Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 9

Resistance ≠ futile

There are all kinds of resistance. Very little of it is futile: people are not the Borg (or even Daleks). People in power are people, fallible and eminently confusable.

To all the federal workers out there worried about their jobs; to all the law enforcement, school districts, academics, and health administrators who are pre-obeying to stay safe, I would like to recommend to you a little book whose precepts I’ve found very useful in years past—particularly the suggestions of ultra-helpful incompetence, and drowning the powers-that-be in just-slightly-wrong information, or information that’s not even wrong but just so overwhelming they can’t find anything actionable. For everyone else: please read it; I think you could learn a lot.

Resistance in this case isn’t about marching in the streets—useful in only a small percentage of instances—or throwing Molotov cocktails (ditto); resistance is about creating friction, getting grit in the gears so the machine slows and falters and stops. Resistance is about buying time to form real plans.

The administration has issued various Executive Orders; various legal actions are in train. Some EOs have already been struck down; others will be. Meanwhile, our mission should we choose to accept it is to buy time: gum up the works, all while being so helpful and smiling so sweetly—pour sugar in that gas!—they can’t quite figure out what’s going on. Frustration, their frustration, is our friend.

Is what is happening terrible? Yes. And grim, and frightening, and dangerous. And for a fair few people already, deadly. Is what is happening unstoppable and inevitable? No. We are still a democracy—only just perhaps, but sometimes that’s enough. The US Constitution is still in effect. Until the Executive Branch openly defies the legal orders of the Judicial Branch, we are not in a Constitutional Crisis. (For a breath of crystal clean air on this issue, see Gabe Fleisher’s recent thoughts.)

We are not there yet. And if we buy enough time—if we set aside despair and get chewing away in the dark at those wires and communication cables—then when and if that dreadful day of crisis comes the opposition will already be in disarray and so frustrated they will make (even more) stupid decisions.

Resistance is not futile. Far from it. Resistance is necessary.

I’m Afraid of Americans

Yes, Bowie did it first—and brilliantly. But this is today, and this is how I’m feeling, and this is BONES UK, a band I’ve been enjoying for a couple of years, doing it right for Right Now.

Turn it up loud.

*This* is how to do it: the Europeans show how to approach bird flu

Europeans are taking the threat posed by avian influenza viruses seriously. Employing a One Health approach, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) have issued scientific advice that assesses avian influenza virus mutations and the potential of these viruses to spread to humans, along with recommendations for the animal and public health sectors.

I’m going to quote directly from the press release because I’m just so delighted by it’s concision and clarity:

The work of the two Agencies draws on extensive data, including genetic analyses, human case studies, and antibody presence to outline current risks and mitigation strategies.

Pamela Rendi-Wagner, ECDC Director, said “Global developments demand that we stay alert and make sure Europe is prepared to respond to the threat of avian influenza. ECDC is supporting EU/EEA Member States in preparing, preventing and containing potential future outbreaks in animals and humans. Having strong preparedness plans in place is paramount to protect public health in Europe.”

“In 2024, avian influenza viruses expanded their reach, infecting previously unaffected species. Our work identifies key mutations linked to a potential spread to humans, requiring rapid detection and response. Collaboration and data sharing along the chain of actors involved remain essential in tackling emerging situations,” saidBernhard Url, EFSA Acting Executive Director.   

Experts generated a comprehensive list of mutations, from which they identified 34 genetic mutations that might increase the potential of avian influenza viruses to spread to humans. Using molecular analysis and genomic surveillance, animal and public health laboratories can refer to the list of mutations, which should be continuously updated, to monitor the emergence of strains that could potentially transmit to humans.

The scientific opinion also identifies how the adaptation of avian influenza viruses to mammals can be driven by factors such as genetic mutations, the mixing of genetic material between viruses, and the interaction with host immune response, alongside extrinsic factors that can increase the chance of transmission to humans, like human activities and environmental changes that increase contact between wildlife, poultry, livestock, and humans. High-density farming, low biosecurity practices, deforestation, urbanisation, and global trade amplify the risk of spillovers from animals to humans.

