Bohemian Rhapsody

Still feeling too raw to write about the election. I don't think I have any particular insight to share. I suspect I'll have something to say before the inauguration.

I've been coping/escaping by diving back into Europa Universalis IV. For much of the time I was playing Hearts of Iron IV I found myself wishing that I was playing EU4 instead, so now I am!

This is my long-anticipated game focused on playing within the Holy Roman Empire. The HRE is probably the singular distinctive feature of the EU series of games, with really specific mechanics and a ton of flavor rooted in late-medieval and early-modern history. In my grand Portugal game I mostly just observed it from afar, except for the insanely exciting World War Zero campaign which may have been the highlight of a very long and very fun game.

That Portugal run ended when, in a bizarre turn of luck, I was crowned the Emperor of the HRE despite being way the heck over in Iberia. In that game, I helped the Catholic League keep Catholicism as the official faith of the Empire; but the HRE was overwhelmingly Protestant, so no major princes were eligible to be Emperor. The crown passed through a series of weak and tiny one-province minors, who would invariably get stomped when called to defend territory. It turns out that, in a "There's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball!" turn, nothing requires the Emperor to actually be a member of the Empire, and so, as an extremely well-liked and very powerful Catholic country, I got tagged in at the end.

Back to the present: I spent just a little while deciding which country to play as. Unlike EU3, where playing as a one-province or two-province minor can be a fun challenge, in EU4 it's a major slog, and larger countries are way better. The obvious answer was to play as Austria, the initial Emperor in 1444, but for some reason I shied away from that; I think it seemed a bit too obvious. I was more attracted to Bohemia, very roughly the modern-day Czech Republic. They're an Elector, so they can influence who becomes Emperor (including themselves); they're fairly large, not quite as big as Austria but bigger than most states; they're a Kingdom as opposed to a Duchy and get various bonuses as a result; they're on the eastern edge of the HRE, so they have options both for expanding inside of it and expanding outside; and over the years they've gotten a fair amount of additional content, including unique Missions, events, and even a related religion.

The religion might be the thing that intrigued me the most. Part of the "Emperor" DLC that I had previously picked up included content related to the Hussites, a sort of proto-Protestant reform sect that had emerged in Bohemia some years earlier; by 1444 it had been repressed, which in-game is represented by the official religion being Catholic but several provinces within the country, including the capital Prague, being Hussite.

I fired up the game and, as I do, immediately started work on converting those provinces back to Catholic. Politically, Bohemia starts off without a ruler: they had previously been in a personal union with Hungary, but that king died before the start of the game, so you're under a regency council. After a year or two, a new king is chosen, with pretty good stats - I think like 5/3/4 or something.

Some time after that an event fires about resolving the legacy of the Hussites. You can choose to suppress the faith, which boosts your missionary effectiveness at the cost of increased unrest; or you can continue to tolerate it, which increases, well, Tolerance of Heretics, and kicks off another event chain. I chose the first option to speed up conversions. But at the game went on, I wondered: Why? My Portugal game had been very Catholic-heavy, and that was all well and good, but since I was playing a whole new game, why not try out a different religion for a change?

For me, one of the hallmarks of a Paradox game is restarting several times at the beginning of a new campaign. In Stellaris I'll usually lock into the species I want to play as and my overall goals, and will play a few decades for multiple games until I find a galaxy that looks like a good match for my game. In EU4, I'll flail through the opening scenarios, figure out what dangers to be scared of and what opportunities to work for, and likely restart a few times until I feel like I can get the game off on a good foot.

In addition to the religion, I also realized that the in-game Missions I was seeing didn't match up with what I saw on the wiki. After some searching, I realized that this is because the most recent DLC "Winds of Change" added new content for Bohemia, including another revamp of their mission tree. This is a relatively recent change, I think starting with "Lions of the North", where there are branching missions available. For Bohemia, for example, you can either follow a Catholic-themed path of religious missions or a Hussite-themed one. While traditionally the missions have been based on actual historical events or attempts, Paradox is increasingly playing with "What if?" scenarios that are fleshed out by the game (and not just by the player).

