Swan Tower

New Worlds: Public Transit

2026-05-08T08:02:45Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/W9jkpG)

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Books read, April 2026

2026-05-05T17:40:07Z

Painted Devils, Margaret Owen. Second of the Little Thieves trilogy, which I started last month and promptly fell in love with.

Most trilogies, having clearly established a romantic relationship in the first book, would immediately start the second book by finding some way to break up the pair or otherwise put them on the outs with each other, so as to maintain some kind of tension in that plotline. I found it striking how thoroughly Owens does not do that: yes, there are multiple factors pushing the two of them apart, but they talk to each other and work through those problems and then a new problem comes along and they keep doing what it takes to deal with each one in turn. Meanwhile the plot has a fresh premise -- instead of trying to con her way to a fortune, Vanja has inadvertently created a cult -- and the structure gives that plot occasion to roam more widely than the single-city setting of the first book. The ending was the good sort of frustrating, where I yelled AUGH and then immediately checked out the third installment in ebook so I could run a search for a certain character's name and reassure myself that they show up enough in the story that I could hope for them to eat dirt the way I really wanted them to do. The only reason I didn't read the third book right away was my usual policy of trying to space out volumes of a series to keep from overdosing.

Ancient Night, David Bowles, ill. David Alvarez. I knew this was an illustrated book, but I didn't realize just how short it is. Very much a picture book rather than a book with pictures, relating a Mexican myth about the sun and the moon.

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen. This is the kind of oddball niche history I'm sometimes very much in a mood for. Allen does his best to approach the subject topically (rather than chronologically, which would be well-nigh useless), starting with things like the advent of accounting ledgers and ranging through how families, artists, musicians, naturalists, housewives, writers, and people dealing with traumatic experiences have used them for different purposes. He also touches on the effect of technology: the notebook itself is dependent on paper, but creating things like lined pages affected how people use them. And then in turn, of course, there's digital technology, which has reduced our use of notebooks -- reduced, but not eliminated. The final section delves briefly into the neuroscience of how devices like notebooks act as an accessory to the brain, effectively making part of it live outside our bodies.

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, Mary Beard. As usual, Mary Beard is extremely readable -- even when, as is the case here, her topic is inherently fuzzy. This is not a chronological or biographical approach to individual Roman emperors, though those elements appear in passing; instead, it's an attempt to figure out what it meant to be the emperor of Rome.

This is harder than you might think to pin down, because there's a ton we simply do not and probably never will know, like how and where exactly the business of government was carried out. (We have vague outlines, but nothing resembling an org chart, or even a map of how the Palatine palace was used.) And when it comes to the emperors as people, Beard does a good job of outlining how the facts we know really add up more to an image of a "good emperor" or a "bad emperor" -- what they were expected to say and do and look like -- than the actual men behind those terms. I particularly liked her argument that the "good" or "bad" reputation had more to do with succession than the actual reign: if you were your predecessor's designated heir, you had a vested interest in depicting him as a benevolent ruler who made wise decisions, whereas if you came to the throne after a bloody civil war, it was much better for you to depict the previous guy as a corrupt and immoral bastard responsible for all that chaos. We have only shreds of contemporary sources to leaven the later hagiography or demonology, but Beard does the best she can to piece those shreds together into something like a more balanced image.

(Also, I got a poem out of this.)

Into the Riverlands, Nghi Vo. Third in the Singing Hills Cycle, though this is not a series that requires you to read them in order. I think this one might be my favorite so far, as Chih grapples with both violence and the fact that you can never know everything about a person. I do, however, continue to have the niggling feeling that I would like these novellas to be longer, so they can dig a little deeper into the tasty meat at hand. They don't need to be a hundred thousand words long -- that would probably overstay the welcome -- but the sort of short novel Tachyon publishes might be ideal.

A Lady Compromised, Darcie Wilde. Fourth in the Regency-set Rosalind Thorne mystery series, which is not the Useful Woman series about Rosalind Thorne. (I will probably at some point poke my nose into that one and see if it's a sequel series to this one or what.)

There's been enough of a gap since I read the previous ones that I can't say for sure if this packs an extra ten pounds of material into the sack, but that's definitely the impression I got. A duel that never happened because one combatant was murdered first, marital intrigues, ethnic tensions, land improvements, the possible rekindling of a romance, and a background strand of blackmail continued on from a previous book . . . it's a lot! I think the ending came together a touch too easily, but that's counterbalanced by characters being put through a brief physical and emotional wringer. Looks like there's one more after this, before I investigate that other series.

Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline, Paul Cooper. Right at the outset, Cooper acknowledges that he's not trying to assemble a grand analytical theory of why civilizations collapse. (He defines that not as portions breaking away, a la decolonization, but as a full-on crash: population takes a nosedive, economy craters, cities are destroyed, etc.) I understand why not -- this is an outgrowth of his podcast, and goes into the box of "pop culture history underpinned by research" rather than a major academic work -- but it does mean that the component chapters are mostly just potted histories of the civilizations he's looking at, rather than anything deeper.

I don't mind the potted histories, though! Especially for the ones I'm not very familiar with. He divides the book into three sections: the ancient world (Sumerians, Late Bronze Age Collapse, Assyria, Carthage, Han China, Roman Britain), the middle age (Maya, Khmer, Byzantium, Vijayanagara), and "worlds collide" (Songhai, Aztecs, Inca, Easter Island). I should note, though, that where I am familiar with the material, I can see Cooper sometimes accepting a little too readily the standard line on a certain topic, only mentioning in passing -- or omitting entirely -- a more nuanced view. Having read Cline's After 1177 B.C. last fall, for example, I raised an eyebrow at Cooper crediting a "Dorian invasion" for the breakdown of Mycenean civilization during the Late Bronze Age Collapse -- despite Cline being one of the sources Cooper references here! And I read the Carthage chapter right after Bret Devereaux started his series of posts on Carthage, in which one of the first things he (I think convincingly) debunks is the notion, repeated here by Cooper, that Carthaginian citizens rarely fought as soldiers for their own land.

Which is to say, this is the kind of book that's a better starting point than a stopping point. But it's still an interesting starting point! I appreciate the breadth of its scope, and even if Cooper doesn't set out to do macro analysis, you can still see for yourself a number of patterns in the data. I did side-eye the ending a bit, though, where he first decries "doomerism" about our own situation . . . then proceeds to sketch out an extremely doomy scenario of what global civilizational collapse might look like.

(Got a poem out of this one, too. Though not that depressing last bit.)

The Iron Garden Sutra, A.D. Sui. I start a lot more SF novels than I finish, simply because a premise will sound interesting and then I remember that SF is not as much my cuppa as fantasy. Here, though, I was particularly interested in the monastic protagonist -- shocker, that's on my mind right now. Plus the scenario (investigating a derelict generation ship) lands squarely atop my interest in Big Dumb Object stories, so I was very much on board.

And I did enjoy it, though I think Vessel Iris was a little too dissociated from his own troubling emotions for me to be quite as gut-punched as I wanted to be about some of the developments. There's good in-story reason for it, but at times it started to feel like the narration was hiding information from me that the point of view knew for a little too long. Still, I will be keeping an eye out for the sequel -- which it does have, though this book wraps up fine if you don't mind ending on a bittersweet note.

The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Third of the Dame Frevisse medieval mysteries. I know it's inevitable that sooner or later the story would move outside the convent, but I'm a little sad to see it happen so soon, as I enjoyed the exploration of what it was like to live under the Benedictine rule. Parts of that remain here -- Frevisse feels guilty when her investigation causes her to repeatedly miss scheduled prayers, and is extremely not okay with the prospect of being seen by a man while not dressed in her habit -- but it's not the same.

Frazer remains, however, interested in the textural details of life in that period, and in neither romanticizing them nor (to use a later SF/F term) being grimdark about them: things like how miserable it would be to live out in the woods when you can't even reliably keep the rain off your head. The premise here is that Frevisse's cousin, outlawed years ago for accidentally killing a man in a fight, wants her to leverage her connections to get him a pardon so he can stop being stuck with an outlaw's unromantic life.

I was a little startled to find how not sympathetic the cousin is. He's the kind of man who can turn on the charm for Frevisse (because he wants her help), but he's an asshole to everyone else. And so, when the murder inevitably happens -- something like halfway through the book! -- he's the natural suspect, which means (by the logic of murder mysteries) he's the second least likely culprit after Frevisse herself. I liked how that resolved in the end.

The Killing Spell, Shay Kauwe. I've been excited for this book ever since I met the author briefly at Worldcon! I knew from that conversation that it was about language-based magic, and specifically about the author's own experience with Hawaiian, which was enough to sell me on the premise; turns out that it delves into how different languages are suited to different kinds of magic, and furthermore that poetry is often integral to making spells work! So, yeah, sufficiently far up my alley that I might need to see a doctor about that . . .

This is a very post apocalyptic setting, but I appreciated that while the apocalypse clearly chimes with climate fiction, it's not straightforwardly mundane: an event called the Flood not only sank the Hawaiian Islands very rapidly, but brought magic back into the world. That was long enough ago that the U.S. has essentially collapsed, leaving city-states defending themselves against magical monsters; the Hawaiian survivors are clinging to semi-independent existence outside of an L.A. ruled by a council of magicians representing different approved languages.

Plot-wise, it's a murder mystery where the protagonist gets roped in because the victim seems to have been killed by a Hawaiian-language spell, but in a place very few people can access. It moves at the thriller/urban fantasy-type rapid clip where the characters don't get much breathing room between events -- which means there's not as much time as I would have liked spent on the art of smithing spells, whether that's Kea wrestling with a Russian-language spell sent awry by the lack of good rhymes for a crucial word, or attempting to create a new signature Hawaiian-language spell for her family so she can join the council of Hawaiian elders who rule their enclave. But then, I would quite happily have read entire chapters of that! So perhaps I am not the best judge. :-P It is still very much my kind of book, and I hope I'm right about the vibe I got from the ending, that this plot is done but there could be more in the future.

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, David Graeber, narr. Roger Davis. Probably I should not have listened to this one in ebook. I was lured in by its brief length (five hours; as Graeber says in the introduction, it's an overgrown chapter of another book split off on its own because "everybody hates a long chapter but loves a short book"), but given my complete lack of familiarity with Malagasy names, I might fared better in following the argument here if I could see names like Ratsimilaho and the Betsimisaraka.

Anyway, in the late seventeenth century there was supposedly a democratic pirate kingdom in Madagascar. Graeber's general thesis here is that while "Libertalia" as described never existed, the interaction of European pirate customs with local Malagasy culture -- in particular Malagasy women -- did lead to some interesting dynamics that he considers to be part of the global experiment in Enlightenment and democracy. But I am probably not doing the best job of summarizing that because, per the above, this was not an ideal thing for me to listen to rather than read on the page. What I followed of it, though, was interesting!

Holy Terrors, Margaret Owen. I decided enough of the month had passed for me to go ahead and read the third book. :-P

In this one the story goes full Holy Roman Empire, with an imperial election -- made more complicated by the fact that somebody is murdering the prince-electors. In tandem with that, Owen goes hard on the emotional front, complete with an interpersonal conflict not easily resolved because the problem at its foundation is not one that can be handwaved away. I very much liked how that got resolved in the end. And the metaphysical strand of the story also continues, with the fascinating problem that the Pfennigeist, the persona Vanja has been using for her less than legal activities, has earned enough fame that it's starting to exert its own force on her, whether she wants it to or not. So basically, allllllll the tasty things wrapped up in one excellent package! I highly recommend this to anybody who finds its subject matter appealing. (And the writing is good, too. There's so many good descriptions in here, and quips that heighten rather than kneecapping the emotional weight.)

Owen has another duology I will be eager to check out, once I've given myself another breather.

The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson. More ravens than I was expecting, less scholarship -- but that's okay, because the ravens are great. (Or rather I should say, magnificent.)