Key recommendations:

Genetic analysis: Use genetic sequencing to detect mutations or virus adaptations to mammals early. Invest in systems to quickly identify emerging viruses and mutations that enable animal-to-human spread.  Animal surveillance: Monitor sick or dead mammals linked to infected wild birds, poultry or mammals. Track unexplained illness during high-risk periods and areas with avian influenza.  Public health surveillance: Test exposed individuals and routinely send samples to further identify the flu sub-type. During outbreaks in animals, hospitals should enhance surveillance and vigilance, especially during flu season peaks when the risk of mixing of genetic material between viruses rises.  Prevention measures: Implement robust farm biosecurity measures, train staff, vaccinate poultry, and prepare outbreak response plans. Ensure humans at risk follow influenza vaccination and antiviral treatment guidelines.

Public health preparedness measures: Raise awareness among high-risk groups, the general public and train healthcare workers to recognise and manage avian influenza. Ensure coordinated response plans for human cases. Develop guidelines and standard operating procedures for testing of exposed individuals and contacts of patients, including preventive protocols. Ensure coordinated response plans for human cases as part of national prevention, preparedness and response plans.

Alongside the scientific opinion, the Agencies also developed a guidance on how to investigate and control outbreaks of avian influenza affecting both humans and animals, using a coordinated One Health approach. Experts developed flowcharts outlining response actions for five outbreak scenarios at the human-animal-environment interface, emphasising the importance of an interdisciplinary response among all stakeholders. This work will support Member States in creating tailored national guidelines. 

But if you really want the nitty gritty, here’s the 100+ page paper on how to think and focus on preparation, prevention, and control of zoonotic avian influenza.

H5N9 on California duck farm

Highly pathogenic H5N9 avian flu has been identified for the first time in US poultry, on a duck meat farm in Merced County, California.1 H5N9 is rare, a reassortant combination of H5N1, H7N9, and H9N2. I don’t know to what degree it can/does infect humans—but it certainly kills birds, even ducks (which are not normally killed in high numbers by H5N1—which is why they’re so good at spreading it).

This is not good news. I don’t know how bad it is, but it’s not good. Now we just have to hope there aren’t infected ducks landing next to pig sties…

Eurasian lineage goose/Guangdong clade 2.3.4.4b ︎

Noodles, doodles, and zoomorphs

I like to doodle when I’m thinking—my old fiction notebooks are covered in abstract lines and curves and stars. Lately I’ve been trying to combine that doodling with Early Medieval style decorations for the maps (and more) I create.

My latest project is playing with negative space, using black and white to create the kind of zoomorphic beasts found on decorative metalwork, standing crosses, and the margins of illuminated manuscripts. But I want them to be uniform: to fit inside a circle. (That way it’s much easier to swap them in and out.) And my rule is that all the lines, curves, and ellipses—except the circular border—are hand-drawn, rather than rationalised by the algorithms of either Procreate or Photoshop.

I started with interlace—this one is my attempt to reproduce part of the great gold buckle (most likely created in the very late 6th or very early 7th century) found at Sutton Hoo.

This was an easy one to start with—it’s already inside a circular border and already monochromatic. I simplified it and used negative space to represent shadow.

The second I borrowed from an fuzzy image of a worked silver plate—at least I think it was plate (I’d cached the image long ago, with no metadata attached)—that used roundels of different beasties around the wide rim. Some of these beasts were so morphed, so abstract, and/or the silver so worn that it’s hard to tell what they’re meant to represent. So I took some liberties to emphasise the points that helped me decide what species I thought it was.

In this case, I decided it was a horse, and so emphasised the tail and mane, the muscles of haunch and shoulder. The image as it is doesn’t entirely make sense—I’m not sure what’s a hoof, what’s a fetlock, what’s a shin—but, eh, I think I’ve taken it as far as I can go.

I find I’m enjoying making these things—doing so frees my mind to roam—and as I’ve just downloaded Trinity College Dublin’s entire high-res version of the Books of Kells (which is illuminated with nothing but zoomorphs) I expect I’ll be doing quite a few of these…

Never Forget Where We Came From

A couple of weeks ago the good folks at Our Opinions Are Correct, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, interviewed me and Tananarive Due about our approach to historical fiction. The podcast episode is out now: Always Remember Where We Came From.

