between the rock and the cold, cold sea

"Why do you read what you read?"

 

It's a question someone asked me once, knowing that I read voraciously, knowing that my reading material ranges from the really lowbrow (Academy 7, Laurell K Hamilton, urban fantasy - I've even read Oh John Ringo No) through the ordinary rungs of genre, to more literary and intellectual of the SFF genre (Steven Brust, Elizabeth Bear, Ursula LeGuin, Samuel R Delany, Michael Chabon) with occasional forays out into mysteries, and the wild world of literature soi-disant: Angela Chambers, Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Durrell. And knowing, too, that I read widely in historical nonfiction (leaning towards the academic side) and in as much of the material - primarily the mythical and primary-source historical material - in the Oxford World's Classics and Penguin Classics series as I can get my hands on and my brain to digest.

 

I've been thinking about this question for a while. On and off - on whenever the topic crosses someone's blog, as it did a while back; and off when I've other things to do, which is most of the thing. (Really I should be doing some of them even now.) And I've come to the conclusion that there's more than one reason why: or rather, that I read different sorts of things for different reasons. (It would be a more elegant construction were I able to put it in ancient Greek:  houtōs dē anagrafō toutous men hōsper legō, huper toutōn logōn, toutous de allous huper toutōn allōn - or at least I think that's how I'd put it.)

 

The first reason is for comfort: to distract my brain from stressful thinking, or to provide undemanding occupation in the absence of proper, coherent thought. When I read for this purpose, the books tend towards the lowbrow. I'm not necessarily reading for style and grace, sometimes not even for plot or logic: I need a book that will hit enough of my narrative kinks to carry me along, with interesting character and ordinary prose, and enough of a eucatastrophe about them not to perturb my emotional equilibrium. They have a simple palette of emotions, and don't require excessive consideration either on stylistic grounds or for the choice of moral evils; sometimes they're just pure trope and string, but I prefer a higher grade. Examples of the good kind include Kelly McCullough's Broken Blade, Elizabeth C Bunce's Liar's Moon, Rae Carson's Girl of Fire and Thorns, anything by Tamora Pierce, Tanya Huff, Jim Hines, Carrie Vaugn. More complex books sometimes arrive in the comfort category through long familiarity: Lois McMaster Bujold's Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls are among these.

 

The second reason combines aesthetic with emotional pleasure. These are more complex books, requiring concentration and a certain amount of focus. The joy here is seeing a good thing intelligently done, with style and verve and attention to detail: with characters facing hard choices, with realism and freshness and attention to choice turns of phrase, juicy bits of language, and cascading, complex what-ifs, in SFF - and enough of a visceral hook to kick me in the metaphorical squids. (Elizabeth Bear does this to me regularly. Steven Brust on occasion. Marie Brennan, Chaz Brenchley/Daniel Fox/Ben Macallan: Above and The Bone Palace did it in a massive way, and so in a way did The Cold Commands. Anthony Burgess reached the shining pinnacle of this in A Dead Man In Deptford.)

 

The third reason is primarily for aesthetic pleasure: the joy is the language above all, the execution: my emotional connection is slim, only intermittently present, and I find this to be the case for most of literature-so-called, though the brilliantly-crafted language of Chambers, Burgess, and Durrell appeals to me on the level of appreciation-for-excellent-craft. But it requires some effort to unpack, and as a result I read this sort of thing seldom.

 

The fourth reason is intellectual. Curiosity. There's aesthetic pleasure in the good history books, and emotional satisfaction sometimes too (not to mention in the Classics series) but it's the grand satisfaction of knowledge that brings me back to the history books: knowledge, and a fascination with cultures and times and places not my own. People are fascinating, and complicated, and weird - and so are the social systems which they make and take part in and surround themselves with.

 

The fifth reason is work. Do you find it odd I should say so? But since I've started reviewing for paying publications - and especially since starting the column with Tor.com - I've been pushing myself to read things I otherwise wouldn't have finished, and to start things I otherwise wouldn't have read, to have more context for my opinions. (Context is important. Proper understanding of context is perhaps the most important thing, in analysis. It's certainly up there.) (And also because if I say I will review a thing, there is contract of expectations there. Can't stop halfway through and say, First half sucked, so I stopped.)

 

There is intellectual satisfaction in acquiring that context, but the aesthetic and emotional dividend varies wildly - and it is work. More work than I expected, if I'm honest. So sometimes lately I might read a book from a sense more of duty than anything else, which I haven't done with respect to fiction since I was forced to read assigned texts in school.

