here is a concept that I’m still trying to flesh out: medieval science fiction.
not, of course, aliens land during the middle ages, though I’ve read and enjoyed that, but something much more difficult to execute, if it’s possible at all: space opera (exempli gratia) as written by Bede or Gildas or Geoffrey of Monmouth.
The challenge is, of course, that you have to get into the medieval mind (ok, I know that talking about “the” medieval mind is fallacious) and figure out what they’d keep from their world and what they’d think to change – what is the analogue to ‘50s writers giving us faster than light travel & radioactive planets & psionics and still having gender and family politics that are identical to ‘50s middle class American politics? I have a feeling it’s the Church – it’s true that there are several books with Space Popes, but it tends to be a rebirth of the Papacy. I doubt a medieval science fiction writer would have the Church decline or even guess at the Reformation.
Also, sci-fi tech tends to be, both aesthetically and functionally, an extension of tech the society it’s from already has – does a medieval space ship look like a siege tower? How do they envision the instant communication I’m sure they’d have to have as working? Would it be through magic (which is often the case in modern sci-fi)?
And what would the spirit of it be? I would argue that, while you can’t really generalize over an entire field, and there is certainly some bleak sci-fi, the general tenor of American sci-fi is hopeful & enamored of the human spirit. Is the point of medieval space travel to find God*? Will leaving Earth leave behind Original Sin? Are we going to convert the Martians?
DO they need instant communication? I mean, even star wars still has people carrying thumb drives around. There could be a pigeon analogue – sleek little machines flitting between the stars carrying messages, or perhaps creatures already native to the higher spheres suited to the task. Venusian swallowtails, mercurial spirits.
I’d love to see the heavenly spheres as a setting for this all on its own, too. What’s the first moment a traveler hears the music like?
I could see a lot of it through the lens of knights on impossible quests – why not ascend the sky? Knights riding on bright steeds of golden fire known as comets. Knights finding allegorical realms on the various planets, like the Kingdom of Love from Capellanus’ Treatise on The Arts of Courtly Love, but set in the golden mountains of Venus, and you could have a Kingdom of War and a Kingdom of Wit and a Kingdom of Time on Mercury and Mars and Saturn. Prester John could be from Jupiter!
I’m not sure about the ways I would expect medieval scifi to be subversive, but I might look at Marie de France for ideas, she plays a lot with expectation and obligation and the implications of gender in her Lais, in very clever ways.
medievals didn’t have the concept of vacuum, let alone know that space doesn’t have air. everything is open ships and space sails. gravity isn’t oriented to the planet, there’s a universal ‘down’. engines are driven by people or animals or wind or water, not burning fuel; your space chariot is pulled by cloud horses or sun lions.
other planets are not other earths, they’re allegorical locations populated by allegorical creatures. angels, demons, dreamers, cannibals, a planet of all women and a planet of all men – but not for 1950′s bikini shenanigans, more as a parable about how the sexes can’t get along without each other because men’s work and women’s work are both necessary. no concept that men could do women’s work and vice-versa, or at least do it competently. the men on the men’s planet would like, grow children in their fields, but wean them on burnt bread soaked in beer because they’re terrible at milking cows and kneading dough, or something like that.
there’s a Renaissance thing, Orlando Furioso, in which the knight Astolfo gets to the moon in Elijah’s burning chariot. (He goes to the moon because everything that has been lost on Earth can be found there, including Orlando’s sanity, because of course.)
I think I’d argue that theological allegory, like the Divine Comedy or the Vision of Piers Plowman, pretty much is medieval science fiction: speculations and warnings and encouragement, based on what is known-or-believed-to-be-known. As I understand it, the general opinion of medieval European scholars was that theology was THE most important thing to know about; studying the Creator more fervently than the creation was considered pretty much the same degree of Obviously Sensible as, say, studying birds doing bird things and being birds instead of just looking at empty nests and eggshells would be to us, like, why study mere side-effects when you can study The Entire Truth And Cause Of Everything? So I would argue that theology is the medieval version of twentieth century rocket science and atomic physics as The Coolest Thing To Know About, and thus spec fic based on it is the equivalent of science fiction.
