I say on a fairly regular basis that we are social primates. But there are limits to that; our brains are adapted for small groups, and cope much less well with hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of people. It’s therefore not surprising that we’ve developed tons of ways of dividing society into smaller, more manageable sets: families, neighborhoods, co-workers, etc. And clubs — which, for lack of a better umbrella term, I’m going to use for a whole swath of voluntary associations.

Because of the breadth of scope implied there, some types of club have already appeared in previous essays. The gangs of Year Six, for example, or the craft guilds of Year Seven, or the mystery cults of Year Eight, or the burial societies of Year Nine: all of these are examples of how people may club together for various purposes.

But if that were all, this wouldn’t merit an essay. So let’s talk about the fun end of things: secret societies and their ilk.

There are differing levels of secrecy in play here. The peak would be a society whose existence, membership, and activities are completely unsuspected by outsiders . . . but good luck pulling that off. In theory these absolutely exist, then and now, and I’m just not aware of them because they do such a flawless job of staying hidden. What we know of human behavior and security failures, however, means this is generally unlikely: sooner or later, word will get out. For this reason, I tend to side-eye such groups in stories — though if they have mind-control magic or similar methods available to them, then maybe they can indeed scrub all knowledge of themselves from the broader world.

More often, though, secrecy operates at a less restrictive level. The group is known to exist, but outsiders don’t know who’s a member. The membership is known, but they don’t speak of their business outside their ranks. The membership is known and engages in public activity, but rumors persist that that’s just the face they present to the world, and behind the scenes, they get up to all kinds of nefarious deeds.

This is, of course, the stuff of conspiracy theories. If you “know” a group exists, but there’s no proof of anybody being a member, it’s probably nothing more than rumor — but good luck disproving a rumor. If a group definitely exists, but they won’t talk about themselves, why not? What are they hiding? In the long run, this can become a form of corrosive distrust, either for one paranoid individual or for whole communities, where they wind up doubting all the available evidence and insisting that something else must be going on behind the scenes.

But for stories? This can be great, because it automatically introduces tension and intrigue to the narrative. And secret societies do genuinely exist, because if there’s one thing we love more than belonging to a group, it’s belonging to a special group, one where your membership means being inducted to privileges — including knowledge — that not everyone else gets. That heightens the feeling of social connection with your fellow members. Secret societies are also extremely prone to ritualizing their business, holding elaborate ceremonies for inducting new members or promoting someone within their ranks, and even dressing up their ordinary meetings with special robes and solemn formalities: measures that strengthen the bond between members, and help ensure that nobody will break ranks.

That helps explain why quite a few secret societies have no particular purpose beyond their own existence. The infamous Skull and Bones, a secret society for students at Yale, doesn’t carry out any public activities that I’m aware of, which differentiates it from the more ordinary student clubs organized around a certain mission or area of interest. It’s simply a way for a select group of individuals to join an elite tradition, forging connections with each other which may benefit them going forward. In this they are akin to the gentlemen’s clubs that began to form in Britain around the seventeenth century, although those latter often had some ostensible unifying theme: military service, political affiliation, or alumni of a certain university.

Unsurprisingly, it’s extremely common to find that members of such clubs and societies go on to careers in politics. These are the the “old boys’ networks” in action — very specifically boys, since many of them resisted or to this day resist admitting women to their ranks. (Though there are women’s secret societies as well, e.g. the Sande in West Africa.) To the extent that a group of this kind has a purpose, it’s the furtherance of its members’ power . . . which readily lends itself to conspiracy theories about a plan for world domination.

That last, of course, is the stuff of the Illuminati and the Freemasons — at least in folklore. The actual Bavarian Illuminati simply wanted to oppose superstition and monarchical abuses of power, but after their suppression in the eighteenth century, some people believed they continued in secret, blaming them for every kind of event and social movement imaginable, all around the world. (I say “blame” because usually people assume these later Illuminati to be nefarious, rather than crediting them with shifts the speaker thinks are desirable.) The facts that the Freemasons publicly exist, each Grand Lodge is independent without answering to a top authority, and (in the Anglo-American tradition) they explicitly prohibit discussions of religion or politics within their lodges, do not keep them from being the focus of similar rumors of machinations for a New World Order.

In some cases there may be real evidence of foul activities. The Ku Klux Klan has not just secretly but publicly and with pride carried out murder and acts of terror against Black people, explicitly to further a white supremacist agenda. Some instances of malicious groups, however, are very much a “handle with care” situation, as with the “leopard” or “human leopard” (sometimes also crocodile and chimpanzee) societies of late colonial West Africa: these do genuinely seem to have existed, may have committed murder, and in some cases possibly did engage in cannibalism . . . but given how much those became a stereotype of racist pulp fiction, I would proceed with a great deal of caution before trying to insert anything like that into a story.

Having dwelt a lot on the negative side, though, I’d like to note that isn’t the whole story of clubs. Fraternal orders like the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Knights of Columbus, or the Odd Fellows may have the ritual elements, but their purpose is often openly charitable or oriented toward aid. Groups like the burial societies I mentioned before fall under the header of “friendly societies” or “benefit societies,” which seek to help members support each other and/or outsiders like immigrants or the indigent poor; depending on their focus, these swing in the direction of cooperatives or volunteer organizations. Even groups with a primary focus like religion may take on such missions: the Catholic Trinitarian monastic order is officially the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and Captives, because the ransom of Christian captives held in other lands was a core principle upon which they were founded. (In modern times, where that’s a less common problem, they evangelize and help immigrants.)