The community consensus seems to be that EU4 is probably nearing its end and EU5 can't be too far off. The game is over 11 years old now, the oldest in this portfolio. Every major and most minor nations have received DLC content, and, as some mildly annoyed commenters have commented, quite a few nations have received multiple rounds: Bohemia had already gotten a significant overhaul in Emperor, did it really "need" more updates?

As I eventually learned (once I was too far into my game to feel good about a restart) it's even worse than that. After getting further down the Hussite mission tree I unlocked a religious Aspect of Faith that costs 200 Church Power and lets you declare war on any neighboring heretic religion (like the "Deus Vult" casus belli from Religious Ideas). But it showed up with an "X" on my screen, and didn't seem to actually unlock the ability. After yet more research, I learned that this ability is actually locked behind the Domination DLC, one of the few that I don't actually own. Even if I were to buy it now, I couldn't continue this Ironman save and earn achievements. Most annoyingly, Bohemia isn't mentioned anywhere on the product page for Domination, so it isn't even like I failed in my research. I found myself missing the icons that Stellaris shows when you're starting a game that suggest DLC which would augment the specific species you're playing at; seeing something like that here before starting the Bohemia game would have been really helpful.

Going back to the campaign: in the one I ended up rolling with, I had my missionary just chill for a few years. After a couple of decisions, we officially converted to Hussite and I set about converting my provinces.

 

I do really like the mission tree in EU4, it gives some great medium-term goals to work towards. Some of mine were diplomatic: you start off with two vassals to the east, and have some missions that encourage integrating them. The bigger and more challenging ones have to do with enforcing Personal Unions over Poland and Hungary. I knew that I'd need big allies for this, so I cozied up to Muscovy and the Ottomans. This turned out to not be very helpful, as they were constantly deep in debt and unwilling to heed my call to arms.

While waiting for my backup to become available, I turned towards some more traditional expansion. In my Portugal game, one of the most important things was controlling Centers of Trade so you could dominate a trade node and get the income from it. Bohemia is mostly in the Saxony trade node. Prague itself is a big center of trade, and there were a few other ones within striking distance. I fought some wars against, hm, I think Brandenberg and Saxony and one other country to take some more. This made me: extremely unpopular! Besides the massive Aggressive Expansion, you also get huge relational maluses from holding "unlawful territory", which seems to happen basically any time you conquer from another state in the HRE. There are a few ways to avoid this but they aren't simple: disband the HRE, become the Emperor, or ally the Emperor. Despite only taking a grand total of maybe 4 provinces I was looking at like 70 years' worth of negative opinion! It sounds like the recommended/preferred way of expanding with the HRE is to instead vassalize your opponents and eventually integrate them, which I guess is more historically accurate. In my case, though, I specifically wanted those provinces now to juice my economy.

Dealing with Austria has been pretty fun. In my first attempt I allied with them, but in this game we started as mutual rivals, which works well for an early mission you have to Humiliate Austria. That was actually the first thing I did in my last couple of games: get some allies together, declare war on them, and get them to concede defeat. This is a great start to the Bohemia game as it gets your Power Projection way up early on and weakens a potentially dangerous neighbor, plus you don't need to take any provinces (at least for this mission) so you don't need to worry about any Aggressive Expansion or Unlawful Territory.

I'm not sure if it was a result of this, but Austria also lost the Emperorship in this game, which has been great; we've had a few Emperors since then and, despite Austria being by far the strongest Catholic country in the HRE, they haven't been invited back in. Austria isn't an Elector, but so far none of the other Emperors have been Electors either. I have at least some influence in this, as I'll back whichever non-Austrian candidate has the most support; but by this point nobody is backing Austria. I wonder if they just lost a ton of Prestige in that war or if some other mechanic is at play.

Back to the east: my plan had been to get Muscovy to help me take Poland/Lithuania and have the Ottomans help me with Hungary. I'd been currying favors for decades and had around 80 favors with each of them. Muscovy never did help, but the Ottomans ended up pitching in for both wars. The "Restoration of Union" casus belli has a fixed warscore requirement, so it's doable regardless of how large the target is; but it's a high warscore, so these are long and grinding wars.

