Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 67

The Ottoman Socialist Republic?

Gasp! An alternate history map that DOESN’T have a “Bulgaria” in it!

And I don’t think it’s plausible.

Okay, let’s say that the Freedom and Accord Party was more Marxist than IRL and they managed to kill or drive off the Three Pashas, topple the Sultan, and set up a socialist republic. Why would they call it “Ottoman”?

But then what would about the reaction of the rest of the world? The Great Powers of Europe hated the idea of a unified state on the Balkans and Levant, not to mention a communist state. The Bolsheviks were still two years away from their revolution and would have been less than no help.

The best scenario I can imagine is a large and well-organized socialist Freedom and Accord Party with Mustafa Kemal at its head. After fighting off the invading armies of practically everyone in Europe, they give up and flee Istanbul, crossing the Black Sea. There, they join Marxist sympathizers in the Ukraine and establish the Turkish Soviet Republic of Crimea, a satellite of the USSR. Tensions mount after Stalin takes power and starts oppressing other Turkic-speaking peoples within the USSR.

There is a Crimean uprising in the 1950s alongside the Hungarian and Armenian revolts. They plead with NATO for aid, but the Soviets have nukes, and western aid is not forthcoming. Soviet tanks roll into Aqyar (and Budapest and Trabzon) and crush the rebellions. There follow thirty years of famine and oppression.

Think that’s depressing? Stay tuned for the 1990s and the Anatolian Cleansing!

I have a crazy idea for a Steven Universe alternate timeline

…in which Bizmuth shattered Rose Quartz and lead a protracted war against Homeworld. Five thousand years later, Earth has mostly been disassembled, but Mars, Venus, and several moons have been terraformed by human slaves. Wanting a weapon but unwilling to make any diamonds who might challenge her authority, Bizmuth orders the terraforming of a carbon-rich comet and inoculates it with a single injector. The result should be a powerful-but-loyal Chondrite.

Instead, they get Graphene.

(no clue what I’m talking about? click here)

All right!

I’ve finally managed to rework the beginning of Junction. The first four chapters have become two, and we got that first moment of wonder WITHIN the borders of the Amazon sample.

Now all I got to do is some bits and pieces through the middle and a last bout of heavy lifting at the end. I hope I hope I hope I’ll have the (what?) delta version by the end of February.

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Dhih tauj nayin Payauld Thayth

You what I want to do? Put modern English (of the General American variety) through the sound-changes that Proto-Indo-European went through to get here.

In other words, what might English sound like in five thousand years?

 

I /aɪ/ > Ey /eɪ/

you /ju/ > ee /i:/

this /ðɪs/ > dhih /ðɪ/

dog /dɑɡ/ >tauj /tɔːdʒ/

blood /blʌd/ > payaul /’paɪjɔːl/

bone /boʊn/ > piya /’pɪjə/

horn /hɔɹn/ >ir /əɹ/

tooth /tuːθ/ > thayth /θaɪ:ð/

name /neɪm/ > nayin /’naɪjɪn/

You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to come up with that word list.

Bulgarian has words for:

to wake up completely: разсънвам се (razsanvam se)

Raz-san-vam se glosses as “apart-dream-verb reflexive” something like “I break up my dreams.” You can add the same suffixes and prefix to buzh- (the root for “wake,” cognate to Sanskrit “Buddha”) to get разбуждам се (razbuzhdam se) which means more or less the same thing.

the back of a chair: облегалка (oblegalka)

Obleg-al-ka comes from облегвам (oblegvam) and means something like “thing for leaning”

to flow up and out: извирам (izviram)

The root of Iz-vir-am (vir) is also found in the word for a spring of water or the source of something (извор – izvor) and the verb “to boil” (изварям – izvaryam), from whence we get извара (izvara, what you get when you boil down milk – cottage cheese).

to not have done A yet, so how can you expect me to have done B?? тепърва (teparva)

Te-parva comes from първо (parvo, meaning “first” and in fact cognate to “first”), but I don’t know where te- comes from. Ideas??

 

DeoThriller

On the northern slope of Mount Olympus, lightning struck out of the cloudless blue sky and an oak tree burst into flame.
Glowing brighter than should any normally burning wood, the trunk split. It revealed a perfectly unharmed human baby.
As tree billowed into black ash, the baby rolled onto the ground. Crawled. Toddled. Walked. In moments, it was an adult man, tall and pale with dark hair and eyes the color of rotten snow. The eyes darted left, right, glanced at the sky, down, widening, at the earth.
A grin spread across Loki’s face.
“Excellent!” he said to his invisible audience. “I’m in.”


