Faufreluches: The World of Menchero

On the borders of the Thousand Day Regency there is a small world - not the smallest - orbiting a distant star - not the most distant - another stout bulwark of mankind's domain - not the stoutest.

Behold Menchero: a world of two billion souls, six major mountain ranges, two vast oceans, extensive wetlands, a bracing copper-scented atmosphere and mild paranoia.

Menchero underwent mild terraforming in the days of the Stellar Regulatory, chosen with the opaque criteria of the Machine-Minds. Settlement by lottery occurred some centuries after the Regent entered his tomb, following survey by a Janissariat expeditionary group. Government was initially by an oligarchy of founding families - who collectively prevented any one lineage from rising, even technically, to the rank of Magnate. Generational debts to Schematician planners, Secretariat licensors and Mews carriers made the world beholden to Pillar influence. This has, however, changed; as in systems spinwards of Menchero settled worlds have been devastated in flesh and spirit.

The government of Menchero is now in the direct gift of the Siegneuria. Talented administrators and leaders from Magnate cadet houses have been placed as governors there for the last century, striving to build up Menchero's resources and resiliency. Native Mencherene stewards watch them come and go, and say that Menchero's care rests with them, as it ever has.

What is it to visit Menchero? Set down at the Benxhan cosmodrome; drive out into the depths of Benxhan Rural, or weave your way into Benxhan Civic. On either journey your passage will be noted by the Vigiles, in their dull green uniforms.  Benxhan Civic will show you buildings clad in the local marmoreal, with its distinctive indigo veins. Members of the Gubernatorial Brigade patrol the Topaz Processional, clad in chrome helmets and brocade sashes. Their banners and motor-carriages show the mulberry and white-gold livery of the Lord Governor. Looking past them, one sees the terminus of the Processional, at the Chrysogonian Hall. Beyond this are the shrine towers of Celb. Drusus and Celb. Famke, with their exconjuratory corner pagodas.  Then the aggressively drab walls of the Continental Academy, and the standard-issue ornamental panels on the barbican of the Office of Public Tranquility. Further out? The Herbgarden Quarter, named for the self-satisfied financial street of Mint Row. 

Perhaps you went to Benxhan Rurual. Once past the marshalling yards and warehouses of the cosmodrome's long brownfield shadow, there are the wetlands and the scattered farm outposts. It doesn't all go one way - mostly, the goods that leave Menchero are canvas, ball-bearings, detergents and canned fish.

Menchero is (approximately) self-sustaining, and has been for some time - but the works programmes of successive governors increase the burdens on most. This is borne stolidly. There has been turmoil in Quoningen Civic as the result of a corruption trial - something to do with railway procurement, they say.  In the hills of Xianwijk Rural there has been strife, and religious turmoil: a dispute over the status of a local holy figure and her placement in the 'Anointed Generations'.  You may see convoys of the Mencharene Defence Force heading west that way, the 1st Security Division visible in buff tunics and oxblood webbing.

This is not the threat that most excites the attention of the governor, however. In the closer-than-comfortable outer galaxy, the foes of man gather. Machine-minds and rogue Janissaries are only part of the picture: rumours and psychic whisperings accumulate of the Empire of P'o L'u. Lords of the Regency begin efforts, subtle or gross, to uncover and repel the Cephalopodic Process and the dreadful absorption into that murky and lurid combine.

Will Menchero be prepared for the great trial when it comes? Which light of human settlement will be snuffed next? What could draw the tentacles of P'o L'u to this little world?

+++

Some persons

Brigadier Sebastian Kemecut - heads the First Security Division. Born and raised in Xianwijk.

Twice-Honoured Volcxken Bohelok - an official, and the most senior Mancherene native official within the Lord Governor's staff. A surprisingly keen historian.

Ioess Hanggata - Chief of the Benxhan Civic Vigiles. Increasingly convinced that he should retire soon, and very keen to obtain funds to enable this.

The Venerable Jorinde Saharca - Arch-Pastor of Benxhan. She belongs to the Echoing Circle of the Pastorate, who have a reputation for gnomic utterances, ascetic sensibilities and remarkable success with the stranger type of psychic. Saharca has been known to treat worldliness as a switch that may be flicked on and off - a habit that sits ill with more than a few of her underlings, especially those more worldly than her. 

Klaas Ergonote - Chair of the Second Directorate, Office of Public Tranquility. He is half-convinced that he could succeed on another world of the Regency, and that his talents are needed elsewhere.

Bombastimaches Greatorex - Lieutenant Governor, a Siegneuria appointment. Can't wait to return to Saiph, and spends a lot of time with the Glossatrices in the Herbgarden Quarter.

+++

Other notes

• Manchero's emblem is a mountain with a long-feathered bird perching on it, between two white blossoming branches. The governor's own symbol (usually an obvious variant of his or her Magnate family's) can be displayed below in a small cartouche. 
• This started life as a piece of 40k material; perhaps the greater military element shows. A world like Menchero is by no means the norm in the Regency, but such places do exist.
• The emperor of P'o L'u is nameless and infinite. His marshals will happily tell you as much.
• Further Faufreluches material (which you may in fact wish to read first...) may be found here. 

Another Return to Yoon-Suin

Yoon-Suin has a second edition. I chose to do a little retrospective work when this news was announced, as you may see here. Now the new edition has arrived, something comparable is in order.

The new edition is, like the shell of a superior Crab-Man fighter, thicker, harder and glossier. There is more content in it, as the initial Kickstarter page made clear - largely in the form of new appendices (including Weapons, Treasure Tables and Collectors of Rarities) and twelve mapped adventure sites. However, the bulk of the text is the same - Opium Plantations, Elephant Shrines, Psionic Gharials and all. 

So, we turn to differences in presentation. An obvious distinction is the artwork. The watercolour-like wavering lines of Matthew Adams have been replaced by harder, somewhat pixellated artwork...by Matt Adams. This is consistently inconsistent, if you will. The artwork of Y-S1 didn't make the book: it was secondary to the table and materials inside in a way that isn't the case in a way that - say - wasn't true of something like a Warhammer Codex. I feel about the same way with the artwork of Y-S2. It doesn't get in the way, and nor should it: if each version of the Purple Land generated by a user is meant to be unique, then setting this in stone with definitive, intrusive artwork will rather get in the way of that. Generated is a curiously appropriate word. The illustrations make me think of something that a long-forgotten video game might have produced - and there are touches that make me think back to MS Paint as lovingly provided by Windows 98. There is one piece - towards the end of the chapter on the Hundred Kingdoms - that stands out in a bad way (not ugly, just out of place). None of it feels like it could exist in the Yellow City itself, which (curiously) helps maintain that degree of separation. 

(Real Yellow-City art would have to be so much more vivid and densely detailed; a sort of Rococo characterised by abundant, even excessive, use of one or two materials - and almost certainly with some kind of patina or wear. Some of the interior maps approach this.)  

Far better about setting the scene or establishing tone are the adventure sites at the end. These take on a number of forms - bounded or open-ended, above ground or as part of a dungeon - and are intended for different regions. Each seems to have a tantalising mix of the social and the violent, which makes excellent sense for Yoon-Suin's blend of cruelty and opulence. There's also some effort being made to make sure they all feel like different places, with a different set of physical challenges and distinct terrains. In several, the weather feels like it could prove as great a threat as anything else. The Mad Sorceress's Blessed Retreat hooks best in my mind. 