 

They also make you very unpopular. I gulped when I saw the Aggressive Expansion warnings: basically everyone in central Europe would be furious at me. And, after taking Hungary, even furiouser.

My economy was doing pretty well by this point, with some decent trade supplementing my already-high production income, and I opted to become Defender of the Faith. I'd convinced my vassals and now my Personal Unions to follow the Hussite faith, so this came with some really nice bonuses like steady decreases to War Weariness even in wartime, increased missionary effectiveness, and extra prestige.

That aggressive expansion is no joke, though. In my Portugal game I'd done a good job at keeping it at bay: alternating conquests between different geographic areas and religions so it would decay before becoming too big of a problem, and by the point it did become a possibility, I had become so powerful that nobody dared attack me. I think the only time I saw coalitions form in that game was when I was occupied with war against massive opponents like the Ming Dynasty; as soon as the war ended, the coalition would dissolve.

 

In this game, though, I had been basically spitting in the face of European Catholicism for the last 50 years, and they were fed up with me. The coalition exploded in size, and I knew that (Ralph Wiggum voice) I'm in danger. The singular large powers like Castile, France and England were too far away to be affected, but the sheer number of princedoms with like 7k soldiers each was dwarfing even my Bohemian-Polish-Lithuanian-Hungarian family.

I knew from reading the wiki that I should declare on the coalition rather than wait for them to declare on me, since the Coalition Casus Belli has an additional -30 penalty to accepting peace. I also knew that I didn't have any realistic hope of winning this war. My goal was to fire it, make peace on the least painful terms, and use the long truce time to repair relations and prevent the coalition from re-forming.

I ended up declaring on the Teutonic Order, a coalition member that was sandwiched between me and Poland. Everyone I was worried about was on my western border, and by taking a Teutonic province early I could get ticking warscore to partially offset the many penalties I was looking at. This ended up working out okay, about as well as I expected: my fully-garrisoned forts were able to hold out for a while as we defeated the few coalition members in the heartland, won a few minor skirmishes around the periphery, and, after a year or two, came to the table.

Another benefit of having the Teutonic Order be the target was that it was mostly their concerns I had to worry about: a Germanic target would have wanted back Saxony or another important province of mine, but in this case, I could cede my partner Poland's land. I spent some time here, picking provinces that didn't have a lot of Trade Power and weren't coastal, and ended up filling in war score with some ducats. In EU4, unlike in say Civilization, losing a war usually isn't a big deal. In this case, Poland already had cores on all the provinces I was surrendering, so I knew that once our truce was up I would be able to win them back at a fraction of the cost.

So, that was exciting, and a bit of a relief. I definitely took it easy for a while after this, letting my aggressive expansion and unlawful territory tick down and my manpower and ducats tick up. One unexpected bummer, which I didn't realize for a couple of years, was that I had lost my "Defender of the Faith" title: apparently you lose this if you lose any war, not just a war where you're called in to defend your brothers in faith. So that was 500 ducats down the drain. Even when I had the money to get it back, I shied away from it: by now it was the late 1400s, the Reformation was probably coming up soon, and as I was planning to switch to Protestant it probably didn't make sense to be the Hussite Defender of Faith for only a few decades.

 

During this "down time", though, I achieved my biggest territorial expansion of the game to date. Earlier on, I had managed to win the Burgundian Inheritance, one of the most significant events of the early game. Despite being different faiths, I had befriended Duke Charles and allied with him, so once he passed, his daughter Marie entered into a personal union with us. The HRE demanded releasing the lowlands; by this time the Emperorship had passed to some podunk prince, and I happily said "No" and fought to keep all the territory. Eventually Marie passed as well and the Burgundian lands all became Bohemian.

