Worldbuilding – Prose Poetry Code

Lands of the lost

Recently, I finished reading Fingerprints of the Gods. I picked it up because I found the premise interesting, and because the mainstream media made such a big deal about author Graham Hancock getting a Netflix miniseries to showcase his unorthodox theories. I went into the book hoping there would be something tangible about those theories. Unfortunately, there isn’t.

Time of ice

The basic outline of the book is this: What if an advanced civilization existed before all known historical ones, and imparted some of its wisdom to those later civilizations as a way of outliving its own demise?

Put like that, it’s an intriguing proposition, one that has cropped up in many places over the past three decades. The Stargate franchise—one of my favorites, I must admit—is based largely on Hancock’s ideas, along with those of noted crackpots like Erich von Daniken. Chrono Trigger, widely regarded as one of the greatest video games of all time, uses the concept as a major plot point. Plenty of novels, especially in fantasy genres, suppose an ancient "builder" race or culture whose fingerprints are left within the world in some fashion.

It was this last point that piqued my interest, because my Otherworld series revolves around exactly this. And I even unknowingly used some of Hancock’s hypotheses for that. The timing of my ancients leaving Earth for their second world matches that of his ancients’ final collapse. The connection of archaeoastronomy as a way of leading to their knowledge arises in my books. Even using the prehistoric Mesoamericans as the catalyst wasn’t an original idea of mine; in my case, however, I did it so I wouldn’t have to deal with the logistics of the characters traveling to another continent.

Some of the questions Hancock asks are ones that need to be asked. It’s clear that ancient historical cultures the world over have some common themes which arise in their earliest mythology. Note, though, that these aren’t the specific ones he lists. The flood of Noah and Gilgamesh is entirely different from those of cultures beyond the Fertile Crescent and Asia Minor, for example, because it most likely stems from oral traditions of the breaking of the Bosporus, which led to a massive expansion of the Black Sea. Celts, to take one instance, would instead have a flood myth pointing to the flooding of what is now the Dogger Bank; peoples of New Guinea might have one relating to the inundation of the Sunda region; American Indian myths may have preserved echoes of the flooding of Beringia; and so on.

While the details Hancock tries to use don’t always work, the broad strokes of his supposition have merit. There are definitely astronomical alignments in many prehistoric structures, and some of them are downright anachronistic. Too many indigenous American cultures have myths about people who most definitely are not Amerind. (And now I’m wondering if Kennewick Man was a half-breed. I may need to incorporate that into a book…)

The possibility can’t yet be ruled out that cultures with technology more advanced than their direct successors did exist in the past. We know that Dark Ages happen, after all. We have historical records of two in the West (the familiar medieval Dark Age beginning c. 500 AD and the Greek Dark Age that started c. 1200 BC), and we’re very likely on the threshold of what might one day be termed the Progressive Dark Age.

With the cataclysmic end of the Ice Age and the catastrophic Younger Dryas cold snap, which now seems likely to be caused by at least one asteroid impact, there’s a very good impetus for the "breaking the chain" effect that leads to a Dark Age, one that would erase most traces of such an advanced civilization.

Habeas corpus

Of course, the biggest problem with such a theory is the lack of evidence. Even worse, Hancock, like most unorthodox scholars, argues from an "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" line of thought. Which is fine, but it’s not science. Science is about making testable and falsifiable predictions about the world. It’s not simply throwing out what-ifs and demanding that the establishment debunk them.

The onus is on those who make alternative theories, and this is where Hancock fails miserably. Rarely in the book does he offer any hard evidence in favor of his conjecture. Instead, he most often uses the "beyond the scope of this book" cop-out (to give him credit, that does make him exactly like any orthodox academic) or takes a disputed data point as proof that, since the establishment can’t explain it, that must mean he’s right. It’s traditional crackpottery, and that’s unfortunate. I would’ve liked a better accounting of the actual evidence.

Probably the most disturbing aspect of the book is the author’s insistence on taking myths at face value. We know that mythology is absolutely false—the Greek gods don’t exist, for example—but that it can often hide clues to historical facts.

