Bit by bit I'm realizing my current infatuation with history is not new. And I realize I've even dabbled with an archaeological/anthropological mystery before. The setting, however, was the fictional warped-mirror-of-contemporary-Japan setting of my unpublished novel Shirato.
A slight scene-setting is necessary. In Shirato, several multi-planet civilizations are involved in inter-planetary trade; the protagonist is a young machinist-trainee on a sort of "Shop truck" serving in the merchant marine of Tojima. As is slowly revealed through the story, in a time in the past roughly comparable to the 1940s of our timeline Tojima developed interstellar travel and made contact with the world of Kojima, which in short order developed their own trading empire, which is in the current day in increasingly violent conflict with Tojima.
Except the interaction of these two civilizations is more complex. In a history so ancient it is largely shrouded in myth, Kojima had been first to explore the "Gates" left by a long-vanished alien predecessor species. They had walked there, carrying swords, and they had brought much of their language and culture to Tojima. The parallels here to the uncomfortable history between China and Japan (and throw in Korea and Okinawa into the mix) are quite intentional.
So in current mythology, the Koyamajin were ancient conquerers of Tojima, thrown off by legendary heroes. The Tojimajin were the rapacious traders of a later age who used their higher technology to impose the equivalents of Commander Perry, the Opium Wars, etc. And with both sides gearing up to current-day war all of these myths, legends, and highly-colored histories are being trotted out by the propaganda machines.
Protagonist Mie Nakamura's people are from small northern-latitude fishing villages remote from the capitol of Tojima; not quite Okinawa or Kuril Islands but definitely considered rural, backwoods, out of the mainstream of Tojima culture. They are in character New England whaling town; hardy, quiet, a strong sense of local identity and solidarity. In the main story, she becomes reluctant wielder of the heritage of Tojima's legendary heroes and must work her way through the net of social obligations and expectations to find a way of diffusing the seemingly inevitable war. Her island heritage; an inability to shirk hard work or the harder path, is in her mind key to her ability to do so.
In any case. The splinter story takes place in these islands, with an archaeological team investigating what legends describe as potentially one of the "gates" that shut down two thousand years ago at the peak of the overthrow of the Kojima (and, in the main story, are in the process of coming awake again).
The official stance is that the old samurai class, the carefully-cultured bloodlines that are strongly represented in the current-day political and economic elite, are original Tojima stock. Places like the Edo island chain, closer to the origin of the Kojima invasion, were more strongly bred into by the invaders. This isn't Soviet Science, and it doesn't reach the crassness levels of, say, America in the 18th and 19th century (or for that matter, some of the discourse today!) but it is something that is being thought and hinted at and dog whistled out in the current inflammatory war fever.
So there is a lot of pride involved, with the elite working hard to support their conceits of being the best and truest and the islanders being not just the unwashed masses and not just hicks, but practically inbred (well, outbred, but the emotional association is similar).
Except for the skeletons. Our archaeological team, led by a prominent and very politically connected man from the top university (the equivalent of Todai, the Tokyo university all the elite go to), has an agenda to support the mainstream view. A young troubled grad student on the team, our narrative POV character (who is not so coincidentally falling for a local girl) is less certain.
So here they are in the cold, rain-swept, rocky rugged northern tip of human habitation, put up with graciousness and New England-style hospitality by the hard-scrabble locals, digging into ancient monuments while politics heats up back home and interstellar war looms overhead.
And of course the anthropological evidence -- the forensics, in fact, of bones found in a sealed portion of the cavern -- is that the capitol has it pretty much backwards. The phenotype seen most clearly in the face of the young local woman injured during the stormy climax of the story is that of the indigenous people. The tall, lean-faced barons of industry and secretaries of war are the remnants of the ancient invasion.
Well, only sort of. Human genetics doesn't work that way. But if you are going to try to make a political point based on a misapplication of that science, you've got no reason to cry when the evidence you want to trump turns out to say something different than what you wanted it to say.
A pretty much unpublishable story, if for no other reason than that it depends too much on the novel for background. Without seeing the war unfold, and the complicated history slowly uncovered as it is in the novel, the pressures that become murderous passions at that lonely archaeological dig are hard to connect to emotionally.
It does, however, demonstrate that I've been trying to tell that archaeological story for quite some time now. Maybe some day I'll figure out a form in which it works.
