Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 97
November 13, 2014
Saving the World, Kojiki-style
I was watching Penny Dreadful and Sleepy Hollow and thinking “meh, I know these gys have to save the world and all, but Christian and Ancient Egyptian eschatology AGAIN?” Why not Japanese mythology? Eh?
Just imagine it!
“According to this scroll, we must assemble the Magatama before the Empress of Yomi BLOTS OUT THE SUN!”
“Quickly, give me the Mirror and warn Amaterasu!”
“Are you crazy? That thing will incinerate anyone who doesn’t have imperial blood.”
“To the palace!”
November 11, 2014
Bulgarian Evidentials and Why They are Great
But wait there’s more!
Order now, and Bulgarian will come with FOUR evidentials! That’s right, four.
You can say:
1st evidential: “The dog ate the fish (I saw it happen)”
2nd: “the dog has eaten the fish (here is the evidence)” “
3rd: (it is said that) the dog ate the fish”
4th: “the dog (supposedly) ate the fish.”
I’d also add a 0th evidential, where you strip all personal comment off the verb by using the present tense even when talking about the past (“In 1492, the dog eats the fish).
Isn’t that great? Evidentials are rare in Europe.
I know this, as I have sampled all your human languages
But the thing that blows my mind about this whole mess is that before I did some research, I thought Bulgarian just had two evidentials (I-did-see-it and I-didn’t-see-it), the I-didn’t-see-it , the evidential function glued onto what I had been told is the present perfect.
Certainly, my students think of it that way. They think that the “I have done” form in English (present perfect, emphasizing the connection between an action in the past and its connection to the present) is a good translation for the “Az sam napravil” (2nd evidential, indicating that you were not there to see the action and can only deduce from the result that it happened).
As you can guess, there is IS some overlap. An English-speaker might say “Someone has eaten my cake” while looking at a crumb-strewn plate, in the same way a Bulgarian-speaker would say “Nyakoi e izyal moita torta,” but the English speaker might as well say “someone ate my cake.” But when an English speaker would have no choice but to say “my great-great-grandmother came from Ukraine,” in Bulgarian you have to say “pra-pra-babata mi e idvala ot Ukraina” (she is dead and I never met her). And this would be TOTALLY DIFFERENT from the English “my great-great grandmother has come from Germany” (implying that she is somehow still alive and traveling).
Even the wikipedia article on the subject talks this way, calling the 2nd evidential the “present perfect” or “past indefinite,” and then noting exceptions (it can’t be used for events occurring in the present, it is used to indicate actions you didn’t witness), as if the Bulgarian 2nd evidential is a wrong or broken (or at least aberrant) present perfect.
This is a consensus that has emerged between patronizing and superior English-speakers and Bulgarian-speakers who assume that the Anglosphere must be right about SOMETHING, given the fact they won the Cold War. And then they go on to shovel all the half-baked political rhetoric they can on top of the mistaken assumption that the Bulgarian must be inferior to English.
I’ve heard that the Bulgarian evidential system was:
Forced upon the language of the Slavic people by their cruel Ottoman masters
Indicative of a culture where nobody trusts each other
A remnant of Old Church Slavonic (it isn’t), implying Bulgarian is out-moded and primitive
(Sometimes from the same person) that it is a corruption of the pure Slavic verb system
Basically useless anyway, since why would you need to communicate evidentiality?
And it’s none of those things. It’s. Just. Language. People! God! Damn!
Deep breaths now.
November 9, 2014
81 One Night in Sixes with Tex Thompson
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/81Tex1.mp3
Can we talk more about Tex Thompson’s One Night in Sixes? Yes, let’s. This week’s podcast is a little weird: it’s from a conversation Tex and I had about her book and what I liked about it.
The Qadi
Carrie Patel’s The Buried Life
The Moken and how they can see underwater
Orcas: transient and residents.
November 6, 2014
Unlost Worlds
Throughout history, besieged peoples have evacuated their homes to settle on parallel Earths (think the Long Earth). They keep doing so, so militarily weaker cultures get pushed “away” from home-Earth by more recent refugees. Until one day modern technology allows us to open permanent gates to these Lost Worlds, populated by descendants of fleeing Romans, Ancient Egyptians, Aboriginal Australians, and so on.
So what do we do with each other?
November 4, 2014
7 Dangerous Myths about Zehra Yilmaz
My first piece of fan-stuff for New Frontiers, centered on its heroine, the scary “exo-erotic diplomat” who loves aliens for the sake of the European Union.
Seven Dangerous Myths About Zehra:
—doesn’t mix business and pleasure
—has phenomenal impulse control
—sexually inexperienced with hyperintelligent farting sea slugs
—would look out of place in a Men in Black sequel
—can only swear in two languages
—does not believe in interspecies dating
—won’t set your shit on fire
These important facts brought to you by Tex Thompson, author of One Night in Sixes.
November 2, 2014
80 Being Professional with Dan Koboldt
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/80DanK.mp3
I’m talking with author Dan Koboldt again about the sort of things you have to talk about with your literary agent.
The scariest words possible
Charles Stross, who was probably always super-cool
Hashtags for aspiring writers: #tenqueries #sffpit #badqueries
“It doesn’t grab me”
Dan spills all about his first novel
Agents don’t like to be treated like interchangeable parts
Tumblr, the weirder the better
10 things writers don’t know about the woods.