To me, one of the most interesting examples of this is also one of the most recent: the finding in 2020 of evidence pointing to an impact or airburst event near the shore of the Dead Sea sometime around 1600 BC. This event apparently not only destroyed a town in such a violent event that it vaporized human flesh, but it also scattered salt from the sea over such a wide region that it literally salted the earth. And the only reference, oral or written, to this disaster is as a metaphor, in the Jewish fable of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Myths, then, can be useful to historians and archaeologists, but they’re certainly not a primary source. The nameless town on the shore of the Dead Sea wasn’t wiped out by a capricious deity’s skewed sense of justice, but by a natural, if rare, disaster. Similarly, references in Egyptian texts of gods who ruled as kings doesn’t literally mean that their gods existed. Because they didn’t.

In the same vein, Hancock focuses too much on numerological coincidences, assuming that they must have some deeper meaning. But the simple fact is that many cultures could independently hit upon the idea of dividing the sky into 360 degrees. It’s a highly composite number, after all, and close enough to the number of days in the year that it wouldn’t be a huge leap. That the timeworn faces of the Giza pyramids are currently in certain geometric ratios doesn’t mean that they always were, or that they were intended to be, or that they were intended to be as a message from ten thousand years ago.

Again, the burden of proof falls on the one making the more outlandish claims. Most importantly, if there did exist an ancient civilization with enough scientific and technological advancement to pose as gods around the world, there should be evidence of their existence. Direct, physical evidence. An industrial civilization puts out tons upon tons of waste. It requires natural resources, including some that are finite. The more people who supposedly lived in this Quaternary Atlantis, the more likely we would have stumbled upon one’s remains by now.

Even more than this, the scope of Hancock’s conjecture is absurdly small. He draws most of his conclusions from three data points: Egypt, Peru, and Central America. Really, that’s more like two and a half, because there were prehistoric connections between the two halves of the Americas—potatoes and corn had to travel somehow. Rarely does he point to India, where Dravidians mangled the myths of the Yamnaya into the Vedas. China, which became literate around the same time as Egypt, is almost never mentioned. Did the ancients just not bother with them? What about Stonehenge, which is at least as impressive, in terms of the necessary engineering, as the Pyramids?

Conclusion

I liked the book. Don’t get me wrong on that. It had some thought-provoking moments, and it makes for good novel fodder. I’ll definitely have to make a mention of Viracocha in an Otherworld story at some point.

As a scientific endeavor, or even as an introduction to an unorthodox theory, it’s almost useless. There are too many questions, too few answers, and too much moralizing. There’s also a strain of romanticism, which is common to a lot of people who study archaeological findings but aren’t themselves archaeologists. At many points, Hancock denigrates modern society while upholding his supposed lost civilization as a Golden Age of humanity. You know, exactly like Plato and Francis Bacon did.

That said, it’s worth a read if only to see what not to do. In a time where real science is under attack, and pseudoscience is given preferential treatment in society, government, and media, it’s important to know that asking questions is the first step. Finding evidence to support your assertions is the next, and it’s necessary if you want to advance our collective knowledge.

Situation report

At the end of last year, I stated that I would spend 2022 on four Great Works. We’re about a quarter of the way through, so this is an update on where I stand in terms of both progress and the mental state that led me to make the original post.

The First Work

I’ve been on the job for almost a full year now, and I still wake up every morning wondering if this will be the day I get fired. So far, that hasn’t happened, and I’m amazed.

In the past three months, I’ve been toiling away at the “Alana” project, and it has finally begun to take shape. Instead of being a lone developer, I’m now the manager of a team that includes a second developer for the front-end, two designers, and a marketing team I have yet to meet. The site is getting built, and that’s largely because of me. However, if—and I stress “if” here—we make our launch date of April 26, it’ll be because everyone did their part.

This whole thing has been less a test of my abilities as a programmer, which I’ve honed over the past 30 years, than a test of me as a person. I’m not a manager. I never wanted to be. I’d rather just write code, but I don’t have that option in this case. And the code I am writing, in this case, is fairly straightforward. Probably the most invention I’ve done is actually in server configuration, of all things.

The Second Work

For the second work, I have until April 7 to submit my petition to be on the ballot. I’ve already launched my campaign site, though it’s still very much a work in progress. I also need to do all the legal necessities of running a campaign, like finance reports, and logistical things like getting signs.

I’m running as an independent, because I believe that political parties are the bane of liberty. That said, an independent representative will likely have to show support for one of the two sides to gain any traction. For me, there’s only one realistic option. A few years ago, I’d say you were crazy if you claimed that I’d find common cause with the Republican Party on anything, but they’re marginally less insane than the Democrats these days, and the people who actually do want a better future have joined their ranks. Therefore, if elected, I see no other choice than to caucus with the right side of the aisle.

