layers of inhuman meaning there, relationships like jokes, or ironies incomprehensible to you, but you can just intuit the inference, and that there is more there you cannot understand. All of it in that terrifying giant-cassowary bird-voice, coming from that staring inhuman Dinosaur-face. The awkward pidgin communication between you limited not by lack of vocabulary, or lack of intelligence, but by a fundamental Otherness.
Speaking directly to a dragon might be more like speaking to a Demon than speaking to an actual Demon would be. Demons after all, are deeply concerned with human ranges of emotion and understanding, though antiethical to them. Speaking to a Dragon would be a truly disassociating Herzogian indifference-of-nature situation.
A Dragons full roar, as well as freezing more totally than a lions, might be enough to rupture ears and even break bones. Also pretty likely you would shit yourself. They ‘aint put that in 5e I tell you.
June 25, 2024
A Review of Scavengers Reign
Once again I am writing about something which I feel most of my readers will be aware, but in this case it’s a rare piece of popular art that I really liked so I want everyone to know about it.
The Science-Fiction animation 'Scavengers Reign', was made for HBO (and unavailable in the U.K.), and it looks like it has been cancelled there. BUT it has moved to Netflix where I can actually see it. This is my attempt to make sure we get a second series.
The series is based on this short, ‘Scavengers’;
Twelve 20+ minute episodes of western-style animation about the survivors of a crashed space ship trying to survive on an alien world with a fecund, bounteous, and incredibly dangerous biosphere.
As the "Demeter" suffers massive damage the waking crew escape to the planet below in survival pods while the majority are still asleep in cryo. On the surface, the ships Captain manages to jury-rig a signal to bring the Demeter down to the planet intact.
Three groups of separated survivors see the Demeter come down. All they needs to do is reach the grounded ship and re-awaken the crew before something kills them or power runs out, and then use the ships lifeboat to leave the planet and go to summon help.
To get there they will have to cross a world of gorgeous bounty and cornucopic terrors.
The incredible fecundity of invention in the environment of Vesta Minor, creates a sense-making baroque Speculative-Evolution Rhapsody which turns its hyper-complex environment of endless transformations and predation into a gorgeous problem to solve, and also a kind of Pilgrims-Progress hajj of transmutation of the identity and soul.
The environment of Vesta Minor is both alien and fecund but more beautiful than its general forms would be alone, (many Science Fiction stories can create mere visual rhapsodies), is the locking together of the logic of life in which every living thing seems to have its own coherent place, purpose, method and cycle of life. Curlicues of white spiral through the air and fasten to white spars, perfectly camouflaged, until a storm disturbs them and they cloud away, like grey petrels flocking in flight from a grey sea, Cambrian-radial megafauna wander across grasslands, ridden by scatterings of minor species. The hyperdeveloped environment is host to wild schemes of parasitism, symbiosis and simulacra, and complex games of signalling and counter-signalling.
SPOILERS BELOW!
Transhumanism, Parasites, Symbioses and Identity
The story follows three groups of survivors; The first is Human/Human; the ships captain and natural history lady (now the most useful human alive), one human/robot and one human/weird frog thing.
By the end of the series the only one left we are sure is human is the lady with the robot. The captain has been parasitised by a mind-altering plant, the ships natural history lady may be a fungal simulacra, but we are not sure, the robot has been infected with a fungal strain and reborn as a new kind of cyborg, and the lone male survivor is rapidly brought into a symbiotic relationship with a mind-controlling predator.
Constant and unalterable transformation is a main theme of the story and the only periods or places of stability lie in accepting or negotiating some level of alteration rather than resisting all.
The Captain is poisoned by one plant, which steals some genes and grows a very rough simulacrum of him, the main purpose of which is just to get close to the herd, (it usually preys on cowlike animals), and explode, poisoning the rest of the group and fertilising the ground beneath for the plants seed, left behind in the pseudo-captains flesh.
Then he is saved by the bio-medical knowledge of a mute survivor left behind by a previous expedition, who it turns out is a symbiote herself, of a different cave-dwelling entity. Yet clearly this woman has some selfhood left, she can perform complex actions, still visits her husbands grave, but in other ways is entirely the creature and servant of the entity. She saves his life but infects him with this fresh form of life.
The Captain then watches his own behaviour change, only half realising as his basic urges and desires are subverted by the plantlike organism growing inside him, which is keeping him alive but, mutely and instinctively, is trying to turn him into an agent to create and sustain its preferred environment.
The lone male survivor is trapped in their pod, high up in trees and is slowly starving to death. He is retrieved by the 'Hollow', a somewhat intelligent froglike thing with limited psychokinetic and mind-altering powers.
Most Hollows walk around on branches peering at little bugs or mouselike entities. If they can fixate one, they can parasitise it, subverting its behaviour so that it brings the Hollow food.
One tries this on the lone survivor and it works. It speaks to him through memory, illusion and instinct, transforming him into a food-gatherer. It’s pretty clear that, at least to begin with, the Hollow doesn't understand much or anything about the buttons it is pressing. If it wants its Gatherer to get food, or to stay, or follow, or be happy, it just presses on the memory/emotion complex in the humans head and the human mind does the rest, creating complex dreams, hallucinations and desires to achieve these ends.