Showing posts with label anthropology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anthropology. Show all posts
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Friday, January 20, 2017
Alas, Babylon
So I'm reading one of the Belisarius books (alternate military-history set during the Byzantine era) and during a scene set in Babylon attention is drawn to the (remains of) the Ishtar Gate. And I stopped and hit the books (rather, hit Wikipedia) to confirm. I've seen the Ishtar Gate. It was reconstructed from salvaged bricks and historic descriptions in the early 20th century and it is at the Pergamon in Berlin and I'd stood within in it. And is pretty durn spectacular, too.
Today I was listening to The Ancient World and was reminded that king Croesus (yes, the "...as rich as..." himself), was the person who had famously been assured by the Oracle in the most Delphic prophesy ever that if he went to war, "A great empire would be destroyed." You probably could have seen that coming, since his opponent on the battlefield was Cyrus of Persia. Yes, that Cyrus, himself prophesied to usurp a king and hidden away as a child (no reed basket for him, though). The man who had saved the child from royal murder, Harpagus, was punished with the death of his own child. But he bid his time well, rose to become an important general in Astyages' forces, and at the right moment took his revenge (not coincidentally handing Cyrus the start of his empire).
The big battle of these two forces was also the one where wily Cyrus put camels at the front of his forces, whose strange smell and presence spooked the horses of Croesus' calvary. Croesus died crying out the name of Solon of Athens, Solon the Lawgiver, who had long ago cautioned Croesus that it was premature for him, or for any man not yet dead, to be described as the happiest man in the world.
Of course this is smack in the middle of Herodotus' favorite feeding grounds, and the rise of Athens, Sparta, and soon enough the Homeric poets. Xenophon wrote of these battles, too. So no wonder a whole bunch of familiar stories are gathered in one place.
(Cyrus also got in a dig that outdid the Laconians in being laconic. The fairly young polis threatened the rising empire-builder with a, "Do not put your eyes towards these territories or you will have to face the Spartans." Cyrus replied by gesturing for his interpreter and local guide, "The who?") It took Sparta a generation to recover from that insult...which they did at a little place called the "Hot Gates." But by that time Cyrus was gone.)
In any case.
I'm still pondering how to write an archaeological adventure story. Fiction based on real archaeology has been done (particular mention here of the Samantha Sutton stories for young readers). Historical fiction also has its attractions (one of the podcasts I follow reviews and discusses in depth the archaeology and anthropology underlying novels set in prehistoric times).
There's even a weird excuse I've only seen employed in basically scientific fantasies of a Victorian setting: to be only restricted to that which was known in the period being described. That is; a story set before the Michelson-Morley experiment can have the luminiferous aether as part of the underlying science. One set before Mariner might have canals on Mars. I've never seen anyone use that excuse to set a story in the time of Pliny the Elder in which there is indeed a land where men have their heads in their torsos, though!
It is a fancy worthy of further contemplation, however. Set a story in the heady years when Archaeology is just starting to develop as a science out of Antiquarianism, and the difference between myths and verified histories has yet to be largely disentangled. In such a world, your hero archaeologist would be less professionally condemned for acting like a genre Tomb Raider, and there might indeed be surprising new civilizations to be discovered. After all, in a time when the biblical Flood is still a matter for professional discussion, Atlantis is a relatively sane conception.
About all I've managed towards a modern-day setting is having the skeptical academically-trained protagonist in the hire of a credulous but filthy rich sponsor. Sponsor sends him to look for a Bosnian Pyramid or Mu Stone or whatever, but whilst on this fruitless search he stumbles into something a lot more interesting.
Thinking about it again, the idea of mysteries unveiled is important. An even better way of looking at it might be secret truths; that what gets discovered is fresh and surprising. There's a hint here of the joys of insider knowledge. The reader wants to share the vicarious pleasure of knowing something the rest of the world doesn't. And it can't be too trivial, or too obscure. Not as much fun finding out a secret about an obscure early Roman playwright -- you want the subject of the revelation to be at least on the scale of a Christopher Marlowe.
I would put in the requirement that the mystery driving a genre adventure needs to be important enough to someone for violence to be offered. But that, sadly, seems all too low a bar. You can get attacked with murderous intent just for wearing the wrong t-shirt. Although I find it a little hard to imagine the person who would resort to murder to cover up the real authorship of Shakespeare's plays.
