Swan Tower

I've been talking about the preservation of history as a matter of written records, but as a trained archaeologist, I am obliged to note that history also inheres in the materials we leave behind, from the grand -- elaborate sarcophagi and ruined temples -- to the humble -- potsherds, post holes, and the bones of our meals.

Nobody really took much of an interest in that latter end of the spectrum until fairly recently, but museums for the fancier stuff are not new at all. The earliest one we know of was curated by the princess Ennigaldi two thousand five hundred years ago. Her father, Nabonidus, even gets credited as the "first archaeologist" -- not in the modern, scientific sense, of course, but he did have an interest in the past. He wasn't the only Neo-Babylonian king to excavate temples down to their original foundations before rebuilding them, but he attempted to connect what he found with specific historical rulers and even assign dates to their reigns. His daughter collated the resulting artifacts, which spanned a wide swath of Mesopotamian history, and her museum even had labels in three languages identifying various pieces.

That's a pretty clear-cut example, but the boundaries on what we term a "museum" are pretty fuzzy. Nowadays we tend to mean an institution open to the public, but historically a lot of these things were private collections, whose owners got to pick and choose who viewed the holdings. Some of them were (and still are) focused on specific areas, like Renaissance paintings or ancient Chinese coins, while others were "cabinets of curiosities," filled with whatever eclectic assortment of things caught the eye of the collector. As you might expect, both the focused and encyclopedic types tend to be the domain of the rich, who have the money, the free time, and the storage space to devote to amassing a bunch of stuff purely because it's of interest to them or carries prestige value.

Other proto-museums were temples in more than just a metaphorical sense. Religious offerings don't always take the form of money; people have donated paintings to hang inside a church, or swords to a Shintō shrine. Over time, these institutions amass a ton of valuable artifacts, which (as with a private collection) may or may not be available for other people to view. I've mentioned before the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala, which has eight vaults full of votive offerings that would double as an incomparable record of centuries or even millennia of Indian history . . . if they were studied. But making these things public in that fashion might be incompatible with their religious purpose.

Museums aren't only limited to art and artifacts, either. Historically -- especially before the development of the modern circulating library -- books got mixed in with other materials. Or a collector might equally have an interest in exotic animals, whether taxidermied or alive, the latter constituting a proto-zoo. More disturbingly, their collection might include people, individuals from far-off lands or those with physical differences being displayed right alongside lions and parrots.

What's the purpose of gathering all this stuff in one place? The answer to that will depend on the nature of the museum in question. For a temple, the museum-ness of the collection might be secondary to the religious effect of gifting valuable things to the divine. But they often still benefit from the prestige of holding such items, whether the value lies in their precious materials, the quality of their craftsmanship, their historical significance, or any other element. The same is true for the individual collector.

But if that was the only factor in play, these wouldn't be museums; they'd just be treasure hoards. The word itself comes from the Greek Muses, and remember, their ranks included scholarly subjects like astronomy and history alongside the arts! One of the core functions of a museum is to preserve things we've decided are significant. Sure, if you dig up a golden statue while rebuilding a temple, you could melt it down for re-use; if you find a marble altar to an ancient god, you could bury it as a foundation stone, or carve it into something else. But placing it in a museum acknowledges that the item has worth beyond the value of its raw materials.

And that worth can be put to a number of different purposes. We don't know why Nabonidus was interested in history and set up his daughter as a museum curator, but it's entirely possible it had something to do with the legitimation of his rule: by possessing things of the past, you kind of position yourself as their heir, or alternatively as someone whose power supersedes what came before. European kings and nobles really liked harkening back to the Romans and the Greeks; having Greek and Roman things around made that connection seem more real -- cf. the Year Eight discussion of the role of historical callbacks in political propaganda.

Not all the purposes are dark or cynical, though. People have created museums, whether private or public, because they're genuinely passionate about those items and what they represent. A lot of those men (they were mostly men) with their cabinets of curiosities wanted to learn about things, and so they gathered stuff together and wrote monographs about the history, composition, and interrelationships of what they had. We may scoff at them now as antiquarians -- ones who often smashed less valuable-looking material on their way to the shiny bits -- but this is is the foundational stratum of modern scholarship. Even now, many museums have research collections: items not on public display, but kept on hand so scholars can access them for other purposes.

