This is not the final New Worlds Patreon post for the month, as there is one more Friday to come — but that one will (as is traditional) be devoted to a “theory” essay, so this is the last one for this topic! We turn our attention to restaurants, a fixture of life very characteristic of our modern society, but not unique to it. Comment over there!
The New Worlds Patreon wrapped up its fifth year at the end of February, and now you can get the Year Five collection!
Featuring discussions of everything from different forms of government to issues of representing invented languages on the page. Get it from Book View Cafe (via our shiny new storefront! we have both epub and mobi!), Barnes & Noble (for Nook), Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, Indigo, or Amazon US or UK. (Be aware that the Amazon US link gives me a small commission. Despite that kickback, though, I strongly encourage buying from sources other than Amazon when you can; BVC sells Kindle-compatible mobi files, too.)
This is only the ebook, by the way — the print edition will follow next month!
The “banquets” I’ve attended at academic conferences and SF/F conventions are a pale echo of the sumptuousness that word evokes. This week, the New Worlds Patreon looks at feasting — comment over there!
How much would the contents of your kitchen spice cabinet be worth five hundred years ago? The New Worlds Patreon turns its attention to the outsized importance of herbs, spices, and other seasonings in the economic and political history of the world. Comment over there!
Drying, freezing, salting, pickling, jugging, and more — the New Worlds Patreon is looking at methods of food preservation! Comment over there.
Just as not all thieves work in groups, not all criminal groups are primarily about theft. For the last week of March, the New Worlds Patreon takes on organized crime. Comment over there!
It had to come eventually, in any discussion of theft and worldbuilding in speculative fiction: this week the New Worlds Patreon is talking about the trope of thieves’ guilds. Comment over there!
The New Worlds Patreon continues its survey of thieves with a look at the glamorous kind — the pirates and the highwaymen! Comment over there.
With this, the New Worlds Patreon officially enters Year Six! The Year Five collection is in prep, and in the meanwhile, we’re starting off in fine larcenous style by talking about thieves. Comment over there!
For the last essay not only of the month but of Year Five, the New Worlds Patreon flips the coin from “how do you keep from freezing” to “how do you avoid sweating to death.” Comment over there!
(Apologies; once again I neglected to correct for the BVC site rebuild by reposting the essay here. That shouldn’t be an issue for much longer, though!)
I am infamous among friends and family for how easily I get cold. But I maintain that this is only natural: at temperatures below about sixty degrees Fahrenheit (fifteen degrees Celsius, for those of you on that system), human beings can die of hypothermia.
This week the New Worlds Patreon reflects the biases of its creator, as I discuss the human struggle to stay warm when it’s cold outside! Comment over there.
I’m a night owl. If I’m up to see the sun rise, something has gone horribly wrong at one end of my day or the other. And while I’m theoretically there to see the sunset, in practice I hardly pay attention to it, unless I’m outside for some reason.
This luxury is brought to me by ubiquitous artificial lighting.
Energy sources are a big topic of conversation these days. With fossil fuels being both damaging to the environment and increasingly difficult to acquire, we’re looking into a wide variety of alternatives — some of which are cutting-edge, and others of which are very old indeed.
The one option that’s been with us from the start has been muscle power. Our own to begin with; later, after we domesticated animals, we got to use theirs instead. For millennia, everything from agriculture to textile manufacture to metalworking has been carried out with sweat and toil, fueled by the food we and our livestock eat. But of course, you can’t elbow grease your way to everything. No amount of direct labor will cause food to cook, nor pottery to harden, nor ores to smelt.
For that, we needed fire.
Because fantasy in particular is full of tyrannical rulers and terrible governments, I suspect there are many readers who assume the reaction of a historical king or queen to a flood, fire, famine, or other disaster was “suck it up — and yes, you still have to pay your taxes.”
I’m not going to say that never happened, but it was less common than you might think. Telling the peasantry to suck it up and still pay taxes is a fantastic way to get revolts — and even if those revolts don’t threaten to topple the throne, every farmer marching against you is a farmer not growing the crops your economy relies on. While you did get the occasional ruler both cruel enough and shortsighted enough to shrug off that danger, most of them at least made some attempt to deal with the underlying problem, however ineffectively.
(I failed to repost this essay here like I intended to. Apologies to anyone who tried and failed to reach the BVC site! We are working like mad to have the new site up soon.)
As I said in last week’s essay, it’s in the public interests of a society to keep fires from spreading. It’s even more in those interests to keep them from starting in the first place — and because of that, government regulations designed to prevent, spot, and slow down fires go back a very long way.
The New Worlds Patreon would like to join such luminaries as Smokey the Bear in reminding you that you can prevent fires. And it’s much better to prevent them than to fight them once they’ve started! Comment over at Book View Cafe.
(We are getting very close to BVC being up and running again! But we aren’t there yet, so once again, this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is hosted here on my site.)
As devastating as fires can be nowadays, we have ways of dealing with them. In my kitchen there sits a canister of fire-suppressing chemicals; on my ceilings perch little disks that scream bloody murder when they smell smoke or carbon monoxide; if something goes wrong, a big truck will roll up and hook itself up to a hydrant that will spew out all the water I might need, at high enough pressures to reach upper floors with ease.
But rewind the clock, and things get ugly fast.
(We have great hopes that the Book View Cafe website will be back up and running soon! Until then, I will continue to post my Patreon essays here.)
If something goes wrong — a fire; a home intruder; but especially for the purpose of this essay, a medical emergency — I know exactly what to do. I’ll pick up my phone and call 9-1-1, the emergency number for the United States. Someone on the other end will send an ambulance full of trained medical personnel, who will administer some aid on-site and then (if necessary) take the patient to the hospital, siren blaring all the way.
There are many reasons to be glad I live in the twenty-first century, but it’s startling to me that if I rewind the clock just fifty-five years — to 1966 — this seemingly obvious and sensible concept would not have been available to me.
On request, I’m reposting the next-to-last non-theory essay from the New Worlds Patreon, since the downing of the Book View Cafe website has rendered it inaccessible. Also, for those of you wondering what happened at over BVC, the short form is: we’re gearing up to give the site a major and long-awaited overhaul . . . and in the course of the gearing up, it, uh, went belly-up. >_< But the good news is that we’re on track to roll out the new! improved! site! very soon, and it’s going to be so much better once we do.