 

Anyway. This is something of an answer.

The difference between fiction and life is that fiction has to make sense, or no one will find it credible.

That's a simple statement, and one easily transposed onto the writing of history with very little alteration. Historical - even semi- and pseudo-histiorical or mythological - narratives are the construction of sense and credibilty out of the sometimes scarce, often conflicting, and potentially arbitrary set of events and evidences which we know, intuit, or deduct concerning things which have happened in the past. To create a causal narrative, even when we have the expressed reasons or interpretations of some of the players, is to accept postulates, deductions, and intuitions. What, how, who, and when may perhaps be recoverable: why remains ephemeral, relative, malleable.

As a result, history is a layered narrative of choices, interpretations, and interesting lacunae, not only in the archaeological record and in the historical sources, but in the mind and works of the historian. The best that a historian might achieve is the adequate justification of their choices and interpretations, to be, convincingly, not wrong as far as we know, much as a barrister for the defence might aim for a convincing verdict of not guilty or not proven in a court of law.

"The past" is the totality of everything which has happened. "History" is a constructed narrative, a set of interpretations that aim to fit, more or less, what we know about what happened; what we can deduct, model, and intuit.

As such, history is relative. Where and when it is written, and who writes it, have as much bearing upon the construction of its narrative - its internal architecture - as do those debatable things we like to call "historical facts."

It is postmodernist of me to claim that there can be no objective truth, no Truth in an absolute form. But it is also true.* In the best case, we may prove event, action, even motivation, beyond reasonable doubt. But the doubt remains - indeed, must remain, for doubt is what permits us to challenge received wisdom, received truth, and find new ways of thinking and of interpreting the world and its past.

Academic humanists might long for the functional certainties of the physical sciences - certainly, today, they long for equivalent funding, and often envy their prominent place in the discourse of modern higher learning. But the historian's concern is not with general laws, repeating phenomena, regularity: the historian studies particularity, similarity, contradiction - but not regularity.

Put more simply, the historian studies people and the contexts which they inhabit and create.

If objective truth is unobtainable, then, why should history matter? If we reject out of hand - and I do - the idea of history as presenting a set of moral exemplars to imitate or to abhor, or as describing (in that old Whig view) a progression towards rational modernity, what does it give us? Does it give us anything of use? Aside from the fascination - often great indeed - which history exerts upon the imagination, why should we read it, write it, endeavour to preserve it?

It's a truism that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. "Doomed" is a good word, there, for ultimately, history matters because people matter. The ghosts of history deserve no less respect than our living peers. They deserve to be valued and remembered, the dead, the lost, the forgotten: the nameless mayor of Egyptian Oxyrhynchus who coughed from his lungs attested in papyri of the second century CE and the infant buried underneath the hearthstone of a Tudor house no less than a consul, an archduke, or a king.

The one virtue above all others which the student of history cultivates is empathy. Without it past events are no more than names and dates, devoid of meaning. But with empathy, we strive - often, indeed almost always, falling short - for understanding of these strange people who lived long ago, so like us - loving and fearing, triumphing and failing, struggling and playing - and yet so unlike us in the lenses through which they viewed the world. We learn to understand that the histories - the mythologies of the past - which form their - and our, for that matter - identities are not necessarily true, that the answers to the questions we ask of motivation and meaning and the interleaved system of relationships which form a society are frequently more complicated than we imagine, or than they appear.

People matter. People - individually, in groups, in societies - do fascinating things, beautiful things, incredible things, and people ought to be valued and remembered, even if they are, as individuals, anonymous. Even terrible people ought to be remembered, for they, too, are human like us, and like us shaped by and shaping their contexts.

Ultimately the historian studies the past not from duty, nor from ambition, but for love. Love and fascination combine to drive us to seek understanding: it is the compulsion of eros, spurring us across vast distances in hope of consummation. This love, which is close kin to empathy, makes us better people: it seeks not possession, but comprehension.

This is why history matters. Because nothing that contributes to the sum of human understanding is ever without use.

And here ends my polemic in defence of history. For today.




*That was indeed a pun.

Lenior ieiunio mors est, cruditate dissiliunt. - Seneca, On Providence, 10.

(Death from starving is gentle, gorged men burst apart.)

Everybody's afraid of something.

#

This week, I'm more afraid than usual. Leading, yesterday, I had the bone-deep conviction I was going to fall and break bones, if not my neck. I could feel it, every time I reached for a clip. My stomach and my shoulders were too tight, my arms too loose, my hands not steady or certain enough, my foot placement more tentative than usual.

