Pre-Polostan

I was fortunate enough to get to see and hear Neal Stephenson as part of his promotional tour for Polostan. Once again he was hosted by the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, this time in a conversation with another author, Charles C. Mann (who I think looks a little like Stephen King). I was pleased to see that the entire talk is available for free on YouTube, but since I've historically noted author events on this blog, I figured I'd drop at least a quick note here!

 

This is actually the fourth time (!!) I've gotten to hear Neal speak. The first was another Long Now event for his Anathem launch; that was the trippiest of the bunch, featuring a Gregorian chant choir. For REAMDE I saw him in another venue - I want to say the Swedish American Hall? - and actually go to briefly chat with him for the book signing, in a surprisingly intimate/sacred space, and geek out a little on a SHEKONDAR reference. Most recently was a bigger event at some nightclub space to promote Seveneves. This last one was at the SF JAZZ theater, a perfect venue for this sort of event that could accommodate a decent number of people while giving everyone a great view.

This is the first author event I've been to since the pandemic hit, and hadn't realized how much I've missed them. It isn't something I constantly did, but in any given year I'd normally go to one or two, so it's weird to have gone for nearly five years without any. They usually feel a little awkward to me, but familiar at the same time, and everyone acknowledges the awkwardness and is just happy to be around other people interested in the same thing (a dang book!).

The initial talk was pretty interesting. I'm always curious if and how much they prep in advance; apparently Neal and Charles have been friends for years, and I wonder if they had talked generally about what to talk about. The conversation seemed very natural and not rehearsed, but also Neal never really needed to pause and think about his reply, so I suspect at least some of it touched in areas that they may have previously discussed in private.

A few minutes in, Neal apologized for a persistent cough; he said that he had gotten a cold a month ago, and been completely recovered for a few weeks, but still had a tickle in his throat, "so you'll be hearing some gross sounds from me."

I especially enjoyed the event once it pivoted towards the Q&A portion. Volunteers distributed and collected cards, then they were screened in real time and periodically delivered to Charles, who would then review and ask them. I love this style of question-asking, which bypasses the agonizing experience of having a random person with mental issues monopolize attention.

I won't recap everything, but just noting a few particular things that stuck in my mind:

The very first audience question was a melodramatic query along the account of "Is there hope for the human race?" Neal said that he thinks we are facing two critical problems: carbon (in the atmosphere), and not being able to agree on what's real. For the first one, he's been growing more optimistic that people are working on it and it is a solvable problem. For the second one, he feels a lot of concern and hasn't seen good solutions. "Ask me in a month," he concluded.

There was a great rabbit-hole where Neal and Charles geeked out on their mutual love of Peter Fleming, Ian's brother and a far superior writer and human being. Peter was a journalist for British papers and had a very keen and cutting style. I really want to check out those books now; apparently they're out of print and hard to find, but worth it.

Charles asked at one point about how much of The Bomb Light series to expect, if it would be something like The Baroque Cycle. Neal said "Yes", basically. There are two books ready, definitely a third, maybe a fourth. The Baroque Cycle was essentially eight books that were bundled into three volumes, the Bomb Light will have "similar complexity". One thing that's nice about Bomb Light is that, because it's closer to our own time, he doesn't need to spend as many pages describing things: he can just say "He got into a car," he doesn't need to explain what a "car" is.

Charles asked about Neal's unconventional novel structures, citing examples like Seveneves's "Five thousand years later...", REAMDE being a several-hundred-page-long chase scene, Fall starting as a kind of social satire and morphing into something very different, and asked whether Neal intentionally rebels against the "neat and orderly" conventions. Neal said "Yes", basically; in a discursive answer, he described how he didn't follow the normal path towards being an author. You're supposed to keep a journal, then practice short stories, and eventually write a novel. Neal can't write short stories, and kind of accidentally discovered that he could write novels when he wrote The Big U during a week when he was stranded in a crummy Boston apartment. Likewise, people usually come up the sci-fi convention circuit starting as volunteers, and working up to panelists, and eventually featured speakers; but Neal entered that world as a featured speaker. "Most people don't mind", he notes. Anyways, he hasn't felt the need to conform, and his own inspirations have been authors who haven't conformed. He was particularly struck by William Gibson's "Neuromancer," which is absolutely science fiction, but written in a literary style; up until then, Neal hadn't realized that you could do that, and it was eye-opening to him. He also name-dropped David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon (yay!) as inspirational writers for him. I thought that was really cool, as I've recently been comparing Pynchon and Stephenson as well.

