How does a society bestow recognition on those who have earned it?

These days we’re very accustomed to the idea of awards. Organizations great and small give these out to individuals or works that have achieved recognition in their field: Most Valuable Player, the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Oscar for Best Actress, the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Countless numbers of these exist, many of them in domains the average person never thinks about, because that’s just not our line of work. If you told me there’s an award for Year’s Best Urban Design in Highway Interchange, I’d readily believe you — because why shouldn’t there be? That’s important work that can be done badly or well, and an award is part of how you nudge everybody toward imitating the good examples.

Of course, any time you have an organization, you also have politics, with all the trouble that implies. I’m sure any one of us could name the problems with awards: institutional bias, popularity contests, logrolling, the work given a prize not because it’s actually standout among its peers but because the person behind it really ought to have an award for something, shouldn’t they? A great deal depends on how the award is run, whether that’s by popular vote, a jury, or some other process. No method is without flaw; it’s just a question of which flaw is in play for a given instance.

But awards aren’t the only option, and I’m fascinated by the different ways human beings have come up with to honor each other’s deeds.

One option is to bestow a title on the honoree. The fact that “aristocracy” means “rule of the best” has little to do with it as a system of government, but there’s a long history of granting an aristocratic title to someone as a way of recognizing their achievements — in fact, arguably it’s the origin of such titles, way back in the distant past. We see this pattern in play even today, with the U.K.’s Order of the British Empire and other chivalric ranks bestowed on musicians, actors, and other individuals completely uninvolved with the peerage or military. In the seventeenth century, Adriana Basile (sister of the fairy-tale writer Giambattista Basile) received a barony for her music and poetry.

Or the title might be more closely related to the achievement, and carry some responsibilities along with it. Although “laureate” can refer in general to anyone who has won an award (thereby metaphorically crowned with the “laurels” of victory), for the last few hundred years the West has had the institution of poet laureates. Essentially this is a revival of the court poets of old, as they’re individuals expected to compose poems for special occasions and the honor of their community, but the title carries a distinct connotation of honor.

These days, we have a weird double meaning around the word “doctor.” Etymologically it means “teacher,” and its roots lie in the university system, but in modern English it’s come to be strongly associated with medical doctors specifically — to the point where some people will now insist that non-medical academics shouldn’t call themselves “doctors,” even when they have a doctoral degree. But universities will also grant honorary doctorates to people in a wide variety of fields, more as recognition for their prestige and skill than for their academic achievements — much less medical ones. A comparable but inverse situation exists in East Asia, where “sensei” (to use the word’s Japanese form) means “one who comes before” rather than “teacher”: as such, it can be used as respectful address for anyone who’s achieved mastery or authority in their line of work.

Japan is also one of a small number of countries where a person of great artistic prestige can straight-up be declared a living national treasure. (Properly speaking, they’re Preservers of Important Intangible Cultural Properties — e.g. artistic traditions — but the other phrase is commonly used.) Since living people may cover themselves in scandal or otherwise disgrace their status, it may be safer to bestow such honors after they’re dead . . . and come to that, sainthood can be viewed in this light, as a form of recognition granted posthumously. Though saints used to be declared while living, too!

Of course, just because someone’s dead doesn’t mean you’re necessarily safe from problems arising. California, where I live, just officially renamed Cesar Chavez Day to Farmworkers Day in response to the revelation that Chavez — who genuinely did great things for the labor movement — also sexually abused minors. We like to name things (days, buildings, even awards) after famous people, but then sometimes have to backpedal when that person’s less admirable side is revealed, or when the tide of opinion shifts: for the latter, see the names of Confederate generals or men who slaughtered Native Americans in the name of white manifest destiny.

Riffing off names, these can provide a more unusual way of recognizing someone’s achievement. Going back to Japanese tradition, sometimes a powerful nobleman would honor a subordinate by allowing that man to use one of the kanji from the nobleman’s name in his own. The Age of Legends in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series had a neat angle on “name as award;” individuals customarily had two names, but those who achieved great deeds of one sort or another were permitted to use a third name. (So far as I’m aware, he provided no details on how this was determined.)

What do you get with your recognition, other than bragging rights? Many prizes come with some kind of physical representation, whether that’s a plaque, a trophy, or a piece of jewelry; a smaller number bestow money. Poet laureates and Japan’s Living National Treasures generally get an annual stipend, to help support them in their pursuit of their art. In societies with sumptuary laws (see Year One), an honored individual may be given special dispensation for a particular style of clothing, vehicle, or house. Even mortuary arrangements can be part of the recognition bestowed for achievement: great individuals might receive funerary parades, and it was recently announced that J.R.R. Tolkien will get a memorial in “Poet’s Corner,” the southern transept of Westminster Abbey, where a number of artistic luminaries are buried. (There’s not enough room there for everyone to get full burial, and the memorials often come well after the individual’s death.) Statues are a hugely popular option — and can become a highly visible and symbolic target for ire when opinion around that individual shifts.

So the interesting questions here are: what earns recognition, and what form does that recognition take? The answer to the former will tell you a ton about what kinds of skill or action that society values; if there’s a slew of honors for military service but none for public service, that’s a very different world from the one in which the reverse situation applies. And of course, the answer to the latter question shows a different kind of value in play, as the right to certain behavioral privileges might be the thing money can’t buy. But honored individuals starving in a gutter because all their recognition brought absolutely no financial support is a running and bitter joke . . .

I’ve mentioned before that until you have industrialization or some equivalent that makes the manufacture of things easier, people will own a lot less stuff, furniture included. But what does that look like in practice? What is a person’s house likely to include and exclude?

Probably the first thing to be invented was the chest or box, and not just because it’s useful for keeping your belongings from rolling around loose on the floor. It gives them (some) protection from vermin, and also — once locks are invented, about six thousand years ago — protection from thieves. Chests are useful for organization, for transport, for a bunch of different purposes.

Including subbing in for other pieces of furniture! I’m sure we’ve all experienced the phenomenon of every available flat surface ending up with stuff on it; well, boxes have a long history of doubling as tables, perhaps with a set of boards laid across the top to expand the surface and give somewhere for your knees to go, which can be removed when the table isn’t in use. Smaller boxes become stools to sit on, with or without cushions for padding. Long chests, topped with a mattress, have served as beds — which probably adds to the security if your valuables are inside. It’ll be one heck of a skilled thief who can get in there without waking you up.

Sleeping atop a chest is also good for getting you off the floor, which means you’re away from cold drafts and less likely (though not guaranteed) to have a mouse or a beetle run across your face. But we’ve already covered beds, back in Year Four, so I won’t repeat all that here. Instead let’s go back to what’s early and common: the shelf.

This can either be a freestanding structure or something fixed to the wall, and it has the obvious merit of expanding your storage options vertically, making better use of the space. But while people nowadays tend to use shelves in the public parts of our houses for storing things like books, photos, and pretty knick-knacks, in earlier times they’ll be much more like a modern pantry or garage, holding utility items. And, again, holding them away from vermin, though enterprising critters will still find a way. Meanwhile, purpose-built tables (as opposed to repurposed chests) offer storage room beneath, again making better use of what would otherwise be wasted space.

(By the way, if you want to see “making better use of the space” really take off in a modern context, look at tiny houses or watch a Japanese home remodeling show. When you’re operating in close quarters, ingenuity around where to put shelves, cabinets, closets, and other storage rules the day. I have to imagine the same would be true of some futuristic person living in an orbital habitat or other confined place.)

Combine shelves with chests, and you get cabinets. As anybody with a chest-style freezer knows, a top-opening box can be a nightmare for internal organization; one that opens on the side and has subdivisions within is vastly more useful. Drawers seem to be a much later development, though, which makes sense when you think about the additional material required and the woodworking challenge of getting the drawer to slide in and out anything like smoothly.

What about chairs? These are shaped by both history and culture. They exist going back for thousands of years, especially when you include stools (folding or rigid) alongside chairs with backs. But they’ve often been elite or special-use items, with most people — even rich people! — sitting on floor cushions; Elizabeth I’s ladies-in-waiting took their meals in chairs at tables, but sat on the floor the rest of the time. There’s a practical reason for this: when most rooms are heated by wood fires in a hearth, being on the floor puts you below the worst of of the smoke. As chimneys improve, though, smoke reduces, and chairs become more appealing places to be.

But bring your cushion with you. I haven’t been able to find out when attached upholstery was first developed; quite possibly we don’t know, given how poorly materials like that would survive archaeologically. Regardless of timing, it’s definitely only for the wealthy, and not just because of the added expense: think about the difficulty of keeping it clean and vermin-free. A ruined cushion can easily be thrown away, but ruined upholstery has to be torn off and replaced, or a new chair acquired.

Then there’s the category of furniture that goes under many names: couch, sofa, settee, and more. These have come and gone, and they blur into other categories as well (a “couch” originally meant a bed). Once again, I think these more often had removable mattresses and cushions rather than the installed upholstery we’re used to. The Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans dined on such things, chaise longue-type couches where they could recline while they ate, rather than sitting upright. After that went out of fashion in Europe (apparently during the medieval period!), the sofa, to use its Turkish-derived name, came to be associated with the Middle East, and only filtered back into Europe later.

Furniture, of course, comes in many more kinds than this. We have specialized versions of the items I’ve already mentioned, like end tables and footstools and étagères and curio cabinets and trundle beds and recliners and . . . you get the point. We also have pieces of furniture built for specific purposes not needed in most of the past, like the filing cabinet in my office. But that all comes later, with wealth and especially with the cheaper production afforded by industrialization. (Though it’s not purely a one-way street: we no longer have things like free-standing braziers to help heat our rooms.)

That doesn’t mean, however, that the future is going to be even more furniture-crammed. Fashion plays a role here; one generation will fill their houses full of stuff, and then the next will rebel against all that clutter and strip down toward a more minimalist look. The shift to digital technology and other modes of entertainment has greatly reduced the need for bookshelves in some households, or filing cabinets, or other things meant to wrangle paper in its various forms. If we improve both 3D printing and the recycling of its materials, then we might be able to create furniture when it’s needed, then get rid of it as soon as the use has passed.

The key point is that our current state of furnishing is neither universal nor inevitable. And changing up what’s in the room may change how the characters behave there!

Don’t assume corridors.

This is my mental shorthand for reminding myself that, when you’re looking at history — and when you’re building a secondary world — certain things you take for granted as natural and inevitable may not be. Back when I started drafting the Elizabethan faerie fantasy Midnight Never Come, I had two characters conversing while walking down a corridor and out onto a balcony at Hampton Court Palace. Got to London for my research trip and discovered that not only does the building have no balconies (which I would have known if I’d looked more closely at pictures), but back in that era, it had no corridors. No hallways, passages, or whatever word is used in your locality for the interior spaces that connect rooms to each other. Instead, rooms just opened directly onto one another: an arrangement you may have seen if you’ve visited a stately historical home from the eighteenth century or watched the kind of movie set in such places.

Hallways give you greater privacy, by providing a buffer of empty space between rooms and by making it possible to come and go without tramping through other rooms that may be occupied. But they also kind of waste space, since the hallway is only used for coming and going, maybe with some decoration to liven it up. I’m fairly sure they became more common post-industrialization, when cheaper materials and greater efficiency in construction made it easier to justify empty space like that.

But the idea wasn’t unknown in earlier ages; it just tended to appear somewhere else. Specifically, on the outside of the building, rather than in the middle. Quite a lot of places are fringed with covered colonnades, peristyles, loggias, verandas — again, there are a number of terms. These not only grant shelter as you pass from room to room, but shelter the rooms themselves, preventing the rain and sun from beating directly on the walls, doors, and windows (while still allowing for some natural light). In Japan, these spaces could sometimes be closed off with removable shutters in the winter, thereby providing a modicum of insulation for the rooms behind them . . . and, yes, turning that space into a corridor.

Going back to those stately eighteenth-century European houses, though, some of them did have corridors — just not for general use. If you were rich enough, then not only did you have servants, but you could afford to build in a fashion that minimized how often those servants had to be seen. If you’ve ever spotted a camouflaged door in the wall, paneled or papered to look like everything around it, that’s a servants’ door. It probably gives access to a narrow passage behind that leads to the service areas of the house — often including a dedicated staircase — so that servants could come and go with minimal disturbance to the inhabitants and guests. (In the really ugly scenarios, e.g. those where the servants are actually slaves, there might even be an intent to segregate them so they don’t “sully” the regular doors and stairs.)

This points us toward another broad principle of layout, which is the separation of the public and private. Even in a one-room peasant’s hut, odds are good that the bed will be at the back of that room, and the work area is at the front. That’s partly for practical reasons — you don’t want to be carrying firewood and buckets of water and dead chickens past your bed, or hauling those things any farther than you have to — but the pattern persists throughout many types of residence, even when there are multiple entrances giving direct access to other parts of the building.

Quite simply, we tend to differentiate “that which strangers are allowed to see” from “that which is only for the family.” These lines aren’t hard and fast; people sometimes chose to entertain guests in their bedrooms, with the host even lying in bed during the conversation. But that was usually a mark of intimacy, an honor of sorts offered to select guests: “You may enter my private sanctum!” Less privileged guests were received in public rooms.

