Teosinte

Found one of the items Jane donated, and, sadly, she was very much of the Heinrich "hand me that dynamite" Schliemann school of archaeology in the acquisition of it. I have the location of the other various exhibits I mentioned in my notes, too.

Cafe-wise, I am tempted to sit my characters at the Place de Tertre because it is both very Paris and annoying; a well-known and crowded tourist spot, that is. It plays nicely to some of Penny's issues on her Paris trip to have her have to keep returning here.

And I have yet to find my memoirs writer. I really want a calvary man in the Great War, and it is even better if he is on one of the various cavalry victories that did occur. English-speaking is probably best as adding translation from German or Polish would be a logistical complication I don't need. I do have a memoir -- well, letters -- in my reading list, but it is from one of Napoleon's campaigns.

The more I write, the more I am able to limit what it is I need to know to actually write the thing. I might not even finish reading that book on Colette, as delightful it is with its almost Wildean prose and better quotes. I swear, I have a bookmark on every page I've read so far.

***

Friday was one of those days when ideas are just bouncing around.

The Athena Fox series isn't selling. The people who read it seem to like it, but I don't know if it isn't finding its audience, or if that audience doesn't exist. What little I've got in feedback says that I am delivering tomb-crawling, artifact-finding adventure with some cool bad-ass moments, and that the stealth game I am playing with staying within what is actually historically and otherwise defensible isn't distracting. But that's all I know.

I don't know if books outside would expand my audience, or find their own distinct audience. Be that as it might, the two proposals that are closest to the top are a fantasy and a genre SF adventure.

Anyhow. The insight on the fantasy one is bamboo technology. Here's the issue; I'm trying to create a technological culture that can vanish from the archaeological record. That pretty much leaves out atomic power, and probably a bunch of industrial chemistry. Worse, there's the scale problem; it isn't so much that you'd have a buried computer, it is that to get to computers you have to have an incredibly wide production base. It isn't just the agricultural surplus problem (although that is part of it); the personal computer as we know it comes out of a social and technological matrix that has widespread power distribution, resource mining, aviation; all sorts of things and on a scale that would definitely leave a mark in the archaeological record.

So I'm really aiming for at least one high-tech culture that is getting there sideways, using some sort of "crystals and togas" tech that isn't as easy to detect in the ground today. And then other cultures working their way up the tech tree or around it, right down to neolithic...

Oops. Because domestication of plants or animals leaves a fingerprint that would be even harder to hide. That's introducing a new and successful species and you have to jump through hoops (the Gros Michel?) as to why we don't see any of these grains or herd animals in the archaeological record of Sumer or Assyria.

And widespread is a problem. One tribe making a Clovis Point is one thing, but that is the kind of tech (improved methods of flintknapping) that would spread almost everywhere our species spread.

So it is in some ways easier to hide cultures that are far in advance than they should be, as a culture that was merely advanced from Paleolithic to Neolithic would have utterly changed the existing record of our species.

***

My insights for the SF adventure were less complex. I've realized anew how bad the temptation it will be to do call-outs, easter eggs, and deconstructions.