The Rest of All Possible Worlds: Publish and Be Damned

The press is one of the great movers of the new age. If you are going to spread ideas or report on a new discovery or promulgate a new law, printed materials can make this happen.

This includes for player characters. A good way to build a reputation is to print an account of your travels and discoveries - even if people violently disagree, the fact that they have to publicly speak against you (or a pseudonymous figure that everyone in the know can identify) will allow your star to rise. 

For TRoAPW's purposes, we will speak of three sizes of publication:

• Pamphlet
• Treatise
• Book

and three types of audience it may be geared to:

• Broad-as-possible
• General
• Specific (and technical)

That's not necessarily low-, middle- and highbrow, but the connection could be made.

We may say that in a city (near the press itself, or on a notable trade route to get them) a fully-fledged book goes for 20 silver pieces, a Treatise 10 and a Pamphlet 2. 

Actually getting something printed and on the booksellers' stalls yourself requires one of the following:

• Paying for it yourself
• Convincing a printing house to print it - usually on the basis that there is a way for them to make their money back
• Convincing a wealthy patron to put up the funds

Or, indeed, a combination of the above.

The costs of paying for it yourself are predictable enough: time and money.  Getting a printing house involved is likely end up with your work edited or suitably adjusted for the market.  Getting a patron involved may distract from your own fame, and indeed yoke you inevitably in the public eye to Lord X or Prefect Y or Arch-Priestess Z - aside from the tie of obligation involved. 

Of course, decent quality maps or illustrations will add to the cost of getting a book printed. 

It is assumed that if a character lacks the skills or inclination to sit down and write themselves, they may hire a hack to do it for them - usually at a rate a little below the average 'white collar' wage in the city you find them. A more highly placed collaborator can do a better job, but may cost more and absorb some of the resulting fame. 

So, what benefit comes from all this?

TRoAPW publishing sits alongside the usual set of carousing rules - but with wider social possibilities. If the Crucible Society want to gain fame from their exploits in the Bronzemount Free State or acclaim for their contributions to the field of Pneumametrics or draw attention to the plight of stranded sailors in the Alamgir Empire, then publishing can accomplish this. 

Looking across to The 52 Pages, in terms of hazard and unforeseen consequences, publishing looks more like 'Training' than the various other options. 

Unless a player wins the jackpot - the right book at the right time with the right distribution network and the right kind of people recommending it - it is assumed that any profits accumulating to them are fairly low. The roof stays over their heads. 

Actually trying to write for that kind of profit is difficult - by the time everyone's aware that they should be paying attention to (again) the plight of stranded sailors in the Alamgir Empire, that section of the market is swamped.
Writing on behalf of a cause or faction - Pneumametrics, say, or in favour of the Jointe in Tsymric - can get you a certain measure of publicity, but a smaller audience than you might hope.
In any case, player characters shouldn't be trying to be professional authors!

There are, of course, two more things to consider.

Firstly, grimoires. It is just about possible to pass on details of a spell without actually having to exactly reproduce a page of a grimoire. Think of an off-the-shelf spell as being like an equation with the final answer not yet given, but all the working shown - and which must then be rewritten for presentation in beautiful calligraphy. 

Accordingly, there are extra costs involved (even before you get to the point of dealing with the magical regulations for that jurisdiction). This involves things like specialist printing presses and secure 'behind the counter' retail transactions. Can't have someone else completing the equation!

So, a pamphlet length account of a new spell costs as much as an ordinary treatise, a treatise with (say) half a dozen spells as much as a full book and a full book with a good number of spells inside it - perhaps as much as ten times the cost of a romance.

***

Secondly, censorship.

Nowhere in Calliste has a formal freedom of the press, or of speech*. There may be city quarters where nobody cares what you say, or what you write - but a law may well have been broken all the same.

Let us speak of six levels of censorship.

1. Review and adjustment of all printed material
2. Review, adjustment of most
3. Review, &c of many
4. Review, &c of certain targeted works
5. Review, &c laser-focussed on certain works
6. Absolute minimum review.

1. and 6. are both basically non-existant- the former for reasons of state capacity, the latter for reasons of social structures.

This is further complicated by how keen the authorities are to actually carry out their duties. The lax censors of the Margravate of Fuchsunddachs may be commanded to review most material throughly (3.) but don't often manage this - unlike the Duchy of Brocq-et-Tod, whose Public Truth Commissioners carry out targeted censorship far more efficiently and dutifully. 

Thus, one pictures something like the below.

1	Painstaking review of all works
2	Painstaking review of most works	Lax review of all works
3	Painstaking review of many works	Lax review of most works
4	Painstaking review of targeted works	Lax review of many works
5	Painstaking review, laser-focused on certain works	Lax review of targeted works
6		Lax review, laser-focused on certain works
7	Absolute minimum review

But states don't have the same laws, or the same short-term policy objectives, or be rooted in the same cultures. The Grand Republic of Melesvulpia may have a robust tradition of political debate and broadsheets, but maintain public order via significant controls on what books of magic can be printed. 

So we might conceive of something like the below.