Private space comes in two kinds, though, one of which is bedrooms and other personal areas, the other of which is the service quarters I mentioned before. The shift toward open-plan architecture in recent decades is a deliberate, though not complete, breaking of that latter distinction: rather than the kitchen being separated from the dining and other social areas, it’s incorporated into them, in ways that genuinely reflect changes in the status of women and how we entertain guests. The laundry room, however, is still probably separate, or tucked into a closet: that part remains not for public viewing. (Though attached garages in car-centric cultures can make a weird hash of this, if you pick up a guest at the airport, drive them to your house, and then . . . bring them in through the laundry room.) Worth thinking about when worldbuilding, even if household tasks are carried out via magic or handwavy technology — where do you put your matter replicator?

How the spaces get separated will depend on the overall architecture. In a house built around a courtyard, reception areas will be toward the front, service and private chambers toward the back. If you have enough space, the service areas — including quarters for the servants to live in — might even be one or more separate buildings; as the kitchens essay in Year One mentioned, this is important for removing smells and fire risk from the main building.

If instead you have one structure, but it’s multi-story, then many of the personal spaces will be upstairs. Not too far upstairs, though; a place big enough for servants’ quarters often sticks them in the attic, where you have to climb a lot of steps and then probably put up with sloping ceilings encroaching on your space. Or, if soil conditions permit, service rooms and servants’s bedrooms are placed in a half-basement: not fully subterranean (as that creates its own problems), but with only a thin strip at the top where windows can let in light and air.

None of this, to be clear, is a hard and fast rule. The specifics will always depend on circumstances — which include fashion. Once garden design really got rolling, a lot of European houses placed their main entertainment rooms on the “piano nobile,” an Italian term for the first floor above the ground, from which you could have a nice view. Meanwhile, in the days before indoor climate control, it was fairly common for Mediterranean households to preferentially occupy the cooler ground floor in the summer, then move upstairs for the winter.

And shifting like that was made easier because of the last principle to bear in mind: that we are far more committed these days to the notion of dedicated, single-purpose rooms than people used to be. We even have regulations saying things like “bedrooms must have exterior windows for safety” and “you can’t list a rental space as a bedroom if it doesn’t have an attached closet.” But when the function of a room depended largely on what furniture you put in it and people had a lot less furniture, then rearranging according to the needs of the moment was much simpler to achieve.

So the layout was what you made of it. But the underlying principles were common enough to be fairly safe bets to lean on!

Having referred a few times to the concepts of purity and purification, maybe we should circle back and talk about what those mean.

If your thoughts immediately went to the online meme of the “purity test,” you’re not entirely wrong. That checklist of sexual and sex-adjacent acts hints at the idea that you’re “stained” by such behavior — an attitude that shows up in full force when you start looking at, say, evangelical Christian attitudes toward sex before marriage. Those offer a constant drumbeat of imagery that associates the non-virgin bride with something irreparably soiled, like a chewed-up piece of gum. It’s about more than just her body; she herself is made worthless by the act.

But it isn’t all about sex. So let’s step back and look at the bigger picture.

Impurity, in a spiritual context, is a metaphysical contamination, and it’s distinct from sin; it’s not about doing something wrong. It may be associated with bodily matters — in fact, it often is — but the stain goes deeper than the flesh. Impurity can make someone unfit to engage in certain religious acts until they are cleansed. It can cause them to pollute those who come into contact with them. Sometimes it’s actively dangerous: a tainted individual has the power to blight and curse, causing misfortune, withering crops, even harming unborn babies.

(Because these essays are written with an eye toward the use of these concepts in stories, that power may sound cool. In societies where this kind of thing is seen as real, though, it is definitely not admired.)

What makes you impure? As I said above, it’s often linked to the body. Elimination of waste might be a minor defilement; washing your hands afterward is a good idea anyway, but it might be required before you’re allowed to touch sacred things or engage in certain rituals. In some cases sex is also considered polluting — not because it’s inherently bad, but because it involves the emission of bodily secretions from a region of the body that’s already pretty suspect.

The two big sources of impurity, however, are blood and death. There’s a reason why, if society has some kind of “untouchable” caste, they probably engage in occupations deeply concerned with such forces: butchers, executioners, gravediggers, and so on. Coming briefly into contact with blood and death is polluting, but when your life involves regular and sustained interaction with them . . . it’s not hard to see why the stain starts to look indelible.

What about warriors, though? Here, we see the double standard at work. After all, their occupation involves killing: maybe less often than a butcher cuts up a carcass or an executioner hangs a person (especially once you factor in how many deaths in war don’t happen right there on the battlefield), but they’re still murdering their fellow humans. But warriors also tend to be — not always, but often — among the elites of their societies. It isn’t that they aren’t defiled by combat; they very well may be! That contamination, however, is seen as removable, not inherent. Purifying men becomes a routine post-battle or post-war activity, part of how they shift gears back to domestic life.

Women, by contrast, very much get the short end of this stick. If blood is polluting, then being an adult woman generally involves a regular cycle of contamination. I’m not going to rehash Year Four’s coverage of practices around menstruation, but refer there for discussion of the ways in which the impurity of that gets handled. Childbirth likewise involves quite a lot of blood and, particularly in the historical past, a high risk of death for mother, child, or both: that fraught, liminal act may leave all parties in need of purification before they’re allowed to return to normal life. To us that sounds like a negative thing, and indeed it can be so; on the other hand, it can also mark out a stretch of time for recovery.

Even when there’s a positive angle, though, attaching the notion of impurity to menstruation and childbirth tends to have an underlying negative effect. Look a few paragraphs back to the discussion of untouchables and their indelible pollution; now look at the situation women are in. No few religions have denied women full participation in key ritual activities, positions of power, or even access to sacred spaces because they will never truly be pure. (Exceptions can be made for pre-pubescent girls or post-menstrual elders, but as far as I know, they usually aren’t.) This, in turn, loops us back around to that question of whether sex is a source of contamination: sometimes the answer is “yes” because it involves contact with women, and specifically with the most impure part of them.

Assuming that a person’s impurity can be removed, how does one go about doing that? Unsurprisingly, physical washing is the number one method, though sometimes the cleansing is more symbolic than anything else: witness the little dippers for water at many religious sites in Japan (they spread to Buddhist temples from Shintō shrines), or the Islamic practice of tayammum (a dry cleansing used in situations of water scarcity, or where full washing would cause problems). In some cases ordinary water suffices; in others, you need a properly sanctified ritual bath, or running water, or salt water.

Salt is a great symbolic source of purity overall, which is why it crops up so often as a way to repel demons and the like. In Shintō — that being a religion greatly concerned with purity — it’s used to cleanse people after funerals, and set in dishes to keep away evil spirits. Also, if you’ve ever seen a Shintō priest wielding a stick with one or more white paper streamers attached, that’s an ōnusa, which acts as a kind of magnet to draw impurity off of people or objects. Because people aren’t the only things that can be impure! Pollution can attach to places and items, too, especially if they’ve been connected with death or blasphemous acts. Just as with a person, physically cleaning the object or space may be part of how you purify it.

In worldbuilding, though, you don’t have stick purely to washing as the route to purity. The real world contains any number of other methods; they’re just individually less widespread. Roll an egg over someone’s body — especially a white egg? Fan them with a special fan? Prayers are pretty common, especially if they’re conducted by a duly authorized religious leader. The important thing, from a setting perspective, is whether the reader can see why that act is considered cleansing. They’ll have a hard time believing in a purification rite that involves dung.

And, as with all our ascetic topics this month, you have the question of what metaphysical effect, if any, this has in your world. Maybe your spiritually-based magic really doesn’t work if the character is polluted, because the divine powers won’t answer them in that state. Maybe someone can use their defiled state to blight those around them. It’s up to you . . . but if you go this route, remain aware of the political dimensions noted above, the ways in which these principles have been used to oppress entire groups of people. You don’t have to mimic those patterns, but you should know how they happened, and take that duly into account.

Having mentioned celibacy in the previous essay, I now want to return to it and unpack in full.

Celibacy is a more complicated term than it seems on the surface, because we don’t consistently distinguish it from abstinence: witness the rise of the term “incel,” or “involuntary celibate,” which might be more appropriately framed as “inab.” Abstinence, in the sense of limited-time disengagement from sexual activity, can happen for a wide array of reasons, all the way from purification and discipline, to saving one’s energy (physical or spiritual) for other purposes, to birth control, to waiting for marriage, to the incel situation of not being able to attract a partner. (Though in that latter case, many of them are unlikely to be refraining from masturbation, which abstinence proper would usually imply.) By contrast, celibacy often takes on the more specific meaning of a lifelong vow to forgo sexual activity of all kinds. That vow is most frequently taken in a religious context, and as such, it goes hand-in-hand with other kinds of religious asceticism.

For certain kinds of people, that vow may come as a relief. While celibacy and asexuality are not the same thing, the religious justification for celibacy can free asexuals from the societal expectation that they will marry and have children. (For them it is not a sacrifice, and celibacy is supposed to be a hardship one undertakes for the betterment of one’s soul, but it can still be a good option.) Homosexuals in a homophobic society may likewise find refuge in celibacy . . . though since that often entails living in a single-sex community, it can lead to intensified temptation as well.

For women, it means freedom from the significant risks posed by childbearing — and for that exact reason, many societies have side-eyed the prospect of women taking such vows. Too many nuns would mean not enough children, and in pre-modern society, that’s not merely a threat to patriarchal control; it could genuinely lead to population decline. But if you were female and horrified or terrified or merely bored by the prospect of giving birth, devoting yourself to God/the Buddha/some other religious focus instead offered an escape hatch.

It’s worth noting, though, that the celibate life can be taken up at any point in time; it doesn’t have to be synonymous with virginity. Plenty of people throughout history have sworn off sex after years of marriage and reproduction — because while celibacy is not restricted only to monastic communities, the link between those is extremely widespread, and retirement into religious life was a common end-point for those who made it that far and could afford the graceful exit. (Monasticism will get its own essay at a future point!)

It’s even possible to be celibate and married. While some of those retiring into monasteries are widowed, others still have their spouses. So, even though “celibate” etymologically refers to the state of being unmarried, in some contexts people can formally vow not to have sex with their husband or wife again. (Historically this often accompanied entering a monastery, but not always: some couples remained in secular life.) Unsurprisingly, the traditions that allow it often require that both parties agree! No abandoning your partner to a cold bed without their permission. If divorce is allowed, one spouse might vow celibacy and the other go off to remarry, but if it isn’t, both have to take the vow.

We in the West, of course, are likely to associate celibacy above all with priesthood. I’m not going to attempt to rehash here the entire complex discussion of which branches of Christianity have required celibacy for which levels of clergy and when they have required it (because the answer has changed over time); that could fill a whole book on its own. But where it is encouraged or mandatory, the rationale is much like that for asceticism in general — only more so.

Because it isn’t just about abstaining from sexual experience. (Yes, masturbation is usually outlawed, too. Monks and nuns often sleep fully clothed, and some orders mandate shared dormitories rather than solo cells specifically to stop people from doing anything in private.) Before quite recently, sex in these societies went almost universally hand in hand with marriage and children, and therefore with a host of worldly obligations. A married man or woman had to provide for their household, invest time and energy in the raising of children, and make arrangements for their futures: apprenticeships, spouses, inheritances, and so forth. No one could properly attend to those things and focus on the divine.

. . . though yes, it’s true that more than a few supposedly celibate clergymen had bastard children running around. Some of those clergymen were very highly placed; some of them even got their bastards high places within the Church itself. Just because they were theoretically focused on God rather than the advancement of their kin didn’t mean they followed through in practice.

But not every faith says that marriage and devotion to God are incompatible. In fact, some of them go the other way! Shinto priests are welcome to be married; Islam does not require marriage but certainly promotes it, and the same is true in Judaism. Sikhs are supposed to be householders, i.e. engaged in normal married existence. In some ancient Greek cities, failure to marry could mean a man lost his citizenship! For those religions, the godly life is not separate from the ordinary business of living, but intimately bound up with it.

As for whether one can be relieved of a vow of celibacy — not just abandon it, but be let out — that can be complicated and situational. I’m pretty sure I’ve read of historical shenanigans in the Catholic Church, usually in situations where a nobleman’s younger brother took holy orders and then was suddenly needed to continue the family line when his elder sibling died, but I can’t remember the specifics well enough to look them up. (If any of you know what I’m thinking of, let me know!) In general, though, the answer is no: if you ditch your vow, then you’re officially condemned for it. After all, a promise doesn’t mean much if you’re allowed to break it at will. That having been said, Vestal Virgins — the only instance of Roman culture championing celibacy — were allowed to exit that life after thirty years of service, though not all of them took the proffered out.

Celibacy, like asceticism, is something we rarely see in main characters. A huge percentage of our stories feature romantic relationships as at least a minor side plot, and where asexual protagonists appear, they generally don’t want to have sex, as opposed to it being an impulse they have chosen to deny. When a major character is under such an oath, odds are high they’ll wind up breaking it before the end of the story. We’re sufficiently invested in the idea that people should act on on their (non-harmful) desires that it’s difficult to sell many readers on the triumphant resolution of someone feeling sexual attraction and then not following through on it. (And if you write that story, the odds that someone will immediately write fanfic where they do get it on are pretty high.)

But there’s power in the notion of celibacy — including the sort I mentioned in the last essay, a literal spiritual power generated by the denial of that impulse. I’d be interested in reading stories that make use of it!

Fasting is one form of asceticism: the renunciation, whether short- or long-term, of material pleasures. But hoo boy is it the thin end of that wedge!

People can adopt an ascetic lifestyle for purely philosophical reasons; Stoicism in the classical era headed in this direction, though I think most of its adherents were more concerned with restraint and moderation than with absolute denial. The overwhelming majority of the time, though, asceticism is linked with religion — and specifically with transcendental religions, i.e. those which treat the divine as otherworldly and separate from the material world we all live in.