What all these groups have in common is the use of social bonding to help further their purpose, whether that’s the advancement of members’ political careers, the spread of religion, or the protection of orphans. Probably all of us know that merely donating money to an organization creates a weak feeling of attachment at best. By contrast, face-to-face interaction with a small enough group of fellow members that you know them all as friends — at least in the loose sense of that word — is a far more powerful lever for motivation. We like to feel as if we belong, and once we do, we don’t want to let our fellows down.

In our increasingly digital, disconnected world, that’s a useful thing to keep in mind.

So far we’ve been talking about friendship in a one-to-one sense, as a relationship between only two people at a time. But of course, we all exist in a much larger social world — even during periods when that existence is best defined by a position firmly outside the circle. What does friendship look like when we open up our scope?

Well, for starters, “friendship” starts to be a word that maybe ought to have sarcasm quotes around it. We are social primates, and unfortunately, that entails some pretty nasty behavior alongside the nice stuff. As I said last week, depending on how you use the term, a friend might just be somebody you know and haven’t outright declared an enemy or dead to you. Or, depending on how you use the term . . . your “friend” might indeed be somebody you are out to hurt.

If that sounds like a particular negative feminine stereotype, you’re not wrong: in our society, teenaged girls in particular are proverbial for how horribly they may treat their so-called friends. This isn’t inherent to being adolescent and female, though; it tends to show up anywhere you foster the kind of hothouse atmosphere where a bunch of people are trapped together and can only rise socially by climbing over each other.

And that means it can describe a royal court every bit as much as a high school! Reading about the interpersonal dynamics of Elizabeth I’s nobles and ministers, I was struck by how much their behavior resembled the cliques and grudges of teenagers. The specifics differed — A offended B, so B arranged to have one of A’s political hangers-on denied the right of entry to the more exclusive precincts of the royal presence — but the vibes were much the same.

Associating this specifically with women is therefore not entirely true, because men can behave in similar ways. It’s also not entirely false, though, because control of social dynamics is a form of soft power, and in a patriarchal society where women are denied access to the formal levers of government, soft power is the only kind they can use. So now the question becomes: how do you acquire that power?

Some of it comes from obvious sources. If a person has some more formal type of authority — or, in the case of a woman, is associated with a man who has such authority — that tends to give their social presence more weight. After all, offending the prime minister or the wife of the Lord Treasurer might mean all kinds of political difficulties, whereas gaining their friendship could open new doors. This is true even at lower levels of society than a royal court; the wife of a town mayor or village headman probably has a certain amount of social cachet.

Similarly, wealth brings the ability to host more people more extravagantly, which is beneficial no matter what scale of party you’re looking at. Though in many cases, the power of wealth has to be evaluated in light of status: where commerce is scorned, then a woman from a merchant family, be she never so rich, will be seen as more déclassé than a noblewoman of more modest means. The former can still win social authority, but she’ll have to work harder for it.

What form that work takes depends on what’s admired in the society at hand. As we’ve discussed before, fashion can play a role here: exhibiting good aesthetic taste will bring approval, and if you can combine that with just the right amount of daring innovation, you might become the trendsetter everyone else looks to for guidance. That’s difficult to pull off if you’re a social nobody — your innovations are more likely to be sneered at as missteps — but one admiring comment from the right person might begin your rise to social influence.

For those of more modest financial means, it may be easier to aim for becoming known as a good conversationalist. Remember, this is a social world, so being someone people enjoy talking to is a major asset! Flatter the right people just the right amount, so you don’t sound too obsequious; tell rousing anecdotes about interesting situations; extemporize good poetry to commemorate the occasion at hand; exhibit whatever type of wit is most admired right now . . . which, yes, can include the back-biting type where you’re constantly tearing other people down, though it doesn’t have to. A lot depends on how vicious the local dynamic is.

Under the right circumstances — and this will be of interest to many people who enjoy reading SF/F — you can even win social influence through your book-learning and smarts. If you live in an environment of intellectual ferment and scientific exploration, then being au courant with the latest discoveries gives you fodder for attracting attention. You do still need to be a good conversationalist, so you can deliver what you know in an interesting fashion — otherwise you’ll have a reputation as a pedantic bore — but it isn’t always about jokes and empty gossip.

For women in Enlightenment-era Europe, in fact, social gatherings were a major part of how they kept up with the intellectual scene. The French salonnières of the early modern period famously established a model of social interaction that spread across the continent and into the British Isles. “Bluestocking,” the Victorian pejorative for an excessively bookish woman, was originally the name of an eighteenth-century “salon” or social circle focused on literary discussion — which, given the era, included philosophy, history, and scientific research, not just fiction. Their community included men, but it was led by women, and through the connections formed at their gatherings, they helped advance each others’ minds, laying the groundwork for the advances of feminism in the nineteenth century.

It’s not all so high-minded, of course. Like I said, these environments can also feature a ton of backstabbing and social climbing: witness all scenes set at Almack’s Assembly Rooms in Regency romances, where a single introduction from the right person might set an individual on a path to an advantageous marriage . . . while others with competing interests do their best to spike any such alliance. The Lady Patronesses of Almack’s, with their control over vouchers for admission, held a great deal of power over that scene.

In that case there was a group of women in control, but where a single queen bee rules over it all, she can be as capricious and arbitrary as any formal autocrat. She’s likely to be a central gathering-point for gossip, and whispered into the right ears, those juicy tidbits might become a scandal that brings down a minister. Even without such weapons at hand, declaring someone persona non grata at her own events can mean they find themself excluded elsewhere as well . . . and without the chance to rub shoulders with influential people, their chances of advancement, whether through marriage or political appointment, go into a steep decline.

So is the social scene occasionally petty and vicious? Absolutely — but that doesn’t make it trivial. Stylish ladies or sociable gentlemen can leverage this world as an alternative route to power, all without ever lifting anything more dangerous than a fan or a pen.