I'll improve, with practice. I'm even thinking I might be prepared to try leading on of the gentler 6As in a week or two. Eventually, I'll get over the conviction that my incompetence will doom me, because already I'm growing more competent, and growing into sureness of my competence. Physically, I feel more sure and powerful than I've ever been. Physically.

#

I don't know if you heard about our drastic April budget, or the fact that the Irish economy is projected to contract by eight percent more in the next twelve months. I don't know if you've heard that the unemployment rate is already at ten percent of adult able population.

I am not sanguine about my prospects of self-sufficiency in the near-to-medium future. It's a good time to be a student parasite on the body politic; a bad time to be looking for work, or funding.

It's not a good time to do poorly.

#

I'm reading Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and thinking about history, and perspective, and language, and bad things happening to unobjectionable people. I have an assignment to write for my class on Jewish Diasporas, about the treatment of aspects of Jewish Diaspora identity by the author, and I am thinking about the extent of my ignorance, and about being the child of an incredibly parochial society, and about the moral standing of academics to examine and pronounce upon the lived experience of people yet living or not very long dead.

And about whether this is more or less problematic than that of the academics who examine and pronounce upon the lived experience of people dead for hundreds of years.

We are always looking through a funhouse mirror, at ourselves, and at the Other. Even when we deny that there is an Other, when we claim we think of people, not objects, or statistics, or dusty theoretical models.

Literature is especially slippery that way. It gets under your skin, and itches.

#

I don't know if you've ever been asked to sit down with part of the New Testament, give your own exegesis, and also sketch out how it's been interpreted by others over the centuries. I find it opaque, and baffling, and frustrating. The letter of Paul to the Romans, chapter 11, is my present nemesis, and all I can think, reading it, is that Paul wanted very desperately to believe.

He's an angry, shouty, arrogant, occasionally patronising little saint. His justifications for what he believes are elaborate, contradictory, and occasionally confused, and he makes reference to the previous Jewish writings with very little concern for context. And yet, I would like him so much better if so many people today did not take him so seriously as an Apostle of the One True Revealed Religion, if they did not refuse to see him in his context, and the context of his times.

For Paul is very much a product of Second Temple Judaism. Far more than he's a 'Christian' as we understand the term, he's a Judaean, a product of a particular class and time in the history of Yahwistic monotheism, and the apocalyptic 'apocrypha' associated with it in the first century CE. Reinterpreting the previous writings out of context was a perfectly valid act for him, and the expectation that the world was in or entering its final period perfectly understandable. Paul did not think it would be long before "the full number of the Gentiles is gathered" and "all Israel will be saved". 1 Thessalonians gives the impression he expects it within his lifetime.

It annoys me, then, when the scholarly commentaries I have to read are uniformly Christian in their presuppositions, no matter how hard they try to maintain their objectivity and academic thoroughness. But I suppose it is only to be expected: the history of early Christianity, and Biblical scholarship, undoubtedly attracts Christians.

I wonder where all the godless atheists, like me, who do biblical studies end up?

#

Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

I don't really remember much of Dune - I think I may have read it when I was twelve, but I tend to ascribe a lot of books whose individual when I can't recall to that year* - but the litany against fear sticks out in my memory: the test scene made an impression.

I come back to my fear, again and again, as - you might say - a dog returneth to his vomit. It's very familiar to me by now, if never comfortable.

Fear is real. Fear is key. Fear is a friend. Fear is what drives success. Fear is a devil. Fear is a lie.

I'm afraid of uncertainty. I'm afraid of discomfort. I'm afraid this comfortable tissue-tower of compromise and security that makes up my life will one day shatter. I'm afraid it's my fault. I'm afraid I'm unlucky. I'm afraid I'm just lucky enough.

I'm afraid it's all quite baffling to me, to be honest.

Uncertainty never goes away: it's a basic principle of the universe**. But I think I am growing, or stumbling - it may be the more apropos word - up. Insofar as up is a term that admits of definition.

I'm already growing into better understandings of my competence, I think, and the ways in which my competence may be persuaded to grow.***

I'll improve, with practice.

Practice. Now there's a helpful, hopeful thought.

---

*Glorious 1998! Alas for the Spice Girls, and Boyzone, otherwise you might be year of sublime perfection in the golden fields of my memory.

**"Certain physical quantities, like position and momentum, cannot both have precise values at the same time. The narrower the probability distribution for one, the wider it is for the other." I approve of Wikipedia. It's useful.