The big change over time involves who's allowed to visit the collections. They've gone from being personal hoards shared only with a select few to being public institutions intended to educate the general populace. Historical artifacts are the patrimony of the nation, or of humanity en masse; what gets collected and displayed is shaped by the educational mission. As does how it gets displayed! I don't know if it's still there, but the British Museum used to have a side room set up the way it looked in the eighteenth century, and I've been to quite a few museums that still have glass-topped tables and tiny paper cards with nothing more than the bare facts on them. Quite a contrast with exhibitions that incorporate large stretches of wall text, multimedia shows, and interactive elements. Selections of material may even travel to other museums, sharing more widely the knowledge they represent.

It's not all noble and pure, of course. Indiana Jones may have declared "that belongs in a museum," but he assumed the museum would be in America or somewhere else comparable, not in the golden idol's Peruvian home. When colonialism really began to sink its teeth into the globe, museums became part of that system, looting other parts of the world for the material and intellectual enrichment of their homelands. Some of those treasures have been repatriated, but by no means all. (Exhibit A: the Elgin Marbles.) The mission of preservation is real, but so is the injustice it sometimes justifies, and we're still struggling to find a better balance.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/WA5QzG)

Philosophy is one of those topics where, if you're intending to explore it in detail in your fiction, you probably already know more about it than I do.

The way we talk about it nowadays, it's the exemplar of a rarefied field of study, the province of intellectuals who hardly engage at all with the world around them. As a result, you're unlikely to center philosophy in your worldbuilding unless you know quite a bit about it to begin with (as I, freely confessed, do not). But I do know this much: philosophy is far from disengaged with the world. Indeed, its purpose is to consider why the world works the way it does, how we should engage with it, and other such fundamental and vital questions. So even though my own knowledge is limited, it's worth taking a bit of time to unpack just what philosophy is.

We've touched on parts of it already, because philosophy is not fully separable from other topics. The Year Six essays on sin and salvation? Those got grouped under my broad "religion" header for obvious reasons, but they're also philosophical topics -- specifically the branch known as moral philosophy, which concerns itself with ethical questions like what is good and whether one should weigh intentions or consequences more heavily in evaluating an action. For many people, religion has long been the foundation of moral philosophy . . . though the notion some hold, that a person can't really be moral without faith to enforce it, is utterly without foundation.

Last week's science essay also touched on philosophical matters, because philosophy asks questions like "what do we know and how do we know we know it?" This branch is known as epistemology, or the study of knowledge itself. That revolution in thinking I mentioned before, where the Royal Society said nullius in verba and started testing long-held dogma to see if it was right? That was an epistemological shift, one that declared sense experience and experimental procedure to be the proper basis of knowledge, rather than deference to authority.

Science also ties in with the logic branch of philosophy. How do you know if someone's reasoning is sound? Among specialists, different logical methods often get discussed in very abstract, dry-sounding ways, but we use them all the time in daily life: if you come home to find toilet paper shredded throughout the house and the only living creature who was there is the dog, ergo you conclude the dog is to blame, you're applying logic. Science, medicine, and the law all share the task of looking at the evidence and attempting to formulate an explanation that adequately explains what you see -- or, alternatively, to show that an explanation fails that test. Because, of course, the flip side of logical reasoning is the fallacy: incorrect reasoning, which fails at one or more steps in the chain.

The fourth major branch is metaphysics, and it's the hardest to pin down (thanks in part to the definition changing over time; that's what happens when your field of study has been around for thousands of years). This, I suspect, is what most people think of when they hear the word "philosophy," because metaphysics is the branch asking questions like "why does reality exist?" But here, too, it loops around to touch on other areas of culture, as the beginning and end of the universe fall under this header: religion-themed topics you'll again find in Year Six.

Enough of the abstractions, though. What does this mean for fiction?

Whether you mean it to or not, philosophy is going to soak your fiction, because it soaks your thinking. If your student at magic school decides to experiment with different ways of casting spells to see if what the teacher said is true or not, that's demonstrating a certain epistemological stance, one that says experimental results are the most valid way to answer a question. If your protagonist investigates a mystery and comes up with a theory about what's happening, they're using a specific logical approach. If your villain is pursuing a potentially admirable outcome by really terrible means, they're subscribing to a consequentialist view of ethics, the one commonly shorthanded as "the end justifies the means."

If you don't make a conscious effort to worldbuild the philosophy of your setting, its philosophy is likely to default to yours. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! But it can feel anachronistic or otherwise out of place. If the protagonist in your medieval-esque story approaches questions of knowledge and logic like a modern scientist, they're going to feel a bit like a modern person dressed up in fancy clothes. If the good guys all do that while the bad guys adhere to different philosophical stances, now you're adding an implied moral dimension to the result.

