Swan Tower

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth, he was thinking in terms of a hollow planet. There's another sense in which we can think about the center of the earth, though -- a more spiritual one.

We can approach this in two dimensions. Horizontally, the center of the world can be called the omphalos, from the Greek word for "navel." The Greeks had a myth that Zeus loosed two eagles from the opposite ends of the earth which, flying at equal speed, crossed each other's paths at Delphi, thereby proving it to be the precise middle of existence. A stone sculpture there -- the original of which may now be in the museum at Delphi, or that may be a later replica -- served as a sacred object to mark the spot.

I should note in passing that this idea can also be executed on a smaller scale than the whole world. The Roman Forum contained the Umbilicus Urbis or "navel of the city," the reference point for measuring all distances to Rome; Charing Cross has served the same function for London since the nineteenth century. That's a very pragmatic purpose, but not incompatible with a spiritual dimension: the Umbilicus Urbis may also have been the above-ground portion of a subterranean site called the Mundus or "world," which was a gateway to the underworld.

Which brings us to the (sort of) vertical dimension. Axis mundi as a term was coined for astronomical purposes, but it's been extended as a catch-all for describing a widespread religious concept, which is the connection point between different spiritual realms.

An axis mundi can take any form, but a few are noteworthy for cropping up all around the globe. One of the most common is the world tree, whose roots extend into the underworld and whose branches reach into the heavens. The exact type of tree, of course, depends on the local environment: the Norse Yggdrasil, one of the most well-known examples, is usually said to be an ash (though some theorists hold out for yew), while the Maya saw theirs as a ceiba, and in northern Asia it might be a birch or a larch. Depending on how flexible you want to be with the concept, you might see as a world tree anything that connects to at least one other realm, like the oak at Dodona whose roots supposedly touched Tartarus, without a corresponding link upward.

Mountains are the other big motif. Olympus, Kailash, Qaf, and Meru are all singular and stand-out examples, but anywhere there are impressive mountains, people have tended to think of them as bridges between different spiritual realms. They more obviously connect to the heavens than the underworld, but especially if there are caves, their linkage can extend in both directions.

Approach it broadly enough, though, and an axis mundi can be basically anything vertical enough to suggest that it transcends our mortal plane. The folktale of Jack and the Beanstalk? It may not be sacred, but that beanstalk certainly carried Jack to a different realm. The Tower of Babel? God imposed linguistic differences to stop humans from building it up to the sky. Even smoke can be an ephemeral axis mundi: ancient Mesoamericans, burning the bark paper soaked with blood from their voluntary offerings, are said to have seen the smoke as forging a temporary connection to the heavens above and the deities who dwelt there.

These two concepts, omphalos and axis mundi, are not wholly separate. While the latter term can apply to anything that connects the realms, like a pillar of smoke, a really orthodox axis mundi -- the axis mundi, the fundamental point where many worlds meet -- is often conceived of as standing at the center of the universe, i.e. at the omphalos. (In a spiritual sense, if not a geographical one.) It's the nail joining them together, the pivot point around which everything turns.

And it does occasionally crop up in fiction. In Stephen King's Dark Tower series, the eponymous tower toward which Roland quests is a canonical axis mundi, linking many realities together. That actually makes the conclusion of his quest a difficult narrative challenge . . . because how do you depict the literal center of the cosmos in a way that's going to live up to its significance? (Without going into spoilers, I'll say that King provides two answers to that question. Many readers find both of them unsatisfying, but to my mind, they are just about the only way you can answer it. Neither one, of course, is a conventional denouement.)

Even without journeying to the fundamental center of creation, however, I think there's unused room for this concept in fantasy. Plenty of stories send their characters between planes of existence via some kind of gateway or portal: an arch, a ring of standing stones, or something else in that vein. I want more beanstalks! Maybe not literally a humble crop plant on steroids, but more vertical transitions, where you feel the effort of the characters climbing up or down to reach a heavenly realm, the underworld, or an alternate reality -- one that, by the climbing, is implied to exist in a certain spatial relationship with ordinary reality. Make them go on a long journey to reach that point of connection, or undergo more effort than a bit of chanting to create a structure imbued with the capacity to carry them across those boundaries.

Ironically, this is a place where science fiction sometimes winds up preserving more of a folkloric feeling than its sibling genre does. Space elevators are absolutely an axis mundi rendered in literal, mundane terms -- complete with placement at the center of the world, since the lower end of the cable would need to be near the equator for the physics to work. Mind you, a space elevator doesn't extend into the underworld (. . . not unless somebody writes that story; please do!), but as we saw above, sometimes the concept is applied to one-sided connections. It's close enough for me!



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

You probably don't much like thinking about death. It's understandable: death is sad and scary, and few of us look forward to it coming for us or anybody we love. But believe it or not, reminders of death have not infrequently been baked in as a cultural practice -- in a couple of cases I'm going to discuss, literally baked!

