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Review: The Hidden Queen by Peter V. Brett

The Hidden Queen is the second book in Peter V. Brett’s series The Nightfall Saga, a trilogy that serves as a sequel to the five-part Demon Cycle. I spotted it at a bookstore a few weeks ago, and I’m so out of the loop on fantasy books these days that I hadn’t even known it was out. So I picked it up, and I finished it off about a week and a half ago. (This review is delayed because I took last week off from…pretty much everything. For mental health reasons, to be specific.)

This book picks up right where its predecessor, The Desert Prince, left off, in the mostly ruined city of Fort Krasia, called Desert Spear by its inhabitants. Our protagonists are the same as in the previous book, and are the children of the major players from the Demon Cycle. Olive functions as your traditional "girl pretending to be a boy so she can fight" trope, but with the added twist that she’s actually a hermaphrodite, so technically is a boy. Darin is…well, kind of a wimp, and a self-admitted coward, but he has what can best be described as superpowers: a magic akin to that of the demons who are the enemies of the series.

More specifically, the enemy in this case is the often-unnamed demon king. (Incidentally, the finale will be titled The Demon King.) He was a prisoner way back in The Core, the last book of the Demon Cycle. He found a way to sneak out during the climax of that book, spent a generation in hiding, and is now trying to create a new demon queen to finish off the free peoples of humanity once and for all. And if he can get some revenge on those who wronged him way back when, that’s even better.

The big reveal of The Desert Prince, then, was that he was working towards that goal. After a devastating battle, a number of prominent leaders of the Free Cities and the Krasians were taken prisoner. And that’s where the troubles with this book start.

The Nightfall Saga really is a direct sequel. If you didn’t read the previous series, you won’t know or care who these older people are. Sure, you can tell that Leesha is Olive’s mother and the duchess of the largest free city, that Darin’s father Arlen was a hero who saved the world, then went on to be worshipped as a literal Second Coming.

But that’s about it. So many important backstory details are left unsaid, and this has to be because it’s assumed that you’ve read the Demon Cycle. If you didn’t, you’re going to be completely lost on most of the worldbuilding, most of the geopolitics, and most of the magic system. The Desert Prince doesn’t help, nor does this book.

Part of the reason The Hidden Queen doesn’t do much exposition about the events that came before is because it’s too busy doing…nothing at all. Nearly the first half of the book serves as little more than a way to get the main characters back into position for a new campaign. Lots of overland travel, a few scenes of political intrigue, and a couple of demon attacks fill 200 pages or so, with a relatively brief stop in New Krasia, the conquered lands bordering the Free Cities of Thesa.

Only then does the action get going, except that it doesn’t quite yet, because there’s a power vacuum to be filled. Here lies the second of the book’s major troubles. While the woke mind virus has made "gender identity" an issue—it’s really not—a character like Olive, who is, due to magical shenanigans before her birth, a natural hermaphrodite at the age of understanding what that entails really does present narrative problems with the English language.

A good author might tie this into a larger narrative structure, a tale of adolescent confusion and acceptance. To be fair, Brett does manage some strides in this direction: Olive has an interrupted fling with a girl and a more protracted affair with a young man in The Desert Prince, for example. But he can’t quite pull it off with depth. Instead, he comes across as tiptoeing the minefield of identity politics, constantly talking about "identifying" and "presenting". Honestly, I’ve seen authors of hentai who handled it better.

Darin, by contrast, is better written. His primary conflict is within himself, the struggle of a physically weak young man trying to live up to his idealized mental image of the father he never knew. His powers make him a pariah, as well as a perfect sneak, and he’s the driving force behind most of the plot; this contrasts with Olive, whose only abnormal abilities are super-strength and Wolverine-level healing. She leads by force of will. Darin tries not to lead at all, but ends up being listened to because he’s insightful.

He’s also autistic. That wasn’t something that came through much in The Desert Prince, but it’s a lot clearer here. He doesn’t like crowds or hugs. He doesn’t understand emotions. His response to a young woman’s "I love you" is, "Why?" (I’ve asked the same question before, though, so call that one necessary but not sufficient.) It’s one of those cases where you have to read between the lines a bit, and that’s perfectly fine. Autism is a diagnosis that is purely modern. The Renaissance-to-Baroque setting wouldn’t have a word for it. And unlike Olive’s hermaphroditism, the author manages to make Darin’s autism click. Once you realize it, things make a lot more sense.

But some things don’t make much sense at all. This isn’t a fault of The Hidden Queen specifically, so much as it’s an issue with Brett as an author. And it’s a consistent issue, one that has been a feature of every book since The Warded Man.

Most readers would complain about his choice of dialect for dialogue—and also narration in this series, since it’s written in first-person present tense, presumably to avoid any pronoun issues regarding Olive—but I’ve never had trouble understanding it. I can only assume that’s because I’m a Southerner who speaks an Appalachian dialect, which is pretty close to the rural speech of the book. "Ent" instead of "ain’t" trips me up, but that’s about it.

No, Brett’s biggest failing is one that has risen in prominence as his books have gone on, and they’re only more glaring in today’s world. The Krasians are bloodthirsty savages, barbarians who combine the worst traits of Sunni Muslims, Ottoman sultans, and Chinese courtiers. They conquered one of the duchies of Thesa 15 years ago—in book time and real time—and killed or enslaved those who fought against them. They tried to do the same to two of the other Free Cities, Lakton and Angiers, but were stopped in what was a major arc of the Demon Cycle series. They not only practice slavery, but have a rigid caste system, a warrior culture practically based on rape, and a prickly sense of pride in all of it.

That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so obvious that the author idolizes them. Krasians are shown as smarter and stronger, more powerful and more pious than their counterparts in the Free Cities. Worse, they’re believed to be all of those by the very same people they spent multiple books attempting to conquer. Yet the evidence quite clearly shows that they’re a culture in the same way that ISIS is. They never create, but only destroy. They have no philosophers or scientists, nor would they want them. Their proudest moment was a full three millennia before the books even start.

Somehow, this doesn’t bother any of the characters from more civilized lands. Krasians have a number of slurs directed at the "soft" people of Thesa, and Olive often finds herself nodding along with them, only to get ready to pick a fight when her best friend’s father doesn’t immediately fall to his knees before her kidnappers. The only character who genuinely seems as put off by their presence as any sane person should be is Lord Rhinebeck. He gets chewed out by Olive for saving her from being killed by one of them, and somehow that rational act is enough to end her brief infatuation with him.

"But they’re Muslim ninjas," you can almost hear Peter Brett saying in response. Because that’s pretty much all they are. As far as readers are concerned, that’s all they’ve ever been. They’re a gimmick that spiraled out of control, I think. The alternative is that I’m reading books by an author who really does venerate the sort of culture that gave us rape gangs, Christmas market stabbings, and beheaded journalists.

I’ve rambled on long enough. The Hidden Queen is a decent read if you can ignore its flaws. If you can let yourself escape into the world—reading the previous books in both series is a prerequisite to that—then it has its fun moments. And Darin is a well-written, well-rounded character who is the genuine bright spot. Other than that, it’s half a book of wandering around, a few dozen pages of hype for barbarians, and a payoff that’s just too short.

I’ll read The Demon King once it’s out, just to say I finished the series, and because the overall plot really is interesting. I like the struggle of humanity against an implacable foe. Brett actually does a decent job of imagining what a civilization dealing with that struggle would look like, and those worldbuilding gems are worth it.