Certain things about the premise here have a YA whiff to them, with basically everybody choosing one of eight animal deities to be their patron, and a competition among warrior representatives of each one to see who will be the next emperor. (Also, murder of a candidate: I didn't mean to read two novels about that back to back, but . . . I did.) However, Neema is not at all a teenager, and the plot gets into a lot more political complexity than I normally see in YA-ish competition tales -- generations' worth of it, in fact. I see why some reviews I saw commented on the number of plot twists along the way, but I didn't particularly mind.

Not quite everything here worked for me. I see why there's such a long opening section taking place years before the main action -- it's important that the people and events there carry more weight than a mere summary would be likely to give -- but it did odd things to the story's momentum, and the approach to point of view was not entirely successful for me, either. Hodgson is doing enough that's interesting, though, for me not to get hung up on the stumbles. I'd rather an author swing for the fences and maybe miss a few balls than play it safe all the time.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/dCkKjj)

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New Worlds: Suburban Sprawl

2026-05-01T08:06:14Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/4alWQd)

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5 Years, 100 Poems

2026-04-28T17:47:06Z

When I sold my twentieth poem recently, I found myself wondering: how many poems have I written?

Several other questions instantly followed in its wake. How far back am I counting? (All the way to that poetry book we did in second or third grade, that I only remember because my parents found it when they moved?) Do I count failed-but-complete drafts of poems I later wrote very differently? (Or are those the same poem . . .) What about incidental things I've tossed off that don't really feel like they should count, like that senryu about jet lag written while, yes, horrifically jet-lagged? (There are probably things in this category I don't even remember: I keep good records, but not perfect ones.)

I finally decided on three rules:

1) Only poems written since I Began Writing Poetry (with "The Great Undoing") count.
2) Early failed drafts of later poems do not count.
3) To count, I must consider the poem "successful" -- meaning worth either posting online or submitting to markets.

By those metrics, I had ninety. And then I asked myself the last, fatal question:

When did I write "The Great Undoing," anyway?

The answer, my friends, is April 2021.

A mad plan instantly proposed itself. I had eleven days left in April, and I was a mere ("mere") ten poems away from one hundred in five years. (Ish. I've attempted to find out when in April I wrote "The Great Undoing," with no success. I decided the anniversary month was good enough.) Could I get myself to that line before the month was out -- understanding that I needed not only to write ten more poems, but ten I considered successful?

As you can guess from this post, the answer is "yes." In part because I got a sizable boost when I remembered four haiku/senryu I'd written for an exchange last summer, which I'd never done anything with; upon examination, I found they were in fact not bad and I should send them somewhere. But I've written six poems I think are successful in the last week: a rate that would have seemed inconceivable to me just a few years ago, when one a month was about all I could manage. And I didn't go only for low-hanging fruit, either; this includes a garland cinquain, elegiac couplets (a Latin meter English does not play nice with), a fifty-six-line nonce form that rhymes throughout . . .

. . . and a sestina. Specifically, the sestina that has been my white whale since 2007, long before I Began Writing Poetry, when my crit group gently told me that a flash piece I'd written was not very good but yes, my vague thought that maybe it should be a poem? was probably right. I've taken several runs at it over the years, though none in the last five. So of course I decided it needed to be Number One Hundred. (Quoth my sister: "Call Me Ishmarie.")

I finally did it. And so, in celebration, I leave you with Poem #101, with apologies for hopping on a bandwagon only slightly less overloaded than Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah":

This Is Just to Say

I have written
the poem
that I've failed at
for nineteen years

and which
had become
my
white whale

Actually
it turns out
it wasn't
that hard

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/hhzpX6)

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New Worlds: At the Public Baths

2026-04-24T08:01:58Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/KL0Twg)

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New Worlds: Join the Club

2026-04-17T08:07:11Z

I say on a fairly regular basis that we are social primates. But there are limits to that; our brains are adapted for small groups, and cope much less well with hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of people. It's therefore not surprising that we've developed tons of ways of dividing society into smaller, more manageable sets: families, neighborhoods, co-workers, etc. And clubs -- which, for lack of a better umbrella term, I'm going to use for a whole swath of voluntary associations.

Because of the breadth of scope implied there, some types of club have already appeared in previous essays. The gangs of Year Six, for example, or the craft guilds of Year Seven, or the mystery cults of Year Eight, or the burial societies of Year Nine: all of these are examples of how people may club together for various purposes.

But if that were all, this wouldn't merit an essay. So let's talk about the fun end of things: secret societies and their ilk.

There are differing levels of secrecy in play here. The peak would be a society whose existence, membership, and activities are completely unsuspected by outsiders . . . but good luck pulling that off. In theory these absolutely exist, then and now, and I'm just not aware of them because they do such a flawless job of staying hidden. What we know of human behavior and security failures, however, means this is generally unlikely: sooner or later, word will get out. For this reason, I tend to side-eye such groups in stories -- though if they have mind-control magic or similar methods available to them, then maybe they can indeed scrub all knowledge of themselves from the broader world.

More often, though, secrecy operates at a less restrictive level. The group is known to exist, but outsiders don't know who's a member. The membership is known, but they don't speak of their business outside their ranks. The membership is known and engages in public activity, but rumors persist that that's just the face they present to the world, and behind the scenes, they get up to all kinds of nefarious deeds.

This is, of course, the stuff of conspiracy theories. If you "know" a group exists, but there's no proof of anybody being a member, it's probably nothing more than rumor -- but good luck disproving a rumor. If a group definitely exists, but they won't talk about themselves, why not? What are they hiding? In the long run, this can become a form of corrosive distrust, either for one paranoid individual or for whole communities, where they wind up doubting all the available evidence and insisting that something else must be going on behind the scenes.

But for stories? This can be great, because it automatically introduces tension and intrigue to the narrative. And secret societies do genuinely exist, because if there's one thing we love more than belonging to a group, it's belonging to a special group, one where your membership means being inducted to privileges -- including knowledge -- that not everyone else gets. That heightens the feeling of social connection with your fellow members. Secret societies are also extremely prone to ritualizing their business, holding elaborate ceremonies for inducting new members or promoting someone within their ranks, and even dressing up their ordinary meetings with special robes and solemn formalities: measures that strengthen the bond between members, and help ensure that nobody will break ranks.

That helps explain why quite a few secret societies have no particular purpose beyond their own existence. The infamous Skull and Bones, a secret society for students at Yale, doesn't carry out any public activities that I'm aware of, which differentiates it from the more ordinary student clubs organized around a certain mission or area of interest. It's simply a way for a select group of individuals to join an elite tradition, forging connections with each other which may benefit them going forward. In this they are akin to the gentlemen's clubs that began to form in Britain around the seventeenth century, although those latter often had some ostensible unifying theme: military service, political affiliation, or alumni of a certain university.

Unsurprisingly, it's extremely common to find that members of such clubs and societies go on to careers in politics. These are the the "old boys' networks" in action -- very specifically boys, since many of them resisted or to this day resist admitting women to their ranks. (Though there are women's secret societies as well, e.g. the Sande in West Africa.) To the extent that a group of this kind has a purpose, it's the furtherance of its members' power . . . which readily lends itself to conspiracy theories about a plan for world domination.

That last, of course, is the stuff of the Illuminati and the Freemasons -- at least in folklore. The actual Bavarian Illuminati simply wanted to oppose superstition and monarchical abuses of power, but after their suppression in the eighteenth century, some people believed they continued in secret, blaming them for every kind of event and social movement imaginable, all around the world. (I say "blame" because usually people assume these later Illuminati to be nefarious, rather than crediting them with shifts the speaker thinks are desirable.) The facts that the Freemasons publicly exist, each Grand Lodge is independent without answering to a top authority, and (in the Anglo-American tradition) they explicitly prohibit discussions of religion or politics within their lodges, do not keep them from being the focus of similar rumors of machinations for a New World Order.

In some cases there may be real evidence of foul activities. The Ku Klux Klan has not just secretly but publicly and with pride carried out murder and acts of terror against Black people, explicitly to further a white supremacist agenda. Some instances of malicious groups, however, are very much a "handle with care" situation, as with the "leopard" or "human leopard" (sometimes also crocodile and chimpanzee) societies of late colonial West Africa: these do genuinely seem to have existed, may have committed murder, and in some cases possibly did engage in cannibalism . . . but given how much those became a stereotype of racist pulp fiction, I would proceed with a great deal of caution before trying to insert anything like that into a story.

Having dwelt a lot on the negative side, though, I'd like to note that isn't the whole story of clubs. Fraternal orders like the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Knights of Columbus, or the Odd Fellows may have the ritual elements, but their purpose is often openly charitable or oriented toward aid. Groups like the burial societies I mentioned before fall under the header of "friendly societies" or "benefit societies," which seek to help members support each other and/or outsiders like immigrants or the indigent poor; depending on their focus, these swing in the direction of cooperatives or volunteer organizations. Even groups with a primary focus like religion may take on such missions: the Catholic Trinitarian monastic order is officially the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and Captives, because the ransom of Christian captives held in other lands was a core principle upon which they were founded. (In modern times, where that's a less common problem, they evangelize and help immigrants.)

What all these groups have in common is the use of social bonding to help further their purpose, whether that's the advancement of members' political careers, the spread of religion, or the protection of orphans. Probably all of us know that merely donating money to an organization creates a weak feeling of attachment at best. By contrast, face-to-face interaction with a small enough group of fellow members that you know them all as friends -- at least in the loose sense of that word -- is a far more powerful lever for motivation. We like to feel as if we belong, and once we do, we don't want to let our fellows down.

In our increasingly digital, disconnected world, that's a useful thing to keep in mind.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/wkTnwM)

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Today's question for the nerds

2026-04-16T17:49:19Z

When writing a poem in (my best English approximation of) a classical Latin meter, upon an ancient Roman topic, do I treat the proper names:

1) according to how we tend to pronounce them in English and where the stress falls, or

2) according to the Latin scansion rules of which syllables are short vs. long?

In other words, is "Augusta" stressed on the second syllable, or is it two long syllables followed by a short one, for the purposes of that poem's scansion?

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Lcf5kG)

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"Drawing Strength"

2026-04-15T17:27:07Z

The "Wildwood" issue of Fairy Tale Magazine is out today, containing a poem from me! (Yes, I have had rather a lot of poems published since the beginning of this year.) As the name suggests, this issue is themed around Green Men and Green Women, dryads, tree spirits, and other things in that vein. My poem, "Drawing Strength," is a sonnet about meditation and metamorphosis, and I'm joined by some excellent names in the Table of Contents. You can download the PDF issue for free, though they do ask for a donation to help keep the magazine operating. It's a PDF because they do gorgeous, art-filled layout -- check it out!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/SLbDAr)

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New Worlds: Queen Bees

2026-04-10T08:01:53Z

So far we've been talking about friendship in a one-to-one sense, as a relationship between only two people at a time. But of course, we all exist in a much larger social world -- even during periods when that existence is best defined by a position firmly outside the circle. What does friendship look like when we open up our scope?

Well, for starters, "friendship" starts to be a word that maybe ought to have sarcasm quotes around it. We are social primates, and unfortunately, that entails some pretty nasty behavior alongside the nice stuff. As I said last week, depending on how you use the term, a friend might just be somebody you know and haven't outright declared an enemy or dead to you. Or, depending on how you use the term . . . your "friend" might indeed be somebody you are out to hurt.

If that sounds like a particular negative feminine stereotype, you're not wrong: in our society, teenaged girls in particular are proverbial for how horribly they may treat their so-called friends. This isn't inherent to being adolescent and female, though; it tends to show up anywhere you foster the kind of hothouse atmosphere where a bunch of people are trapped together and can only rise socially by climbing over each other.

And that means it can describe a royal court every bit as much as a high school! Reading about the interpersonal dynamics of Elizabeth I's nobles and ministers, I was struck by how much their behavior resembled the cliques and grudges of teenagers. The specifics differed -- A offended B, so B arranged to have one of A's political hangers-on denied the right of entry to the more exclusive precincts of the royal presence -- but the vibes were much the same.