But this Gatherer is a sentient self-aware and quite intelligent human, and in order to gather ever-more food, he takes to tool-use, traps, ambush, throwing spears and persistence hunting, making this combination of Hollow and Human Gatherer an abnormally insanely successful system, and making the Hollow a FUCKING UNIT.
As this happens it seems that the Hollow itself is being poisoned, or altered by the infiltrating visions of its human Gatherer. We never know how much the Hollow understands of what it sees in the human mind, or of what emotions it shares, but it ends up making a pilgrimage to the Demeter itself and treats the place as a kind of preferred lair or hunting place, trying to kill or drive off whatever else turns up.
It’s possible that nothing on Vesta Minor is self-aware or intelligent in an way we can understand, but so many of its species can subvert, parasitise or enter symbiosis with humans, which we know are self-aware, we have to ask; what then is the nature of the soul which results?
Many of these effects are horrific but this is not a horror series. The tone and form of the storytelling accept these changes evenly and clearly, with a kind of acceptance similar to that of a Ballard story. What results might be called Environmental Horror, Speculative-Evolution Porn, Alien World Survival Show or Transmutation Drama. It has a little of the Tempest, a little Dougal Dixon, some David Attenborough and a dab of William Golding.
Is this planet actually more complex than earth, or just so strange that it seems so?
In a sense Vesta Minor is "Life-Horror/Wonder" or "Evolution Horror". All the systems and ideas of life’s interaction, transformation and evolution on Vesta Minor are drawn from or influenced by that of our world, but re-enchanted or make strange by their incredible new forms and the complexity and subtlety of their interactions.
If Vesta Minor causes us Awe, or Horror , or Wonder, this is in some sense only because those processes should cause such emotion, yet we are blind to their day-to-day nature here due to overfamiliarity. When recast on an alien world through a Wunderkammer of alien forms, the same processes and logic amaze and astound us.
(Nerd Shit - If Vesta Minor was real and people landed there, even if they could breathe, most likely the viruses and bacteria would infect them and eat them alive within a day.
Possible reasons they might not include; not being adapted to live inside humans, the humans having some kind of sci-fi inbuilt auto-immune system either via genetic alteration or implant, or Vesta Minor microsphere for some magical reason, not being as incredibly hyper-complex as its macro-scale biosphere.)
It’s really a lovely non-stupid dream of a series so if you are a lover of Science Fiction or strange things and are very tired of fucking stupid stuff then please give it a go.
The ending does have slight Gaia-vibes, which is something it managed to avoid up until that point. It’s kind of boring if the planet has a Mind because that answers a lot of the complex moral questions to do with encountering an alien environment.
The Science-Fiction animation 'Scavengers Reign', was made for HBO (and unavailable in the U.K.), and it looks like it has been cancelled there. BUT it has moved to Netflix where I can actually see it. This is my attempt to make sure we get a second series.
The series is based on this short, ‘Scavengers’;
Twelve 20+ minute episodes of western-style animation about the survivors of a crashed space ship trying to survive on an alien world with a fecund, bounteous, and incredibly dangerous biosphere.
As the "Demeter" suffers massive damage the waking crew escape to the planet below in survival pods while the majority are still asleep in cryo. On the surface, the ships Captain manages to jury-rig a signal to bring the Demeter down to the planet intact.
Three groups of separated survivors see the Demeter come down. All they needs to do is reach the grounded ship and re-awaken the crew before something kills them or power runs out, and then use the ships lifeboat to leave the planet and go to summon help.
To get there they will have to cross a world of gorgeous bounty and cornucopic terrors.
The incredible fecundity of invention in the environment of Vesta Minor, creates a sense-making baroque Speculative-Evolution Rhapsody which turns its hyper-complex environment of endless transformations and predation into a gorgeous problem to solve, and also a kind of Pilgrims-Progress hajj of transmutation of the identity and soul.
The environment of Vesta Minor is both alien and fecund but more beautiful than its general forms would be alone, (many Science Fiction stories can create mere visual rhapsodies), is the locking together of the logic of life in which every living thing seems to have its own coherent place, purpose, method and cycle of life. Curlicues of white spiral through the air and fasten to white spars, perfectly camouflaged, until a storm disturbs them and they cloud away, like grey petrels flocking in flight from a grey sea, Cambrian-radial megafauna wander across grasslands, ridden by scatterings of minor species. The hyperdeveloped environment is host to wild schemes of parasitism, symbiosis and simulacra, and complex games of signalling and counter-signalling.
SPOILERS BELOW!
Transhumanism, Parasites, Symbioses and Identity
The story follows three groups of survivors; The first is Human/Human; the ships captain and natural history lady (now the most useful human alive), one human/robot and one human/weird frog thing.
By the end of the series the only one left we are sure is human is the lady with the robot. The captain has been parasitised by a mind-altering plant, the ships natural history lady may be a fungal simulacra, but we are not sure, the robot has been infected with a fungal strain and reborn as a new kind of cyborg, and the lone male survivor is rapidly brought into a symbiotic relationship with a mind-controlling predator.
Constant and unalterable transformation is a main theme of the story and the only periods or places of stability lie in accepting or negotiating some level of alteration rather than resisting all.