But they’re diamonds in the rough, I have to admit.

Nightfall

I’ve written before on the topic of what I call the Third Dark Age, the hypothesis that our current Western society is on the same trajectory as those of Europe in the 6th century AD and the Mediterranean coast in the 12th century BC. I’ve also written about my belief that the only way to stop—or, at least, to cut short—the Third Dark Age is with a Second Enlightenment.

Both of those posts were written before the 2024 election. Now that we’re five months into the fallout of that election, the picture is becoming a little clearer…and a little darker.

It’s no secret that America is becoming increasingly divided. The fractures between political left and right have become gaping fissures that are busy swallowing all of us who profess allegiance to neither extreme. Battle lines are being drawn in the culture war, the race war, the war for control over hearts and minds for generations to come.

Truth is, both sides have a fatal flaw. This isn’t my natural contrarianism coming out. It’s not the fallacy of false equivalence, because—in this instance, anyway—leftists and rightists truly are equally bad. They both have the goal of dragging Western civilization into a time of darkness and regression. They just have different motives.

The left-hand path

The Left’s modus operandi is well known by now. The woke mind virus has long since taken root, and taken control of its host. Progressivism is dark and anti-human by its very nature: an erasure of all that makes humans, and human societies, unique and great. The idea that a man can become a woman simply by force of will, that anyone can become an American in the same fashion. A reduction of our status to mere numbers and the diversity boxes we check.

That sort of social rot has been in place for over a decade. We see its effects everywhere we look. We see the statues of our heroes being torn down because they were "colonizers" or "slave-owners", only to be replaced with nameless, shapeless figures who are exceptional only by virtue of being unexceptional. Monuments to mediocrity, an uplifting of those ugly in flesh and spirit. What better way to celebrate an ideology that encourages sterilization, than by creating something that lacks any sense of humanity?

In the progressive version of the Third Dark Age, we fall because we are dragged down to the level of the worst of us, Harrison Bergeron on the scale of a civilization. Whites and East Asians have higher intelligence on average, so we must not be allowed to use it. Men are stronger on average than women, yet we must only use that strength in service to the fairer sex. And even the word "sex" becomes a slur, because it implies the biological reality whose denial is crucial to the entire enterprise: if we recognize that there is an unbridgeable gap between men and women, what other innate barriers must we admit?

More than merely social, however, the woke darkness is one which transforms science into dogma, turning scientists into priests or heretics, depending on whether or not they toe the line of what the regime considers orthodox. We witnessed this firsthand over the past five years, watching as noted physicians, epidemiologists, biologists, physicists, climatologists, and many others were ostracized, fired, deplatformed for coming out—with verifiable evidence, in accordance with the scientific method—against the various tyrannies of the 2020s. Whether the tyrannical response to a mild flu, the pushing of a deadly genetic experiment in the guise of a vaccine, or the continued de-industrialization of our world in response to a fictitious claim of higher temperatures, people’s lives were ruined simply because they questioned the prevailing narrative.

This is the communist type of bad ending, an Orwellian Dark Age where the masses are kept sick and stupid, living in pods and eating bugs and being told that it’s for their own good. Rather than being denied the light, we are told that it’s bad for us. That we are creatures of darkness, and to aspire to anything better is offensive to those who lack the courage.

The right turn

One way to read the results of last year’s election is as a rejection of such progressive ideals. That’s not to say it’s necessarily the correct reading, but there is an element of truth. Enough people truly were tired of the status quo that they flipped.

Unfortunately, some are taking that to mean they would prefer the opposite extreme.

This is becoming an increasingly popular opinion among the farther segments of the Right. Rather than restoring our constitutional republic, the norms and values that made our nation great in the first place, they seem willing to reject it entirely. Worse, they’re ready to reject the Enlightenment itself.

Their reasoning, as much as there is reasoning involved, seems to be a case of mistaken identity. Progressives call themselves liberals, and actual—called "classical"—liberals are too few and too scattered to push back. Thus, these extremists consider those extremists to define what it means to be liberal. Following that twisted logic, they then deem that liberalism itself is at fault, and must be destroyed.

Of course, liberalism is the foundation of America in the first place. It’s what led to the Revolution. Without the bedrock of the liberal Enlightenment, there is no free speech, no free press, no free religion. Without liberty, equality, and fraternity, we cannot have the Red, White, and Blue.

And some people genuinely don’t seem to care.

Right-wing Twitter, for example, is becoming crowded with people who would gladly trade our Republic for a theocratic dictatorship, as long as that dictatorship was whites-only. These are people who reject the premise of the Declaration of Independence, that we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights. They reject the notion that there is room for debate. They even reject the verifiable fact—I can verify it myself—that it is possible to have a strong moral compass without religion.

The nationalist-conservative Dark Age, then, looks a lot more like the Medieval Dark Age: a land of kings using their subjects as pawns, of priests keeping the masses in check with nonsense such as "divine right" and "original sin". Of power unchecked, because people are taught to believe that power in itself is the goal.

On this road, we come into darkness because we reject the progress we have made, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Because the Left pushed mRNA "vaccines", we must toss aside germ theory. Because the Left facilitated an invasion of illegal immigrants, we must throw away equal protection for our citizens. Because Reddit-tier atheists convinced teens to question their biology, we must rip out secularism by the roots.

This, then, is the theocratic version of the bad end, and it’s Islamic in the literal sense of the word islam: submission. Here, we are not creatures of darkness, but creatures stuck in darkness through no fault of our own. We are not allowed to strive for the light, because that light is reserved only for the chosen few. But if we debase ourselves enough, believing all the right unbelievable things, saying all the right platitudes, we might be permitted a glimpse of that light as we die. For, in the world of the far right, a human is worthless when he is alive, but downright holy before and after.

The third way

I reject both extremes. To the Left, that makes me little better than a fascist. To the Right, it makes me little better than a progressive. And I don’t particularly care.

America was founded on liberal ideals. This much cannot be denied. We were a refuge for the oppressed from the start. We understood multiculturalism and diversity were important…within reason. On that, I must disagree vehemently with the nationalists.

Humans are diverse in many ways. Although theories like Sapir-Whorf have long since been debunked, we do know that cultures have differences that can be inscrutable, and nearly indescribable, to others. And some of these cultures are, to put it simply, incompatible with the ideals of the classical liberal. On this, I disagree with the progressives.

Some of the incompatibility does share its roots with religion, but only in the vaguest sense; even among the Christian nations of Europe, there are distinct variations between, for example, the Germanic peoples and the descendants of Rome. There have been closed or backward Christian societies and open, cosmopolitan Muslim ones. There is, for example, nothing innate about Hinduism that leads its adherents to reject modern sanitation. Tribal religions are not fundamentally opposed to technological progress. And a lack of religion does not imply a lack of spirituality or a lack of empathy.

Liberalism, however, is very much an ideology of plenty. When there are few pressing demands, when survival is largely routine, we have the ability to grow as a people. That is why the seeds of republicanism were born in the fertile period of Ancient Greece, and why the Enlightenment took root only after the Age of Discovery.

I believe it’s also why the liberal ideals are so foreign to the invaders in our country today. Sub-Saharan Africa is a dangerous place, as is most of South America. The Middle East is largely a wasteland. China, of course, is now a communist nightmare, though it wasn’t always so. The Indian subcontinent is so crowded and despoiled that a nuclear war might make things better.