Someone asked if the cipher/code in The Baroque Cycle can be decoded, Neal says "Yes". It's really an invented language system by John Wilkins of the Royal Society; the idea was to create a graph of every concept we have (every physical thing, every idea, every action, etc.) and assign a unique number or glyph to each. Then you can communicate any sentence by listing what are essentially offsets into this database of universal knowledge. It was kind of a fad among Royal Society members for a short while, but obviously didn't catch on. Charles noted that Christopher Columbus's son had invented a similar system in the early 1500s, which apparently was news to Neal, so that was cool to see; that son also had invented the library cart catalog system. This discussion reminded me of Ithkuil, another attempt at creating a language to express all possible ideas, which was featured in an excellent New Yorker article many years ago.

Also on the subject of language, Neal talked about how some people noticed that the letter "O" looks a little like the shape of a mouth pronouncing the sound "O", and "that insight took them to a very dark place." They started thinking that you should be able to make all letters look like the physical shape that produces them. So, for example, they would take a cadaver's head, give a graduate student a pair of bellows and have them pump air through the severed throat up through the mouth, and they would try to move around the tongue and jaw to produce a particular sound and record what it "looked" like.

Needless to say, this did not catch on!

One person complimented Neal's very accurate portrayals of Eastern Europeans and asked how he was able to write them so well; his answer is basically to read as widely as possible, most of his "research" is done through reading, ideally from contemporary sources. Separately from that question they talked a fair bit about eastern Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union, including some things like Kerensky that I'm only familiar with thanks to having read October not too long ago.

Charles asked: does Neal need to explain what the Soviet Union is, in the same way he had to explain things in The Baroque Cycle? People of their age grew up with the USSR as a famous and existential threat, but people in their 20s today were born decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and may just not be very familiar with it. Neal pondered that briefly, then noted that this may actually be a benefit. During the time of the Bomb Light series, the West's perception of the USSR was very different than it would become in the 50s and later. This was before the purges started. It was after the man-made famine in Ukraine but before what had happened was widely known. This was a time when there was tremendous optimism and widespread support for Communism. So in some ways readers who can come to this book without pre-conceived notions about the USSR will be more on its level than people who know where things are headed. This also reminded me of October, and Mieville's great desire to communicate how people thought and felt while living in that historical moment, and not how we judge it in light of what came after.

At the end Charles asked about the status of adaptations of Neal's projects. I imagine that this is something which comes up in every interview or Q&A; I definitely recall Neal fielding it in earlier events I've seen him in. Basically, there are three projects that are being "actively worked on", but nothing is far enough along that it's worth really talking about or getting excited about. That isn't unusual, just how things work. Someone had the rights to D.O.D.O. for a while but those just came back to them, so they're trying to do something with that. Snow Crash is being worked on. He mentioned a third one but I forget now what that was - maybe Seveneves? Once again I'm surprised that nobody is trying to make REAMDE, that would be an amazing movie.

They noted that Neal was probably near the end of the time he should be speaking with an injured throat, so the program wrapped up and we all filed out into the night, happily holding our red-slipcovered signed books. I'm just a couple of chapters in, and am already very surprised that a particular detail from the first chapter wasn't mentioned at all during this event. But I will return to that after I finish the book and write that post!

Esau's Hurricane

I checked out Isaac's Storm from the library a few weeks ago. After reading and enjoying The Splendid and The Vile, I heard from a few family members that they had particularly enjoyed Erik Larson's earlier historical narrative about the great hurricane of 1900, which devastated the city of Galveston TX.