God’s Empire Under Heaven my alt-history experiment
Get Known Before the Book Deal
Jaime Wyman talking with John Scalzi
My experience at Worldcon 2014
…and…group hug, everyone!
October 30, 2014
A Predator’s History
Happy Halloween, everyone!
Let’s talk about zmeys.
A zmey (змей, sometimes inaccurately translated as “dragon”) is a creature from Balkan mythology. They fly, they have scales, they can shape-shift, and they like to either eat or have sex with humans.
I’ve wanted to do something with zmeys (zmeyove, if you want to be pedantic about plurals) for a long time, but finally a conversation with Melissa Walshe got me off my butt and writing some thoughts about what it would mean to be an obligate anthropophage.
Let’s say I (a zmey) need to eat 1 pig a week to survive (assuming no other sources of meat), that gives me 52 pigs a year. So a ratio of about 1 zmey to 50 humans. Dunbar’s number (for humans) is between 150 and 200 people, which sets the limits of a traditional human settlement (i.e. a village), which could support a family of three to four zmeys. Or a mommy zmeyka, a daddy zmey, and two little baby zmeycheta.
Zmeys should have an instinctive distrust of anyone outside their nuclear family (and want to drive off their older children as they have more babies). So they don’t have much culture. They can’t cooperate or learn from each other, but they have to be much smarter than humans (individually and as a village) in order to hunt effectively. A long lifespan and a certain ruthlessness (psychopathy?) wouldn’t hurt either.
For their prehistory, zmeys live in small family units widely scattered with their human herds. But in some places, the land is rich enough to support high enough populations of humans, that more than eight zmeys can come together in one place. They exchange ideas, and kick off the agricultural revolution as the next step in the domestication of humans.
Human and zmey populations boom, but zmeys really aren’t built to live together, and start to go to war (giving us our mythology about gods using humans to settle their disputes). War continues until someone invents writing. Now, zmeys can live at great distances from each other, but still share ideas through letters. Zmeys very quickly develop high technology, using it to build up human populations even higher (resulting in the dawn civilizations: Indus, Mesopotamia, Minoa, Egypt, Yellow River).
Things are looking great until a human rebellion uses those weapons against the zmeys, and the resulting war caused a population crash that destroyed zmey (and human) civilization. Coming out of the catastrophe into early classical history, the zmeys’ policy became cryptic. They hid themselves and their technology from humans, preying upon and manipulating their cattle from the shadows. Many of the “great men” of history are zmeys.
Thus things continued until the discovery of the New World, and its population of zmeys who split off from their Old-World brethren before the population crash, and still take an active part in human politics (there are no native zmeys in Australia, and sub-saharan Africa is a monastic retreat, FYI). The resulting war obliterated the New World zmeys and their prey populations, but necessitated “controlled sharing” of zmey secrets with their cattle, resulting in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the Industrial revolution.
Now that the dust is finally settling, the much larger, much more heavily networked population of zmeys is considering its next step. What’s that going to look like?
~~~
Thanks to Peter Watts for finding a plausible evolutionary history and biology for “vampires” and to Melissa Walshe for thinking about their ecology a bit more. Gene Wolfe also deserves some credit for reverse-engineering the idea of zmeys. So good for him.
October 26, 2014
79 Querying and Self-Control with Dan Koboldt
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/79DanK.mp3
I’m talking with author Dan Koboldt about passing yourself off as a professional author.
The first real podcast that I did
Fake it till you make it
Jennie Goloboy of Red Sofa Literary
“Query Moguls” like Anne Mini and Query Shark
I was sure I was going to be the exception
NaNoWriMo—there’s still time to do it!
Fight your instincts
The executive control cookie text
Success to Trade by Jennie Goloboy
October 23, 2014
Captain Lagrange and the Update of Doom
Enter Strange Lagrange, captain of the Anakata, most feared of all the Intellectual Piracy ships of the Matrioshka Brain. Swooping down on unsuspecting yachts, Lagrange and his crew of radical engineers and feral AIs “destructively map” the component parts of their prey. Their ruthlessness matched only by their good taste, these artistic bootleggers copy useful or beautiful structures and beam their precious design specs to the Dark Cornucopia.
~~~
This is what happened when Simon Roy said he wanted to do an illustrate story with me about a post-Singularity society. We ended up going with another story idea, but I do like the idea of space-pirates in the Pirate Bay sense of the word. Some day, Captain Lagrange. Some day.
October 19, 2014
78 Creating Background with Turbofanatic
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/79Turbo.mp3
I’m talking with Turbofanatic, author of Aphelion, Deltavengers, and co-author and illustrator of Wheel in the Sky. We talk about using objects to add background and depth to a story, starting with Aphelion, a reaction to the reaction to our world.
We are always fighting the previous war
A do-anything-thing
Bill Watterson’s appearance on Pearls Before Swine
Homestuck?? What is this new-frangled jibber-jabber?
Why is it telling me that I’m a silly girl? I’m a serious man! I have a wife!
Apparently it’s the Ulysses of the internet?
Charles Stross and the end of labor
Can’t you see I’m crowd-sourcing, mother?
Nightwatch and Daywatch
In Deltavengers, don’t try to deconstruct anything
Except the science
Pandemonium. You can’t top it.
Cultural Prolapse is a problem