In none of these places do we see the lack of scarcity that proved necessary for philosophical thought to flourish. Only with that sort of wisdom can we see beyond ourselves, to look at society and humanity from a wider angle and draw conclusions from what we find. That is why the time immediately following World War II, when there was such a push to reach a state of post-scarcity, gave rise to such rapid progress in America and Western Europe. We were on the cusp of a Second Enlightenment, even though we didn’t yet need it.

Progressivism failed us then, tearing down our lofty ideals, and we’re only now, a lifetime later, clawing our way out of that mire. But we must beware not to fall into the other extreme. The nationalist version of the Third Dark Age will serve us no better.

A warning about Amazon

Amazon has very quietly made the unfortunate decision that those who purchase books through the Kindle Store are not entitled to basic customer rights under the doctrine of first sale, and will no longer be allowed to copy those books to anything other than another Kindle. Since this is a violation of the fundamental expectations of a storefront, I feel I must act as someone whose wares are available through that storefront.

If you have purchased one of my books in digital form through Amazon at any point, and you are not able to copy or transfer it to your PC, tablet, or other device, please reach out, and I will send you a DRM-free copy of the book or books you have purchased.

In the meantime, I will be looking for other platforms and storefronts to make my works available as widely as possible, and as freely as possible. Innocence Reborn is already available as an ebook through Barnes & Noble, so that will be the first site I intend to focus my efforts on.

Review: Wind and Truth

It’s been four years since I wrote my review of Brandon Sanderson’s Rhythm of War. In that post, I did a fairly deep dive into the plot, worldbuilding, and character development of the fourth installment of the Stormlight Archive.

Now that series has a fifth entry, Wind and Truth. It came out a few months ago, I read it to kick off 2025, and I’m feeling just sick enough to offer up some thoughts on this particular novel. So let’s go.

Oh, and of course, reviewing the fifth book of a series is obviously going to spoil the first four. It has to be that way. I can’t talk circles around things that have been happening for…what? Almost 15 years now?

The plot

Wind and Truth picks up almost immediately after Rhythm of War left off, and the book is structured around the ending to its immediate predecessor. Dalinar, head of the Knights Radiant and effective leader of the free peoples of Middle—I mean, Roshar, has forced the dark god Odium into an agreement: ten days hence, there will be a clash of champions that will decide the fate of the world.

Thus, the novel is divided into ten parts, one for each day, with some interludes in between. Which is a pretty neat trick, I must admit. In the eighth entry of my Otherworld series, I did something similar, so it’s nice to see a "real" author using the same gimmick. It also helps with the flow, I think. And that’s something needed, because this is a very sprawling book.

Anyway, the plot. The way the deal works is that both sides get to keep the territory they’ve gained at the moment the duel begins. As there’s fighting on more fronts than World War I, that means a mad dash in every direction as armies scramble for territory. Add in the intrigue, politicking, and outright treachery that the bad guys are of course going to use, and it makes for a lot of action.

But that’s not all that’s going on. Kaladin, our hero since the beginning of the series, has been given his own mission. Events in Rhythm of War have left him mentally broken, but in a place where he feels not only that he’s coming out of it, but that he knows how to help other people do the same. In other words, he’s becoming his world’s first therapist. (Wit, a side character who has become much more important as the series has progressed, even states it that way. But I’ll get to that in a moment.)

Kaladin’s quest involves taking Szeth, the first character we ever met back in Way of Kings, to his homeland in the far east. That quickly becomes a major trial straight out of a JRPG, with Szeth needing to free his land from a foul influence one gym leader—er, honor-bearer—at a time. Seriously, it’s very reminiscent of Pokemon or a shounen anime. The Radiant powers only add to the feel.

Meanwhile, the other main characters are playing their parts in the final days of the war. The spren are now no longer simple manifestations of emotions, but important people in and of themselves. And the scope has crept up more than my work, which is a good time to talk about the worldbuilding at play here.

The world (and beyond)

The Stormlight Archive is set on Roshar, a very peculiar planet whose oddities I ran down in the old post. This book did go into more detail about it and its neighbors, Ashyn and Braize, enough that an astute reader can understand what Sanderson is going for here.

Ashyn seems to be the original home of humans in this solar system; they were brought there at some point in the distant past (at least 10,000 years before the books) by Adonalsium, who is finally personalized as some sort of ascended, possibly draconic, being. After he seeded the "Cosmere" with life, some of his cohorts managed to take him down. They split his power into sixteen shards, and Wind and Truth finally has the courage to actually explain this. Through the eyes of the bearer of the Honor shard, no less.

So we finally get some answers I’ve been waiting for since I read that one chapter intro of Hero of Ages that mentioned "this Shard of Adonalsium". It’s about time.

Anyway, Ashyn was where humans lived, until they blew it up and basically turned it into Venus. Braize is a kind of Early Mars analogue that has a curious spiritual power. Roshar, the middle child of the system, is habitable but was also inhabited by the beings who eventually became the Voidbringers, and are now the enemy army of the present day.

Roshar is described in this book as having a kind of mathematical perfection. That makes a lot of pieces click into place for me. That’s why the main—only?—landmass looks like a Julia fractal. That’s why the Shattered Plains have a waveform pattern. That’s why everything seems to be in such…balance.

But humans disturbed that balance by leaving their destroyed homeworld and coming here. I don’t particularly like that concept; it’s very anti-human and reeks of green eco-terrorism. Sanderson tries to deflect it, but he’s not very successful. I’ll return to my thoughts on that at the end of the post.

Beyond this world is an entire galaxy of inhabited planets, some of them with their own Shards whose bearers are quite literally playing God. Because of Roshar’s unique nature, and the fact that it’s home to three of the Shards (Honor, Odium, and the rarely-seen Cultivation), everybody gives it a wide berth.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t references, and here is where the "Cosmere" part comes into play. There are numerous references to the Mistborn series, including a cameo from Demoux, who may or may not be the same B-team captain from those books. And, although I won’t go into detail, the final part of the epilogue even takes place on Scadrial, the Mistborn planet.

It’s ambitious, especially when you add in the last scene of The Lost Metal, which seemed to be going in the opposite direction. But this is where things begin to break down.

The downfall

At times, the interconnected universe Sanderson is weaving starts to come undone. There’s just too much of it, to the point that I would almost say Stormlight Archive is not a self-contained series. Meaning that you have to read his other works to even be able to follow the story at this stage. You’re not going to know who some of the people are, how some of their magic works, or why they’re all here in the first place unless you do. This includes not only Mistborn and Elantris, but also the Stormlight novellas like Edgedancer. I’m not saying it’s a money grab. It’s just an author not knowing how to rein himself in.

That goes for the novel as a whole, though. Weighing in around 1400 pages in hardback, and those printed in a smaller font that gave my failing eyes no end of trouble even with my glasses, Wind and Truth has too much wind for too little truth. The ten-day structure is great for keeping the story moving, but even then it has long stretches where I felt like nothing was really happening.

Some of this comes from Sanderson’s prose, which has not improved to any appreciable extent. He has started including normal English profanity, even when it doesn’t really fit—but he kind of lampoons this at one point, which was nice to see—and still has the occasional Americanism. Some of the characters, especially Maya, talk like I’d expect from Twitter posts rather than a novel with such amazing production quality.