	Books of Magic		Books of Magical Discussion		Political material		Religious material		Military material
1	Painstaking, all works		Painstaking, all works		Painstaking, all works		Painstaking, all works		Painstaking, all works
2	Painstaking, most works	Lax, all works	Painstaking, most works	Lax, all works	Painstaking, most works	Lax, all works	Painstaking, most works	Lax, all works	Painstaking, most works	Lax, all works
3	Painstaking, many works	Lax, most works	Painstaking, many works	Lax, most works	Painstaking, many works	Lax, most works	Painstaking, many works	Lax, most works	Painstaking, many works	Lax, most works
4	Painstaking, targeted works	Lax, many works	Painstaking, targeted works	Lax, many works	Painstaking, targeted works	Lax, many works	Painstaking, targeted works	Lax, many works	Painstaking, targeted works	Lax, many works
5	Painstaking, laser-focused	Lax, targeted works	Painstaking, laser-focused	Lax, targeted works	Painstaking, laser-focused	Lax, targeted works	Painstaking, laser-focused	Lax, targeted works	Painstaking, laser-focused	Lax, targeted works
6		Lax laser-focused		Lax laser-focused		Lax laser-focused		Lax laser-focused		Lax laser-focused
7	Absolute minimum review		Absolute minimum review		Absolute minimum review		Absolute minimum review		Absolute minimum review

This is not exactly complete - it leaves out, for instance, pornographic material. 'Targeted' in the above refers to a certain type of (EG) magical work - thus necromancy, mind control and so forth.

You will also note that Books of Magic and Books of Magical Discussion are different categories in Calliste. For reasons discussed above, they are different things (just one spell would be enough to make a theoretical tome into a Book of Magic). It may be assumed that most legal systems would wish to keep a closer eye on Books of Magic than Books of Magical Discussion, but Calliste is a big place with a wealth of little principalities and enclaves! 

Of course, it should be noted that states may also wish you to add something to a publication - a seal of approval, for instance. This is aside from states (or state actors) seeking, commissioning or encouraging publishing. 

Illegal presses may exist, allowing you to dodge the above but will have their own complications. The price will be at least comparable to a legal press - any costs (in time or coin) you avoid in not going before the censor you accrue in (for time) the necessary discretion an illegal press requires and (for coin) the premium they extract.

***

So as not to end on that note...TRoAPW is portraying a world in which substantial, influential works are being printed and circulated. Difficult to have an Enlightenment without that. Lawmakers are (perhaps) more often curious than censorious. Publishing in Calliste may be difficult, but it is also widespread. 

I don't insist on TRoAPW being a 'glass-half-full' setting (things might be going badly wrong!) but the glass definitely isn't empty.

*And, indeed, even places that proclaim both may have various organisations, cultural tendencies, &c. that suppress or discourage a certain kind of book.

A Map: Possibilities and Realities

I acquired a book called North Russian Architecture in a give-away a few months back. A small item, pages of heavy high-quality paper, a wood-effect hard cover. Published 1972 in the USSR, translation by Kathleen Cook. If it didn't have pages about six inches square in area, I might call it a coffee-table book.

Opening it the last few days, I found it to be quite charming - if the sort of volume replaced these days by Wikipedia and digital photography*. Many details on the wooden Churches in Lake Onega, for instance - which really are incredible. An interesting testimony to the abundance of a resource fuelling architectural creativity.

Among the material within, I found this map, showing Solovetsky Monastery, on the islands of the same name in the middle of the White Sea.

    The key is not conveniently positioned, so I reproduce it here:

Towers:
A - Spinning, B - Assumption, C - Watch, D - North, E - Kvass-Brewing, F - Kitchen, G- South, H - White

Gates:
I - Holy, II - Herring, III - St Nicholas, IV - Kvass-Brewing, V - Kitchen, VI - Assumption, VII - Archangel

Buildings:
1 - Cathedral of the Transfiguration (1558-66), 2 - Cathedral of the Assumption and refectory (1552-57), 3 - Trinity Cathedral (1859), 4 - Bell-tower (1777) and Church of St Nicholas (1834), 5 - Passage, 6 - Church of the Annunciation (1596-1601), 7 - Church of St Philip (1798-1859), 8 - Hospital building, 9-17 -  living quarters and domestic buildings, 18 - Water mill, 19 - Chambers (1615), 20 - Chambers (1642).

Heady stuff - with that assortment of gates and functions and religious areas. All the more so when one reads that Ivan IV (the Terrible) gave the monks cannons. So much that adventurers could tamper with, so many options. Is the herring gate somehow enchanted for monastic anglers? Does the spinning tower revolve?

If you were primed to assume that Solovetsky Monastery was made of wood - well, so was I. However, it is of brick and stone. Don't worry; your version - in northmost Tsymric? - can be wooden.

The other unexpected discovery was in my cross-checking; as it emerges, the Solovetsky Islands were the site of one of the earliest Soviet prison camps. This makes geographic sense: in 1923, the sites of the old Tsarist penal colonies in Siberia (EG) were cut off during the Civil War, and the Allied Archangel Expedition had wrapped up by then. The White Sea would be accessible by rail from the Muscovite heartland and the islands would make escape difficult. I had encountered this before, but it hadn't lodged in my mind like the names of (say) Alcatraz, Devil's Island, Wormwood Scrubs, Botany Bay or Dartmoor. Thankfully, I have encountered attractive maps to be questioned before and I do not regret picking this up by chance.

To end on a milder note - I have encountered few other things in following up for this post, including the Anglican Church in Riga (Cf. St Olaf's, Balestrand), the Estonian and Latvian naval jacks, and the source of the Pinega River, in the Krasnoborsk marshes, at the confluence of the Black and White Rivers - which sounds like something out of the Painted Lands.

*Occasionally it lapses from art-historian technicalities or tour brochure gloss to refer to something oddly specific. See this passage, when referring to old Autumn fairs:
'...they would trade in distaffs, clay toys, household utensils and birch-bark boxes. Similar boxes painted with strange green and red flowers with white and blue leaves are still made by Dmitri Matveyevich Novinsky, a local craftsman who lives not far from Verkhnyaya Uftyuga in the village of Novoandreyevka.'

July-August 2024 Miscellany

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, 1951
(trans. into English 1954 by the author and Grace Frick)

Historical fiction.

Read in light of a recent spell of reading historical fiction about classical antiquity - see also The Corn King and the Spring Queen and Gore Vidal's Creation. 