A last odd bit to throw into the mix. In the back of my head for a couple decades has been the idea of something known to ancient peoples that takes on a new importance in the modern age. Say, a long-term comet of potential threat and the chance that Mayan astronomers had recorded the last pass in sufficient detail to work out the ephemeris. The thought is still largely unformed; the above is not necessarily a good example.
(Actually, Greg Bear did something a bit along the line I think I'm thinking, with a modern physicist investigating a rare bit of physics (a macro-scale object that behaves like a subatomic particle) early Mycenaeans had previously encountered.))
Today I was listening to The Ancient World and was reminded that king Croesus (yes, the "...as rich as..." himself), was the person who had famously been assured by the Oracle in the most Delphic prophesy ever that if he went to war, "A great empire would be destroyed." You probably could have seen that coming, since his opponent on the battlefield was Cyrus of Persia. Yes, that Cyrus, himself prophesied to usurp a king and hidden away as a child (no reed basket for him, though). The man who had saved the child from royal murder, Harpagus, was punished with the death of his own child. But he bid his time well, rose to become an important general in Astyages' forces, and at the right moment took his revenge (not coincidentally handing Cyrus the start of his empire).
The big battle of these two forces was also the one where wily Cyrus put camels at the front of his forces, whose strange smell and presence spooked the horses of Croesus' calvary. Croesus died crying out the name of Solon of Athens, Solon the Lawgiver, who had long ago cautioned Croesus that it was premature for him, or for any man not yet dead, to be described as the happiest man in the world.
Of course this is smack in the middle of Herodotus' favorite feeding grounds, and the rise of Athens, Sparta, and soon enough the Homeric poets. Xenophon wrote of these battles, too. So no wonder a whole bunch of familiar stories are gathered in one place.
(Cyrus also got in a dig that outdid the Laconians in being laconic. The fairly young polis threatened the rising empire-builder with a, "Do not put your eyes towards these territories or you will have to face the Spartans." Cyrus replied by gesturing for his interpreter and local guide, "The who?") It took Sparta a generation to recover from that insult...which they did at a little place called the "Hot Gates." But by that time Cyrus was gone.)
In any case.
I'm still pondering how to write an archaeological adventure story. Fiction based on real archaeology has been done (particular mention here of the Samantha Sutton stories for young readers). Historical fiction also has its attractions (one of the podcasts I follow reviews and discusses in depth the archaeology and anthropology underlying novels set in prehistoric times).
There's even a weird excuse I've only seen employed in basically scientific fantasies of a Victorian setting: to be only restricted to that which was known in the period being described. That is; a story set before the Michelson-Morley experiment can have the luminiferous aether as part of the underlying science. One set before Mariner might have canals on Mars. I've never seen anyone use that excuse to set a story in the time of Pliny the Elder in which there is indeed a land where men have their heads in their torsos, though!
It is a fancy worthy of further contemplation, however. Set a story in the heady years when Archaeology is just starting to develop as a science out of Antiquarianism, and the difference between myths and verified histories has yet to be largely disentangled. In such a world, your hero archaeologist would be less professionally condemned for acting like a genre Tomb Raider, and there might indeed be surprising new civilizations to be discovered. After all, in a time when the biblical Flood is still a matter for professional discussion, Atlantis is a relatively sane conception.
About all I've managed towards a modern-day setting is having the skeptical academically-trained protagonist in the hire of a credulous but filthy rich sponsor. Sponsor sends him to look for a Bosnian Pyramid or Mu Stone or whatever, but whilst on this fruitless search he stumbles into something a lot more interesting.
Thinking about it again, the idea of mysteries unveiled is important. An even better way of looking at it might be secret truths; that what gets discovered is fresh and surprising. There's a hint here of the joys of insider knowledge. The reader wants to share the vicarious pleasure of knowing something the rest of the world doesn't. And it can't be too trivial, or too obscure. Not as much fun finding out a secret about an obscure early Roman playwright -- you want the subject of the revelation to be at least on the scale of a Christopher Marlowe.
I would put in the requirement that the mystery driving a genre adventure needs to be important enough to someone for violence to be offered. But that, sadly, seems all too low a bar. You can get attacked with murderous intent just for wearing the wrong t-shirt. Although I find it a little hard to imagine the person who would resort to murder to cover up the real authorship of Shakespeare's plays.
