Silent Titans: The Manmade and the Liminal

I am rather late to the party on this; much has been said (and conclusions drawn) about Silent Titans. Despite having contributed to the Kickstarter campaign at the time (full disclosure, as they say) and having read and enjoyed it, I didn't think I had much to contribute on the subject. I certainly haven't managed to play it.

That was until I encountered a comment referring to 'the bewildering liminality of Northwest England'. The train of thought promptly left the station.

The Wirral (or Wir-Heal) unquestionably has something of the liminal about it. As the book says, Wir-Heal is made from swamp and hill with little in between. One way lies The Sea of Broken Eons, another way the Wrecked Heptarchy, still another way Wales. ('Beyond the Rood-Die lie the black hill of the Welsh, to whom every fear and terror-legend clings. No one from Wir-Heal would ever willingly go there.') The place Silent Titans deals with is stuck between terrains, between states, between legal systems (as the roaming Courts make clear), between realities.

The titular Titans, in the soil itself of Wir-Heal are the stand-out feature of the book. They are strange distillations of the modern and/or the world to come, both grotesquely artificial and biological. However, they are not what I wish to talk about.

The inter-connective tissue of the peninsula has a feel about it that might be very familiar to those who have wondered round portions of the intensely farmed, settled English countryside, especially where town and country meet. The landscape is distorted, made difficult to navigate, by the schemes of human cultivation and construction. One simple indication of this is the difficulty one experiences in walking across a newly-ploughed East Anglian field in November.

I shall offer two more briefly. I once had it in mind to walk out of Canterbury for a quick run near the back of the student quarter. I could leave by a fairly obvious gate - but then found myself in a sloping field, with a concrete wall at the bottom. The wall was continuous, as if trying to firmly separate town houses and fields - though it had not been built at a time that would require defence from beasts or raiders. Water gathered at the foot of the wall, by the most obvious path, making it a muddy bog. There was in time a turning back into the streets, but far further along than I had predicted.

Another occasion had me cycling through a portion of Cambridgeshire. My path had diverged from that predicted, and thrust me onto an odd set of lanes to turn away from a major road. This in time took me to a solar farm. It was quite new, a field of panels surrounded by a high, secure, green-painted metal fence. A wide track ran around it. The field and the track shared the same soil: light, biscuit-hard, almost devoid of plants. It is tempting to think that it had been chemically treated. The track had clearly been made by tractors and earth-movers; anyone not in one of these vehicles would likely have a troublesome journey.

These are fairly well fleshed-out examples: I leave aside walled, dead-end villages, innumerable broken barns, concrete slabs, old railway lines and bunkers. When Silent Titans describes 'A maze of narrow pathways squeezed between dense nettles, thorny bushes and chain-linked fence.' it is certainly familiar. An inhospitable suburbia, as well as the effects of intensive agriculture and dense transport infrastructure all produce the confusion that defines Wir-Heal and the Wrecked Heptarchy, titans or no.

All this is to say that in the world of Silent Titans it would be quite correct for you to fight goblins clad in armour made from discarded lager cans who dwell in the hawthorn thicket between the back of the supermarket and the golf course.

Why do I like this book?

The book in question is a 1945 Atlas of the Soviet Union.

Well, it's not purely the content. I mean, it is interesting - but feel obliged to apply the occasional pinch of salt. This was published just as the grand wartime alliance was ending - so the creators may be a little too tempted to believe official Soviet figures. Perhaps that's uncharitable, but I feel caution is called for here.

Anyway, I like this book. I appreciate the old Penguin format anyway, but the let's not judge the book by it's cover. Take a look at the inside. There are maps detailing variously the boundaries, infrastructure, landscape, products and industry of the Soviet Union. The variety of such things is considerable, but perhaps no more than might be expected from a book of this kind. Though I wonder if the modern equivalent would be as comprehensive.

How many varieties of cross-hatching can you conceive of?
(Enlarge if you wish)

Your setting could aspire to such agricultural complexity.

These figures are presented as fairly isolated from external context; Stalin's regime is not dwelt upon or dissected. Though there is perhaps an implicit degree of praise for the extent of industrial development. Putting this aside to think about worldbuilding, one's fictional creations should aspire to such variety.

To concentrate on matters more widely applicable for a moment, consider the layout and appearance. There are only two colours used, beyond the colour of the paper. I appreciate the textured, slightly tan colour of the paper - this might be down to age, though I'm not sure how white this would have been to begin with - rationing can't have done much for paper quality; it certainly limited supply.

Speaking of paper...

This is simple and clear. Again, to compare to a hypothetical modern equivalent, I suspect it would take hyper-detialled relief maps or photographs and overlay information on them. Too much information? Perhaps. But this is purpose designed for the book.

Even the graphs and stick to this rule. Two colours, with differences represented by different patterns. I recall having a collection of historical maps of this kind - I still like this black and white effect. I like the idea that this is a way of presenting information that could be relatively easily produced with pencil. You don't even need a penny paintbox.

(That said, there is plenty of Red for Russia.)

There are other, quieter details. Looking at the maps or graphs and the explanatory texts, the font for the paragraph is sans-serif and plainer, whereas the text on the maps is in a heavier, seriffed font. This not only gives it, to my mind, a bit of gravitas but also definitively differentiates it from the paragraph.

A reminder of how much of Central Asia the USSR contained.

Why talk about this now? Well, by happy coincidence Skerples's Magical Industrial Revolution setting is coming soon and has a Kickstarter - and this does a very nice job of describing an industrial state. The detail here is worth examining if you are world-building: there are numerous crops and industries described; to feed people, to feed cattle, to clothe them, move them, entertain them, to give them chemical stimulants.

But I also look at this and wonder if one day we will look up and all the draughtsman - the simple sketch artists, the magazine illustrators, typesetters, blueprint-makers and the designers - will have gone. There will be a gentle replacement with stock photographs, computer-generated cartography and the sheen of digital mock-ups. Perhaps that is putting it a bit too far. But I'm still going to preserve this book, both in my library and on this blog.