these far and starlit shores

Elizabeth Kolbert is one of my favorite writers in the New Yorker's writing stable. This week, in somewhat of a departure from her usual ecology and climate science beat, she has an incisive dismantling of the curiously blinkered* assumptions of Steven Pinker's book about violence. (sorry for the paywall.)

What does it reveal about the impulse control of the Spanish that, even as they were learning how to dispose of their bodily fluids more discreetly, they were systematically butchering the natives on two continents?

It is an excellent article. I have some sympathy for the basic underlying assertion that the nature of violence has changed, as the ways we identify with each other has changed, and that larger political units mean less daily interpersonal violence. But: you cannot burk a fact to support a thesis, and it seems like Pinker is doing this in spades. State-sponsored violence is a pretty big fact.

Wandering further out along the “laser cannon versus fly” axis, there is a crackling and satisfying essay by Stephen Marche, "Wouldn't It Be Cool If Shakespeare Wasn't Shakespeare?" in the New York Times magazine today.

You don’t have to be a truther or a birther to enjoy a conspiracy theory. We all, at one point or another, indulge fantasies that make the world seem more dangerous, more glamorous and, simultaneously, much more simple than it actually is. But then most of us grow up. Or put down the bong. Or read a book by somebody who is familiar with both proper historical methodology and the facts.

Yay for blistering takedowns of people trying to buy their crackpot theory into discourse. At least no one has tried making a thriller (starring everyone's favorite aging British actors!) out of climate change denialism yet. Fair warning, though, the penultimate paragraphs spoil it a bit, at least for me; it's still worth the read.

The perennial idiocy of women's Halloween costumes hardly bears reiteration, but this is pretty amusing.


* i.e.: reliably Western-ly colonialist and racist only with carefully updated 21st century crypto incarnations of the old chestnuts

Title: A Far and Sere Elysium
Rating: PG
Word count: 2400
Summary: A soldier and a dock worker walk into a bar...
Notes: Originally started for springkink, and first version posted here, though the plot and characters ran away with me completely, leaving the kink far behind, together with most of my sanity. Yes, there's more. Yes, I'm working on it. No, don't expect it to come on any kind of regular schedule (sorry).

( Bay 32 West X430-B had four gas-exchange valve locks, two electrical interchanges, six fluid pumps, and a cute structural vulnerability in its outer piping. I'd gone over the blueprints. I was pretty sure I'd know where to aim in an emergency. )

The things one finds in one's folders.

Wrestling with the SRS BZNS of the azkafic made my brain rebel from time to time. ( This is the result. It is very silly. )

The books I'm reading: A wind from the south, by Diane Duane. I've developed this habit of reading books in bites on my iPhone (yes, really. Stanza is an awesome and free ebook reader that rapidly fades into invisibility, try it!) and what fiction I'm reading at the moment often depends on what I can find for cheap or free in ePub format. It's epic fantasy, set in Switzerland during the Holy Roman Empire, and I find the cultural backdrop fascinating, more than redeeming the slow pace and the gratuitous Romansch. Rites of Peace, by Adam Zamoyski: beautifully written book on the slow and freighted process of reconstructing Europe in the wake of Napoleon's defeat. There are strong resonances off of Tuchman's Guns of August: strong personalities, national blinders, breathtaking egos, and the intermittent will towards stupidity.

The books I'm writing: hahahaha oh god they're on hold, the only thing I'm writing these days is research papers. which is what I'm doing right now hi Internet I'll just be leaving.

The book I love the most: um. ALL OF THEM except the bad ones.

The last book I received as a gift: a book of essays by Steven Weinberg, as a Christmas gift. I haven't had a chance to read it (sob).

The last book I gave as a gift: a small text on constructing those spectacular geometrical Islamic decorative patterns, to my dad, for his birthday.

The nearest book: a textbook on quantum field theory. (and my iPhone.)

The last book I bought myself: Hmm. I don't remember for sure, but probably Lifelode, by Jo Walton -- sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to have a moment to breathe.

Right, so, Gaiden is over. The last chapter just went up over at saiyuki_manga (and thank you so much again to everyone involved in that community).

I'm not going to be terribly coherent.

( spoilers and flail )

(oh jeez, I really should be working, but, well, this seemed important.)

I really like Jo Walton. I really like Pat Wrede. It is thus with a sinking feeling of "oh, no", that I read Jo Walton's description of Wrede's latest book, here:

This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.

I read that description and I stopped dead in my tracks. How can one even imagine creating "American fantasy" without Native Americans? How can one possibly disentangle the mythology of the American frontier from the steady drumbeat of encroachment, threat, and loss? The story of the American frontier is not, cannot be made a story only of human vs nature. This is only an alternate version of "our" world with a very narrow understanding of the pronoun.

I completely understand wanting to have alternatives to the generic and soulless pseudo-medieval European
settings that constitute a depressing percentage of the fantasy genre. But a wholesale removal of a continent full of cultures is hardly the way to build a world.

The problem with "American fantasy" -- historic American fantasy, let's call it, as distinct from modern urban fantasy -- is that American history cannot honestly be separated from genocide and slavery. To ignore these ugly aspect of our national heritage, or to create a world where this original sin can be wished away, keeps only a part of the story, and feels fake. Any story which aspires to be emotionally true, artistically honest, has to acknowledge and mythologize the darkness as well as the light.

As fantasists we want to read and write stories where good goes up against evil and wins, or at least tries very hard. Fantasy also has an urge towards epic, wanting at least a suggestion of an epic in the backdrop, if not a big one straggling across foreground -- Wrede's worldbuilding, as I understand it from Walton's post, has this sort of big story in the background, an overarching narrative, because history as told is narrative, between human and unconquered continent.

The "American epic" latent in the history taught in American schools and the family stories handed down by (white) American relatives, is that of Manifest Destiny, cowboys and continents and the virtuous frontier. This is the raw material that's handed to white Americans by our cultural history. Sure, it's better to use this raw material to create a world where the original sins of the USA are erased than it is to try to mythologize our own history, in our own world. But it can never be real, in the sense that myths can be real. You can't deal with slavery and genocide by closing your eyes and wishing it away.

I know the kind of American fantasy I want to read. I want to know what happened in those alternative worlds where the Native Americans had different immune complexes and their civilizations survived the first contact with European settlers. I want to read stories set in the thriving, complex societies of Dawnland and Cahokia, in the glittering sophisticated cities of the Aztecs, about the Incas at war, or the less well-known cities in the deep Amazon, cities built up in great and verdant mounds, connected by roads that ran for miles, perfectly straight. I want to read the histories of these people, I want adventures with qipu and llamas, or jaguars and jade; wetu and canoes and the sun rising beyond the waves; the thousands of stories this continent could have held.

Anyone interested in American fantasy should go read 1491.