Spent two days this weekend at Salt City Steamfest. I’ll post a write-up elsewhere on the three Space Balrogs events we ran. Otherwise, I’ll just say I saw a lot of old friends and met a few new ones; sold some books and played some games; and saw lots of people in costume. So, in short, this.
“It is almost a cliche for archaeologists to remind their readers that people of the Stone Age had skulls and brains the same size as ours; but, symptomatic of the progressive age, many persist in believing our ancient ancestors were howling savages teetering several steps down the ladder of social development from us–except when occasional finds like the Ice Man or the exquisite 30,000-year-old French cave paintings of Cosquer and Chauvet remind us of the sophistication of our forebears.”
— Anthony Aveni, Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures
“The cosmos itself is what mattered to our ancestors. Their lives, their beliefs, their destinies–all were part of this bigger pageant. Just as the environment of their temples was made sacred by the metaphors of cosmic order, entire cities and great ritual centers were also astronomically aligned and organized.”
— E.C. Krupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies: The Astronomy of Lost Civilizations
Today and tomorrow (August 1 and 2), I’m at Salt City Steamfest, doing convention stuff.
To celebrate, today and tomorrow, I’m giving away free ebooks. Liahona is part the first of City of the Saints, my western steampunk novel. Follow Sam Clemens as he rides west to Deseret in his amphibious steam-truck, the Jim Smiley, dodging hostile Shoshone, vicious Danites, and his wiley, relentless opponent, the secret agent Edgar Allan Poe. Can Sam get Brigham Young and his air-ships into the looming war on the side of the north? And if not, how far will he be willing to go to sabotage Deseret’s fleet?
Hellhound on My Trail is the first installment of Rock Band Fights Evil, a comic-action-horror-pulp-fantasy tale about a rock and roll band of damned men, struggling to get their own back from the powers of Hell, whatever the cost. Follow washed-up drunk and former gangbanger Mike as his one-night gig is blown to shreds when a Hellhound bounds onto the scene… and the situation goes downhill from there.
“[I]n the history of the world no culture but our own–and then only very recently–has chosen the path of pursuing the ideology of an infinite space-time that frames colossal cataclysmic events, with humanity relegated to the role of insignificant bystander.”
— Anthony Aveni, Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures
“Advice like: ‘Follow your heart!’ and “Be true to your vision!’ is fine if you’re in therapy. Me? I really want to improve my odds.”
— Blake Snyder, Save the Cat!
So I’m one of the founders of a semi-interactive speculative fiction live performance troupe, the Space Balrogs. What does that mean? It means Zombie Rock Opera, it means Choose Your Own Apocalypse, it means Supervillain Idol — you know, science fiction convection performances that are funny and exciting, and an end to those dry as dust panels with writers talking about the mechanics of prose.
We’ll be doing a few things at Salt City Steamfest this weekend. We’ll also be at SLC Comic Con, and Tree City Comic Con this fall.
Check us out at http://spacebalrogs.com (still under construction). Use the form below to sign up for regular updates on our appearances, and also to get choice snippets emailed to you for your personal amusement.
But definitely don’t sign up if you’re one of those people who likes listening to lengthy panel debates about whether one should use dialog tags other than the word “said.”
“Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things.”
“Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?”
“No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns.”
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
I’ve just finished re-reading Hamlet’s Mill, for the fourth time. That makes it the third-most-reread book in my library, I think, and the most-reread work of scholarly nonfiction.
Hamlet’s Mill is about mythology. The authors argue that myth, and its degraded successors folk tale and fable, encode ancient technical astronomical data. This information was handed down in story form because its codification preceded literacy. The nature of myth then effectively embedded the astronomy deep into a kind of code, which could pass unnoticed before the eyes of the uninitiated and even be handed down by multiple ignorant generations seriatim before reaching a sympathetic ear. De Santillana and von Dechend start with the familiar figure of Hamlet, but before they’re done they’ve danced with Samson, Kronos, Susanowo, Pan, Vishnu, Tlaloc, Phaethon, Tammuz, Ptah, Gilgamesh, and many, many others.
Hamlet’s Mill is a must-read for your personal education. Until the twentieth century, humans lived inside a sphere surrounded by an eternal round of stars. What did those humans before us see? Did they really think the earth was flat? What did they think when they discovered that the apparently unchanging procession could slip, the throne of the celestial kingdom passing from one constellation to another? What did they mean when they talked about heroes like Gilgamesh diving to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve gifts that brought with them immortality?
And because this is a website that has to do with writing — how deep are the mythologies of your worlds? Do they tie to liturgy? Fertility rites? Sympathetic magic? The motion of the planets?
Here’s another one for you worldbuilders out there.
I just re-read Charles Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. Depending on your perspective, this is either a persistent bit of quackery or a classic of alternate history. Me, I’m not so sure, but I try always to bear in mind that sometimes the crazies turn out to be right.
Hapgood analyzes a series of medieval maps and concludes:
1) they were made with sophistication and technology (e.g., trigonometry and some kind of longitude-measuring method) unavailable to the medievals, or to their known predecessors,
2) they tended to have in common a cartographical connection with Alexandria in Egypt, implying that they might at one time have been copied or assembled at the great library there, and
3) they show some features, especially but not limited to apparently accurate coastlines and other features of the continent of Antarctica, that indicate that their originals were made no more recently than 6,000 years ago, and by a civilization that was familiar with all the world’s continents.
Right or wrong, this is cool stuff to think about. At the least, it’s an interesting reminder that the humans of 6,000 years ago had the same brains as the humans of today. And again, you worldbuilders, take note.
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