Yes, I was finding some great quotes to send to my girlfriend, like "As I fear not the child with a weapon he cannot lift, I will never fear the mind of a man who does not think." Or "So often, it began with just looking up. That was the first step in clawing free of the darkness." The therapeutic aspect of this book can’t be overstated. Considering I described the cast four years ago as "the DSM-5 in novel form", this is not only appropriate, but welcome.

Apart from such gems, however, the prose generally feels clunky. Too wordy when it needs to be direct, too blunt when it should be descriptive. I don’t know why this is Sanderson’s writing style. It’s the single most infuriating thing about his stories.

The disaster

Well, it was.

Much more in this book, Sanderson has begun inserting not only American figures of speech, but American political topics. Some parts are anti-human. Some are downright woke. At least three named characters came out as gay, which is three more than I can think of in the entirety of his works before this. There’s a general breaking-down of gender roles that permeates the book, an important character who’s a Reddit-tier atheist, and a feel that’s far leftward of anything I remember from the mostly apolitical Mormon I call my favorite author.

Quite possibly the worst bit of progressive ideology in Wind and Truth, however, is the race-blindness. First of all, that’s a very modern concept that doesn’t fit well in a fantasy world to begin with. Second, it’s handled poorly. Real people truly are cognizant of differences in race. Here, though, that recognition is ignored or mocked. Kaladin, for example, is practically berated by his spren companion for noticing and remarking on the much different appearance of those in Shinovar.

You might object by pointing out that the world is embroiled in a fight for survival. Wouldn’t racism be set aside? To a point, yes, but that argument falls flat when you look at the way the "singers" are treated. At every point, even when they aren’t present, humans speak of them with respect and even a hint of reverence. There are no curses, no slurs; they don’t even call them by the name "Parshendi" anymore. There isn’t much of a resistance in the lands they’ve conquered. You get the feeling that some humans like them more than their own species. Considering these are the beings their religion literally depicted as demons, that’s a little hard to swallow.

That’s not the only place where my suspension of disbelief got strained. In the first book of the series, Kaladin and his fellow slaves (as he was at the time) didn’t know anything about the spren, the Cognitive Realm, the healing powers of Stormlight, or any of that. And they were depicted as being average in that regard. Sure, a few people had some hidden knowledge, but even the learned, like Shallan, were largely unaware of their world’s place in the universe.

In Wind and Truth, things are completely different, and that can’t all be attributed to the tumult of the war. Take, for instance, the people of Iri, a backwater rarely mentioned and almost never visited. Somehow they not only know that other worlds exist and are populated by humans, but they have a way to travel into Shadesmar en masse, like a band of gypsies? You’d think that would’ve come out before now, surely.

And that brings me to the ending of both the book and this post. The ending was honestly the worst part of the entire novel. It felt like a letdown, in a way that Sanderson usually doesn’t provide. True, it hit some bittersweet notes, but even those weren’t handled well. Parts of it felt like Empire Strikes Back. Parts felt like I was watching Cartoon Network late on a Saturday night. And parts felt like he just didn’t know where he wanted to put all the major players, so he just kind of…left them stranded.

Maybe the "second arc" of the Stormlight Archive will make that make sense. I hope so. This thing still has five books left to go. In my opinion, Wind and Truth, despite being the biggest one so far, is also the weakest by a wide margin.

Welcome to 2025

Munder Nüjersdag 2025 fram Altidisk!

In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve gotten back on the conlang train over the past year, and I want to use 2025 to ride that train to its next destination. So that’s the big project for the new year, and I’m going to use this post to talk a bit about Altidisk: what it is, why it’s interesting, and why it’s the first time I’m constructing a language explicitly for other people to speak.

Communication and community

Languages are a part of culture. In a very real sense, those who speak a certain language have a shared bond that comes from it, a group distinction that separates them, gives them a way to communicate that recognizes their commonality.

English, being the major language of the world now, lacks that common bond. Because everyone is expected to speak English, or at least know someone who does, those of us who have it as our native language don’t see it as part of our heritage or community. English, alone among the living languages of the world, no longer has an established culture. In that, it’s like Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, or even Sumerian in ancient times. Long gone are the days where speaking English meant you had some connection to England.

Our native tongue’s closest living relatives don’t have that problem. The other Germanic languages are, by and large, spoken in their traditional homelands and by a small group of expats and colonists, most of whom still remember and respect their ancestry. Germans know they’re German, even in Argentina. Swedes know they’re Swedish, whether they’re in Stockholm or St. Paul. Only English, by virtue of the British Empire’s storied history, has lost what it means to be itself.

That was my first motivation behind Altidisk. Because every Germanic language, while different in many ways, has a lot in common. For that matter, every Germanic culture has a lot in common. We all share a deep instinct, almost like genetic memory, that recalls the way of life our ancestors had 2000 years ago. To be Germanic is to descend from a people who prized courage, family, and honor. Three things, coincidentally enough, that are considered disgraceful or even "toxic" in modern times.

The people’s speech

There are other "auxiliary" languages out there. Indeed, the most well-known conlang of them all, Esperanto, is one such. Add in Ido, Interlingua, and a few less-notable cases, and the space is pretty crowded already. The difference is that Altidisk, unlike Esperanto, isn’t intended to be a world language. Its goal is not to replace English. Instead, I want it to augment the Germanic linguistic cultures, to help rebuild that shared bond.

To that end, the words are derived from Proto-Germanic, the common ancestor of English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and so on. Grammar is derived from the same source, though with a lot more variation due to the way the individual languages evolved. If you speak any of those languages, you’ll be able to get a good idea of what’s being said without even learning…or that’s one of the goals. I don’t know how well it’ll work in practice.

But the other goal, restoring the cohesion of the Germanic peoples, is just as important. That’s why the language is called "Altidisk" in the first place. Tidisk is its own word for "of the people"—cognate to Deutsch and Teutonic, as a matter of fact—and al is just "all". Thus, "language of all peoples", but specifically all the Germanic peoples. (It also self-identifies as the Viterens Folkspaka: "white folks’ speech", with "white" here used to refer specifically to the people around the shores of the North Sea.)

Resolution

As of today, Altidisk has a lexicon of over 4000 words, and over 5000 semantic meanings; there’s a great deal of homophony in the "core" vocabulary, owing to the way words were derived from Proto-Germanic. I also have translations of a few "classic" conlang texts: the Babel Text (Genesis 11:1-9), the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13), and the entirety of McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader, which has become a kind of exhibition for a budding language.

All told, the corpus is somewhere around 8000 words in total, and I hope to at least double that in the coming year. I also want to do a few more translations, mostly to pin down some of the more obscure corners of the grammar. And then I want to compile that grammar in a format others can use, along with vocabulary lists, lessons, and the like. In short, I’m starting 2025 with the goal that, by the end of it, people—specifically Germanic-descended people—can start communicating in Altidisk.

Then we speakers of English and its cousins can, I hope, find our culture again. And that is a good resolution for the new year.

Review: Yesterwynde

It’s been a few years since my favorite group put out a new album, but the time has finally arrived. Yesterwynde came out last month, and I’ve got some things to say about it.

Nightwish remains at the top of my list of favorites, as they have for almost two decades now. Their music truly has touched me in many ways. It’s emotional, which carried me through some tough times. It’s inspiring, to the point of providing me with titles for about a dozen of my stories. Most of all, it’s just good music. Considering what the media tries to push these days, that’s a rare occurrence indeed.