It purports to be the memoirs of the emperor Hadrian, written to a young Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian lays out the course of his life in a number of sections, from youth to military service to supreme authority to impending death. The sections are named for lines of a poem, apparently written in Hadrian's last days.

All well and good. But what makes this an interesting book and worth your time? For one, I find the style most appealing. Magisterial, in a way that rather fits. This was not just fun to read, but a work I very deliberately stopped myself from reading to quickly (unlike Vidal).

For another, the figure of Hadrian is beautifully drawn. Even considering the purposes of a memoir, it's a rare portrait of a historical figure that feels so natural and so unfamiliar. Compare and contrast the last paragraph here. The other obvious comparison is I, Claudius*. This differs - not least in being less explicitly drawn from Suetonius - in the approach. Unlike the afflicted, sensitive Claudius (who is, of course, also writing his memoirs - albeit to a mystical future audience rather than a defined successor) surrounded by a family variously boorish, hedonistic, Machiavellian or mad, Hadrian is far less of an outsider. He writes as one immersed in his work as a soldier or imperial administrator, one clearly with factional leanings and politics, if not as a partisan. When he is finally made Emperor, he is able to use that office far more adroitly than Graves's Claudius. This is coupled with a sort of measured indulgence on his part - Epicurean rather than gluttonous - which makes him more obviously vital. 

Further, he appears to have a far more developed religious belief than Graves's characters. He participates in rites of a dozen different cults and undertakes magical experiments. When someone in I, Claudius is proclaimed a god - especially if they proclaim themselves a god - eyes are rolled and eyebrows are raised and the whole business is treated as lamentable (largely). When it happens in the Memoirs of Hadrian it is far more natural; an exceptional event, to be sure, but not an unthinkable one. 

The death of Antoninus is interesting, and connects with the portrayal of those events in Mike Walker's Caesar! But Hadrian narrates this story and his grief is the equal of his distance. 

I shall be re-reading this. I shall also look out for more of Yourcenar's work; she seems to have lived an interesting early life, ending up on an island off the coast of Maine. There is a book of essays - The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays - which not only has some material that complements the Memoirs of Hadrian but also deals with that perennial OSR figure Piranesi. 

[On that Note .... time for some carefully separated nerd-talk. Hadrian is an accomplished imperial figure, a decorated soldier - he's well-liked, physically active, well-travelled. He delves into the occult, is a member of numerous secretive religious bodies, sees the sacrifice of those near him, is willing to consider that he may become a god.

He would be, I think, a fascinating model for an ambitious somewhat sympathetic sorcerer-king type. Think Paul Atriedes in imperial mode. It's been at least a decade since I opened any of Jordan's Wheel of Time, but I suspect that later books had this kind of approach to the messianic Rand al'Thor. Even Warhammer 40,000's God-Emperor of Mankind (at least in his 30k not-yet-a-plot-device version) works. Hadrian's background and mortality feels far more natural to producing the grandiose golden armoured chap than the whole perpetual and/or shamans business.]

*Have a brief reminder of some of Brian Blessed's best work as Augustus. 

***

Robert Sobel, For Want of A Nail, 1973

Historical, fiction?

There's an experience some of you may recognise. You find out about alternate history and it's sold as exploring a world where (say) Julian the Apostate was far more successful or a British Civil War broke out over the Abdication Crisis. 

But then you read one or two famous works, and it seems that it's less about that world than using it to explore something else. Alternate history as a means to explore questions of identity, to re-iterate moral lessons from the past, to assess the tendencies of the present or to parallel the sweeping effects of a technology, to ground a work's aesthetic or genre roots (Dystopia, adventure fiction)....

Think, in the last few years, how many have picked up a copy of The Man in the High Castle after seeing the television series. 

Anyway, For Want of a Nail is that rare thing - an alternate history that is just a history. A history from another timeline, complete with references and GNP figures and election results - and a critique from another author at the end. And in 1973, rather than from an obscure forum in 2006. However, this is a novel of three elements. 

It is a world where - as the subtitle say - Burgoyne won at Saratoga. The American War of Independence dies in its cradle and a new settlement is implemented - the Confederation of North America. Meanwhile a number of defeated rebels travel into Texas to found the state of Jefferson - which will eventually merge in the aftermath of war to create the United States of Mexico.

Yes, this is a world without the United States - though one shouldn't assess the CNA and USM as merely 'Greater Canada' and 'Greater Mexico'. There's a more to it than that, and Sobel is going to explain as much over many chapters. 

The history and dynamics of both are laid out in a fairly convincing way - the statistics might be made up, but seem to be fairly consistent. There are things that a contemporary history wouldn't do, or would feel obliged to mention - but that very fact makes one think about the business of writing history, especially when one knows the whole thing is very much fake. Either way, it's quite convincing - nothing too spectacular, nor so conspicuously hard-nosed and materialistic to look fake. Men - even quite wealthy men - are swayed by appeals to grand causes, or to national pride, or to utopian ideals. 

That is the first element, a well-confected not-history. The second element is a boardroom drama in which Ayn Rand was given a brief spell as script doctor.
The USM gives birth to a firm, Kramer Associates. Which slowly gains power in a number of vital industries, influencing the fate of the USM and being actively involved in its elections. One can only assume its directors all look as (fittingly) smug and self-satisfied as Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair. 

Anyway, even when Kramer Associates gets booted out of Mexico, it hops over to the Philippines and then Taiwan. Then detonates it's own nuclear device. I'm well aware of powerful corporations in our own past - as the East India Companies (Dutch or British) or those that gave us the phrase 'banana republic'. Even so, Kramer's continual success is a trifle too dramatic to take entirely seriously, though I will grant it is arresting.