What's also worth commenting on is the new form of the tables. In place of the curving sans-serif font and alternating grey-and-white tables rows is something sharper, somehow more vertical. It's not always as direct, to my eye - but the tables work in about the same fashion as before. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing that I've picked up from dipping back into Yoon-Suin is how I find myself diverging from it. I certainly still admire it, and the structure and restraint it shows were very useful in conceiving some aspects of Punth. But I find that what I've worked on or written or conceived recently tends to have some strong central pillars of a culture or an intellectual system or something of that kind to be played with. This put me sort of at odds with Y-S2 on reading it. Where are the Slug-man lawmakers? The great philosophers and prophets? The conquerors and kingmakers? Even resisting the urge of great man theories of history, movements have figureheads and exemplars. Would I try to work the Purple Land's own home-grown amethyst Napoleon into full realisation? Perhaps not, but I might be tempted to build a pantheon or a set of dynasties or to build resemblances between groups in the interests of knitting all things together. 

Of course, this bodes well for play. Can one group pull together the scattered threads of the Purple Land? Knit together magic and statecraft and courage to produce an enduring legacy? One might say that the Yellow City and the great God River have seen an thousand such before, and seen their every statue crumble. If so, then we will be the thousand and first, and none the more ashamed for it. 

Appendices N

A number of blogs have been putting out Appendix N posts as part of a bandwagon. I'm not going to do so - in part because I already have two. 

• The first is for Punth: A Primer and may be found here. 
• The second is for The Rest of All Possible Worlds and may be found here.

In similar vein, my 250th Anniversary post also has a certain resemblance to an Appendix N in its long list of media discussed here.

If anyone really was waiting with bated breath for my entry...here it is. More interesting things are on their way!

July-August Miscellany 2025: France, Alabama, Estar, Little Gidding and the High Dreaming Citadel

The Heptameron, Marguerite of Navarre

Marguerite, from a drawing held at the Bibiotheque Nationale.

A sixteenth century collection of tales, written by a French princess and published after her death in one form or the other. Over seven days - Hepta/Emera - a collection of French nobles stranded by floods in a monastery tell each other tales. The Heptameron was unfinished on Marguerite's death: it was meant to last ten days - as Boccaccio's Decameron - and features ten storytellers. The Anglophone reader will automatically look to Chaucer, but there are a few essential differences. The storytellers are not travelling, there is no landlord of The Tabard to issue prizes and corral pilgrims (one of the French nobles is older and a sort of first among equals, but it's not the same), the story tellers are all of the same social rank (unlike Chaucer's mix: Knight, Reeve, Miller, Prioress, Cook, Pardoner...) and all the stories are of love and lust. 

It's also worth noting that all ten storytellers tell tales on each day. These run from two to fifteen pages long in a Penguin paperback edition (there is a version on Project Gutenberg), so they don't outstay their welcome. Each story is dissected and discussed by the listeners afterwards, and we get a growing sense of their characters - from the stories they tell, from how they react to the stories of others, from the rivalries and alliances made over the seven days. There are five men and five women among them. The ladies are Parlamente, Oisille, Longarine, Ennasuitte and Nomerfide; the gentlemen Hircan, Geburon, Simontault, Dagoucin and Saffredent. Some of them appear to be virtuous or vicious souls from the beginning - but all of them reveal something slightly further by being pushed and prodded by the exchange of ideas. High ideals begin to look a little shabby, or (eventually) naïve. Cynicism is revealed to be at least consistent and resolute, even when to a character's detriment. For characters who aren't actually doing much, they reveal a fair amount of themselves.

As for the stories themselves, they are a mix. There are tragic affairs, bedroom farces - and tales of adultery and betrayal. The sensibilities of the Early Modern reveal themselves, and interactions range from true love to seduction to coercion to deception to outright rape. Friars are especial targets for scorn and are held up as perilous to be around women. It's tempting to put this down to the Reformation - which Marguerite was around to see and take part in - but I would avoid doing so: firstly, because it is only Marguerite's daughter Jeanne III who becomes a Calvinist (and gives us Henri IV, who knows what Paris is worth) and secondly because the Decameron and Canterbury Tales alike have their share of less-than-pious monks, despite being a century or so before Luther. 

More vital are the clashes between male and female virtue - between the urge for conquest and the desire for purity - and all the consequences this has for devout Christians. The behaviour of monks is distressing because of the stated ideals of monks. Jacques Barzun's opinion is stated in From Dawn to Decadence.

It has been called "a masterwork of pornography" and it is certainly erotic: all are stories about the tricks and turns of love affairs, mostly illicit, But the porn-monger of today would look in vain for the physical exploits that have become commonplace in high and low fiction.

...her stories praise in all sincerity love and chastity. ... Toward the end of [the Heptameron] she verges on a sombre naturalism in which love is still a force but the erotic disappears. 

I suspect I would tell most people to read Chaucer first, but this is certainly something to pick through - especially if you like the ideas of the storytellers slowly revealing more of themselves. If you are after more information - or just comparing the jottings of a random blog with another source - then I would look to French Wikipedia before English. (Or just go to In Our Time.)

***

The Adventures of Telemachus, François Fénelon (as translated by Tobias Smollett)

A 1699 work of fiction about Bronze Age Greeks translated by an Englishman in 1776.

Telemachus, you may remember, is the son of Odysseus. He's a young man in the Odyssey, with a kingdom to save and a father to find. His teacher was Mentor - and yes, that does appear to be the origin of the word.

François Fénelon was, among other things, Archbishop of Cambrai and tutor to the Duc de Bourgogne. He had been made the latter rather unexpectedly by Louis XIV - for he had manifested Jansenist and Quietist sympathies for a good chunk of his career. As part of the young Duke's education he wrote The Adventures of Telemachus (hereafter Télémaque to distinguish character and book). This fits neatly into the gaps of the Odyssey, and shows Telemachus on several journey (Crete, Cyprus, Tyre, Egypt, southern Italy) seeking his father - in the company of Mentor, who is in fact Athena in disguise. Telemachus assists in several campaigns, is frequently praised, is taken as a slave, condescended to by Egyptians, rejects vice and learns many important lessons. 

Télémaque is unashamedly didactic. This is part of the appeal: it is being very obvious indeed about what it wants you to think. Even considering Smollett's translation work, this drips of the Baroque. The leafy Sylvan settings, the long speeches, the Classical figures put to Christian moralising - it feels like every chapter could be painted on a palace ceiling. Of course, this probably doesn't recommend itself much to a modern audience as literature. The 'first novel' is one of those things that can be debated to death, but this feels oddly unlike a novel for something written after Don Quixote. 

It's also worth noting that Télémaque was remarkable popular, in part for how often Mentor goes on about the need for a King to make firm allies, not embark on wars of conquest, heed advisors and be faithful to his wife. Barzun (again!) refers to the 

'picture of the government [Fénelon] thought France should have: a limited monarchy with a written constitution, representative assemblies, and a strong aristocracy discharging important duties. There should be equality before the law, public education, the mutual independence of church and state: the liberation of agriculture and trade from oppressive burdens.'

He also mentions that 'Télémaque is a classic, which until lately French children made to read.' One can see why: it's a perfect work for introducing the period, it's apparently quite good French prose, there's a good obvious story of the author managing to vex the king, and the lessons Fénelon imparts probably fit quite well with a vision of French Republican virtue. 

