Having looked at the ideas of class and status, now the New Worlds Patreon is turning to the question of how those things get layered: which people are considered to be the most important and respectable in society, and which people are the least? The common answers aren’t always what you might assume . . . comment over there!
For the month of May, the New Worlds Patreon is turning its attention to the social divisions within society! We begin by clarifying some terminology that often gets carelessly used — that of class, status, and caste. Comment over there . . .
I feel vaguely like I’m typing in a foreign language when I say:
I sold my first poem today.
. . . yeah. That’s a thing that really just happened. To Fantasy Magazine, no less, which is a market I have yet to crack with my fiction. Contract is signed and everything, so it’s official.
I . . . what? How did this happen? When did I start writing poetry?
April 2021, sorta. I could point to a variety of poems I wrote before then: things for school, things for role-playing games, things for stories that for one reason or another needed to include poems. Even a very small number of things I wrote just because I wanted to. (Three. That small number is three.) But in April 2021 I looked at the list of short story ideas I keep, and my brain said “what if poem instead” to one of them, and I wrote a sonnet. Which my brain, arbitrarily and in defiance of actual historical evidence, has deemed My First Poem. And then in October of that year it coughed up another one, which just happens to be the one I sold to Fantasy this afternoon. (Funny: my first novel sold was my second one written, too.) And then it kept coughing and more poems kept coming out. This is apparently a thing I do now? And now it’s a thing somebody’s gonna pay me for?
I guess it is. I, like . . . have to figure out where to put poetry on my website now. Because I’ve written over twenty poems in the last two years, and presumably somebody’s gonna pay me for some of those, too, if I go on sending them around like I have been. Because this is a thing I do now.
This feels even weirder than when I started writing short fiction. (I was a natural novelist first.) I’m . . . a poet? Which manages to sound vastly more pretentious to me than saying “I’m a writer” ever did? And yet there have been two occasions in the past year or so where I found myself reflexively typing the phrase “other poets” in conversations online, as in, “poets other than me,” so I guess my subconscious is slowly easing its way into the swimming pool of this particular identity shift. At some point the water will presumably stop feeling peculiar. But we’re not quite there yet.
The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride, Daniel James Brown, narr. Michael Prichard. This is a splendid book about a dreadful topic — and by that, I don’t even just mean what happened to the Donner Party after they got trapped in the Sierra Nevada. Forty percent of this book elapses before you get there, and that forty percent establishes very clearly just how awful an experience the western migration was even when it went well. Brown says at the outset that part of his goal here is to humanize the settlers who went to Oregon and California, getting past the stoic photographs and sanitized depictions, and I think he succeeds excellently.
At the political along with the personal. Like, I knew Hastings was basically a liar, promoting his “cutoff” that turned out to be vastly worse than the established route, but I’m not sure I’d ever seen that put into context of the growing conflicts between the U.S. and Mexico, with Polk wanting a war and Hastings wanting to funnel white settlers to California instead of Oregon so they could take it over. Brown is also excellent about scrupulously noting the presence and actions of people of color, whether that’s not letting you forget that there were enslaved Blacks at work in the background at certain trail stops, laying out cold hard numbers for the number of white travelers killed by Indian war parties vs. vastly higher the number of Indians slaughtered by xenophobic white travelers, or doing his best (given the absence of their perspective in the record) to acknowledge the cultural background and possible thoughts of Luis and Salvador, the two Miwoks who got caught up in the disaster. He’s also very attentive to the lives of the pioneer women, including a frank and detailed discussion of the methods of contraception and abortion used on the trail.
The end of the month means the end of a theme (for now), and so the New Worlds Patreon‘s last economic piece for April is on the complexity of two very different systems, manorialism and post-scarcity. Comment over there!
I’m having the kind of week where I was on my way to bed last night when I realized I’d failed to actually mention that the latest New Worlds Patreon collection is out!