The third element is the history of the rest of the world, which occasionally produces some eyebrow-raising moments - as when the Global War in the 1930s and 40s between (largely) the British Empire and the German Confederation (The CNA sits this one out) leads to things like the Germans going from Ottoman Turkey to Indochina conquering most everything in their path in three years. Rather than indulge an image of turbo-Blitzkrieg, I will quietly assume that those territories were only ever lightly held. 

But the first element is the dominant one, and that remains interesting. A deal to profitably chew over here.

***

The mod Fallout London has been released, to much fanfare and comment. I have written on this before and had an eye on it for a while.

I haven't yet played (and I'm not altogether likely to). But I have dug into some material online. Is it impressive? Yes, it is a tremendous accomplishment. Have I revised my opinions of it? Not quite, in the same way as I can admire the work put into (say) a skyscraper while disliking the building itself. No matter how many obscure firearms appear in the game.

Among other things, and acknowledging the limitations of a mod, I'm a little disappointed by the lack of a status quo ante ending (Cf. siding with the NCR in New Vegas). Although I would be intrigued to learn if the conclusion to The Prisoner influenced one part of it. 

***

HCK over at Grand Commodore has recorded a reading of 'Hell Screen' by Ryunosuke Akutagawa - I enjoyed it! An interesting comparison with Togo Igawa's version for BBC Radio.

***

A tantalising project coming up from the False Machine - a novel called Queen Mab's Palace, about 'an adventure through a decaying, dying space-ship inhabited by crazed transhumanist radicals, through the eyes of a Medieval Scribe.' One to keep an eye on. 

City of Libations

You must never call it a necropolis, for it is no such thing. It is merely the city where the dead dwell. No memorials, no tombs, no graveyards are to be found there.

The dead dwell there, and have a sense of obligation to the living. At set intervals through the year, therefore, the dead make offerings to them. Shrines radiate out from the city like the spokes of a wheel, set at the end of long roads of white stone. Before the shrines are gardens and covered arbours. The shrines themselves vary in ornament and detail, but not in form. There is a broad double door at the front, facing a back wall with a shallow stage. In the left and right walls are small doors, facing one another in line with the stage. It is usual for a bench to run along every wall other than the back.

Each shrine is associated with a village or the quarter of a town. The people of the region go to their shrine, which they furnish and decorate with painted patterns, geometric motifs and local symbols. Sometimes they sweep out leaves or cobwebs, but the shrines themselves remain curiously free of decay. 

On the days when the dead make their offerings, everyone in the village is meant to come. It is known that the very ill cannot or should not, and that women heavy with child may not - no stigma is attached to this. The misfortune of illness, the laborious necessity of childbirth and the empty gap in the year's cycle is considered burden enough. The wayfarer is not compelled to come, neither are they told what day is coming. A resident outsider, as a foreign merchant, may in time become part of the ritual. 

In the early morning, the village will rise, dress and march the long miles to the shrines. There, they do two things before entering. In the gardens before the shrine are set long troughs of rainwater, with which they wash hands, face and feet. Then, they sit to eat at long benches. The food varies with season and locale - but it is generally both portable and plentiful. Often it is cooked on fires in stone braziers. Flatbreads are not uncommon. 

Aside from the usual business of the daily meal, this has two functions. Firstly, it prepares the villager for the effects of a libation. The wine of the dead is strong and it is largely considered best to have something in your belly before you imbibe. Secondly, the wine of the dead is not of the living; it is otherworldly. Therefore, it is best to face it with a ballast of the mundane within you. There is the tale - invariably passed down from the teller's grandparents - of a lean season, and men eating balls of clay before entering a shrine.

When they have eaten, all enter. Those that tire readily are seated on the benches; most stand. The main door is closed and the shrine is lit only from high windows. after some time, the side doors open and the dead enter. A prominent villager stands nearest the stage, holding a large bowl. Unseen, the dead cross the stage, and moisture is seen condensing on the bowl. Eventually, the last of the dead passes by. In local tradition, this may be the newly departed, the oldest in recollection, the famously tardy, the notably dutiful or something else entirely. The bowl is now full and the side doors close.

Within the bowl is a strong, pallid wine. The taste has been compared to plum brandy. Villagers each extract a small travel cup from their clothing and advance to take a measure. Slowly or quickly, they drink and leave. It is consider well-mannered to pause briefly outside and see how your companions are doing, but this is not a place for conversation. The last out will close the doors and clear any remnants from the garden.

Curiosity is expected of men, and this includes villagers. It is quite common for a youth to walk a ways down the white stone road where the dead walk - but not generally on the day of a libation. Some eventually become brave enough to enter the city itself. 

Those who do report back on two things. Firstly, the white stone which makes up the roads is used for the houses as well. Secondly, the lack of any of the patterning and motifs that artisans would employ in houses or clothes or other worked items in the village. Third, the half-silence that moves in a slow bubble around them as they pass through the courts of the city. Fourth, the cypherbirds. Cypherbirds are seen outside of the city as well, but clearly make the city their home. From a distance they appear to be peafowl of a sort of drab cream colour. Those who actually make into the city have seen them fan open their tailfeathers, displaying inscrutable symbols on a pallid screen. No-one agrees quite what these mean; to the bold, they are pictograms of courage and strength - to the splenetic, they show spite and insolence. To the fearful, they confirm each contradictory fear.*

Those that go the deepest into the city report a taller building with three arched entrances at the front. No light can be seen from within these, nor any sign of a door or side passage. Some have thought this a vault; some a great meeting hall, some a temple. Faded glyphs cover the outside, which may be the same as those on the cypherbirds. 

Curiosity is expected of men, and this includes those not from the villages. Bandits, treasure hunters and bravos have long assumed that the city of libations has within it fabulous wealth. So, they attempt to cross the walls, avoiding the open roads of white stone and the shrines. They find themselves confronted by dense walls of cut thorn, rather like those reported on the savannah. However, these thorn branches appear to be petrified.  