Should you read this if you are not one of the (presumably very many) French schoolchildren that read this blog? If you are interested in the period, you might care to read a few chapters. It fits well with the Rest of All Possible Worlds.  However, this may be a work more of France than of 'the Republic of Letters'. 

***

Crimson Tide (1995, dir. Tony Scott)

Rewatched after many years, having first caught it on my grandmother's television. Turns out I remember it pretty well!

Anyway, it's a submarine drama. Have they received the orders to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike, or haven't they? Aboard the USS Alabama, Gene Hackman ('Captain Frank Ramsey') and Denzel Washington (his XO, 'Lt. Cmdr. Ron Hunter') will dispute this fact.

This uses the enclosed spaces and social structures of military life really well. The repetition of the missile drill scenes and the confirmations of codes works to lay out the mechanics and areas where tension can build. The fact that all the officers have to mess together regardless of how much they like one another helps; that everyone shuts up while Gene Hackman is talking - even just socially - helps. 

Gene Hackman's quite fun in this. As a rare combat veteran in the US Navy of the 1990s (no idea how true that is to life) he's apparently given a lot of leeway by his commanders, and is so is given a fairly free, ungrudging obedience by his men. He smiles, he carries a little dog around, he spouts bombast and knows he's spouting it - he grins crookedly in Denzel Washington's face. He's no Bligh or Queeg, but clearly he's not so many inches from a tinpot tyrant. But more to the point, he thinks that he needs to be - baiting and drawing on his XO in conversation, testing the line in order to reinforce it. Hackman could feel on the verge of caricature, but it's more a matter of a man twisting ever more and more to fit his chosen social niche.

It makes him a good foil for Washington, and (to some degree) a more interesting person than pillar of morality Ron Hunter. Fragments of Tarantino's comic book trivia in his dialogue only goes so far. 

***

Worldbuilding & Woolgathering and
The Wizards & the Warriors (1986) and 
The Wordsmiths & the Warguild (1987)

I recall the names of Hugh Cook's series from the back pages of other Corgi Paperbacks. The W__ & W___ format of the titles probably made me roll my eyes a bit even then, but I can vaguely recall wondering what a Weaponmaster would be, and how a coherent work of fiction with twenty protagonists could (The Wormlord, the Wazir, the Weaponmaster....) could reliably function. As far as I know, there was no conscious influence on the name of this blog (the above subtitle was irresistible).

Anyway, in the wake of the False Machine two-part review of all ten of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness - and with a lucky second-hand find - I elected to record some thoughts on the first two, The Wizards & the Warriors (1986) and The Wordsmiths & the Warguild (1987).

For those after a fairly quick introduction to the series, I could do worse than point you towards these two summaries with a smattering of comment by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

>>LANGUAGE AND LAUGHTER

Wizards... feels like the most familiar territory. Evil wizard steals dangerous mystical artefact, good wizards and assorted fighters pursue him. The book starts fairly abruptly, with brief profiles of the main characters in the first few chapters to bring you up to speed. There are ancient wizards with significant powers, mystically named orders, castles vaster than even the Romantic dreams of the 19th century could produce, lots of slightly baggy detail about trade languages and nations. It feels a lot like you're stepping into any instance of Tolkien-imitating material from the late 20th century. (The second paragraph on Wikipedia denies that the Chronicles are High Fantasy; true enough, but they pretty clearly want to be taken for it initially - although I stop short of calling them parody or satire). 

I think this is to some degree deliberate. First, because Cook wanted to sell fantasy novels in the 1980s - and we have his own account that Wordsmiths... at least was written at the request of the publishers. Second, he probably quite liked coming up with words and deploying them in long flowing passages - or indeed, short ones. (The sun, naturally, says "Zaan." Injured legs go Balder-shalder-tok.) Third, there are these long passages of trade goods or instruments or what have you which keep knocking you off balance and away from any assumption that this is your world.

Fourth, he's being comic. This passage is from Wordsmiths...; it is situated at a party with young lovers, which is a fairly traditional topic for comedies. 

...the music escalated to a stormburst crescendo. A thrum began to gallop, a kloo honked harshly, a krympol crashed and scattered, a skittling nook began to campaign against the skavamareen and a plea whistle hooted. 

This sounds silly, and invites us to laugh - softly - at the young couple and the situation around them.  

Fifth, Cook knew he was walking into stereotypical waters (if the above passage was in a Star Trek novelisation, you wouldn't blink. If it was in a parody of a fantasy novel, you wouldn't blink). This XKCD comic sums up the attitude.

Cook obviously never saw that, but I think he would have recognised the view, and elected to just walk right through it. This is weird and offputting and you should feel weird here.  This aside from the constant narrator - Chronicler - who might well be willing to just use terminology you have no familiarity with. 

[From that same page of Wordsmiths...

"Don't laugh, gamos,' said the old man, naming Day with the Galish word for a female horse, which was unpardonably vulgar.

Clumsy? Deliberately so?]

>>TOO MANY COOKS

After finishing Wizards.... something crept into my mind from 1984. The Black Company, a dark fantasy series by the American author Glen Cook. I've seen it called or associated with the beginnings of Grimdark; I've only read the first book (The Black Company). A mercenary unit takes on service for a dark empire, that feels quite Mordor-ish (minus orcs-proper, but with plenty of Nazgul types). They are a fairly brutal and unpleasant lot, but there's a vein of loyalty and camaraderie - especially against the internal politicking of the empire that leavens this. The glimpses of ruthlessness by the resistance against them complicates matters further. It is occasionally observed at this point that Glen Cook was a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Anyway, Wizards... felt bleaker than The Black Company - or, rather, as bleak as I expected The Black Company to be. I think this is largely because everyone hates each other. That's a slight exaggeration, but are introduced in the first few chapters to to a wizarding master and apprentice who hate each other and a pair of warriors who hate the Prince they serve and are becoming increasingly caustic to one another. Memorable later is the sheep-rearing father who takes in his sons (a priest whose temple has been burnt down and a mercenary). He shelters them and feeds them, but really thinks very little indeed of them, and isn't shy of showing it.

Even the humble, practical wizard Miphon presumably spends the first half of Wizards... really frustrated with his magical colleagues (and knows that he can't fulfil the mission without them - he might not be frustrated by his own powerlessness to a point of mania, but it isn't a comfortable state of affairs. The Miphon who helps win the day is a different man to the Miphon of the first half-dozen chapters). The hunter Blackwood may love his wife Mystrel dearly, but hates his rulers and is horrified by the warriors around him. 

This changes slowly by the end - after much death, and harrowing journeys, and war. 

>>BRITISHISMS

There are at least two on-the-nose (at least, on my nose) T.S. Eliot references in Wizards... and Wordsmiths... . Mystrel, wife of Blackwood comes from Little Gidding. At one point in Wordsmiths... the thunder says 'Gronnammadammadamyata', almost as in The Waste Land.

There is a reference to Ashmolean jade being traded on the Salt Road in Wizards.... . A character in Wordsmiths... is named Cromarty. There is a city called Runcorn. This sort of thing apparently doesn't stop (click the following link if you are unfamiliar with Liverpool). 

Hugh Cook spent his first few years in England, but soon went to live around the Pacific - where he seems to have spent most of the rest of his live, living in Kiribati, New Zealand and Japan. What are we to make of these uses of British place names? Not too much, I think. The Little Gidding thing certainly doesn't apply that much thematically. I would just observe it as on of Cook's peculiarities.