The logic there is pretty easy to follow. The divine is more important than the mortal, so it ought to be the focus of our attention. And if that’s the goal you’re pursuing, then aren’t mortal, material concerns a distraction from what really matters? You should set them aside so you can devote yourself more fully to God and the pursuit of salvation/the Buddha and the pursuit of enlightenment/etc. In some strands of thought, this world gets characterized as fundamentally evil, a trap we have to escape. Ascetism is the way to freedom.

Note that this isn’t (necessarily) the same thing as subjecting oneself to pain, or seeking that out for its own sake. A number of religious traditions involve practitioners doing horrible-looking things to themselves in pursuit of triggering a religious experience, but that doesn’t mean they think one should eschew pleasures as an ongoing habit. The latter, from what I can tell, seems to have cropped up most frequently as a feature of Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism: not to say that there haven’t been ascetic movements in Islam (e.g. Sufism) and Judaism or other faiths, but they haven’t achieved the same idealization and centrality as in those first four. (And yes, I’m aware that Buddhism’s “Middle Way” advocates against extremes of asceticism. That doesn’t mean lighter versions haven’t been very important to a number of Buddhist traditions.)

The basic practices of asceticism often involve disciplining oneself to live with a reduction in material comforts. I led into this essay with the one on fasting because it’s extremely common for ascetics to limit what they eat, how much of it they have, when they eat, and so on. Although “Buddhist temple cuisine” in East Asia can rise to the level of high art, in most cases the emphasis will be on plain, monotonous food, discouraging sensual pleasure from the act of dining. The purpose of food is to sustain the body and nothing more.

Next up is sleep. If you’re pursuing ascetic ideals, your bed should not be soft, and you shouldn’t spend much time in it, either. If you’re a normal Christian monk or nun, you might be getting up in the middle of the night to pray; if you’re St. Peter of Alcántara, you sleep standing up with a beam of wood for your pillow. As for doing anything in that bed other than sleep . . . you likely won’t be surprised to hear that celibacy is hugely common among ascetics. We’ll leave that one for the next essay, though, because it deserves to be unpacked at greater length.

What about bathing? While we have the idiom “cleanliness is next to godliness,” historically, not everyone has agreed. Quite aside from the obstacles (described in earlier volumes) that used to make regular bathing difficult, some ascetics have held that, since the body is unimportant at best, actively corrupting at worst, attending to it more than absolutely required for survival is mere vanity. So: minimal bathing, or none at all — and although that sounds horrifying to us now, some people thought of the resulting stench as the “odor of sanctity,” proof of the unwashed one’s holiness.

Secular entertainments, of course, are off the table. Ascetics aren’t supposed to watch plays, or read frivolous literature, or participate in dances. Music and literature are usually limited only to holy matters. Prayer is a far more suitable pastime, perhaps carried out under uncomfortable conditions: for a Catholic that might mean kneeling for a long time on a hard floor, while a Buddhist might stand under a cold waterfall.

Clothing should not only be un-ostentatious but quite possibly uncomfortable. The proverbial garment here is the hair shirt — in Catholicism, formally known as a cilice — which is an undergarment of coarse, skin-irritating fabric. Often worn for penance, it was therefore ideal for people wanting a more constant experience of humility. Going without shoes is another option, though “discalced” (shoeless) orders in Christianity may permit sandals: enough to protect the sole of the foot from danger, not enough to keep the rest of it warm.

Enduring cold is a recurrent option in temperate climes. Historical Catholic monasteries often had tight regulations forbidding the lighting of warming fires before a certain date, regardless of what the weather was doing; I wouldn’t be surprised if the same is still true today, except it applies to central heating instead. Similar regulations governed when you broke out winter clothes — which still might be what other people would consider inadequate for the weather! Basically, if it would make you more comfortable, you should limit it to the bare minimum necessary for safety and health.

. . . or you could go further.

Self-mortification can describe any of the above practices, but we often use it to mean the more severe end of the spectrum. In Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, the mortification on the flesh can be framed as a way to draw closer to Christ, by sharing in his suffering. This can involve everything from adding twigs to your hair shirt to scratch yourself more, to harsher and more extended fasts, to active practices like self-flagellation.

Which, from an outside perspective, sure does invite the label of “self-harm.” And the Catholic Church is not unaware of that risk; there’s a recurrent thread in its history of trying to discourage the extremes, and making sure that people only go there under the supervision of an appropriate spiritual director. In modern parlance, that person’s job is to make sure the behavior in question isn’t a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, or some other mental illness. But Church history is also full of devout people who desperately wanted to mortify themselves more than they were allowed — especially in pursuit of mystical visions during which they felt themselves to be in God’s presence.

Because that’s one possible result of ascetic life: spiritual power. Depending on your religious framework, it may purify the body and spirit, burn away karma, concentrate and intensify your personal energy, or enable you to contact and perhaps even compel the attention of the divine — the Sanskrit epics contain many instances of people practicing austerities (tapas) until the heat generated thereby forces a god to respond. (I recall my Hinduism professor phrasing this informally as “lighting a spiritual fire under their butts.”)

We see this occasionally in fiction as a thing the wise old mentor does, but I feel like it’s generally less common for protagonists. Not hard to imagine why; we tend to want our characters to partake in the full range of ordinary experience, rather than swearing off three-quarters of it. And since many of us disagree with the basic principle that one ought to subordinate the self and personal desires to the concerns of a higher power, it may be hard to get the reader on board with the idea that doing so is anything other than a tragic tale. But the notion that exercising self-denial is necessary to the generation of spiritual force seems like a fruitful one to me, with plenty of tasty potential for inner conflict!

Somewhere in the course of childhood, I got the impression that “fasting” meant “not eating anything.” This isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete: as shown by the well-known custom of Lent in the Roman Catholic Church, there are degrees of fasting, from the token to the incredibly strict.

On the lighter end, one might fast by abstaining temporarily from a particular food. For this to be meaningful, the change in diet should be more than trivial; if I abstain from mushrooms, which I don’t particularly like and almost never eat, how is that different from my ordinary life? Abstaining from meat or dairy is much more significant (and common) — though for a vegetarian or a vegan, again, that’s just business as usual. The stricter the fast, the less nourishment is permitted, until you reach the point at which no food may be eaten at all.

What about liquids? Again, it’s a spectrum. In religious contexts, temporary abstention from alcohol is (unsurprisingly) a common prohibition. People fasting before a medical procedure like a colonoscopy are allowed to have clear liquids, so they can get some calories in them for the day or so preceding. Other kinds of fasting might permit only water, to avoid dehydration; the absolute strictest forbid anything at all.

As you can imagine, that latter is not very sustainable, which is why timing also matters. During Ramadan, observant Muslims take nothing during daylight hours — which, depending on where you live, makes the fast much harder to maintain in the summer! (There are various religious opinions on how to handle this at extreme latitudes, or in space.) Once the sun sets, however, they’re free to eat and drink as needed. If your fast means continual abstention from food, or especially from drink, then you can only keep it up for a little while before you’re in medically dangerous territory. Which people have voluntarily entered, for all kinds of reasons!

Medical fasting usually tries to avoid negative side effects; it’s done for safety purposes before going under anaesthesia, or to test baseline blood sugar levels. Some people use intermittent fasting (which, like Ramadan, limits consumption to certain times of day) as a weight loss method: done right, fasting can indeed bring some health benefit.

Religious fasting sometimes goes much further. It often has overtones of purification, with the participants exerting conscious control over the base needs of their bodies and ridding them of the filth of excretion; because of this, a short fast is a common element before rites of passage or other such rituals. It may also be a form of penitence, showing your contrition for your sins by denying yourself the comfort of food. Extremely pious individuals, seeking to focus on the spiritual rather than the material, have taken it to great extremes — including all the way to the end. The Jain practice of sallekhana (fasting to death), meant to destroy karma that would influence your next rebirth, is officially not considered suicide; the Cathar endura was somewhat similar, with people on their deathbeds refusing everything other than water after they received the funerary rite of consolamentum. In historical Japan, some Buddhist monks underwent a process of lethal fasting designed to ensure their bodies would become natural mummies after their deaths, known as sokushinbutsu.

Or perhaps your fast goes beyond orthodox religion and into the realm of magic. Despite its dramatic-sounding name, a “black fast” is merely a strict form of Catholic fasting, akin to Ramadan, with nothing during the day and only a vegan meal and water at night. According to folklore, undertaking a black fast on certain holy days could bring special benefits, like protection from harm or sudden death. But some people took it further, using it as a form of spiritual vengeance: they would “fast upon” someone who had wronged them, with the intent of harming or even killing them outright.

Take away that magical angle, and you have the notion of fasting as a protest against injustice. In this form we often call it a hunger strike, and in Ireland, this appears to have roots stretching back to before Christianization. The practice there was usually to fast on the doorstep of the person from whom you wanted justice, and scholars theorize that this interfaced with the deep-seated customs around hospitality. (Letting somebody starve on your literal doorstep: the opposite of being a good host.) It’s not just an Irish practice, though, being found in India as well — and in modern times, Gandhi might well be one of the most famous examples of a hunger striker. His fame played a key role in the success of his fasts, as the Brits knew very well how bad it would look if somebody that well-known died in one of their prisons. Meanwhile, a no-name agitator might be allowed to starve to death without comment.

Because for a protest fast to work, it generally needs publicity. In pre-modern times it’s enough for a fast to be known within the community — which is another reason doing it on someone’s doorstep is useful; even if you get forcibly evicted, people will notice that happening. As society gets bigger, hunger strikers depend on news media to report their actions . . . and, if necessary, their deaths. In 1981 Ireland, Irish Republican prisoners made a point of fasting one at a time for more sustained attention, ultimately resulting in ten deaths.

Not all such fasts end fatally, of course. Some hunger strikers flinch; others succeed in achieving their aims and return to normal eating. But sometimes, their fasts end involuntarily, as authorities either decide they have a moral duty to prevent death or refuse to let the guilt of the striker’s death land on their heads. In these cases prisoners get force-fed, usually by means of a tube placed down their throats, though some slavers at the height of the trans-Atlantic trade used a speculum to pry open the mouths of slaves who refused to eat. Suffragettes in particular received this treatment, as the chauvinism of the era meant deaths of women would have cast their captors in a particularly bad light.

Before wrapping this up, I should make mention of the concept of inedia, i.e. the ability to live without eating. Some claimants of this ability insist they need only air, and are called breatharians; others say that sunlight is all they need. Mythologically, the concept seems to have its roots in South and East Asia — and of course, in speculative fiction it might be literally possible! Lots of cultivation novels assume their characters can build up the spiritual power necessary to survive without food, though they might still enjoy it as a sensory pleasure afterward.

In real life, however, there are no confirmed cases, because this simply doesn’t work. By all means, abstain from food or drink for short periods of time if it benefits you medically, spiritually, or politically. But be careful not to take it too far!

Uniforms, heraldry, flags. In a military context, these all serve the crucial purpose of communication. And if they seem like fairly primitive methods of achieving that, well, for most of history, primitive methods are all we’ve had.

When it comes to communication — whether that’s signaling to troops on the battlefield or sending a message to a different part of your force elsewhere — your options are fundamentally three: it can be visual, auditory, or written (a special case of visual). Touch and taste are far too short-range to be of any use, and while scent can theoretically travel farther, our olfactory senses are too poor to make much use of it. Even an alien species gifted with a better nose would face the problems of slow movement and dissipation over distance, reducing the signal’s utility.

Written communication is great in some ways, terrible in others. So long as everybody involved is literate, the message won’t get garbled in transmission: excellent! Unfortunately, it’s also vulnerable to being intercepted, altered, even forged outright. Prior to modern times, it’s also slow, being limited to the speed of whatever’s carrying it, whether that’s a guy on foot, a rider, or a pigeon (which, as Year Four discussed, only works in very specialized circumstances). Writing is handy for sending a message to another military detachment, but you’re not going to be able to use it to communicate with the guys currently locked in combat.

What about visual signals more broadly? Movies give us tons of examples of a flag being raised or waved to communicate with the troops . . . but those examples are often deeply flawed, with the same movement of the same flag having the magical ability to communicate whatever is needed in the moment. Worse still is the version where the commander just lifts his arm, and suddenly thousands of men know it’s time to march forward.

Visual signals only work if you can see them. Which sounds like an obvious statement, but now imagine that the flag — much less the raised arm! — is two, three, ten football fields away from you. (Doesn’t matter which type of football. The point holds regardless.) How well can you see it? Remember that battle lines can get extremely long when the armies involved are big; are your eyes good enough to pick out a bit of cloth half a mile or more away? Are you looking in the right direction when the signal goes out? What about when you march forward, and now the flag is behind you?

Flags and similar kinds of standards, like the Roman legionary eagles, mostly get used at much shorter range, to drive individual smaller units. Your standard-bearer is at the front of your group’s block, not the back; when the flag advances, so do you. When it stops, you stop. When it retreats, you retreat. (When it falls, you say oh shit. And then probably try to pick it up, or hope one of your buddies does.) It’s useful for moving a limited mass of soldiers around, but you can’t use it to transmit orders from the commander to that mass.

There are other visual ways to signal, e.g. by sending flares up into the sky, but you get the idea. Any such method is subject to these limitations on the battlefield, while over longer distances, you’re looking at the kinds of communication systems described in Year Eight. They are, generally speaking, blunt instruments at best, not capable of delivering complex information or instructions.