If they can safely cross these, they must climb the walls, and then they must navigate a crowded cityscape of toughly-built homes and high walls. Further thorn clumps are found within. They will be followed - by the cries of cypherbirds, by swarms of insects, by dull roaring that may or may not be the wind, by footprints - and by the open eyes of the dead. 

You must never call it a necropolis, and tomb raiders are unwelcome. 

*   'To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.'
Flannery O'Connor writing in 'The King of the Birds' on the peacock. 

The Rest of All Possible Worlds: Pocket Items

There are all sorts of interesting devices these days. Bigger and better telescopes, dense almanacs, precisely fitted sextants. And since then there has been a market for portable versions of these. 

Bluntly, these are toys for rich men.  Few need a sextant at any moment, let alone a smaller, fiddlier, uncomfortable, easily broken version. But one or two people have found these very useful indeed - and not just as portable trade pieces.

Here's a few - others may exist.

1. Within a stubby silver cylinder ticks A Perpetual Calendar. Turn shells of year and system on the outside to the indicted marks. Good for all Calliste, valiant attempts to indicate assorted high days and holidays of the Alamgir Empire and the Bronzemount Free State.
2. The slim brass case of a Tally-Box. This can add, subtract and convert the Pavaisse Mark, the Pavaisse Trade-Weight and the Malmeric Gold Piece.
3. Extending from a smooth horn box is a Microscope. The base of the box turns into a mount for whatever minuscule thing you wish to examine.  
4. A carved wooden case reveals a series of ivory Rabdological Rods.
5. A brass-half moon unfolds into a small Astrolabe.
6. Set in velvet, a fine golden set of Scales and a set of tiny weights.
7. A Mage's Chronometer. Perfectly mundane in construction, but allows the user to set a series of markers for when they can re-apply themselves to a spell.
8. Folding wood and gilt Sundial (sun not included).
9. Set in a rotating gimbal in a little pale box is a Mundane Lodestone. This points to the least magical place in a Ninety-Nine Mile radius of the user and is often used by insufferable wags at parties. 
10. Some men hold the world in their hands; you hold it in your pocket. Or at any rate, an ornate and definitely accurate Globe.

As for some actual rules:

The value of any of these in working order is meaningful - at least a month's wages, say. It may be difficult to find someone who will buy it, however. 

None of the above meaningfully contribute to encumbrance. 

This is not an age of mass production. At most, there are a dozen items of this kind coming from the same artificer's studio. Finding an exact replacement outside the maker's home city and years after it was made will be difficult.

Spare parts are non-existent. You will need to find someone who can work from scratch.

It may be that whoever made the device in the first place lacked certain details - the knowledge of annual holidays in Transmontane Tsymric may be patchy in High Malmery.

There may be lands where all of the above is untrue! 

If you are ever in Cambridge, consider visiting the Whipple Museum.

May-June Miscellany 2024

Naomi Mitchison,  The Corn King and Spring Queen

Can't say I was as taken by this as False Patrick, but still very good. It's an interesting comparison with (say) some of the character work of Rose Macaulay or the pre-occupations of some of C.S. Lewis's lesser known stuff. There's also probably a big wedge of Bloomsbury Group in there that I'm too uptight and square to properly grok. 

Comparisons aside, this thing is rich. Rich interior lives, rich in its extensive cast, generous in the scope of the plot, rich in description: it reads as the work of someone who has done things with their hands often enough to know about sewing or ploughing or hunting or dancing what have you - rather than the perspective of someone who only knows plate armour through a video game. 

***

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars

I've had this for ages, but only just got round to reading it. Well worth it, and quite digestible. The photographic plates help. It's clearly a standout work in its field - Cf. what Wikipedia says as a general assessment - and I see why it was referenced in my university courses. 

Should you read it? Well, I think that if you're an Anglosphere type with an interest (academic or practical) in your history and culture, reading a few chapters from the first half would be very worthwhile - for religious ignorance reasons gestured at in some of my recent work. If you've read any proper history you can spot Duffy's focus and/or agenda, but that's not necessarily important. 

***

Lucan's Civil War or Pharsalia

Almost finished this at time of writing. Not one of the more prominent classical epics, but an interesting read all the same. Part of this is the subject matter: the clash of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great after the former crosses the Rubicon. Familiar territory, even fictionalised - but not in the conventions of the epic. The civil war angle is not neglected, and the tragedy of events is clear. Added to this is the fact that it is describing real battles and troop movements, and largely leaves out Divine intervention, makes it rather interesting to compare with Virgil or Homer.

All that said, there are some thoroughly sensational moments. A carefully described reading of the entrails in Book One, a consultation of a Thessalian witch, Cato's army harassed by snakes. Is this the B-Movie of Classical epics? (Probably not.)

Another consideration is that Lucan was writing in the early days of the Emperor Nero. There's some praise for his ancestor Julius, though however potent Caesar is, Pompey gets the more enduring praise. 

'Pharsalia', incidentally, is the name of a battle between Caesar and Pompey in northern Greece, in the region around the town of Pharsalus (now Farsala). So I suppose you could call Lucan's Civil War something like The Battle of Pharsal County (which sounds rather American) or The Clash of Farsalmark (for something faintly Nordic). 

I read the translation by Susan H. Braund, but I've been comparing material elsewhere - including the Early Modern rhyming version by Sir Arthur Gorges, which may be found here.

***

Celine and Julie go Boating, dir. Jacques Rivette, 1974

Have you ever wanted to see what would happen if someone took late-period Tim Powers and made it significantly more French? Well, here's a good place to start. The mix of a contemporary setting and a supernatural house is arresting and well-executed - once you've got into the groove of the film.