>>WORDSMITHS GONE BEFORE

Wordsmiths.... traces the bumbling, occasionally heroic journey of the young man Togura Poulaan, son of the leader of the Warguild. A series of events leads to him losing his young love and being thrown into a quest on behalf of the Wordsmiths, who have a mysterious and highly unpredictable device of the ancient world that responds to language. 

Togura goes through any number of distressing events, sometimes intersecting with the plot of Wizards..... until he returns home, to meet with further shocks and misadventures. The whole narrative, with the rube of a protagonist, manipulative scholars, unyielding patriarchs and episodes in remote communities feels rather like Jack Vance's Dying Earth in places - though Togura is a more charming prospect than Cugel ever was. Voltaire's Candide is probably another great comparison, though there's no real Pangloss equivalent. 

[There is a passage attacking a certain flavour of anthropology that Voltaire might well back, of course.]

Though there are other influences. The image of a petty king obsessed by breeding pigs and his obese, terrifyingly strong daughter with her vast appetites might come right out of Rabelais. Though if it were ever accurately put to screen, it would only bring to mind South Park. (Conceivably, Pasolini in full-bore Decameron mode could also successfully portray it).

There's also a few lines of pure bureaucratic legalese that might have come out of any number of British comedies - and contrast the squalor of the town with the political ambitions of its rulers. The line about 'a special tax on Barons' might have come out of the mouth of an Oliver Postgate character. 

As you may have gathered, there's something frothier and lighter in Wordsmiths... than Wizards.... (with some notable exceptions - the cult in the ruined city, for instance). I certainly read it quicker.  

>>AM I GOING TO CONTINUE WITH COOK?

Well, I think I'd like to read The Women and the Warlords as Cook's planned second book. I would definitely like to read The Worshippers and the Way for comparison purposes with Punth. But that may take a while. 

***

Last year I reviewed and praised Dave Greggs's Investigating Censor. There is a new edition - the 'Steppe Cataphract Edition' available (hot off the digital presses!) on Itch.io. This incorporates some of the extra adventures he wrote after the first edition, as well as acknowledging my review work and feedback. If you think this makes anything I write on the subject now tainted by proximity......well, maybe, but that's been the case since I wrote The Cape of Four Pleasances (which I ought to compile into a PDF sometime soon).

Anyway, there's also a new adventure, titled Impermanence. 

This is a useful new adventure - largely, I should say because it offers an example of a different tone. The opulent splendour and violence of general IC fades a bit into the background in Impermanence. Indeed, there's an extent to which it feels more - well - hardcore. 

The Investigating Censors are deployed to a section of the coast called the Fringe of Moments. They are given a sumptuous welcome, intended to deploy them against the current rulers' enemies. There's an element of paranoia that develops from this, with not only hidden (and distressing) Ultracarcerist dens, but also human-puppeteering parasites. (Perhaps I've been thinking too much on Alien.) Environmental touches - like a silk palace suspended over a pitch-black mysterious chasm - add to this. 

Certain elements - as the parasites and the chasm - are carefully left unexplained. There's a predicted order of events (which is very carefully not a railroad) which laves out any dead ends or potential backwater encounters - but that's easy enough to pull together from the base game. 

In any case, the atmosphere and imagery, especially the Jade Sword Saint and the Cargo Labyrinth, work beautifully. There's a sense that even the supernatural powers on your side, or that oppose the Cult of Protection, won't quite heal the Fringe of Moments. It may even harm. (There's some slight alteration to the details of the High Dreaming Citadel that helps this.) This brings to mind - in a good way - Qelong. 

***

Garamondia have just put out an index after 150 posts. It's quite a collection for a little over a year's work and an excellent place to start an archive binge.

Cold War, Fever Dreams

The looming, biomechanical, Freudian image of the Alien franchise may not immediately hint at the Cold War. Certainly, the first few films were made during the 1970s and 1980s, but there's not much in them immediately about the NATO-Soviet clash. Weyland-Yutani might be part of the military industrial complex, but there's little enough that would demonstrate that in Alien. Aliens shows us the Colonial Marines, with all their Vietnam-era looseness of discipline, wildness of manner and military overconfidence, though that's in some ways quite partial. Where we really get a Cold War image is in the un-produced material by William Gibson for Alien 3; this situates the United Americas against the Union of Progressive Peoples (the Soviet Union, Germany, China, Vietnam). Gibson's screenplay is even set in a pair of space stations facing one another along a boundary line. The UPP have continues to crop up in wider Alien material since. So, a Greater US of A and a re-jigged Second World with a patched Sino-Soviet split. All sensical enough, given how Alien has an aesthetic and sensibility continually with one foot in the 70s and 80s. 

But I'm missing something here. Something stranger. In the material of the very first film, we have mention of a 'Three World Empire'. Ron Cobb's notes suggest this as something like a stage of Britain's spacefaring development. One notes the mix of British and American cast in Alien - which was filmed in Britain.
Later material indicates that the Three World Empire is a merging of Japan and Britain (along with a number of Commonwealth and South-East Asian countries). 

In some ways, this is sort of silly. Taking the Weyland-Yutani merger - a name derived from Leyland (the British car company) and a neighbour of Cobb's** - and having the political sphere mirror the commercial. It's a little too close to really convince, without some greater form of detail.***

And yet...the name, with the faintly occult overtones. The Union Flag three-sided vortex, which hints at the British Leyland symbol. The presence of a junior partner in the West of this new Cold War. The fish-hook nerd-bait of 'Okay, but how does this actually work?' I can't help feeling that this should be more interesting to people than it is. There should be fan-art and Woyjak material galore. As it is....well, this is it. 

I have to wonder what more could be done with this 70s-echoing Anglo-Japanese culture and economy. Butskellism on a diet of Bushido, courtesy of the MITI? Morning suits for statesmen imported back to Westminster from the National Diet? Consumer electronics and integrated circuits for both the Atlantic and Pacific? An Anglo-Japanese Concorde? James Clavell was Australian-born: perhaps there would be a BBC version of Shogun; or, indeed, Tai-Pan (would Hong Kong continue to be a flashpoint?). You may debate for yourselves the image of Milton Keynes with Zen gardens. 

***

The real time strategy game Red Alert 2, by contrast, is very much embossed with the Cold War. A branch of the Command and Conquer games, Red Alert (which I never played) supposed a removal of Hitler via time-travel and Stalin attempting a conquest of Europe in his place. Red Alert 2 (RA2) had a rejuvenated Soviet Union try again, with an invasion of the United States. 

So far, so Red Dawn. The main thing to discuss is tone (you can look up a more general review elsewhere). Both Allies and Soviets find themselves developing assorted implausible weaponry: Tesla coils, devastating zeppelins, laser tanks, invulnerability courtesy of the 'Iron Curtain', mind controlled giant squid countered by specially trained dolphins, assorted psychic abilities. There was some of this in Red Alert, but far more in RA2. The bigger difference is tone. Red Alert is (by reputation) far more serious. To my mind, this is only mostly true. My goggles tonight are rose-tinted, but there's a few elements of presentation that skew RA2 away from the full-blown cartoonishness of Red Alert 3.**** 

Both Red Alert and RA2 have the live-action cutscenes that are a C&C mainstay, though RA2's, being a few years later, are rather more polished. The characters are more often stereotypes than caricatures. Ray Wise as US President Dugan is in the lightly comic but not implausible role of portraying a personable politician clearly elected in peacetime trying to grapple with a Second Great War (perhaps I'm reading back from Twin Peaks, but is there an air of hidden desperation?). The assorted plot elements are somewhat wilder, though the destruction of Chicago by nuclear bomb is given a certain weight.

