"Her mom divorced him. Her sister won't talk to him. He lives alone in a little apartment with all his guns."
It was a long, peaceful July evening in Sofia, and I was finally out of the hospital. I had nothing to do but regrow my internal membranes and repeat gossip about the family of an old friend. I'll call her Irene. "It's sad," I said, "because this man spent his whole adult life building his family. Marry, buy a house, raise three daughters, and it all just falls apart." I lay on my back on the couch in our lawn, watching the bats work against the darkly glowing sky. My daughters were inside, probably watching videos on their phones. "Irene? Wasn't she the home-schooled girl?" asked my mom. She had flown out to help me recover. "Her family was always a little weird. Very religious." I didn't share her disapproval. My recent contact with death had left me aware of my need for religion. It was as if a clinging sheet of plastic had been pulled off my face, and I could no longer ignore the things that mattered. "Yes," I said. "Weird. Someone said something a bit too extreme, and the normal people went to find another church. That would leave a group that was less normal on average. Now someone else would say something more extreme and the community would get even smaller.” Pavlina knocked her wine glass against the arm-rest of her chair. "Brain Drain. When everyone who's smart and ambitious leaves, you get," she said, "what's left." We three sat there, considering the fact that we were in Bulgaria. My mom had been horrified by the black mold growing on the bathroom walls of my room at the hospital. She didn't even know yet that my second surgery had only been necessary because of a doctor's mistake after the first one. I was past caring about that. Leaning on my rack of fluid-filled bags, learning how to walk again, I had asked myself "why did this happen?" "Because one molecule bumped," into another was like trying to eat sand. "Because your enemies attacked you," was like drinking lye. I’d spent a month reading Terry Pratchett and watching the kestrels that nested in the hospital's neglected attic. I was glad to be in Bulgaria. Also, if I'd gotten a colostomy in the US, the medical bill would have bankrupted us. "Heart Drain," I said. "It wasn't the smart ones who left Irene's father's church, it was the good ones. The people who stayed were like a tide pool in the sun. They got saltier and saltier." If my mother and wife rolled their eyes at me, I didn't see it. The sky was darker now and the bats were hard to make out. "Well, I'm glad she's out of it at least," said my mom. "How is Irene's baby? Say hi to her for me." Except Irene wasn't out of it, at least from my perspective. Irene and I kept in touch for years, writing long emails and critiquing each other's stories. I must have sent her hundreds of thousands of amateurish words, but by the time I got to my first published book, something had started to go wrong. "He likes her because she doesn't remind him of his EX-WIFE?" Irene wrote in the all-caps of outrage. "She reacts to the oppression of the patriarchy by feeding into their classification of her as a child?" She told me I was infantilizing a black character because he was short and had a round face. I didn't know what to do. Irene was reading my work like she was a censor, but I couldn't tell her that. I didn't want to be mean, and also I was starting to understand that to push back against a certain type of comment might be a career-limiting move. In the end, I couldn't bear to send her my manuscripts. We would talk about other things. My readers will know that selective silence wasn't enough. Irene's increasingly extreme ideology infected everything we talked about. Food, gardening, our children. Her final email told me how much Irene limited her son's screen time and why that was so important. I read it, stumbled downstairs, yelled at my daughters who were of course staring at their phones, and realized that I had a problem. I had to leave this conversation. For about five years, I only handled the internet with tongs. My app-blocker was strict. My emails were terse. My posts avoided readers, because readers might comment. I kept my head down and told myself that I still had my agent, my publisher, my colleagues. I would work and that would be enough. My readers will know that it wasn't. My agent became more demanding and my publisher colder. Every science fiction convention was worse than the last. My fellow writers were angrier, pettier, more likely to end your career for you. I once asked a stranger at a con what the badges on his lanyard stood for. "Well of course I declared my gender," he said, pointedly. "Why wouldn't you?" I nodded silently. And I left. I stopped going to conventions. In the words of one of my colleagues, why would I pay to spend time with people who hate me? I hear that subsequent cons have become absolutely unbearable. It's not worth reading much traditionally published genre fiction, either. Heart Drain has hit scifi hard. None of this is news to anybody, but now we get to my question for you, my readers. What do we do now? What attracted me to the Literary Right was its kindness and generosity. Come to us and say what you're thinking. We'll disagree with you, and then we'll get back to writing. Now, based on the essays of JE Tabor and John Carter, I wonder if I was naive. If I say the wrong thing to you, will you try to get me fired? Harass my colleagues? Get my books pulled? If I suspect you might, and if others suspect it, you won’t be able to have honest conversations any more. If you become powerful enough to threaten the rest of us, we’ll go along with it, nodding silently, until we leave. Imagine us in another ten years. Will we be surrounded by fractious, squabbling, honest fellow writers, or will we be alone in our small apartments, surrounded by our weapons?