A last odd bit to throw into the mix. In the back of my head for a couple decades has been the idea of something known to ancient peoples that takes on a new importance in the modern age. Say, a long-term comet of potential threat and the chance that Mayan astronomers had recorded the last pass in sufficient detail to work out the ephemeris. The thought is still largely unformed; the above is not necessarily a good example.
(Actually, Greg Bear did something a bit along the line I think I'm thinking, with a modern physicist investigating a rare bit of physics (a macro-scale object that behaves like a subatomic particle) early Mycenaeans had previously encountered.))
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Box of Plot Bunnies
I've been reading Mass Effect fanfiction and thinking again about all the missed opportunities of the Tomb Raider (2013) game.
Had some trivial thoughts about the Harry Potter universe as well. Main one; the story is hermetic. It is about magic versus magic. Neither the magic system nor the entire Magical World as presented are ever intended to interact with anything outside of magic and the magical world. Thus to my mind cross-overs and most fixfics are non-starters; magic is an out-of-context problem to any other setting, and the muggle world (be it our world or the world of Darth Vader) is an out-of-context problem for the magic world. It makes as much sense as asking whether a Checker can put a King in check, or how many spaces a domino advances in Monopoly.
The other is that the magical world is Britain between the wars. They lost so many in the first Wizarding War against Voldemort, they simply can't deal with the threat of a second one. They don't want to believe it possible, and they can't bring themselves to commit to planning against it, they don't even want to talk about it. Thus the ineffectual and even counter-productive actions by so many of the adult characters, and the willful ignorance they impose on the young characters.
And that led to the first thought; perhaps the best way to break the pattern of what happens to Lara Croft on Yamatai is to pick a character who comes to their interactions with the world from an entirely different context. Say, Sherlock Holmes. First Bunny here; Holmes and Watson on Yamatai, with the Endurance expedition taking place in the late Victorian age. A lot more deduction, a lot less shooting (well, unless you cast the Robert Downey version).
Flipping that, though, since the story of Lara on Yamatai is about growing from a scared kid into a survivor...switch up and put Lara in Shepard's shoes. In the Mindoir origin. Given the way the events of Yamatai unfolded, I'd say it would be a bad day to be a Batarian.
(There's another Bunny lurking here; given that the archaeology of Liara T'soni is what gives the first good clues to the nature of the Reapers, some of the tools used to defeat Sovereign, and in one of the outcomes of the third game leads to the only really decent resolution, one could make an argument that an adventure archaeologist makes as much a fitting protagonist for the story as does the universe's most persuasive soldier-hero since Darth Revan.)
From a completely un-quantified survey of Fanfiction.net, about a third of the Lara Croft stories are set in the 2013 reboot continuity (almost another third are in the original continuity, post Angel of Darkness, and include Kurtis as a character), and of those the majority are post-Yamatai and of that number the majority are Lara/Sam fics. There's also a sizable contingent of Amanda fics, and just enough of a sampling to be statistically significant of Lara/Natla fics.
Of the Harry Potter fics that have attracted my eye, most have turned out to be fixfics. Either crossovers or introduction of out-of-context elements like dragonriders or unexplained new powers or just plain Harry-gets-a-clue, they almost inevitably reveal the rest of the magical world as a bunch of dopes. To my mind, it never really works (as much fun as a snarky bit of "take that!" can be).
What few Mass Effect fics I've looked show the following trends; generally through all three games or set post, inevitably femshep (aka Commander Shepard is female), and she most often romances Garrus (I agree -- I was happy enough to leave Kaiden on Virmire.)
The vast majority of SG1 fics are Jack/Sam. But there's a statistically significant trend for builder fics, in which the Stargate Program is managed differently, with different methods, gear, etc. The best of which so far is one set in the late 40's, with an Ernest Littlefield who remembers to take a radio along.
And mostly unrelated: the title music to Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (which opens with Lara's old mentor Werner von Croy getting killed in Paris) reprises the main theme from Tomb Raider: Revelations (in which that character was strongly featured.) So I'll definitely see if I can work a reference to that theme in the Tomb Raider: Legacy title track I'm tinkering up!
(Which will be multi-tracked with a little pennywhistle and violin from your's truly. The violin is I'm afraid going to have to track itself into string sections, though. I am years from being able to do a soulful solo on that instrument.)