Of course, that assumes I have a chance at getting elected at all, but it isn’t out of the realm of possibility. There is no Democrat candidate for House District 27, and no other independents have announced their intent to run. It would be a two-way race, but the incumbent is very much a “traditional” Republican: big business, big corruption, and nothing for the masses. My district includes a lot of rural and suburban people who are crying out for a populist candidate to represent them in Nashville. All the pieces are there. I just have to find a way to put them together.

The Third Work

My spiritual journey continues in fits and starts. I started The Weekly Technetic in January, and I’ve managed to keep it going at one post per week since. Those posts aren’t as long as some of the ones here at PPC, but I think they’re very…on point. They let me explore my thoughts in a way I really haven’t in a long time, and that has helped.

I still have big plans for technetism in 2022. I want first to flesh out the remaining areas where I feel it’s weakest, then find like-minded people who would be willing to share in the wisdom I truly believe I’ve stumbled upon. I also plan to finish, edit, and publish The Prison of Ignorance, so that some of this wisdom might outlive me.

The Fourth Work

Last on the list is ICONIC, which didn’t even have a name in the original post. Basically, the idea is to design a method of visual communication that can be sent to, and understood by, a hypothetical extraterrestrial species.

I have a rough sketch of the contents of a primer. First (and the only part I’ve actually written down thus far) is a mathematical introduction, defining symbols for numerals and the basic arithmetic operations. This alone would provide multiple facts about humans: that we are sapient, that we understand mathematics, that we have a positional number system of base 10, and so on.

Next comes a more thorough dive into math. Following that are definitions of chemistry, physics, and biology. All of these are intended to be self-contained and self-sustaining: at any point, a statement must depend only on what has come before. Like many other SETI enthusiasts, I begin with the hard sciences because they are the most universal.

Once I’m done with those, however, it gets much more difficult. I want to draw on my 20+ years of conlang design experience to create a kind of visual lingua franca. By illustrating and defining the concepts most vital to human communication, I believe we can devise a means to “talk” to another advanced species about most topics. It would be very rudimentary conversation in most cases, but that’s a start that most experts in the field don’t even consider possible.

The situation

In three months, I’ve made progress on all four of the Great Works. I’m glad I have. I finally feel like I’m doing something again, instead of merely waiting on things to happen. I even have a few side projects on top of these, like On the Stellar Sea, the Noctis OS, and a series of programming tutorials I really want to write.

The darker side of my original post, on the other hand, continues to gnaw at me. I still believe my days are numbered, and that the number is much lower than anyone expects. With each passing week, the world grows closer and closer to an all-out collapse. Forces beyond my control have more power over my life than I do. All along, that has been the source of my depression, and it will continue to affect me as long as I live.

In a sense, the Great Works were meant to substitute for the true life goals I felt were no longer achievable three months ago. They’re a pale imitation, I’ll admit, but they were all I had left. They were intended as a swansong, a last chance to make my mark on a world that couldn’t care less. I would like to believe that’s no longer the case.

But you know me. I’m not a believer. I need proof.

Slavery in fiction

Slavery exists. Whether you like it or not, it exists, and it has existed almost as long as civilization itself. Around the world, the practice has been, well, practiced for thousands of years. Even today, in the enlightened West, it’s not totally gone. The Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, often cited as banning slavery, does no such thing—it only prohibits private ownership of slaves. The government can and does continue to enslave, specifically in the form of prison labor.

But, you may say, that’s completely different from what slave-owners in the South did before the Civil War! Yes, that’s true. Funny thing is, though, most examples of slavery throughout history are also nothing like that, so you can’t use it as the typical example. It’s just the most well-known, partly because of the general anti-Southern bias in modern media that makes all of us out to be racists who would love nothing more than to enslave all blacks, if only those pesky Feds would let us. (Fact: most of East Tennessee, where I’m from, voted against secession, and almost nobody here actually owned slaves. My great-great-grandfather very vocally freed the two he received as an inheritance from his uncle, because he considered slavery an affront to God, and a coal miner had no use for plantation slave labor besides.)

For fantasy, and the historical periods it tends to cover, slavery is a completely different institution. And “institution” is very often an apt description. Not only was slavery practiced, it was respected, regulated, and treated as nothing more than another part of society.

The practice

Before we go any further, let’s take a step back and define what we’re looking at. Slavery, as it has been practiced through the millennia, comes in a few different forms that the author should be careful to distinguish.