This one promises you “topics as weighty as slavery, as illicit as crime, and as fun as the inner workings of a magic system. With essays ranging from siege warfare to artistic patronage to food prohibitions, there is something here for every story!” Can I just say that having to write cover copy for these things is an increasing pain in the neck? By the end it’ll just say, “look, there’s stuff here about culture, idek.” 😛
Anyway, you can get it in both ebook and print formats from a variety of retailers! For the ebook I recommend Book View Cafe (as that is the publisher), but also Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Kobo, Apple Books, Books-a-Million, Bookshop.org, and Amazon in the US and in the UK. (Other countries, too, but I only have the Anglophone links easily to hand.)
I promise, the New Worlds Patreon is not going to take you too deep into Econ 101 — but this week, we are talking about how much a given economy is planned and controlled vs. left to do its own thing. Comment over there!
Where do the days go? I make a note to do something, and then it’s like a week later and somehow it got squished to the side by everything else.
But hey, two birds with one stone! By which I mean I have had two stories published recently, and I can now link to them in one post. The first, “At the Heart of Each Pearl Lies a Grain of Sand,” requires a subscription to Sunday Morning Transport, but since this is a magazine putting out a weekly story from a broad array* of splendid authors, it’s well worth subscribing to. My own recent contribution — my second in SMT thus far — is a riff on a minor character from one of the stories in One Thousand and One Nights: what happened to her before those events, and what happens to her after.
(*To quote from their own About page: “Max Gladstone, Karen Lord, Elwin Cotman, Kij Johnson, Kat Howard, Elsa Sjunnesson, Kathleen Jennings, Sarah Monette, Juan Martinez, E.C. Myers, Maureen McHugh, Tessa Gratton, Sarah Pinsker, Yoon Ha Lee, Michael Swanwick, Brian Slattery, Malka Older, and many more.”)
The second piece, “Oh, My Cursed Daughter,” is free to read at Dream of Shadows (which, sadly, will end publication next month). This is based on a folksong, and it has a bit of history, being the only instance I can think of where I wrote a story, shopped it around, trunked it, and then wrote a completely new piece off the same starting concept. I am so glad this and not the first one is the version that got published!
The next stop on the New Worlds Patreon tour of economic systems is the concept of property ownership! Comment over there . . .
April will be an economics month at the New Worlds Patreon! We’re starting off with sources of wealth — comment over there . . .
Much less to report this month. Less reading overall, as I was very busy writing, but also I bounced off a good half-dozen books that either just didn’t hook me or were picked up for research and proved not to be nearly as useful as I’d hoped.
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators, ed. Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, trans. various, narr. Katharine Chin. Anthologies like this are really great samplers of work you may not have encountered or, in this case, may not even have much access to. This one ranges all across the genre spectrum, from cultivation fantasy to nearly encyclopedia-style SF, with some time travel and some very understated contemporary fantasy and so on and so forth. Interspersed with these are essays on related topics, largely focused on the history of Chinese science fiction (and the roles of e.g. female authors or the webnovel format in that history) or else on the challenges and choices of translation. Scattering them throughout is probably a good move from the standpoint of convincing more people to read/listen to them — grouped together at the front or the back, there might be more temptation to skip — but it did give me a bit of mental whiplash, since I was listening to the audiobook in situations where I didn’t want to pause it and go do something else while waiting for my brain to shift from fiction mode to nonfiction mode. I may very well pick this up in print, in part because it would help me to see in written form the names that went speeding by in audio. (Novels at least give you a while to familiarize yourself with the names; short fiction — even long-ish stories/novelettes, which many of these are — much less so.)
Digging Up the Past, Leonard Woolley. Eheheheheeeee. This is probably not so funny if you weren’t an archaeology major, but whee, blast from the past! Woolley originally published this book in 1930, though this is a later, updated edition. I read it because I have two separate story ideas that would both involve archaeology of roughly this era, and my god, Woolley delivered exactly what I needed to my door — and some things I didn’t know I needed.