And I suspect that for most stories, it's that ethical dimension of philosophy where this influence becomes most obvious and, at times, problematic. Protagonist does a bad thing, but it gets brushed off because they've got a good heart and that makes it okay? The story is presenting a philosophical argument, whether the author thinks of it that way or not. When the chips are down and a character has to make a hard decision, which way do they jump? Will they bend or break a principle to help someone in need? Will they sacrifice their own desires for the sake of upholding that principle? This is the stuff of deep personal drama, and simply recognizing it as such -- and thinking about what stances the various answers would express -- can result in more powerful stories, rather than simple ones where the supposed hard choice is really a no-brainer.

But especially on that ethical front, it's going to be difficult to write a story that endorses a philosophy you, the author, do not support. Deontology, for example, is the field that looks at ethics from the perspective of obedience to rules . . . and for many of us, that rapidly leads to "lawful evil" territory. We'd have a hard time writing a sincere story in which the protagonist virtuously obeys a terrible order because their duty requires it -- not as anything other than a tragic ending, anyway. It could be the basis of a villain or an antagonistic society, though, and in fact we often deploy these elements in exactly that fashion.

So even if you don't have a degree in philosophy, just dabbling your toes in the shallow end of that ocean-sized pool can help you become more aware of what message your worldbuilding and plot are sending. And that, I think, is worth it!



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

It may seem odd that I'm following up a discussion of segregation on the basis of sex with one on pornography, but bear with me: they're not as unrelated as they seem.

Pornography is notoriously difficult to define. There's even a Wikipedia page for the phrase famously used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward to describe hard-core material: "I know it when I see it." Subjective? Definitely. But then, what counts as obscene or purient material has always been subjective. In one society, the sight of a lady's ankles might be titillating; meanwhile, over in Moche Peru, potters were busy making ceramics depicting anal sex, fellatio, and other explicit acts.

What is licentious is closely linked with what is hidden from common view. I recall reading a mystery novel written by an author living in Saudi Arabia, where the male protagonist mentally chides himself for gazing too long at a woman's hands, the only part of her not covered by her burqa. He also overhears conservative imams on the radio railing against women "seducing" men with the mere sound of their voices. When almost everything is hidden away, the few scraps remaining become massively charged with sexual potential.

This means that, believe or not, what's considered pornographic or titillating is a place for worldbuilding! Holly Black made great use of this in her Curse Workers trilogy, a contemporary fantasy where magic requires contact between the bare skin of someone's hand and another person. Because this ability is widespread, gloves are a standard part of the dress code for everybody, a way of signaling that you're safe to be around . . . and at one point in the series, the teenaged protagonist, snooping on his older brother's computer, finds a stash of soft-core porn featuring women tugging their gloves off all sexy-like for the camera. We think nothing of seeing somebody's bare hands, but when they're normally concealed? You bet that would become an erotic sight.

By contrast, that which is routine will carry much less force. We tend to hide female breasts from view enough that even breastfeeding in public can be controversial, but in tropical regions where women traditionally wear nothing on top, it's not a non-stop pornographic show: that's simply normalized. Greece and Rome in antiquity were full of representational dicks -- worn as jewelry, carved on buildings, molded into lamps, used as wind chimes -- but those were to turn away evil, not to get people aroused.

In addition to shaping what is pornographic, your worldbuilding specifics will affect what kind of pornography is available to people. The Moche may have left behind a lot of sexually explicit ceramics, but those would have been elite objects; the average peasant toiling away in his field wouldn't be able to acquire elaborately molded works made by skilled artisans, regardless of their subject matter. For most of history, pornography has largely been the domain of the wealthy.

Some things are ubiquitous. We've had the ability to scratch simple depictions of genitalia into wood, stone, or clay for tens of thousands of years, and boy howdy have people done that! But how often was it done for the purpose of titillation? That, we don't know. It's easier to be certain when we find sexualized graffiti in appropriate contexts, like the walls of brothels in Pompeii. We also have examples of extremely phallic objects going back to the Upper Paleolithic, though the earliest we can be sure of any of these being put to sexual use is ancient Egypt (where we have artwork depicting it in action). Was that use purely recreational, or somehow ritual in nature? Again, we often don't know.

What really makes pornography take off, though, is printing technology. Prior to that, your smut had to be artisanally hand-crafted -- expensive in both labor and resources. The common person could really only afford dirty talk and maybe some crude pictures scratched into a wall. Once you have woodblocks, though, and later on, movable type, it becomes possible to mass-produce both images and text for all kinds of purposes. Of course, early printing was often highly regulated, with governmental censors eager to quash anything that might corrupt public morals. We don't have a great surge of obscene material from the late medieval and early modern periods. As printing became cheaper and more widespread, though, so was born an underground industry in pornography. Later on, audiovisual media did the same thing for sexual performances, allowing them to be enjoyed in privacy rather than only at live shows.