Associating this specifically with women is therefore not entirely true, because men can behave in similar ways. It's also not entirely false, though, because control of social dynamics is a form of soft power, and in a patriarchal society where women are denied access to the formal levers of government, soft power is the only kind they can use. So now the question becomes: how do you acquire that power?

Some of it comes from obvious sources. If a person has some more formal type of authority -- or, in the case of a woman, is associated with a man who has such authority -- that tends to give their social presence more weight. After all, offending the prime minister or the wife of the Lord Treasurer might mean all kinds of political difficulties, whereas gaining their friendship could open new doors. This is true even at lower levels of society than a royal court; the wife of a town mayor or village headman probably has a certain amount of social cachet.

Similarly, wealth brings the ability to host more people more extravagantly, which is beneficial no matter what scale of party you're looking at. Though in many cases, the power of wealth has to be evaluated in light of status: where commerce is scorned, then a woman from a merchant family, be she never so rich, will be seen as more déclassé than a noblewoman of more modest means. The former can still win social authority, but she'll have to work harder for it.

What form that work takes depends on what's admired in the society at hand. As we've discussed before, fashion can play a role here: exhibiting good aesthetic taste will bring approval, and if you can combine that with just the right amount of daring innovation, you might become the trendsetter everyone else looks to for guidance. That's difficult to pull off if you're a social nobody -- your innovations are more likely to be sneered at as missteps -- but one admiring comment from the right person might begin your rise to social influence.

For those of more modest financial means, it may be easier to aim for becoming known as a good conversationalist. Remember, this is a social world, so being someone people enjoy talking to is a major asset! Flatter the right people just the right amount, so you don't sound too obsequious; tell rousing anecdotes about interesting situations; extemporize good poetry to commemorate the occasion at hand; exhibit whatever type of wit is most admired right now . . . which, yes, can include the back-biting type where you're constantly tearing other people down, though it doesn't have to. A lot depends on how vicious the local dynamic is.

Under the right circumstances -- and this will be of interest to many people who enjoy reading SF/F -- you can even win social influence through your book-learning and smarts. If you live in an environment of intellectual ferment and scientific exploration, then being au courant with the latest discoveries gives you fodder for attracting attention. You do still need to be a good conversationalist, so you can deliver what you know in an interesting fashion -- otherwise you'll have a reputation as a pedantic bore -- but it isn't always about jokes and empty gossip.

For women in Enlightenment-era Europe, in fact, social gatherings were a major part of how they kept up with the intellectual scene. The French salonnières of the early modern period famously established a model of social interaction that spread across the continent and into the British Isles. "Bluestocking," the Victorian pejorative for an excessively bookish woman, was originally the name of an eighteenth-century "salon" or social circle focused on literary discussion -- which, given the era, included philosophy, history, and scientific research, not just fiction. Their community included men, but it was led by women, and through the connections formed at their gatherings, they helped advance each others' minds, laying the groundwork for the advances of feminism in the nineteenth century.

It's not all so high-minded, of course. Like I said, these environments can also feature a ton of backstabbing and social climbing: witness all scenes set at Almack's Assembly Rooms in Regency romances, where a single introduction from the right person might set an individual on a path to an advantageous marriage . . . while others with competing interests do their best to spike any such alliance. The Lady Patronesses of Almack's, with their control over vouchers for admission, held a great deal of power over that scene.

In that case there was a group of women in control, but where a single queen bee rules over it all, she can be as capricious and arbitrary as any formal autocrat. She's likely to be a central gathering-point for gossip, and whispered into the right ears, those juicy tidbits might become a scandal that brings down a minister. Even without such weapons at hand, declaring someone persona non grata at her own events can mean they find themself excluded elsewhere as well . . . and without the chance to rub shoulders with influential people, their chances of advancement, whether through marriage or political appointment, go into a steep decline.

So is the social scene occasionally petty and vicious? Absolutely -- but that doesn't make it trivial. Stylish ladies or sociable gentlemen can leverage this world as an alternative route to power, all without ever lifting anything more dangerous than a fan or a pen.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/G7vEgj)

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Books read, March 2026

2026-04-07T02:32:47Z

This month I finally did something I should have done ages ago: I checked out every library ebook currently available from my wishlist there and put holds on as many others as they would let me hold at once, so I could browse -- the way I once would have done in a bookstore. The truth is that there are many books where I can tell within the first ten pages that they're unlikely to be for me, and by taking some time to give a quick look to a bunch of things, I was able to clear a good portion of that bunch off my list.

. . . meaning that instead of my TBR being seventeen miles long, it is now a mere sixteen miles long. But that's progress! And it in no way interfered with me being able to finish a goodly number of books last month.

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, Django Wexler. This was selected by a book club I intermittently participate in, and I was startled by how quickly it drew me in. (This definitely contributed to the decision to ebook-browse: one of those periodic salutary reminders that there are plenty of books out there I don't have to "give a chance," because they click right out of the gate.)

The premise here is straightforward isekai: Davi, the protagonist, is someone from our world dropped into a fantasy realm, with no idea of how she got there or why she keeps resetting to the moment of her arrival every time she dies. She's supposedly the prophecied hero who will save the human kingdom from an army of monstrous wilders led by a Dark Lord, but after failing at that several hundred times, she decides to sort of take a vacation by joining the winning side. Why not be the Dark Lord for once?

I'm normally a poor audience for too much of a modern, pop-culture tone in fantasy, but here it worked for me. If you try this one and find the opening too bleak, consider sticking it out for another chapter or two; I think Wexler is setting you up for why Davi is so burned out that she takes her subsequent path, and/or front-loading the dark stuff so that anybody inclined to nope out at that won't get blindsided by anything later on. Much of what follows isn't surprising -- for starters, the inhuman wilders turn out to be just as much of a mixed bag as humans are -- but I found it highly engaging.

What Stalks the Deep, T. Kingfisher. Third of the Sworn Soldier novellas, which I've been greatly enjoying. I agree with Sonya Taaffe's comment on her own blog about wanting more from the central weirdness here; it feels like Kingfisher spends too long setting up the creepy atmosphere of the abandoned mine and not enough time on what the characters find there. Possibly this one should have been a short novel instead of a novella? You could start here if you wanted to, as the references to previous adventures aren't so load-bearing you can't pick them up from context; each installment is a different flavor of historical-dark-fantasy-tilting-toward-horror, leavened by Kingfisher's trademark dry narration ("I tried to back away from the floor. It went about as well as you'd expect").

The Owl Service, Alan Garner. A classic of children's fantasy I somehow managed to miss for four and a half decades. It is, as I had gathered, highly atmospheric in its restaging of the Blodeuwedd story in twentieth-century Wales, with characters being swept up in re-enacting mythic roles they never signed up for. "She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls." I greatly enjoyed everything except for the feeling that my copy somehow left out the final chapter, the one that would give me more than half a paragraph of off-ramp from the climactic moment.

Can anybody tell me if the TV adaptation is worth tracking down?

Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me, Django Wexler. Normally I try to space out my reading of a series, because I've learned the hard way that too concentrated of a dose tends to make me enjoy the later installments less. But since the Dark Lord Davi series is a duology, and the first book had such madcap energy, I decided to go ahead.

I don't think it's the concentration of the dose that made the conclusion somewhat disappointing. There are a number of enjoyable moments, but on the larger-scale level, I feel like the narrative ball got fumbled. Wexler set himself up with a significant central conflict -- the ongoing hatred and warfare between humans and wilders -- and then let it be handled far too easily, in a way I can't simply chalk up to the humorous tone of these novels; doing that cheapens both the story conflict and its real-world parallels. I was also underwhelmed by the eventual explanation of why Davi is in this fantasy world, why she's looping, and what the villain is up to. So, good start in the first book, but a swing and a miss in the second.

Where the Dark Stands Still, A.B. Poranek. Slavic-inspired and very folkloric fantasy about a young woman who goes into a haunted forest to pick a magical flower that blooms only once a year, all to get rid of her own magic -- only to instead wind up serving the master of that forest and uncovering the history of what's been going on there all this time. The mythic elements here were occasionally undermined just a touch by the story swerving toward conventional YA beats, but those never lasted for too long. This appears to be a standalone, though it ends with the kind of stinger that miiiiiight be setup for a future book? I sort of hope not, as it works well in its current form. And I enjoyed it enough that I promptly put another of Poranek's novels on my wishlist -- this being, of course, the curse of finding a book you like.

Paladin’s Grace, T. Kingfisher. This is a series I keep hearing mentioned in various corners of the internet, so I decided to finally try it out.

Somehow, in seeing all those references, I had missed the fact that this is straight-up fantasy romance: not a fantasy novel with a romance subplot, but a fantasy novel where the romance is the plot. Which, as I have mentioned before, winds up being less romantic to me than the alternative. I did enjoy this -- especially the worldbuilding around the Saint of Steel's paladins, the Temple of the White Rat, and so forth -- but I wanted that to be the focus of the story, not the "oh, this person couldn't possibly be interested in me" dance of the main characters' relationship. This particularly grated when it came to the serial killer plot, which landed in the worst possible middle zone of being resolved too conveniently while also not being fully resolved because (presumably) it will continue into the books centered on the love lives of the other paladins. (Also, I don't particularly like serial killer plots in the first place.) So the ending wound up being more frustrating to me than satisfying, even as I enjoyed individual elements of it.

Well, now I know. My wishlist can shrink a little instead of growing again.

Shanghai Immortal, A.Y. Chao. It's apparently my month for enjoying types of thing I normally bounce off, because this novel -- set in Jazz Age Shanghai and its underworldly (in the magical sense) counterpart -- has a protagonist who routinely exhibits a total lack of self-control, and I'm a bad audience for characters so angry at the world around them they just can't hold back. But the setting was vivid enough, and Jing's reasons for lashing out clear enough, that I happily stayed on the roller-coaster. The ending dragged out a little too much for me, with too many characters suddenly appearing to stick their oars in, but that was more a matter of craft than concept. Turns out there's a sequel forthcoming, which sends the characters to Paris; despite my reflexive "bleh" reaction these days to the word "vampire," I will check it out!

Botanical Curses and Poisons: The Shadow-Lives of Plants, Fen Inkwright. This is a lovely hardcover book with copious black and white line illustrations, organized like an encyclopedia, alphabetically. Inkwright is interested in not just poisonous plants but anything with a dark reputation, whether that's from association with witches or death, a starring role in a tragic legend, or anything else. My main caveat here is that I'd check any factual information you want to get from it, as the cited sources are often rather old ones, and I caught at least one outright error. (The Japanese word for wisteria does not mean "immortality." It's a homophone for the name of Mt. Fuji, and one of the proposed etymologies for Fuji is "immortality": not the same thing.) If you just want it for general inspiration, though, it's good for that, and very pretty!

The Alchemy of Stars II: Award Winners Showcase 2005-2018, ed. Sandra J. Lindow. Having learned this exists, of course I had to get it! I was pleased to see it includes the Dwarf Star winners, after the SFPA added a separate award for poems 10 lines and shorter. Like the first volume, it's an interesting longitudinal section of what's been going on in speculative poetry over the decades.

Little Thieves, Margaret Owen, narr. Saskia Maarleveld. As I've mentioned before, I've kind of gone off YA, because it's often out to do something other than what I really want from a novel these days. I gave this one a shot anyway because the premise sounded like it was going to land right on top of the Rook & Rose gear in my mind, and I was not wrong. What I didn't expect was that it was also going to bring a delightful folkloric strand to the party, and the kind of textured worldbuilding I so rarely get from YA. Combine that with a lively prose style whose occasional modernisms bothered me much less than usual, and, well, as soon as I finished the audiobook I went and ordered it in paper, along with the sequel. If "loose retelling of 'The Goose Girl' meets politics and a con artist/thief in a flavorful Germanic world" sounds like it's up your alley, absolutely try this one out.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats, Ursula K. Le Guin. A little collection of her various works (poems, prose, drawings) about cats, mostly her own. I'd encountered a couple of the poems previously and decided to get the book. It's cute, but ultimately I found I'd already read the best bits of it.