Yesterwynde, however, is…a bit of a conundrum. It marks another shift in lineup, as Marko Hietala left the band a few years ago. His replacement on bass doesn’t sing. Than means male lead vocals fall to Troy Donockley—admittedly, he did most of the male singing on Human :II: Nature—who also plays…bagpipes. (Metal is weird, in case you’re wondering.)

Concept-wise, it’s not fully coherent, but there are definite themes that run throughout. From what I can tell, it’s envisioned as completing a trilogy that began with Endless Forms Most Beautiful. What that tells me is something I’ll save for the conclusion.

Anyway, on to the song-by-song.

Yesterwynde

The opening, and title, track sets the tone for the whole album. It starts with a very Nightwish symphonic and choral intro, tosses in some piping, and lets Floor Jansen show off. Very traditional, but you can already sense a shift in the tone of the album. There seem to be more minor chords and more drops that give the song a sense of sadness that was totally missing from the last two albums.

At the beginning, even before the strings, is another recurring theme, in the form of a film projector sound. The word "yesterwynde" is a pure neologism that, broadly speaking, refers to nostalgia, the longing for the past. That sense permeates the entire album, and the projector noise only reinforces the notion that we’re looking back. Compare this to Endless Forms, which always gave me the feeling of being looked at.

An Ocean Of Strange Islands

Now we get to the first "real" song, and it’s much more metal. It hearkens back to "Stargazers" and "Devil And The Deep Dark Ocean" in its energy and feel. In my view, that’s another way Yesterwynde invokes nostalgia: it’s as if you’re listening to a greatest hits album that doesn’t actually have any of the songs.

In terms of theme, it’s hard to tell just what these strange islands are, but I suspect that, in this instance at least, they’re worlds like Earth. Phrases like "universal mariners" and "the starbound quay" hint at that, while also reminding us that Nightwish has always been a very sea-focused band.

The Antikythera Mechanism

The object referred to in the title of this one, the Antikythera Mechanism, is the oldest known analog computer, a Greek invention from Late Antiquity that functioned as an orrery. Finding it changed a lot of what we thought we knew about that era, and technological progress as a whole.

The song gives a hint of that: "Your father’s voice, no more unheard." What it also gives is an unusual rhythm for the verses, interspersed with a rapid-fire refrain that opens up as it progresses, both filled with lofty lyrics that still come across as down-to-earth. This is also the first reference to the "weave", a theme that we’ll pick up later.

The Day Of…

No, the title didn’t get cut off. That’s really what it’s called. The day of…what, you might ask? Reckoning, I would assume, because this track definitely has an apocalyptic vibe. Rather, it’s closer to a deconstruction of apocalypse.

This is where Nightwish, like many metal acts, makes you think. For the whole song, Jansen is rattling off various ways the world might end. Y2K, overpopulation, global warming, and other such falsehoods. The best part is, she’s mocking them. She’s laughing at all these crazy theories humans have devised for the end times. And that goes all the way up to the present, the "mind virus" (which can only be a reference to woke progressivism) and the urge to "obey, stay away, cover up" that too many people submitted to in 2020.

"The Day Of…" thus feels like a rejection of the modern ideology, the state religion of fear impressed upon us. But it’s not a call for returning to tradition, either.

Perfume Of The Timeless

I barely know what to say about "Perfume Of The Timeless". It’s just one of those songs that gets into your mind, your very soul, and makes itself at home there. An 8-minute epic that evokes pretty much anything you could think of, if you squint hard enough. Symphony and metal intertwined. And, best of all, that chorus. The second line of it, to be precise: "We are because of a million loves."

Those seven words, in my opinion, encapsulate not only the overarching theme of Yesterwynde, but the feeling it seems to want you to feel. We’re human. We have human emotions. And this song isn’t saying that we live for love, but because of love. We’re here because our parents loved each other (or tried to), because their parents did, and so on. It’s the spiritual counterpart to what I consider the most important line of "The Greatest Show On Earth": "Not a single one of your fathers died young."

It’s humanism, plain and simple. It is the sense that we all have things in common, that there are universals among our species. And that we owe our lives to the humans who came before us.

Sway

After the humanist national anthem, we get "Sway", an airy ballad that lets both vocalists shine in harmony. Nothing too complex or even deep here, just good singing and an undercurrent of innocence. That’s another Nightwish standard, going all the way back to the 90s. There’s a bit of whimsy in here, that then stands in counterpoint to the bridge speaking of some unknown big reveal. Death? Revelation? Whatever it is, we should greet it with the eyes of a child.

The Children Of ‘Ata

Speaking of children, next up is "The Children Of ‘Ata". Not sure what ‘Ata is; my admittedly cursory search came up with a mythical Polynesian island, sort of a Pacific Atlantis or Hyperborea. The song starts with a chant in a Polynesian language—I think it’s Tongan?—lending credence to that theory.

Besides that, this is a song that confuses me. It works in the lyrical theme of a mariner, as in "An Ocean Of Strange Islands", but also the "watchers" theme from "Edema Ruh" and the endurance theme from the climax of "The Greatest Show On Earth", both on Endless Forms, the notion that we’re being watched and judged by someone beyond our knowledge. In this case, based on the rest of Yesterwynde, that someone is…our children. Future generations looking back, probably wondering what in the world we were thinking.

Oh, and there’s a haka. I think it’s a haka, anyway. Sounds like one. And that reminds me of Christopher Tin’s "Kia Hora Te Marino". Nothing wrong with that.

Something Whispered Follow Me

A nighttime visitor, physical or spiritual. A call of the wild, beckoning you to step into the unknown, into the land of fantasy that waits beyond the "normal". Every metal band does it, apparently. Queensryche made a hit of it. Avantasia wrote two whole albums about it. Nightwish themselves put it in a song ("Elvenpath", in case you’re wondering) when I was still in middle school.

This rendition of that timeless trope is nothing spectacular, but it’s solid. Hard. It urges us to find something real by, paradoxically enough, embracing flights of fancy. And it’s another song with humanist trappings, reminding us that our lives are works of art simply by us living them.

Spider Silk

Here’s another song where I don’t know what to say. Unlike "Perfume Of The Timeless", it’s not because I was bowled over by it. No, "Spider Silk" is simply…uninspiring. It’s literally a song about spiders, and it just isn’t a very good one.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The track has a catchy beat. When I listened to it at home, relaxing, I was immediately put off. But the second time, driving across the state to see the woman I love, I found myself almost singing along. So it’s the very rare case of a symphonic metal band creating a…pop song? That’s really what it feels like.

The Weave

Spiders, of course, weave webs. That’s what they’re known for. And weaving is a very important theme in Yesterwynde. Stories are woven. Tapestries are woven. And I’d say that all comes about because fate, in many older traditions, is also something woven.

As for "The Weave" as a song, there’s little to say. It’s definitely a filler track, but at least it has a gimmick: the whole thing is, with one exception, a palindrome. What that means, I have no idea.

Hiraeth

I put this out of order purely to keep "Spider Silk" and "The Weave" together. Well, also because it deserves more words. This is another ballad, one far more downcast than "Sway". For reference, hiraeth is the Welsh word for nostalgia, and thus basically a translation of Yesterwynde itself.

Even if you didn’t know that, you could probably figure it out if you listened to the lyrics. The verses are sung by Troy here, with Floor harmonizing in the refrains. And it does seem to be his song, his time in the spotlight as male lead.