It isn't all about getting people off, though. Some sexual works are created with an eye toward education, e.g. for married couples who needed to learn how to do the deed, and maybe even how to enjoy themselves better along the way. The Kama Sutra is an extremely famous example of this, though it's much broader in focus than its pop-culture image presents; it's more like a forerunner of the entire relationship-advice genre. Meanwhile, Edo-period shunga (erotic pictures) in Japan kept getting regulated not because the shogunate disapproved of salacious art in general, but because the artists kept slipping political commentary into their works!

Regulations have run the gamut. In puritanical eras, the government usually tries to eliminate pornography entirely -- with limited success at best. Such things will still circulate via private networks, especially among the elite, who have the wealth and influence to buy both the material and escape from the consequences of having it. In other times and places, normative heterosexual pornography is fine, but anything considered "deviant," like homosexual acts, faces censorship. Or pornography is permitted, but it has to be packaged in a fashion that marks it out for what it is, e.g. with a plain paper cover in a certain color. Or it's high art if it takes certain forms, like sculpture, but low art and banned if it's available to the masses.

But again, bear in mind: what's considered licentious will be entirely defined by social norms. Thomas Edison made a film in which a man and a woman kissed; some people considered that obscene when it came out in 1896. In 1999, it was judged culturally significant enough to be preserved in the National Film Registry. And whether licentiousness is a priori bad will also be culturally relative: some Hindu temples not only depict sexual acts, but are intended to arouse the viewer, because sexual desire is entirely compatible with religious experience. So from the perspective of a fictional world, it's entirely up to the writer where they set their parameters . . . but how that's received by their real-world audience will be another matter entirely!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/dP9kgS)

As you can imagine, this essay will continue with a frank discussion of genitalia and modifications to same.

A eunuch is generally understood to mean a man who has been castrated, i.e. whose testicles have been cut off. Sometimes, though, he has been fully emasculated -- meaning removal of the penis as well; this was usually the case with Chinese eunuchs -- while on other occasions, the term refers to any man who is unable to procreate (e.g. because of impotence or chemical castration), even if he is intact. Unsurprisingly, it can also be slung as an insult against a man, questioning his virility.

We probably got the idea of eunuchs from animal husbandry, where castration of males is common enough that we often have separate terms for the two types: steers vs. bulls, geldings vs. stallions. Among livestock, it brings a number of benefits to their human owners; castrated beasts are less likely to attack people or other males and less likely to break down fences to try and get at females, while the small number of reproductively capable individuals makes it easier to control the population size and arrange for advantageous breeding matches. Neutered animals, female as well as male, also tend to live noticeably longer.

Among humans, the physical effects are similar. The removal of the testicles generally reduces sexual desire and its associated behaviors, while preventing reproduction. If performed before puberty -- as it usually is with animals -- the subject's voice will remain high, he won't grow facial hair or develop male pattern baldness, he'll put on less muscle and retain more fat, and he may wind up tall and long-limbed, as castration interferes with the hormonal changes that stop bone growth. He also stands a good chance of living longer. Males castrated after puberty, by contrast, will generally keep the changes already experienced, though they too will not progress to baldness.

The social effects, though . . . those get very complicated.

Castration or emasculation can be a punishment, not only for the individual, but for the lineage they're no longer able to perpetuate. As such, in a society where a crime taints the whole family, a male criminal might be executed and his sons castrated, stopping the line in its tracks. We've also often seen it as a fitting consequence for sexual crimes -- a category that at times has unfortunately included being gay. Of course, reduction in sexual desire doesn't necessarily mean its elimination entirely, not all sexual crimes are driven by desire in the first place, and there are ways to rape people without functioning testicles (or even a penis). And while there's some evidence that castrated men are less likely to re-offend, it's too scant for us to be sure of a firm causal relationship. Still, in some jurisdictions, convicts are offered a choice between castration (surgical or chemical) followed by release from prison, and serving a longer sentence while keeping their bodies intact . . . and some of them do indeed choose the former.

On the other hand, castration has sometimes been a thing people voluntarily seek out. Transgender women, of course, may pursue it in the interests of bringing their bodies in line with their self-image. Historically, boys with particularly pure singing voices might either be castrated or undergo a procedure that made their testicles atrophy, so they would retain their childhood range into adulthood; where women were forbidden to sing, these castrati took their place in music. And then in certain places and times, becoming a eunuch could actually be a route to opportunity, wealth, and power.