Friendship hardly seems like something that needs worldbuilding. It’s a basic human behavior, right? We all make friends?

Sure — but what friendship means does not stay the same.

Starting at: Who can you be friends with? Then and now, social divisions may complicate the answer to that. Can men and women be friends? If sex segregation means that women aren’t supposed to go out into society or interact with men who aren’t their relatives, then cross-gender friendship is pretty much restricted to a trusted cousin or two. (Even then, the relationship is likely to be spoken of in familial terms instead.) But a more egalitarian society may still be dubious of friendships between men and women, with many people assuming there will always, inevitably, be an undercurrent of sexual tension there: friendship as a consolation prize, or a barrier to head off escalation to something more.

What about friendship across class lines? That will often be awkward, even without formal hierarchies of status to get in the way; after all, if one person’s struggling to make rent and the other could buy their entire apartment building, you have some inherent inequality there. This gets particularly thorny when one person employs the other: however well they get along and enjoy each other’s company, their personal and their business relationships may wind up pulling in opposite directions, to the detriment of both bonds. In that light, it’s not surprising that many past societies would have said straight-out that such connections cannot be true friendship. That can only exist between equals.

Class also shares a quality with racial boundaries, which is that both of them are deeply interwoven with culture. People from different groups may have any number of cultural differences, creating significant contrasts in how they spend their free time, what they eat, and even how they converse. These things don’t prevent friendship — we have far too many real-world examples proving otherwise — but they can make it more difficult, with opportunities arising for misunderstanding or conflict.

But what does it mean to be friends, anyway? So far we’ve been glossing over that as if it can be taken for granted . . . but one look at an elementary school (where kids are very much learning the social ropes) shows that’s not the case.

The answer here isn’t just cultural but personal, too. One individual may refer to anybody they know in a positive, non-business capacity as their friend; to their neighbor, most of those people are “acquaintances” or “people they know,” with the term “friend” reserved for those who enjoy a deeper connection. Digital relationships particularly complicate this, with the rhetoric of “friending” someone on a social media network implying more connection than actually exists. And how many friends can you have? Most people don’t put a real cap on that, but they may feel you can have only one best friend at a time, and that to throw the superlative around more broadly cheapens its meaning.

Part of what muddies the waters here is that we rarely have formal markers for friendship, the way we have them for marriage. Friendship bracelets (which are said to have historical origins in Central America) started being shared in the ’70s or ’80s; however, they’re not universally used, and people can wear that style of bracelet without it signifying anything in particular. Children may declare “you’re my friend now” or ask “are we friends?”, but adults — at least in the societies I know — are more likely to leave it implicit, with all the social pitfalls that entails.

Because part of friendship is being able to share certain intimacies with the other person. That might mean dumping your troubles on them, knowing (or at least having good reason to hope) you’ll receive a sympathetic hearing; it might mean asking them to do things for you, without needing to negotiate some kind of explicit compensation or trade. If you try either of those things with someone you assume is a good enough friend for it, only to find they don’t see the two of you as being that close . . . oof. It can get very awkward, very fast.

And “intimacy” may go a lot farther than that. In much of the past, and in many parts of the world today, it’s entirely normal for friends to show a degree of physical affection that my fellow Americans generally reserve for significant others: hugging is okay, at least for some people in some circumstances, but holding hands as you walk down the street? Kissing, on the cheek or on the lips? Taking a bath together, or sharing a bed? Those things look romantic to us, not platonic.

The same goes for emotional intimacy, or rather, how it’s expressed. If you read the letters of same-sex English friends from the nineteenth century, they regularly speak of each other in terms so passionate, you could easily mistake them for lovers. And in some cases, we have reason to surmise that’s one hundred percent true; deep friendships could indeed be a cover for a type of relationship not sanctioned by society at the time. But that cover worked because friends did write to each other in such terms, without anybody assuming that “I long to kiss your lips again” carried sexual implications.

Which makes for interesting challenges when it comes to fiction. If you write such behavior into your invented society, then it’s likely that a high percentage of your readers are going to interpret that as shippy. In some ways that’s fine — a certain type of reader will ship all kinds of pairings you never intended — but in other cases, that may make your audience think you’re queer-baiting them, suggesting something and then not delivering. Even if they don’t feel cheated, the weight of association is going to shift how they read the characters’ behavior, adding sexual overtones where none were supposed to be.

Finally, there’s the question of how friendship ends. Again, children tend to make it more explicit: “I’m not going to be your friend anymore!” Social media gives us the passive-aggressive option of unfollowing somebody, which they may or may not even notice happening. If you have some of their belongings, or they have a key to your place, a sufficiently bad rift may entail a dramatic scene of shoving somebody’s stuff back at them or revoking their access. But mostly we just drift away, ending the relationship as ambiguously as we began it. . . with every bit as much room for uncertainty and misinterpretation.

Seen in that light, there’s frankly a lot to be said for worldbuilding more overt structures around the beginning, ending, and depth of friendship between your characters. Or maybe not: maybe crossed wires and hurt feelings are exactly what your story needs!

Ars longa, vita brevis — but even art doesn’t last forever. At least, not without a lot of help.

The ephemerality of art does, of course, depend on what you’re doing. Performing arts are fleeting by nature: there’s notation or (nowadays) recording, but when we talk about preserving something like music or dance, we tend to mean the art form as a whole, making sure there continue to be practitioners and audiences. In this sense it’s much like a craft, where you need an ongoing series of teachers and students to inherit their wisdom — which includes passing on the specific details of a song or a dance, an oral story or an epic poem, if you don’t have a way of committing those to a more permanent medium. If that chain of transmission gets broken, then skills or entire works of art may be lost.