The Captain is poisoned by one plant, which steals some genes and grows a very rough simulacrum of him, the main purpose of which is just to get close to the herd, (it usually preys on cowlike animals), and explode, poisoning the rest of the group and fertilising the ground beneath for the plants seed, left behind in the pseudo-captains flesh.
Then he is saved by the bio-medical knowledge of a mute survivor left behind by a previous expedition, who it turns out is a symbiote herself, of a different cave-dwelling entity. Yet clearly this woman has some selfhood left, she can perform complex actions, still visits her husbands grave, but in other ways is entirely the creature and servant of the entity. She saves his life but infects him with this fresh form of life.
The Captain then watches his own behaviour change, only half realising as his basic urges and desires are subverted by the plantlike organism growing inside him, which is keeping him alive but, mutely and instinctively, is trying to turn him into an agent to create and sustain its preferred environment.
The lone male survivor is trapped in their pod, high up in trees and is slowly starving to death. He is retrieved by the 'Hollow', a somewhat intelligent froglike thing with limited psychokinetic and mind-altering powers.
Most Hollows walk around on branches peering at little bugs or mouselike entities. If they can fixate one, they can parasitise it, subverting its behaviour so that it brings the Hollow food.
One tries this on the lone survivor and it works. It speaks to him through memory, illusion and instinct, transforming him into a food-gatherer. It’s pretty clear that, at least to begin with, the Hollow doesn't understand much or anything about the buttons it is pressing. If it wants its Gatherer to get food, or to stay, or follow, or be happy, it just presses on the memory/emotion complex in the humans head and the human mind does the rest, creating complex dreams, hallucinations and desires to achieve these ends.
But this Gatherer is a sentient self-aware and quite intelligent human, and in order to gather ever-more food, he takes to tool-use, traps, ambush, throwing spears and persistence hunting, making this combination of Hollow and Human Gatherer an abnormally insanely successful system, and making the Hollow a FUCKING UNIT.
As this happens it seems that the Hollow itself is being poisoned, or altered by the infiltrating visions of its human Gatherer. We never know how much the Hollow understands of what it sees in the human mind, or of what emotions it shares, but it ends up making a pilgrimage to the Demeter itself and treats the place as a kind of preferred lair or hunting place, trying to kill or drive off whatever else turns up.
It’s possible that nothing on Vesta Minor is self-aware or intelligent in an way we can understand, but so many of its species can subvert, parasitise or enter symbiosis with humans, which we know are self-aware, we have to ask; what then is the nature of the soul which results?
Many of these effects are horrific but this is not a horror series. The tone and form of the storytelling accept these changes evenly and clearly, with a kind of acceptance similar to that of a Ballard story. What results might be called Environmental Horror, Speculative-Evolution Porn, Alien World Survival Show or Transmutation Drama. It has a little of the Tempest, a little Dougal Dixon, some David Attenborough and a dab of William Golding.
Is this planet actually more complex than earth, or just so strange that it seems so?
In a sense Vesta Minor is "Life-Horror/Wonder" or "Evolution Horror". All the systems and ideas of life’s interaction, transformation and evolution on Vesta Minor are drawn from or influenced by that of our world, but re-enchanted or make strange by their incredible new forms and the complexity and subtlety of their interactions.
If Vesta Minor causes us Awe, or Horror , or Wonder, this is in some sense only because those processes should cause such emotion, yet we are blind to their day-to-day nature here due to overfamiliarity. When recast on an alien world through a Wunderkammer of alien forms, the same processes and logic amaze and astound us.
(Nerd Shit - If Vesta Minor was real and people landed there, even if they could breathe, most likely the viruses and bacteria would infect them and eat them alive within a day.
Possible reasons they might not include; not being adapted to live inside humans, the humans having some kind of sci-fi inbuilt auto-immune system either via genetic alteration or implant, or Vesta Minor microsphere for some magical reason, not being as incredibly hyper-complex as its macro-scale biosphere.)
It’s really a lovely non-stupid dream of a series so if you are a lover of Science Fiction or strange things and are very tired of fucking stupid stuff then please give it a go.
The ending does have slight Gaia-vibes, which is something it managed to avoid up until that point. It’s kind of boring if the planet has a Mind because that answers a lot of the complex moral questions to do with encountering an alien environment.
June 18, 2024
Demons on a Moths Wing
Imagine Man as a Moth Upon a Leaf
Many prey animals will have no coherent image of what their greatest predator actually is
This is probably more true with very specifically-evolved predator-prey relationships, and likely less so in relations between more generalist animals.
My idea here is that any prey animal that stuck around long enough to get a good long look at its predator was much less likely to survive, while any prey animal that ran for it at the slightest hint of its predator was much more likely to survive, and the slighter the hint that was required, generally the better. So over time the genetics, behaviour and culture of prey animals will be very strongly ruled by the tendency to run-don't-look. In fact active complex thinking about the predator will be almost absent because it will require a cognition and resources load that makes the prey animal over-heavy'.
So what a prey-creature 'knows' of predators is like a cubist array of images, scents, sensations, combinations of circumstance and so on, that if a certain amount or certain kinds are triggered, produce an instant flee/hide response, and that there may be layers to this bag of splintered perceptions, the deeper ones of which produce an ever more intense flee response; "If you perceive such-and such then burn your fat cells if you have to", "If these sensations combine then gnaw off your leg if you have to", "if you feel this then jump off the cliff if you have to".