There's a grim reason for this, which is that death was far more of a looming threat for historical people than it is for us. Obviously it's true now, as it was then, that everybody eventually dies; the difference is that the average person today can expect to enjoy decades of life first. But life expectancies in the past were much lower -- which is not the same thing as saying that most adults died by the age of thirty! The reason average life expectancy was so much lower is that the odds of surviving your first few years were horrifyingly low. Childhood diseases like the measles tended to kill almost half of all children born before they reached the age of ten.

Which means that nearly every family in existence, rich as well as poor, suffered the repeated grief of seeing life cut short before it really had a chance to start. Then, for those who made it to adulthood, men often had a meaningful chance of dying in war, and women faced the recurrent risk of dying in childbirth. On top of all that, there's the experience of death: people were more likely to die at home, rather than off in some hospital, and ordinary people had the task of caring for them in their final hours and preparing their bodies for funerary rites afterwards. They saw and touched and smelled the effects of death, in a way that most of us today do not.

One of the ways to cope with this is to look death squarely in the eye, rather than flinching away. The Latin phrase memento mori, an exhortation to remember that you must inevitably die, has come to signify all kinds of cultural traditions intended to remind people of the end. Our modern Halloween skeletons and ghosts used to have that function, even if few of us think of them that way anymore; let's take a look at some other approaches.

A few memento mori traditions are things you do rather than objects in your life. Buddhism, for example, has traditions of "foulness meditation," in which a person is encouraged to contemplate topics like disease and decay -- sometimes in cemeteries or the presence of corpses. After all, Buddhism tells us the nature of the world is impermanence, and what illustrates that more vividly than death? Islamic scriptures likewise exhort believers to think about death, and some Sufis make a habit of visiting graveyards for that purpose. I'm also reminded of a fictional practice, which I think might be based on something in the real world, though I can't place it: in Geraldine Harris' Seven Citadels quartet of novels, the Queen of Seld holds banquets in what will eventually be her tomb.

Speaking of banqueting, the Romans had a rich tradition of memento mori (as you might expect, given that we got the phrase from their language). In the early imperial period, it was fashionable to dine in rooms frescoed with images of skeletons and drink from cups decorated with skulls. The message, though, was far from Buddhism's reminder not to become attached to impermanent things: instead it was, as the poet Horace wrote in that same era, carpe diem. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. These macabre decorations were meant to heighten the transient pleasures of life.

Other classical thinkers took it in a more Buddhist-style direction, though. Stoic philosophy is full of injunctions to curb the pleasures of life because you and all the people around you are mortal, and there are accounts which claim a Roman general celebrating a triumph was accompanied by someone reminding him that eventually he would die. We find the same sentiment echoed in the Icelandic Hávamál, with its "Cattle die, / kinsmen die, / all men are mortal" -- though that one goes on to praise the immortality of a good reputation.

Christian tradition leaned heavily into this for centuries, because of the theological emphasis on the dangers of sin and of dying unshriven. To have any hope of heaven, a Christian was supposed to live with one eye on the ever-present possibility of death, rather than assuming it must be far off and you'd see it coming, with time to prepare. Memento mori took every shape from tomb decorations (don't forget that many wealthy people were buried inside churches) to clocks (time is inexorably ticking away) to paintings (the genre known as vanitas emphasizes the vanity, i.e. worthlessness, of impermanent things) to jewelry. The devastation of the Black Death undoubtedly bolstered this tradition, as seen in the Danse Macabre artistic motif, where the Grim Reaper summons away people from all walks of life, kings and bishops alongside peasants.

I promised you baked goods, though, didn't I? Malta celebrates the Month of the Dead in November and commemorates the season with ghadam tal-mejtin, "dead men's bones," a type of cookie filled with sweet, spiced almond dough. And in Sweden, there was a nineteenth-century tradition of funerary confectionery, wrapped in paper printed with memento mori images -- though the candies were often meant to be saved instead of eaten, and some manufacturers bulked them out with substances like chalk to cut costs. You could break a tooth trying to bite into one.

We might even count death omens as a type of memento mori. Most of the ones I know about are European, and take forms ranging from spectral voices in the night to black dogs to a double of the person who's about to die -- with a certain amount of ambiguity around whether encountering such a thing causes you to die (perhaps with some way to avert it), or whether it's merely a signal that death is at hand. To these we might add plague omens, which I know of from both Slavic lands and Japan: people or creatures who appear to warn a town that an epidemic is about to sweep through. The Japanese ones usually promise that anyone who hangs up an image of the creature will be protected from disease, which is certainly helpful of them! (And yes, there was a resurgence in that tradition when the Covid-19 pandemic began.)

These days we are more likely to enjoy death imagery as an aesthetic rather than a philosophical practice. Our life expectancy is vastly higher -- in part because we're far more likely to survive childhood -- and thanks to modern medicine, even an ultimately fatal injury or illness stands a higher chance of giving us time to prepare for the end. But notwithstanding the fever dreams of some technophiles, we have yet to defeat death; immortality remains out of reach. Until that changes, mortality will remain an inescapable fact for every human born.



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

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)