Physical art is more fixed, but that doesn’t mean it’s lasting. I’ve talked before about how much literature was destroyed after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire cut down on the availability of papyrus: that stuff isn’t durable, and so anything written on it has to be copied and recopied, over and over again, as the original version decays. Many kinds of wood-pulp paper have a similar problem with acid; unless it’s specially treated (acid-free paper), it succumbs to what’s poetically known as “slow fire,” gradually turning the paper more and more brittle until the slightest touch causes it to disintegrate. Modern science has ways to stabilize and de-acidify the paper, but for these kinds of artworks, “preservation” usually consists of continually making new copies, so that the content survives even if the container does not.

Some things you might think don’t need conservation. Fired clay has survived for thousands of years; surely it’s perfectly fine, right? Not necessarily. Depending on how the clay was treated, it may still contain salts that can expand and crack the material, even to the point of it disintegrating into useless fragments. Salt and other chemicals can also attack stone, accumulating either through rain (which is rarely entirely pure), through wind, or through dampness rising from the ground. Heat and cold also create stress on the stone which can lead to cracks: microscopic ones at first, but as the strain continues, and especially if those cracks are infiltrated by substances that expand and contract at different rates, entire pieces can break off. This is why so many ancient statues are missing noses, hands, and other protruding bits.

Even if it’s less dramatic than that, weathering takes a gradual toll. Erosion from wind and water scrapes away infinitesimal layers of detail from the surface, year after year. Iron obviously rusts, but nearly any metal can corrode in one fashion or another — sometimes damaging not only itself, but everything around it. Wooden elements not only rot but warp, placing stress on anything they connect to. Pigments fade and discolor, perhaps from the mere touch of light; textiles combine the vulnerabilities of those pigments with the brittleness and decay of organic material. Insects may eat away at artworks or lay their eggs within them; moss and lichen, while picturesque in their own way, hasten the breakdown of whatever they’ve latched onto. The list of potential sources of damage is nearly endless.

The cruelest twist is that sometimes we ourselves are the cause of the very problems we’re trying to address. Our efforts to preserve great works of art go back for centuries, but our knowledge of how to do that well is much more recent. Past conservators have worked diligently to clean dirt and overgrowth off statues or paintings . . . not realizing that the cleansers they’re using are causing other kinds of damage, especially once the long term comes into play. Maybe it looks fine in the moment, but it’s actually dried out the paint so that later on it begins to crack and flake away from the canvas or panels beneath.

Our efforts to halt or reverse damage can likewise become part of the problem. Adding metal brackets to stabilize some work of stone may seem like a good idea, but their corrosion or warping can destroy what they were meant to protect. (This likely contributed to the collapse of Coventry Cathedral during the Blitz, as the fire heated the iron supports added by the Victorians.) And have you ever wondered why so many paintings by the Old Masters look dark and yellow? That’s because at some point, some well-meaning person gave them a coat of varnish to protect the paint beneath — and then, in the decades or centuries since then, the varnish has aged and collected dust, distorting the colors of the painting and obscuring finer details. You can see this in a video by Philip Mould that recently made the rounds of the internet, showing him cleaning away a thick layer of discolored varnish to reveal a startlingly vibrant portrait beneath.

And finally, conservation sometimes includes touching up the original — but where the line is between “touching up” and “adding your own ideas” may be in the eye of the beholder. Quite a few classical sculptures you might see in Italy nowadays were actually found as fragments, with Renaissance artists hired to “restore” the missing portions according to their own vision — look into the famous grouping Laocoön and His Sons to see the replacement right arm Laocoön was given, versus the one found later that seems to have been the original. A portrait of Isabella de’ Medici in the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum of Art was so thoroughly overpainted that the curator actually thought it was a modern fake; only upon X-ray examination did she find the original was holding an urn and had a completely different face. And, most egregiously, the “restorers” Sir Arthur Evans hired for the frescos in the Minoan palace of Knossos exercised so much of their own creativity around the surviving fragments that they transformed what we now know was a depiction of a monkey into a young boy.

The key goals nowadays are prevention, stability, reversibility, and honesty. Prevention means producing art on durable materials like acid-free paper, keeping fragile materials in climate-controlled rooms, bundling up outdoor sculptures in wintertime to protect them from the cold, and otherwise trying to forestall problems from getting a foothold in the first place. Stability means leveraging our improved knowledge of chemistry to ensure that the materials we use to repair or protect works of art are less likely to cause damage later on. Reversibility means doing our best to guarantee that anything we add can be removed later on without harm: it’s fine to put protective varnish on a painting or a sculpture, so long as we can also wipe it away. And honesty means that, if we fill in the gaps on some fragmentary relic, we let the seams show, instead of trying to pass off our own additions as the genuine article.

Do we succeed at adhering to these goals all the time, in all circumstances? Of course not. And even when we try, we may miss the mark, such that later generations curse us for well-meaning interventions that accidentally made things worse. But we do the best we can with the knowledge and tools we have, which is all that anyone can promise.

Forgery: where art and crime intersect.

Not all kinds of forgery are art, of course. When my fourteen-year-old self forged my father’s signature on my practice records to assure my band director that yes, of course I practiced at home as much as I was supposed to, there was no art involved there. (Rather the opposite, in fact.) I suppose you could argue that mimicking someone’s handwriting is calligraphic forgery, but that feels to me like it’s stretching the point. Counterfeiting we’ve already talked about separately, in the first year of this Patreon; the manufacture of fake IDs or other legal documents, or of something like knockoff Gucci purses, are also not the focus of this essay.