***

Metropolitan, dir. Whit Stillman, 1990

Utterly unseasonal, though I didn't know that when I picked it up. A curiously touching film, though this is in part perhaps the result of living in a young city while being less than aged myself. There's some interesting currents in it - and I suspect the use of the tune to Luther's hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott is no mistake.

***

The Mark of Zorro, dir. Rouben Mamoulian, 1940

Starring Tyrone Power. You don't need me to tell you this is good or influential and I won't try to comment on the sword fights. Other people can do that. 

What I think makes this worthy of note - and it's something I don't see discussed to the same degree - is the elements of disguise and secret identity. Don Diego Vega - the man they call Zorro - is deliberately concealing his motives and character, making himself into a ridiculous, useless fop. There are good reasons to do this, and Vega clearly has or had some frivolous facets to his character - but unlike Robin Hood concealing himself or the various versions of Bruce Wayne that have appeared on the screen, this is painful or costly in ways that aren't seen elsewhere. His father is openly contemptuous of him, his mother loves him but in a somewhat disinterested way, his old teacher barks at him and he must humiliate himself in front of his love interest and the villain. High literature this isn't, but the willingness to put a distinct social (psychological?) cost on his subterfuge gives this a bit more weight (Cf. Christian Bale getting to have his cake and eat it too as both playboy and vigilante).

Dr Syn dealt with this from time to time as well, though there things are complicated by the Vicar of Dymchurch's dark past. 

***

There's a poem of C.S. Lewis I encountered recently. It doesn't really apply to my post on Saturn, but it's certainly adjacent to the whole matter.

Anyway, from 'La Roi S'Amuse':

Jove gazed
On woven mazes
Of patterned movement as the atoms whirled.
His glance turned
Into dancing, burning
Colour-gods who rushed upon that sullen world,
Waking, re-making, exalting it anew –
Silver and purple, shrill-voiced yellow, turgid crimson, and virgin blue.

(Cue for music.)

It's a complex bit of rhyming, tricky to read aloud. Find the rest here. 

***

Sinjin - a new piece of work by Mateo Diaz Torres, who did Pilgrim. Again, available on Itch.io. Black and white artwork from a variety of artists.

Quote:

A century ago, the Black Heron College performed an experiment into the nature of Death and caused a great disaster. The site of this catastrophe came to be known as The Saint John Forbidden Territory.   

A hundred by hundred yawning miles of sawgrass, palmetto hammock, winding river, and overrun industry—all reclaimed by the Dead. In the territory, the land forgets itself, geography flexing and twisting like a straining muscle, the progression of days stuttering and jumping like a broken zoetrope.  

You are a freelance exorcist, compelled or driven to enter the Territory. You wield the remnants of Death's instruments: arts and tools left over from Her now-unfinished work. It is your duty to carry on against the growing disaster. The depths spread, and the Dead stand against you.  Put them back in their graves.

No Appendix N provided, but I would agree with other reviewers in detecting the influence of Garth Nix's Old Kingdom books and Annihilation. Though the overgrown sprawling abandoned Louisiana buildings of season 1 of True Detective kept springing to mind. Southern Gothic abounds. 

The territory itself is a limited space that keeps changing. As a region, it's probably no bigger than a county - but, as above, it contorts. The fixed landmarks are the same, but the connecting elements will shift - as will the climate. There's something of Darkest Dungeon in this, in which an opulent and imperial mansion has an improbable number of rooms. Indeed, it would be interesting to have something like a quartet of Sinjin-esque regions one could enter.

Sinjin is worth your time - though there's something that caught my eye. The setting is '19th century pastiche not-Florida' - there's the implication of a state outside it, and several regions are mentioned, including the San Serafin of Torres's New Barbary setting. This has the side effect of making me think of what lies outside Sinjin. The organisations that send you into the territory are these slightly-too parallel groups of exorcists. 

Part of me itches for...well, A) a sketch of geopolitics and cultural shockwaves and B) asymmetry. To explain on the latter - the differences and clashes between groups and styles in the territory: professional and amateur, government and private, religious and secular, cautious and imprudent. But this is a very particular issue and should not put anyone else off.

Lewis and Saturn in the 41st Millennium

If at the height of heaven Saturn's
cold and harmful star were lighting his black fires.....

Pharsalia, Bk 1, Lucan, trans. Susan H. Braund

....at length old Saturn lifted up 

His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone,

And all the gloom and sorrow of the place....

Hyperion, Keats

I made a long comment on this post on Monsters and Manuals. noisms invited me to expand on it. 

1) noisms suggests an approach to Warhammer 40,000 - at least as far as roleplay is concerned - rooted in the theology of Christian speculative fiction authors as Lewis, Tolkien and Gene Wolfe. This wouldn't necessarily be apologetics, but would round out some of the ideas suggested by the setting. A 40k roleplaying game in which the PCs 'try to do good'. Wolfe (not unreasonably) is suggested as the most obvious point of comparison.

2)  It's tempting, taking that 'try to do good' remark, to imagine levering Pollyanna into the Grim Darkness of the Far Future. I would say noisms doesn't mean this, and further that the proposed 40k RPG would want to be of a tone with existing 40k. Further, I would suggest that there is a degree of material that can be found in the work of C.S. Lewis that fits this rather well. 

3) For completeness, I shall mention that Lewis did write about dystopian future states - notably in the lecture series collected as The Abolition of Man. As interesting as that might be, the future state of controlling pallid intelligences and hollowed-out underlings is a poor match with the Medievalism and decay of the 41st Millennium. An age of chains, not an age of rot; a panopticon-world, not a dungeon-world. 