So that, the more relentlessly dangerous something is, the less clearly they think about it, or at least consider it as a whole thing, and the more it becomes, to the, a scattering of burning glyphs within the mind which, if triggered, overwrite any other thinking and produce an instantaneous, physical, escape response.
Moth Wings
It’s a reasonable supposition that Moth Wings hold amongst their patterns, fragments of image that, when seen through the strange eyes and mad brain of an insect-eating bird, provide splintered signals of just such a predator; a larger bird, snake, leaping fox or similar.
The wings of the Atlas Moth are the most obvious example of this; even to us they clearly seem like snakes looking about. Other moth wings look a lot less like anything we can recognise, but this may be for several reasons;
• That they are cubist impressions only; the sensation of a predator broken up into is most sensate elements yet organised in a manner unlike that seen in nature.• That birds see in ultraviolet, which we cannot, and will encounter these fragments in-flight, in strange situations of light or shade and during predation, when they are hyper-focused on one target to the exclusion of all else.• We don't know much about how a leaping predator looks to a diving bird, or how its tiny brain organises the information it does have.
In any case, we might say that, if we continue this line of reasoning; the patterns on a moths wing are nightmares of a birds mortality.
A more curious consideration is that through simple iteration, one species has evolved upon it, signs and symbols which signal to its predator, dreams and impressions of that predators own predator, which, if we continue the conceit that prey have no coherent impression of their own predators, is a transmission of information to the barely-knowable of what is utterly unknowable.
The moth carries symbols and fragments of something so far beyond its understanding that it could not even begin to conceive of it.
Esoteric and Fantastic Considerations
(I deal more in the world of honest Fantasy rather than the murky and somewhat schizoid realm of the Esoteric so I will remain focused on worlds of the imagination, but if you want to go all Von Danekin with the same ideas, then you can.)
In a Fantastic world in which Demons, and other supernatural creatures that prey primarily upon humanity, exist, and which are so utterly dangerous that humanity has developed a hyper-prey response to them, then humanity will be simply unable to name or fundamentally conceive of them, because any attempt to hang around and analyse, observe, understand them or to integrate that understanding into a larger scheme of knowledge, will get you killed.
This becomes more severe when you consider potential psychic, extra-dimensional or extra-causal entities where the environment through which they are hunting us is only partly sensible or comprehensible to us. Or Information Hazard-like entities where just thinking about them, (naming the monster adds to its power, the wizard can hear everyone who speaks their name), makes them more real and deadly
Yet, in such a world, there may well be 'impressions', cubist or modernist fragments of knowledge, information or understanding available to mankind; the 'Moth Wing Patterns' which give hints of predators the simple humans of that world could not imagine. Or even give suggestions of what is utterly unknowable, that beyond-which-is-beyond which preys upon the unknown.
Mans Moth Wings in a Fantastic World
What fragments of reality which might indicate the nature of that which is unknowable, or that which is beyond what is beyond? Or what things found in the organisation of sentient minds through culture, artefact or otherwise, that might show splintered fragments of that which preys upon that which preys upon us. Or things found in the forms of the prey of man that may suggest the form of what preys upon him?
Signs Of That Which is BeyondSigns of that which might prey upon man but be unknowable to us, as a bird to a moth.
Signs and Glyphs which ward against Man
Like the magic signs that imbue fear, or which cannot be read. Or those which ward magically upon tombs.
Any sign which repels, frightens or disconcerts so that it might not be read could well impart some essence of the extra-real predators of man.
Signs Borne on Curious Animals
Some magical creatures carry strange signs or astonish the sight without reason, or hypnotise or delude. Such as the Cobras hood, the Peacocks tail, the horses hooves when it races (which cannot be seen), or great whales who's song hypnotises, or the roar of a Tiger, which freezes.
That which is beyond may have some element of all these things, or more likely it carries the qualities which emanate the true and combined qualities, of which these beast signs are only fragmentary simulations.
Insects
These often revolt the sight with their scuttling, unnatural movement and skinless nature. Also they are low and hidden.
Poisoning Things
These things have a power to make ill and do harm much greater than is evident, that it is out of proportion with their seeming strength, that their ill may last longer and have more subtle corrosions than another wound.
In some cases this power is hidden so that you may not guess at it, but in other cases the form and colour of creatures boasts and advertises such a power, seeking to frighten and overawe.
Slithering Things
Things such as Worms, Wyverns, Snakes and all who go upon their belly, for they move by motion and not by limb. Also they are low.
Insidious Things
The most fearful and disgusting are those creatures which writhe or hide within other things, and this be worse if such things be living, for it is one living thing within another which should not be, and worse still if it be within oneself.
Perhaps that which is beyond might be able to lie unseen within other things, and even so within living things, like worms within an apple, and worse still, within ones own flesh.
Things Deep in the Sea
That they dwell in a cold blackness where nothing should live. That they mimic no earthly form. That they may come forth and take what is on the surface of their dark world and may not be opposed or followed.
Signs of the UnimaginableIndications of whatever it is that might prey upon that which is beyond, as a Fox upon a Bird.