 

This wasn't part of my initial plan for the game, and definitely complicates a lot of things. Burgundy is obviously not contiguous with Bohemia, so I can't move my troops between them without 4-5 military access agreements with minor Germanic states. The provinces are all Catholic and of different cultures. Still, it's a big net benefit. You get free full cores on all of these lands, so it's a huge boost to manpower, tax and overall income. I still need to figure out what to do about trade. They participate in the English Channel (one of three terminal trade nodes) and Bordeaux; I'm currently pushing trade upstream but I know that's very inefficient. Over the very long term it might make sense to collect trade in the English Channel, but I don't have nearly enough trade power there yet, and would need to push my main Saxony power through some intermediate nodes where I have zero power. If this wasn't Ironman I would experiment with using my merchants to collect from multiple nodes instead of steering to Saxony and see how it compares. Heck, maybe I'll just try that anyways, I guess I'd only need to compare a couple of months.

 

 

The current situation I'm dealing with is the Lowlands Revolt. In most games the Netherlands emerge around this time, and I'm fighting really hard to keep that from happening. It's a lot harder than normal rebel suppression: in addition to the mechanics of the +10 local unrest, you get periodic events that just straight-up spawn a large rebel army in a Low Countries province. So basically I'll need to babysit this area for the next 20 years, which in turn means that my Balkan ambitions will probably be on hold for a while.

But that's fine. The Reformation did fire. I knew that there would be an event to convert from Hussite to Protestant, but I wasn't sure if it would convert every province or not. It turns out that it does, yay: or at least every province in your border. I had enforced religion on a few other nations over the years and almost all of them converted as well, except for The Palatinate which has remained Hussite. So we've got a nice head start on the Reformation.

 

In this game, the Reformation started southwest of Denmark, and so far the Centers of Reformation have mostly been along the North Sea and Baltic coastlines. I'm killing time while babysitting rebellions by declaring wars on small states and forcing them to become Protestant. It's pretty fun! Helpful too - apparently switching religions drops Prestige by 100 (!!!), so I was deeply negative for a while, and these wars are helping it to come back up.

It's also been a nice way to mess with the Catholic majors - they've started taking Defender of the Faith, so I'll like to declare a war on a small country far away, occupy it to get to -99 war enthusiasm, force religion on them (plus war reparations, ducats, and whatever else I can prestigiously demand), and take away the title from the Catholic Defender. This has been especially funny against Portugal, as they have to walk all the way across Europe and can't even get there before the war is done. Once that war is over, the next one won't have a Catholic Defender, so I can pick a larger target or one with more allies and take my time separate-peacing all of them.

Let's see, I think those are the major developments so far! My current plan is to keep doing this while the Lowlands Revolt is in place, hopefully getting together a lot more friends and prestige. Then I might finally take the Mission to subjugate Brandenberg and Saxony, since my Aggressive Expansion is mostly gone. Hungary is a bit of a problem: my rivals England, France, Castile and Muscovy are all supporting rebels there, so I can't lower their Liberty Desire. I'm hoping to eventually inherit them, but need to read up on the mechanics for that, they may just be too large. In any case, I want to go further down that tree for the "defend against the Turk" missions to reclaim the Balkans. I've already lined up Venice and the Mamluks as allies; the Ottomans are big but haven't fully blobbed yet so I think this will be my best chance.

Oankali

I'm continuing to gradually poke my way through Octavia Butler's books. It's kind of funny, I've been vaguely aware of her for a while but hadn't realized she wrote science fiction until quite recently. I just finished "Dawn", which is (probably) set in a different timeline than her "Parable" books.

MINI SPOILERS

I really loved Dawn. It's very different from Parable of the Sower, but like that book it felt far ahead of its time to me. (Which one would expect with science fiction, but in my own readings authors are usually exploring contemporary concerns in a future setting, not future concerns in a contemporary setting.) It doesn't feel prescient about specific events and trends like Parable, but it fully engages with ideas that were not in common discourse back then and are everyday topics now.

Where Parable's background is a very slow-burn gradual decline and rot of society, Dawn's background seems more traditional: a catastrophic nuclear war between the USA and the USSR. I flipped back to the copyright page and saw that this was published back in 1987! Funny to think how ubiquitous this scenario used to be and how it has vanished.