You guys might enjoy a book I remember reading ages ago…Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters. I honestly can’t remember whether I liked it or not, but it’s basically “What if ancient astronomy was totally legit? Okay, adventure time.”
And, going in the opposite direction, for a modern example of someone writing in the style of a medieval travelogue but as if it were true science, check out Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. If you love history and sly wit, Eco’s your man.
I’m drawing a blank at how many people in Medieval Europe knew the Earth was round, and coming up with the possibility of a Universe shaped like an hourglass of sorts, with Earth as the flat plane through the smallest point in the middle, and the Infinite Heavens above and the equally-infinite Infernal Hell below, with “space travel” in two parts: man flying up to the realms of angels and heavenly spheres below the gates of Heaven, and man flying down to the realms of demons and diabolical spheres and, eventually, the gates of Hell.
These spheres would be I suppose something like the Death Star: round castles without an internal center of gravity, composed of layers on which people (or other entities) live and work. There would be spheres ruled by particular angels and demons, saints and noteworthy sinners, whose populace, society, and behavior are all based on that particular entity’s attributes.
The heavenly realms would have a lot of abundance and flying around on angels’ wings, and the infernal realms would have a lot of torture and riding on chariots of fire, and there would probably be a lot of stories focusing on what happens when a person from one side is displaced to the other, sometimes with them settling into (or succumbing to) their new environment, other times reshaping it into something more like themselves (an angel gets taken to hell, takes control of a sphere, and it rises into Heaven, full of rejoicing former-sinners filled with the Love of God, or a demon is brought to a celestial sphere by someone who wants to show off their power, and the demon carefully subverts the whole population and they rejoice as their sphere sinks down into Hell), and other times escaping back to their own place, or just travelling—perhaps there are Captain Jack Sparrow style characters that simply wander through and cause chaos through their “corkscrew in a world of straight lines” breezing through rules not meant to apply to them.
Dammit I want to write like six books’ worth of this now.
anyway it’s canadian thanksgiving and that means it’s the two year anniversary of when kyle, griffin and i drowned gerard way
canadian thanksgiving CAME AND WENT and i didn’t even THINK to partake in the only tradition that really matters: reblogging the tale of gerard way the turkey. three years ago we feared our tremendous boy. thank you. may we never forget.
I think people really underestimate how fucking evil a large chunk of American Christianity is, when they try to say to antichoicers “well if you’re against abortion, at least you should support things like WIC and SNAP, so that women facing an unplanned pregnancy can still feed their future kid”
I’ll be blunt, to American Christians like this, “but single mothers and their kids will starve!” is the entire fucking point. Being ostracized by your family and community and left for you and your bastard child to starve alone in abject misery and deprivation is what they believe the Godly punishment should be for being “unchaste,” and that things like food benefits and contraception are destroying moral society because they let women have unapproved sex without being as controlled by the fear of being cast out to starve with an unwanted kid (this also heavily ties into misogynist racism against woc, especially black women, who are accused of being “welfare queens,” draining good, properly chaste white Christians with kids born from their supposedly mindlessly lustful and irresponsible behavior, that can only be kept in check with threats of starvation or violence).
“Women (especially woc) cannot overcome their base urges and live virtuous lives without being heavily trained and coerced by threats of deprivation, isolation, and violence” is one of the most important unspoken ground rules of reactionary movements, both religious and secular
Evangelicals have no long-standing theological problem with abortion. My parents have been married for longer than evangelicals have been against abortion. Evangelicals in the 1970s didn’t care about abortion. Being against abortion was a Catholic thing. Evangelicals thought abortion is unfortunate, but not evil.
What changed?
Bob Jones v. US (1983).
Bob Jones University, an evangelical school, had a segregationist dating policy. It means what you think it does – they wouldn’t allow white students to date black students. They also wouldn’t admit black students who supported interracial marriage. This was in the mid-70s. Loving v Virginia was nearly a decade in the rearview mirror. The government threatened to revoke their tax-exempt status as a university unless this Jim Crow shit stopped. The school sued, and this eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Court, unsurprisingly, agreed with the government.
What was clear to evangelical leaders, then, in 1983, was that out-and-out racism was no longer going to be tolerated. What could they focus on that would have the same effect? What could rally the base without openly espousing racist views?