So what about sound? You won’t be surprised to hear me say this also has problems. Speech only goes so far; studies suggest that if you have a close-packed and quiet crowd and a good set of lungs, your voice might carry to a few thousand people, but “close-packed and quiet” does not describe battlefield conditions, nor communication at a distance. It’s a little unclear how long ago speaking trumpets (megaphones) were invented, but even those only boost your range a little.

Musical instruments do better, and they don’t require you to be facing them to receive the signal. As with flags, though, your “vocabulary” is limited, because relying on a complex melody to communicate “third unit of cavalry, circle around the army’s flank to intercept their reserves” is not so much courting failure as doing a swan dive into failure’s arms. It also turns out that, like flags, instruments have mostly been used to control the movements of smaller units: you’re only being cued to move if it’s your group’s horn or drum sounding the advance or retreat. (I presume, though I don’t know, that you know it’s yours because it’s loud enough to be obviously nearby, as opposed to farther down the field.) Once again, the commander can’t really use this to send orders from his post, because which group is he trying to signal?

Pretty much the only thing he can use is a messenger. Send someone on foot or on horseback with orders (written or verbal), and hope the messenger doesn’t get captured, killed, or ignored by the officer on the receiving end, who’s annoyed that some lackey claims he’s supposed to change his plans or move into action. There’s a reason we have that idiom about “don’t shoot the messenger” . . .

With all of this in place, you can see why modern technology had such a revolutionary effect on warfare. Telegraphs and radios, not to mention their later successors, mean that suddenly you can transmit your written or auditory signals vastly quicker — and that goes both ways! I’ve been talking as if everything is supposed to go from the commander to the troops, but he needs updates, too, and being able to send word more or less instantaneously that the center is collapsing or the right wing is about to be flanked opens up a whole new world of tactical responses.

Because if you were wondering how anybody managed when signaling was so crude and inefficient, the answer genuinely is “they kinda didn’t.” If your communication is limited, your control is limited. You deploy your troops for battle and then press play, with maybe one or two tricks held in reserve; everything else is up to the guys in different spots on the field, because there’s no way to manage more complex coordination and maneuvering.

But with every improvement in your signals, you acquire new options. Maybe your infantry units can not just advance, halt, and retreat, but wheel to face a new direction. Maybe you can tell in something like real time that your far-distant left is hard pressed, so you can dispatch reinforcements in time to do some good.

Which means that if you’re writing speculative warfare, the communications aspect is vitally important. Do they have telepathy? Flying animals with more capabilities than homing pigeons? Long-distance scrying or satellite surveillance? Teleportation? Anything that can transmit detailed information faster than a guy on a horse is a major advancement in tactical and strategic capability over most of human history. Meanwhile, the weaknesses of that method open up fascinating possibilities for trouble: can it be intercepted, altered, forged entirely? How can you use that to screw over your characters, er, I mean, make their lives more interesting?

The comedian Eddie Izzard has a bit in her show Dress to Kill where she characterizes colonialism as sticking a flag in the ground to claim a place, then ignoring the assertion of the locals that their home is their own because, well, they don’t have a flag, do they?

While obviously exaggerated for the purpose of comedy, the idea in play there isn’t without basis in fact. Nowadays, flags are the premier emblem of a country — and often smaller units thereof as well, like provinces and states and even cities. We march our flags in the parade of nations that starts off the Olympic Games; we brand our exports with them. We fly them high over our governmental buildings and lower them to half-mast in the wake of tragedy, as a signal that the whole community is (or should be) in mourning.

Flags probably have their origins in a military context, and we’ll get into how they were used there more in the next essay. Fabric banners, as opposed to standards more broadly, may have been invented twice: one in south or eastern Asia, the other in ancient Rome, though I can’t swear that there wasn’t influence from former on the latter. They can be attached to the side of a pole, to a horizontal cross-bar at the top, or both; the advantage of a horizontal attachment is that you’re not dependent on wind to lift the flag and display its design.

Nowadays almost all flags are not only rectangular but adhere to one of a small number of ratios in their proportions (2:3, 1:2, or 3:5). There are still exceptions, though, and they used to be more common. If you look at the state flag of Ohio, you’ll see an example of a swallowtail pennon: a flag wider at the hoist (attachment) than at the fly (loose edge), with a forked edge rather than tapering to a triangle point. Heraldic rules used to dictate who carried what style of flag at what size, along with what could be placed on the flag; for example, differentiating a banner from a pennon helped differentiate a knight banneret from a knight bachelor.

Speaking of heraldry . . . As you might expect, a lot of early European flags consisted of sticking one’s heraldic arms on a pole. Because of that, the rules governing design ensured a fairly high degree of clarity, like you would want on a battlefield. But the intersection of various emblem traditions has in modern times produced some fairly terrible flags, especially at the level of cities: the city has a seal, and it needs a flag, so it just sticks the seal on a flag and calls it a day. The result is a fiddly, complex image nobody would ever have bothered with if they needed to embroider or appliqué the entire thing, instead of mechanically printing it.

The term for flag design is vexillography, and boy howdy do people in that field have Opinions about the right way to go about it. These days, there’s general agreement that a flag should be relatively simple — often characterized as “a child could draw it.” Many countries have adopted a triband, i.e. a flag divided into three bands either horizontally or vertically, which may or may not be equal in width. Some of these have a “charge,” an emblem of some kind superimposed, usually at the center (but not always). When each band is a different color, it’s termed a tricolor, and since the late sixteenth century, that style has been associated with republicanism and revolution. As democratic governance has spread around the world, tricolors have followed — though of course nothing stops a government from adopting that design as a fig leaf over very un-democratic rule!

Of course, these get very repetitive, and (outside their charges) they can fill up the available color design space very fast. Modern flags often depart from the heraldic rules for tinctures, both in the colors they use and how they’re positioned. The green/yellow/red of Pan-Africanism or the black/white/green/red of Pan-Arab nationalism don’t always avoid putting a color against a color; the flag of Argentina specifies a pale blue instead of the more midline hue seen in many other flags. Non-triband flags also sometimes reach for ways to distinguish themselves from the herd; the redesign of Minnesota’s state flag (which used to be a poster child for bad design) cleverly inverted the sideways triangular charge called a “pile” so as to echo the shape of the state itself. When everybody has a flag, it helps to get creative!

But the reason we need so many flags boils down to modern nationalism. It’s not that kingdoms didn’t have banners in the past — they absolutely did, on the battlefield and in their castles — but often those banners were simply the arms or emblem of the ruling dynasty. Or a country might use multiple flags in different contexts, like sixteenth-century Spain flying both the arms of the Habsburg king and the saw-toothed Cross of Burgundy (that one deployed particularly on ships). As national identities coalesced in the late eighteenth century, though, it became increasingly important to have a national symbol separate from the person in charge, and those symbols appeared more and more often in contexts other than military ones.

Not that flags have ever been limited to military use. Taken in the general sense of “a piece of fabric meant to fly in the wind” rather than the distinctive emblem of a person, group, or locale, flags can serve all manner of purposes! Signal flags came up in Year Eight as a means of communication; Tibetan prayer flags are flown to spread their blessings on the wind. We use flags to mark everything from the finish line of a race to where your tour guide is in the crowd (though when you get down to it, that latter is probably a direct descendant of their role on the battlefield . . .). When a player commits an offense in certain sports, we signal it with a flag. When a city wants to advertise a festival or a special museum exhibit, they may dangle banners from the streetlights.

And when they want to assert their right not to be governed by a colonial power, they might just design a flag.

Heraldry is a peculiar mix of localized and universal.

By “localized,” I mean that it’s very specifically a medieval-and-later European phenomenon. The idea of individuals or groups having emblems is vastly older and more widespread, but that isn’t heraldry per se; it lacks the hereditary element that turns idiosyncratic choices into an organized system. In Europe, that system started forming during the High Middle Ages, around the twelfth century. By the middle of the fourteenth century you start having heraldic authorities responsible for recording and enforcing unique designs and color schemes, so that you can truly identify a member of a particular family by seeing their coat of arms — whether on the battlefield or off.

To the best of my knowledge, no other place in the world has quite this same practice. Japan comes close; mon or kamon (“family mon”) developed in the Heian period as a way of identifying members of the nobility so their order of precedence would not be in doubt. (It’s extremely useful to be able to answer that question at a glance! Heralds in Europe had similar responsibility for memorizing coats of arms and knowing who outranked whom.) In later centuries, certain mon like the imperial chrysanthemum were restricted, while others saw multiple uses by different groups. But although mon are hereditary — and, like heraldic arms, can be assigned to organizations as well as families — color is irrelevant as a distinguishing factor. And although mon can be modified to indicate a cadet branch of a family, there’s nothing equivalent to European heraldry’s system of quartering, where multiple emblems can be combined into one.

Tamgas on the Eurasian steppe are the other noteworthy candidate, as these are again a hereditary emblem of a family, clan, or tribe. Unlike Japanese mon and most of the charges (images) of European heraldry, tamgas are highly abstract, and their original purpose — still in force today — was for branding livestock. They’ve seen use outside that context, though, e.g. on funerary monuments, thereby expanding and strengthening the sense that these images represent the lineage more broadly.

The full system of European heraldry is ridiculously complex, its difficulty compounded by the fact that half its terminology is taken from medieval French. I’m not going to try and cover it all here (that’s a job for a specialized book), but I do want to note that the complexities of it very much developed over time. In fact, a lot of it dates to the early modern era and later, when coats of arms were no longer nearly as important for identifying men on the battlefield or in a tournament; instead they had become a decorative art, a little game played by the upper classes of society (gentlemen and nobility) and powerful organizations like universities and guilds.

In this game, the range of permissible emblems and how you deploy them expands enormously. Early heraldic arms went for a small number of impressive signifiers, like dragons, lions, and crosses; in later use you find mice, fish, and the tools of different trades. New colors came into use. Quarterings started to get out of hand; the arms of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, consisted of no less than twenty distinct components, representing all the places he ruled — some of them more than once, because of how he inherited them! (The most ridiculous example I know of cranks that up to three hundred twenty-three quarterings.) Furthermore, the emblems acquired add-ons like supporters, helmets, mottos, and crests, all of which were equally subject to the specific rules for heraldry.

But let’s loop back to that color thing for a moment, because this is where heraldry unexpectedly taps into something universal.

Do me a favor and take out your phone. Look at the icons for the apps. Or while you’re going through your day, look at the logos for corporations, the signs along the road. Count how many of them consist of either white or yellow on a colored background, or some color on a white or yellow background. This is a fundamental rule of heraldry in action, and it persists all these centuries later for good reason.

Heraldic tradition dictates how tinctures are organized and juxtaposed. For our purposes, we can lay aside the furs (specific background patterns); we’re concerned only with the metals — gold, silver — and the colours — blue, red, purple, black, green. (Heraldic history also includes a mulberry color between red and purple and an orange-to-brown color, but they were not commonly used, and later folklore decided those were “stains” that represented a dishonorable act.) According to the rule, you can juxtapose a metal with a color or a color with a metal, but not a metal on a metal or a color on a color. In other words, you can have white or yellow (representing silver or gold) against some other shade, but not white and yellow together, or red and blue, or green and black, and so forth.

More than just arbitrary aesthetic taste underlies this rule. By following it, you create a high-contrast design that is easily “read” even at a distance or in poor light. With modern pigments and dyes, we do have the capacity to make a green bright enough to stand out against black, or a red vivid enough to contrast with a pale, desaturated blue, but those rely on a command of coloration not easily attained when working with historical materials — especially when you consider the propensity of dyes to fade! If you want to be sure someone can make out your emblem at a glance, whether it’s on a battlefield or driving seventy miles an hour down a highway, following the medieval rule for tinctures is the safe way to go.

So I roll my eyes a little whenever I read a novel where the author, clearly in pursuit of badass vibes, describes the villain’s heraldry as being red on black. Sure, it sounds cool . . . but odds are high that somebody trying to make out the specifics at anything past close range just sees a blob of something red. Which I guess is fine if nobody else is running around with a red-on-black banner, such that the colors alone are sufficient, but still: nobody’s going to appreciate the artistic effort that went into your skull-and-snake design, because they can’t really see it.

Putting full-blown heraldry into a book is automatically going to make the setting read as European, which means it won’t suit every story. But as the examples of Japan and the Eurasian steppe show, there’s room for different systems of hereditary emblems, even if they aren’t as complexly elaborated as heraldry became in later centuries. On the other hand, the latter offers all kinds of potential for narrative fodder, whether that’s making a reality out of the “stain” notion or somebody starting a massive diplomatic incident because they confused one coat of arms with another that’s very similar!

Uniforms aren’t purely a military thing. Sports teams wear them; so do students at certain kinds of schools. Some jobs mandate uniforms for their employees, including servants in the past wearing the “livery” of their masters. But we associate this idea so much with soldiers (and with the not entirely unrelated police) that being “in uniform” can be shorthand for military service, “uniforms” shorthand for the personnel of such groups.

Why, though? What purpose does the uniform serve?

The knee-jerk answer is “to tell friend from foe on the battlefield,” and that’s not entirely wrong. But if you’re envisioning that thing you’ve seen in movies where two armies smash into each other and instantly dissolve into a confused melee with enemies on all sides, erase that from your mind. If your battlefield looks like that, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. Uniforms are more likely to serve their purpose in letting you know that the unit you see approaching from the south is your reinforcements — or, alternatively, the other side about to flank you. (Disguising yourself as the enemy has both its merits and its perils . . .)