Now, there's a quiet tendency to talk about the Chronicles of Narnia in terms of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The events, tone and theme of that work are (relatively) bright. The instantly recognisable scene of Mr Tumnus contributes to this, as does the inclusion of Father Christmas and the repeated phrase of  'Always Winter, Never Christmas'. Narnia is peopled by talking animals, not human beings. While this tone isn't consistent through the entirety of LWW, this has a touch more of the childlike in it than later Chronicles. Where we might look is to that final work, The Last Battle.*

4) The theologian and literary critic Michael Ward wrote a book in 2008 called Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. This is not an entirely obscure work - I'm not revealing anything very special here - the BBC made a documentary based on it and Ward himself is moderately prominent. 

Anyway, Planet Narnia lays out much of Lewis's writings on the seven heavens** of Medieval Cosmology - the Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Certainly Lewis (as one who taught Medieval and Renaissance literature) knew of these and wrote about them in non-fiction - see Ch. 3 of The Discarded Image. He wrote poetry on them - in part, it seems, as an intellectual exercise. The Cosmic or Ransom Trilogy was written in the 1940s, after the discovery of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto but focuses on the Medieval planets (the one reference seemingly to them makes it appear that they are older and have ceased to support life or relevance). The various planetary geniuses that go by the term Oyéresu (singular Oyarsa) have in them a resemblance to the Classical deities as rendered by Medieval minds.

Ward's thesis is that the varying tones in the Chronicles of Narnia are attributable to each book being connected to one of the seven heavens. 

--At this point, some of you may be wondering which book is connected with which planet. Well, if I may - please don't look that up now! Even granted that I've given the game away regarding Saturn in my original comment and in this post, I would be fascinated to know what your guesses would be. Answers in the comments.

I don't propose to lay out his full argument here, but it's a fascinating lens to examine them through. Some of you may be mulling over at this point 'Does this mean Lewis believed in astrology?' - Ward, of course, answers this. I might compress his response and my own thus: more than someone who refers to a person or thing as 'Lawful Evil', 'Chaotic Good', &c, but less than he did in the Trinity or Newton's Laws of Motion.

5) So, The Last Battle is Saturnine. What does that mean?

Myn is the ruine of the hye halles, 

The falling of the toures and of the walles

(Incidentally, thanks to the Middle English in Traitor General and the presence of a pardoner in The Armour of Contempt I'm pretty certain that Abnett knows his Chaucer.)

Quoting Lewis in The Discarded Image, we get : 'In the earth his influence produces lead; in men, the melancholy complexion; in history, disastrous events....He is connected with sickness and old age.....A good account of his promoting fatal accidents, pestilence, treacheries and ill luck in general occurs in [Chaucer's] The Knight's Tale....sometimes called The Greater Infortune, Infortuna Major'

'My dere doghter Venus,' quod Saturne, 

'My cours, that hath so wyde for to turne, 

Hath more power than wot any man. 

Myn is the drenching in the see so wan; 

Myn is the prison in the derke cote; 

Myn is the strangling and hanging by the throte; 

The murmure, and the cherles rebelling, 

The groyning, and the pryvee empoysoning: 

I do vengeance and pleyn correccioun 

Whyl I dwelle in the signe of the leoun. 

Myn is the ruine of the hye halles, 

The falling of the toures and of the walles 

Up-on the mynour or the carpenter. 

I slow Sampsoun in shaking the piler; 

And myne be the maladyes colde, 

The derke tresons, and the castes olde; 

My loking is the fader of pestilence.

The Knight's Tale, Chaucer
(Try reading it aloud.)

But Saturn is not Satan. Exactly. (Likewise, Jove is not God). See Bernardus Silvestris.

...the Usiarch Saturn, an ancient to be most strongly condemned, cruel and detestable in his wickedness savagely inclined to harsh and bloody acts. As many sons as his most fertile wife had borne him he had devoured newly born, cutting short the beginning of life....how destructive a threat he would pose to the future race of men by the poisonous and deadly property of his planet. While Nature, after observing his labours, judged him harsh and treacherous, yet she believed that the old man must be respected, as it was said that Chronos was the son of eternity and the father of time.

Cosmographia, Bernardus Silvestris, (Microcosmus 5.5-6),  trans. Winthrop Wetherbee

There is no avoiding Saturn, though one may escape the grasp of the Devil. His influence is more woeful than foul. 

Of course, this picture is complicated by Virgil - the Aeneid in Book VIII has a passage describing a Golden Age brought about by Saturn, as does Eclogue 4. These appear to be images that pre-date the melding of Roman and Greek myth. On a practical note, the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum was the state treasury - one doesn't place one's treasure in the keeping of a loathsome god. See also the Saturnalia, the festival with a brief return to an age of plenty and equality.

To turn (naturally) from Virgil to Dante, we ascend to the Paradiso. Dante and Beatrice pass through the spheres of Paradise, each associated with a Planet. Saturn is not named - Longfellow refers to the 'Seventh Splendour' in his translation (Canto XXI). His sphere is that of contemplatives - Dante meets with St Benedict and St Peter Damian.

There are also some fascinating extracts on Saturn from the astrologers/astronomers of the Islamic world (as Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi), that were transmitted into Christian Europe. Some of these are familiar enough in terms of their content (melancholy, misfortune, cold, plague), though the level of detail is different to the literary uses of Saturn.*** Book Three of the Picatrix or Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, however, (in addition to the claim that the image of Saturn is 'the shape of a black man wrapped in a green cloak with a dog-like head and a sickle in his hand') makes the claim that his is the 'retentive virtue' (Cf. Mars and the 'attractive virtue', or Jupiter and the 'augmentative virtue'). This is interesting as a Saturnine neutral quality, and applies itself equally to Time gnawing away at men, and to the holding or maintaining of wealth.