 

In between me checking out that book and actually starting to read it, the country has suffered another two historically painful hurricanes, Helene and Milton. While I haven't followed those storms super-closely, there's plenty of news of the devastation and anguish they have caused, and some of that contemporary news was fresh in my mind while reading this. Helene in particular felt kind of similar in the almost unbelievable way it unfolded: nobody had thought that a hurricane could strike the coast of Texas before it did, and nobody imagined that a hurricane could cause such devastation deep in inland North Carolina before it arrived.

As with his other books, Erik Larson writes in a novelistic style with characters, plots, dialogues and tension, but 100% backed by historical data. Every time a character "speaks" in the book, it's based on a contemporary recording. All of their movements and actions are based on data (when necessarily qualified with a "perhaps" or "maybe").

The primary character here is the titular Isaac Cline. A station chief for the nascent Weather Bureau positioned in Galveston, Isaac is uniquely positioned for a perspective on the storm: he's plugged into the Bureau bureaucracy, the science, the Galveston geography, culture, and so on. As with The Splendid and the Vile, though, there's a wide range of "supporting characters" filling the novel as well. One of the most poignant is Joseph, Isaac's younger brother. Joseph and a few other characters reappear thoughout the book, while others may only appear in a single scene.

After a dramatic opening, the book rewinds to the formation of the Weather Bureau and gradually progresses forward to 1900. Pretty much everything here was brand-new information for me. The Bureau started as a wing of the military, which wanted to systematize the gathering and reporting of weather information. Of course this is hugely important for warfare - as is demonstrated in a later meeting, a single hurricane can destroy more warships than enemy cannons, and being able to predict even a few hours out whether it will be rainy or sunny can have a huge impact on the decision to launch an infantry assault.

Isaac grew up in a tiny rural farming community, went to college, and was plucked to join the Bureau; but because it was a military operation, he also needed to practice swordsmanship, horseback riding, and other basic training of the day. A big part of this was signalling, the ancient art of communicating over long distances through flags, smoke fires, mirrors and so on. This wasn't used in practice, thanks to the relatively recent development and spread of the telegraph. Larson notes that prior to the telegraph there wouldn't have been any way for the Weather Bureau to function: it relied on near-instantaneous communication across a vast amount of space, collecting data in near real-time to get a better understanding of what systems were active and how they were moving. As with most books I read these days, I was reminded of William Bernstein, particularly The Birth of Plenty and its argument that the creation of the telegraph was the final pre-requisite for creating the modern economy.

I was a little surprised at first to learn that the modern National Weather Service started as a creation of the military, but in retrospect it makes a lot of sense. More recently, the Internet, GPS, Roombas and many other things were directly spawned by US military research and development, before spinning off and creating enormous civilian benefits.

It was cool to read about the start of weather forecasting as a science. I've recently been thinking about the origin of psychology and psychiatry. Prior to Freud, the mind was generally thought of as belonging to the religious/spiritual domain, something to discuss with your priest and not with a doctor or scientist. Like many founders of new sciences, Freud was wrong about most of the stuff he wrote about, and he promulgated some specific ideas that caused harm for multiple generations until they were eventually disproved and unwound. But Freud does deserve credit for creating a system around the mind, treating it as something that can be analyzed, experimented on and understood.

It's surprising how similar weather is. Isaac's Storm describes that many people thought it was blasphemous to attempt to predict the weather, because God creates the weather and only He knows what will happen. Much like Freud, the early Weather Bureau was almost comically bad at making forecasts: predicting clear skies immediately before enormous snowfalls, predicting warm weather right before steep freezes. But during this time they were systematically gathering data, refining their techniques and eventually learning from their mistakes and turning into the much more trustworthy National Weather Service we have today.

The NWS still isn't perfectly accurate, of course, as the two recent hurricanes demonstrate. But a huge and important change between 1900 and 2024 has been the embracing of humility. At the time of Isaac's Storm, it was official policy to deny any errors and spin misses into successes. Larson notes in the Afterword that today forecasters are far more willing to admit what they don't know. There's a high level of awareness that things can happen which have never happened before (like massive flooding in the mountains of North Carolina). Acknowledging these limits leads to some more couching, but also far more trust.