For the former, I specifically mean details on how digs of the era were run, when it was common to have huge numbers of relatively unskilled laborers on site. Woolley goes into everything from how those laborers are organized into small gangs and compensated for what they find to how to decide where to dig (in an era where you didn’t have things like magnetometry to guide your decisions). He also scatters about all kinds of anecdotal gems of the sort I totally want to work into one of these stories if I can. And it’s a salutary reminder to me of how the culture-historians thought in the days when the only way you could get absolute dating was if a date was literally written on some artifact you found, i.e. before the advent of carbon dating.
. . . and then there are the bits you cringe at. Like the whiffs of racism coming off half the things Woolley says about Arab workmen, or — very different flavor of cringe — when he opines that honestly, it would be a great loss to art but no loss to archaeology if a museum were to collapse into rubble, because by that point archaeologists have extracted all the information they can and the artifact is now superfluous. Hahahahah no, sir, not in the slightest. Please tell me you never threw anything out on those grounds.
Return of the Trickster, Eden Robinson. Finale of its trilogy; my thoughts on the first book and the second book
This one, oof. It very nearly reads as one ongoing narrative climax, with stuff blowing up from page one. And it gets extremely dark, with Quite a Lot of Gruesome Torture. After going through that, I wanted way more than two measly pages of denouement — especially when said denouement is just a flat summary of what happens to the various characters afterward. If somebody is about to spend the next year in trauma therapy, it would be nice to give them — and the reader! — a gentler off-ramp than “okay, all the murdering is done now; you’re free to go.” This felt a lot more brutal than the earlier books (and to be clear, they were often not nice). I’m not sorry I read it, but if this had been the tone from the start, I probably would not have read the whole series.
Come, Tell Me How You Live, Agatha Christie Mallowan. Yes, that Agatha Christie — presumably the “Mallowan” was included here to help advertise to her readers that this was not one of her mystery novels.
Instead it’s her account of going with her archaeologist husband to Syria from 1935 to 1937, where they excavated several prehistoric tells (well, her husband excavated; she assisted with finds and apparently was writing a novel for at least part of that time). Parts of it are hilarious; parts are, to no one’s surprise, mildly to cringingly racist; there is one utterly inexcusable comment about the Armenian genocide. It is very full of useful details about life on a dig of that sort, and also of travel in that period — less the logistics (though some of that) and more the lived experience, about everything from obtaining clothes for the trip to sharing a very luggage-filled train compartment with someone you share absolutely no language with to realizing you’ve worn your shoes down unevenly because you’re always circling a tell in the same direction while looking for surface finds. It’s less useful on the archaeology front than the Woolley book was — which is unsurprising as Christie was not an archaeologist — but that’s fine; I need both things.
Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon, Eric H. Cline. Modern book this time, but focused on the same general period. Cline’s subject is the “Chicago excavators,” i.e. the rolling series of archaeologists from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute — renamed just yesterday, now the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa — who worked at the tell of Megiddo (a.k.a. Har Megiddo, a.k.a. Armageddon) from 1925 until World War II: both the work they did and what it uncovered, and the parade of personality conflicts and other bits of social drama that drove a fair bit of the turnover in staff during that time.
Tell excavation is fascinating! Well, it is if you’re me. A tell is an artificial mound built up, not deliberately, but through centuries and millennia of occupation, depositing strata like a layer cake. The Chicago excavators spent years methodically stripping one entire layer after another off Megiddo — which is so not how anybody would do it now — before finally switching to trenches that cut cross-sections through the mound. Tragically, neither of my two story ideas involve a tell, so I can’t really make use of that aspect in my fiction, but it was fun to read about. As for the personality conflicts, hoo boy. I mean, it’s sort of inevitable when you have people living in the middle of nowhere with only a handful of peers to talk to (unsurprisingly, they didn’t socialize much with their Egyptian and Palestinian workers), but even so. I got a ton of valuable information off this about dig management (and mismanagement), which I will absolutely put to use.