This is as good a place as any to mention that I read a lot of poetry this month. In addition to this and the collection above, I was participating in a poetry challenge for all of March wherein I had to read and comment on other participants' work, and I'm on the Rhysling jury for the long poem category. Which leads us to . . .

The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach. Recommended by a fellow poet during the challenge I just mentioned. When the book showed up, I realized I'd read another from this series -- Mark Doty's The Art of Description -- which I did not find terribly useful. But this is the kind of nonfiction series where one not liking one book has absolutely no bearing on whether you'll like another by a different author, so.

Did I like this one? Kind of. I have a long-standing puzzlement with the craft of deciding where to break a line in free verse, and the idea here was to unpuzzle myself a bit. Longenbach does make a useful-to-me distinction between the end-stopped line, the parsing line, and the annotating line, and he gives a few examples about how to switch between those for effect. However, he also has a tendency to quote a bit of poetry and then describe how the lineation creates thus-and-such effect that . . . I just don't get from the quotation? Poetry is subjective; news at eleven, I guess. I learned some useful things here, which is all I could really hope for.

The Servant’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Second of the Dame Frevisse mysteries about a fifteenth-century Benedictine nun. This one had much less of my main quibble with the first book ("why have you not asked questions yet about Obviously Weird Thing?"), and meanwhile it had as much if not more of what I liked, which is interest in how people lived back then. Here that alternates between Frevisse's life as a nun -- complete with some back-and-forth about what the religious life gives her, and what it takes away -- and the life of the titular servant, with all the stresses of being a poor peasant worrying about how she'll pay the taxes and fees that will come due if her alcoholic husband dies. This is an ideal series for me to dip in and out of when I want something short and comfortable; the third is already on my shelf.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/7VMVVP)

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New Worlds: Let's Be Friends

2026-04-03T08:01:34Z

Friendship hardly seems like something that needs worldbuilding. It's a basic human behavior, right? We all make friends?

Sure -- but what friendship means does not stay the same.

Starting at: Who can you be friends with? Then and now, social divisions may complicate the answer to that. Can men and women be friends? If sex segregation means that women aren't supposed to go out into society or interact with men who aren't their relatives, then cross-gender friendship is pretty much restricted to a trusted cousin or two. (Even then, the relationship is likely to be spoken of in familial terms instead.) But a more egalitarian society may still be dubious of friendships between men and women, with many people assuming there will always, inevitably, be an undercurrent of sexual tension there: friendship as a consolation prize, or a barrier to head off escalation to something more.

What about friendship across class lines? That will often be awkward, even without formal hierarchies of status to get in the way; after all, if one person's struggling to make rent and the other could buy their entire apartment building, you have some inherent inequality there. This gets particularly thorny when one person employs the other: however well they get along and enjoy each other's company, their personal and their business relationships may wind up pulling in opposite directions, to the detriment of both bonds. In that light, it's not surprising that many past societies would have said straight-out that such connections cannot be true friendship. That can only exist between equals.

Class also shares a quality with racial boundaries, which is that both of them are deeply interwoven with culture. People from different groups may have any number of cultural differences, creating significant contrasts in how they spend their free time, what they eat, and even how they converse. These things don't prevent friendship -- we have far too many real-world examples proving otherwise -- but they can make it more difficult, with opportunities arising for misunderstanding or conflict.

But what does it mean to be friends, anyway? So far we've been glossing over that as if it can be taken for granted . . . but one look at an elementary school (where kids are very much learning the social ropes) shows that's not the case.

The answer here isn't just cultural but personal, too. One individual may refer to anybody they know in a positive, non-business capacity as their friend; to their neighbor, most of those people are "acquaintances" or "people they know," with the term "friend" reserved for those who enjoy a deeper connection. Digital relationships particularly complicate this, with the rhetoric of "friending" someone on a social media network implying more connection than actually exists. And how many friends can you have? Most people don't put a real cap on that, but they may feel you can have only one best friend at a time, and that to throw the superlative around more broadly cheapens its meaning.

Part of what muddies the waters here is that we rarely have formal markers for friendship, the way we have them for marriage. Friendship bracelets (which are said to have historical origins in Central America) started being shared in the '70s or '80s; however, they're not universally used, and people can wear that style of bracelet without it signifying anything in particular. Children may declare "you're my friend now" or ask "are we friends?", but adults -- at least in the societies I know -- are more likely to leave it implicit, with all the social pitfalls that entails.

Because part of friendship is being able to share certain intimacies with the other person. That might mean dumping your troubles on them, knowing (or at least having good reason to hope) you'll receive a sympathetic hearing; it might mean asking them to do things for you, without needing to negotiate some kind of explicit compensation or trade. If you try either of those things with someone you assume is a good enough friend for it, only to find they don't see the two of you as being that close . . . oof. It can get very awkward, very fast.

And "intimacy" may go a lot farther than that. In much of the past, and in many parts of the world today, it's entirely normal for friends to show a degree of physical affection that my fellow Americans generally reserve for significant others: hugging is okay, at least for some people in some circumstances, but holding hands as you walk down the street? Kissing, on the cheek or on the lips? Taking a bath together, or sharing a bed? Those things look romantic to us, not platonic.

The same goes for emotional intimacy, or rather, how it's expressed. If you read the letters of same-sex English friends from the nineteenth century, they regularly speak of each other in terms so passionate, you could easily mistake them for lovers. And in some cases, we have reason to surmise that's one hundred percent true; deep friendships could indeed be a cover for a type of relationship not sanctioned by society at the time. But that cover worked because friends did write to each other in such terms, without anybody assuming that "I long to kiss your lips again" carried sexual implications.

Which makes for interesting challenges when it comes to fiction. If you write such behavior into your invented society, then it's likely that a high percentage of your readers are going to interpret that as shippy. In some ways that's fine -- a certain type of reader will ship all kinds of pairings you never intended -- but in other cases, that may make your audience think you're queer-baiting them, suggesting something and then not delivering. Even if they don't feel cheated, the weight of association is going to shift how they read the characters' behavior, adding sexual overtones where none were supposed to be.

Finally, there's the question of how friendship ends. Again, children tend to make it more explicit: "I'm not going to be your friend anymore!" Social media gives us the passive-aggressive option of unfollowing somebody, which they may or may not even notice happening. If you have some of their belongings, or they have a key to your place, a sufficiently bad rift may entail a dramatic scene of shoving somebody's stuff back at them or revoking their access. But mostly we just drift away, ending the relationship as ambiguously as we began it. . . with every bit as much room for uncertainty and misinterpretation.

Seen in that light, there's frankly a lot to be said for worldbuilding more overt structures around the beginning, ending, and depth of friendship between your characters. Or maybe not: maybe crossed wires and hurt feelings are exactly what your story needs!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/QcgTOl)

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Live now: Lady Trent's Field Journal!

2026-04-02T22:37:39Z

The Kickstarter is up and running for Lady Trent’s Field Journal: A Dragon Coloring Book! . . . and it funded in three hours flat, heeeeeeee.

Granted, the goal this time around is literally an order of magnitude smaller than it was for the pattern deck, so I had every expectation that it wouldn't take all that long. But three hours? It literally happened while I was asleep (since I followed the same pattern as last time, i.e. pull the trigger and then immediately go to bed -- with my phone in another room, so I wouldn't be tempted to check on progress in the middle of the night). As of me posting this, we're almost at double the goal, which is excellent! We've already achieved one stretch goal, which is me hand-lettering the captions that will label the art; the second, which unlocks at $5000, is to upgrade the paper stock for the coloring books. There are more beyond that, too!

I'm really delighted to be doing this. People genuinely have been asking for years if I would ever write some of Isabella's scientific work, and while I couldn't quite make it go to do an entire article or book's worth of that, this coloring book gives me the chance to drop in snippets of that, while also exploring some fun corners of zoology. So check it out, and let's see how many stretch goals we can unlock!

(By the way, I consider this part of my twentieth anniversary celebration. It just seemed . . . inadvisable . . . to launch it on the actual anniversary, lest people think the Kickstarter is a joke!)

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/CSz8n2)

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My favorite April Fool's Day Joke . . .

2026-04-01T18:32:48Z

. . . is that twenty years ago today, my first novel was published.

Psych! My entire career since then has been a trick! The Doppelganger duology, the Onyx Court, the Wilders series, the Memoirs of Lady Trent and their sequel, my Legend of the Five Rings tie-ins, Driftwood, The Waking of Angantyr, the Rook and Rose trilogy as M.A. Carrick, the short stories and novelettes and novellas, the game writing, the poetry, the Hugo rocket on the shelf behind me as I type this: all of it has been my April Fool's joke upon you! Hahahahahah, you all have been fooled into thinking I can write!

And the best part of the joke is, I'm not gonna give it up. I have stuck it out in this bonkers industry for twenty years, and I fully intend to stick it out for another twenty at least. I will keep up the gag with more novels, more short fiction, more poetry. My commitment to the bit is so strong that today marks the publication of THREE new works: the rai "In the salt-drowned lands" and the sonnet "Gorgoneia" in Vol.031 of The Rialto Books Review, and the short story "All Under Heaven" in issue #2 of Adventitious. That latter, which is free to read online, demonstrates how far I'll go for this joke: fully fifteen years ago, in the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake, a (fortunately very patient) friend made won my offering in the charity auction and asked me to write a short story about Oda Nobunaga's sack of the Enryakuji monastery. It took me eleven damn years to write the story and then a little longer to sell it, but now -- once again on April Fool's Day; see how well-crafted the joke is? -- it is finally out, the latest addition to a gag two decades long and counting.

I even woke up to a poetry acceptance this morning. My joke is so good, other people are telling it back to me today!

Thank you all for being such a good set of marks for so long. I could not sustain this joke without you, and you are the ones who make it all worthwhile.

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New Worlds: Art Conservation

2026-03-27T08:06:26Z

Ars longa, vita brevis -- but even art doesn't last forever. At least, not without a lot of help.

The ephemerality of art does, of course, depend on what you're doing. Performing arts are fleeting by nature: there's notation or (nowadays) recording, but when we talk about preserving something like music or dance, we tend to mean the art form as a whole, making sure there continue to be practitioners and audiences. In this sense it's much like a craft, where you need an ongoing series of teachers and students to inherit their wisdom -- which includes passing on the specific details of a song or a dance, an oral story or an epic poem, if you don't have a way of committing those to a more permanent medium. If that chain of transmission gets broken, then skills or entire works of art may be lost.

Physical art is more fixed, but that doesn't mean it's lasting. I've talked before about how much literature was destroyed after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire cut down on the availability of papyrus: that stuff isn't durable, and so anything written on it has to be copied and recopied, over and over again, as the original version decays. Many kinds of wood-pulp paper have a similar problem with acid; unless it's specially treated (acid-free paper), it succumbs to what's poetically known as "slow fire," gradually turning the paper more and more brittle until the slightest touch causes it to disintegrate. Modern science has ways to stabilize and de-acidify the paper, but for these kinds of artworks, "preservation" usually consists of continually making new copies, so that the content survives even if the container does not.

Some things you might think don't need conservation. Fired clay has survived for thousands of years; surely it's perfectly fine, right? Not necessarily. Depending on how the clay was treated, it may still contain salts that can expand and crack the material, even to the point of it disintegrating into useless fragments. Salt and other chemicals can also attack stone, accumulating either through rain (which is rarely entirely pure), through wind, or through dampness rising from the ground. Heat and cold also create stress on the stone which can lead to cracks: microscopic ones at first, but as the strain continues, and especially if those cracks are infiltrated by substances that expand and contract at different rates, entire pieces can break off. This is why so many ancient statues are missing noses, hands, and other protruding bits.

Even if it's less dramatic than that, weathering takes a gradual toll. Erosion from wind and water scrapes away infinitesimal layers of detail from the surface, year after year. Iron obviously rusts, but nearly any metal can corrode in one fashion or another -- sometimes damaging not only itself, but everything around it. Wooden elements not only rot but warp, placing stress on anything they connect to. Pigments fade and discolor, perhaps from the mere touch of light; textiles combine the vulnerabilities of those pigments with the brittleness and decay of organic material. Insects may eat away at artworks or lay their eggs within them; moss and lichen, while picturesque in their own way, hasten the breakdown of whatever they've latched onto. The list of potential sources of damage is nearly endless.