The storm itself is highly dramatic, but the human element was even more striking to me: the hubris and arrogance that not only kept people from preparing for the storm, but even know that it was coming. The most infuriating aspect is rooted around imperialism and racism: meteorologists on Cuba had spent several decades developing a very advanced forecasting tradition, drawing on the long knowledge of enduring Caribbean storms and recent scientific advancements. The Weather Bureau was also present on Cuba, and pooh-poohed the idea that the Cubans could predict better than them: they saw Cubans as ignorant superstitious barbarians. Their rivalry grew so intense that the Bureau actually blocked any telegraphs from leaving Cuba without first going through them, and they censored any predictions they didn't agree with. The Cubans correctly recognized that the storm was continuing west and would hit Texas, while the Bureau clung to their prior assumption that hurricanes invariably turn north and would enter through Florida. Even days after the disaster, the Bureau brass refused to recognize that the hurricane which devastated Galveston was the same one that had passed through Cuba days before.

There are of course many examples in human history of mankind turning a tragedy into a catastrophe, but the one that first comes to my mind is Chernobyl, as depicted in the excellent recent HBO miniseries. There as here, powerful natural forces cause the direct damage, but it is human arrogance, stubbornness, and clinging to bureaucracy that makes the situation far worse. The good news is that, in both cases, we can find ways to improve our systems: allowing for dissent, making hierarchies less rigid, being able to at least recognize the possibility of black swan events.

Most of what I've written about here has to do with the Bureau and stuff, which honestly interested me the most, but there's a lot of great personal drama in this book as well. Joseph Cline emerges as possibly the most poignant character of the book. When he's first introduced, I thought of him as the "lesser brother", and imagined him consumed by bitterness and jealousy of his more successful older brother; but by the end of the book he comes across as by far the more admirable brother: more honest, less self-aggrandizing, very brave.

I loved the rivalry between Galveston and Houston. I think that's one of those things that's hard for us to really appreciate from our modern standpoint: knowing how things end, it's hard to take Galveston seriously as a contender, but Larson does a great job at portraying just how optimistic city leaders were about their future destiny. That's another thing that felt uniquely turn-of-the-century, the kind of civic boosterism that seemingly prevailed everywhere west of the Appalachians. While Houston makes very few direct appearances here, each specific one is loaded with significance. The book ends with the discovery of the Spindletop gusher and the massive wealth that subsequently flowed to Houston and Texas; this lines up in some ways with Chernow's biography of Rockefeller, which likewise pays very little attention to Texas other than noting how oddly long it took for anyone to discover significant oil reserves outside of western Pennsylvania.

Near the end of the book, while the storm ravages Galveston, we see some really macabre scenes. One of the most affecting describes how, as the storm was growing more intense, the nuns at an orphanage attempted to protect the children by collecting them in groups and connecting them together with a rope line, keeping anyone from getting lost. After the storm passed, a rescuer found a dead child on the beach, and when attempting to retrieve the body, dragged up another dozen bodies and a nun's. The rope that was meant to protect them all ended up dooming them all.

Anecdotes like that help communicate the gravity of the destruction. Reading the death toll numbers sounds bad - early reports put it at a few hundred, then over a thousand, and eventually as many as 10,000. But personally I have a hard time emotionally connecting to a raw statistic: 100, 1000, 10000 deaths all sound bad. Having those personal stories really helps humanize the particular losses, which you can then extrapolate out to the scale of the suffering.

So, yeah! Not the most cheerful book I've read, but a really compelling and shockingly readable one. I finished almost the entire book in a single day, which is almost unheard of for me: I'll typically plug away at something over a week or more during transit rides and occasional evenings, but this particular one I picked up on a Saturday morning and had almost finished by the time I went to bed. Larson is a terrific writer, taking an incident I was barely aware of, illuminating it, placing it in the historical context and drawing some really great lessons from it.

Iron Lung

A common joke among Paradox Grand Strategy game players goes something like "I have 400 hours in this game, so I'm almost done with the tutorial." It's a truer statement than you might think. These games are dense. It isn't just that they have steep learning curves, but that there is so much to learn, and almost everything is interlocked with everything else. It's incredibly satisfying to feel your brain grow and stretch as you learn the game, but also extremely daunting.