He couldn’t have picked a better one. "Hiraeth" is all about looking back, about reaching out for what has passed us by. It’s sad in a bittersweet way, and it’s all too real. Life is full of hurts, of pain and loss. And that wears us down to the point where we do start to long for the days of old. Pain and sorrow and living with the thought that maybe we could’ve done something different to prevent it—that’s called being human.

And that’s why "Hiraeth" hits hard, despite being tucked away near the end of the album. It’s almost a hidden gem of a "sad" song. It makes you think. It makes you dwell on the past, and then realize what you’re doing.

Lanternlight

Last, we come to "Lanternlight". This is more of a story than a song, a bit of free verse that caps our journey through the rose-tinted world of memory. Musically speaking, it’s really nothing more than Floor Jansen’s rehearsal. If you’ve heard her cover of Heart’s "Alone", you’ll wonder if she used that to practice for this. (If you haven’t heard that, check it out. It’s amazing.)

For some reason, I can’t get through "Lanternlight" without crying, and I don’t really understand why. It’s not overly sad. Very bittersweet, yes, but not something intended to get the tears flowing. All I’ve been able to figure out is a sequence in the penultimate verse: "I hear our song now, sung by the free / For a thousand more tomorrows / Of an incomplete weave". That’s the part that gets misty for me, and the only reason I can think of is because I just don’t believe I’ll even see a thousand more tomorrows.

Conclusion

Overall, Yesterwynde is a good album. It’s not the greatest, far from the worst, and very much a coherent whole. Even the filler tracks ("Spider Silk", "The Weave") contribute to the primary themes of fate, humanity, humanism, and the idea that we live not for ourselves, but for those who are yet to come. That our descendants, our children and their children and their children, will be the ones who tell our story, not us.

On top of that, it’s nostalgic in the music sense, too. At almost every point in the album, you’ll hear something that sounds enough like an older Nightwish song that it tickles your ear and makes you think back to Once or Oceanborn or whatever. It’s new, but it’s not completely fresh. Instead, it builds off what came before.

If anything, that’s the message right there, and I can see how it’s the cap to a trilogy. Endless Forms Most Beautiful set us in our place in the universe, in the chain of evolution that stretches back to the birth of our world. Human :II: Nature places us in the world, contrasting our human ingenuity with the natural wonders around us. And Yesterwynde roots us in time, reminding us that the way we look back on our ancestors is exactly the way we will be looked upon by future generations.

So maybe we should act like it.

41

I’m a year into overtime now, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. I honestly don’t feel much different from this time last year, at least regarding my position. I’m back to work, if only part-time, and that’s enough to tread water. Never enough to move forward, however, and that’s really how I see every part of my life these days. Add in the exhaustion and stress I feel most days, the parts of my body that don’t quite work as well as they used to…

I’m old. There’s no other way to put it.

While I do still prefer it to the alternative, it makes things much more difficult. I just don’t have time to do all the things I want. I’m not talking about the Boomer obsession with vacations to faraway places or interminable roadtrips. I mean putting my ideas into practice. Because I still have tons of those.

Since I have, for almost three years now, continued to believe that each new birthday will be my last, I’ve decided to focus on my legacy, what little there is. Barring a miracle (and you know I don’t believe in miracles), I probably won’t have children of my own. I’m not going to be a billionaire philanthropist. No, I create things. That’s what I do. And I want to create something that, to put it bluntly, outlives me.

All my ideas are incredibly niche. I’ll freely admit that. I’ve never been one to follow trends or try to be popular. I think outside the box, whether or not people want me to. It’s a lonely path that my mind walks.

That said, the thoughts that have taken root lately have been for things that other people might find interesting or useful. So this year is my chance to focus on those.

Altidisk: It’s hard to believe I’ve been creating languages for a quarter of a century. True, I didn’t do much with the craft for a few years, but I never truly stopped. (I’ve used one of them for making passwords for 20 years!) Altidisk is a little different, though. It’s the first time I’ve made an auxiliary language. More Esperanto than Elvish, in that sense. Unlike most auxlangs, mine has an ulterior motive: it’s based on Germanic roots, Germanic principles, and it’s intended to foster a renewed sense of Germanic community.
Pixeme: This one’s still around. The idea is simple enough. Take a picture, describe in a single sentence what’s happening on it, then translate that sentence into as many other languages as you can. It’s good for building vocabulary and grammar, the latter of which flashcard methods tend to overlook. And I’ve even tested the Pixeme method myself; even just using AI-generated images, I was able to associate the image with a Spanish sentence fairly easily, and that helped with the words, too.
Rakentan: I’ve been wanting to build a "fediverse" platform ever since I first saw the ActivityPub standard. It just seems like it solves so many problems with the way the modern web is designed. Originally, I wanted to create a replacement for the old PHP-based forums of decades past, and that’s still on the table, but I recently had the idea of something like a recreation of webrings (remember those?) crossed with StumbleUpon (remember that?), in a federated model. So you’d have all your own links, and you could follow others’ collections to see what they’re liking, and so on. I’m…still working out the specifics, to be honest.

I have other ideas, because I always do, but these are the top ones at the moment. Other than my writing, of course. That’s what kept me going through the deepest parts of depression, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t continue it, even if basically nobody ever reads the books.

So there you have it. Another year older, somewhat crankier, as quixotic as ever, and altogether jaded. That’s me at 41.

Fork in the road

The past week or so has been an eventful one in the game development world. Unity is still backpedaling on their disastrous attempt at charging devs per-sale. The CCP-infested Unreal Engine has lowered its royalty fee. Ubisoft is teaching us all how best to set half a billion dollars on fire.

And then there’s Godot.

I’ve written about Godot Engine in the past. It first came out about 10 years ago, and it took the opensource world by storm. Here was a pro-level—okay, semi-pro back then—game engine that was free to use, without worrying that Unity would demand payment when you only ever opened the editor twice. (This actually happened to my brother.) Over the past decade, it grew, evolved, becoming the premier engine for budding developers on a budget.

All that changed a few days ago. "Get woke, go broke," the saying goes, and Godot’s management has chosen to go for broke. A far-left "community manager" proudly boasted on Twitter that this engine was perfectly fine being on an admittedly overzealous list of woke games. Fine. Sure. Find me a AAA studio that isn’t utterly broken to the mind virus, and I’ll gladly buy their games. Well, except I can’t actually buy their games; they won’t sell them to me. (California got one right this time, amazingly enough.)

Most people probably ignored the initial message, seeing it as just another fluorescent-haired professional victim parroting the latest narrative. And that’s probably how it was originally intended. But then came the doubling down. People who questioned the intent of the message started getting banned. Developers were kicked out. Backers were kicked out. The project head first claimed to be apolitical, then whined about being bullied off Twitter altogether, retreating to the safe space of leftist Mastodon. At every turn, those who objected to, disputed, or simply asked about Godot’s underlying political agenda were purged.

The great thing about open source is that this doesn’t mean the end. Because anyone can take the source, compile it, and release the resulting binaries, an open project can’t be shut down by progressive whim; this is most likely why so many are switching to "open core" models or demanding copyright assignments.

End result, though, is Redot Engine. Yes, the name’s derivative, but that’s to be expected. The whole thing is derivative, but in the positive sense that only free code under a permissive license allows. Redot hasn’t even released a build yet, and they’re already overwhelmed with support, so much so that Godot’s screeching gallery has started openly attacking it. They use the usual communist methods, so familiar from Antifa, BLM, and anything to do with Trump: projection, accusations of white supremacist beliefs, attempts to clog the system with garbage, and vague allusions of unseemly images stored on the "bad guys’" computers.

