For the last essay not only of the month but of Year Five, the New Worlds Patreon flips the coin from “how do you keep from freezing” to “how do you avoid sweating to death.” Comment over there!

This week the New Worlds Patreon reflects the biases of its creator, as I discuss the human struggle to stay warm when it’s cold outside! Comment over there.

Energy sources are a big topic of conversation these days. With fossil fuels being both damaging to the environment and increasingly difficult to acquire, we’re looking into a wide variety of alternatives — some of which are cutting-edge, and others of which are very old indeed.

The one option that’s been with us from the start has been muscle power. Our own to begin with; later, after we domesticated animals, we got to use theirs instead. For millennia, everything from agriculture to textile manufacture to metalworking has been carried out with sweat and toil, fueled by the food we and our livestock eat. But of course, you can’t elbow grease your way to everything. No amount of direct labor will cause food to cook, nor pottery to harden, nor ores to smelt.

For that, we needed fire.

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The New Worlds Patreon would like to join such luminaries as Smokey the Bear in reminding you that you can prevent fires. And it’s much better to prevent them than to fight them once they’ve started! Comment over at Book View Cafe.

(We are getting very close to BVC being up and running again! But we aren’t there yet, so once again, this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is hosted here on my site.)

As devastating as fires can be nowadays, we have ways of dealing with them. In my kitchen there sits a canister of fire-suppressing chemicals; on my ceilings perch little disks that scream bloody murder when they smell smoke or carbon monoxide; if something goes wrong, a big truck will roll up and hook itself up to a hydrant that will spew out all the water I might need, at high enough pressures to reach upper floors with ease.

But rewind the clock, and things get ugly fast.

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On request, I’m reposting the next-to-last non-theory essay from the New Worlds Patreon, since the downing of the Book View Cafe website has rendered it inaccessible. Also, for those of you wondering what happened at over BVC, the short form is: we’re gearing up to give the site a major and long-awaited overhaul . . . and in the course of the gearing up, it, uh, went belly-up. >_< But the good news is that we’re on track to roll out the new! improved! site! very soon, and it’s going to be so much better once we do.

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I’ve learned more about naming in fiction since I first touched on the subject in New Worlds, Year One. So for the final New Worlds Patreon essay of the year — on a fifth Friday, and therefore a theory essay — I’ve got concrete advice on how to make your invented names seem more real. Comment over there!

EDIT: updated with a new link, as before.

I’ve already apologized to my faithful New Worlds patrons, but I’ll repeat it here: when I put up the poll for them to vote on the theme for December’s essays, I didn’t do the math and notice that if “sexual behavior” won out, that would mean I wind up posting about sexual misbehavior on Christmas Eve. And not in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge sense, but in the sense that this post comes with trigger warnings. So my apologies for the bad timing . . . but if you still want to read, you can comment over there. [Edited to provide new link due to BVC site difficulties.]

This week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is a touch Not Safe for Work, as it deals with our changing standards around what’s considered “normal” for sexual behavior. Comment over there!

It happens not infrequently with the New Worlds Patreon that I find a topic is too large to fit into a single post, and so it sprawls over two. That’s the case with sexual orientation; I’ve split homosexuality out for its own discussion. Comment over there!

Flowing very nicely out of November’s survey of sex and gender, this month the New Worlds Patreon moves on to sexual behavior. Starting with how we define “sexual orientation” . . . and other ways it could be, or has been, defined. Comment over there!

Appropriately enough, the New Worlds Patreon finishes up this look at sex and gender with non-binary gender — including the ways in which the modern permutations of this are exploding the concept of gender entirely. Comment over there!

This week, the New Worlds Patreon takes a look at the foundational elements of our gender systems, i.e. the ideas of male and female. Comment over there!

Continuing on from last week’s look at biological sex and the ways in which even that is affected by culture, the New Worlds Patreon turns to one that’s cultural turtles all the way down: gender! Comment over there.

For November the lovely supporters of the New Worlds Patreon have voted for a discussion of sex and gender. The starting point for that is sex (in the biological sense, not the activity) — comment over there!

Back in July, the New Worlds Patreon talked about language and how we represent its variations on the page. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, so for this month’s theory post (brought to you by their being five Fridays in the month), we’re looking at foreign and invented languages in the text! Comment over there.

This week in the New Worlds Patreon, we basically can’t do politics without organizing ourselves into groups — but how factionalism plays out is a little different depending on your form of government. Comment over there!

Continuing its survey of democratic government, the New Worlds Patreon turns its attention to who’s being elected — a president? A prime minister? A legislature? What kind? Turns out the answers to that are often very messy. Comment over there!

This week, the New Worlds Patreon looks at something that is still far too much of a hot-button issue today: the right to vote, and who does and does not get to have it. Comment over there!

The patrons of New Worlds have cast their votes! Which makes this month’s topic especially apropos, as we’re turning our attention to democracy as a form of government, beginning with the different forms that takes. Comment over there!