Signs which Ward Man from the Other
Signs, symbols, glyphs and rituals which man employs to ward themselves from what they fear may be Beyond, may employ some fragmentary aspect of the hunters of the Beyond.
By which we see that they are clear and regular, and never quickly imbued.
Fire
For as darkness itself flees fire, so do all beasts that prey upon man. Therefore fire itself in all its mortal forms may be only a symbol of that meta-fire, the nature of which is cannot be known but which must be
Alike fire in that it is bright against that which is not, that it devours and transforms, that it lives in that it grows and dies, but not like any other living thing.
Doors, Doorways, Bars and Locks
Alike doors in that it separates on thing from another, but can alter that separation, like bars in that it can be set against what is beyond and once set, its very nature keeps it so. Like locks in that hit has a hidden complexity that may alter its nature, and that there be keys to such, and that these keys may be passed from one to another, even if the full understanding of its workings are not known to those who hold them. By which we mean to understand; spells.
Many prey animals will have no coherent image of what their greatest predator actually is
This is probably more true with very specifically-evolved predator-prey relationships, and likely less so in relations between more generalist animals.
My idea here is that any prey animal that stuck around long enough to get a good long look at its predator was much less likely to survive, while any prey animal that ran for it at the slightest hint of its predator was much more likely to survive, and the slighter the hint that was required, generally the better. So over time the genetics, behaviour and culture of prey animals will be very strongly ruled by the tendency to run-don't-look. In fact active complex thinking about the predator will be almost absent because it will require a cognition and resources load that makes the prey animal over-heavy'.
So what a prey-creature 'knows' of predators is like a cubist array of images, scents, sensations, combinations of circumstance and so on, that if a certain amount or certain kinds are triggered, produce an instant flee/hide response, and that there may be layers to this bag of splintered perceptions, the deeper ones of which produce an ever more intense flee response; "If you perceive such-and such then burn your fat cells if you have to", "If these sensations combine then gnaw off your leg if you have to", "if you feel this then jump off the cliff if you have to".
So that, the more relentlessly dangerous something is, the less clearly they think about it, or at least consider it as a whole thing, and the more it becomes, to the, a scattering of burning glyphs within the mind which, if triggered, overwrite any other thinking and produce an instantaneous, physical, escape response.
Moth Wings
It’s a reasonable supposition that Moth Wings hold amongst their patterns, fragments of image that, when seen through the strange eyes and mad brain of an insect-eating bird, provide splintered signals of just such a predator; a larger bird, snake, leaping fox or similar.
The wings of the Atlas Moth are the most obvious example of this; even to us they clearly seem like snakes looking about. Other moth wings look a lot less like anything we can recognise, but this may be for several reasons;
• That they are cubist impressions only; the sensation of a predator broken up into is most sensate elements yet organised in a manner unlike that seen in nature.• That birds see in ultraviolet, which we cannot, and will encounter these fragments in-flight, in strange situations of light or shade and during predation, when they are hyper-focused on one target to the exclusion of all else.• We don't know much about how a leaping predator looks to a diving bird, or how its tiny brain organises the information it does have.
In any case, we might say that, if we continue this line of reasoning; the patterns on a moths wing are nightmares of a birds mortality.
A more curious consideration is that through simple iteration, one species has evolved upon it, signs and symbols which signal to its predator, dreams and impressions of that predators own predator, which, if we continue the conceit that prey have no coherent impression of their own predators, is a transmission of information to the barely-knowable of what is utterly unknowable.
The moth carries symbols and fragments of something so far beyond its understanding that it could not even begin to conceive of it.
Esoteric and Fantastic Considerations
(I deal more in the world of honest Fantasy rather than the murky and somewhat schizoid realm of the Esoteric so I will remain focused on worlds of the imagination, but if you want to go all Von Danekin with the same ideas, then you can.)
In a Fantastic world in which Demons, and other supernatural creatures that prey primarily upon humanity, exist, and which are so utterly dangerous that humanity has developed a hyper-prey response to them, then humanity will be simply unable to name or fundamentally conceive of them, because any attempt to hang around and analyse, observe, understand them or to integrate that understanding into a larger scheme of knowledge, will get you killed.
This becomes more severe when you consider potential psychic, extra-dimensional or extra-causal entities where the environment through which they are hunting us is only partly sensible or comprehensible to us. Or Information Hazard-like entities where just thinking about them, (naming the monster adds to its power, the wizard can hear everyone who speaks their name), makes them more real and deadly
Yet, in such a world, there may well be 'impressions', cubist or modernist fragments of knowledge, information or understanding available to mankind; the 'Moth Wing Patterns' which give hints of predators the simple humans of that world could not imagine. Or even give suggestions of what is utterly unknowable, that beyond-which-is-beyond which preys upon the unknown.
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Mans Moth Wings in a Fantastic World
What fragments of reality which might indicate the nature of that which is unknowable, or that which is beyond what is beyond? Or what things found in the organisation of sentient minds through culture, artefact or otherwise, that might show splintered fragments of that which preys upon that which preys upon us. Or things found in the forms of the prey of man that may suggest the form of what preys upon him?
Signs Of That Which is BeyondSigns of that which might prey upon man but be unknowable to us, as a bird to a moth.
Signs and Glyphs which ward against Man
Like the magic signs that imbue fear, or which cannot be read. Or those which ward magically upon tombs.