No, here we’re concerned with the creation of fake objects of art, whether works attributed to a specific artist, or anonymous artifacts of a particular place and time. And this is a topic I find fascinatingly squirrelly.

The techniques necessary to pull this off have gotten increasingly sophisticated over time. Back in the day — or even now, if you’re selling to a credulous enough fool — anything that passed muster to a casual glance might suffice. Get yourself a fresh sheet of parchment, papyrus, or paper, write or draw on it, apply some physical and chemical stresses to make it look old, and you’re good to go. Fire a pot or clay figure, or carve something out of stone, then batter it around for that authentic chipped look. Maybe even stamp out an ancient coin or two, if it’s a piece rare enough to be worth substantially more than its metal content.

These days, it’s not nearly that simple. We have carbon dating, spectroscopic analysis, and other high-tech methods of determining whether some detail is out of place. Which doesn’t mean forgeries have gone away; it just means that talented forger needs to know a lot more than just what their proposed artifact should look like. There’s a thriving market in blank fragments of ancient papyrus — so the substrate will pass an age check even if what’s written on it is new — and who knows what texts have been scraped off bits of parchment, what paintings have been covered or rubbed away, so something more lucrative can be put in their place. The best forgers need to know the chemistry of inks and paints, how to make the right tools, the techniques used back then, so that only the closest analysis by the most skilled experts can spot the fake.

Nor is it only about the object itself. These days, we also pay a lot of attention to provenance: the history of an object’s ownership, which can help to prove that it wasn’t made last week. (A very similar term, provenience, is used in archaeology to refer to where the object was found: relevant to sifting out illegally looted objects from those excavated under legitimate conditions.) Of course, if you want to pass off a fake as the real thing, you also have to forge a provenance — hence the massive upswing after World War II in items that had been the property of an “anonymous Swiss collector,” a fig leaf to cover Nazi theft and forgeries alike.

That’s when you’re just trying to make a Twelfth Dynasty Egyptian ushabti or a bronze ornament from Sanxingdui: a plausible example of a type, but nothing more specific than that. When you’re trying to pass something off as a previously-unidentified Picasso or Rodin, then you can’t hide behind the expected variations between different nameless historical artisans; you have to mimic not just the materials but the ideas, composition, and execution of that specific person — well enough that it seems like it could have genuinely been their work.

And at that point, you very nearly have a Zen koan on your hands: if someone forges a Rembrandt so well it can’t be told from the real thing, is there a meaningful difference? Is the art itself what’s worthwhile, or the fact that it was made by a specific person?

The answer to that really depends on context. If I’m a layperson who likes Caravaggio’s style of painting, and somebody else comes along who paints just like Caravaggio (without claiming those are his works), I might be delighted to acquire things of the exact type I like for a fraction of the cost. Yay for pretty art! By contrast, if a forger lies to me and I pay Caravaggio prices for something that doesn’t suffer from the scarcity of the artist being dead for centuries, I’m probably going to be pissed. And if I’m an art historian trying to learn more about Caravaggio, that forger has actively poisoned the well of scholarship by introducing false data.

Some of our “forgery” problems now actual stem from situations more like that first example. You can buy a million and one plastic replicas of Michaelangelo’s David in Florence, and nobody thinks of those as forgeries . . . but rewind a few centuries or millennia, and those replicas had to be hand-crafted out of marble or bronze or whatever suited the sculpture being copied. That wasn’t forgery; it was just how art got replicated, and the best copyists were deploying a useful, legitimate skill. The same was true of paintings. Now, however, the interests of both scholarship and the aura of owning a verified-as-legitimate original mean we have to sort that historical wheat from the chaff.

Or take the workshop context in which many Renaissance artists operated. Apprentices were expected to mimic their master’s style, and if the result was good enough, the master was free to sell those works under his (or, more rarely, her) own name. Again, nowadays we strive to separate those out from the authentic works of the master — but that reflects a modern attitude where the individual genius is the most important thing, above whether it reflects their style or was made under their auspices.

Some forgeries are extremely famous. Han Van Meegeren had to out himself as a forger when he was accused of collaboration for selling a Vermeer to the Nazi Hermann Göring; to prove that he hadn’t hocked a piece of cultural patrimony, he painted another one while court-appointed witnesses stood and watched. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has spent quite a bit of money trying to prove the disputed authenticity of a kouros (a specific style of statue) they bought for seven million dollars, but the best they’ve been able to achieve is a label identifying it as “Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery.” The Boston Museum of Fine Arts similarly clings to the hope that their probably-fake “Minoan snake goddess” statuette might be the real thing.

One thing these forgeries have in common: the demand for the genuine article is high enough to make fakes worth the effort of their creation. Minoan snake goddesses got manufactured because Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations at Knossos attracted a ton of publicity, and he was not particularly discriminating in buying the “discoveries” people brought to him. Few criminals bothered forging Indigenous art until collectors turned their attention toward those parts of the world, thereby creating demand. This can in turn come full circle: van Meegeren’s post-trial fame made his paintings rise high enough in value that his own son wound up forging more of them.

Nobody knows for sure how many fakes are on display in museums, galleries, and private collections. Some estimates run very high, due to the way today’s plutocrats treat the acquisition of art as an investment strategy and display of status, while others say that improved methods of detection and the emphasis on authenticating an object before somebody forks over millions for it have greatly reduced the incidence. We’ll never really know for sure, because of the loss of face inherent in admitting you paid too much for a forgery — including the cratering in value for other works that might become suspect by association. But if you want to tell a story of trickery and sordid doings, the art world is rife with possibility!

