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!

“History is written by the victors” is a familiar adage, and it holds a lot of truth in it. But as an analysis of who specifically is writing the history, and what they’re out to do, it falls a bit short.

First of all, we should acknowledge that history — like many intellectual fields, and perhaps more than some — really does involve standing on the shoulders of, if not giants, then at least the ordinary-sized people who came before you. Until we invent time travel, there’s no way to go back and get fresh primary data on, say, the Battle of Marathon; we have a limited number of ancient sources on any particular topic, and some of those sources are probably based on their fellows, narrowing the pool even further. There are also histories we only know about because a later historian mentioned, summarized, or outright quoted those in the course of writing their own work. Archaeology can fill in some gaps, but not all of them, and not of all kinds. When we’re extremely lucky, a document turns up that contains a previously unknown fragment of somebody’s history, but that’s rare.

So who are the giants whose shoulders we’re standing on?

Some of them are, to put it bluntly, dilettantes. Some guy (it’s usually a guy) with time and money decides to write a history of his current era, a past one, or — if he’s feeling really ambitious — a sweeping account of everything up to the present moment, at least in his own land, or maybe the whole region. Or the whole history of the world! If he’s writing about the more distant past, he assembles all the previous histories he can gets his hands on and synthesizes them into one narrative, maybe with the aforementioned summaries and quotations. But what does he do when those sources disagree? If he’s a rigorous fellow, he’ll note the disagreements and perhaps offer his own judgment on which one is more reliable. If he’s not, then he’ll just choose and not tell you . . . or even make up his own answer, based on his philosophical convictions and what “makes sense.”

But while the dilettantes can be interesting, where I find this actually fruitful for worldbuilding is the more official end, where the Powers That Be get involved.

It’s not uncommon in history, but vanishingly rare in the fiction I’ve read, for there to be a royal chronicler of some sort whose job is to record the events of the monarch’s reign. This can be anywhere from a tool of governance (“let’s look up how we handled a similar situation before”) to an exercise in ego-stroking — with those two options not being mutually exclusive! It can also be a tool of legitimization, when the chronicler’s job extends past the current reign into the events that came before. A history of a dynasty burnishes the credentials of its current scion; if the dynasty is new, this may be even more important, as the chronicler lays out the arguments — genealogical, supernatural, or what have you — that justify why the current guy ought to be on the throne.

. . . and yes, this does sometimes mean that “history” ought to have sarcasm quotes around it. A chronicler’s job is not always to record fact, but rather to create a historical narrative that favors his employer. Someone who refuses will rapidly be out of a job, imprisoned, or even executed — and the latter two fates can also befall the dilettante who writes an unfavorable account.

But not always! While it’s often true, especially in older eras, that history is written to flatter those in power, there are some fascinating exceptions.

The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty from Korea are a truly astonishing historical resource, covering nearly five hundred years in nearly nineteen hundred volumes. But even more impressive than their scale is their completeness and integrity, thanks to a well-regulated system. There were eight historians tasked with recording current affairs; the king was always accompanied by at least one and forbidden to conduct official business without a historian present. Then, after he died, those daily records and other sources like administrative accounts were compiled into an official version whose drafting and revision were overseen by ministers and scholars.

What’s truly gobsmacking here is the information security they practiced. After the official account was finalized, all its sources were destroyed, to prevent information from leaking out via other routes. Sounds like a recipe for flattering revisionist history, right? Except that even the king himself was not permitted to read the official history. Only authorized historians could do so, and if they spilled anything about what it said — much less tried to change it — they faced serious punishment. They had so much editorial independence and legal protection that it led to a famous incident still remembered more than six hundred years later: when King Taejong fell off his horse and tried to order his accompanying historian not to record that event, not only did the historian note the fall, but he also included the order he ignored.

Furthermore, the Veritable Records existed in multiple copies held in different locations — a security measure that’s the only reason we still have the earlier volumes, since all but one copy were destroyed during the sixteenth-century Japanese invasion. Making those duplicates was of course aided by the existence of printing presses: by the time the Veritable Records began, Korea had movable type. Doing the same thing in, say, eighth-century Europe would have been wildly more difficult.

If similar security measures had been taken with the text known as the Secret History of the Mongols, we might not now have the massively frustrating gap left by someone literally cutting pages out of it. The last bit of text before the hole has Genghis Khan saying “Let us reward our female offspring” — and given that other records allow us to piece together the scale of power and influence his daughters wielded, it’s a tantalizing lacuna. I await someone with the proper Mongolian chops to give us the alternate history we deserve, about one of them rising to become khatun over her father’s mighty empire!