All this, because someone said, "No, I don’t want my game engine to have a political agenda."

Nor should it. Tools should be apolitical, because a tool, in and of itself, is amoral. It does not think or act on its own. It simply exists. The uses of a tool are in no way indicative of any inherent moral qualities of that tool. Nuclear bombs were once considered a viable means of digging canals, after all. And even if we accept the idea that a tool can espouse an ideology, why would we want one that’s communist? Why would we want to support the single most deadly ideology in all of human history? The one responsible for the Holodomor and the One Child Policy, the one that gave the world Stalin and Mao and Castro and Chavez?

Redot, as I see it, can be a chance to show that some people are still fighting against the encroachment of anti-human ideology in software. That gives me hope, because I’ve often felt I was fighting that battle alone, as I watched project after project adopt censorious codes of conduct or otherwise wall themselves off from rational discourse.

It’s not perfect yet, so my other hope is that the Redot team understands two things. One, something founded purely on a negative basis—that is, solely to be against another—cannot endure. This was the downfall of Voat and Threads, among many others

Second, if Redot wants to be inclusive in the true, non-bowdlerized meaning of the word, then it must be open. As yet, it is not. All discussion and development is currently hosted only in walled gardens: Discord, Github, Twitter, Youtube. There isn’t any way for a privacy-conscious developer/author to contribute, and I won’t compromise my own morals by supporting the very platforms which have spread the woke mind virus to software development in the first place.

So that’s where we stand right now. Godot has self-immolated, and I have no problem saying they deserve it. Redot is carrying the torch, but they need to prove that their words are not just wind. If they do, then we will have not only a great game engine for free, but a beacon of light in an otherwise dark time.

The Second Enlightenment

The Third Dark Age is upon us. We live in the modern equivalent of the final days of Rome, waiting for the sack that finishes off the Empire once and for all. Like the Huns and their Bronze Age counterparts, invaders run rampart in our towns and cities, not only not stopped by those who claim to lead us, but actively supported by them. Meanwhile, alleged academics want to banish all knowledge of the past, for fear of the masses recognizing our decline.

Can we halt our decline? Probably not, as far down the path as we’ve come so far. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work to ensure that it is as short as possible, and that our descendants are not left in a centuries-long era of regression and barbarism.

Awakening

Out of the Greek Dark Age came legends: Homer and Exodus, mythic tales of people overcoming the great and powerful with more than a little help from their chosen deities. By the time the dust had settled, the world had changed irrevocably, a full break with the past. Gone were the Hittites and Trojans and Canaanites, while Darius and Alexander were still hundreds of years away.

It was a long road back, but we got there in the end. Eventually, rational thought returned to the Western world, largely confined to Greece at this stage. Philosophy was born, and with it the awakening of wisdom, of reason.

Much, much later, the fall of Rome and rise of Islam brought the Medieval Dark Age to Europe, all but extinguishing that light. And while the cultural and technological and even scientific knowledge of the West rose from the mire after only a relatively few generations, the higher purpose of wisdom, of the kind of knowledge that creates civilizations and jump-starts human progress, lay dormant far longer. Instead, Europe looked to religion, to mysticism and myth, for another few centuries.

Only when science had advanced far enough to prove the fairytale stories of Jewish scripture demonstrably false could the Enlightenment begin. And only when it began was Europe able to cast off the last of the darkness.

That didn’t start until the early 17th century, with great thinkers like Galileo and Bruno to start, followed later by those such as Newton and Spinoza. Eventually, the Enlightenment even began to fracture, different regions going their separate ways. The French Enlightenment, for instance, gave us the rational philosophy of Descartes and the like: ways to look at the world that didn’t invoke the supernatural. The English and even Scottish, on the other hand, contributed the wisdom of politics, economics, and the "hard" sciences. Last, but most important, was the American Enlightenment, bringing the liberal (in the classical sense) values of French thinkers together with the moral imperatives of free speech, free markets, and freedom of religion that came from their rivals across the Channel.

In that sense, then, there were still bits of darkness in the world as late as 1800. (Really, not all of them left, but I digress.) Even though Europe didn’t have wandering hordes of invaders anymore, we in the West still needed a thousand years after Charlemagne to truly return to the glory days he was trying to emulate.

And that pairs up well with the Greek Dark Age. Yes, Homer was writing his epics in the ninth or tenth century BC, but they were the beginning, not the end, of Greece’s rise. Most of the great thinkers we associate with the Greek school of philosophy came much later, in the third and fourth centuries BC. In other words, almost a full millennium after the invasions of the Sea Peoples. In a very real sense, then, the path from darkness to light was longer for medieval Europe.

Learning from the past

We must do better than that. The effects of our Third Dark Age can’t last for a thousand years. We’ve come too far as a species to allow ourselves to be dragged back into the darkness, no matter what the "traditionalist" right and "inclusive" left wish for us.

So how do we do it?

First, we must keep knowledge alive. True knowledge, the wisdom passed down to us and created in our own time. Digital collections such as Library Genesis are a good thing—the fact that elites hate them so much is a pretty good indication—but they have the downside of being, well, digital. If the Third Dark Age collapse is too great, ubiquitous computing won’t be a given. In addition to distributed, censorship-resistant online libraries, then, we need open, secure libraries in the physical world. The Library of Alexandria, except there’s one in every city, and their shared goal is to archive as much knowledge as possible, in ways that it will endure even the harshest decline.

Second, those of us who are awake to the peril must continue to share that knowledge. Within our family, our community, and our country (in that order), we should be training others in the skills we possess, while also passing down what we have learned. And this includes the greatest lessons of all: that the world is not some divine mystery; that humanity is inherently a good and positive force; that science is not reserved to the elite, or those with the right credentials, but is something every one of us experiences every single day.

Third on the list is a greater focus on that community. The post-collapse time of the previous Dark Ages was a reversion to a heavily decentralized world. An anti-globalism, or a "localism", if you will. In modern times, I can foresee that creating a multitude of city-states; we’re already pretty close to this with New York, London, and a few others. But even rural areas will have to become more self-reliant as the Third Dark Age brings a fall of the American Empire. We can’t do that if we don’t know our neighbors. (We also can’t band together to resist invasions without that sense of brotherhood, so this strengthening of community has more than one beneficial effect.)

Fourth, reconnecting with our past, in the sense of doing useful work outside of the internet. This can be writing books, building a shed, or just anything. The key is that it has a physical presence. It’s a physical manifestation of our knowledge, which matters more in a world that will come to see that knowledge as worthless in itself. I’m not saying to become a prepper—that might be more useful in other collapse circumstances—but to prepare for a major shift in what society deems important.

Above all, we need to remember, to preserve, to teach the world that the coming darkness is not eternal. There is a light beyond, and it is not the light at the end of the tunnel. It is the dawn of a new day. Working together, recognizing what we are losing and why, we have the chance to bring that new dawn faster than in our ancestors’ previous two attempts.

If knowledge is power, our job is to be a generator. And that’s what you need to keep the lights on in a disaster.

The Third Dark Age

Twice before, the West faced a crisis, a series of unfortunate events that led ultimately to the decline of the reigning powers of the civilized world, a long stretch of technological stagnation or even regression, and a loss of the cultural achievements of those who came before. In short, a Dark Age.