Worrals Carries On, W.E. Johns. Second of its series, fiction from the 1940s about a female W.A.A.F. pilot in World War II. These are delightful little snack books: I demolished this one in about two hours, I think, and it was exactly the sort of easy and exciting read I wanted. Once again, Worrals uncovers a Nazi spy, but this time she winds up staging the evacuation of some trapped British military personnel from France. The titles for these books are largely so bland that I can already tell I’m likely to have difficulty remembering which is which, but my mnemonic for this one is that the rescuees are her carry-on baggage for the flight home!
Brain Games for Blocked Writers: 81 Tips to Get You Unstuck, Yoon Ha Lee. A short book that’s exactly what it says, a set of (brief) suggestions or exercises that might help jar your brain loose when you’re stuck on the book you’re currently writing. Some of them are about plotting, others about brainstorming on your characters or your worldbuilding; they’re deliberately intended to be zany and off-the-wall rather than the systematic approaches another book might suggest, specifically for people who maybe don’t have much luck with being systematic. Many of them include personal anecdotes leading up to the suggestion itself, which gives it all a conversational tone. Whether or not I will ever try any of the exercises, who knows, but it was fun to read. And I get mentioned in it, which was an unexpected surprise!
(Confidential to Yoon: I almost didn’t use that Battletech track, precisely because it comes from so very much the wrong genre! But I was having trouble finding something with the right mood and contour for the scene in question . . .)
Five Fridays make a theory post! The New Worlds Patreon is still talking about magic, but now we turn our attention to how magic intersects — or all too often doesn’t intersect — with the rest of the world around it. Comment over there!
After two years out of print, I am delighted to say that A Star Shall Fall is back in print! And I do mean print; at that link you will find both ebook and paperback editions. Faeries, dragons, English history, Halley’s Comet . . . I have to say, it’s been delightful revisiting my old haunts to prepare this edition.
With Fate Conspire will follow in May, and then the set will be complete once more!
I promise the New Worlds Patreon will get less grim very soon now . . . but before then, we have to talk about capital punishment. Comment over there . . .
Rather dark material this week on the New Worlds Patreon, as we look at the (regrettably) long history and wide use of torture, especially for interrogation purposes. If you’re up for that subject, then comment over there.
Yesterday the Bay Area experienced a lot of really high winds, and to absolutely nobody’s surprise, a lot of places lost power.
We . . . lost half of our power.
As in, half the rooms have electricity, and half do not. Which is a thing I didn’t know could happen until yesterday! Current theory involves the phrase “hot leg” (which has led to me opining that somebody needs to write a hard-boiled electrician parody), and the possibility that one of the two hot legs got knocked out, but the other still works. So we have power in the rooms connected to the working leg — or rather, to the elements that are on the working leg, since the wiring done by a previous owner of this house has left things a bit . . . idiosyncratic. The main kitchen lights and the microwave do not work, but the fridge does (thank god) and the lights over the sink. The lights in the den don’t work, but the outlet the TV is plugged into does, so we can watch TV in the dark. We didn’t lose internet because my husband installed an uninterrupted power supply for it a while ago, and before that could run out, we used an extension cord to plug the networking gear into an outlet in my office, which is still fully functional. The main problem, from my perspective, is that the furnace is one of the things not working and it’s getting pretty chilly in here. Time to break out the space heater, the fleece, and the fuzzy socks, I guess.
No word on when this will be fixed. Given the scale of outages in the Bay Area, I’m sure they have crews working flat-out to restore power, and mine being fairly localized (it’s just my block), we’re probably lower-priority than the failures that hit orders of magnitude more people. I can manage for now. But it is weird, having this jigsaw puzzle of electricity vs. not.
The New Worlds Patreon continues its look at police with the question of what kinds of duties fall under their responsibility — comment over there!