Though our modern democratic societies tend not to think this way, in cultures more organized around lineages and inheritance, a man who can't procreate is seen as lacking the motivations that drive people to amass power for themselves, their heirs, and their broader kin groups -- meaning that he can be relied upon to serve the interests of his lord instead. In East Asia, eunuch officials were often seen as extensions of the king's or emperor's will, in contrast with scholar-officials who might oppose it. How true this was in reality, of course, depended on the rulers and the officials in question!

That's one kind of trustworthiness; another involves women. Unsurprisingly, eunuchs have also been trusted among sheltered female populations in ways that intact males were not. Probably the most common image of them in the West is as harem guards, because they were less likely to engage in sexual behavior with the women there, and incapable of siring children on them even if such transgressions happened. That's not inaccurate, but it's incomplete, as eunuchs served in a variety of domestic and bureaucratic roles related to such environments. They were the point of contact between male and female worlds, their own liminal status allowing them to cross over into both.

Liminal -- and in many cases, lowly. Eunuchs were commonly servants or even slaves (with castrated slaves sometimes fetching a higher price), and as many of us know from other contexts, high-ranking people easily fall into the trap of forgetting just how much the servants around them are overhearing. Assumed loyalty plus invisible ubiquity makes for a great combination: is it any wonder that eunuchs sometimes doubled as spies? Of course this was not without its dangers; a servant or slave can easily be executed if caught snooping, and that loyalty may not extend in both directions. Still, knowing everyone's secrets and passing them on to the right ears can be a route to power.

Eunuchs didn't only wield power from the shadows, though. In both the Muslim and Chinese worlds, they could also rise to incredibly high rank -- including military rank! The advantage of a eunuch general is that there's not much point in him staging a coup to overthrow the ruler: what's he going to do, start a dynasty that ends when he dies? Few people will flock to that usurper's banner, given that they want stability, not a new civil war a few years or decades down the line. (I do wonder how many of those eunuch military officials were castrated as adults instead of as boys. I suspect more of the former, as they would have the benefits of puberty-induced changes to their bodies -- useful if they're expected to fight personally, instead of just directing the soldiers -- but I don't know for sure.)

In speculative fiction, eunuchs have tended to serve precisely one role: to code a society as a certain kind of "decadent" court, usually modeled on something like Muslim caliphates or the Ottoman Empire. They guard harems, and that's it. But that's been changing a little of late, with characters like the spymaster Varys in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire or the general Ouyang in Shelley Parker-Chan's Radiant Emperor duology, which is historical fantasy set in the transition between the Chinese Yuan and Ming dynasties. Both of those characters are singular, rather than belonging to extensive traditions of eunuch service, but they both reflect genuine dynamics around the roles castrated men can fill that aren't guarding harems. I doubt we'll see a flood of eunuch characters in Anglophone fiction any time soon -- if only because it's a topic that tends to make a lot of male readers uncomfortable -- but it would be interesting to get some continued variety!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/3vKXuV)

It seems fitting for Halloween that the traditional fifth-Friday New Worlds Patreon theory post should focus on weird critters -- but in this case, real ones! Let's talk about drawing inspiration for science fictional and fantasy species from the aliens we share a planet with: comment over there . . .

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/HJO91g)

Insurance is rather a hot-button topic these days, especially (but not only) in the field of healthcare. How did it even get started? That's the topic this week at the New Worlds Patreon -- hint, it involved ships sinking at sea. Comment over there!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/N18vHc)

For October, my loyal patrons in the New Worlds Patreon have voted for a turn toward the field of economics! Though what we're talking about this first week could potentially have gone into the "law and crime" category instead, as we're talking about bribery . . . comment over there!

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

As part of its current tour of military topics, the New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at all those other people involved: not the soldiers, but the secondary army of people who support and/or profit off them. Comment over there!

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

My New Worlds patrons having voted for a set of military topics this month, we're taking a look at the logistical side of warfare! Not to the depth that an officer or military historian would study it, of course, but we can at least manage a top-level overview of how worldbuilding factors shape the way armies get fed. Comment over there!

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

This week, the New Worlds Patreon pivots slightly from human migration and cultural contact to the question of how societies respond to crisis -- a question whose list of possible answers unfortunately includes "turn on any perceived outsiders" among its historical and present-day options. Comment over there . . .

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/sLMd43)