Throughout the art sections of this Patreon, I’ve been grouping them into broad categories: visual arts, performing arts, literary arts, and so forth. But what about the arts that are kinda of . . . none of the above?

It’s a trick question, honestly, because just about everything can be classed under one of those categories. But I do want to take a moment to talk about a variety of arts that, while classifiable as painting or sculpture or what have you, don’t normally get included under those headers, because of how they’re used or what materials they involve. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it will serve as a reminder that our species is as much Homo creatrix as it is Homo sapiens: if we can use it for art, we probably have.

Let’s look at the “painting” side of things — I don’t know if there’s a good technical term that covers painting, drawing, and anything else involving the creation of images or designs on a two-dimensional surface. Some variations here are about technique, as in the case of frescoes: there you execute your work upon wet plaster, making the pigment far more durable. And those are usually murals, though not always, which differentiates them from both the more portable sort of art and the scale on which the average painter operates; a mural doesn’t have to be enormous, but it certainly lends itself to monumental work, far beyond what a canvas could reasonably support.

The question of what is being painted leads us toward some other interesting corners. Illumination, for example, is the art of decorating the pages of books, whether by fancifying the text itself (illuminated capital letters and the like) or by including images alongside. Other people have made art out of painting eggshells — or carving them, if the shell is thick enough; ostrich eggs are good for this, and one can imagine dragon eggs being the same way — or the insides of glass balls. Those also frequently involve working at a very tiny scale, and it’s worth noting that miniature painting is a whole field of its own, making a virtuoso display out of executing your work at a level where someone might need a magnifying glass to fully appreciate it.

(Er, “miniature painting” in the sense of “very small,” not “minis for Dungeons & Dragons or a similar game.” Though that’s its own popular art form, too!)

In other cases, it’s the medium of the decoration itself that becomes unusual. I’ve mentioned mosaics before, tessellating colored stones, ceramic, or glass to make an image, but you can grind even smaller than that with sandpainting. This doesn’t always involve actual sand — sometimes it’s crushed pigments instead — and some versions are more like carving in that they involve drawing in a sandy surface, but most specifically this involves pouring out sand or powder to create your designs. As you can imagine, this tends to be an ephemeral art . . . but that’s often the point, especially when it’s used in a ritual, religious context.

Some of these arts start rising above the two-dimensional surface in interesting ways. Beading can, when done thickly enough, become almost sculptural; it’s also massively labor-intensive, which is why it became popular for sartorial displays of wealth when industrialization made the production and dying of fabric much cheaper. Quillwork is a form of fabric decoration unique to Indigenous North America, using dyed and undyed porcupine quills to create designs; among the Cheyenne, joining the elite Quilling Society that crafted such things was itself a form of status. This is distinct, however, from quilling: a different art with a similar name that curls tiny slips of paper into coils, then glues them to a backing to create images from the coils.

Paper leads us onward toward more overtly sculptural uses of that medium. What is origami, after all, but a specific kind of paper-based sculpture? That one in its strict incarnation prohibits cutting or gluing the paper to create its forms, which puts it at the polar opposite end of the spectrum from papercutting: an art some of us may have tried in simple form as kids, but skilled practitioners can achieve astonishingly complex and beautiful pictures. One particular version of this, the silhouette, is traditionally done with black paper and used especially for portraiture.

Basketry maybe should have gone into the textiles essay, both because many of its techniques are close kin to weaving and sewing, and because it very much belongs among what I termed the “functional arts” — those which serve a utilitarian purpose while also including an aesthetic dimension. Anything pliable can potentially be used for basketry: most often plant materials like straw, willow, grass, and vines, but also animal hides or modern materials like strips of plastic. The resulting vessels are vitally important as storage containers and can even be made waterproof, especially if they’re coated in clay or bitumen, but by working patterns into their design, basket-makers can also make them beautiful.

Or perhaps you go in an entirely non-utilitarian direction. Flower arranging is about taking nature’s beauty — perhaps from a garden — and displaying it in an artificial way, knowing full well that soon the flowers will wilt. But where most of us stop at just sticking a few blooms in a vase, some artists go on to create full-blown sculptures of flowers and greenery, sometimes with complex internal structures that continue supplying water to the blooms to extend their life. There was even a competitive TV show about this, The Big Flower Fight!

I could keep going, of course. Baking is a functional art insofar as it makes something for you to eat, but it definitely has its elaborate end where the artistic value of the decoration or shaping is as much the point as the taste of the final product — if it’s edible at all, which it may not be! Amaury Guichon has made an entire TikTok phenomenon out of showcasing his monumental chocolate sculptures. I’m sure someone out there has devoted their life to the art of meat sculpture, but I’m not going to go looking for evidence of that. The point is made: if we can turn it into art, we probably will.

Which is honestly kind of amazing. Art is, after all, about doing more than the minimum required for our survival. It is a mark of our success as a species, that we have freed enough of our time from the work of acquiring food and shelter that art is possible. And it says something about our inner state, that when we have a spare moment available, we often want to spend it making something beautiful — out of whatever comes to hand.

I’ve been trying for some time now to get a landscaper not to ghost me, so we can redo the front and back yards of my house.

Am I trying to hire a contractor, or an artist?

Yes. Both. Year Nine’s discussion of how we’ve reshaped the land focused entirely on utilitarian aspects: draining wetlands, filling in shorelines, flattening land for agriculture and roads. We entirely skipped over the aesthetic angle — but that matters, too! The land and what grows atop it can become a medium for art.

A fairly elite art, though. At its core, landscaping for the purpose of a garden or a park is about setting aside ground that could have been productive and using it for pleasure instead. Not to say that there can’t be some overlap; vegetable gardens can be attractive, and parks might play home to game animals that will later grace the dinner table. But there’s a sort of conspicuous consumption in saying, not only do I have land, but I have enough of it to devote some to aesthetic enjoyment over survival.