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We rounded the corner of the university and walked up the street, the two of us. I stooped and leaned sideways, eyes scanning the concrete as I thanked Professor Yanakieva for agreeing to meet with me.
"It's no trouble," she said. "I'm retired. I just don't know how I can help you." We hadn't reached the cafe yet, but I took the opening. "Did Thracian have cases?" I asked. The Thracians were a Classical Age people who lived north of the Greeks. Unlike the Greeks, however, they didn't write much down. Aside from four inscriptions, a handful of words recorded in Greek sources, and some names of people and places, there is no surviving documentation of the Thracian language. There are coins, Professor Yanakieva said, that show the name of the Thracian king Seuthes with the spelling "Seuthou" - the Greek genitive case - but others that show "Seutha." Is that the Thracian genitive? We crossed the street and walked into the small park behind the national library, past the lawn-bowling pitches and into the shade of a circle of large walnut trees, where a cafe surrounds a mostly dry pond. We ordered a pair of espressos. "Okay," I asked. "What about aspiration?" "We just don't know," she said. "Sometimes a Thracian name will be recorded with a delta and sometimes with a tau or even a theta. Maybe Thracian plosives had different qualities from Greek. This is all in my paper." It was. I'd read all her papers and input their data into my succession of huge spreadsheets of Thracian sound shifts. "What exactly do you want to do with Thracian?" she asked. "You said you were writing a novel?" I told her I did. When I began Wealthgiver, I had thought it would be a straightforward task to track the sound changes between known Thracian words and their Proto-Indo-European ancestors. Six years later, I have learned a great deal about classical Greek, Phrygian, Proto-Albananian, and Indo-European linguistics. I'm on my third version of the spreadsheet. "And you want to include whole sentences in Thracian?" I intend to include prophetic poetry in Thracian. I didn't say that, but Professor Yanakieva was still cautious. "Have you heard of the Bessian Bible?" "Oh that," I said. What happened is someone got a hold of a Coptic bible, noticed the Greek loan-words in it, and pretended that everything else was a descendant of Thracian.1 "I've read many conspiracy theories," I said, much to her relief. "My project is a speculative reconstruction, like paleontologists make of dinosaurs." "But paleontologists have a whole skeleton!" I thought I heard some envy in the thracologist's voice, and remembered my friend Vladi, who is thrilled to unearth a single fragment of a femur. But I didn't want to get sidetracked. "Okay," I said, "so we have a tooth." She laughed. I felt like I'd passed a test. "Do you know about Zoni? It was a church in Greece, but the church was built on top of a temple to Apollo. Worhippers would write a prayer on a clay pot and smash it, so we have many examples of the ritual formula "Abolo Uneso somebody ekaie." Abolo is the god and uneso probably meant holy." "Yes!" I showed her my notebook with copies of those inscriptions: (they're written right to left) "And that e in ekaie. Is that," I asked, "augment?" She lit up. "It might be!" I could feel the coffee taking effect, and see it in my guest, as well. But I looked at my watch. "I have to go pick up my daughter in about five minutes," I said. "I'll pay for the coffees." I had time for one more question. "I only found one paper on the Zoni inscriptions," I said as I came back from the bar. "This one by Brixhe. But there are many more, right?" "Yes. All the inscriptions from Zoni are published in the year-book of Sofia University 1954. They include the bilingual tablet." "The what!?" I said, thinking of the Rosetta Stone. Also, I had to go pick up my daughter from Russian camp. But a bilingual inscription? That was revolutionary! It could blow the Thracian language wide open! "It's damaged," said Professor Yanakieva. "The top of the Greek part and the bottom of the Thracian part are missing, so we can't decipher it. Didn't you say you have to pick up your daughter?" "Well, she can wait five minutes." "How old is she? Eight? She'll be frightened if she has to wait." In fact, I was the one who had to wait because Ellie wasn't done making her noisemaker. I didn't mind because my brain was on fire. A bilingual inscription. I poured over it for the next month, and I have a sketch of a translation here. Professor Yanakieva says it's "amusing" and sent me links to more papers. My reconstruction continues, a dinosaur based on a tooth. Maybe I got the legs wrong and put the nose on backwards, but I'm not afraid of making mistakes. I write speculative fiction, and my goal is plausible wonder. I think I got it. *** In the month of June I finished working on the penultimate draft of Wealthgiver and...started working on the Thracian language that will appear in Wealthgiver. Here's my plan: I'll work on the language stuff over the summer (and writing up some of it for you, my readers) and getting ready to begin serializing Wealthgiver here on Patreon in the last week of September. I will polish the manuscript as I serialize it, the way I did for Fellow Tetrapod, so your feedback and advice will have an impact on what you read. *** And I read some books this month The Initiate by James L. Cambias There's a thematic point in this book where someone tells the main character, "you tell me not to do it because it is evil, and you tell me that evil is what I should not do. For we, who do not fear judgement, what reason is there to do anything other than what pleases us?" The main character answers him - I won't spoil the book by saying how. I will say that the first time I read The Initiate, I was disappointed with that answer, but now I see that Cambias had a different, better one for us. I won't spoil that, either. Go read the book. The Knight by Will Wight I'm trying to figure out why the books in this series bore me so much more