I enjoyed it; it was a good interview. Annalee and Charlie Jane are both smart and well read, and both me and Tananarive got to say a lot about our respective areas of interest and eras of history. I learnt a lot from what Tananarive had to say—you absolutely should go read her book, The Reformatory—it’s well worth a listen.

One of the things I’m finding about group radio/podcast/Zoom/YouTube conversations, though, is that a lot of stuff gets elided. In my interviews this seems to happen a lot more often with groups than in one-on-ones1 Sometimes this is a slip of the tongue, sometimes it’s an unfortunate edit, sometimes I’m hurrying to make a point and forget to say the words that actually connect the dots leading to point, and sometimes it’s just that someone makes a mistake.

So if you listen to the podcast, and you’re not deeply versed in either Early Medieval or my personal history, I’d like to clarify a couple of things. I do have a PhD, one I earned rather than was given—it’s not honorary—but the story of that PhD, what it is exactly, how it could be described, is complicated. When I was trying to explain it before we began, I said it was an analysis of my fiction and how it works and what it does, using research in neuroscience and more (poetics, the rhetorics of various genres, history). I joked that you could say it’s as much in cognitive poetics as anything. And in a way that’s true—it’s just a lot more complicated than that.

Similarly, talking about plagues, climate change, and culture change, it sounds as though I’m saying the so-called Justinianic Plague2 caused the fall of the Roman Empire and led to same sort of labour shortages that put more power in the hands of common folk as happened after the Black Death. What I was trying to say (obviously not well very, sigh) is environmental crises (volcanoes, weather events, climate change, asteroids) lead to environmental changes that lead to things like mass migration and plagues—such as the Antonine and Cyprian plagues—that destabilise society.3 It’s also been documented that after the massive mortality of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, in England skilled labourers were in such short supply that they had the unprecedented power to demand an increase in wages from the king. But I just want to make clear that I don’t believe the first bubonic plague brought down the Roman Empire, that it lasted beyond the eight century, or it was that first pandemic that led to peasants demanding higher wages.

So enjoy the podcast and forgive the elisions.

I don’t know why. Perhaps because there’s less opportunity to stop and backtrack and/or clarify in a rolling, moving conversation. ︎It’s much more accurate to refer to it as the First Plague Pandemic, or even Early Medieval Plague. One day I’ll explain in detail on my research blog—but today is not that day. Today let’s just say there’s evidence of Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes bubonic—and pneumonic and septic—plague) in several countries, including Britain, before it ever reached Constantinople. ︎The Antonine Plague, for example, killed at least 25% of the population of the Roman Empire, and some argue that Rome’s power never returned to its pre-pandemic zenith. ︎

Better than politics

Today I plan to steer clear of all things political—I’ve found that if something isn’t inside my zone of control there’s no point fretting about it and healthier to think about something else: I seek delicious distraction.

Assuming some of you might like to do the same, I’ve posted the last of the 3-part “When Aud Met Julia” reading, on Patreon. I’ve also made the first two free to all members, paid or unpaid. (Not a member yet? Go sign up for free.) Hey, we all deserve a bit of distraction. And sexual tension is so much more engaging than the political kind.

Enjoy!

Patreon update #1

My new Patreon page currently has 120 members, 75 of whom pay a small amount a month to access all the content.1 That means nearly 40% of the members currently pay nothing. Right now, unpaid membership entitles you to vote in polls and to access the occasional post I’ve already made available to all. But the meatier stuff, and almost all the new stuff from now on, will require paid membership.2 The point of doing all this work is, after all, to raise money.3 The page hasn’t been up long enough yet for the platform to let me offer discounts for annual membership, but as soon as I can, I will.

So what’s going on there?