More interesting is perhaps the influence of the gameplay on tone. There's a level of pixellated detail to the cities your troops move through that implies a sufficient urban density. Being able to garrison civilian structures helps - there's an echo of Stalingrad in it all. Units frequently have secondary abilities, can gain experience over time  and benefit from close attention; especially so for the Allied faction, but not exclusively so.  When coupled with a campaign that had a number of limited-unit missions, this gives more weight to the lives of your soldiers. Campaign missions would also end with a victory screen giving your par time - the text given if you are under is rather more positive than if you are over. Compare the two texts for one mission here, another here (comparing the actual screens is difficult; apparently people don't like to show the internet that they didn't make the top of the list).

Is this all enough to make you take RA2 seriously? Probably not. Enough to invest you? I think so.

Anyway, I recently encountered and enjoyed a mercenary generator for TF2. Here's something like it for RA2. 

The Second Great War is over. You were a soldier. You aren't any more. You had a little money and a home. You haven't any more. There's rumour of a supply of gold reserves stashed in a devastated region. Perhaps you and some people with stories quite like yours could put these to better use than whatever's being done with them at the moment.

---You were a...[d8]

[1] Bog-standard infantryman (but you do bear a marked resemblance to Clint Eastwood).

[2] Rocket trooper

[3] Tank/APC driver

[4] Airship pilot or jetpack infantry

[5] Spy, saboteur or infiltrator

[6] Armoured exotic energy specialist

[7] Loyal but completely unpredictable dog

[8] Would-be psychic who deserted just before the pioneering brain surgery. You still went through all the training.

---You managed to grab a few things from the supply depot...[d10]

[1] Rapid-deploying portable foxhole

[2] Tesla gauntlet (rubber boots not included).

[3] Lots of dynamite with only the shortest of fuses.

[4] Tinnitus-inducing shoulder-mounted flak cannon

[5] Jetpack that was in the depot for vital maintenance

[6] Pyrokinetic focus module (broken targeting lobes)

[7] Plague-dart sniper rifle. Handle with care.

[8] Disguise Kit (might fool psychics, doesn't fool dogs)

[9] Briefcase of highly useful but curiously fragile tools

[10] Gun that erases people from time. You don't know how it works, how much power is left in the batteries or how you got it. But you do know that you really shouldn't have it, and everyone else knows it too.

---You also managed to obtain a set of wheels....[d8]

[1] Optical camouflage tank perpetually stuck in the form of a Scots pine. 

[2] Nippy little half-track.

[3] Teleporting supply hauler. It can instantly travel to a certain designated location within 30km, but it needs to be recharged by an industrial generator afterwards. Also really uncomfortable to drive.

[4] An airship. Full fuel tanks, full magazines, just had been fully refitted - but still very slow and very obvious. 

[5] Massive cumbersome tank with a set of propaganda speakers mounted on the rear.

[6] A big flat-bed trailer pulled by two skittering arachnoid terror drones.

[7] Six seats welded to a hovering robot tank.

[8] Truck carrying a big mobile radar jammer.

---The Gold is hidden....[d8]

[1] Somewhere at a disused military base in the Adironacks.

[2] In the cellars of the inn of a remote Serbian mountain town.

[3] On an island in the Florida keys.

[4] At an abandoned mine in the Congo.

[5] Not far from a concealed airstrip in the southern half of Borneo.

[6] In a Mayan temple-cum-guerilla camp in the Yucatan.

[7] At a farm in the north-east of Sichuan province.

[8] Beneath a major national monument.

---A local militia control the area with the power of.....[d8]

[1] Fleet of lightly-armed but highly mobile stealth helicopters.

[2] A pair of towers firing laser-like 'Prism' rays in a commanding location.

[3] Cloning vats. They can only make one kind of goon, but apparently that's all they need.

[4] Hacked feed to a spy satellite guaranteeing constant intel for the region.

[5] A big electromagnet that can pick up cars from twenty miles away.

[6] A self-propelled cryoshell artillery piece. 

[7] Something that looks like a UFO.

[8] Lots of mobile, customisable APCs - and a machine shop churning out spare parts.

---They are led by a warlord....[d10]

[1] A Frenchman who really likes Westerns.

[2] An incredibly handsome Russian nihilist.

[3] Captain Queeg, if Queeg had spent too long watching prism rays light up the dark.

[4] A bombastic Ruritanian cyborg who spends their free time listening to Wagner.

[5] An American journalist from the Midwest pretending to be a CIA agent. Or is it the other way round?

[6] The key member of a Yugoslav stay-behind network.

[7] Hollywood film star who had the money to get out of California at the right time, but not to get back.

[8] Korean submariner deprived of their submarine, and resentful about it.

[9] Peruvian psychic commando who had to spend three nights in No-Man's Land with a damaged interface unit experiencing hundreds of death agonies and went mad.

[10] Politician from a regional legislature who can't recall whether they were a willing collaborator, a mind-controlled puppet, a deep cover agent, was pretending to be one but not the other or just possibly was any of the above at different times - and really doesn't want anyone else to know.

Yes, it's Kelly's Heroes for RA2. Elements of Yuri's Revenge and certain RA2 mods included. The TF2 merc generator could do nicely for comrades or NPCs. 

Détruir tout: c'est une obligation.

***

By way of an ending, I will point you in the direction of S.M. Stirling's Lords of Creation series - which blend the Space Race with Edgar Rice Burroughs-style Sword and Planet fiction, so that you get American explorers dealing with the consequences of the (human, Bronze Age) Venusians getting their hands on AK-47s. The books are acceptable rather than good, but do offer a setting with a certain amount of potential. To my surprise, there's a third one on the way after seventeen years. 

*But then, I have long been of the opinion that David Lynch's Dune has the meme-making scope of the Star Wars prequels. Many do not act as if they share such a belief.

**I've seen that quote a number of times, but never where or when or to whom Cobb said it. I think the origin is in The Authorized Portfolio of Crew Insignias, by one Jeffrey Walker. 

***There is also comparison with Grenville's article on Brexotica: the dreadful rapacious amoral company is the result of the merger of Old-World hierarchy and the inscrutable Orient - against which freedom-loving American protagonists can rage. Not that (by implication) any polity in the Aliens universe comes across very well.

And yes, it seems that there was a Brexit-themed Aliens novel.

****Yes, Yuri's Revenge was rather more B-Movie. That was an expansion pack, and we may consider the base game without it. 

From the Nile to the Wall: Noises on the Memoirs of Hadrian

I read Margurite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. Then so did Patrick. Over the last week we decided to get together twice for some chat on the subject.

The recordings of both are presented below. The first is intended to be a better introduction, and we get a little more discursive in the second. 

1, Pt 1:

1, Pt 2:

2, Pt 1:

2, Pt 2:

Included in our discussion: Wolf Hall, Gene Wolfe's Peace, Starship Troopers, *CURRENT AFFAIRS!*, Piranesi, Piranesi, The Dark Brain of Piranesi, Agatha Christie, Rebecca West, classical architecture, the 1976 film Coup de Grâce and Napoleon. 