We don’t know what the earliest gardens were like, but we know they’ve been with us probably about as long as stratified society has been, if not longer. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (named for their tiered structure) were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and those — if they ever existed — were a continuation of a well-documented Assyrian tradition of royal gardens, which included hydraulic engineering to supply them with water. So this was not a new art.

But when did it become an art? I’m not entirely sure. The boundary is fuzzy, of course; gardens can exist without being included in the discourse around Proper Art. (As we saw in Year Eight, with the shift toward recognizing textiles as a possible form of fine art.) Europe didn’t really elevate gardens to that stature until the sixteenth century, as part of the Renaissance return to classical ideals. The earliest Chinese book I’ve been able to find on the aesthetics of gardening, as opposed to botanical studies of plants, is from the seventeenth century, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were earlier works. I think that when you start getting specific aesthetic movements and individual designers famous for their work, you’re in the realm of Art instead of a functional thing that can also be pretty; I just don’t know when that began.

There definitely are aesthetic movements, though! In particular, gardens-as-art swing between the poles of “nature in her most idealized form” and “intentionally artificial.” Many Japanese gardens exemplify the former, while European gardens laid out in complex geometric beds demonstrate the latter. It’s not entirely a regional differentiation, though; Japanese dry (“Zen”) gardens, with their carefully raked seas of gravel, are obviously not trying to look natural, and Europeans have enjoyed a good meadow-style garden, too.

This is partly a question of how you’re supposed to interact with these spaces. Some — including many of those Japanese examples, dry or otherwise — are meant to be viewed from the outside, e.g. while sitting on a veranda or looking down on it from an upstairs window. Others are meant to be walked through, so they’re designed with an eye toward what new images will greet you as you follow a path or come round a corner. Meanwhile, hedge mazes may purposefully try to confuse you, which means they benefit from walls of greenery as close to identical as you can get them — until you arrive at the center or some other node, where the intentional monotony breaks.

In pursuit of these effects, a garden can incorporate other forms of art and technology. Hydraulics may play a role not only in irrigating the garden, but in fueling fountains, waterfalls, artificial streams, and the like, which in turn may host fish, turtles, and other inhabitants. Architecture provides bridges over wet or dry courses and structures like walls, gazebos, arches, arbors, bowers, pergolas, and trellises, often supporting climbing plants. Statuary very commonly appears in pleasing spots; paintings are less common, since the weather will damage them faster, but mosaics work very well.

But the centerpiece is usually the plants themselves. As with zoos (Year Four) and the “cabinet of curiosities”-style museums (Year Nine), one purpose of a garden may be to show off plants and trees from far-distant lands, delighting the eye and possibly the nose with unfamiliar wonders. The earliest greenhouses seem to have been built to grow vegetables out of season, but later ones saw great use for cultivating tropical plants far outside their usual climes — especially once we figured out how to heat them reliably, circa the seventeenth century. In other cases, the appeal comes from carefully pruning the plants to a desired shape, whether that’s arching gracefully over a path or full-on sculpture into the shapes of animals or mythological figures.

One particularly clever trick involves accounting for the changing conditions inherent to an art based in nature. Many gardens go dead and boring in the winter — or in the summer, if you’re in a climate where rain only comes in the winter — but a skilled designer can create a “four seasons” garden that offers shifting sources of interest throughout the year. Similarly, they may use a combination of artificial lighting and night-blooming flowers to create a space whose experience is very different at night than during the day.

And gardens can even serve an intellectual purpose! Like a museum, its displays may be educational; you see this in botanical gardens and arboreta, with their signs identifying plants and perhaps telling you something about them. Many scholars over the centuries have also used gardens as the site of their experiments, studying their materials and tweaking how to best care for them. But this doesn’t stop with plain science, either. We often refer to dry rock gardens as “Zen gardens” because of their role in encouraging meditative contemplation, and actually, it goes deeper than that: the design of such a garden is often steeped in symbolism, with rocks representing mountains in general or specific important peaks. I don’t actually know, but I readily assume, that somebody in early modern Europe probably created a garden full of coded alchemical references. The design of the place can be as much a tool for the mind as it is a pleasure for the senses.

Which brings them back around to a functional purpose, I suppose. Gardens very much straddle the line between aesthetics and pragmatism!

Uprisings. Revolts. Insurgencies. Rebellions. Civil wars.

What are the differences between all these things?

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Last week I mentioned in passing that “castle” in the stricter sense refers to a type of fortified residence: not necessarily a single-family dwelling, of course, but a place belonging to and possibly occupied by an important family, with all their associated guards, servants, hangers-on, and so forth. That’s the sense that will be at the forefront of this essay, because life in a fortified military camp, an isolated watchtower, or a walled village is going to be very different from life in that more narrowly defined castle.

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Castles are a stereotypical feature of the fantasy genre, but for good reason: they’re a ubiquitous feature of nearly every non-nomadic society well into the gunpowder era, until artillery finally got powerful enough that “build a better wall” stopped being a useful method of defense.

But castles, like walls, sometimes get simplified and misunderstood. So let’s take a look at the many purposes they once served.

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There’s a pop-culture tendency to point at structures like Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall of China and laugh because “they didn’t keep invaders out.” But that betrays a very limited understanding of what a wall is for.

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A fictional world is potentially infinite in its detail, just like the real world. How do you decide when to say, that’s enough — I’m done worldbuilding?