Had some trivial thoughts about the Harry Potter universe as well. Main one; the story is hermetic. It is about magic versus magic. Neither the magic system nor the entire Magical World as presented are ever intended to interact with anything outside of magic and the magical world. Thus to my mind cross-overs and most fixfics are non-starters; magic is an out-of-context problem to any other setting, and the muggle world (be it our world or the world of Darth Vader) is an out-of-context problem for the magic world. It makes as much sense as asking whether a Checker can put a King in check, or how many spaces a domino advances in Monopoly.
The other is that the magical world is Britain between the wars. They lost so many in the first Wizarding War against Voldemort, they simply can't deal with the threat of a second one. They don't want to believe it possible, and they can't bring themselves to commit to planning against it, they don't even want to talk about it. Thus the ineffectual and even counter-productive actions by so many of the adult characters, and the willful ignorance they impose on the young characters.
And that led to the first thought; perhaps the best way to break the pattern of what happens to Lara Croft on Yamatai is to pick a character who comes to their interactions with the world from an entirely different context. Say, Sherlock Holmes. First Bunny here; Holmes and Watson on Yamatai, with the Endurance expedition taking place in the late Victorian age. A lot more deduction, a lot less shooting (well, unless you cast the Robert Downey version).
Flipping that, though, since the story of Lara on Yamatai is about growing from a scared kid into a survivor...switch up and put Lara in Shepard's shoes. In the Mindoir origin. Given the way the events of Yamatai unfolded, I'd say it would be a bad day to be a Batarian.
(There's another Bunny lurking here; given that the archaeology of Liara T'soni is what gives the first good clues to the nature of the Reapers, some of the tools used to defeat Sovereign, and in one of the outcomes of the third game leads to the only really decent resolution, one could make an argument that an adventure archaeologist makes as much a fitting protagonist for the story as does the universe's most persuasive soldier-hero since Darth Revan.)
From a completely un-quantified survey of Fanfiction.net, about a third of the Lara Croft stories are set in the 2013 reboot continuity (almost another third are in the original continuity, post Angel of Darkness, and include Kurtis as a character), and of those the majority are post-Yamatai and of that number the majority are Lara/Sam fics. There's also a sizable contingent of Amanda fics, and just enough of a sampling to be statistically significant of Lara/Natla fics.
Of the Harry Potter fics that have attracted my eye, most have turned out to be fixfics. Either crossovers or introduction of out-of-context elements like dragonriders or unexplained new powers or just plain Harry-gets-a-clue, they almost inevitably reveal the rest of the magical world as a bunch of dopes. To my mind, it never really works (as much fun as a snarky bit of "take that!" can be).
What few Mass Effect fics I've looked show the following trends; generally through all three games or set post, inevitably femshep (aka Commander Shepard is female), and she most often romances Garrus (I agree -- I was happy enough to leave Kaiden on Virmire.)
The vast majority of SG1 fics are Jack/Sam. But there's a statistically significant trend for builder fics, in which the Stargate Program is managed differently, with different methods, gear, etc. The best of which so far is one set in the late 40's, with an Ernest Littlefield who remembers to take a radio along.
And mostly unrelated: the title music to Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (which opens with Lara's old mentor Werner von Croy getting killed in Paris) reprises the main theme from Tomb Raider: Revelations (in which that character was strongly featured.) So I'll definitely see if I can work a reference to that theme in the Tomb Raider: Legacy title track I'm tinkering up!
(Which will be multi-tracked with a little pennywhistle and violin from your's truly. The violin is I'm afraid going to have to track itself into string sections, though. I am years from being able to do a soulful solo on that instrument.)
Monday, March 28, 2016
Wrong Soapbox
I've gone and written myself into a corner again on my TR/SG1 fanfic.
Well, sort of. The plot will proceed just fine. But I may have made it impossible to indulge in the polemics I had planned.
I've got Lara somewhere between the midwestern states and northern California; somewhere where I can preferably look at relics of the Mississippian culture. And I was going to go off a little on hyperdiffusionism; I originally created "Colonel" Newberry to not just be arguing that Vikings or Egyptians or one of the lost tribes of Israel were responsible for the creation of the spectacular burial mounds, but to wander even further afield into Giants, Nephilim, bits of biblical literalism and even some Young-Earth Creationism.