Given the interest right now in “dark academia” as a subgenre, I’m a little sad we don’t have more stories about this process of making history and all the tensions around it. Whether it’s the discovery of some fragmentary text that undermines the official narrative, a royal chronicler balancing a commitment to truth against the desire to keep his head on his shoulders, or a Joseon-style historian defending a priceless archive against political attack, I feel like there’s real potential there!

Up front, I should say that “the language of flowers” is mostly bogus.

That’s not to say there is no symbolism in flowers and other kinds of plants! There absolutely is; in fact, there must be, so long as human culture has a tendency to trot out particular species or colors in particular contexts, and nature has a tendency to make some things bloom or sprout or leaf out at certain times of year. We will build up associations, because that’s how our brains work.

Some of those associations will be based on color (whose symbolism was previously covered in Year Nine). Red is commonly linked with passion; therefore the floral-industrial complex has poured untold amounts of money into convincing us that only red roses are acceptable for romantic occasions like Valentine’s Day. But come wedding day, you’ll often see more white, because of the connection to innocence and virginity.

Other, less visible qualities can give also rise to certain associations. Notably, it’s extremely common for hallucinogens to evoke witchcraft and spirits — an easy linkage to understand! After all, hallucinogens are a great way to make you feel like you’re flying or otherwise experiencing magic. And, naturally, quite a few poisonous plants have dark connotations, thanks to their peril and the opportunity they afford for murder.

Or perhaps it’s the environment of the flowers. Orchids, which grow naturally in remote forests where people rarely go, are a Chinese emblem of the virtuous man, who ought to cultivate his finer qualities regardless of the approbation of others. Somewhat similarly, the lotus, rising out of muddy water to reveal its clean beauty, represents purity, enlightenment, and escape from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Behavior can play its part, too! Japanese camellias are linked with a variety of qualities like elegance and strength, but you’re not supposed to give them to a sick person, e.g. when bringing a bouquet to the hospital. Why? Because that species of camellia drops its entire flower at once, in a single piece, as if it’s been decapitated. Not a good omen. (In fact, some cultures feel it’s deeply inappropriate to give a bouquet of any kind to someone in the hospital, lest the wilting of the cut flowers symbolically imply the patient will continue to sicken and eventually die.)

Often, however, the symbolism is just . . . there? I’m not sure anybody has a good answer for why, in European culture, lilies are associated with funerals, other than “it’s been true for a very long time.” And even if we do have a potential answer — e.g. I’ve heard it said the soul is returning to a state of innocence, one of the qualities implied by lilies — that may be a retroactive explanation, rather than one backed up by historical evidence.

But you may have noticed me using phrases like “one of the qualities” or “a variety of qualities.” Symbolism is rarely a pure, one-to-one equation . . . and that brings us back to the language of flowers, and why it was probably never quite the thing the internet likes to claim.

The language of flowers is supposedly a form of cryptography, used to send coded messages through bouquets, boutonnières, and so on. If you try to research this, you will find elaborate claims for how it all worked — but those claims rarely cite primary sources, and they rarely hold water.

Starting with the fact that they frequently contradict each other. Do white carnations represent first love, or disdain? Do purple lilacs signify first love, or death? Any system of communication needs enough consistency for the sender and receiver to have reasonable certainty they’re working with the same message. I’ve seen websites claim this is why it was very important to be sure your recipient had the same dictionary of floriography as you do . . . but if that were true, we’d have a much more significant historical corpus of such dictionaries than we do. And were people really running around asking “Do you have Horton’s Glossary of Flowers? No, Murrow’s Floral Lexicon — drat, I don’t have that; I’ll have to go to the bookseller before I send you your bouquet tomorrow — just be sure not to use An A to Z of Floriography; I don’t want you thinking I’m telling you to die –” It seems unlikely.

Also, as systems of cryptography go, flowers are wildly insecure. Their message is right there, out in the open! If lovers were secretly communicating through bouquets, you can bet that Victorian mothers would have acquired dictionaries posthaste to vet anything their daughters received. Meanwhile, if a gentleman showed up to an event wearing an ambrosia boutonnière to signify that he returns a lady’s love, how many ladies there would think that message was meant for them? A bouquet sent as a gift can be targeted to the recipient, but any other display risks being broadcast to too many people. (This is also a major flaw in the supposed language of fans, though at least in that case, the signal is transient and could perhaps be “aimed” via eye contact. In reality, however, the language of fans was a nineteenth-century marketing gambit by fan manufacturers.)