This question is, among other things, a matter of taste, which means there’s no actual “right answer” apart from the one that suits your preferences. I think it’s pretty obvious from my essays here, my own novels, and the things I enjoy reading that I set the bar on the higher end: I like to feel immersed in a believable world, one that has enough texture for me to sink into the illusion of its reality. Other people would look at books I love and find them tediously over-detailed.

But I’d argue this isn’t purely driven by taste. Or rather, taste sets the upper and lower bounds for your preferences; within the resulting range, there are certain factors you can use to guide your decision-making.

The first is that I think it’s beneficial for a story to have at least a little more worldbuilding than the plot strictly requires. The word “strictly” is key to this equation, though; I am really and truly talking about what the plot absolutely has to mention in order to make the story go. This came to my attention when I tried reading a novel (which, unsurprisingly, I did not finish) that appeared to subscribe to the “only what is required and not an adjective more” school of thinking. Nothing was described unless it was load-bearing — for example, the first mention of anyone’s clothing was when a character showed up wearing the uniform of a dangerous organization. What did that uniform look like? Dunno, because that doesn’t matter. The factual content of “this is why the protagonist knows to be wary of him” was sufficient, and the visuals were treated like unnecessary padding. The story was so bare bones, even a skeleton would eye it askance. And the result was that I had a direct view of the plot machinery operating, without any skin of verisimilitude to make it feel more natural.

Of course, you don’t want to mention that which is entirely irrelevant. In the setting of the Rook and Rose trilogy, when Vraszenian settlements make war on one another, the victorious side raids the labyrinth (temple) of the losing side and steals all the Faces (representations of the benevolent aspects of the deities) as their trophies, leaving behind only the Masks (representations of the malevolent or wrathful aspects). You will find this detail nowhere in the books — admittedly because I thought it up after my co-author and I had finished writing them! But even if I’d come up with that detail sooner, it still wouldn’t be in the trilogy, for the simple reason that nowhere in our story do we have one Vraszenian settlement making war on another. Any reference to that practice would be air-dropped in from the stratosphere, disrupting the story we’re actually telling.

One solution to this, as I’ve mentioned before, is to make your cool idea relevant. We’d have a hard time doing that with internecine warfare, but we could have worked it in as a side note: we do have a conflict between street gangs, and maybe they do something metaphorically similar, which would be reason for someone to mention the larger-scale practice in passing. In this case it’s still a reach, but it serves to illustrate how, if you already have a super-shiny idea, you can look for ways to integrate it with your narrative. From the perspective of “where do you stop worldbuilding,” though, the answer is “before you reach this point, unless the idea comes to you of its own accord” (as this one did). There would be no purpose in me asking “okay, so what does warfare look like in the rest of Vraszan, when city-states or neighboring villages get into conflicts?” when that’s entirely tangential to the actual plot.

You also have to keep an eye on your pacing. Let’s say your protagonist is writing a letter in cipher: should you spend time figuring out what type of cipher their society uses? It’s a relevant question . . . but the details could potentially bog down your scene, stalling the reader with minutiae that distract from the content of the message itself. Personally, I’d be more likely to go in-depth on that question if the character was trying to crack a cipher, because now it’s a challenge they’re trying to overcome — automatically more interesting thanks to the unknown contents of the letter. If you start to research or brainstorm on something, then realize it’s drawing you away from the forward momentum of the story, limit it to a line or two of description at most, or just let the reader supply whatever default lives in their brain.

Finally, is your worldbuilding stopping you from writing the story? It’s one thing if you genuinely need to know something in order to move forward. That happened recently with me getting some distance into the draft of an upcoming novel about a monk going on a pilgrimage, then stopping because I needed to do a lot more development of both my map and my calendar if I didn’t want the pilgrims to be floating in a vague, timeless void. That’s one I maybe should have seen coming and taken care of sooner . . . but there’s a lot of worldbuilding stuff you don’t know you’re going to need until you sit down to write a given scene.

So the notion that you will do all your worldbuilding first and then, when that’s complete, write your story? That’s a trap, one that can keep you forever in the planning stages and never in the execution. Some things you have to know in advance: I couldn’t have started the novel without a basic sense of the religion my monk protagonist follows. It’s entirely legitimate to lay some groundwork before you begin. Much of your setting, though, can and probably should grow with the characters and the narrative, shaping and being shaped by the specifics of the tale. You’ll get a more organic, real-feeling result that way than if you lay down a bunch of shiny ideas in advance and then shoehorn everything in around them.

When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth, he was thinking in terms of a hollow planet. There’s another sense in which we can think about the center of the earth, though — a more spiritual one. (more…)

In these days of climate change, the notion of coastal areas going underwater is a familiar fear. But it’s not a new one; we have stories of drowned lands going back for thousands of years. (more…)

You probably don’t much like thinking about death. It’s understandable: death is sad and scary, and few of us look forward to it coming for us or anybody we love. But believe it or not, reminders of death have not infrequently been baked in as a cultural practice — in a couple of cases I’m going to discuss, literally baked! (more…)

We’ve touched on sacred objects before, as they’re often integrated with other aspects of religion, but we haven’t looked at them directly. We’re going to do that now not only because it’s a key element of practically every religion, but because these turn out to be the hook upon which cultures have hung some fascinating behaviors! (more…)

I’ve been talking about the preservation of history as a matter of written records, but as a trained archaeologist, I am obliged to note that history also inheres in the materials we leave behind, from the grand — elaborate sarcophagi and ruined temples — to the humble — potsherds, post holes, and the bones of our meals.

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Thanks to my research for the upcoming Sea Beyond duology, I became aware of something called the “Alexander Romance.” (more…)

Philosophy is one of those topics where, if you’re intending to explore it in detail in your fiction, you probably already know more about it than I do.

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In the beginning, there was the list.

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