***I'm also trying to grow into a better person, but, you know, that's one of those hard things.

There are new routes at the climbing wall. On balance, the consensus seems to be that they're easier than the ones that were there before.

This is probably only half true, but the ratings aren't up, so I couldn't tell how difficult they're supposed to be. I sent two 4+ routes (one was definitely a 4+ at most, the other might have been a borderline 5) clean on sight. I had to do a bit of dogging with an orange route, probably also a 5, but I managed it.

Alas, that is the sum total of my sent routes for tonight. Although I made a good stab - within three moves of the top - of a borderline grey 5+/6a, and of a very reach-y blue 5+. (Got stuck on a move than required me to match hands well above my head on a flat slopey block and smear up through sheer strength, and I wasn't that strong. I could see the next two moves to the top! And how to do them! Didn't help that the wall was sauna-warm.) I also made it halfway up a blue that I think will probably end up graded 6a - the start is straightforward, but it gets rapidly more complicated from there.

There are some tempting probably-6a routes there, now - two with only one move on the roof, making it just possible I can do them, or will be able to within a month or two - a ladder route (it's now my avowed goal to lead that one at least partway by the next routesetting) that has a whole lot of roof, and one really interesting-looking black route in a corner that I think will work out to 6b, probably - the start is all reach and balance and pressing down with the heel of your palm on one wall while standing up and stretching tippy-fingers on another. It should be an interesting learning experience. I look forward to it.

As I look forward to learning to lead on the gloriously simple green 4.

---

Today I made use of a present. The parent gave me a new mobile phone at the end of October, so I could actually call home from away. I changed over mobiles permanently with great ceremony last night, and today uploaded the pictures I have from Calgary to my Flickr account.

I remain astounded by the size of North American cities. And I don't really travel well.

I don't have many, and none of WFC itself, or other people. But it's nice to have a reminder of my Grand Canadian Adventure. With any luck, one day I'll be able to repeat it at greater leisure.

---

I was considering, today, the sanity of my desire to be hawkwing_lb, PhD. It is a fine dream, but do I really want four or five additional years of student poverty and an uncertain career? Would it be more fruitful to consider a masters in International Relations and a move into the vast bureaucracy of a the civil service or a transnational organisation?

It's a good thing I don't have to make these decisions for at least another year.

I don't have to wonder why this time of year always makes me sad. I know.

It's no big thing. But I can't help remembering people I used to know, places I used to love. Things I used to look forward to, like Christmas, I dread for so many small, petty reasons I couldn't count them all. People I used to care for, who I've... misplaced, one way or another, due to time or distance or simple carelessness.

Lately I've been dreaming of a house in the country. Actually dreaming, not daydreaming: a small grey farmhouse in the old style with worn rooms comfortably arranged and a wooden stair, four-pointed stars carved into the risers of the steps, and a kitchen where a cat sleeps on a jumble of shoes in a corner by an Aga cooker. Outside there is a shed half-full of straw, a small paved yard, and beyond, fields green and damp and full of dying gorse under a grey sky sweeping down to the sea. And I know if I went down a narrow hall and opened the door to the living room, it would be full of friends. And I wake up full of regret.

It's happened more than twice now. The house in the dream is nowhere I've ever been. Or rather, it's bits and pieces of a number of places I've been, all mixed together, under a dream of west-of-Ireland scenery and sky. It's the house I wish I could belong to, in the middle of countryside that for all its foreigness to me (I really am more comfortable in towns) still smells like coming home.

I hate that dream only a little less than I hate the fact that I have had it. It seems a little implausible, not to mention impolite, for your own brain to be giving you tastes of things you can never have. Hell, I thought the recurring symbolic dream thingy was a literary invention. It's freaking ridiculous to find out it actually isn't.

And it's really not helping my winter mood of sorrow and old socks and fruitless regrets. Fruitful regrets would be a different thing, but I don't seem to quite do fruitful regrets.

It's the tail end of the (solar) year. Maybe some other year I'll get a sunlamp, mum won't be scheduled for too many shifts over the holidays, and the shops will play choral music instead of hive-inducing cheery jingles. That's the year I'll have a pony, too, and an antidote for some of this tired cynicism. Right?

Here's to the year to come. May it be more just, fairer, and more kind.