 

 

I recently picked up Hearts of Iron IV on a Steam Sale. It's been on my radar for a while, as are all of the other games in this portfolio. Very roughly:

• Imperator: Rome: ~300BC - ~1AD
  
• Crusader Kings: ~900 - 1453
• Europa Universalis: 1444 - 1821
• Victoria: 1836 - 1936
• Hearts of Iron: 1936 - 1948
• Stellaris: 2200 - 2500
  

I've mostly been interested in Victoria and HoI due to my increasing interest in economic and social developments during this era. It seemed like a fun way to dig a bit deeper into these ideas and maybe play around with some alternate-history scenarios.

 

 

I came to this game with a false sense of confidence in mastering its mechanics. After all, I've already gotten decent at EU4 and Stellaris, and all of these games are built on the same Clausewitz engine. Obviously the HOI4 timeline is much more compact, but surely it would be a lot easier to master my third Paradox game.

So far, that has not proven to be true! There are some graphical similarities - in particular, the use of real-world provinces drawn on actual maps (as opposed to Civ-style square or hex translations of geography), and the menus have the same very dense appearance. But the mechanics are hugely different. In no particular order:

 

Combat is much more granular, particularly in your troop design. I suppose the ship designer in Stellaris is a very rough analogue, but a significant part of the game revolves around designing your divisions: how many infantry, artillery, etc. to put in a single division template, then how those divisions are assembled into armies and army groups. Where Stellaris and EU4 just has a handful of stats to track (like "Sublight Speed" or "Shock"), there are far more in HOI.

There are entirely separate map modes for infantry, navy, and air units, and each of them work significantly differently from the others. In EU4 and Stellaris these units are different but interact on the same map.

The economy is completely different, being resource-driven as opposed to money-driven. In Stellaris, "Energy" is your main currency; in EU4, "Ducats". There is no equivalent to those in HOI4. Instead, you produce specific resources: aluminum, steel, oil, rubber, etc. Those resources are required to make the equipment that supplies your troops that fill your divisions that get deployed to the field. If you're low on resources, you'll need to trade for them, or conquer for them.

Oddly, while the design of units is much more tactical in this game, actual warfare is much more strategic. You'll typically declare a "front line", assemble troops near the border, and develop a battle plan that defines your objective. Once the plan starts, though, your troops move mostly on autopilot: they'll find the appropriate areas to assault, fall back to recover when pressed too far, jump back into the fray when ready, flank and encircle enemies when they can, defend against counterattacks, and continue their big-picture advance until their objective is secured. There's almost no babysitting (at least in my limited gametime so far), just occasionally checking in on their progress, which is a huge difference from the more hands-on wars of Stellaris and EU4.

Technology is much more like the classic Civilization tree than either the anonymous EU tree (where you're researching without knowing exactly what you'll discover) or the semi-randomized Stellaris cluster (gradually unlocking higher "tiers" but largely free of prerequisites, with only a few options available of many unlocked at any given point). In HOI4, you can see the entire tree from the start, and can pick any item available from the tree. Given the short timeline, these are very granular: you can research a very specific model of a battleship, or something that will improve the productivity of your refining plants, along with a few genuinely transformational technologies like Radio and Nuclear Fission. (Which is a great reminder of the incredible strides in science that occurred in an astonishing short number of years!)

 

Leaders are a bit like Stellaris commanders (nee Admirals and Generals) or EU4 military leaders. But, as with most combat, they are much more granular, with a huge tree of unlockable options. Those options are kind of like Traits in Stellaris, but are almost entirely player-driven (though leaders do often start with a few and may occasionally unlock some during combat).

A quick summary of my own game:

The in-game tutorial has you playing as Italy from 1936, which is actually a pretty great way to learn the game. You start off fighting a war against Ethiopia, which is significantly weaker than you. In most of these games I specifically try to avoid war for my first game or two so I can master the other systems before taking on that added complexity; in HOI4, though, I'm finding actual combat a lot easier than the economic/production/recruitment system, so learning that first works well.