The cruelest twist is that sometimes we ourselves are the cause of the very problems we're trying to address. Our efforts to preserve great works of art go back for centuries, but our knowledge of how to do that well is much more recent. Past conservators have worked diligently to clean dirt and overgrowth off statues or paintings . . . not realizing that the cleansers they're using are causing other kinds of damage, especially once the long term comes into play. Maybe it looks fine in the moment, but it's actually dried out the paint so that later on it begins to crack and flake away from the canvas or panels beneath.

Our efforts to halt or reverse damage can likewise become part of the problem. Adding metal brackets to stabilize some work of stone may seem like a good idea, but their corrosion or warping can destroy what they were meant to protect. (This likely contributed to the collapse of Coventry Cathedral during the Blitz, as the fire heated the iron supports added by the Victorians.) And have you ever wondered why so many paintings by the Old Masters look dark and yellow? That's because at some point, some well-meaning person gave them a coat of varnish to protect the paint beneath -- and then, in the decades or centuries since then, the varnish has aged and collected dust, distorting the colors of the painting and obscuring finer details. You can see this in a video by Philip Mould that recently made the rounds of the internet, showing him cleaning away a thick layer of discolored varnish to reveal a startlingly vibrant portrait beneath.

And finally, conservation sometimes includes touching up the original -- but where the line is between "touching up" and "adding your own ideas" may be in the eye of the beholder. Quite a few classical sculptures you might see in Italy nowadays were actually found as fragments, with Renaissance artists hired to "restore" the missing portions according to their own vision -- look into the famous grouping Laocoön and His Sons to see the replacement right arm Laocoön was given, versus the one found later that seems to have been the original. A portrait of Isabella de' Medici in the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum of Art was so thoroughly overpainted that the curator actually thought it was a modern fake; only upon X-ray examination did she find the original was holding an urn and had a completely different face. And, most egregiously, the "restorers" Sir Arthur Evans hired for the frescos in the Minoan palace of Knossos exercised so much of their own creativity around the surviving fragments that they transformed what we now know was a depiction of a monkey into a young boy.

The key goals nowadays are prevention, stability, reversibility, and honesty. Prevention means producing art on durable materials like acid-free paper, keeping fragile materials in climate-controlled rooms, bundling up outdoor sculptures in wintertime to protect them from the cold, and otherwise trying to forestall problems from getting a foothold in the first place. Stability means leveraging our improved knowledge of chemistry to ensure that the materials we use to repair or protect works of art are less likely to cause damage later on. Reversibility means doing our best to guarantee that anything we add can be removed later on without harm: it's fine to put protective varnish on a painting or a sculpture, so long as we can also wipe it away. And honesty means that, if we fill in the gaps on some fragmentary relic, we let the seams show, instead of trying to pass off our own additions as the genuine article.

Do we succeed at adhering to these goals all the time, in all circumstances? Of course not. And even when we try, we may miss the mark, such that later generations curse us for well-meaning interventions that accidentally made things worse. But we do the best we can with the knowledge and tools we have, which is all that anyone can promise.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/kvMTkk)

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New Worlds: The Questionable Art of Forgery

2026-03-20T08:08:31Z

Forgery: where art and crime intersect.

Not all kinds of forgery are art, of course. When my fourteen-year-old self forged my father's signature on my practice records to assure my band director that yes, of course I practiced at home as much as I was supposed to, there was no art involved there. (Rather the opposite, in fact.) I suppose you could argue that mimicking someone's handwriting is calligraphic forgery, but that feels to me like it's stretching the point. Counterfeiting we've already talked about separately, in the first year of this Patreon; the manufacture of fake IDs or other legal documents, or of something like knockoff Gucci purses, are also not the focus of this essay.

No, here we're concerned with the creation of fake objects of art, whether works attributed to a specific artist, or anonymous artifacts of a particular place and time. And this is a topic I find fascinatingly squirrelly.

The techniques necessary to pull this off have gotten increasingly sophisticated over time. Back in the day -- or even now, if you're selling to a credulous enough fool -- anything that passed muster to a casual glance might suffice. Get yourself a fresh sheet of parchment, papyrus, or paper, write or draw on it, apply some physical and chemical stresses to make it look old, and you're good to go. Fire a pot or clay figure, or carve something out of stone, then batter it around for that authentic chipped look. Maybe even stamp out an ancient coin or two, if it's a piece rare enough to be worth substantially more than its metal content.

These days, it's not nearly that simple. We have carbon dating, spectroscopic analysis, and other high-tech methods of determining whether some detail is out of place. Which doesn't mean forgeries have gone away; it just means that talented forger needs to know a lot more than just what their proposed artifact should look like. There's a thriving market in blank fragments of ancient papyrus -- so the substrate will pass an age check even if what's written on it is new -- and who knows what texts have been scraped off bits of parchment, what paintings have been covered or rubbed away, so something more lucrative can be put in their place. The best forgers need to know the chemistry of inks and paints, how to make the right tools, the techniques used back then, so that only the closest analysis by the most skilled experts can spot the fake.

Nor is it only about the object itself. These days, we also pay a lot of attention to provenance: the history of an object's ownership, which can help to prove that it wasn't made last week. (A very similar term, provenience, is used in archaeology to refer to where the object was found: relevant to sifting out illegally looted objects from those excavated under legitimate conditions.) Of course, if you want to pass off a fake as the real thing, you also have to forge a provenance -- hence the massive upswing after World War II in items that had been the property of an "anonymous Swiss collector," a fig leaf to cover Nazi theft and forgeries alike.

That's when you're just trying to make a Twelfth Dynasty Egyptian ushabti or a bronze ornament from Sanxingdui: a plausible example of a type, but nothing more specific than that. When you're trying to pass something off as a previously-unidentified Picasso or Rodin, then you can't hide behind the expected variations between different nameless historical artisans; you have to mimic not just the materials but the ideas, composition, and execution of that specific person -- well enough that it seems like it could have genuinely been their work.

And at that point, you very nearly have a Zen koan on your hands: if someone forges a Rembrandt so well it can't be told from the real thing, is there a meaningful difference? Is the art itself what's worthwhile, or the fact that it was made by a specific person?

The answer to that really depends on context. If I'm a layperson who likes Caravaggio's style of painting, and somebody else comes along who paints just like Caravaggio (without claiming those are his works), I might be delighted to acquire things of the exact type I like for a fraction of the cost. Yay for pretty art! By contrast, if a forger lies to me and I pay Caravaggio prices for something that doesn't suffer from the scarcity of the artist being dead for centuries, I'm probably going to be pissed. And if I'm an art historian trying to learn more about Caravaggio, that forger has actively poisoned the well of scholarship by introducing false data.

Some of our "forgery" problems now actual stem from situations more like that first example. You can buy a million and one plastic replicas of Michaelangelo's David in Florence, and nobody thinks of those as forgeries . . . but rewind a few centuries or millennia, and those replicas had to be hand-crafted out of marble or bronze or whatever suited the sculpture being copied. That wasn't forgery; it was just how art got replicated, and the best copyists were deploying a useful, legitimate skill. The same was true of paintings. Now, however, the interests of both scholarship and the aura of owning a verified-as-legitimate original mean we have to sort that historical wheat from the chaff.

Or take the workshop context in which many Renaissance artists operated. Apprentices were expected to mimic their master's style, and if the result was good enough, the master was free to sell those works under his (or, more rarely, her) own name. Again, nowadays we strive to separate those out from the authentic works of the master -- but that reflects a modern attitude where the individual genius is the most important thing, above whether it reflects their style or was made under their auspices.

Some forgeries are extremely famous. Han Van Meegeren had to out himself as a forger when he was accused of collaboration for selling a Vermeer to the Nazi Hermann Göring; to prove that he hadn't hocked a piece of cultural patrimony, he painted another one while court-appointed witnesses stood and watched. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has spent quite a bit of money trying to prove the disputed authenticity of a kouros (a specific style of statue) they bought for seven million dollars, but the best they've been able to achieve is a label identifying it as "Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery." The Boston Museum of Fine Arts similarly clings to the hope that their probably-fake "Minoan snake goddess" statuette might be the real thing.

One thing these forgeries have in common: the demand for the genuine article is high enough to make fakes worth the effort of their creation. Minoan snake goddesses got manufactured because Sir Arthur Evans' excavations at Knossos attracted a ton of publicity, and he was not particularly discriminating in buying the "discoveries" people brought to him. Few criminals bothered forging Indigenous art until collectors turned their attention toward those parts of the world, thereby creating demand. This can in turn come full circle: van Meegeren's post-trial fame made his paintings rise high enough in value that his own son wound up forging more of them.

Nobody knows for sure how many fakes are on display in museums, galleries, and private collections. Some estimates run very high, due to the way today's plutocrats treat the acquisition of art as an investment strategy and display of status, while others say that improved methods of detection and the emphasis on authenticating an object before somebody forks over millions for it have greatly reduced the incidence. We'll never really know for sure, because of the loss of face inherent in admitting you paid too much for a forgery -- including the cratering in value for other works that might become suspect by association. But if you want to tell a story of trickery and sordid doings, the art world is rife with possibility!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/aYnVC2)

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New Worlds: Miscellaneous Arts

2026-03-13T08:12:12Z

Throughout the art sections of this Patreon, I've been grouping them into broad categories: visual arts, performing arts, literary arts, and so forth. But what about the arts that are kinda of . . . none of the above?

It's a trick question, honestly, because just about everything can be classed under one of those categories. But I do want to take a moment to talk about a variety of arts that, while classifiable as painting or sculpture or what have you, don't normally get included under those headers, because of how they're used or what materials they involve. It's not an exhaustive list, but it will serve as a reminder that our species is as much Homo creatrix as it is Homo sapiens: if we can use it for art, we probably have.

Let's look at the "painting" side of things -- I don't know if there's a good technical term that covers painting, drawing, and anything else involving the creation of images or designs on a two-dimensional surface. Some variations here are about technique, as in the case of frescoes: there you execute your work upon wet plaster, making the pigment far more durable. And those are usually murals, though not always, which differentiates them from both the more portable sort of art and the scale on which the average painter operates; a mural doesn't have to be enormous, but it certainly lends itself to monumental work, far beyond what a canvas could reasonably support.

The question of what is being painted leads us toward some other interesting corners. Illumination, for example, is the art of decorating the pages of books, whether by fancifying the text itself (illuminated capital letters and the like) or by including images alongside. Other people have made art out of painting eggshells -- or carving them, if the shell is thick enough; ostrich eggs are good for this, and one can imagine dragon eggs being the same way -- or the insides of glass balls. Those also frequently involve working at a very tiny scale, and it's worth noting that miniature painting is a whole field of its own, making a virtuoso display out of executing your work at a level where someone might need a magnifying glass to fully appreciate it.

(Er, "miniature painting" in the sense of "very small," not "minis for Dungeons & Dragons or a similar game." Though that's its own popular art form, too!)

In other cases, it's the medium of the decoration itself that becomes unusual. I've mentioned mosaics before, tessellating colored stones, ceramic, or glass to make an image, but you can grind even smaller than that with sandpainting. This doesn't always involve actual sand -- sometimes it's crushed pigments instead -- and some versions are more like carving in that they involve drawing in a sandy surface, but most specifically this involves pouring out sand or powder to create your designs. As you can imagine, this tends to be an ephemeral art . . . but that's often the point, especially when it's used in a ritual, religious context.

Some of these arts start rising above the two-dimensional surface in interesting ways. Beading can, when done thickly enough, become almost sculptural; it's also massively labor-intensive, which is why it became popular for sartorial displays of wealth when industrialization made the production and dying of fabric much cheaper. Quillwork is a form of fabric decoration unique to Indigenous North America, using dyed and undyed porcupine quills to create designs; among the Cheyenne, joining the elite Quilling Society that crafted such things was itself a form of status. This is distinct, however, from quilling: a different art with a similar name that curls tiny slips of paper into coils, then glues them to a backing to create images from the coils.