Going back to that ambrosia boutonnière: just where did our gentleman get it? Kate Greenaway’s The Language of Flowers — an 1884 book that seems to be the main primary source of much writing on this topic — lists hundreds of flowers. Even with hothouses, I’m dubious that anybody would be able to get hold of, say, red balsam on demand, just so they could signal “touch me not.” On the receiving end, it assumes a high degree of botanical knowledge: could you tell the difference between marsh mallow, Syrian mallow, and Venetian mallow? Or recognize mesembryanthemum and myrobalan on sight? I know I couldn’t.

As usual, though, what’s realistic in history need not restrict what can fly in fiction. Thomas West’s City of Iron and Ivy takes this idea and runs for the end zone, with flowers grown by magic and carrying equally supernatural effects. That gets around the hothouse problem, and where flowers can do more than just communicate, it would absolutely be worth people’s time to learn the differences between various blooms. So despite the cynical objections above, I would love to see more of this in spec fic! I just appreciate it more when there’s attention paid to the practicalities, rather than swallowing hook, line, and sinker the accreted pile of internet claims about how all this supposedly worked in the past.

And, of course, nothing stops you from leaning into plant symbolism more broadly, letting go of the idea that it might be for coded communication. In fact, this is a good idea, because as I said at the start, all cultures have associations for many of the plants around them. Leaning into that, even with just a few words about how a yew tree in someone’s garden gives it a dark, funerary vibe, adds a tinge of realism and depth.

It’s possible, even in surprisingly ancient times, to have hugely sprawling cities — but they’re not quite the same type of sprawl we see today. The reason is simple: how are you going to get around?

A city that is a mile or so across can be traversed on foot in half an hour, give or take, depending on how fast the individual in question walks and how much traffic and crowding get in their way. Two miles, you can cross it in an hour, or get from the periphery to the center in half an hour. And when you look at historical cities in places like Europe, you frequently find that’s about how big they are. One to four square miles is a manageable size.

Cities with a larger footprint did exist, but they require you to change what you imagine when you think “city.” It’s more like the agrarian version of suburban sprawl — and, as Annalee Newitz mentions in Four Lost Cities when discussing Angkor, there’s some reason to think that pre-modern urbanism in tropical areas simply looks different than it does in temperate zones, due to differences in agriculture. Lidar surveys indicate that Angkor may have covered three hundred and ninety square miles! But that’s not a thousand square kilometers of densely packed buildings surrounded by a wall; that’s a complex patchwork of fields, houses, temples, and markets, connected by the complex works of irrigation infrastructure that were necessary to maintain it all.

That infrastructure points us toward one possible solution for getting around an enormous city: go by water. I’ve mentioned before that water transport is often more efficient than land until you get motorized options . . . but when it comes to cities, that’s far from a perfect answer.

See, odds are good that you’ll be more reliant on muscle power to move the boat, with a paddle, oars, or pole, rather than being able to benefit from natural forces. A river’s current will carry you downstream just fine — but going home? Now you have to fight that force. (Unless the river is tidal in that reach, but then you’re constrained to the timing of tides.) And within an urban context, you have much less space to maneuver about with wind. Don’t get me wrong; water is still often better. One or two people can operate a boat full of produce brought in from an outlying field, as opposed to needing to wrangle a draft animal for a cart or being limited to what they can carry on their own backs. But it’s not as dramatic of an improvement as being able to sail an entire ship or barge hundreds of miles for long-distance transport.

I’m talking about produce because that’s going to be the most common reason people in a large city need to move around. (Other goods, too, but food is the first ten items on the list of “what needs to be transported in or the city dies.” Water pretty much has to be there already or the city is dead to begin with.) Commuting of the sort that’s a dreary feature of daily life for many people in modern times was vastly less common in the past, because most people lived at or very near their places of work, i.e. within walking distance.

This starts to change with the Industrial Revolution — but not because we got motorized transport, not right away. Instead you started having factories that employed huge numbers of people in a very small area, and while some of them had associated lodgings nearby, the explosion of urban populations as people came thronging there for work meant that density became horrifically unmanageable. Cities had to spread outward, and somebody had to come up with a way to move people around faster.