 

The tutorial is well-designed and integrated into the game, which I appreciated and did not take for granted; I still remember when the in-game EU3 tutorial was completely broken because it required objectives that were no longer present after a more recent update to the game. Following the guide I massed troops at the northern and southern borders and ordered them to converge in Addis Ababa. My northern wing made swift advances and captured the capital soon; movement and fighting were significantly slower in the south, with long, drawn-out combat all along the front. I'm not sure if this is because my northern force had air support and the southern didn't, because my northern force had a higher-ranked general, or just more troops. If I were to play this again, I would relocate my entire air force (mostly based in Italy but also with some wings in Libya and elsewhere) and provide more support throughout the theater.

 

The tutorial proper ends with the annexation of Ethiopia, but after that the in-game Decisions / objectives / goals take over. These give great mid-level targets to work towards, including things like stamping out resistance and increasing compliance in Ethiopia, building more factories, recruiting more soldiers, etc. They work as a sort of extended tutorial, prompting you to figure out how to do these things.

Shortly after the Ethiopian war wrapped, the Spanish Civil War broke out. A big part of the reason I bought this game in the first place was a fantasy of leading the FAI/CNT to victory, but in this game I followed the historical precedent of sending "volunteers" to assist the Nationalists. This introduced a whole other set of mechanics, with an entirely separate theater for this war, but also gave me a lot of valuable (real-life) (though I guess also in-game!) experience with combat. I only had three units there, but got to observe a lot of battles, including my first glimpse of Soviet tanks. We inserted in the northwest and managed to (re-)conquer the north coast. Around this time the Catalan Free Republic revolted, starting a three-way war against the Nationalists and Republicans. I stayed focused on the Republicans, the CFR was able to conquer a good chunk of the Republicans and then got chunked by the Nationalists and their Reich allies.

 

Japan declared on China during the Spanish Civil War. In both cases, I improved relations with the fascist countries for a few weeks, then sent attachés. This ended up pretty much completely consuming my Command Power (50 CP for each attaché, plus 20 for each of my Military Cabinet ministers), but gives a significant source of XP even without fighting.

Probably my favorite part of HOI4 so far has been the Focus Tree. This is somewhat similar to the Mission Tree of EU4, but is more like a tech tree in that you select one item and spend some time to progress it rather than having a discrete goal to work towards. This seems to be where a lot of the historical and alt-historical aspects of HOI4 come about: I initially followed a fairly accurate path dealing with creation of military police in Africa and developing that region, along with some scientific and industrial reforms; more recently, I have been getting heavily involved in the Balkans, variously propping up pretenders to thrones, bullying small nations into personal unions, and outright taking small states. I recently created the Italian Confederation faction, severing the possibility of cooperation with the Reich. There are tons of other directions to go in, though, including (if the war in Ethiopia leads to the disgrace and removal of Mussolini) a rekindling of the Great War alliance with France and England; or a communist uprising and joining with the Communist Faction. There's even a path to creating a new Roman Empire, just like the Mare Nostrum achievement of EU4.

 

So, where do I go from here? I'm not sure! Part of me wants to muddle further along as Italy as I try to grok the systems at play. Another part wants to try that Spanish Republic game. Or some other alternate history path, like a Trotskyist revolution in the Soviet Union.

 

Or I may just pause this indefinitely. I am reminded that war is usually one of my least favorite parts of 4X/Grand Strategy games, and in retrospect picking up the entirely war-focused Hearts Of Iron may not have been the smartest move on my part! I have been feeling freshly tempted to start a new EU4 game (despite knowing that can be a several-hundreds-hours-long commitment) or firing up Stellaris again. But this may all be moot if it turns out that Dragon Age Veilguard is good after all. We will see!

Democracy (Yeah You Know Me)

As usual, the 2024 California ballot is a long one! I usually know out the gate how I'll be voting in the political races, but the propositions and measures usually take a bit more research. For future reference, here is how I am casting my vote!