***

Animula vagula blandula
Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca?
Pallidula rigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis iocos

Phases of the Moon of Gomrath

I recently acquired an old copy of Alan Garner's Moon of Gomrath. I recognise that this name may not be a familiar one to readers. To my mind he is best described as an author of low fantasy, very heavily rooted in certain parts of the British countryside - not as in a generalised sense or spirit of a region, but as in very precise, real bits of Cheshire. If Tolkien is all languages and chronicles, Garner is archaeology and parish registers. I encountered him as a child (perhaps too young), but his works always seemed to need a little push to fully get, which I couldn't (wouldn't?) give*. (And I suspect that the business of adulthood and the effects of the internet mean that I never quite will get it.) Indeed, while I think he will still be praised by writers in (say) forty years, I wonder if he will be read or circulated in libraries. This is for reasons other than the usual declining literacy notions: there is something in Garner that probably only makes sense if you've been twelve and stayed in a cottage with no television and precious little radio reception in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway, you can compare and contrast all this to the various opinions collected on Wikipedia. 

To return to The Moon of Gomrath. Two children, a brother and sister live on Alderley Edge. This is a sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which introduced them to the supernatural and fantastical. They don't quite literally 'save the world' but they have thwarted evil on a fairly grand scale. Is it implausible that so many of the great secret powers of the world should be tied to this bit of Cheshire? (How parochial, how nationalistic....) Implausible? Maybe, but that rather misses some of the point: without being too didactic, the notion that the battle between good and evil can be waged in your back garden should not be a surprising one. 

Ignore the scene-setting: the main point is this. There is a passage when something that you might as well think of as the Wild Hunt is summoned up. This chapter has stuck with me, thrilled me for years (even as other bits of Garner didn't)**.

A sample: 

'Wakeful are the sons of Argaton! Wakeful Ulmrig, Ulmor, Ulmbeg! Ride, Einheriar of the Herlathing!'

A breeze stirred the mist into dancing ribbons, and the flames trembled and it seemed that there was movement within them, and voices. 'We ride! We ride!' And out of the fire came three men.

Their cloaks were white, fastened with clasps of gold, and a whip was in the hand of each. Their hair was yellow, tight curled as a ram's head, and their horses white as the first snow of winter on the black mountain of the lean north wind.

Other such horsemen are woken:

'Wakeful is the son of Dunarth, north-king, mound-king! Wakeful is Fiorn in his hill! Ride, Einheriar of the Herlathing!'

'I ride! I ride!'

A lone figure came from the trees. His face as stern, heavy-browed, his beard plaited, two-forked, his mane black, awful, majestic. He wore a tunic of coarse hair without any cloak, and a round shield with five gold circles on it, and rivets of white bronze, hung from his neck. In his hand was an iron flail, having seven chains, triple-twisted, three-edged, with seven spiked knobs at the end of every chain. His horse was black, and gold-maned.

Another:

'Wakeful are the sons of Ormar! Wakeful Maedoc, Midhir, Mathramil! Ride, Einheriar of the Herlathing!'

'We ride! We ride!'

Their cloaks were blue as rain-washed day, their yellow manes spread wide upon their shoulders: five-barbed javelins in their hands, and their silver shields with fifth knobs of burnt gold on each, and the bosses of precious stones. They shone in the night as if they were the sun's rays. The horses' hoofs were polished brass and their hides like cloth of gold.

Well, there's the pattern.

Now, before I continue, allow me to say that I like and respect Garner's work. 

Having said that, you know I'm now going to say something odd. Here it is: these are, on some level, silly. Even at the age of nine or so, I knew that a flail with than many chains was....unlikely. A five-barbed javelin might work, but seemed a bit unnecessary if not fishing for eels. It was thrilling, but almost a little stupid (and not in an OTT way, as depictions of Warhammer and chainswords). And all this set alongside Garner's other historical detail and sense of place. Even in the descriptions of the 'Einheriar of the Herlathing' the images of patterned shields with 'burnt gold' or 'white bronze' provide a note of solid, tangible grave goods out of the untracked past. 

Note that most of the fantastical beings that carry weapons in Gomrath carry fairly ordinary swords and things. The Einheriar of the Herlathing are part of the 'Old Magic', deeper and wilder. So, part of their weapons and accoutrements is meant to show this: a five-barbed javelin is less a five-barbed javelin than it is an indication of some heaviness, some great mass of reality in them that can only be expressed by elaborate items and heavy colours. Don't confuse this approach with other things: it's different to 'The dread spectre held something that looked like a scythe'.***

Does this mean we should never see the Einheriar of the Herlathing? Now, obviously, the mind's eye will do its work here, and Garner has given a detailed description that could allow one to make an image of them. Indeed, they have. The copy I found is below.

Cover image by George Adamson.
Laid out with the lovely Albertus (lovely until one gets to the ampersand, that is).

And here is another cover that I recall in the local library. 

This image found on Ebay. The cover to the Collins edition; I believe this is by David Wyatt - who I have learnt did any number of fantasy covers from my youth (I don't think that this is one of his best, but I do remember it - though happily, I'd forgotten that sparkly font for Garner's name). 

Anyway, I think that it will be agreed that the above depict A) Fiorn, mound-king and B) Maedoc, Midhir, Mathramil, the sons of Ormar. Working from my paragraph above on the 'thrilling but silly' nature of their descriptions and the meta-real (perhaps) idea of the horsemen and the hunt, I'm almost minded to suggest that you shouldn't try and depict these figures at all. 

It's not that I believe it could never look good or right (though there's surely an element of that). Fantasy art has shown itself more than able over the last few decades to depict remarkable and elaborate arms and costume in a satisfactorily realistic, lovingly detailed way. Somewhere, there's no doubt an artist whose version of (say) the Horsemen of Donn utterly succeeds. 

But would this flatten it? Undo it? Pin the drifting butterfly to the card? Collapse the wave function? Of course, given that I'm writing about this one chapter of a children's novel from the 1960s, the covers above haven't utterly undone or obliterated the worth of Garner's work. But I think it would be a mistake to film or animate Gomrath. Other books by Garner are fair game (and indeed have been adapted into television series).

To end: two things you can chew over. Firstly, are there any more uses of description like those above that you can picture? Secondly, is there anything else in fiction of this kind that you think really shouldn't be depicted? I recall a friend once saying that there should never be an attempted map of Gormenghast. 

*I'd have never understood Red Shift if I had found a copy at the time.

** I wasn't thinking of it at the time, but if a recording angel of the celestial bureaucracy were to tell me that it inspired parts of The Orrery of Golems, I'd have little reason to doubt them. 

*** To say nothing of the discussions one sees on the Wings of the Balrog.

March-April 2025 Miscellany

A busier than expected last few months, which included a chance find of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, as memorably reviewed by Patrick Stuart. I don't plan to address that here - I'm not certain I'd really care to review it at all - but it's worth reading, however weighty a tome it is.

Some less weighty tomes included....

***

A Wonderful Welcome to Oz

That being a collection of The Marvellous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz and The Emerald City of Oz. All written by L. Frank Baum, but put into one volume by A) The Modern Library Classics and B) Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked. (Which you may or may not know as a sort of parallel narrative to The Wizard of Oz published in 1995).

The three volumes so picked are sequels to Baum's first, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900); Marvellous Land (1904) and Ozma (1907) being the second and third books and Emerald City (1910) being the sixth. Baum, despite a sensational novel, was not good with money, and kept writing them through most of the rest of his life. A Wonderful Welcome to Oz maintains as near as possible the illustrations of John R. Neill, who illustrated most of Baum's Oz books.