Paper leads us onward toward more overtly sculptural uses of that medium. What is origami, after all, but a specific kind of paper-based sculpture? That one in its strict incarnation prohibits cutting or gluing the paper to create its forms, which puts it at the polar opposite end of the spectrum from papercutting: an art some of us may have tried in simple form as kids, but skilled practitioners can achieve astonishingly complex and beautiful pictures. One particular version of this, the silhouette, is traditionally done with black paper and used especially for portraiture.

Basketry maybe should have gone into the textiles essay, both because many of its techniques are close kin to weaving and sewing, and because it very much belongs among what I termed the "functional arts" -- those which serve a utilitarian purpose while also including an aesthetic dimension. Anything pliable can potentially be used for basketry: most often plant materials like straw, willow, grass, and vines, but also animal hides or modern materials like strips of plastic. The resulting vessels are vitally important as storage containers and can even be made waterproof, especially if they're coated in clay or bitumen, but by working patterns into their design, basket-makers can also make them beautiful.

Or perhaps you go in an entirely non-utilitarian direction. Flower arranging is about taking nature's beauty -- perhaps from a garden -- and displaying it in an artificial way, knowing full well that soon the flowers will wilt. But where most of us stop at just sticking a few blooms in a vase, some artists go on to create full-blown sculptures of flowers and greenery, sometimes with complex internal structures that continue supplying water to the blooms to extend their life. There was even a competitive TV show about this, The Big Flower Fight!

I could keep going, of course. Baking is a functional art insofar as it makes something for you to eat, but it definitely has its elaborate end where the artistic value of the decoration or shaping is as much the point as the taste of the final product -- if it's edible at all, which it may not be! Amaury Guichon has made an entire TikTok phenomenon out of showcasing his monumental chocolate sculptures. I'm sure someone out there has devoted their life to the art of meat sculpture, but I'm not going to go looking for evidence of that. The point is made: if we can turn it into art, we probably will.

Which is honestly kind of amazing. Art is, after all, about doing more than the minimum required for our survival. It is a mark of our success as a species, that we have freed enough of our time from the work of acquiring food and shelter that art is possible. And it says something about our inner state, that when we have a spare moment available, we often want to spend it making something beautiful -- out of whatever comes to hand.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/ANFkiL)

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Introducing . . . Lady Trent's Field Journal!

2026-03-11T18:44:12Z

I was busy enough yesterday that this went out on Bluesky, but not yet here on my own site!

I am teaming up again with Avery Liell-Kok (one of the artists from the pattern deck) to make Lady Trent's Field Journal: A Dragon Coloring Book. Ten images of dragons in the wild, accompanied by excerpts from Lady Trent's scholarly writings -- my way of answering a question I've gotten with surprising frequency, which is "Will you ever publish any of her scientific work?" I have yet to come up with any complete ideas in that regard that would be interesting enough to pass as a short story, but as pairings for her drawings from the field? Sure!

The dragons featured here are a deliberate mix of old favorites you've seen before, dragons which got mentioned but never depicted, and new beasts created entirely for this project. The Kickstarter campaign will offer the writings and images in three formats: a file pack you can print at home or color in digitally, a loose-leaf pack to facilitate sharing around or hanging on the wall, and a paperback book -- that last coming in both a regular and a Scholar's Edition, which will be signed and have an additional quick sketch from Avery. I'm also including add-ons for bookplates and signed paperbacks of the novels in the series!

Right now we're in the pre-launch phase. If you'd like to be notified when it goes live (or you just want to support the project in the eyes of the algorithm gods), just click the "notify me" button here. It won't be long!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/ww1BN4)

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New Worlds: Gardens and Parks

2026-03-06T09:04:49Z

I've been trying for some time now to get a landscaper not to ghost me, so we can redo the front and back yards of my house.

Am I trying to hire a contractor, or an artist?

Yes. Both. Year Nine's discussion of how we've reshaped the land focused entirely on utilitarian aspects: draining wetlands, filling in shorelines, flattening land for agriculture and roads. We entirely skipped over the aesthetic angle -- but that matters, too! The land and what grows atop it can become a medium for art.

A fairly elite art, though. At its core, landscaping for the purpose of a garden or a park is about setting aside ground that could have been productive and using it for pleasure instead. Not to say that there can't be some overlap; vegetable gardens can be attractive, and parks might play home to game animals that will later grace the dinner table. But there's a sort of conspicuous consumption in saying, not only do I have land, but I have enough of it to devote some to aesthetic enjoyment over survival.

We don't know what the earliest gardens were like, but we know they've been with us probably about as long as stratified society has been, if not longer. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (named for their tiered structure) were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and those -- if they ever existed -- were a continuation of a well-documented Assyrian tradition of royal gardens, which included hydraulic engineering to supply them with water. So this was not a new art.

But when did it become an art? I'm not entirely sure. The boundary is fuzzy, of course; gardens can exist without being included in the discourse around Proper Art. (As we saw in Year Eight, with the shift toward recognizing textiles as a possible form of fine art.) Europe didn't really elevate gardens to that stature until the sixteenth century, as part of the Renaissance return to classical ideals. The earliest Chinese book I've been able to find on the aesthetics of gardening, as opposed to botanical studies of plants, is from the seventeenth century, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were earlier works. I think that when you start getting specific aesthetic movements and individual designers famous for their work, you're in the realm of Art instead of a functional thing that can also be pretty; I just don't know when that began.

There definitely are aesthetic movements, though! In particular, gardens-as-art swing between the poles of "nature in her most idealized form" and "intentionally artificial." Many Japanese gardens exemplify the former, while European gardens laid out in complex geometric beds demonstrate the latter. It's not entirely a regional differentiation, though; Japanese dry ("Zen") gardens, with their carefully raked seas of gravel, are obviously not trying to look natural, and Europeans have enjoyed a good meadow-style garden, too.

This is partly a question of how you're supposed to interact with these spaces. Some -- including many of those Japanese examples, dry or otherwise -- are meant to be viewed from the outside, e.g. while sitting on a veranda or looking down on it from an upstairs window. Others are meant to be walked through, so they're designed with an eye toward what new images will greet you as you follow a path or come round a corner. Meanwhile, hedge mazes may purposefully try to confuse you, which means they benefit from walls of greenery as close to identical as you can get them -- until you arrive at the center or some other node, where the intentional monotony breaks.

In pursuit of these effects, a garden can incorporate other forms of art and technology. Hydraulics may play a role not only in irrigating the garden, but in fueling fountains, waterfalls, artificial streams, and the like, which in turn may host fish, turtles, and other inhabitants. Architecture provides bridges over wet or dry courses and structures like walls, gazebos, arches, arbors, bowers, pergolas, and trellises, often supporting climbing plants. Statuary very commonly appears in pleasing spots; paintings are less common, since the weather will damage them faster, but mosaics work very well.

But the centerpiece is usually the plants themselves. As with zoos (Year Four) and the "cabinet of curiosities"-style museums (Year Nine), one purpose of a garden may be to show off plants and trees from far-distant lands, delighting the eye and possibly the nose with unfamiliar wonders. The earliest greenhouses seem to have been built to grow vegetables out of season, but later ones saw great use for cultivating tropical plants far outside their usual climes -- especially once we figured out how to heat them reliably, circa the seventeenth century. In other cases, the appeal comes from carefully pruning the plants to a desired shape, whether that's arching gracefully over a path or full-on sculpture into the shapes of animals or mythological figures.

One particularly clever trick involves accounting for the changing conditions inherent to an art based in nature. Many gardens go dead and boring in the winter -- or in the summer, if you're in a climate where rain only comes in the winter -- but a skilled designer can create a "four seasons" garden that offers shifting sources of interest throughout the year. Similarly, they may use a combination of artificial lighting and night-blooming flowers to create a space whose experience is very different at night than during the day.

And gardens can even serve an intellectual purpose! Like a museum, its displays may be educational; you see this in botanical gardens and arboreta, with their signs identifying plants and perhaps telling you something about them. Many scholars over the centuries have also used gardens as the site of their experiments, studying their materials and tweaking how to best care for them. But this doesn't stop with plain science, either. We often refer to dry rock gardens as "Zen gardens" because of their role in encouraging meditative contemplation, and actually, it goes deeper than that: the design of such a garden is often steeped in symbolism, with rocks representing mountains in general or specific important peaks. I don't actually know, but I readily assume, that somebody in early modern Europe probably created a garden full of coded alchemical references. The design of the place can be as much a tool for the mind as it is a pleasure for the senses.

Which brings them back around to a functional purpose, I suppose. Gardens very much straddle the line between aesthetics and pragmatism!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/O7UpKN)

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Books read, January-February 2026

2026-03-04T19:32:51Z

Beastly: An Anthology of Shapeshifting Fairy Tales, ed. Jennifer Pullen. Sent to me for blurbing purposes. This is a cross-section of fourteen largely (though not exclusively) European tales themed around the "beast bride or bridegroom" motif, some of them very well known -- "Beauty and the Beast," of course -- and others more obscure. But Pullen casts a fairly wide net, such that transformations in general wind up here, e.g. with "The Little Mermaid" making an appearance. Each comes with some introductory context from Pullen as well as footnotes throughout, many of which are overtly more about her personal thoughts on the tales than academic analysis. On the whole, I'd say this is very approachable for a layperson.

A Thousand Li: The Fourth Fall, Tao Wong.
A Thousand Li: The Fourth Wall, Tao Wong. These two were actually separated by the following title, but I might as well talk about them together. Normally I make a point of spacing out my reading of a series -- especially a long series -- because I've realized that otherwise I tend to overdose and stop enjoying them quite so much. Since these are the final two books, however, I said "screw it" and read them very nearly back to back.

(. . . mostly the final two books. They conclude their series, but Wong has begun a sequel series. Which, ironically, is even more on point for the genre research impulse that led me to pick up A Thousand Li, so I guess I'll be reading those as well?)

I do appreciate how Wong maneuvers in the back half of this series to change up exactly what kind of scenario and challenges his protagonist is facing. In The Fourth Fall, it's international diplomacy: Wu Ying has to accompany a delegation to first secure an alliance and then attempt to negotiate an end to the ongoing war with a rival land. Since Wu Ying is not a great diplomat, this is definitely a challenge, but also he's not at the forefront of it, so he feels a bit peripheral at points. On the other hand, when things (inevitably) blow up into a climactic battle, there's a delightful "when life hands you lemons, make lemonade bombs to throw at your enemy" bit of tactics, which sets the stage for the final book.

As for the final book . . . I very much liked the beginning of it, which addressed the fallout from before (including with some good pov from the secondary characters), and the ending of it, which leaned into the philosophical elements I've always found to be one of the stronger parts of this series. The middle, however, felt a bit like it was there to keep the beginning and the ending from bumping into one another. It wasn't bad, but it felt less like vital connective tissue and more like "let's put some obstacles in the way of the conclusion."

I should note, btw, that apparently this series will be getting a trad-pub re-release. I'll be interested to take a look at the first book, because I'm curious whether it's just getting repackaged, or whether it will have gotten a thorough editing scrub first. I stuck it out for all twelve books first because it was a useful tour of the cultivation genre, then because it manages some genuinely good moments of genre philosophy along the way, but . . . well, the writing has always fallen victim to the self-pub trap of reading like it was pounded out very fast with essentially no time for revision. (I think it was the eleventh book that used the word "stymie" over and over again, sometimes where that was not actually what the word means, and in at least one place, misspelled.) I'm hoping the trad pub version will polish that up, and maybe also address the less-than-stellar handling of female characters early on -- which, I'm glad to say, improved as the series went along.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, Nghi Vo. Novellas are interesting because sometimes they read like short novels, and sometimes they read like long short stories. This is the latter type, with the plot essentially consisting of "Chih and companions get cornered by talking tigers who want to eat them; Chih stalls for time by telling a story, during which the tigers argue with how they're telling it." The tension with the tigers was excellently done, as was all the arguing, but the result did feel a little slight for what I was expecting from a novella.

Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore, Adrienne Mayor. This is specifically a book about geomythology, a term for which -- as with Pullen above -- Mayor takes a broad definition. Sometimes it's "here's a story about these offshore rocks that clearly sounds like a mythologized record of the tsunami that likely put them there," and sometimes it's "here's a famous tree; now we'll talk about the lore surrounding that type of tree." Interesting fodder if you're the kind of person who finds such tidbits suggestive of stories!

Ausias March: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Arthur Terry. Read because March is possibly the most famous Valencian poet ever, so this was research for the Sea Beyond. I have no problem with Terry choosing to translate March's work as prose, because I understand the very great challenges inherent in trying to balance the demands of meaning and style while also making it work as poetry. However, Terry has a comment toward the end of his introduction about how he makes no pretense regarding the aesthetic merit of his translations, and boy howdy is there none. This is the kind of "just the facts, ma'am" translation that's useful for being able to look at the original text on the facing page and see how they line up . . . but it made for stultifyingly boring reading, and in no way, shape, or form helped sell you on March being a great poet.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. Would you believe I never read this before now? We read Emma in high school, but that's it for me and Austen on the page. A friend linked to an interview with Colin Firth, though, which made me want to re-watch the A&E miniseries, and then for comparison I watched the more recent film adaptation, and after that I thought, hey, maybe I should read the book while those are fresh in my mind!

And, well, surprise surprise, it is very good. I know the A&E miniseries well enough that naturally I envisioned and heard all the characters as those versions, but that was in no way jarring, because it's such a faithful adaptation. It was delightful to see the bits that didn't make it onto the screen, though, like Elizabeth opining on the power of one good sonnet to kill off a love affair.

Star*Line 49.1, ed. John Reinhart. I am technically in this, insofar as there's an interview with me. Otherwise, quite a lot of SF/F poetry packed into a tidy little volume.

You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue, trans. Natasha Wimmer. This novel is bonkers. It's about Cortés in Tenochtitlan, and about how Moctezuma and the people around him responded to that, but it's got the kind of meta voice that feels free to wander omnisciently around and also to comment from a modern perspective, like when it explains the difference between Nahua and Colhua and Mexica and why some Europeans in the nineteenth century looked at that tangle and said "fuck it, we're just gonna call them all Aztecs." And then it goes trippy alternate history on top of all that.

Literally trippy, because a lot here hinges on the use of indigenous hallucinogens. I don't know this history well enough to tell if Enrigue is really playing up just how stoned Moctezuma in particular was, but here it's very much presented as part of the political turmoil in Tenochtitlan, with the huey tlahtoāni retreating into drugs rather than dealing with the problems around him. But don't worry, this book is here to show you the ugly underbelly of both sides of the conflict -- and also things that aren't the ugly underbelly; I very much appreciated how much time (in a relatively slender novel) is spent on exploring the agency and complicated dynamics of the various people involved, so you understand at least one interpretation of why Cortés was allowed to get far enough in to do what he did, and what different individuals thought they might gain from it.

If I have one objection, it's that Enrigue gives a strong impression that most of his key indigenous characters didn't really believe in their own religion, just went along with it because of tradition and social pressure. That's an angle I always side-eye, because it generally feels like modern mentalities failing to understand those of the past. But it's a small quibble for a book I very much enjoyed.

The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, ed. Roger Dutcher and Mike Allen. This anthology collected the short and long form winners of the Rhysling Award (the biggest SFF poetry award) up through 2004. What's interesting about that is how it lets you see the trends come and go: there's a stretch of time where a lot of the poetry was very science-y (sometimes more that than science fiction-y), or the bit in the early 2000s which I can best sum up as "my kind of thing." I did skip a few that just got too experimental and weird for me to get anything out of them, but otherwise, good cross-section.

Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun, Jane Harrington, ill. Khoa Le. This is about the French salon writers of the late seventeenth century, Madame d'Aulnoy and her ilk -- emphasis on "her ilk," because half the point of this book is to talk about the ones who aren't as famous. Harrington's general thesis here is that the fairy tales they wrote were their way of expressing the troubles they faced and/or imagining better worlds, e.g. where women could choose the husbands they wanted. Each chapter gives a short biography of one of the writers, including connecting her to the others who were perhaps relatives or friends, then retells one or more of their stories.

I did like getting to read tales less familiar than "The White Cat" (which also shows up in Pullen's book), but I wish Harrington had gone more for translation than retelling, or at least had tried to adhere to a more period tone. I feel like her "yay early feminism, so relatable" mission statement led her to modernize the language more than I would have preferred, and in the cases of the stories I don't already know, that leads me to question whether the plots have also been presented in a more "updated" fashion. And while she does have an extensive bibliography at the end, the way she talks about "rescuing" these writers from obscurity does give a self-aggrandizing whiff to the whole thing, as if Harrington is the first person to pay attention to this topic. Wound up feeling like a bit of a mixed bag.

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, Stephen Fry. Yes, that Stephen Fry, the actor. Didn't know he wrote poetry? That's because he writes it purely for his own enjoyment, not for publication. (He mentions toward the end of the book that, among other things, he knows his celebrity status would warp how those poems are received, and he'd rather just not deal with that.)

His comedic skills shine through here, as this is a highly readable introduction to formal poetry -- meaning not "poetry always about serious subjects," but "poetry that adheres to a particular form." The introduction is not shallow, though: when he leads you by the hand through meter, he doesn't stop at showing you the different feet and explaining how to count them. Instead he talks about things like the different ways you can futz around with iambic pentameter, where a trochaic substitution will sound okay vs. weird, and what effect it has if you put a pyrrhic substitution in the third foot vs. the fourth. (Though right after reading this, I came across a blog post that characterized what Fry considers a pyrrhic substitution very differently: same phenomenon in the end, but a good demonstration of how there's no One True Answer for a lot of this stuff.)

Be warned that this book is unabashedly opinionated. Fry says there are free verse poems he likes, but on the whole he has a very poor opinion of modern poetry being just about the only art where people are told "Don't worry about rules or technique! All that matters is that you ~*express yourself*~!" He thinks that acquiring a solid handle on meter and rhyme is equivalent to a visual artist learning the rules of perspective: they're vital skills even if you wind up breaking those rules later. When he gets to the section discussing particular forms, he's also unafraid to bag on the ones he doesn't think very highly of -- mostly modern syllable-counting forms like the tetractys or nonet, but also elaborate stunts like the sonnet redoublé, where you'd better be damn good at what you're doing for it to seem like anything more than a stupid flex.

The guidance, though, is very thorough and I think very accessible -- though admittedly I come at this as someone who's never had trouble figuring out how meter or rhyme work, so I'm not the best judge of that. He gives copious examples from literature, and also practice exercises for which he provides his own demonstrations: the exception to him not making his poetry public, but only a quasi-exception, because he says outright that these are pieces meant to practice the basic skills, with no expectation of them turning out good. And that is useful in its own way, because it helps chip away at the notion that poetry is some mystical, elevated thing, rather than an art whose basics you can drill without worrying about whether you've produced immortal verse.

Highly recommended for anybody who would like a solid entry point into writing poetry!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/VdjDrK)

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Two new poems!

2026-03-02T20:18:22Z

I am belated in posting about one of these -- but it turns out that's fine, because another one dropped just a couple of days later!

First up is "The Virtues of the Throne," a piece inspired by the Sanskrit text Siṃhāsana Dvātriṃśikā (rendered in the translation I have as Thirty-Two Tales of the Throne of Vikramaditya). It leans hard into the kind of rhythmic musicality you might expect from a song -- which is why it's appearing in 4LPH4NUM3R1C, a magazine that makes a point of offering both audio and text versions of its material! (Yes, this is the same place that published "The Great Undoing" a few months ago.)

And second, for a complete contrast, is the free verse piece "Core Sample" in DreamForge Anvil. This one is inspired by a piece of art created by Mark Garlick, and it's sorta science fantasy-ish.

Thanks to poetry generally being quicker to write than even short fiction, and therefore me having manymany opportunities to sub and sell it, there's more on the way. But that's it for now!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/wW3ARE)

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New Worlds: Civil Strife

2026-02-27T09:04:50Z

Uprisings. Revolts. Insurgencies. Rebellions. Civil wars.

What are the differences between all these things?

The gradations can be quite fine, in no small part because they're often as much a question of public relations as one of technical definitions. (Especially in a historical context, before political scientists started making technical definitions.) They're all forms of internecine strife, differentiated by how organized they are, how violent, how acknowledged by the official government, and so forth. And so, rather than trying to separate all the possible strands, I'm just going to talk about them in a lump here.

Genre fiction loves the idea of the Big Rebellion. A plucky band of idealists gather together, maybe fight a few battles, kill or capture the king, and put somebody new in charge: Mission Accomplished! A phrase George W. Bush famously used rather prematurely after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and I deploy it here quite with deliberate intent, because of course the situation is unlikely to be that simple. Regime changes rarely go that quickly and smoothly, and even if the guy who used to be in charge dies, is that really the end? His loyalists, instead of laying down arms, are liable to find someone else to rally around: a brother, a son, somebody claiming to be a son, etc. It took about thirty-one years for the fighting to end after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 deposed James II & VII from the thrones of England and Scotland, and Henry VII had to deal with multiple pretenders announcing themselves as various lost royal relatives after the Wars of the Roses.

But it's also somewhat rare for a rebellion to sweep in and put somebody totally new on the throne, at least in the kinds of societies we tend to write about. Changes of dynasty do happen, but where there's a strong expectation of titles being inherited within a bloodline, claimants often grasp for some fig leaf of lineage or marriage to a suitable spouse to cover their naked ambition. Winning legitimacy on charisma alone is not unheard of, but it's much less common. Most civil wars within a kingdom look more like the English Anarchy, with the previous king's daughter fighting his nephew for the crown. (She lost, but her son wound up inheriting anyway after her cousin died.)

There are other reasons for civil strife, though, and they tend to be much less explored in science fiction and fantasy.

In particular, a whole swath of this subject can be placed under the header of "listen to us, damn it!" The famous Magna Carta of England was the product of rebellion by a group of barons against King John -- but they weren't trying to replace him. Instead they wanted him to confirm the Charter of Liberties proclaimed by Henry I about a century before, which protected certain elite rights. (Magna Carta itself is not about the rights of the common man, either, though people in later centuries assumed for a while that it was.) If war is the continuation of policy with other means -- the actual phrasing used by Clausewitz, often somewhat misquoted -- then revolts can be a way of angling for leverage in a political dispute.

This is especially true of peasant revolts. It is extraordinarily rare for the common folk to rise up and effect a regime change all on their own; in fact, it is rare enough that I can't think of any ironclad examples. (If you know of one, I welcome it in the comments!) The American and French Revolutions were heavily led, at least in the first instance, by relatively privileged men; even the Haitian Revolution likely would not have succeeded if the rebels hadn't received support from outside. Peasants, slaves, and other such folk simply do not have the resources or knowledge necessary to stand unsupported against people who hold every advantage against them.

But most peasant revolts aren't aimed at installing a new king or swapping monarchy for some other system of government. They're attempts to redress specific grievances, like unfair taxation or judicial corruption, or to achieve improved rights, such as through the abolition of serfdom (one of the goals of Wat Tyler's Rebellion in 1381). And if we're being honest, goals like that are a lot more important to the average farmer in his field than who exactly is ruling the country! Kings come and go, but taxes remain.

The relative achievability of those goals doesn't mean they get achieved, though. Governments have a loooooong and inglorious history of viewing any such resistance as treason, and they put it down with extreme force. Nor is this solely a thing of the distant past: in more modern times, labor organization has been viewed in a very similar light, as a rebellious disobedience to the law, posing a great enough threat to the stability of the nation that it justifies violent or even lethal response.