After a covid-induced delay (not mine; there was an outbreak at the warehouse, and I hope everyone involved has recovered), The Game of 100 Candles is out now! It’s the return of the Legend of the Five Rings-set, Japanese-inspired, queer romance-tinged supernatural mystery series, now with clan politics added into the mix!
The demon-vanquishing samurai, Asako Sekken and Agasha no Isao Ryotora, are summoned to Winter Court. Their exploits with the Spirit Realms have taken a toll on the pair and the cut and thrust of Rokugani politics proves challenging. After being urged to share their tales of adventure, the Winter Court guests begin to fall into a deep sleep from which they cannot wake. Fearing foul play, the Phoenix demand retribution, but Sekken and Ryotora uncover the hand of a supernatural trickster seeking entry to the mortal realm. The path to victory will risk their lives and the strange bond between them. But they must succeed, lest something awful escape into Rokugan.
It is available in print, ebook, and audiobook from a variety of fine retailers. And as we speak, I am 2/3 of the way through writing the third and final book of the series!
[Everything below is from my friend Rachel Manija Brown, reposted with permission from here. I have used the form on whitehouse.gov to contact the federal government; you can do the same.]
I have written a post which I have copied below. Feel free to link if you don’t have Facebook. If you do have Facebook, please share it.
Please share this widely! I’m a resident of Crestline, CA and a former disaster relief worker for the American Red Cross. This is the worst disaster response I’ve ever encountered. One week after an unprecedented snowstorm, we’re in dire straits and getting very little assistance.
Crestline and other areas affected by the San Bernardino snow disaster need help. We need a FEDERAL disaster declaration, door-to-door welfare checks for people trapped in their homes, door-to-door help shoveling paths out of the snow, removal of 10’ and higher ice berms trapping our cars, reimbursement for disaster-related expenses, and permission to return to our homes if we need to leave the mountain to get medical aid or supplies. Please contact President Biden, CA Governor Newsom, and San Bernardino elected officials to urge this help. You can just copy the requests in this paragraph, but read on if you want more details about what’s going on – and my own story.
We are used to snow here, and most residents are well-prepared for a typical snowstorm. Crestline normally gets six inches to two feet of snow. We got over nine feet of snow. Individual residents are not prepared for that, and we are overwhelmed.
Some people are literally trapped inside their homes by snow blocking their doors. Others can leave their homes but not their yards because the snow is over their heads. Many streets are not plowed, so no vehicles can drive. When streets are plowed, the snow is pushed to the sides and forms 10’ – 20’ walls of solid ice which block cars and driveways. The official statement of San Bernardino is that there will be no help breaking down the ice walls or shoveling paths to homes – they are only willing to plow the streets. These are not normal ice berms and individuals cannot break them down! We need help with this.
Many people are running out of food, as the only grocery in Crestline collapsed due to snow and the one in the next closest town partially collapsed. The only food distribution is at city centers, and it’s not in the same places every day. Many people cannot get past the ice walls or walk miles through snow up to their waist or over their head to get to the food. Because the food distribution points rotate rather than being in the same place consistently, people are struggling for hours through the snow only to find there is no food there that day. The sites are announced over the internet the day before, but many people have their internet cut off due to the storm and have no way of knowing where the food will be. We need consistent, daily food distribution sites. We also need door to door food distribution as many people can’t walk to the sites. Remember, our cars are trapped and we can’t drive!
Residents are allowed to drive down the mountain (if they’ve dug their cars out), but if we leave, we will not be allowed back up. No one is saying when we will be allowed back, but officials have hinted it will be at least a week and maybe a month or more. So anyone who drives down to get medical help or food is trapped away from their home with no idea of when they can return. Because of this, everyone is afraid to leave, so we have no way of replenishing our own supplies and no way of lightening the load in general by going to stay with friends. Residents need to be allowed back up the mountain!
Homes and businesses are collapsing from the weight of snow on the roof. We have ten times the amount of snow we normally get in some places, and we need help with it.