 ~~

They used to talk about the mortal realm as a chess game for the gods, but that’s inaccurate. Our world is actually the gods’ MMORPG. They’ve been playing us for the last thousand years of game-time (the stuff before that is just backstory), and some of them take the game more seriously than others. For some gods, the mortal realm is just entertainment, but for others, there’s serious money to be made. Or, as the case may be, stolen.

Timeline 9

I’m watching a lot of DS9 right now and reading alternate history and I can’t help but imagine a drama centered around:

Flightless vampire bats from a timeline where South America never connected to North America. The bats built boats and wrapped their world in trade networks, never forgetting their instinct of reciprocity.

Giant tuataras from a timeline with a different pattern of asteroid impacts after the Permian extinction. They have slow basal metabolisms, but by clustering together, they stay warm enough to run consciousness on the brains of the individuals in the middle of the cluster. Tuatara political systems are rather authoritarian.

Human-like mammals descended from tree-dwellers-turned-Savanna-walkers, but their evolution took a turn for the weird when they were infected by a species of Toxoplasmosa, which causes infected individuals to enjoy working late in dangerous environments far from friends. Originally, infected individuals would walk out of camp into the night to be devoured by hyenas, but their utility as diplomats, profits, and harbingers of danger has elevated toxoplasmotics to a revered station in society.

Intelligent glass sponges from a very divergent timeline, where terrestrial life takes the form of amoebas colonizing a “slush” of water and glass spicules. Intelligent sponges grow the tools they need from glass (including arms and legs), and mimicry-of-form is basic to their communication and cognition. Other sapients find the glass sponges’ slushy homunculi to be creepy.

Haven’t figured out what to do with the Bajorans yet. They’re just super boring.

ALSOIMADEPICTURES!

Five Star Reviews: The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred

Another book that comforted me during Chemo Christmas in the Balkan Tower of Matriarchy, this one has really stayed with me.

The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred, is a novella by Greg Egan, and like all of his work, boils down to a grim, SMBC-style joke.

Q: Should you pull a lever and definitely save 800 people, at the cost of possibly killing 4,000 people?

A: This is a monstrous decision that nobody should have to make!

A human colony on the asteroid Vesta sends mineral-rich boulders to the colony on Ceres, in exchange for water-rich icebergs. A tidy system, except now there are refugees in the Vestan cargo stream. These people are willing to glue themselves to ballistic rocks and enter suspended animation on the hope they’ll be picked up and revived for a better life on Ceres. What went wrong on Vesta?

Egan does a fantastic job of documenting Vesta’s descent into madness. There’s a lot in there about the nature of moral decision-making, democracy, and good old-fashioned tribalism. Come for the realistic treatment of an isolated society in space, stay for the genocide!

Have I made this book sound depressing. It is. But it’s also uplifting. I feel like I’m a better person for having read it. Plus it’s short, so you’re not suffering that long. You can take it.

(Four) Star Reviews: We Are Legion

I have some quibbles with this book, but I read the whole thing in like a day, so I must have really liked it. Yeah I did. I liked it.

We Are Legion is very much like The Martian. It’s tightly focused around a single character: a nerdy, funny engineer who finds himself stranded in an SFnal scenario in which he needs to use his wits and expertise to survive. Nice.

There are some differences. We Are Legion’s protagonist is a software engineer with experience as the manager of an IT startup, so the problems he solves are less about repairing equipment and more about process management in an interstellar empire/post-apocalypse/stone-age cult. We Are Legion not as technical as The Martian, and you sometimes get the feeling that the non-protagonist characters are more video-game NPC than people, but I still feel like I learned something, which is a big part of the pleasure of reading science fiction.

 

Five Star Reviews: Babylon’s Ashes

Hold onto your hats because there’ll be a bunch of these. Being on chemotherapy in the Balkan Tower of Matriarchy at Christmas means there is a lot of time for me to hide, reading in my bed, but not much time to write. But maybe that was a good thing, especially for this book.

Babylon’s Ashes really grew on me. Like the rest of the Expanse (as individual books, and as a series, and as a TV series), Babylon’s Ashes is slow to start but picks up a lot of momentum. It is, on the one hand, super dismal. For, like economics values of “dismal.” The economic landscape of the solar system being what it is, people are motivated to do terrible things to each other.

That’s part of the mastery of the writers. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franc (“James S.A. Corey“) adeptly show us the big picture of clashing tides of history as well as the personal stories of the little people struggling inside them.

Kindness, though, stands out above philosophical waffling about the “great man” vrs. “historical forces” debate. The heroes of the book are the people who, whatever their personal backgrounds or contexts, try to be compassionate. They reach out and help where they can. For a guy who’s life is uncertain in many ways right now, that was comforting. I might have had a different reading of the book if I’d read it at a different time, but that’s kind of the point.