Basically all life on earth is toast as a result. It doesn't happen in an instant, and we only learn small snatches of facts in passing. It sounds like the northern hemisphere was hit the worst. The southern hemisphere is doomed as well, in large part because of the freezing temperatures brought about by nuclear winter.

With human life on the brink of extinction, they are saved by a race of aliens called Oankali. Probably the first 2/3 or so of the book is mostly the protagonist Lilith getting to know the Oankali: how they work, what they're doing, and what their plans are both short-term and long-term. The Oankali are an ancient race engaged in something they call "the trade". They explore, find sentient species, study them, modify their own genes to incorporate desirable traits, uplift the species with traits of their own. The Oankali as a civilization spread in this way, with half remaining behind and the other half continuing their exploration.

The Oankali have "saved" some of the surviving people, bringing them from the lethal surface of Earth to a space ship, curing wounds, and putting them into suspended animation. Most Oankali tech is biological rather than mechanical: the space ship is alive, and humans are kept alive and in stasis by Venus flytrap-type plants. We learn that these plants used to be carnivorous, but the Oankali modified them to be helpful instead.

I'm not clear on exactly what the timeline of Oankali contact with Earth has been. Were they silently observing the Cold War for years as it lurched towards Armageddon? Were they coincidentally passing by at the time? Did the energy of the nuclear war get their attention? In any case, they have a pretty deep understanding of humanity (though not as deep as they think they have). Jdahya, the first Oankali who Lilith meets, says that humans have two fatal traits. One is that they (we) are hierarchical. The other is that we are intelligent. Either one alone would be fine, but the combination would always inevitably lead to destruction. Because of this, they deliberately do not rescue the most hierarchical humans, which are the generals and politicians hiding in fallout shelters in the northern hemisphere. Human society will need to change.

And, more creepily, human biology will change too. The Oankali won't act without consent, but they seem implacable in their determination to mix human genes with Oankali genes, which severely grosses out Lilith and all of the other humans as well. Humanity has been "rescued", but will they still be humans once they become hybrids?

Reading this book, I thought this problem was nicely ambiguous and compelling. It's a very strange thing, and a very strange situation; but clearly humanity on its own wasn't faring so hot, so it might be something to consider. Looking back over it, I'm now wondering if we're meant to consider this idea sympathetically, or with horror like Lilith does.

I've been writing a lot about humans, but more of the book is about Oankali, and they're pretty interesting too! Physically, they're vaguely humanoid, but their bodies are covered with many dozens of tentacles. The impression I get from reading is a little like a sea anemone or something: they tend to move in concert, are used for sensing, seem to mostly move unconsciously/automatically but can be controlled if desired. Their skin is gray, smooth and cool. They are alien and revolting to look at, and it takes quite a while for Lilith and eventually others to be able to stand interacting with them.

Besides their tentacular appearance, the most interesting aspect is probably that they have three sexes. The females seem to be the tallest. Males are closest in appearance to humans. The "ooloi" have no gender and are referred to as "it". Ooloi look physically different from males and females, with an additional pair of "sensory arms", particularly thick and sturdy tentacles. Ooloi seem to dominate, although I'm not sure if that's generally true or only for the situations humans are observing. Oankali biology requires all three genders to participate in order to reproduce, with an ooloi essentially mediating between a male and a female. Yes, there is alien sex in this book.

MEGA SPOILERS

Lilith has been chosen to help train a larger group of humans, with the goal of relocating back to Earth in the Amazonian jungle. Humans don't come off very well. Prior to Awakening her first group, she is nearly raped by a human male: the first human she has seen in the long time since her captivity. This is the first of what will become many examples of the Oankali in general and the Ooloi in particular not understanding people (individually and as a whole) as well as they think they do.

Unnverved by that experience, Lilith is very strategic in her Awakening, reading candidates' biographies to try and find likely allies. This has mixed results. People are being awakened from the stress of nuclear war into an alien environment surrounded by strangers, so it's not too surprising that people aren't at their best.