Any sign which repels, frightens or disconcerts so that it might not be read could well impart some essence of the extra-real predators of man.
Signs Borne on Curious Animals
Some magical creatures carry strange signs or astonish the sight without reason, or hypnotise or delude. Such as the Cobras hood, the Peacocks tail, the horses hooves when it races (which cannot be seen), or great whales who's song hypnotises, or the roar of a Tiger, which freezes.
That which is beyond may have some element of all these things, or more likely it carries the qualities which emanate the true and combined qualities, of which these beast signs are only fragmentary simulations.
Insects
These often revolt the sight with their scuttling, unnatural movement and skinless nature. Also they are low and hidden.
Poisoning Things
These things have a power to make ill and do harm much greater than is evident, that it is out of proportion with their seeming strength, that their ill may last longer and have more subtle corrosions than another wound.
In some cases this power is hidden so that you may not guess at it, but in other cases the form and colour of creatures boasts and advertises such a power, seeking to frighten and overawe.
Slithering Things
Things such as Worms, Wyverns, Snakes and all who go upon their belly, for they move by motion and not by limb. Also they are low.
Insidious Things
The most fearful and disgusting are those creatures which writhe or hide within other things, and this be worse if such things be living, for it is one living thing within another which should not be, and worse still if it be within oneself.
Perhaps that which is beyond might be able to lie unseen within other things, and even so within living things, like worms within an apple, and worse still, within ones own flesh.
Things Deep in the Sea
That they dwell in a cold blackness where nothing should live. That they mimic no earthly form. That they may come forth and take what is on the surface of their dark world and may not be opposed or followed.
Signs of the UnimaginableIndications of whatever it is that might prey upon that which is beyond, as a Fox upon a Bird.
Signs which Ward Man from the Other
Signs, symbols, glyphs and rituals which man employs to ward themselves from what they fear may be Beyond, may employ some fragmentary aspect of the hunters of the Beyond.
By which we see that they are clear and regular, and never quickly imbued.
Fire
For as darkness itself flees fire, so do all beasts that prey upon man. Therefore fire itself in all its mortal forms may be only a symbol of that meta-fire, the nature of which is cannot be known but which must be
Alike fire in that it is bright against that which is not, that it devours and transforms, that it lives in that it grows and dies, but not like any other living thing.
Doors, Doorways, Bars and Locks
Alike doors in that it separates on thing from another, but can alter that separation, like bars in that it can be set against what is beyond and once set, its very nature keeps it so. Like locks in that hit has a hidden complexity that may alter its nature, and that there be keys to such, and that these keys may be passed from one to another, even if the full understanding of its workings are not known to those who hold them. By which we mean to understand; spells.
May 4, 2024
THE MOON! THE MOON! THE MOON!
April 25, 2024
QuarHammer
I stumbled, addled, into my local semi-rural game store in search of off-brand Contrast paint to finish up Ionus Cryptborn, and while wandering around, I saw the strangest thing;
A single box, in the spot where the newly-arrived, single-type or just oddly specific boxes are set, guarding the door like a cyclops.
Unless you know about game stores, even quite well-supplied ones, you won't have a clear idea of just how singular and unlike anything else there this was.
Wargames are usually either Historical, part of some well known Paracosm like Star Wars, Marvel or 40k, generic genre entries, (i.e. Chthulu-like or Western-like), or one of a few Paracosm not well known outside wargames but reasonably so within; Malifaux, Warmachine/Hordes, etc.
I am pretty well up on my wargames and I had absolutely no idea what this was. What’s a 'Quar'? Why are they at war? Why are they using 'Rhyfles'? This looks like decade-long Fantasy Heartbreaker paracosm created by some guy in a basement where they eventually find it as they clear out his house after death and he becomes a Local Legend and gets a small Wikipedia page.
And that nearly is what this is, except Joshua Qualtieri isn't dead and has been running a small Quar-based business in America for quite some time, selling Quar he cast with the spinny bits of a washing machine he took apart a while ago, and working hard to make Quar, his childhood Anteater Ralph Bashki/Jim Henson WW1.5 dieselpunk peudo-european paracosm pals, a thing, using every medium he can get his hands on;
There was, and may still be, a Quar-based VR Real Time Strategy game…
I have no idea if this went anywhere.
And now Atlantic Wargames have produced a plastic injection moulded Quar Wars boxed set strategy game. From what I can tell, Atlantic focused largely on Historical wargames. More recently they have begun producing some pretty-good generic fantasy sets like mythic skeletons and goblin hordes, and a range of dark-future Sci-Fi sets for their skirmish game 'Death Fields'. A standard route for a wargames company in the U.K. is to semi-parasitize off Games Workshop by producing stuff that is nominally different but in-effect can be used for GW games. Its a soft route to a kind of medium success with some strong limitations.
But now cometh.. the Quar! A boxed set with an Indie vibe that might remind some of you of early OSR books.
The box has cartoon standee scenery printed into its base, so you can cut it out and play with it.
And hidden revolutionary and royalist slogans in the folds.
And the initiative cards are this custom print of perhaps-grieving tender leaves.
What are Quar?
Cute, slightly muppet-looking Anteater-people living on the continent of Alwyd, (which *might* be on the other side of the globe from the place where Ralph Bashkis 'Wizards' is set?).