I saw this second-hand and grabbed it, largely because I have no connection to Oz whatsoever. The 1939 film rather passed me by as a child, and I have never seen an edition on a library shelf. Yet we still have extensive reference to it, and various revivals or revisions or similar - as witness Maguire's Wicked, and adaptations thereof. 

So do I regret a childhood without Oz? I may say that I do not. In certain respects, it summons up the image of an Alice in Wonderland without the attendant dislocation and peril. The conceit and spleen of Wonderland's inhabitants is sharper than the whimsy and peevishness of the Ozites, however similar the narratives may be. There is a picaresque, unconnected quality to the plot, especially in Emerald City. 

It does all read as very American, of course. It is written by an American and Americans often appear; Oz itself is at the centre of a sparsely inhabited continent. This is on top of lunch-pails growing from trees, or the pragmatic and industrious conceit of the Tin Woodman. Perhaps it's something to do with the air of a well-fed and self-satisfied citizenry? Calling it America's fairyland makes a great deal of sense, I suppose. 

I note that in Oz, men are either A) Non-entities or B) Remarkable but pretty useless eccentrics. Women are sylphs possessed of wide-ranging magics, witches or (merely) driven, competent and practical. If a man happens to possess any of the latter traits, he will turn out to be a woman in disguise. (Applications of the above to any land other than Oz are made at the reader's own risk.) I wonder what Chesterton would have made of this?

Anyway, I remain (alas) unenchanted. 

***

The Etruscan, Mika Waltari (1955; translation into English published in Great Britain 1957)

In its native Finland, this was first published as Turms, Kuolematon. 

A mercenary (Turms) in 5th century BC Greece has to uncover his own background and supernatural significance, believing himself to be cursed. A comment a year or so back brought it to my attention. I think I had heard of The Etruscan before (and Waltari, if only for being something like the only Finnish novelist with a Hollywood adaptation). I will push a little against Alec - Soldier in the Mist reads like Wolfe's use of Waltari's premise, and even plausibly might be a sequel (Turms sends off soldiers to aid  Persia in Xerxes's invasion of Greece towards the end of the book, and these might have included Latro.) There's also differences in tone: Wolfe's supernatural elements are more blatant and the appearance of historical figures more obvious (Pindar, Themistocles). Turms is doing something like writing his memoirs; Wolfe maintains the structure of Latro's day to day use of the scroll. 

The Etruscan also covers a longer span of time. Turms goes from cast-up soldier to maturity, with several years-long stays in various places or roles.  His gradual apotheosis involves not a little heartbreak and blood - and he aids some fairly vile people in his progress. It's just on the historical side of the border between fantasy historical fiction, maintaining that place despite Turms growing to become a sort of priest-king called a Lucumon and referring to himself as an immortal (Turms Kuolematon translating to Turms Immortal). An interesting comparison might be Votan. I think this will reward your curiosity. 

***

Another chance find was The Modern World, Steph Swainston. I think that a longer piece would be necessary to do justice to her Castle novels, but suffice it to say that I think they work fairly well. The central image of the Castle itself, with its competitive immortals, medieval stylings, mysterious Emperor and constant apocalyptic threat represent the sort of setting that would be good for those looking to do something with Space Knights outside 40k.

***

There is a new edition of The 52 Pages, together with the Next 52 Pages! I have a personal attachment to this system, and have used it for some of my work on this blog - but if you have an interest in a nice compact (and free!) RPG system, do take a look!

***

You may or may not know that there is a Price Drop for False Machine products - if you were on the fence, perhaps this is a time to take the plunge.

Too Like the Lightning-Rod: Serendipitous January Reading

I suppose I could bulk this out into a fuller miscellany, but January's almost over and these go quite well together.

I acquired two bits of reading which I only got round to in the last month or so. Both have a nice connection to the Magical Enlightenment stuff I've been putting together under the name The Rest of All Possible Worlds.

***

No. 1 : The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

These were a chance find in a book giveaway. I picked up the Everyman edition. 

Lady Wortley Montagu was alive from 1689-1762. She's perhaps most famous for having gone with her husband as part of an embassy to Constantinople and brining back smallpox vaccination. That's impressive, but forms only one part of her letters. 

She writes sending back reports of her travels - to her lady friends in Britain, to the Abbe Conti in France. These are a mix of responses to their letters, personal news and her discussions of the places she visits. Her journey across Europe takes her through Amsterdam, Prague, Genoa, Leipzig and such places - and she finds time to comment on the local habits, the doing of the aristocracy and so forth. It's when she reaches Ottoman territory that things become more interesting (though comparisons of 18th C London and Amsterdam have their purposes). 

Thus, then to Belgrade, Adrianople, then Constantinople. We are given her impressions of these territories quite closely, with the consciousness of being 'outside of Christendom' (however many Greek or Armenian Christians she encounters). Aside from how observant and discerning Lady Wortley Montagu may herself be, she also has the advantage of being able to enter the women's quarters - to go into the bathhouse and harem and report back. This isn't exactly untitillating, though I note her discussions of Western Europe weren't shy of mentioning dalliances. But it does give her a different insight into the ways and means of another culture - which she uses to pass comment on European customs, be they Catholic or Protestant.

Indeed, Lady Wortley Montagu is sufficiently questing, sufficiently outspoken and well-connected to make her something of a proto-feminist. She's not the model of a Bluestocking - that would come later in the 18th Century - but her remarks on women's education and status certainly indicate a dissatisfaction with the status quo (at least for her class) and places value on the work and wisdom of her sex. 

She wrote throughout her life, and her letters from Turkey only form part of this. Indeed, once she gets past reports from abroad, she is able to write in a more focused way on the place of women - especially to her daughter. Lady Wortley Montagu would live apart from her husband in Avignon and northern Italy toward the end of her life; her letters are still undulled by a long stay and full of the observations of another country.

None of this is crucial reading, of course. But I found it valuable to read the sort of accounts that would fuel what we think of as the Enlightenment; read them in their original mix of the dull, the obvious, the prejudiced, the now-remarkable and the exciting. If you are the sort of person to have read your way to this blog, I think I would suggest reading a similar set of letters at some point. 

***

No. 2 - Terra Ignota

A recent series of four novels (published 2016-2021) by Ada Palmer, Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Chicago (I've approvingly linked before now to her blog, Ex Urbe). It's a semi-Utopian society in the year 2454 and a series of tensions and conflicts within it.

First things first: this is embedded with - shall we say - culture war lightning rods. Nation-states as we know them are abolished, courtesy of rapid transport in the form of flying cars. Citizens present themselves in as gender-neutral; that the narrator is going back through apply 'He' and 'She' is controversial. The nuclear family has fallen so far out of favour as it may be said to be abolished. Public religion has been banned, following a period in the 21st century called 'the Church Wars'. Reservations for religion still exist, as do private counsellors called senssayers. Censorship is widespread, if sensitively applied. There is an ongoing in-world controversy about childrearing and cybernetics which is akin to other debates about home education and significant surgery for minors. 

Hence my image of lightning rods. I don't know if anyone was jumping up and down hoping to burn these books, but this is clearly inflammable stuff. Which, naturally, makes it fascinating. 