Early on, the answer to this was the horse-drawn omnibus. (Which is where we get the word “bus” from; in older works, you see an apostrophe marking the bit we dropped, as ‘bus.) They were essentially the same idea as the hired coaches between cities, just repurposed for urban use and focused far more on moving passengers than luggage. They also didn’t require buying a ticket in advance, instead having the kind of hop-on, hop-off service we’re used to nowadays. As the nineteenth century progressed, many of them became double-decker buses, with passengers sitting on the roof as well as inside the carriage — though the top was usually only for men, as women would have more difficulty climbing the ladder in their dresses, and be exposing themselves to up-skirt ogling besides.

The earliest attempt at this was in the seventeenth century . . . so does that mean it could exist in any era? Perhaps, but I suspect the answer is that it’s unlikely. The challenge of the omnibus is making it sturdy and stable enough not to be a hazard to its passengers — at least, by the lax safety standards of the Victorian era — and also making the service profitable. Industrialization meant it was easier to produce steel for things like braces and wheel rims, and the sheer scale of demand for transportation allowed for entire networks of routes, rather than just one line that might or might not see enough use. Earlier eras are not going to offer the same favorable conditions.

Of course, we didn’t stop at horsebuses. Laying down metal rails in the street greatly increased the amount of weight the horses could pull (and gave passengers a smoother ride to boot); then we got engines that could move the trams in place of the horses; then we realized we could put the trams underground, where traffic wouldn’t slow them down, and we were off to the races with subways. Meanwhile, motorized water transport made regular large-scale ferry services possible, without having to worry as much about the vagaries of current, wind, or tide.

Expanding public transit made it easier to expand cities, because now people could live farther away from the noise and the stench, without spending half their day getting to work and the other half getting home again. Even now, though, it can often be an imperfect solution, because not all areas are equally served. If you look at a map of the London Underground, you’ll see that while the north side of the Thames has an abundance of lines, the southern bank — where there are fewer elites and important institutions — has vastly less. It isn’t always the case, though, that elite = access; where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the residents of wealthy Marin County to the north consistently oppose efforts to extend public transit up to their neighborhoods, because then the hoi polloi could get there more easily.

I should note in closing that public transit is not always mass transit. Our modern taxis and pedicabs are the descendants of horse-drawn hackney carriages and human-carried sedan chairs for hire, both of which became common long before we had omnibuses running regular services for large numbers of people. Those more individualized options really only require enough urban density for profit, and enough people with the money to pay for them — you’re not likely to see them hanging around slums waiting for passengers. (Even today, it can be notoriously difficult to get a taxi in a bad part of town.)

And, as usual, speculative fiction throws a few wrinkles into the mix! Science fiction often includes mass transit, because most of it assumes both the technology for such a thing and populations on a scale to make it necessary. Fantasy, by contrast, often leaves it out — but it doesn’t have to! Depending on how magic works, you could have self-propelled vehicles, animated constructs pulling them, even regular flying carpet service from the suburbs to the urban core . . . or no magic at all, beyond the straightforward ingenuity of past invention.

Suburbs are such a characteristic feature of the twentieth century, especially here in the United States, that you’d be forgiven for assuming they’re a wholly modern phenomenon. In fact, the general concept of “not quite in the city, but very much associated with it” is very old; it’s just the scale and to some extent the organization of it that changes.

And it isn’t hard to see why. Cities are, by nature, going to be noisier, smellier, and more crowded than the countryside; because of that, it’s practically a universal law that rich people will want to get away from them — but not too far away. They’ll maintain villas or equivalent just outside the city walls, within easy distance so they can go in for an afternoon or a day, then retire to more comfortable surroundings at night. They get all the economic and political benefits of being close to where the action is, without subjecting themselves to too many of the downsides.

Living outside the city isn’t only for the rich, though. Most pre-modern cities are going to have vegetable gardens and/or dairy farms outside their walls, which means they’ll probably also have the houses of the people tending those gardens and farms, and it isn’t uncommon for those to nucleate slightly into villages. After all, you don’t want to have to walk into the city for everything; much more convenient to have your parish church and local alehouse (or regional equivalents) closer at hand.