than the excellent Cradle series. It's not the change in genre, because in fact this problem started to manifest in the later Cradle books as well. Since 2020 or so, Wright's novels have become longer and less substantial. A lot of things happen, but the connections between one event and the next are weak. The characters don't react as deeply or stand out as strikingly as they used to. Certainly, the word-level writing style has deteriorated. I couldn't even finish The Knight. It felt inflated and thoughtless, as if it was compiled rather than written. Whatever process Wright has adopted since the pandemic, I hope he returns to the old one. The Higgs Boson and Beyond by Sean Carrol Ironically for a summary of particle physics from the standpoint of quantum field theory, this book is too certain. Electrons ARE waves. Interactions with the Higgs field IS mass. There's none of the nuance of "according to this model," or "experiments have shown." There's too much space and too little substance devoted to the funding and construction of particle accelerators, and we're left without knowing much about Higgs boson itself. Carrol does okay with his central metaphor about a celebrity try to move through a crowded room, but he doesn't take it any farther. Why is being slowed down by the Higgs field a good explanation for inertial mass? What does that have to do with gravitational mass? PBS Eons goes deeper. The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman God damn I love reading Feynman. When other physicists proclaim, he clarifies. When others offer up half-baked metaphors, he gives us thoughts experiments that are both helpful and funny. How precisely could we determine the a bowling ball's velocity and position by bouncing ping-pong balls of it? What would an Aztec astrologer say to Galileo? What if mysteries in physics never run out, but new discoveries get harder and harder to make? In that last case, Feynman would consider himself very lucky to be born when he was. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis A friend of mine read this book and argued about it with me in high school. Maybe I wasn't ready for it then, but I was now. C.S. Lewis explains what he thinks Christianity means, for example when it comes to God as an anchor for objective good. He is not so much persuasive as illuminating. How Asia Works by Joe Studwell This is one of those books that changes the way you look at everything. I now listen to Economist podcasts about the French election and think about DeGaul's post-war industrial policy. I see what you did there, orienting on exports. Or my wife tells me about A Suitable Boy and I recognize the importance of agricultural land reform. My friend Paul in Japan was incensed when I told him that cherries are too expensive there, but I'm right, and now I know why. What a pleasure it was to read How Asia Works. A heartfelt thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Psmith, who recommended it. Wintersteel by Will Wight This is the apex of the Cradle series and Wight's best book. It asks an important question: how can you dedicate your life to improving yourself without leaving your loved ones behind? In answer, there's a kiss. The War Revealed by Karl Gallagher The renaissance fair that was teleported to a fantasy world has overcome their first orc invasion. Now it's time to meet the elves! Again, Gallagher's characters are very true to their natures. An agorophobe magician doesn't thank the protagonist for helping her develop her power of flight. She's mad at him! He scared her! Again, Gallagher lets this truth shine through prose that is so clear it feels like a synopsis. You have to slow down and imagine before you're hit by the emotional impact of what you're reading. I didn't like this one quite as much as the first one - maybe because there were fewer surprises. The biggest was that this is the second book in a fantasy series, and it ends. Good job! Guest Law by John C. Wright Hypocritical medieval courtiers...in space! As with most of Wright's work, my only complaint was that this one was too short. The future history he describes could and ought to support a trilogy at least. Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About by Wilfred Reilly The outline of this book is good, but it lacks something in the execution. Reilly is a political scientist, and would have done well to team up with a statistician or an economist. That could have elevated his examples from anecdote to data. Does the media really fail to report the police killing white people? Reilly found instances where that seems to be the case, but specific instances aren't enough. When I repeated the arguments Reilly made to my wife, she got angry at me. Maybe she would have been less angry if I'd had some more rigorous data? Don't worry, we apologized to each other. Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry I read this book to my daughters. Ellie (8) was bored and demanded yet another repetition of Dory Fantasmagory, but Maggie (11) liked the horses and the grandpa. What struck me, though, was a scene where the child protagonists are incensed at the sight of captured feral colts being separated from their mothers, and take their complaints to the manager. He tells them that this is how young horses grow up. It's hard for the children to understand now, but when they get older, they'll see that this is for the best. And he's right. I can't think of any children's book written since the 80s where the adult was right and the children were wrong, and I'd like to see more. Animal Farm by George Orwell Animal Farm covers a lot of the same ground as The Gulag Archipelago, but in a much condensed and more impressionistic form - not so much a story as a description. I wondered as I listened to this audiobook what Orwell would have changed if he had known Russia's history from 1989 to 2022. Maybe not much. See you next month 1 In fact, Coptic is a descendant of Ancient Egyptian. Way more interesting than a dumb conspiracy theory. |
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