They have a roughly 1910'/1920's level of technology, a bunch of nations and have been locked in various forms of war for a long time.
So like, Jim Henson Anteaters plus post-Westphalia Europe?
The Quar are very cute and they fight in very sad wars. They look like muppets or 70s animation but use guns with specifically worked out calibres and individual design ethos' for each different nation and group.
They have specifically sculpted Baguette bags, that is tiny 28mm knapsacks with tiny French style baguettes sticking out of them that you can glue onto your tiny Quar so they don't need to enter a rhyfle skirmish without their lunch, and they exist in an exhaustively worked-out paracosm with highly-complex and interrelated Great-Power style international and intranational relations.
Quar look like they were drawn by a child, (because they were; Joshua Qualteri, age = small), and a key plot point might be, for instance, a royalist kingdom bankrupted by war taking out huge loans from a semi-independent city state to keep its economy afloat but thereby being drawn into colonial adventures that provoke a classic "war on two fronts".
Also they write sad letters to their families about the nature of industrial warfare. The letters are in the rulebooks;
Is this an extremely crunchy war simulation or more of a Vibes game?
Yes?
The two factions in the starter box have distinct Squad formations and loadouts based on their available and preferred technology. The Royalist and traditionalist Coftryans have squads broken down into larger groups, soldiers armed with accurate long range repeating rhyfles with a single LMG per squad. (These are also the guys with the Baguette bags). The more 'modern' radical Crusader faction are broken down into three man teams, each with two short range assault rhyfles backed up with a single larger Heavy Rhyfle.
Very clearly, if you are the kind of person who wants to min/max a squad or army, then you are fucking basic and are not welcome here. You will arrange your Coftryan forces in a manner typical for their standard organisation because that is what Coftryans would do. Its all there, in the very extensive lore. Their baguette bags are hand-sewn because they are a deeply traditionalist faction who believe in the Old Quar ways. I mean if you are fucking with the squad formation why are you playing Coftryans in the first place? Or even playing 'This Quars War'?
So, really, this is actually an historical wargame, just for a history of another world that not that many people actually know.
Who is this for?
I have no idea who 'This Quars War' is for. Well, me obviously. But how many of 'me' are there? I only know of one.
The unique tonality of this light, gentle sad and whimsical species from a magic world (with no magic or fantastic elements at all), and this very very deep pseudohistorical lore and quite crunchy somewhat odd ruleset, which has a lot of depth, simulation and quirks, but is very obviously set up to be a granular simulation roleplay competition between friends rather than the the kind of crunchy explicit wargame to be played between near strangers with no particular context to the battle where the crunch goes to removing any possible source of disagreement or misinterpretation.
I mean, there are people who might want to roleplay cute anteater people, and people who might want to roleplay the cute anteater people in a very too-real horrors of industrial warfare situation. These are your Hippies.
And there are people who might want a very crunchy but also pretty open wargame you can play at 28mm, 15mm or 6mm with a general simulation of battlefield tactics and perhaps might want to re-fight the historic 'Battle for Gate 13' during the Crusader/Coftryr conflict of 1781, (if that were a real thing that actually happened in real life). These are your Grogs.
And there are people who might really like diving into an extremely deep and specific Paracosm set in an alternate world with an alternate featherless biped doing complex international relations, cultural change, revolutionary war and industry, just for the pleasure of the details. These are your Patricks.
This is a very nutty, particular and original thing and if you didn't already know about it and are finding out here you probably already have a good idea if this is the kind of thing you are into.
A bunch of the PDF's are free on the website here and the 28mm hard plastic boxed set is available online in a bunch of places.
(I did not get paid for this and I do not take money for recommending this stuff. I am forwarding it in this case because I sense a distant kindred spirit and I feel like someone need to be the person to tell you about this stuff and today that person is me. Also me writing this makes that boxed set a business expense.)
Here is a longish interview with Joshua Qualteri;
Quar will either be the hot new thing or the utterly strange and forgotten old thing that you can dig out and show to the grandkids and explain how you knew about it long ago in the before times.
A single box, in the spot where the newly-arrived, single-type or just oddly specific boxes are set, guarding the door like a cyclops.
Unless you know about game stores, even quite well-supplied ones, you won't have a clear idea of just how singular and unlike anything else there this was.
Wargames are usually either Historical, part of some well known Paracosm like Star Wars, Marvel or 40k, generic genre entries, (i.e. Chthulu-like or Western-like), or one of a few Paracosm not well known outside wargames but reasonably so within; Malifaux, Warmachine/Hordes, etc.
I am pretty well up on my wargames and I had absolutely no idea what this was. What’s a 'Quar'? Why are they at war? Why are they using 'Rhyfles'? This looks like decade-long Fantasy Heartbreaker paracosm created by some guy in a basement where they eventually find it as they clear out his house after death and he becomes a Local Legend and gets a small Wikipedia page.
And that nearly is what this is, except Joshua Qualtieri isn't dead and has been running a small Quar-based business in America for quite some time, selling Quar he cast with the spinny bits of a washing machine he took apart a while ago, and working hard to make Quar, his childhood Anteater Ralph Bashki/Jim Henson WW1.5 dieselpunk peudo-european paracosm pals, a thing, using every medium he can get his hands on;
There was, and may still be, a Quar-based VR Real Time Strategy game…
I have no idea if this went anywhere.