Identification goes beyond knowing who to stab in the heat of battle, though. Uniforms can also tell you which part of your own army you’re looking at: is that guy an infantryman? Gunner? Cavalry soldier? Which lord’s retinue or modern squadron does he belong to? If you find some dead bodies in the woods, which unit got ambushed, and what does that mean for your subsequent situation?

Or you can read “identification” in a slightly different sense. Wearing a uniform signals not only to others but to you that you belong to a particular group, whether that’s your specific unit or your army as a whole. And this isn’t merely a nice side note; that sense of identity is key to battlefield performance, since the bond with your buddies and your unwillingness to let them down play a vital role in getting you to fight instead of running away. There’s a reason soldiers often take pride in their uniforms; those represent membership in something bigger than just themselves.

The psychological angle also turns outward, having its own effect on the enemy. By now you won’t be surprised to hear me say that not all armed forces achieve uniformity of appearance; that requires money, effort, and the organizational capacity to make it happen. Modern states take these things for granted, but historically, not everyone pulled it off. Those that did signaled to their opponents that they were well-funded, committed to the cause, and organized enough to handle the necessary logistics and discipline. Who would you rather fight: that guy, or the one with a ragtag assemblage of fellows in whatever clothes they happen to be wearing? Uniforms are a tool of intimidation as well as cohesion.

Of course, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Modern uniforms are incredibly codified, even down to mandating the exact chemical composition of the dyes used on the fabric. Everything from a soldier’s boots to their haircut is governed by regulations (which may also prohibit the addition of personal touches on top of required bits). Before industrialization, though, that degree of standardization was much harder to achieve — and very few armies tried.

Instead, you can go for more limited elements. Maybe everybody is supposed to wear a coat and trousers of more or less the same color and cut, but everything past that is up for grabs. Maybe you issue tabards, which don’t have to be fitted and are easily thrown over whatever else your soldiers are wearing. Maybe it’s headgear or, in an absolute minimal form, armbands to identify which force each guy belongs to. In Japan it was sashimono, small banners on poles attached to the soldiers’ backs; you’ve probably seen this in films.

You also don’t have to outfit your entire army with uniforms. Elite units tend to get these first, both because they have the money to do it, and because it makes them look special — which I don’t mean in a derogatory sense! They’re elite for a reason, and dressing them in the same gear both gives them confidence and advertises their badassery to the enemy. Sometimes their “uniform” is just better and more complete armor, but that counts; if your infantry are in boiled leather and your elite cavalry are in mail, or the infantry have mail and the cavalry have plate, it doesn’t matter as much whether the plate is all identical in style. Just seeing all that polished metal shining in the distance signals that a real threat is about the enter the field.

Officers are a special subset of this. Up until quite recently, we took it for granted that officers should be immediately identifiable by their appearance, without having to check for small markers like the stripes on a patch. This wasn’t just to make them look important; it was because you needed to be able to find them as fast as possible so you could follow their orders. One of the best ways to do this was to give them taller hats, with crests or feathers or big ol’ spikes or anything that made them stand out in a crowd. They might also look archaic; there’s a distinct tendency for officer garb to lag a bit behind current fashion, probably because we associate tradition with authority. But the flamboyant visibility of officers declined very sharply around the time we got better at long-distance sniping: being immediately identifiable becomes a fatal liability when that helps a hidden enemy pick out the most valuable target to drill through the skull.

Flamboyance can become a problem for regular soldiers, too. For a while in the nineteenth century, French soldiers wore trousers in a particular shade of red called garance, which came to be seen as a proud symbol of French identity. Then we developed smokeless rifles, and battlefield visibility improved enormously. After they lost 27,000 men in a single day in early World War I, France decided their national identity would be better off without red trousers.

Finally, uniformity can be situational. Modern soldiers may have a service uniform and a full dress uniform, both of which are distinct from their combat uniform, i.e. the kit they’re wearing in the field. That’s multiplying the investment and effort by three! In less organized forces, soldiers might be permitted to wear whatever they like most of the time, and only don their uniforms for battle or for ceremonial occasions. Or alternatively, they’re supposed to be in uniform at all times, and their officers simply fail to enforce that discipline: coats get hocked to pay gambling debts, torn up for rags, or left behind because the soldier just doesn’t care.

Because remember, one option for uniforms is “nothing at all.” Though I sometimes see writers forget this, it’s entirely possible that an army deploys no uniformity whatsoever, because they just don’t have the money or the organizational oomph to make it happen. Soldiers show up in whatever assortment of clothes and gear they can scrape together, or whatever the recruiting authority managed to scrape together and then hand out. They won’t look very good, and they might not feel very good, either, but they’ll just have to cope. It’s the best their particular force can do.

Given that my job mostly involves sitting at a desk, I have to devote particular effort to getting exercise if I want to be in good health.

This is not a modern phenomenon, but it is something of an elite one. If your day involves heavy physical labor in the fields or a factory, if you’re a laundress or a dyer hauling around sopping masses of fabric on the regular, if you’re a warehouse worker or grocery store stocker constantly lifting boxes, why on earth would you want to spend some of your precious non-working time doing yet more physical activity? Even if something like strengthening auxiliary muscles or stretching would benefit you, odds are low that you’re spending much time on that. When your workday ends, you want to rest.

But the more leisured classes throughout history have often understood that getting exercise improves health, and they’ve had the time, money, and energy to devote toward that goal. Depending on where you look, they’ve also linked it to spiritual development (Indian yoga) or character-building (Muscular Christianity). So what did such people do to stay fit?

Unsurprisingly, a whole swath of historical exercise looks a lot like war training. Warriors and soldiers prior to the gunpowder era often practiced with heavier versions of their usual weapons, whether those are swords, maces, spears, staves, or otherwise. Archery has likewise occupied a frequent niche, as have wrestling and boxing, even if men rarely expected to be fighting bare-handed in the field.

This extends not only to fighting, but to other things you might need to do during a battle. Climbing, for example: up a pole, up a rope, up the underside of a ladder, even running up a wall to grab the top like a modern parkour athlete. Throwing things: not just javelins but any heavy object, like a stone, a discus, or a pole (most famously in the form of Scottish caber tossing, but they’re not the only ones to do it). Riding — and not just riding, but also vaulting onto a horse (real or wooden), as if you are mounting on the run.

And, of course, the perennial classic: lifting heavy things! Often this was just stones, but purpose-built weights like the Greek halteres or Indian clubs go back a fair way. (Kettlebells are much more recent, coming from Russian weights used for crops, and then repurposed by performing strongmen.) Exactly what form the lifting has generally taken, though, is unclear to me. Deadlift? Bench press? Squat? I’m leery of assuming people have always done the same modes we do now; odds are pretty good it was more generally “pick this thing up and then maybe walk with it before putting it down,” rather than the strictly regulated movements of a modern gym.

Many historical exercises required little to no equipment. Running, skipping, jumping, swimming, dancing . . . if it moves your body and gets your heart rate up, it’s probably been used as exercise. (Unless you’re doing it in bed. Though that’s been considered exercise, too.) Calisthenics such as push-ups, which use the body’s own weight to provide resistance, are easy to incorporate into an exercise regimen, though I’ve seen indications that chin-ups might be a more modern phenomenon. Possibly this is true when they’re viewed as their own, separate movement, as opposed to the final stage of something like that wall-running exercise mentioned above. Then off in India, yoga of course has a centuries-long history — though we should bear in mind that modern yoga-as-exercise is significantly different from the historical tradition, which goes well beyond bodily fitness.

Some kinds of acrobatics seem to be fairly ancient, though it’s difficult to be sure exactly what forms people practiced. Tumbling in the basic sense — somersaults of various kinds — is another of those things that can double as a war skill, so it seems to have been common. Other movements, like bridges or handstands, are done more for their own sake, to build flexibility, strength, and balance. I haven’t been able to find out whether more advanced skills like handsprings or flips featured in exercise routines; certainly they would be practiced by actual acrobats, but I personally doubt the average person was doing them just for fitness.

Naturally, we don’t always stick to just one thing at a time. If running is good, and jumping is good, why not combine them? Now you have invented hurdles! The leisured classes most likely to engage in these activities were also not above doing elective grunt labor for the sake of fitness; ancient Greek boxers apparently thought digging was great exercise, and others have chopped wood.

Exercise also bleeds over into the broader category of sport. Any kind of physical game provides a workout; the distinction is merely whether you happen to be getting that workout because you wanted to play a game, or whether you’re play the game in order to improve your fitness. There’s no particular point in trying to separate those two — it only matters for how you present someone deciding to engage in that activity.

Though exercise has frequently been a male-dominated pastime, it’s not wholly so. Women’s health also benefits from fitness . . . but it’s true that people have often worried that too much of it might harm us, or more specifically, our fertility. A fear that is not entirely unfounded; elite female athletes do tend to experience amenorrhea, the absence of a period. But you have to train pretty hard to get that far, and the notion that your uterus might fall straight out of your body if you run a marathon has more to do with sexist assumptions and bad biology than any practical truth. (How else would all those peasant women doing heavy labor manage to have kids?)

Because of these fears, women’s exercise has tended to be lighter: walking, running (at shorter distances than men), and riding are very common. During the Victorian era, activities like archery, cycling, and rowing got added to the approved list. Calisthenics for women were much more of an innovation in that era, promoted by reformers, with much backlash and fear of what the consequences might be.

While exercise can be done in many places, then as now, we like to make it as social activity. The term “gymnasium” comes to us from the Greek institutions where men and boys would work out — naked, as the root of that word indicates — which also doubled as schools more generally. The Romans liked to pair a gym with a bath complex, so they could warm up their muscles and clean themselves off afterward. Over in India, the spiritual aspect of yoga could mean its physical practices were carried out in suitable locations like temples . . . or conversely in the wilderness, as part of a broader ascetic life. European gentlemen of the last few centuries might have rooms for boxing or fencing, or even private swimming pools, as part of their elite clubs. And, of course, where exercise is used to keep soldiers fit in peacetime, you’ll find facilities incorporated into military barracks.

Public gyms for general use, though, seem to be a phenomenon of the nineteenth century onward. And that makes sense: as industrialization and mechanized transport vastly increased the amount of time we spend sitting, as more children went to school and spent their days at desks, we started having to carve out dedicated spaces and times for working our bodies. We put more emphasis on physical education in childhood, and adults started thinking more about the need to move.

Which is my cue to stop typing and go downstairs to work out in my den. I have a goal of being strong enough for a pull-up by the end of the summer, and I want to hit that mark!

This is honestly closer to a theory-type essay, as I’ve already talked about more concrete angles like prostheses and assistive devices (in Year Four), and this time around I’m looking more at the dynamics of presenting physical disability in fiction.

Activists for better representation of disability often object to worldbuilding that imagines magic or advanced technology has erased that issue from existence, and advocate for greater visibility for disabled characters in our stories. I want to take a moment to say: in any setting that doesn’t have such handwavy solutions, quite frankly, disability ought to be vastly more common than it is.

Let’s take the specific example of trachoma and its accompanying condition, trichiasis. It roughens the inside of the eyelid and causes it to turn inward — eyelashes and all — resulting in repeated abrasion of the cornea. Though it was eliminated in the developed world during the 20th century and a 21st-century push has thus far wiped it out in thirty countries where it was still endemic, historically, this has been one of the leading causes of infectious blindness. It ran rampant through army camps and other crowded environments; it spread in cities; it infected people repeatedly throughout the course of their lives, until they lost their vision entirely.

How often have you seen it in a story?

Or consider osteoarthritis. We may occasionally note an elderly character being “stooped” or groaning at their stiff joints, but the reality is that any person whose job involves a lot of heavy manual labor is at high risk of developing such problems . . . and “heavy manual labor” is a great description of agrarian life at any point prior to industrialization. (During industrialization, it depends a bit more on what type of factory you’re working in.) Archaeologists can look at a skeleton and judge what social class that person belonged to just by comparing their age to the wear and tear on their joints: two sets of remains recently found in Pompeii were fairly clearly identifiable as some middle-aged lady of the house and some younger male servant or slave, based on the damage to his bones — and the lack of such damage to hers.

Injury in particular plays a key role here. Just in my lifetime, the tendency to send someone to physical therapy after an accident or surgery has skyrocketed, because we now have a much better idea of how to return the body to full function. But in the past? People often had to return to work as soon as they were anything like physically capable of it, instead of taking time to fully heal — or, if they were wealthy, they got coddled with bed rest that actually made their recovery harder. How often do we see the results of that in fiction, though? Sure, we all know the trope of the character with old injury who can tell when it’s about to rain . . . but we say much less about reduced range of motion, persistent loss of strength, or the ways that compensating for one problem (like an uneven gait) can screw up some other part of your body (like your back).

Of course, this is in part because we complain most about discomfort and limitations when we feel like we shouldn’t be subject to them. If literally everybody around you starts experiencing arthritis by the time they’re thirty because you’re all constantly doing backbreaking labor, then when your own aches and pains begin to set in, that’s more apt to feel like par for the course. It’s a mark of how far medicine has come in the last century that we in the developed world expect we ought to continue to feel good for decades on end.

But also, I suspect that if we were to depict physical disabilities being as widespread as they were in historical reality — and still are, in many parts of the world — it would come across as unrelenting misery porn. If we tried to represent the honest rate of painful and disfiguring scars, missing teeth, deteriorating vision, weak grips, backaches, neck pain, reduced mobility, disturbed digestion, and more that probably afflicted the average rural village, market town, or overcrowded city of the past . . . frankly, I’m horrifying myself just trying to imagine it.