Reagan, with his “welfare queens” dog-whistle politicking gave them a like-minded politician glad of their support. And Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was only to happy to tell people what he thought of abortion.
So here we are, thirty-five years later, with every evangelical doing their damnedest to pretend that evangelicals have always been against abortion. They’ve lied themselves into believing it, and now they claim they’re against birth control too. That’s even more spurious – If they actually thought life begins at conception, then birth control would be a necessity, because fertilized eggs being rejected is the norm. Most of what they want to call human life never even gets implanted in the womb, or lasts very long if it does. And if they cared about life, welfare programs ought to be the most important, to ensure everyone has a good standard of living worthy of human beings.
But they don’t care about those things, so the only conclusion is that they are not pro-life. They just don’t want to see family planning and health care go to women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, etc.
It was never about being pro-life.
(and incidentally – Bob Jones v US was an 8-1 decision. Who was the dissenting voice? None other than William Rehnquist. Who was elevated to Chief Justice by Reagan when Warren Burger retired a few years later. None of what has happened has happened by accident)
And it’s worth noting that Bob Jones University defended their policy exclusively on religious freedom grounds, but Rehnquist’s dissent was based entirely on procedural grounds. Even the one justice who was “on their side” didn’t buy their argument and had to justify it on other grounds. It’s been a long road from BJU v. US to the Hobby Lobby case.
I have a similar theory about why evangelicals fight so hard against believing climate change when supposedly humans are stewards of the earth. It’s all about evolution. Climate change is a proxy war. It’s all the same rhetoric about scientists being corrupt and only looking out for their own interests and trying to shove their research down other people’s throats.
For a group of people who supposedly believe that God charged them with taking care of the Earth, they really seem to have bought into the whole “I can do whatever I want to the planet because God put us in charge of it” mindset really hard. Of course, maybe this is just the 21st century version of manifest destiny.
I think another problem is that with a large chunk of US evangelicalism, the world ending is what they want. The apocalypse means that the chosen few get carried off to heaven as a reward for beating the shit out of their gay kid or whatever, while the rest of us who failed to give the true believers the obedience respect that they feel entitled to are left behind to die in slow agony before being cast into eternal hell. It’s really hard to get people to give a shit about the planet dying when they view literally would have the world end to own the libs
It’s ABSOLUTELY what they want. During the Bush years, they were pretty up front about it, too. The entirety of the Evangelicals’ support of Israel is explicitly so that the Jewish People rebuild the Solomon’s Temple; which is a prerequisite for the events of Revelations to happen. The sooner it’s built, the sooner the Rapture can sweep them up into Heaven so they can laugh as all the “sinners” suffer the End Times. They don’t ACTUALLY care about Israelis or the long lasting sociopolitical factors of the area; they’re literally just pawns for the most death cult aspect of American Evangelical Christianity. It’s legitimately terrifying that people like this run large sections of a nation already capable of destroying all life on the planet.
It’s a fatal but common liberal mistake to assume that evangelicals are motivated by (misguided) compassion. They’re not. They will watch you die and be pleased about it because youve gone to hell faster.
Compromise: hobbits smoke both & lump them together as ‘pipeweed’
u never kno what ur gonna get when a hobbit offers u some “pipeweed”
‘pipeweed’ in the Shire just means ‘herbs u can smoke in a pipe’ and it’s common knowledge that there are pipeweeds that are smooth & relaxing to smoke and pipeweeds that’ll get you stoned and they know which is which.
For whatever reason only tobacco caught on outside the Shire so middle earth’s other smokers just took to calling it pipeweed bcos that’s what the hobbits they bought it from called it.
Of all the many wonderful, complex characters in Fullmetal Alchemist, I find that Izumi Curtis is one of the most nuanced and original, both within the series and in the shounen manga field. In a genre full of dead mothers and overbearing harpies, Izumi stands apart as a physically and magically talented fighter who is also an “ordinary housewife”; she has, most unusually for a shounen manga female character, survived not only childbirth but also an horrific, failed attempt to resurrect her dead baby.