And now Atlantic Wargames have produced a plastic injection moulded Quar Wars boxed set strategy game. From what I can tell, Atlantic focused largely on Historical wargames. More recently they have begun producing some pretty-good generic fantasy sets like mythic skeletons and goblin hordes, and a range of dark-future Sci-Fi sets for their skirmish game 'Death Fields'. A standard route for a wargames company in the U.K. is to semi-parasitize off Games Workshop by producing stuff that is nominally different but in-effect can be used for GW games. Its a soft route to a kind of medium success with some strong limitations.
But now cometh.. the Quar! A boxed set with an Indie vibe that might remind some of you of early OSR books.
The box has cartoon standee scenery printed into its base, so you can cut it out and play with it.
And hidden revolutionary and royalist slogans in the folds.
And the initiative cards are this custom print of perhaps-grieving tender leaves.
What are Quar?
Cute, slightly muppet-looking Anteater-people living on the continent of Alwyd, (which *might* be on the other side of the globe from the place where Ralph Bashkis 'Wizards' is set?).
They have a roughly 1910'/1920's level of technology, a bunch of nations and have been locked in various forms of war for a long time.
So like, Jim Henson Anteaters plus post-Westphalia Europe?
The Quar are very cute and they fight in very sad wars. They look like muppets or 70s animation but use guns with specifically worked out calibres and individual design ethos' for each different nation and group.
They have specifically sculpted Baguette bags, that is tiny 28mm knapsacks with tiny French style baguettes sticking out of them that you can glue onto your tiny Quar so they don't need to enter a rhyfle skirmish without their lunch, and they exist in an exhaustively worked-out paracosm with highly-complex and interrelated Great-Power style international and intranational relations.
Quar look like they were drawn by a child, (because they were; Joshua Qualteri, age = small), and a key plot point might be, for instance, a royalist kingdom bankrupted by war taking out huge loans from a semi-independent city state to keep its economy afloat but thereby being drawn into colonial adventures that provoke a classic "war on two fronts".
Also they write sad letters to their families about the nature of industrial warfare. The letters are in the rulebooks;
Is this an extremely crunchy war simulation or more of a Vibes game?
Yes?
The two factions in the starter box have distinct Squad formations and loadouts based on their available and preferred technology. The Royalist and traditionalist Coftryans have squads broken down into larger groups, soldiers armed with accurate long range repeating rhyfles with a single LMG per squad. (These are also the guys with the Baguette bags). The more 'modern' radical Crusader faction are broken down into three man teams, each with two short range assault rhyfles backed up with a single larger Heavy Rhyfle.
Very clearly, if you are the kind of person who wants to min/max a squad or army, then you are fucking basic and are not welcome here. You will arrange your Coftryan forces in a manner typical for their standard organisation because that is what Coftryans would do. Its all there, in the very extensive lore. Their baguette bags are hand-sewn because they are a deeply traditionalist faction who believe in the Old Quar ways. I mean if you are fucking with the squad formation why are you playing Coftryans in the first place? Or even playing 'This Quars War'?
So, really, this is actually an historical wargame, just for a history of another world that not that many people actually know.
Who is this for?
I have no idea who 'This Quars War' is for. Well, me obviously. But how many of 'me' are there? I only know of one.
The unique tonality of this light, gentle sad and whimsical species from a magic world (with no magic or fantastic elements at all), and this very very deep pseudohistorical lore and quite crunchy somewhat odd ruleset, which has a lot of depth, simulation and quirks, but is very obviously set up to be a granular simulation roleplay competition between friends rather than the the kind of crunchy explicit wargame to be played between near strangers with no particular context to the battle where the crunch goes to removing any possible source of disagreement or misinterpretation.
I mean, there are people who might want to roleplay cute anteater people, and people who might want to roleplay the cute anteater people in a very too-real horrors of industrial warfare situation. These are your Hippies.
And there are people who might want a very crunchy but also pretty open wargame you can play at 28mm, 15mm or 6mm with a general simulation of battlefield tactics and perhaps might want to re-fight the historic 'Battle for Gate 13' during the Crusader/Coftryr conflict of 1781, (if that were a real thing that actually happened in real life). These are your Grogs.
And there are people who might really like diving into an extremely deep and specific Paracosm set in an alternate world with an alternate featherless biped doing complex international relations, cultural change, revolutionary war and industry, just for the pleasure of the details. These are your Patricks.
This is a very nutty, particular and original thing and if you didn't already know about it and are finding out here you probably already have a good idea if this is the kind of thing you are into.
A bunch of the PDF's are free on the website here and the 28mm hard plastic boxed set is available online in a bunch of places.
(I did not get paid for this and I do not take money for recommending this stuff. I am forwarding it in this case because I sense a distant kindred spirit and I feel like someone need to be the person to tell you about this stuff and today that person is me. Also me writing this makes that boxed set a business expense.)
Here is a longish interview with Joshua Qualteri;
Quar will either be the hot new thing or the utterly strange and forgotten old thing that you can dig out and show to the grandkids and explain how you knew about it long ago in the before times.