President and Vice President: Kamala D. Harris and Tim Walz

Senator: Adam B. Schiff (ugh)

Senator Again For Some Reason: Adam B. Schiff (still ugh)

US Representative: Kevin Mullin

State Senator: Josh Becker

Assembly Member: Diane Papan

San Mateo County Board of Education: Maurice Goodman

Proposition 2 (bonds for schools): Yes

Proposition 3 (constitutional right to gay marriage): Yes

Proposition 4 (bonds for water projects): Yes

Proposition 5 (lowers required local votes for housing bonds to 55%): Yes

Proposition 6 (abolish forced labor in prisons): Yes

Proposition 32 (raise minimum wage): Yes

Proposition 33 (allows local rent control): Yes

Proposition 34 (revenge for Prop 33): No

Proposition 35 (medi-cal funding): No (I actually like what this would do, but it should be handled by the legislature, not a proposition)

Proposition 36 (repeal Prop 47, re-felonize most thefts): No

Measure J (Millbrae elementary school bond funding): Yes

Measure FF (Expand city council term limits from 2 consecutive to 3 consecutive): No

I have increasingly mixed feelings on our top-two primary/election system. I feel like early on it was really effective for shaking up ineffective but entrenched Democratic incumbents, and let to much more dynamic and competitive elections. In recent years, though, at least at the statewide level, the (usually centrist) Democrats have come up with an effective playbook of elevating marginal Republican candidates who can't win in a general election, so they can coast to an easy victory instead of competing against another Democrat who has a shot. The Harris/Sanchez and Feinstein/DeLeon races were actually interesting, while Schiff/Garvey is not. I increasingly think that ranked-choice with instant runoff is the way to go.

For better or worse, the fall elections can be simplified quite a bit thanks to candidates running unopposed in the first round or (for some races) a candidate winning by a huge margin and skipping the "runoff". Just a reminder to vote in every election to make sure that your vote actually counts, and to see the candidate(s) you'd like to see!

I'm taking a bit of a chill-pill in this election on my standard "vote No on Bonds" principle. I don't really have a great reason for that, more just a general feeling that these are worthy enough projects to overcome my dislike of bonds.

I am feeling a slight amount of relief at casting my vote early, but obviously still have plenty of angst to spare between now and the election. Living in California and the Bay Area, there aren't many competitive races or measures to focus on. If you're like me and have some extra bucks that you'd like to send to a good political cause, I recently started using Oath. This gives a good way to find down-ballot races throughout the country, races that are spending thousands instead of millions of dollars and where your donations can make an outsized impact. They have a pretty nice interface where you can filter by causes you're most passionate about (like climate change, gun safety, mental health, etc.) and specific states. You can donate to specific candidates, which I generally like more than giving to committees and organizations. (The great thing about Oath is that they only focus on competitive elections, so you aren't tempted to waste your money on high-profile but hopeless challengers to, like, Mitch McConnell or Marjorie Taylor Green.) And unlike a lot of other platforms, Oath doesn't share your email address with the candidates, which helps cut down on inbox spam.

So, yeah! I have lots of Thoughts and Feelings about this election, but probably nothing that would surprise long-term readers, so I may or may not write that up in a separate post. I hope everyone stays safe & practices good self-care during this intense time!

Spar

Nicola Griffith has become one of my go-to authors: as soon as I hear of a new book from her, I know I'll pick it up. Not necessarily on Day One, but I immediately look forward to reading it, and avoid any reviews, summaries or other information that may color my initial reading.

 

In a bit of reverse chronology, I finished reading Spear (written in 2022) after Menewood (written in 2023). I think that in my mind I had somewhat conflated the two: they're both set in England near the middle of the first millennium and (as usual for Griffith) feature awesome lady protagonists.

MINI SPOILERS

They are pretty different, though. Menewood, like Hild before it, is a doorstop of a book, while Spear is much briefer at just around 150 pages. Both books feel anchored in their historical moments and geographical places, while also inviting in a sense of mysticism: but in Hild/Menewood that mysticism is itself grounded in history, and we can see both the secular origins of mystery and the effect it has on peoples' minds; in Spear, the magic actually is real, and the novel slowly grows in the direction of myth and legend.