She is chastened but not broken by the experience. Izumi is the only female alchemist within the series to have seen “the Truth.” Her payment is highly gendered – I take “my organs” (or “some of my insides,” as another scanslation group renders it) to mean her womb and ovaries. And she is the only character whose payment is neither returned nor compensated for with automail or a surrogate body*.
I think it is so gutsy (no pun intended) of Arakawa to have Izumi remain in this state. It feels so radical to see a woman whose worth extends far beyond her ability to give birth. Who lost a child but still finds meaning in her family, work, and community. Who has a fulfilling life but still mourns for and thinks about her lost baby, even after her guilt is assuaged. In another author’s hands, Izumi would be long dead, a woman with no value beyond her womb, existing only to provide fodder for another character’s development. Or she would be a villain, a broken woman madly hungering for what she cannot have. Or she would have her organs restored, and be shown pregnant or holding a newborn at the series end. Instead, Arakawa gives us a female character who is both happy and wanting, powerful and poignant, and presents those dualities as valid, inseparable aspects of a whole.
*Within the context of the FMA universe, adoption is shown as an option, but one which the Curtises appear not to have pursued. Surrogate pregnancy, I believe, is not discussed within the series.
I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017.
the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too.
he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it.
he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.
previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.
is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.
it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.
tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.
This is such a fabulous flip side of what I’ve always known about villians. That their biggest weakness is that they always assume their own motivations are the motives of others.
Well, right now I’m in Philadelphia (where I’m moving for an amazingattorney position) and I’m sitting in my best friend of eight years’ place, after we saw an apartment, got ice cream, made dinner, talked about—everything, so many things, all of them meaningful or lighthearted, and important to me or her or both of us.
So I’m pretty good.
It’s funny you ask me this question, though, because it’s something I’ve been struggling with a lot in the last couple years. (The state of the world being what it is.) And what it comes down to, for me, is a question of framing. No one questions there are bad things happening in the world, if your optimism is founded on bad things not happening, then you’re going to be largely disappointed.
But bad things don’t happen in a vacuum. We aren’t living in an amoral universe, or if we are, humans ascribe a hell of a lot of morality to it—to the point where bad things happen, and people are offended by it. People get angry. Then they get angrier. People want answers to why the bad thing happened, and how to stop the bad thing; some people even give up their relative comfort and dedicate their lives to stopping the bad thing, or risk violence and death and arrestto stop the bad thing; after the dust has cleared, they question whether, now that we’ve theoretically stopped the thing, was that sufficient? Were we really addressing the bad thing, or are there other things we should be doing instead, to stop that bad thing more completely and effectively?
In these days and times I cling, so strongly, to the fact that I am not alone in my anger and confusion. No one is. There are people standing alongside me who are even more angry, more disappointed; that I share a world with the angriest people you could find. I’m such a mild optimist, I get disappointed and depressed when I find out the world doesn’t obey my rules. When people let me down, when we aren’t our best or even our mediocre, I just have feelings.
Some people have riots.
I take incredible heart in that. However bad the world gets, people are there, ahead of and with me, and they’re fucking pissed. The universe can never be truly amoral. because there are those people, and I can trot after them, believing in goodness and truth and love because there’s also this profound and complete anger. It races ahead, a product of fury, faith and conviction. (It’s hard to communicate to the more comfortable people in my life, but it exists, and endures, and anger that demands an answer. Jesus had a whip of cords, modernity has more weapons at its disposal.)
And then, at the end of the day, I spent a couple hours sitting outside a park, watching a bunch of kids between 7 and 12 play one of those inexplicable circle games—I watched them for an hour and genuinely could not tell you the rules. But the sun was weakly out, and there was green grass, and children of various colors bouncing a blue ball on the concrete. I wasn’t hungry, and I wasn’t anything, and sitting there, I thought—jesus, I am so profoundly lucky. To be sitting here, content in my safety, warm in the sun, watching this. Children, also safe, playing a stupid game I don’t understand except they’re standing in a circle with a blue ball and playing it.
The universe doesn’t guarantee our safety and happiness. Even other people don’t guarantee our safety and happiness, and they actually have an active will that could make a promise like that. But despite that, safety and happiness exist.
Terrible things happen, and despite that, good things happen too. You can either focus on the former, or the latter.
just moving along like everyone else 