Our world today is on the same track. We’re following those same steps, dealing with those same crises. Unlike the past, however, we have the ability to recognize what is happening, and to stop it. But we can only do that if we acknowledge our situation. To do that, we must understand the warning signs and the parallels.

The last Dark Age

Most people in the Western world have heard of the Dark Age. (Sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages, but the singular is important here, as you’ll see shortly.) The time after the fall of the Roman Empire was a period of barbarism in Europe, a long stretch of Vikings and serfdom and general horror.

Archaeological finds show that our legends of this time are exaggerated. Alas, these finds have given ammunition to those on both sides of the political spectrum who wish to argue that the Dark Age never even happened. The left will point to algebra and the Almagest to say, "See? Muslims kept making advances where white Europeans failed." The right, meanwhile, counters with, "Look at those cathedrals! That’s proof that Christianity is what kept civilization going."

Both are wrong, of course. The few Muslim inventions—and their occasional translation of ancient knowledge—don’t make up for the ravages of the Moorish conquest of Spain. The cathedrals built in the 9th century weren’t constructed from Roman concrete, because knowledge of how to make that was lost along with so much else. There was a Dark Age, no doubt about it. The only questions are how long it lasted and just how dark it was.

By any reasonable estimation, the fall of Rome was the tipping point. Many of the Gothic tribes that settled in Italy, France, and Spain at the time still considered themselves vassals of the Empire, to some extent, and some continued to pay homage to Constantinople, the eastern capital where the flame of civilization was kept alive. But even that had ended by 540, following a volcanic winter (caused by an eruption in Central America!) and attendant famines and plagues. So we can put the start of the Dark Age around 500 AD, plus or minus about 40 years.

When did it end? Tradition has it lasting as late as 1066, with the Norman Conquest. Academics like to credit Charlemagne’s accession in 800 as ending it. I’d say the best date comes in between those. The early not-quite-Renaissance of the late ninth and early tenth centuries shows that European culture was beginning to rise from its nadir far better than the end of the Merovingian era. Personally, I’d use 927, the year of Æthelstan’s coronation as king of England, as a good compromise, but you could make a case for anywhere in the range of 870-940.

In between, most of the continent was a mess. Rational thought took a back seat to mysticism and monasticism. Texts, cultural contributions, and even general knowledge of the Roman Empire all fell away, until the Romans themselves almost became mythologized. The typical Hollywood portrayal of medieval peasants in dirty, tattered clothing, treading muddy streets to go back to their thatch hovels, isn’t entirely accurate, but it’s probably closer to the truth than the almost romantic notions of some traditionalists.

The European Dark Age was, to sum up, a time where the strong ruled, the weak toiled, and the wisdom of the past was forgotten. What’s worse is that it wasn’t the first time that had happened.

The one before

As far back in history from the start of the European Dark Age as it is from our present day, the lands of the Mediterranean faced a crisis. This was precipitated by invasions from what are commonly called the Sea Peoples, a later collective name given to groups who are mostly known only from a few Egyptian accounts. We can identify some of them from such accounts, however: the Achaeans, Sicilians, Sardinians, and Philistines. Possibly also the Etruscans, though this etymology is on somewhat shakier ground.

Whoever they were, the Sea Peoples invaded Egypt, most of the Levant, and Anatolia. They clashed with the major civilizations of that time—Egyptians, Hittites, and so on—and ultimately wore them down so much that they fell into their own decline. It wasn’t a conquest, but more like a war of attrition, the same way forces in Palestine and Lebanon (almost the exact same place!) are bleeding their occupiers dry as we speak.

Dates are hard to find this far back in history, but the most common given for the start, or perhaps the height, of the troubles is 1177 BC, owing to the popular book of the same name, which isn’t bad except for the part where it does the usual academic trick of trying to be notable by minimizing the impact of known historical events.

This "Greek Dark Age", as it’s commonly called, isn’t as much known, but its effects were no less drastic than the European one that started a millennium and a half later. The Hittites fell out of history entirely, to the point where our only knowledge of them as recently as 200 years ago was a mention in the Bible. The Egyptians fared a little better, but lost most of their holdings east of the Sinai to the Philistines and Canaanites, who—in another event paralleled by modern times—later lost them to invading Hebrews. Farther north, Troy fell to an alliance that included Sea Peoples; its collapse was so total that the modern West thought the whole city was a myth until it was rediscovered.

Three thousand years is a long time, so it’s only reasonable that we have far less data about the Greek Dark Age. We don’t know a lot of details about it, but what we do know shows that it follows the same pattern as the one that befell Europe later on.

What’s to come

The biggest contributor to both of the previous Dark Ages is invasion. Rome was invaded by Goths, Huns, Vandals, and (later) Moors, all of whom picked apart the bones of the empire and left little behind for its citizens. The Sea Peoples did much the same to the powers of the Bronze Age, even when Ramesses II tried to resettle some of them.

It’s not hard to see that pattern repeating today. Our own country is being invaded as we speak, as are so many of the major Western powers. Millions of "asylum-seekers" who consume resources but refuse to assimilate, who provoke or cause violence, who care nothing for the sentiments of those who call this land home. The Haitians eating pets in Ohio, the Venezuelans capturing apartment complexes in Colorado, the rape gangs of England…these are the modern Sea Peoples, the modern Huns and Moors. And they are one tip of the trident thrust our way.

The apocalyptic conditions of the 530s contributed to the European Dark Age, as well as the fall of a number of smaller cultures in the Middle East, where the resulting power vacuum provided fertile ground for a Muslim conquest. It’s harder to pinpoint a major ecological disaster for the Greek Dark Age; probably the closest is an impact (or airburst) event on the shores of the Dead Sea circa 1600 BC, the historical basis for the Sodom and Gomorrah myth. But that must be too far back. Undoubtedly, the Sea Peoples wanted to migrate south for some reason. Perhaps it’s linked to the fall of the Minoans on Crete, another total collapse in that era.

Today, we don’t seem to have as much to worry about on that front. We’re in a stable climate epoch, a period of global "greening" while temperatures remain steady and comfortable. In our case, the ecological angle of collapse might come from an overreaction on the part of—or simply led by—doomsayers who claim our relatively quiescent climate is somehow a bad thing, and that we need to go back to the days of the Little Ice Age.

More likely, ecology will be used as a way to contribute to the collapse. We already see that happening, as clean nuclear plants are shut down and replaced with toxic solar panels and bird-killing turbines. Eugenics is another possibility: the attempts by the so-called "elite" to force us to eat bugs or genetically modified plants, to take experimental drugs that are shown to have a deleterious effect on our health.

The third and final pillar that must fall to create a Dark Age is cultural continuity. In modern times, that one isn’t so much collapsing as being demolished. The entire agenda of ideologies such as progressivism and communism is to create a clean break with the past, with the traditions and customs that brought us to where we are. What little history is allowed to be learned is shown through a distorted lens, and too many who should oppose such acts instead welcome them, hoping that, in the chaos that follows, their particular ideologies will have a chance to step forward.

To be continued

Our new Dark Age, then will come from those factors: unchecked immigration, ecological fear-mongering, and the destruction of our heritage. That’s not to say these things will start happening soon. No, they’re already happening. With every border crossing, every falsified temperature record, every statue torn down, we sink deeper into the darkness. We’re on the path of decline right now. We have been for almost the entire 21st century.

The question then becomes: what are we going to do about it? In the next post, I’ll offer my own thoughts on a solution. To combat the Third Dark Age, I believe we’ll need a Second Enlightenment.