In some ways, this section feels a little like a zombie movie, in the sense that "the real monsters are the humans." That isn't generally the case, or even mostly the case, but the scariest and most disturbing stuff tends to come from people (usually men) violently imposing their hierarchical superiority.

END SPOILERS

I just checked to see if there's a sequel, and there is! I'll probably check it out at some point, there's definitely more story to go with this.

Dawn is a little like the Parable books in that it looks directly at the problems with humanity - our selfishness, violence, fear and hostility towards the unknown - while still fundamentally loving humanity as a whole. The protagonists need to navigate challenging and dangerous worlds, and we admire them for that. There's good in the world, and bad in the world, and the good need to stick together and act on their principles in order to secure a better future for themselves. No matter what form the apocalypse takes.

Post-Polostan

I am at least as surprised as anyone to have finished the new Neal Stephenson novel already. Even though I generally drop everything when a new one drops, it typically takes me at least several weeks and often a month or more to finish. Polostan really flew by, though: I read most of it in a weekend and finished off the last couple of chapters on BART.

 

The book is a quick read, much more REAMDE than Anathem, and blessed by a shorter page count than either. There's lots of fun technical digressions as you would hope for in a Stephenson book, but the actual plot is much tighter and less discursive than normal, and all of those technical digressions end up furthering the story in one way or another.

MINI SPOILERS

Before dipping into plot, a few technical observations:

I was thinking how impressed I was at Aurora/Dawn as a well-written female protagonist, but Neal has been writing those for a while now, especially in Seveneves and Fall. Then I was thinking how this book is special in that it has a sole female protagonist; but on further reflection, it's one of the only Stephenson novels to feature a sole protagonist. Even Snow Crash had YT alongside Hiro Protagonist, Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle had various Waterhouses and Shaftoes, Fall featured Dodge as a prime mover but had many other points of view. The only other book I can think of off hand with a similarly singlular perspective is Zodiac.

I was thinking a lot of Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day while reading this. Polostan chronologically picks up basically where Against the Day left off; AtD opens in the Chicago World's Fair (the Columbian Exposition) in 1893, hurtles towards the event horizon of World War I, and ends with the beginning of Hollywood. Polostan's story begins a few decades later and on the other side of the world in 1920 Petrograd, continues through yet another Chicago Fair (the Century of Progress), and ends in 1933 as the pieces begin to be set for World War II. As I noted in my earlier Pynchon post, both he and Stephenson have a strong grasp of the science and technology of the period, weaving it into their stories and unafraid to use it as metaphor.

Somewhat surprisingly, both authors also lean into leftist movements in these particular books. Stephenson actually addressed that during the Long Now talk. In what he couches as a "gross oversimplification," the US left was divided into geographic halves, West and East, with Chicago as the dividing line. In the East it primarily consisted of factory workers, often first-generation immigrants from Europe, who organized in labor unions and were receptive to Soviet-style centralized planning. In the West the movement consisted of mine workers, timber fellers, longshoremen, and others; this followed a much more anarchic bent, glorifying individual action and small-cell action over mass organization, and often featured pitched shooting battles between the forces of labor and capital. I hadn't thought of that framing before, but I really love it, and it places Against The Day's post-Repeal militants firmly in the center of that western anarcho-socialism tradition. And it adds another dimension to Christopher's "betrayal" in heading to an eastern college to continue his studies: even if he hadn't fallen under the shadow of the Scarsdale Vibe crowd, he couldn't have continued the Western struggle in the East.

That west/east explanation is repeated in this novel, with a great illustration: Aurora, trying to explain this schism in American culture with terms that will be familiar to her Russian companions, compares the Westerners to Cossacks, which I love.

The novel has a kind of interesting structure that I've encountered with other writers before but I don't recall having seen from Stephenson. It's sort of set in the "present" of 1933, with Aurora a young woman, but most of the content is told as flashbacks, proceeding in chronological order. She will reminisce about her childhood in a Petrograd komunalka, then return to the present in Magnitogorsk, then something will remind her of Chicago, and we'll see that, then return to Magnitogorsk, and so on.