And even if you’re writing science fiction of the sort that imagines a more technological future, this won’t all go away — or at least, it won’t for all of the characters. Anyone on the bottom end of the social scale is liable to experience more disability relative to the elite, who can afford time to heal or expensive treatments and therapies to address their problems. The nature of the problems in question may change, and might include fictional ideas like neurological issues caused by the use of brain implants, but they’re still likely to be there.

I am not, for the record, advocating that half of all characters under the age of forty should have some kind of disability, and every single character above that line. I suspect the result would end up distracting rather than effective — one of those situations where truth winds up seeming less realistic than fiction. But I do think that all of us, not just the disability activists, would benefit from acknowledging more often how much this can be threaded into characters’ lives, without them being explicitly marked out as Characters With Disabilities.

Especially because, when these issues are so widespread, they’re no longer going to define someone’s identity in the same way we might expect today. Having a bum knee or terrible vision or a stomach that regularly sends you to the privy at a run is just going to be how people are. That character can’t walk without a cane? The same is true for six other people in the village. Some disabilities will still stand out — seizures, for example, are going to be rarer, and quite possibly attributed to supernatural causes rather than ordinary life — but many of them will seem like business as usual.

Which means that, in fiction, noting their presence can be done through simple traces of description. Two characters are having a conversation; one of them, upon being given a heavy object to look at, grimaces and transfers it to her stronger hand. The other one, standing up to leave, leans on the arm of his chair and then gently eases his weight onto his right hip. The servant, summoned to escort him out, stops rubbing at the infection reddening their eyes. The narrative doesn’t have to stop and explain that these people have physical problems; it’s just part of the descriptive texture, used to break up the dialogue and exposition.

Am I thinking of these things more right now because I’m moving through my forties? Is that “right hip” example possibly drawn from personal experience, which I only recently mitigated with physical therapy? Nahhhh.

But man, does age give me more sympathy for characters whose bodies don’t work perfectly on command, every time.

Climate change is on everyone’s mind’s lately, to the point where “climate fiction” is now a recognized subgenre — both within speculative fiction and without. Given my focus in this Patreon, however, I’m not going to attempt to spin scenarios about what our world might realistically look like in fifty or a hundred years, or how we’re going to respond to it; other people have already done that in far greater depth, with far greater knowledge of the subject, than I could hope to do.

Instead, we’re going to take a look at the climate changes humanity has already experienced, and what we’ve done about them.

Broadly speaking, we can lump these into two major categories: changes in precipitation, and changes in temperature. Furthermore, we can specify that, for it to count as “climate change” in a meaningful sense, it has to be a lasting alteration, not a brief one. Short-term change is weather; long-term trends are climate. And only the latter drives significant adaptations from society.

Of those two categories — please forgive the incoming pun — temperature tends to sneak under the radar. As we’re in the process of finding out, you can get significant alterations in weather patterns from global shifts of only a degree or two; in the days when no one had reliable thermometers marked with a systematic scale, that kind of shift was impossible to measure. And a gradual, large-scale drift like the one that produced the eras we term the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age happens on a timeline so slow, people are apt to notice it only across the generations: maybe your grandfather tells stories about how frost never used to strike after the spring equinox, or conversely, the ground had always thawed by then.

These changes are still significant! Agriculture depends on people knowing when it’s safe to put crops in the ground, and having enough time for them to mature before autumn storms or winter freezes kill them. As the average temperatures drift from what they used to be, harvests get poorer, because local customs are adapted to the weather patterns everyone expects. But as those patterns break, people will gradually change their customs to match, growing crops better suited to the conditions that now prevail.

Changes in precipitation can be a lot more calamitous. In this historical record, we most often hear about this as an issue of drought, when a persistent lack of rainfall across multiple years results in famine. It’s also possible, however, for the problem to go the other way; too much rainfall leads to flooding and crops drowning in the field. Or, in a worst case scenario, you get both: current theories hold that the decline of the Khmer Empire owed a lot to unpredictable shifts between not enough rain and far too much, which wrecked the stability of a society that depended upon sophisticated hydroengineering.

People can also adapt to changes in rainfall, of course, but it’s more difficult because the effects are more sudden. While unusual heat or frost can kill crops, a slow upward or downward drift in average temperatures gives you time to change from wheat to barley or vice versa, as you plant something hardier for the conditions. Droughts and flooding arrive more abruptly, and in between instances, you get good years where it seems like everything is back to normal. It’s only when you look back on the pattern that you can see where things started going downhill — and by then, quite a lot of people may have starved.

Attempts to engineer our way out of trouble are not a new phenomenon. The aforementioned hydraulic works, discussed in more detail last year, are all about trying to buffer against the vagaries of water being over- or under-supplied. Farmers can also insulate their fields with straw or attempt to shade them with taller plants, to mitigate the effects of heat and cold and reduce evaporation. But mostly, the response to this has had to take the form of changing our own behavior: planting something more tolerant of the conditions at hand, so that at the end of the day — or the season — we have something to eat.

I’ve been speaking of this primarily in terms of crops because that has been the overwhelming consideration — and also the only part even vaguely in human control. If climate shifts produce more hurricanes or tornadoes or blizzards . . . well, historically speaking, there is bugger-all people have been able to do about it. Even now, we can only do so much to fortify our houses and cities against those kinds of storms. And while it’s true that climate change can also introduce novel diseases, neither the people of the time nor historians looking back now can generally tell where exactly those epidemics came from. All people could do was hunker down and hope to survive, or migrate somewhere they hoped would be safer.

Because climate has historically been every bit as much out of our control as weather. While it’s true that human action can affect the globe, as we’re seeing right now, it tends to require a scale of influence we really only hit with the Industrial Revolution. Before that, our population was too small, our output of climate-changing factors too restricted. We have changed local climates through actions like deforestation, which can lead to desertification, but the biggest alterations have mostly come about through natural forces: volcanic eruptions, changes in ocean circulation, and the like.

I should note in passing a particular subset of (thus far fictional) climate change, which is the process of terraforming. Science fiction has long played with the idea that humans could deliberately alter the climate of a whole planet specifically to make it hospitable — and not just the climate, but the entire composition of the atmosphere and the biomes of the land and sea. Most novels have handwaved their effects into existence, caring more about it as a background device to allow for human settlement on other planets; only a few have really devoted attention to the mechanisms by which this might be achieved. If you’re interested in that end of things, I am definitely not qualified to help you! But it’s an intriguing question to explore — not least because the precursors to such ideas are being explored right now on our own planet.

Back to the home front: bear in mind that, more than any given set of conditions, the problem tends to be change. Some conditions are, admittedly, more favorable than others; mild temperatures and moderate rain — however those are defined for the region — are going to produce better results than the alternative. But humans are very good at adapting to the situation at hand, and thriving as much as possible under those circumstances.

It’s when the rug gets pulled out from under us that havoc truly results. Then the behaviors and patterns that protected us before suddenly become maladaptive. Even if the new situation is entirely survivable, we may not be acting in the best fashion to get through it. But figuring that out, and making the necessary changes, is easier said than done . . . and no, that isn’t simply a not-very-coded slam against all the inertia getting in the way of responding to our current climate crisis. People cannot easily abandon cities threatened by rising sea levels or the depletion of the local aquifer, or pivot their economy toward resources that better suit the new reality. That’s especially true of everyone at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, for whom the immediate concern has to be their ability to get by today.

As I said above, these changes are mostly going to play out on a timescale that means we only see a snapshot of one moment along the line — or, perhaps, look back upon it in retrospect. (A few authors will have their story elapse over generations or centuries, but that’s not common.) Still, knowing that context can help set the stage for a plot . . . one with far too much relevance for us today.

Weather tends to show up in novels merely as a background detail — all too often as an example of the pathetic fallacy, where e.g. it’s raining because the protagonist is sad. Every so often, it rises to the level of plot device: there’s a snowstorm so characters can get snowed in somewhere. Speculative fiction honestly has a dearth of weather worked into the general description of a scene, despite the fact that any time the story moves outside, there must be some kind of weather in play.

But if that were all, I wouldn’t be devoting an essay to this subject. After all, this Patreon is about worldbuilding, which means not just the physical but the cultural side of a setting. (Given my inclinations, the cultural side more than anything else). So how is weather itself a part of society?

Depending on where you live, you already know some of the answers to that. Weather shapes our houses, our clothing, and our food, in ways discussed in previous essays. It also gives a rhythm to our lives: if you live in a region where afternoon thunderstorms are expected in the summer, or the monsoon blows through at certain times of year, that affects what activities people undertake at what times. But there are other, more directly weather-focused elements, too.

Let’s start with a question we tend to take for granted nowadays: can you see the weather coming?

Weather forecasting as a formal science got started in the nineteenth century, and it began with us more rigorously measuring what the weather even was. You can’t do much in the way of prediction unless you have a mass of data about highs, lows, wind speed and direction, pressure changes, precipitation, and so on. And you need that data to be spread over a large area, because of course weather is never purely a local phenomenon! This included giving scientific instruments to ship captains, since the ocean is a key driver of weather . . . and also the safety of those captains can depend on knowing what the weather is about to do.

Fast communication is key, too. If you hear that an area upwind of you is getting a cold snap or a storm front, odds are good that’s headed your way shortly. What really sets forecasting going, though, is computers — which can crunch huge amounts of data vastly quicker than humans can — and weather balloons and satellites to measure conditions from above. Thanks to those things, especially improved computer modeling, the precision of our forecasts has improved astonishingly: these days, the prediction for four days from now is as accurate as the prediction for tomorrow was thirty years ago.

Of course, people have been trying to predict the weather for a lot longer than we’ve had computers, or even thermometers. This has largely been short-term and based on observations of immediate phenomena: for example, “red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning” is accurate for regions where weather tends to move from west to east, as the tint of the sky signals the location of a high-pressure (good weather) system and whether it’s headed toward you or moving away. Or, where I grew up — at the tail end of Tornado Alley — we all learned that a certain greenish cast to the sky meant the weather was ripe for forming twisters.

The thing about that green sky is, it does mean a likelihood of severe weather . . . but not necessarily tornadoes. And that’s the flaw of this kind of weather lore, that it can be inconsistent, or outright incorrect. That whole North American tradition of Groundhog Day, where the presence or absence of shadows seen by a groundhog predicts how much longer the winter will last? It has absolutely no statistical underpinning. Some analyses even give it a negative correlation, showing that Punxsutawney Phil’s predictions are less accurate than random chance! Maybe we need to update our proverb.

But humans are not content merely to know what the weather is likely to do an hour or a day from now. We would really, really love to control it, to suit our own purposes.

And for millennia, people have been promising the ability to do exactly that. This is honestly one of the underpinnings of certain elements of religion: you pray or make offerings to a deity of the sky or agriculture in the hopes of getting the rain or sun necessary for a good crop, or a deity of the sky or sea to get the wind you need for your ocean voyage. Humans can’t control the weather, but gods can, so you ask them nicely for their help. Colloquially, we often call society-wide weather rituals “rain dances,” and dancing is indeed a common element, though not a universal one.

Rainmakers, however, peddle claims of a more direct skill. They assert that they, on their own, can end a drought — or, less commonly, end a deluge that’s causing flooding or drowning the crops. Historically, they attributed their power to magic; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they instead dressed their assertions up in scientific trappings. Charles Hatfield, one famous American rainmaker, used a secret mix of chemicals in evaporating tanks to “attract” rain to an area. His apparent success rate (likely due to him being a good weather predictor, rather than weather-worker) was high enough that he was able to charge the City of San Diego ten thousand dollars — in early 1900s money! — to fill their empty reservoir.

Which promptly backfired on him, as the region experienced torrential rains that broke a dam, killed about twenty people, and caused an estimated $3.5 million in damage. Rainmakers who promised results they failed to deliver could and did get sued for fraud, but rainmakers who “succeeded” too well could also wind up in trouble.

This idea has not gone away. If anything, it’s trying to accelerate into the realm of actual, reliable science. We’ve been conducting experiments in cloud seeding for decades, aiming to encourage rain or snow through scattering material in the atmosphere. Its efficacy is debatable, and people have understandable concerns about the environmental impact of the material used. Other, newer concepts involve things like reflecting some of the sun’s energy back out into space, to slow the effects of global warming.

Science fiction can take these ideas to an extreme. Especially in closed environments like biomes, stories may depict weather as scheduled down to the minute, so characters know to expect a quarter-inch of rain between 3:17 and 4:01 p.m. That’s plausible when the “rain” is actually coming out of ceiling pipes; when it’s the product of natural planetary forces, it’s much more of a stretch. At that point, you’re more in the realm of fantasy, where a sorcerer can summon a storm on demand . . . which would probably have a lot more society-wide effects, especially in military contexts, than most novels take the time to imagine.

With the rise of climate fiction as a subgenre, though, we might expect to see a lot more weather control showing up in our stories. And so, with an eye toward that, next week we’ll take a look at climate change!

I live in California — specifically in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place whose history is indelibly shaped by the gold rush of 1848. And, having proposed in last week’s essay a speculative path to industrialization involving the discovery of some kind of unobtanium, I find myself led naturally to the notion of a rush: a sudden influx of hopeful miners to the location of a newly discovered mineral deposit, seeking to make their fortunes in one fell swoop.