These things don’t form evenly. If you look at early modern maps — which are usually the first point at which we can see anything like accurate visual representation — they very much tend to string out along the major roads leading to and from the city. That’s because they also serve the function of catering to travelers, who might prefer to lodge just outside the city rather than in its (noisy, smelly, crowded) heart. Or the outskirts are where those travelers leave their horses and carriages, rather than trying to wrangle such things in tighter confines. Or they pause to eat and freshen up, then continue on in. The city winds up looking like an octopus, with legs stretching in all directions.

But that’s the thin end of the suburban wedge — the sort of thing called a fauborg in French, with the English “fore-town” being a less common equivalent. (A “suburb” is “below the city,” and reflects the tendency to build fortified towns on hilltops, meaning that their outlying settlements are literally below them.) So long as urban populations remain small, so will their penumbra.

As soon as something causes the city to boom, though, it’s going to have growing pains. Maybe the capital shifts there, or a war causes refugees to flood in, or famine and economic disaster hit the countryside, or industrialization creates a huge new demand for labor. Suddenly you have a lot more people, and the very pressing question of where to put them. Are existing sites in the city sufficient to take in these people? And even if the answer is “yes,” will they? Especially if the influx consists of refugees and penniless migrants, local establishments may not want to rent to them, or local government may forbid them to settle within the city’s bounds.

Since those people still want to be in or near the city, though, they’re going to crowd as close as they can get — and I do mean crowd. The kind of shanty town that springs up in these circumstances usually has an insanely high population density, not least because the kind of people shoved out to the margins don’t have a lot of money to spend on construction. The buildings may barely even merit the name, being a conglomeration of tents, lean-tos, and whatever makeshift materials can be pressed into service, or shoddy walls and roofs thrown up in a hurry that may come down even faster. There’s little to no infrastructure, and because these places are frequently outside the official authority of the city, there’s little to no governance. Disease and crime are extremely high — but the people who live there can’t just afford to pack up and go somewhere else. They have no choice but to cope.

Until, of course, something else intervenes. Quite frequently that is fire: all it takes is one spark and a place like this is liable to go up in flames. Then, since the people who lived there almost certainly have no legal title to the land, it’s easy for someone else to snap that up, or for whoever owned it in the first place to seize their chance to evict everyone en masse. The area is unlikely to revert to green field pastoralism, though, because by now you’re no longer looking at a modest little city supplied by its neighboring vegetable gardens. If the settlement has grown enough to have this kind of extramural slum, odds are very good that it will also grow straight into the space left behind: gentrification by fire.

Throw all of these factors into a pot together, and you get the process by which a city grows. I used the term “extramural” there very deliberately, because in any society without efficient artillery or equivalent, most cities are going to be walled, and these elite houses, neighboring villages, and suburban slums are outside that line. But walls aren’t a one-and-done affair; new ones may be built farther out, with or without demolishing the older version first. If you look at the historical geography of Constantinople, you’ll find a steady march up the peninsula on which the city sits, with the Severan Wall enclosing a modest area, the Constantinian Wall significantly farther out, and the famous Theodosian Walls farther still. You can track the growth of the city by how much later rulers felt needed to be protected.

Or cities can grow without moving their walls. London and Westminster were separate settlements about two miles (three kilometers) apart, but a lot of business was in London while much of the work of government was in Westminster. When an enterprising earl received a chunk of the land between them in the mid-sixteenth century, he deliberately constructed a fashionable area — now Covent Garden Square — to attract the kind of rich tenants who might be regularly visiting both places. It was the prototype of a later building spree that created the West End we see today, part and parcel of how for the last two or three hundred years, London has been steadily absorbing those and all the smaller towns around it. Nor is it the only one: many other cities worldwide have sprawled to an enormous footprint many times larger than their original cores.

What’s different about modern suburbs — especially in the U.S. — is that they’re often entirely new construction, along the lines of Covent Garden, with developers creating communities out of whole cloth. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say “communities,” because that implies a kind of social fabric that rarely exists there. Many of these places get referred to with phrases like “bedroom town,” pointing at the way residents are expected to sleep but not really live there. The worst of them have few if any local businesses, so that you have to conduct all your shopping, doctor’s visits, and outside entertainments somewhere else.

But to get that kind of suburb, you need something else in the mix: transportation. And that’s next week’s essay!

It may seem something of a non sequitur to swerve from talking about friendship to public baths, especially when that latter topic has come up before. But Year Four‘s essay focused on such baths as a place one goes to get clean, devoting only half a sentence to the notion that they might also be — often were, and are — a social nexus.