6) I doubt Lewis read the Picatrix - literature, not magic was his field - but it's an interesting contrast and part of the wider scheme. Either way, let's talk about Lewis's Saturn. 

By his own account, Lewis's own generation - who fought in the Great War and then wrote an awful lot about it - were born under Saturn. However, he denied the final authority of Saturn, the claim of the universe to be 'Saturnocentric'. Quoting Ward, that quality which Lewis called Saturnocentric 'means astringent, stern, tough, unmerry, uncomfortable, unconciliatory, and serious, though not necessarily profound or virtuous.' 

40k has of course, been quite willing to make reference to the Great War.

That Hideous Strength features a scene with the decent of the planetary influences into the manor at St Anne's. The introduction to Saturn goes like this:

All thought of that [the cold outside]: of stiff grass, hen-roosts, darks places in the middle of woods, graves. Then of the sun's dying, the Earth gripped, suffocated, in airless cold, the black sky lit only with stars. And then, not even stars: the heat-death of the universe, utter and final blackness of nonentity from which Nature knows no return.

Meanwhile, at the focus of Saturn's descent, things are different.

Saturn, whose name in the heavens is Lurga, stood in the Blue Room. His spirit lay upon the house, or even on the whole Earth, with a cold pressure such as might flatten the very orb of Tellus to a wafer. Matched against the lead-like burden of his antiquity the other gods themselves felt young and ephemeral. It was a mountain of centuries sloping up from the highest antiquity we can conceive, up and up like a mountain whose summit never comes into sight, not to eternity where the thought can rest, but into more and still more time, into freezing wastes and silence of unnameable numbers. It was also strong like a mountain; its age was no mere morass of time where imagination can sink in reverie, but a living, self-remembering duration which repelled lighter intelligences from its structure as granite flings back waves, itself unwithered and undecayed but able to wither any who approach it unadvised. [Characters] suffered a sensation of unendurable cold; and all that was strength in Lurga became sorrow as it entered them.

Ward mentions at this stage the 'godly sorrow' of St Paul in 2 Corinthians 7.8-11. If there is a Saturnine human character in That Hideous Strength, it is the Ulster scientist and rationalist Andrew MacPhee - a serious-minded type, sceptical of some of Ransom's wilder claims, apparently a happily unattached bachelor. By the conclusion, he is dressed in an 'ash-coloured and slightly monastic looking robe' - once again, note the reference to contemplatives. He may be a rough tribute to Lewis's tutor William Kirkpatrick.

An adaptation of Ward's chapter in Planet Narnia on Saturn may be found here. Those who recall that work will remember the scenes of darkness and despair, the leaden weight, the deceptions, the appearance of Father Time - to say nothing of the death of so many of its characters. The Last Battle, as he notes, ends with the return of the Jovial. We may compare Aeneid VIII here - Saturn's golden age comes after his displacement by Jupiter.

7) Fine: of the Seven Heavens, Saturn may be most apt for 40k. But how do we have a virtuous struggle - and even a victory - under Saturn?

First of all, to be Saturnine is different than to be Martial. This is not just a matter of degree - Infortuna Major and Minor - but also of quality. The bracing contest and clash of arms under Mars is different to the crushing weight of years under Saturn. This also means, I would say, less chance of an ongoing series. The regiment going on to another world, another battle. The contest must be final.

The protagonists must, I suspect, be on the defensive - or a 'best defence is a good offence' endeavour. But that which it preserves must be consistent with the Saturnine. A lonely outpost of survivors, a hospital of the maimed, a hermetically sealed library or a depopulated mega-structure, its furnaces and power plants finally cooling. Player Characters should be (as in the Saturnocentric quote above) stern and unconciliatory, though for 'Let justice be done though the heavens fall' reasons. Contest of arms should be costly and uncertain. 

"I tell you naught for your comfort,

Yea, naught for your desire,

Save that the sky grows darker yet

And the sea rises higher.

"Night shall be thrice night over you,

And heaven an iron cope.

Do you have joy without a cause,

Yea, faith without a hope?"

The Ballad of the White Horse, Bk. 1, GK Chesterton

I said before that this would this would involve 'a bitter struggle, despair, trudging, misfortune'. Trudging and footslogging is often rather neglected by 40k, at least when it comes to Space Marines; but for our purposes, an emphasis on fatigue and becoming overwhelmed is necessary - which takes the fun out of being a muscular super soldier. (Admittedly, the later Horus Heresy books had good moments of this.)

To repeat myself again, 'the triumph is in some distant preservation for a coming dawn (...a New Sun). Resting on the association with contemplatives and monasticism, perhaps we see an iteration of [the conclusion to] A Canticle for Liebowitz.' Interestingly, while the Imperium of Man is the natural fit for all the above, it strikes me that the Eldar would also fit quite well. Their tragedy and decline is as pronounced, of course, but we have not the short lives and brutal deaths of humanity, but the slow dwindling, like the space elves they are. 

Coupled to this is their method of preservation, the spiritstones. An Eldar soul may be retained in one of these rather than falling to Slaanesh in the Warp. They are gathered into the Infinity Circuits of their space-faring craftworlds. This does not appear to be much of a paradise, in so much as we know much of it. Death, but deliverance from damnation; an eternity of contemplation. Life for survivors among depopulated cities or amidst distant echoes of old friends - who must still be preserved. Of the craftworlds, Iyanden may express this best.

Anyway, I think that indicates ample scope for the Saturnine as a theme or mode in 40k. 

*Please assume, as in the original comment, that I am aware of some of the discourse and criticisms of The Last Battle and that I can add nothing the informed would find relevant or interesting to that here.

**Discussed and employed here before!

***See this article for some extracts. Also, the association of Saturn and the Jews, which may be the result of the connection between Saturn's day and the Sabbath.