MEGA SPOILERS

What's a little surprising is that there's nothing surprising: even though Stephenson isn't known for twists, I was half-expecting some twist to come out of this back-and-forth, some hidden knowledge in the past that would reshape my understanding of the present. That isn't really what it's about, though. We get a really complete story very early on from Aurora's casual conversations, and then the novel is about filling in the details. Why did her parents divorce? What did she mean by "giving birth to a monster"? Who got her pregnant? Why was she involved in a bank robbery? It isn't a great analogy, but it kind of makes me think of Vonnegut, telling the end up front to deliberately eliminate any suspense and then focusing on just telling the story.

I often wonder why authors choose to tell stories in the forms that they do. Long-time blog readers know that second-person storytelling in particular is kind of a bugbear for me: sometimes there's a clear reason for it and the story is more satisfying, interesting or cool than it would have been in first or third person; but absent that reason, it just feels affected and annoying. Here, it's interesting to think about what the story would have been like if all the Magnitogorsk passages had moved to the end and we'd gotten a straightforward chronological description of her young life. Maybe the Magnitogorsk parts would have seemed more boring in comparison to the pitched shootout that preceded them? Or we may be able to derive additional significance from past events by already knowing how they will play out or be perceived in the future.

The overall thrust of the book is that Aurora has led an unbelievably exciting life, moving between the US and the USSR, playing polo, meeting Major (soon to be General) Patton along with MacArthur and Eisenhower, participating in the Bonus March, supporting a suppressed communist plot to attach the White House, engaging in a pitched tommy-gun battle with federal agents, and so on. I hate the term "Mary Sue" but on its surface it seems a very Mary Sue-ish story. One big benefit, though, is that the unbelievability becomes the story, as the characters in this novel are rational and have a hard time believing all these wild stories could possibly be true; and, on the other hand, that they are so wild that they must be true, a liar wouldn't have come up with them.

Various topics Neal digs into here that I dig: how a blast furnace works, and related topics of metallurgy both ancient and modern; cosmic rays; the delayed discovery of the neutron, how it was discovered, and what it means (astonishing to see how nuclear power was understood when airplanes were still novelties); polo (more on that later); Soviet all-female machine-gun battalions (selected because operating a machine gun was not unlike operating a sewing machine); the in-retrospect-horrifyingly-widespread use of X-rays; fat and slow tommy gun bullets vs. powerful and fast rifle bullets; early-20th-century abortion laws and realities; Ukrainian famine; the design of Soviet and pre-Soviet rail lines; mixed reactions in the US to European fascism (roughly "Nazis bad, Italians OK").

Neal had also talked at the event a little about polo, which I definitely wasn't expecting to enjoy as much as I did. When researching that era, he was astonished at just how popular and widespread polo was: it and baseball were by far the two most popular sports. Today, we think of polo as the archetypal rich-people-only sport and see it as very niche. Why was it so much more popular back then? Well, because horses were a much bigger part of our society. You had lots of farms with draft animals, still quite a few horses in and between cities for transportation (as automobiles had been invented but were not yet omnipresent), and, most importantly, cavalry as a key component of nations' armies. Polo is a sport that teaches riding and horsemanship: not flat-out running for speed as in horse-racing, but maneuverability and precision, exactly the skills you want in cavalry. So there was an entire industry and culture around the cultivation of polo ponies and cavalry horses, which involved the entire range of racial backgrounds and economic classes: plenty of people who couldn't personally afford a horse worked in jobs involving horses, so there was a widespread connection to and affinity for the sport that we can't really imagine today.

I was glad to see that "Polostan" itself made an appearance near the end of the novel. I was a little worried it was just a clever title. But it was fun to see that the in-book character who names it is himself infatuated with the cleverness of the title.

END SPOILERS

This is also one of my shorter blog posts about a Neal Stephenson book! But this is just volume 1, I may have more to say as the series continues and the Bomb Light grows more vivid.

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.