Because I am too sleepy to turn this into a post with actual paragraphs:

hawkwing_lb (23:04:19): Possibly this is a thought brought on by the last vestiges of cold medicine.
hawkwing_lb (23:04:57): but it occurs to me that there are many alien worlds or world-experiences very close at hand.
stillnotbored (23:05:30): there are indeed
hawkwing_lb (23:06:02): and for all the vaunted sensawunda of science fiction, most of it is very conservative when dealing with 'alienness,' and even more conservative in dealing with human people.
cristalia (23:07:38): That sounds like a thought worth chasing.
stillnotbored(23:07:50): it does
hawkwing_lb (23:08:02): I mean, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the recent science fiction novels I've read where people are less strange to me than the Nigerian immigrants who have church service in the local community centre of a Sunday.
tanaise (23:09:10): Liz, that's basically why I always think of my stuff as SF.
tanaise (23:09:36): because it's not this culture, so it is 'the other' and SF is about 'the other'
hawkwing_lb (23:10:18): (I mean, their experience of life is different to mine in ways I can hardly begin to imagine. For starters, they come from somewhere warm. And the congregation sings in church, all of them, every Sunday)
tanaise (23:11:09): Yeah. Sociological SF is part of the sf that gets most overlooked , I notice.
hawkwinglb (23:11:13): or to pick another example, I have read science fiction novels where the people were less strange to me than some of the people I went to school with
stillnotbored (23:11:51): you should chase that for sure
hawkwing_lb (23:12:04): (and certainly less strange to me than my good friend from Tallaght whose best friends all go to art school.)
hawkwing_lb (23:12:55): this is as far as my chasing goes, tonight.

So, does anyone have any thoughts on this? Because I'm fairly sure I'm not imagining the lack of strangeness in SF, or at least, the SF I've read recently.

That's 300 words of essay, and time out for catwaxing and dinner while I think about the next three hundred.

I've been doing a bit of thinking lately about autodidacticism, and why the habit of self-directed learning is a good thing.

I had a good basic education. Good teachers (for the most part), interesting courses - I have a grounding that I could build on in biology, physics, maths, chemistry, languages, and a grouding that I did build on in history and critical thinking*.

But post-primary education is incredibly narrow and incomplete. I was always a history geek, so when I realised how very basic my secondary history education really was** (although on the causes of WWI and WWII? Quite detailed, thank you.), I started doing some extra reading.

What I know about the SOE in WWII is self-taught, for example. Verdun and Gallipoli in WWI? Self-taught. The Russian gulag sytem and its lasting effects on modern Russia? The medieval world and medieval self-understanding? The empresses of medieval Byzantium? The first crusade?

All self-taught. And what I know about self-teaching is also (mostly) self-taught.***

(Although what I know about self-teaching falls apart when it comes to teaching myself a process. Bodhrán-playing, for example. It's a series of repetitive actions that take time and persistence to put together in a meaningful way. The tin whistle, likewise. Cooking, on the other hand, seems to be about experimenting madly until I find something that works. And we will not speak of writing, which as matociquala has so often said, is like everything.)

Now that I'm in college, I'm finding self-teaching very useful to fill up gaps in what the lectures offer, as well as gaps in my own knowledge.

(I am slowly, for example, introducing myself to the English literary canon, starting with Marlowe. In the summer, I will be introducing myself to the Roman literature, and teaching myself Latin. I have no plans to further my understanding of Irish history, though. It's hard to appreciate thoughtful analyses of past blunders, bigotry and/or cruelty when you're living with the dust of their legacies. But I suspect that may yet change.)

Autodidacticism. Everyone who reads nonfiction does it, to one degree or another. But doing it - knowing that you're directing your own learning - is really one of the things 'official' education doesn't encourage. (Not until you get to third level, anyway, and that's a whole 'nother jar of worms.)

And yet, the people who learn early that they can direct their own learning (anecdotally) seem to be the ones who keep learning their whole lives long.

...Well, that's a thoroughly waxed cat. Since I've run out of waffly thinky thoughts, I should go back to my essay.

*Though those two come bound up together, in my view.

**Europe 1870-1960 and Ireland 1869-1960. With large chunks - such as Spain, and post-WWII Russia, left out for time constraints.

***For history: pick something and read widely about it. Assess the sources for biases, and the theories for whackjobbery. As you go, keep fitting the bits together until things make some sort of sense. For the sciences: the latest research is almost always out of date by the time it's published, so it's futile to try to keep up with the cutting edge. Get a good grip on the basics first (or instead).

Performing triage on my bookshelves. Out go thrillers I will never (ever) read again; in goes room for the college book collection that is expanding more rapidly than I ever could have imagined.