For this to make sense, you have to expand your mental image well past bathing as the modern goal-oriented shower at home (get in, get clean, get out), and think more in terms of a spa. Or the better comparison nowadays might be a beauty salon, the kind of place you go to get your hair cut, dyed, and/or styled, while somebody nearby is having their nails done. These tasks can take a while, and if your local salon has a clientele of regulars who know each other and the staff, of course people will fill the time with conversation. (Or we did, before people had smartphones to stare at instead.)

Public baths can be just a place to get clean, but that’s rarely all they are. As a result, going to one is less likely to be an errand you check off in the middle of your busy day and more likely to be a good chunk of the day all on its own, as you attend to a variety of bodily needs — at least if you’re sufficiently wealthy that you can afford the add-on services, not just quick scrub.

Haircuts are a perennial need, of course, with frequency depending on style, and some kinds of hairdos (especially for women) that take enough time to set up that once done, you leave it in place for a week or more. Those with facial hair may need it trimmed or shaved off, whatever’s the fashion; the same can be true of those who need a bald scalp for whatever reason, whether it’s status, religion, clearing the way for a wig, or getting rid of lice. Nails also need care, and polish or dyes for those go back thousands of years. Massages are a natural accompaniment when the muscles have been relaxed by warm water — and, yes, sometimes the “massages” are of the euphemistic kind; bathhouses are a notorious site of sexual activity, be that prostitution or unpaid hookups of an illicit (e.g. homosexual) type.

But massages in the therapeutic sense lead us toward more general medical services. And it turns out that the notion of going to a place of bathing for its “healing waters” is not be entirely bogus! Analysis of the waters in Bath, England — famed as a healing center since pre-Roman times — recently uncovered fifteen different species of beneficial bacteria that can help combat E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and other prime culprits for infection. Mind you, it’s also possible for the waters of a communal bathing place to become a filthy breeding ground for bacteria that are much less friendly . . .

(I should note, by the way, that concerns over hygiene have also been used as cover for less admirable impulses. Where bathing is communal, you have the question of who’s allowed in: not just gender segregation, but also class and racial. Just a bit to the north of me are the remains of the Sutro Baths, an indoor public swimming pool in San Francisco that in 1897 lost a legal battle over prohibiting a Black man from using their facilities. Racists absolutely couched their efforts at discrimination in health terms, casting minorities as inherently “dirty” spreaders of disease.)

The use of public baths for broader medical purposes means that going to such a place could be anything from a quick dip, to your entire afternoon, to several weeks of leisure while you “take the waters” in a suitably tony establishment. So let’s look at what kinds of social opportunity that affords!

If it’s a regular item on your schedule, odds are fairly good that you can expect to see certain friends (or people you emphatically do not consider friends) every time you visit. That gives you a chance to at least exchange greetings and maybe some quick news about what’s going on in your lives: not an in-depth conversation, but that isn’t needed when you see each other every week.

Should you be spending more time there, however, more possibilities open up. Steam baths, saunas, and soaking pools give you a reason to lounge around for a while, perhaps enjoying a snack or a drink, or reading a newspaper if your society has those. Now the bath is a place you might go specifically for the purpose of catching up on news and gossip — useful if a character is trying to investigate something! It can also be an unparalleled opportunity to schmooze, with a socially adept character inserting themself into a nearby conversation with an interesting tidbit or a clever bon mot. The more exclusive the establishment, the more likely it is that this is one of the places the old boys’ network (of whatever gender) operates, and gaining access is a great way to get a leg up.

And when it’s not just the local bath but a whole town like Bath, now you’re looking at sociability on the scale of tourism or a vacation. Whole families or groups of friends go there together, and being invited to join such an excursion signals a particular level of belonging. These trips might be seasonal — especially if the site is known for its mild climate — or maybe everybody with the money and freedom to do so decamps there in times of pestilence, hoping the healing waters may protect them. If enough people have gone at once, then this becomes the scenario you’ve seen in Regency romances: lots of maneuvering around courtship and marriage, with or without a side order of political intrigue.

I have to admit, though, that the core element here always feels a little odd to me. I grew up in a culture that’s fine with swimming pools but emphatically does not expect people to get naked around each other — which is kind of necessary if you’re trying to get clean! When I’ve been at an athletic club with a steam room or sauna, clients are expected to wear towels over key areas. So the notion of some key stages for socialization being clothing-optional is just weird.

But weird is fine. Weird is an opportunity for worldbuilding!

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.