We hear about these mostly as gold rushes, but they can actually happen for other resources, too; there have been silver rushes and diamond rushes. So what elements are necessary to cause a rush?

First and most obviously, the object of the rush must be highly valuable. Nobody’s going to travel for months, often through rugged wilderness (because all the sites closer to home have already been claimed), to go after an ordinary resource like iron or coal. Or rather, they will, but not in the kind of sudden mass migration that leads us to call such an event a rush. If people don’t grow starry-eyed at the thought of getting their hands on some of that thing, it’s not fancy enough for this scenario. Think especially in terms of value versus volume: something that wows people when you hold it in the palm of your hand will have much more power to attract prospectors than something that requires an entire cartload to impress.

Second, it has to be (theoretically) easy to obtain. This is both a legal and a technological angle, with the legal part being the question of who owns the land where the resource is found. I suspect it’s no accident that, of the nine countries Wikipedia lists as having major gold rushes in the 19th century, eight of them were areas colonized by Europeans, with Greece as the sole outlier. In places like Australia, Venezuela, and the United States, a frontier mentality prevailed which facilitated the idea that any random guy could move in and start panning for gold. Try the same trick in England of the same era, and the landowner will have words and possibly bullets for you — not to mention the unlikelihood of finding major gold deposits not already under exploitation.

At least, easily accessible ones. This is the technological side of the equation: if extracting the resource requires sophisticated training and/or expensive equipment, then that’s going to limit active parties to the well funded, well organized operations. These days a lot of our mineral extraction involves digging up ore, sometimes from deep underground, and subjecting it to complex chemical and physical processes. It’s a far cry from some guy with a pan on the bank of a stream believing he might strike it rich.

And finally, people have to hear about it. This seems like an easy requirement to meet, but again, notice that “gold rush” is a phrase we associate with the nineteenth century. There are a handful from earlier — all of them in the context of Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas — but the mass communication of newspapers and especially the electric telegraph made it vastly easier to spread the news widely, creating a large pool of hopeful prospectors willing to pack up their lives and go in search of fortune.

(You might think, by the way, that the accessibility of the location might matter. One look at the Klondike Gold Rush, however, puts paid to that notion. People were willing to risk freezing off their body parts, dying of starvation, being eaten by bears, or falling off a mountain to get to where there was gold. It certainly does help if it’s easier to get to, especially if there are ships or trains, but it’s not a requirement.)

That mass media thing, of course, cuts both ways. Whoever first discovers the resource probably doesn’t want anybody to know about it! Marshall and Sutter at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 wanted to keep their gold to themselves. Alas, despite oaths of secrecy, the guy they sent to secure mineral rights for their land blabbed the tale repeatedly along the way and failed in his mission to boot. Sutter not only didn’t get to keep the gold to himself, but lost all his workers to prospecting, his crops and cattle to squatters, and his entire dream of a profitable agricultural rancho there.

Of course, not everybody who rushes to a source of gold, silver, diamonds, or any other valuable material makes their fortune. In fact, the vast majority of them don’t. Advantage goes to those who get there first, as they stake out and deplete the best claims — which of course contributes to the feverish sense of urgency, people making snap decisions rather than thinking it through. Between the cost of getting there, the cost of equipment (which may not be specialized but is still an expense for the kind of poor man hoping to strike it rich), and the cost of supporting yourself and any allies or employees in the wilderness, most people start out in the hole. In the California Gold Rush, it’s estimated that a few lucky souls truly acquired a fortune, about half made a modest profit, and the rest lost their shirts.

Which is why the actual smart move — albeit the much less glamorous one — is to be the guy selling picks and shovels. It was less than two months after the discovery at Sutter’s Mill that Samuel Brannan bought every piece of prospecting equipment he could find and opened a store in the then-tiny town of San Francisco, so he could sell those things to the people he knew would come — knew in part because he was also one of the first people to publicize the discovery! (The story goes that he couldn’t put it in his newspaper because all his staff had run off, so instead he walked through the streets with a vial of gold, shouting about it to everyone who could hear.) Selling pans at seventy-five times the price he paid for them, he made out like a bandit and became enormously wealthy.

Selling picks and shovels is also a lot safer. Any time riches or the dream of them are at stake, you’re going to get people fighting over them, and a gold rush is no different. Claim-jumping is the act of starting to work on a site someone else has claimed as their own — usually not while they’re conducting active operations, but if they haven’t gotten to it yet or have decided it’s not as promising as another location, neither of which mean they’re ready to let you have it instead. Even when people respect those boundaries, any dispute is liable to escalate to fighting . . . and, of course, any pre-existing tensions are likely to be exacerbated by the tense conditions. Black, Latino, and Chinese miners — along with smaller numbers from other marginalized groups — faced particularly intense threats and bloodshed; it’s no accident that they were less likely to reap a profit than their white counterparts. Meanwhile, Native Americans were massacred by miners who wanted them out of the way.

This kind of thing is also environmentally disastrous, because the men (and much smaller number of women) chasing a vision of gold don’t care very much about anything else. Deforestation, soil runoff, and active pollution from toxic chemicals wreak havoc on the land and anybody relying on it for their survival. In just a few short years, this can transform not only the immediate landscape of the claims but anything downstream of them, and not for the better.

And all of these things could happen in a speculative world! Any planetary colonization scenario is ripe for it, so long as interstellar travel is available to the masses. Even something non-mineral, like the hunting of fantastical beasts could potentially look like a gold rush, if someone finds a critical use for their horns or hides or other body parts. As long as it’s local to a certain area, valuable, relatively easy to get, and advertised widely, the fever will take hold, and people will come.

There’s a particular type of alternate history whose premise is: what if [fill in the blank past society] industrialized? (Rome is a particular magnet for this.)

The challenge of such speculation is that we have precisely one data point for what de novo industrialization looks like. Many parts of the world have industrialized, but they’ve done it by adopting the concepts and technologies developed elsewhere. As a result, our explanations for how it happens run the risk of being just-so stories, with no way to test them and see if they’re correct. Those being the only explanations we have, though, we pretty much have to go with them whenever we attempt to depict either an alternate historical industrialization, or this process happening in a secondary world.

But before we ask what it takes to industrialize, we should first look at what industrialization is.

I’m going to give a simple answer to this. An industrial society is one that’s figured out mechanized methods of production, rather than everything having to be done by hand. In order make that mechanization work, we had to harness new sources of energy — specifically, fossil fuels — and then reorganize labor around creating and operating the machines. As a consequence of such changes, a society of this type develops more specialized division of labor, and also tends to support higher, denser populations.

So: how do you get there from an agrarian society where muscles provide most of the power?

Obviously this is in large part a technological question. A Bronze Age society can’t industrialize for the simple reason that their metallurgy can’t support the kinds of technology necessary for powerful steam engines; hunter-gatherers, even less so. Even an iron-working society can’t necessarily manage it, because a boiler capable of surviving useful levels of pressure isn’t something any old blacksmith can bang together. But technology is only one side of the equation, and if all you’re looking at is the metallurgy, it’s easy to think that surely any place with good blacksmiths could figure it out — that it’s pure chance no other time period industrialized. In reality, you also have to ask yourself, what are we making these machines for?

Yes, aeolipiles — primitive steam turbines — existed nearly two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution got rolling. But they were essentially toys, producing very little power and using up tons of fuel to do it. They had no practical function. It took a completely different design to arrive at a steam engine that could do anything useful . . . and the odds that anybody was going to put in the work for that design were low, because what purpose would it serve?

When your vision of the Industrial Revolution is that change at its height, with massive engines driving locomotives or machines that fill whole rooms, you miss how inefficient, ineffective, and unreliable early steam engines were. Even if some Greek inventor tinkered around with the aeolipile or asked “I wonder if there’s a better approach?”, he would wind up spending tons of money and effort on making a device that still wasn’t worth it. The argument I’ve seen — the best just-so story we have for the Industrial Revolution — is that it started where it did and when it did because eighteenth-century Britain found itself in a situation where even a kind of crappy steam engine was better than no engine at all: coal was needed for heating purposes, their coal mines had gotten deep enough that they were flooding with water, and oh look, the fuel you need for the engine is right there where you’ll be using it. No need to pay for transporting it anywhere. The economics worked out to make that a problem worth solving with a new technological development.

Coal has been used for a long time in cooking and heating, but we’ve tended to go for the easy surface deposits first, and to switch away from it when those become less accessible. The roots of Britain’s industrialization probably lie in deforestation and the more intensive mining of coal in the century or two leading up to the development of actual steam engines — a set of circumstances that didn’t prevail in, say, Rome. They handled their mechanical problems with slave labor and had much less need for coal, living where they did; as near as I can tell, peninsular Italy had very little coal anyway (compared to Britain). So trying to invent a steam engine there would be a solution in search of a problem to solve: not a situation that favors the kind of technological development that has to pass through multiple not-very-effective stages before it gets to the good stuff.

And the good stuff, as you all probably learned in school, is steam engines that are smooth and efficient enough to be useful in textile production. Once you have those, it’s worth the cost to build them in places other than on top of coal mines and transport coal to them. Other uses, too, but after the water-pumping prologue, textile industrialization really is Act I of the Industrial Revolution, because it’s an easy place for a better (but still not amazing) engine to make a difference. So here, again, the just-so story says Britain was the right place at the right time: they had huge industries in both wool and (thanks to colonialism) cotton, meaning that productivity gains in something as basic as the spinning of thread could produce absolutely explosive growth. Everything after that — trains and steamships and cool steampunk gadgets — is flying on the momentum created by coal mining and thread.

Of course, all of this is the mundane path to industrialization. In a speculative world, it’s entirely possible to change the starting conditions and create a different trajectory; so long as it still follows the general pattern of “non-muscle energy source allows for new, mechanized, mass production,” it will feel industrial. If that energy source is the discovery of a vein of some mineral which, when a small quantity is placed into a device, becomes an abundant form of power, maybe nobody has to slowly iterate through crappy devices to reach a point where it makes economic sense to transport the stuff elsewhere. Or it’s a method of channeling magical power from the sky, recently discovered by an innovative sorcerer, which turns out to be useful for some productive task. (Quite possibly it’s still textiles: as noted in the previous essay, those are, alongside food, one of the basic survival requirements that have historically demanded the most time and labor.)

I’ll admit to ambivalent feelings about that latter example, because of what kind of magic I like in my stories. An industrialized form of magic is one that, by definition, can be depersonalized. At that point, no matter what words you attach to it, I no longer find it very magical: it’s just technology by a different name. I can still enjoy stories in such a setting; I’ll just enjoy them for reasons other than the magic. And I freely admit this is a personal opinion, not one shared by every reader. For worldbuilding purposes, it’s entirely fine to create a speculative twist on the process of industrialization — and then it helps to understand what does and does not make sense!

Given the surge in popularity of “tradwife” influencers these days, it seems an appropriate time to take a direct look at what it actually means for everything you need to be produced at home.

Starting with two basic facts: first, that essentially nobody has ever produced everything they need at home. And second, that the more you have to do so, the more your life sucks.

If you want an illustration of what I mean, check out the book Lost in the Taiga by Vasily Peskov. It’s a nonfiction account of the Lykov family, who fled religious persecution and spent fifty years living in almost total isolation in the Russian wilderness. By the time they started having regular contact with anyone outside their family, they were living the most horrifyingly marginal existence you can imagine: their house was a filthy, windowless lodge, they wore crude skins for clothing, and multiple family members (especially children) had died due to the almost complete lack of medicine. The weather itself had nearly killed them more than once when their crops failed, at one point necessitating the Lykovs taking turns keeping round-the-clock watch on their few surviving plants, to keep wild animals from destroying them.

And even then, the Lykovs weren’t fully self-sufficient. They depended on metal tools like their cooking pot which, if lost or destroyed, were completely irreplaceable. Yes, it’s possible to cook without metal vessels; yes, you could theoretically make stone tools if you didn’t have access to metal knives. But every such step toward self-sufficiency requires more labor, until every single hour in your day is devoted to the task of bare survival.

Granted, the Lykovs were not living in the most forgiving environment. But if you check out the stories of people who exited the “trad life,” you’ll find account after account of how much work they poured into living that way, until there was simply no time or energy left over for enjoying its supposed benefits. It’s an open secret at this point that the glossy, successful tradwives pulling in huge amounts of money from their work are showing a highly edited version of their existence, often involving armies of paid assistants — and/or their children, whose free time becomes a sacrifice on the altar of their mother’s career as an influencer.

Because that’s the first thing to know about home production as a system: everybody works. If you’re old enough to do some kind of simple task, like shelling peas, then you do it. Furthermore, you work nigh-constantly, because there is always more to do. The internet likes to pass around the claim that medieval Europeans worked less than moderns, but if you start to crunch the actual numbers, that doesn’t really hold up . . . especially when you consider the tendency to ignore women’s work. Even if a saint’s day or other religious festival meant the men weren’t going out to labor in the fields, the women still had to tend children, cook meals, clean up afterward, and probably spin thread while they watched the celebrations. Life will not go on hold just because it’s a special day.

But what do I mean when I say “home production”? It’s a fuzzy concept, but generally speaking, it refers to the idea that stuff is mostly made and used at home. You can also, of course, make stuff at home and then trade or sell it elsewhere; given how often houses doubled as workshops, it’s inevitable those two modes will overlap. And piecework, where someone gets paid per item they make, has gone hand-in-hand with home production for centuries, as a way for a household to bring in a little more money. Home production in the sense I mean it here, though, is about the idea of self-sufficiency: rather than buying things ready-made, you make them you and your family, for you and your family.