I'm donating all the Never Agains to my old secondary school. But I'm beginning to feel a bit dubious. Should I really send them some Karin Slaughter and Janet Evanovich (don't ask)? What about Jeanne C. Stein's The Becoming? Does a Catholic girls' school library and vampire!sex really mix?

Reading broadens the mind. Much like travel, but less expensive. So on the whole I incline to yes. My only regret is that the only YAs I still own are immensely re-readable, so I won't be parting with any actually 'age-appropriate' reading.

(You know how appallingly under-stocked that library was when I was there? The encyclopedias were many decades old, I don't remember ever seeing any non-fic younger than twenty years old, and the fiction was... Well. Limited is the word that comes to mind. And it only opened every other lunchtime. These things combined to make it of excessively limited utility. I feel goddamn obligated to attempt to rectify that, to the utmost of my limited power.)

So. Here's a question. (Answers solicited.) Or even a meme, if you like.

1. What one [1] novel do you think ought to be part of every school library (ages 12-18)? Pick three, if you can't narrow it down any farther.

2. What one [1] novel were you most startled to find in your school library?

3. What one [1] novel (if any) do you think should never form part of a curriculum/school library?

( Read more... )

Progress Wednesday 27 June

The duellist of Alusind

New words: 1,098
Words total: 19,300
Reasons for stopping: quota, the approach of Thursday
Refreshment: Water, strawberry chocolate.
Exercise: About two, three miles round trip on the bike.

( bike rambling )


Darling du jour: She called his name from the front step and tossed [the pendant] to him, the iron light of overcast morning glittering from the silver as it fell.

Typo du jour: N/A
Words Word doesn't know: afield

Books in progress: Mark van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East.

#

Books 95-98, Fiction 90-93.

90. Nina Kiriki Hoffman, The Silent Strength of Stones.

Hoffman's books, from what I've read of them so far, are strangely gentle. This is no exception. Nick, the son of a motel owner at Sauterelle Lake, entertains himself by spying on holiday-makers at the lake. When he discovers a strange family staying nearby, things become interesting. A wolf in the woods, people who can do magic, the bittersweet resolution of an old family rift...

It's a kind book, and a hopeful one. I don't like it as much as The Thread That Binds the Bones or Spirits That Walk in Shadow, but it's quiet, and contained, and lovely.

91. Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites.

This is urban fantasy with a - what's the Americanism? ah, yes - kickass female heroine. But not, thankfully, urban-fantasy-with-kickass-female-heroine of the legion of wish-fulfillment vampire sex books. The heroine, Kate, is capable and capably violent - perhaps a little too capable, all in all, but I don't read urban fantasy for the realism. When her guardian is murdered, she becomes involved in tracking down the killer.

Andrews is fortunately inovative in her world-building. Vampires are pretty much mindless without a necromantic handler; magic and technology work at alternating intervals, and the structure of the world's response to supernatural threats is quite believeable.

A good book, decently crunchy light reading.

92. Tanya Huff, Smoke and Ashes

Another urban fantasy. Huff does good storytelling in the latest book focusing on Tony Foster, half-trained wizard and now Trainee Assistant Director on a syndicated vampire detective television show. There's a Demonic Convergence happening in Vancouver, and Tony, along with vampire Henry Fitzroy, is humanity's first line of defence.

Good stuff.

93. Elizabeth Bear, New Amsterdam.

I'm a little in awe of this book. Or, to tell the truth, I'm quite a bit in awe.

It's a mosaic novel, a series of stories following wampyr and Great Detective Sebastien de Ulloa, and Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett, in a late nineteenth century world where magic works and the American colonies never gained their independence. It's complex and marvellous, full of fraught relationships and weighted silences, and Bear's prose, is, as usual, richly luminous.

Also, it has airships. What's not to love?

#

There's a line from "Lumière", the concluding novella of New Amsterdam, that set me to thinking. Of his means of sustenance, the wampyr Sebastien acknowledges that

The blood was only a metaphor. [pg 216 of the hardback]

That line, to my mind, sums up everything about the vampire that is other. The vampire as the creature of the night, the vampire as predator and seducer, monster and lover and nightmare and dream.

A lot of writers defang the vampire. Make them easy, safe, understandable. The need for blood becomes an odd dietary requirement. The fangs, the undeath, they become mechanistic. Bloodless, almost.

But the vampire is the archetype, one of the faces humanity puts to the unknowable dark. And the blood is only the metaphor.

Because vampires aren't about the blood.

They're about what the blood means.

And the meaning of blood is rarely safe.