I’ve posted the whole of a short series of poems about grief. Some are available to all members but most are paid-only. From now on, poems I post on Patreon (the only place I will post them) will be a bit more hard-edged and/or…juicier.In terms of essays I’ve posted The Paradox of Tolerance—published simultaneously as a blog post, and therefore free—and Layered Cities, with another, Spit Out Your Mouthguard—never previously published—coming in the next day or two.So far I’ve posted part 1 and part 2 of a 3-part series of readings from The Blue Place. Until the audio book is released in summer, this is the only place to hear them. I’ve temporarily made the first two readings free to all members. Part 3 will go up soon.You can listen to only one song so far, Draw Me Down, an a capella cri de coeur of yearning I composed and sang for Kelley when we were separated by an ocean for a year. There are plenty more songs to come.I posted some cartoons I’ve been teaching myself to draw—specifically to illustrate this Patreon! But it’s amazing how difficult drawing simple things can be—fascinating, though.Polls: I’ve posted two so far, one for text options and one for audio. Both are still open—you have to be a member to vote (but remember right now you can still join for free)—so if you’ve haven’t yet voted, please do. I admit, so far—the numbers keep changing—the votes have not been quite what I expected. A third poll, this time for visual options, is coming very soon.

If you look at the poll posts you’ll see what kind of things you can expect in the future. I’m just getting started. Thank you for joining me in this adventure!

Memberships currently range from $3—less, much less, than a fancy cup of coffee—to $100 a month. ︎It’s possible that some time after paid members have read the posts I might make some of them more generally available—but only when I reach certain milestones. ︎It’s for the specific purpose of hiring two independent publicists, one on each side of the Atlantic ︎

Bird flu: panzoonotic

I’ve been busy, so this is just a few bits and bobs of stuff from the last week or so, with most of the meat in the links.

In The Guardian , animal virologist Janet Daly explains why H5N1 avian influenza is unique: it has become panzoonotic, able to spread between multiple species. “We have some viruses that can infect multiple species, and we have some viruses that can cause massive outbreaks, but we haven’t tended to have the combination — that’s something of a new phenomenon.” Unique viruses are, obviously, unpreditable. When it comes to epidemiology, unpredictable is not a good word. As I said in an earlier post, we have already had our first human bird flu death in this country—the older man in Louisiana. I doubt it will be the last. In other parts of the world, several people have already died. For example, a man in Cambodia who took care of chickens and cooked and ate one has died. Previously (Sept 2024) a 15-yr old Cambodian girl who had handled sick birds died, and her H5N1 was identified as a novel reassortant1 that included internal genes from the newer 2.3.4.4b clade. We don’t yet know much about the clade or genotype of the Cambodian man.Another child in California has been diagnosed with H5N1 of unknown origin. The illness was mild. How is the US preparing for a possible pandemic in the face of these uncertainties? The MIT Technology Review has a summary of where we stood about a week ago. A lot of the decisions, you will be shocked—shocked!—to hear will be based on money. So we could and should be doing more—and a lot of it wouldn’t have cost that much at the beginning (probably less than it’s costing the poultry and dairy industry right now)—but it’s understandable why some of it can’t, quite, be justified. Yet.

So, I’ll just leave you with a reminder: don’t panic but stay alert and take a few sensible precautions.

I’m not defining these words here because I’ve already done that in a handy primer of basic definitions. ︎

Snippets of the past—tiny cats, massive lakes, women ruling Iron Age Britain

Today I’ll focus not on the ugly news topics of the week—there are plenty; go find them for yourselves if that’s what floats your boat—but on fascinating bits of life in the past, in the form of massive hidden aquifers, cats small enough to curl up on your hand, and—saving the best til last—the proof that in Late Iron Age Britain women ruled.