Two problems, though. One is that the Colonel's character is rapidly evolving on me; he is turning into someone more intelligent and competent and perhaps a nicer person as well. The other is that at this juncture Lara is undercover (or, rather, she thinks she is) and not in position to make the scientific and rationalist arguments. Worse, though, is this; when you think about it, her whole career has been based on the reality of some kind of hyperdiffusionism. In her world, there were gods/aliens who gave gifts of advanced technologies to primitive cultures. She's held the real relic -- an alien weapon -- that gave rise to the legend of Excalibur. She's met at least one of the rulers of Atlantis (and shot her in the face...but Natla got better).
On the other side of the pond, I'm sending Daniel Jackson to Croft Manor so Alister can let him know Atlantis was real and start him on the right track to bring all my mice up to the right spot for the climax. Thing is, Daniel is hardly one to harp on the obvious problems with the Atlantis myths. He spent his career arguing that the Egyptian gods were aliens from space, and has very, very good proof that he was right. Those very "gods" shot him in the face (Daniel also got better). And later in the official SG1 canon he not only searches for Atlantis on his own impetus, he finds it.
About the biggest wriggle room I've got here is that Alister could chose to put one on, and bring up the counter-arguments. Also, of course, the one he knows is not the one Daniel later finds (or so they think...I'm not sure anyone but Lara is actually going to realize over the course of this particular story just what the Ancients/Lanteans have been up to).
Well, losing polemics is probably good. Although without the chance to talk about the Mad Hatter logic that led from a Mayan codex to the continent of Mu, or the social trends that disinherit people from the accomplishments of their own culture, I may have to work harder to fill my 8,000 words.
Well, I did just do a little reading on climate cycles, and I am very, very tempted to do another long aside -- similar to the Ariadne vignette -- of Seh and her family, early agriculturalists in that moment where even their god can't project them from a shift (some 8,000 years ago) in the flood patterns of the Nile....
Well, sort of. The plot will proceed just fine. But I may have made it impossible to indulge in the polemics I had planned.
I've got Lara somewhere between the midwestern states and northern California; somewhere where I can preferably look at relics of the Mississippian culture. And I was going to go off a little on hyperdiffusionism; I originally created "Colonel" Newberry to not just be arguing that Vikings or Egyptians or one of the lost tribes of Israel were responsible for the creation of the spectacular burial mounds, but to wander even further afield into Giants, Nephilim, bits of biblical literalism and even some Young-Earth Creationism.
Two problems, though. One is that the Colonel's character is rapidly evolving on me; he is turning into someone more intelligent and competent and perhaps a nicer person as well. The other is that at this juncture Lara is undercover (or, rather, she thinks she is) and not in position to make the scientific and rationalist arguments. Worse, though, is this; when you think about it, her whole career has been based on the reality of some kind of hyperdiffusionism. In her world, there were gods/aliens who gave gifts of advanced technologies to primitive cultures. She's held the real relic -- an alien weapon -- that gave rise to the legend of Excalibur. She's met at least one of the rulers of Atlantis (and shot her in the face...but Natla got better).
On the other side of the pond, I'm sending Daniel Jackson to Croft Manor so Alister can let him know Atlantis was real and start him on the right track to bring all my mice up to the right spot for the climax. Thing is, Daniel is hardly one to harp on the obvious problems with the Atlantis myths. He spent his career arguing that the Egyptian gods were aliens from space, and has very, very good proof that he was right. Those very "gods" shot him in the face (Daniel also got better). And later in the official SG1 canon he not only searches for Atlantis on his own impetus, he finds it.
About the biggest wriggle room I've got here is that Alister could chose to put one on, and bring up the counter-arguments. Also, of course, the one he knows is not the one Daniel later finds (or so they think...I'm not sure anyone but Lara is actually going to realize over the course of this particular story just what the Ancients/Lanteans have been up to).
Well, losing polemics is probably good. Although without the chance to talk about the Mad Hatter logic that led from a Mayan codex to the continent of Mu, or the social trends that disinherit people from the accomplishments of their own culture, I may have to work harder to fill my 8,000 words.
Well, I did just do a little reading on climate cycles, and I am very, very tempted to do another long aside -- similar to the Ariadne vignette -- of Seh and her family, early agriculturalists in that moment where even their god can't project them from a shift (some 8,000 years ago) in the flood patterns of the Nile....
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