Measured by the time and effort invested, home production focuses almost entirely on food (including drink) and clothing, and neither one is fully seasonal. Winter still entails agricultural labor, and when it doesn’t, the men are probably working on making or repairing tools they’ll use when the weather warms up, or taking care of livestock. The women are busy turning the raw outputs into actual food, and the aforementioned spinning, which has to fill almost every moment it can if you’re to have enough thread to weave enough cloth to clothe everybody in the family. They might also make simple medicines at home, or crude furniture, or other necessities and minor luxuries, but those are a side note to the overwhelming demands of sustenance and shelter for the body.

And that’s still not the whole story, is it? Blacksmiths have been high on the list of necessary trades since we invented metalworking. (All right, since we invented iron-working. Apparently the proper term for someone who works bronze is a brownsmith!) Successful metalworking requires so much training and specialized knowledge, not to mention equipment, not to mention time, that nobody’s doing that and also being a full-time farmer. Pottery is much the same, because building and operating your own kiln is way too much to add atop everything else. Other things can be done at home, like milling grain, but they’re so labor-intensive that it’s vastly more efficient to have a specialist with the right tools do the job.

This is how “home production” turns out to be a spectrum. Yes, people used to produce most of what they needed at home — but not everything, and at the first opportunity, they started outsourcing certain tasks. If you could buy or trade for thread already spun (perhaps from a local poor spinster), you did; if you could buy or trade for cloth already woven, you did. You were, essentially, buying a respite from the endless labor that is the genuine trad life. Furthermore, specialization of labor is good for us as a society: a dedicated weaver can make finer cloth than someone who’s doing that in her spare time, and god knows a dedicated physician can know more about medicine than someone tossing a few herbs into tea and hoping that will do the job. When you don’t have to do everything yourself, you get better results.

But the belief that the traditional life was somehow purer and better isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. The transcendentalist philosophers of nineteenth century America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, touted the benefits of “simple living” out in nature. In recent years the internet has given them something of an unfair shake; it’s true they weren’t entirely self-sufficient, but neither did they claim to be. (Thoreau in particular has become the target of “his mom did his laundry and brought him sandwiches!” We don’t actually know how his laundry got done, and he himself admits he regularly walked into town to dine with friends and family.) It is true, however, that they approached their vision of simplicity from a relatively privileged direction, and could therefore afford a great deal of assistance and modern convenience. Their lives would have been significantly more difficult if the innovations of the Industrial Revolution had not made things like the production of their clothing faster and cheaper than the womenfolk of their families could manage by hand.

The flip side, of course, is that there can be genuine satisfaction in making stuff yourself. Especially if your job feels very separated from material reality — you spend all your time on the computer moving words or numbers around, all to create something far removed from the physical product, or that never becomes a physical product at all — then sinking your hands into a mass of dough, or sewing your own skirt, or raising vegetables, or any of the other simple tasks of creation often feels rewarding all out of proportion to its necessity . . . or maybe rewarding because it isn’t necessary. It reconnects you with the fruits of your labor, and that can be very good for the brain.

So although I have a ton of issues with the entire “trad” movement (even before we get to the often reactionary politics behind it), I recognize and value some of the impulse there. And for writers, it’s worth not only acknowledging the ugly reality of what real self-sufficiency looks like, but understanding the conditions that make people nostalgic for the concept. I would wholeheartedly believe in a spacefaring civilization where anything can be printed from a replicator on the spot — and therefore has thriving communities of hobbyists who enjoy making stuff by hand instead.

If your mental image of a shepherd is a person with a crook and a dozen sheep on a hillside above a farm, you need to scale up. And also, those sheep probably won’t be on the hillside for very long.

Transhumance is, admittedly, one of those topics where my knowledge is noticeably regional. I’m familiar with cattle ranching in the American West and, more globally, sheepherding — which I believe is similar to goats, both of them being caprines — but much less so with camels, and basically not at all with yaks or llamas or reindeer. I don’t even know if transhumance is a thing practiced with all those species! So take this with a grain of salt.

Having brought up the technical term: what is transhumance? (Not to be confused with transhumanism.) It is the practice of moving livestock between pastures, and in particular, the seasonal patterns thereof. On the extreme end, a herding society may be fully nomadic, packing up everyone and everything to move with the animals. On the nearer end, most people stay put, and only a small number of caretakers have to move around.

One way or another, though, the animals have to move. If you have a decent-sized pasture and just one cow you keep on hand for milking, she might be able to shift from spot to spot in the pasture, letting one area regrow while she grazes on another. As numbers increase, though, there’s no single pasture big enough, and keeping the herd in the same place will rapidly ensure they have nothing to eat. How large a herd you can support in how large an area will vary based on local conditions — good soil and regular rain will bring on faster, lusher growth than poor soil and aridity — but also, shifting pasture isn’t purely a matter of bare survival. Bringing your livestock to fresh grazing will improve the quality of their milk and, in the case of animals like sheep, the fineness of their wool. So the more a region is dedicated to animal husbandry rather than farming, the larger the herds will be and the more transhumance will shape the world around them.

So far, so dry and logistical. Let me take this out of the realm of theory and put it into a shape that might matter for a story: if you lived in Spain in, say, 1540, then twice a year you would watch two and a half million sheep go ambling down the roads.

Spain practiced seasonal transhumance, where livestock move between summer and winter pastures. Thanks to the geography of the peninsula, in summer the sheep lived in the cooler, wetter lands of Old Castile and León, and then in winter they were driven south to the fields and hills of Extremadura and Andalusia. This ensured they had fresh grass year-round, which contributed to the excellence of Spain’s wool industry.

Wasn’t that terribly disruptive to everybody in between those two regions? Hell yes, it was — and for those at the ends of the route, too. Farmers weren’t supposed to plow the pastureland or use it for crops, and as the political power of the Mesta (the association of livestock owners) grew, this led to them pushing for more territory, forcing farmers off their land. To prevent the sheep from trampling crops, there were dedicated rights-of-way for the sheep (called cañadas) that nobody was supposed to build on or cultivate, but of course farmers encroached on those boundaries. And since the sheep had to follow set routes and the people along them hated this disruption, anybody selling lodgings or food often set an extortionate price — which in turn meant the wealthier members of the Mesta, each with thousands of sheep, eventually squeezed out the smaller livestock owners.

Seasonal transhumance on that gobsmacking scale is fairly rare, but smaller versions of it are extremely common. In mountainous areas, the transition is vertical rather than north to south: in the winter livestock will live down in the valleys, then be driven up to the slopes when the weather warms. In these cases a small number of shepherds (or cowherds or goatherds — whatever terms is appropriate) go with them to herd the animals, and to protect them. Those herdsmen have to be tough, because they’re frequently living alone or in very small numbers, in rough accommodations, and vulnerable to all kinds of threats. Outlaws and poachers, mountain lions and wolves, all may have an interest in snacking on an isolated flock.

Doing all of this benefits enormously from assistance. We probably could not have herded large livestock in any meaningful quantities without first domesticating dogs, who can sprint about to keep a herd clumped together or chivvy a straying beast back into the flock. Dogs also double as a warning system and assistant guard against the threats mentioned above. The addition of horses again makes it easier for a small number of humans to control and direct a large number of animals. Cattle ranching on the scale it’s been practiced in the American West is essentially unthinkable without mounted cowboys, as the average herd driven from Texas to the Kansas railheads in the late nineteenth century was three thousand head.

What usually puts an end to this kind of thing is the growth of enclosure. That doesn’t always mean literal fencing (though it can); it just means that land is cut off from common use, reserving it only to the landowner and whatever they choose to do with it. Often there are valid reasons for enclosure, as tighter control over a piece of land means you can do things like complex crop rotations for higher productivity without worrying that somebody’s sheep will interfere . . . but it also generates a huge amount of resentment among those common people, sometimes to the point of outright rebellion.

And sometimes rebellion itself is the cause of transhumance decline. Wars make it hard to move livestock safely across large distances, and with the pattern broken, it may be difficult to get back. Or perhaps you’ve been raising sheep for fleeces, and something causes that market to crater, so it’s no longer worth the expense of moving them back and forth. Conversely, something like an epidemic or an extended dry period can cause transhumance to surge, as there’s no longer as much need for farmland or the soil is no longer as fertile for crops.

So this can be anything from a background detail in a political brangle, to a source of income for an innkeeper on a livestock migration route, to a major inconvenience for a character attempting to travel quickly down roads filled with sheep, to the reason why your lonely shepherd protagonist stumbles across an ancient evil awakening in the hills. (We’ve had plenty of innocent farmboys in the fantasy genre. It’s time for the shepherds to shine!) Just remembering that humans are rarely the only ones living in an area can make a difference to the story!

Even if you work very, very hard with your worldbuilding, you may not be able to get readers to interpret it the way you want them to.

I’ve titled this essay “the past is a foreign country” because that’s a recognizable phrase (though few people know it’s from a book by the English novelist L. P. Hartley), and of course our worldbuilding often draws inspiration from the past — at least until we gain the ability to peer into the future. But I’m referring more broadly to the worlds we make, and the difficulty of translating fictional cultural differences effectively to your audience.

We touched on this a couple of months ago with the discussion of friendship, and how same-sex bonds could be expressed in astonishingly passionate terms compared to our models of friendship today. If you write that into a story now, you can insist all you like that it doesn’t imply anything more; some readers, maybe even most of them, are likely to find romantic and sexual overtones in it anyway. Those characters never sleep together? Maybe they’re asexual. They sleep with opposite-sex partners? Maybe they’re closeted or bi, and just not acting on those particular impulses. Especially since representations of queer desire have still not caught up with the straight kind, people open to those interpretations may have a hard time accepting that those two characters really are “just friends.”

The same can go for gendered behavior in general. I can say all I want — in keeping with cultural standards elsewhere and elsewhen — that crying is a perfectly masculine behavior, an expression of the powerful emotions felt by a properly manly heart. My modern Western readers will still have a hard time shaking the modern Western assumption that men should not shed more than perhaps a single stoic tear. If my heroic male character breaks out sobbing for anything other than the climactic death of a beloved character (and maybe even then), it’s going to carry a whiff of weakness, regardless of what standards prevail within the setting.

I’ve also talked about this in the context of beauty. We’re constantly bombarded with images and videos showing us the current ideal and marketing the notion that anything else is unattractive. Some forms of this, I suspect, are more amenable than others to worldbuilding in a different direction: if my story sings the praises of dark skin and beautiful clouds of hair, it’s clear that I’m pushing back against the white default (and I like to think my readers would be on board). It’s going to be a lot harder to make them understand why it’s appealing for people to black out their teeth, so their mouths look like empty holes. Even with all my anthropological training mustered to help me understand it, I look at photos of people with blackened teeth and see something that evokes a horror movie, not beauty.

Humor is notoriously difficult to translate from one culture to another. Now imagine making it up! This can be an effective way to signal cultural difference; if the alien ambassador laughs uproariously at seeing someone use a fork or tells a joke about that hilarious time his friend used the wrong meter in his poem, the reader receives that as evidence of very different behaviors and expectations. Much more difficult is establishing a variant framework of humor for your protagonist, where they find things funny that the reader does not share but is invited to empathize with. The best you can likely hope for is, through persistent effort, to establish what that framework is. Then, by the end of the story, the reader may recognize that what just happened will be considered funny — but that’s not the same thing as the reader laughing.

Or maybe what you’re going for is the opposite of funny, and your challenge is not so much making it register as making it feel real. If you read history — or, alas, if you encounter certain problems in the world today — you’ll eventually hit instances of bigotry that seem howlingly cartoonish. Whether they have to do with race, gender, class, religion, or any other point of difference, you can find instances of people saying things and committing acts that come across as absolutely and incomprehensibly inhuman.

You can put these in a story, of course. But I know authors who have written their own real-life experiences into their fiction . . . then have looked at the result, shaken their heads, and taken them out again. Because even when it’s reproduced directly from reality, the actual effect feels not real; it doesn’t produce the emotional result the author was going for. It winds up being distancing.

I particularly think about this in the context of writing war. Military campaigns of the past often included atrocities that, while they may be smaller than the Holocaust on a raw scale, were so pervasive and appalling that to put them on the page would seem like absurd, mustache-twirling villainy. Vlad the Impaler is said not merely to have impaled people, but to have gathered up three hundred Saxon boys and executed them either by that method or by burning, entirely because the leaders of the towns of their homeland were supporting his opponent in a civil war. And that’s just one example! The routine cruelty of such rulers is so over-the-top — and trust me, ol’ Vlad was hardly the only one or even the worst — that reading too much of it winds up numbing rather than horrifying.

What all of this means in practice is that sometimes the most important question is not “is this realistic?” but “is this effective for my story?” Is your reader likely to get the intended emotional effect from it, or are you better served by changing tactics and taking a different route to your point? Sometimes the answer will be that you want to stand your ground; you want to put that detail on the page, whether it’s inspired by a historical factoid or your own personal experience, even if it means the reader may not receive it as you intended. That’s a valid choice! At other times, you may decide that you prefer an alternative approach. You choose one instance of wartime horror to focus on in detail, rather than subjecting the reader to the full litany of atrocities. You pick at the edges of our current beauty standards or assumptions about masculinity, chipping away at cracks in that edifice rather than running at it headfirst.

. . . but maybe don’t try to invent an alternate framework of humor the reader is supposed to find funny. I know we’re writing speculative fiction, but some mountains might just be too steep to climb!