Let’s start with that aquifer. To quote from Live Science, “An enormous water reservoir — likely the largest aquifer of its kind on Earth — sits inside the volcanic rocks of the Oregon Cascades…” We’re talking nearly 20 cubic miles of water. “It is a continental-size lake stored in the rocks at the top of the mountains, like a big water tower,” according to study co-author Leif Karlstrom, an Earth scientist at the University of Oregon. That is a lot of water. A lot. Naturally I worry what humans will do to/with this marvel formed in geological time—it could be used up recklessly in the blink of an eye—but for today I just revel in its existence. It’s like something from a Victorian adventure novel: a huge, hidden lake1 deep inside a mountain…

Also found underground, this time in a cave in Hualongdong, southern China (for those without academic access—like me, sigh—Live Science has an okay write-up), the fossilised teeth of a previously unknown species of cat, Prionailurus kurteni, that lived about 300,000 years ago. Its closest living relatives are the leopard cat genus (Prionailurus) that live in South Asia. But P. kurteni is smaller—much smaller—than those cats. It may be the smallest felid that ever twitched its whiskers in disdain. How small? Small enough to curl up and sleep on the palm of your hand. Smaller than the world’s smallest living feline, the rusty-spotted cat. (Take a look at two-minute BBC video of a young adult male rusty-spotted cat to see just how small those are—smaller that Charlie and George did as kittens.) The fossils were found in a cave also used by ‘early humans’ (I don’t know what species). Perhaps it scavenged leftovers, but perhaps—people being people—it was a pet. (Yeah, okay, that’s unlikely, but it’s lovely to imagine.)

Best and last, a Nature paper (lead author Dr Lara Cassidy), “Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain,” which pleases me enormously. (This one is open access—yay Nature!—but if you’d rather read a summary I can recommend the Guardian.) Cassidy tells us that in Dorset (the south and west of England) the Durotriges, an Iron Age ‘tribe,’ were matrilocal. She and her co-authors determined this by looking at 57 ancient genomes from Late Iron Age burials spanning 100 BCE – 100 CE (pre- and just post-Roman invasion). This showed that most of the women were related to each other but few of the men were. Which means women owned the land and ran it and passed it along to their daughters, and it was men who came as single strangers and married into the powerful local lineages. (I’m using the term ‘marriage’ loosely. We don’t know if marriage, as we know it, was practised by these people at this time.) The paper then further suggests that this was true for the whole of Britain, which was not only matrilocal but matrifocal.

This is really rather amazing. As far as we know those Celtic tribes such as the Iceni (East Anglia) and Brigantes (a confederation of peoples that covered the entire north of England and a chunk of the Midlands) did not have written language. What we know of their culture and power relations are therefore based on classical writers such as Caesar and Ptolemy. As Romans had a tendency to exoticise ‘barbarian’ cultures—to provide excuses for conquering, colonising, and exploiting them and their territory in the name of bringing civilisation and its benefits to the barbarians2—historians have treated their descriptions with caution.3 On some level, when these classical writers talked about Celtic queens and war leaders, about these women taking multiple husbands—that is, behaving as kings have done throughout history—modern readers rolled their eyes and laughed. Only now, well, it looks like Cartimandua (queen of the Brigantes for 30 years) and Boudicca (queen of the Iceni, and leader of the famous uprising that destroyed London and other major Roman centres and came within a whisker of kicking the Romans out altogether) really did wield the power, really did run Iron Age Britain.

Seriously. Go read the paper. As the Guardian says, quoting Cassidy, the author, “There’s an awful habit that we still have when we look at women in the past to view them solely within the domestic sphere with little agency, and studies like this are highlighting that this is not the case at all. In a lot of societies today and in the past, women wield huge influence and huge power, and it’s good to remember that.”

Exactly. It’s important to remember that history is just a story we tell about the past to help make sense of what we think we know of it in light of what we understand of the world today. What we understand depends on wo we are and what we’ve experienced. That is, the story depends on the storyteller. It’s therefore prudent when reading any story about history to bear in mind who is telling it.4

It’s a bit of a stretch to call an aquifer a lake, which is usually visualised as an open body of water. I think of an underground lake being open to the air inside a soaring cavern. This most likely is not like that. But it’s pleasant to imagine it so. ︎This tactic is a perennial favourite. See the reasoning and explanations given by Britain, France, America and other imperial powers in the last century or two. ︎A polite way of saying that scholars of English history, mostly men, dismissed as laughable those Roman assertions of women running things: Women? Rule? Ridiculous! ︎I’ve written about this many times. You could start with “My Story, Mystery: A Letter to Hild of Whitby.” ︎