Nonviolent resistance isn't unheard of in historical eras, but large-scale acts of it have become more common over the past century or so. I wonder -- this is entirely my own thought, not anything I've read, and it's not a subject I'm deeply familiar with -- if its success relies at least in part on mass communication. While nonviolent groups have existed before, as a tactic in effecting widespread social change it seems to be mostly new, and that makes sense when you think about the role played by optics. As I said above, governments tend to respond with force to those who disobey, and that excites a lot more sympathy and support for peaceful protesters when the news can be widely circulated. (Particularly if the event is captured on video.) Of course, routine interpersonal violence has also declined over time, so most disputes these days are less likely to break out into fights, let alone fatal ones.

Civil strife has absolutely not gone away, though, nor do I think it's likely to do so any time soon. Right now in my own country, we have widespread resistance to the authoritarian government of Donald Trump, ranging from peaceful protests in the streets to acts of low-grade sabotage against the secret police of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arresting and deporting anybody who looks too brown. It's not a revolution to throw him out ahead of schedule and replace him with somebody new, and it certainly can't be accomplished with one climactic fight and a quick denouement . . . but perhaps we could use more fictional examples of how this kind of struggle is fought.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/CYJRUS)

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New Worlds: The Multi-Purpose Castle

2026-02-13T09:04:34Z

Castles are a stereotypical feature of the fantasy genre, but for good reason: they're a ubiquitous feature of nearly every non-nomadic society well into the gunpowder era, until artillery finally got powerful enough that "build a better wall" stopped being a useful method of defense.

But castles, like walls, sometimes get simplified and misunderstood. So let's take a look at the many purposes they once served.

(Before we do, though, a note on terminology: strictly speaking, "castle" refers only a category of European fortified residence between the 9th and 16th centuries or thereabouts. I'm using the term far more generically, in a way that would probably make a military historian's teeth hurt. There's a whole spectrum of fortification, from single small buildings to entire cities, whose elements also vary according to time and place and purpose, and probably "fortress" would be a better blanket term for me to use here. But because "castle" is the common word in the genre, I'm going to continue referring to my topic that way. You can assume I mean a fortified building or complex thereof, but not an entire settlement -- though some of my points will apply to the latter, too.)

Most obviously, castles are defensive fortifications. What a wall does for the territory behind it, a castle does for everything within its bounds -- extending, in the more complex examples, to multiple layers of walls and gates that can provide fallback positions as necessary. This means that often (though not always; see below) the land outside is cleared, access is restricted, regular patrols go out if danger is anticipated, and so forth.

This defensive function is more concentrated, though, because a castle is frequently also a depot. If you're going to store anything valuable, you want it behind strong walls, whether that's food stores, military equipment, or money. Or, for that matter, people! Prisoners will have to stay put; nobles or other figures of importance are free to wander, but when trouble threatens, they have somewhere (relatively) safe to retreat. This can become a trap if the enemy lays siege to the place, but when you can't flee, holing up is the next best choice.

That category of valuables also includes records. Fortified sites are built not just for war, but for administration; given how much "government" has historically amounted to "the forcible extraction of resources by an elite minority," it's not surprising that defensive locations have often doubled as the places from which the business of government was carried out. Deeds of property, taxation accounts, military plans, historical annals, maps -- those latter are incredibly valuable resources for anybody wanting to move through or control the area. Someone who knows their castle is about to fall might well try to screw over the victor by burning records, along with any remaining food stores.

It's not all about hiding behind walls, though. As with a border fortification, a castle serves as a point from which military force can sally out. Even though these sites occupy very small footprints, they matter in warfare because if you don't capture them -- or at least box them in with a besieging detachment -- before moving on, they'll be free to attack you from behind, raid your supply train, and otherwise cause you problems. Sometimes that's a risk worth taking! In particular, if you can move fast enough and hit hard enough, you might pass a minor castle to focus your attention on a more significant one, leaving the little places for mopping up later. (Or you won't have to mop up, because the fall of a key site makes everybody else capitulate.)

Castles are also economic centers. Not only do they organize the production and resource extraction of the surrounding area, but the people there generally have more money to spend, and their presence entails a demand for a lot of resources and some specialized services. As a consequence, a kind of financial gravity will draw business and trade toward them. Even when the key resources are somewhere other than the castle itself -- like a water-powered mill along a nearby stream -- they're very likely owned by the guy in the castle, making this still the regional locus for economic activity. If there's a local fair, be it weekly, monthly, or yearly, it may very well be held at the castle or nearby; regardless of location, the castle is likely to authorize and oversee it.

This economic aspect may lead to the creation of a castle town: a settlement (itself possibly walled) outside the walls, close enough for the inhabitants to easily reach the castle. In Japan, the proliferation of castle towns during the Sengoku period was a major driver in the early modern urbanization of the country, and I suspect the same was true in a number of European locales. Eventually you may wind up with that thing I said I wasn't discussing in this essay: an entire fortified settlement, with a castle attached on one side or plonked somewhere in the middle. It's not a good idea to let the buildings get too close to the walls -- remember that you want a clear field in which to see and assault attackers, and you don't want them setting fire to things right by your fortifications -- but the town can contribute to the idea of "defense in depth," where its wall adds another barrier between the enemy and the castle that is heart of their goal.

You'll note that I've said very little about the specific design of these places. That's because there is an ocean of specialized terminology here, and which words you need are going to depend heavily on the specifics of context. How castles get built depends on everything from the money available, to the size and organization of the force expected to attack it, to the weapons being used: nobody is going to build a star fort to defend against guys with bows and arrows, because you'd be expending massive amounts of resources and effort that only become necessary once cannons enter the field. Moats (wet or dry), Gallic walls, hoardings, crenelations, machiolations, arrowslits, cheveaux de frise . . . those are all things to look into once you know more about the general environment of your fictional war.

But back to the castles as a whole. Most of the time, they "fall" only in the sense that they fall into the hands of the attacker. A section of the wall may collapse due to being sapped from below and pounded above, but it's rare for the place to be entirely destroyed . . . in part because that's a lot of work, and in part because of all the uses listed above. Why get rid of an extremely expensive infrastructure investment, when you could take advantage of it instead? Wholesale destruction is most likely to happen when someone has achieved full enough control of the countryside that he's ready to start kneecapping the ability of his underlings to resist that control.

Or, alternatively, when somebody shows up with cannon and pounds the place into rubble. Functional castles in even the broadest sense of the word finally died out in the twentieth century, when no wall could really withstand artillery and pretty soon we had airplanes to fly over them anyway. But at any technological point prior to that -- and in the absence of magic both capable of circumventing fortifications, and widespread enough for that to be a problem defenders have to worry about -- you're likely to see these kinds of defensive structures, in one form or another.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/NzFCtO)

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New Worlds: Why We Build a Wall

2026-02-06T09:02:59Z

There's a pop-culture tendency to point at structures like Hadrian's Wall or the Great Wall of China and laugh because "they didn't keep invaders out." But that betrays a very limited understanding of what a wall is for.

Without a wall, anybody can wander through anywhere they like -- terrain permitting, which is why people like to put borders in places where nature itself forms a useful barrier. (Much cheaper that way.) When you build a wall, though, easy passage can only be effected in a limited number of places: specifically, where there are gates. Legitimate traffic will go through those restricted channels, which means that at a minimum, your wall gives you the chance to monitor that traffic. If you want to ask their business, record information, collect taxes, or turn somebody away, a wall makes those tasks much simpler.

Can people get over the wall in non-gate locations? Of course: outside of fantasy, basically no wall is completely unclimbable. But every bit of difficulty you put in an intruder's way is going to limit how easily and, more important, how usefully they can get across. Even a mere palisade of sharpened stakes, like that used to defend the Roman border in Upper Germania, is beneficial in that regard. Sure, somebody can get over it. But can a hundred? A thousand? Without being noticed? Even if they can, their horses sure as hell can't, or their supply train. If they want to bring an effective invasion force through, that small group has to either bring the wall down, or (more likely) hit a gate fort from behind, through a surprise attack or treachery. Then, with the gate in their control, they can actually start the invasion proper.

Defense, however, isn't just about barriers; it's also about surveillance. A wall and its forts make a useful base from which to send out reconnaissance patrols, which might either return word of an approaching army or not return at all -- and that's a warning in its own right. If the defenders are competent, they'll also keep a swath of ground outside the wall clear of trees, so that anybody approaching will be spotted before they reach the wall itself. Once there, ideally no point anywhere along the line will be out of view of a watchtower, even if you have to change their spacing or the path of the wall to arrange that. The result is that even the aforementioned single guy or small force can't go unnoticed, unless they go without torches on a cloudy or moonless night -- which, of course, makes it that much harder to effect a crossing. Once the defenders see anything, they light signal fires or otherwise send an alert, and the larger body of soldiers at a gate fort knows to prepare for trouble.

Nor does it end there! In addition to the watchtowers and forts, a wall frequently has nearby support, in the form of one or more larger settlements with their own garrisons. This place can have support services for the army (you don't want a ton of civilians at your wall), and soldiers can rotate in and out -- wall duty being kind of famously an unpleasant assignment. When something goes down at the border, word also gets sent to the nearby army, which can either ride out in support or batten down the hatches in preparation for an impending attack. This can ripple out as far as it needs to, from that settlement to deeper within the territory, and all the way back to the capital or wherever the ruler happens to be.

In other words, a wall is a larger-scale version of the security principles we talked about in Year Three. To begin with, it serves as a deterrent: attacking someplace guarded by a wall is harder than attacking someplace without, which either diverts the enemy to an easier target or discourages the less well-organized foe. If they attempt something anyway, the wall gives you an opportunity to spot it coming, and to warn others that they're in danger. And finally, it provides a foothold for your response, whether that be killing, capturing, or driving off whoever threatens the wall and everything it protects.

So why don't they always work?

Most failures can be chalked up to an insufficiency of money, of loyalty, or of both. If a state can't or won't pay to properly maintain its wall and associated defenses, then crumbling sections or encroaching forest will make it easier for people to get across unseen. If it can't or won't pay to properly equip, train, and compensate its soldiers, then they'll slack off in their vigilance or be useless when trouble arrives. And poorly paid soldiers -- especially poorly paid commanders -- are more susceptible to bribery. Why bother sneaking a bunch of guys over the wall in pitch-black night and then assaulting a fort when you could just get somebody inside to open the gate for you?

Most of the time, the security failures will be small ones. Somebody takes an unauthorized nap and it's fine, because nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, nobody's trying to slip across at that exact moment. Guys at a watchtower or two get bribed to look away from, not an invading army, but some smugglers bringing contraband over the border. Maybe twenty guys manage to raid a border village -- and then possibly stay on that side of the wall, marauding through the countryside, because everything they steal makes it that much harder to get back home (assuming they even want to go).

But the big failures are dramatic. Somebody turns coat against their country, maybe for greed, maybe for ideology, but the result is pretty much the same. It may sound like a good idea to get a troublesome general out of your hair by sending him as far from the capital as he can get, but you do risk him deciding he's got better friends on the other side of the wall. If he's competent and ruthless enough, he can keep that warning system from transmitting an alert until his loyalists and new allies are deep into your territory, where there are no more walls to help keep them out.

No, walls don't always work. But when you really need to defend a border, having one is worth the expense. Just make sure you don't stop paying the bills.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/ZidYV5)

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First poem of 2026!

2026-01-26T19:18:35Z

Yep, I'm following up right on the heels of yesterday's first story of the year with today's first poem of the year! "Dulle Griet Stages a New Assault" is out now in Strange Horizons -- and because they decided to make it part of their "Criticism" issue, and my poem is ekphrastic commentary on a painting, it comes with a brief essay from yours truly!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/iwWcto)

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First story of 2026!

2026-01-25T19:01:40Z

Sunday Morning Transport is making all of its January stories free to read, and that includes my latest piece: "The Final Voyage of the Ouranos"!

If you're getting Mary Celeste vibes off it, you're not wrong; the genesis of this story was entirely me going "oooh, I want to do something kinda like that." (It is not, however, a retelling of that specific incident.) The setting of my previous SMT story, "The Poison Gardener", struck me as the ideal place for such a narrative, and the editor, Fran Wilde, snapped it right up!

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