It took quite a while into Spear for me to get a bead on the question of "is magic real or not". The protagonist is initially nameless, just known as "the girl" or "her." Eventually, she wins a name for herself: Peretur, referencing her self-trained skill with a spear. She has special qualities from the start of the novel: able to calm animals, to sense changes in the weather. Later on these become increasingly special and uncanny: during a duel in a stream, she recognizes by a movement in her opponent's eyes that there is a root hidden beneath the water, and she is able to avoid stepping in it. It isn't until nearly halfway through the book that we realize she can have actual visions: seeing things far away, or that nobody else can see: not merely heightened senses and keen perception, but a real sixth sense, combining telepathy and divination. This isn't a magic to hurl fireballs or call down rain or compel men: it's a magic that makes her the best at things other people can do.

Unlike Hild, who had great wisdom and carved out a unique role for herself as a "freemartin", protected by her boldness and strangeness, Peretur cloaks herself (literally and figuratively) in a man's garb. She wants to be a fighting companion of the king, and no woman can do that, so she presents herself as a man. Since this is more of a fantasy, she probably could have succeeded without the ruse, but it adds a really great layer to the story. The narrative always refers to Peretur as "she" while the dialogue usually uses "he". I kept half-expecting her to be found out, but that doesn't really happen: a few others do learn, but only when she chooses to share with them.

MEGA SPOILERS

It's great fun to discover, surprisingly far into the book, that this is a reimagining of one of the Arthurian legends. We start to hear of King Artos, also called Arturus; later on we meet Llanza, Gwenhwyfair, Myrddin and others - all very Welsh, obviously. Peretur herself turns out to be Sir Percival, who discovers the Holy Grail.

One of the things I liked best about this book was how, when you learn new things later in the book, they illuminate things from earlier in the story. One of the biggest examples is the bowl: one of Peretur's earliest memories is the black, decorated bowl that her mother Elen used for water and cooking. Much later, we learn that this bowl is one of the four great treasures of the Tuatha: her mother stole it from Manandan, one of these godlike creatures, as revenge and payment for her captivation. I'm pretty sure that this is the same item as the Cauldron as depicted in Lloyd Alexander's Black Cauldron; in this book, it's one and the same as the Grail as in the Quest for the Holy Grail. And this bowl/cup/grail/cauldron is the source of Peretur's great abilities: the bowl confers immortality, and by casually drinking from it from a young age, Petetur has absorbed god-like abilities.

As with many of Griffith's other novels, this one features an excellent romance. There's a sweet casual-ish connection between the young Peretur and an innkeeper's daughter that in some ways reminded me of Hild's "bed games", simultaneously sweet and no-strings-attached. The main romance is between Peretur and Nimue, Myrddin's apprentice and captor. Once again, there's a unique spin on the classic mythology here: Nimue is once again a young woman who learns sorcery from Merlin and eventually imprisons him: but in Spear, Myrddin is a manipulative jerk, stealing Nimue's power while pretending to grant his to her, and shaping her into an accomplice to help seize the Tuath treasures. Rather than a betrayal, her imprisonment of Myrddin is an act of justice. Anyways, Nimue is understandably wary of Peretur: her magic, her power, and, as we eventually learn, her kinship with Myrddin. But they work through this and secure a really wonderful relationship.

END SPOILERS

The book also includes an afterword that I found really interesting, describing Griffith's long interest since childhood in these kinds of stories, the various historical and literary antecedents of the tales, and how she as a writer found her way into this particular novel. That raised a few connections I had missed while reading the book but that make perfect sense in retrospect.

The timing of this post is somewhat fortuitous, as Nicola just announced today the republication of her Aud Torvingen novels! I don't think I ever blogged about these since I felt like I didn't have anything particularly insightful to say, but I highly enjoyed them: great hard-boiled modern noir mysteries with (as usual) a vivid and compelling protagonist and sharp writing. She has previously blogged about the ordeal in dealing with these books: although it is a linear trilogy, each had a separate publisher, and none of them were ever motivated to publicize the other books or offer a unified visual appearance. After a LONG time she got the rights back, and I'm sure she's thrilled to finally have them presented as she'd like them.

Anyways! I highly enjoyed Spear, and I think just about anyone would like it. It's a much easier commitment than Hild, familiar enough to be accessible, unique enough to be intriguing, with great characters and telling its own flavor of a heroic journey.