As gas vents are blocked by snow and gas pipes are breaking from the weight, a number of houses have exploded or burned down. I have yet to see any assistance shoveling out gas vents. Again, normally we could do this ourselves, but not when there’s nine feet of snow and ice!
Supposedly help is here. None of us have seen it. We’ve seen National Guard helicopters circling, but no boots on the ground. If ever there was a time for a large National Guard deployment, it’s now. The American Red Cross has opened a shelter, but it’s in Redland – off the mountain and 45 minutes away from anyone who actually needs help. We need the Red Cross on the mountain, where they’re actually needed.
We would love to help each other and are doing our best, but we literally can’t get to each other. We are overwhelmed and need help. I am especially worried about disabled, sick, and elderly people who live alone. What happens to them if they don’t have close neighbors who can check on them? We need door-to-door welfare checks.
Here’s my own story. At the beginning of the storm, one of my water pipes burst. The water company contacted me and told me they were cutting off my water. I filled my bathtub and all containers. (I also keep emergency water.) They plowed my street just up to my water meter, turned off my water, and backed out rather than continuing to plow the street. That was a week ago and to date they have been the only official response of any kind I have seen on my street.
Soon after, my internet cable broke in the storm. My 4G and telephone service also went out. I live alone and at that point I had no way whatsoever to communicate with anyone. I am five feet tall and my house was surrounded by snow over my head. I dug my way out of the house in the hope of making phone calls asking for help from a neighbor’s house. Then I discovered that the ways out of my property were also blocked. My driveway was under nine feet of soft snow, and my staircase, which is wooden and very steep, was under five feet of soft snow. Both ended in ice walls about ten feet high. Either way out was extremely dangerous.
I was so desperate that I climbed and slid down the staircase, then climbed the ice wall. I found a neighbor with internet and phone service, and began making calls for help. I explained to everyone that I spoke to that I had no communication whatsoever at my house and no running water, and that leaving my house was extremely dangerous. I requested help shoveling the staircase and for my internet and/or phone to be fixed so I could at least call for help. (I couldn’t move in with the neighbors or go to a shelter as I have pets and farm animals I need to care for.)
The response I got was disheartening. My internet company, Spectrum, offered me a service appointment ten days in the future. The San Bernardino official helpline took my number, but I never heard back from them. The plumbers I contacted about repairing my pipe so I can get my water turned back on were sympathetic, but they all lived in San Bernardino and worked in Crestline, and were not allowed up the mountain. One of them said that he has snow cats and a full crew and asked to come up to help shovel people out, but was refused permission to go up the mountain.
My neighbors shoveled a path up my stairs so I could get in and out without risking my neck. I still have no running water and no idea when that can be fixed. My car in under ten feet of snow and blocked by a fifteen foot wall of solid ice, so I can’t leave. I still have no reliable internet or phone service at my house. I am posting this from a neighbor’s house.
Please repost this to spread the word of the desperate situation and shocking mismanagement of this disaster. Please contact President Biden to ask him to declare a FEDERAL disaster. Please contact Governor Gavin Newsom of CA and elected officials in San Bernardino to ask them to send actual help, not just empty promises and false claims.
Thank you.
Rachel Manija Brown, writing from Crestline, CA on March 5, 2023.
Feel free to copy or reprint this anywhere with attribution.
And so the New Worlds Patreon rounds the corner into a new year! Year Seven, to be precise, and the wheels are turning in the background for the Year Six collection, which will be out next month. If you aren’t a patron, this is a splendid time to become one and get access to additional goodies (which include weekly photos from my travel stash, monthly non-fiction book reviews, behind-the-scenes looks at my own worldbuilding process, and more). And whether you’re a patron or not, this is also a splendid time to mention the project to people you think might enjoy it!
Meanwhile, the project itself marches on. We’re going back to crime again, but this time from the side of how we respond to it — starting with the origins of police. Comment over there!