I've seen Terra Ignota referred to as a dizzying mix of heaven and hell to a 21st century reader, rather like 2025 would be to a human being of the 16th century. This is not wrong, though clearly some would find it far more heavenly than others. And, indeed, you should likely prepare for something to bother you unpredictably in Terra Ignota. 

The world of Terra Ignota has been divided into Hives. These have coalesced over time into several large entities, more akin to culture-blocs than nations - and certainly not geographically contiguous. Wikipedia's guide to these is quite good, laying out the nurturing Cousins and ambitious Humanists. 

It is a world of solid freedoms, drawing from the Enlightenment - and deliberately written to evoke the 18th century. Thinkers of the period are quoted - Voltaire especially - and the writing style is composed to match. There is a focus on the correct form of government, of conflict bounded by a sense of goodwill, of plenty, of debate, of competition among elites. This last part is rather characteristic; it is both delightful that we get such a top-down and wide-ranging view of things, from characters who can and who want to learn all they can about a situation - but one does sometimes have to wonder what the lowest members of the Hives do with themselves. 

I think that this is especially the case with some groups. Palmer seems to have a moderately good idea of who the Cousins are, what sort of person joins the Utopians, and so forth. But while I can see that she knows that there are the sort of people (who aren't Princes or wunderkind) who would join the orderly Masonic Empire I don't get the impression she has a notion of how they think or act. Which is a problem if part of the conditions for later conflict is that the Masons have become the largest hive, with no sign of stopping!

One can certainly take the whole series as an extended meditation and discussion of the Enlightenment, and how it might shake out if sufficiently embraced and extended. There's a set of scenes toward the end which could certainly be read as referential of A) Postcolonial thought and B) A transition from Liberal Democracy to Social Democracy. That is, the end of the Enlightenment, or perhaps a phase thereof. 

I won't delve into the plot here (really). I was more often appreciative of it than swept up in it. The main point I have is that I was not quite satisfied by Terra Ignota, and you should probably read it. It is doing the things that one would wish Science Fiction to do, and it is doing them from a well-read informed position. 

Certainly, it sometimes tries too much - the elements of theodicy are not what they could be (but then, perhaps they are as good or as informed as our theologically innocent [or, perhaps, theologically sophomoric] narrators). The vast list of characters is benefit and hazard both. The extensive reference to the Iliad and Odyssey are apt, but liable to flap a little too loose. There are elements that clearly point forward from present debates - but then the approach to them and the framing feels a little too like the early 2010s, at least in rhetoric, and it turns out that this is exactly when this was written. This can make it feel...late to the party. (The art, culture and sensibilities of the Utopians feel especially guilty of this. It's not un-sensical in universe, but it really does have something too much of Tumblr in it. Though paradoxically, Terra Ignota doesn't feel that 'online', really. Thank the 18th century and the flying cars.)

There are other ways Terra Ignota undercuts itself. I've highlighted the Masons above. There's a sense in which the Mitsubushi are having their cake and eating it by being so based in East Asia without being formally a national or regional culture (also, though it almost certainly isn't the intention, it's difficult to un-see a Yellow Peril element). Religion is private, but there are lines in the fourth book, Perhaps the Stars, of it being unspoken general knowledge that certain hives have a reputation for having many members from a certain faith. And that the religious reservations are freely accessible. This reframes things awkwardly, and if it was going to appear, should have done so earlier. 

There's an anime-esque cast of thousands, along with long scenes of back-and-forth dialogue in moments of vital action. A little cumbersome, but not objectionable - and better than the alternative. There are one or two moments of smug, glib, triumphalist anti-authoritarianism that I associate with the (movement? subgenre? tendency?) tendency Hopepunk, but these are happily few and far between. Palmer has explicitly linked Terra Ignota and Hopepunk in essays and such material, but that doesn't distress me. 

I suppose my reaction to Terra Ignota is largely that I wish to like it more. The flaws it possesses are not severe, but they are flaws. But it is undeniably of such a substance that one can grapple with.

Returning to the Veins of the Earth

Patrick Stuart of the False Machine has announced a remastering of Veins of the Earth. I imagine most readers already know what this is; for those who don't - well, it's a vision of the 'Underdark' of D&D fame as examined and remodelled through the lenses of A) Real world caving expeditions, B) Geological time and C) Nightmares, possibly relating to the above.

If you haven't read it, then I can recommend it. If you want someone else, then here's the Questing Beast review. 

Anyway, I've been rereading it over the last week and a half, with an eye towards the remaster - and here are some thoughts.

The Pariahs of the Earth: It's almost impossible to imagine any worthwhile changes to this bestiary. The nature of the various monsters, the art, the assorted off-putting or unsettling or downright mystifying descriptions rather makes Veins. Are they difficult to use versus a pack of level one Goblins? Of course, but one rather has to push the boundaries a little if a work is to stand out at all. (To say nothing of the all-important conceptual density.) Cluttering this up with a low-level goblin / rat / other substitute to carve your way through would be a mistake.

Some of the entries have Treasure or Trophy paragraphs (as, say, the Scissor Fish or Fossil Vampire) - I would like to see these appear for every entry. Not that every entry needs them, but it would be a way to say 'These are here, look out for them'. To point to something of mine for a moment - the Gifts and Trophies entries for Humanity's Elementals is a model I like.

I would also like to know how some of these beasts climb and navigate. Sometimes that's in the text, sometimes it can be clearly derived from descriptions (the salamander-men have two legs and two arms and will climb more like human beings that snakes).

Cultures in the Veins: Likewise, it is very difficult indeed to imagine changing these. Things like the Dvargir are so very emblematic of Veins that changing them would be a mistake. (The dErO are charming, as always.) The Gnonmen don't quite strike the same note, but we have had a hint at a potential remodelling in the form of the RayMen, whose J.B.S Haldane-influenced society strikes the right note of alienness demanded by the Veins.

What would be useful is a separate table appended to these entries of other items from that cultural - EG, the Dvargir Carbide Lamp. The index goes a certain way to do this, but could be broken down more - X, X items, X locations and so forth. If adding or shoring up these entries, some other general purpose details might be good (that the Dvargir capital is City 1A is good, and interesting to learn through a treasure table - but what is the general pattern of Dvargir settlements?). I admit, that too many details of some entries may be less of a boon than hoped for.

Likewise, I suppose - how does Culture XYZ use the light and the darkness?

Generating the Veins: The bit that strangles me a little here is the Large Scale Maps. The overall principle makes sense once explained, but I would be interested in an extra part in the worked example in the Appendices. One more page, explaining 'This is how I decided that this section here is an Eight Mile Waterfall' (or a series of cascades, or...). As with the rest of Veins, no-one has to act make the same decisions, but knowing how someone else has made those decisions is useful. (I may have to do a worked example here!)

Some other, less general points:

• The Gegenschein - how many moths are going to appear in your work, Patrick? (The trilobites are different, I know that.)
• In Appendix III there's talk of a settlement generator in the sequel. I know that this isn't quite a sequel, but some settlement or trading post details would be good. What food and lumes are traded? What games and forms of entertainment are shared in the Veins? What card game would a dErO, an Ælf-Adal and a Substratal all enjoy playing?
• Are the Zombie Coral building anything?
• When the current font is in bold, some of the detail of serifs is lost and takes a moment to identify - see especially As and Ms. 

***

I'm not certain that I'm necessarily the best person to answer the question of what to do with Veins - I've not tried to run it, and I've had it in my headspace for too long. But I am interested in seeing what comes of it, and look forward to seeing it remastered.