What we know from biased history texts is chattel slavery. In this form, the slaves are in all respects considered property, sometimes on the same level as livestock animals, but more often in a higher position commensurate with their status as human beings. They can be bought and sold, auctioned off, passed on as inheritance, and so on. The owner doesn’t always have free reign over their lives, however. In many cases, there are legal or social pressures restricting what a slave-owner may do with his property. (The forms of discipline attributed to antebellum Southerners—whipping, beating, the rack, and some more fanciful ideas—are the exception, not the rule.) Slaves in this system may even be taxed, the same as any other property.

Another form of slavery is indentured servitude. Here, the slavery is intended to be only temporary, and usually in exchange for something. For example, debtors in 18th-century England could submit to indenture for a period of time, such as five or seven years, effectively paying off their debt by letting themselves be owned for that time. Many such servants ended up in America, often in Georgia and the Carolinas, and the key thing to understand here is that they were white. They weren’t captured or sold into slavery, but sentenced to it, and they would be released from it when their time was up.

The third kind doesn’t really have a common name, but here I’ll refer to it as caste slavery. Some cultures consider certain people enslaved by birth. These castes are accorded fewer rights, barred from social and career advancement, and otherwise treated as lesser in some way. This is a kind of slavery that still exists everywhere: illegal immigrants are de facto caste slaves, as are Palestinians and Uyghurs, and the “vaccine passport” system is an attempt to create a caste distinction throughout the world.

Finally, “wage” slavery is another form that continues to exist today, and is even heralded as a good thing by some. Rather than a system of ownership, wage slavery exploits its subjects by forcing them to work to live at a below-subsistence level, by arranging for the cost of living to be higher than the average wage. Yes, wage slaves make money, but so did actual slaves in some cultures. The slavery aspect comes in when it becomes mathematically impossible to make enough money to bring oneself to financial independence.

In all forms of slavery, there is a method for gaining freedom. The more barbaric practices make that more difficult, often requiring an escape to a freer territory (the Underground Railroad) or outside aid. But this isn’t always the case. It’s perfectly possible to have a society where slavery is practiced within well-defined limits, where slaves always know that freedom is possible, and that it is something they can work towards. Indeed, some might even consider such a society better than ours.

Who is a slave?

This is a very important question for a society, and not necessarily one with an easy answer. Who is considered eligible to be enslaved? The Enlightenment gave us the ideal of universal rights, the belief that all men are created equal, that liberty is the natural state of man, but not everyone today accepts that premise. Before 1776, almost no one did.

Yet that doesn’t mean that a specific group or race could always be equated with slavery. Instead, the answer is culture-specific. The New World settled on black Africans as slaves for specific reasons. The African warlords took slaves in their constant raids on each other, then sold them to European traders for a relative pittance, so even shipping them across the Atlantic was cheaper than using local indigenous labor or undesirables from the homeland.

That brief description gives us one source of slaves: prisoners of war. And this was common throughout history. It’s still a tried and true method of gaining slaves among tribal societies today. Industrialized nations ran plenty of POW work camps in World War II, and those tales make for a good modern analogue to previous eras’ concepts of war slavery.

Prisoners in general provide us with another pool of potential slaves. We’re all familiar with the various prison work gangs, but they used to do a lot more than pick up litter on the side of the road; see the opening scenes of O Brother, Where Art Thou? as one example of the Depression-era version. Here, it’s assumed by government and society as a whole that the commission of a crime (and, one hopes, being found guilty in a fair trial) is justification for a regulated, public-owned sort of slavery. As most crimes don’t carry a life sentence, we expect this to be limited in time, so indentured servitude is by far the most common kind of prison-related slavery.

The worst kind, on the other hand, simply takes a minority of some sort and assumes they have so few rights that they can be enslaved at any point. Of course, this requires both an authoritarian mindset and a useful foil, so it’s not very common in Western democracies and republics. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is a notable exception, while China’s enslavement of the Uyghurs in occupied East Turkestan illustrates the depths minority slavery can reach when the majority is complicit.

Religion also offers some potential justifications for slavery, and this comes from two directions. One is the obvious: infidels forfeit their rights simply by existing, so enslaving them is not only not a bad thing, but it’s God’s will. This view was common among Muslim countries all the way up to the 20th century, and was one excuse used in Spanish America. It does require scriptural support (the Old Testament and the Koran both provide that, in fact), but dedicated slavers can contort anything into standing behind them.

On the other hand, a tamer and more socially acceptable form of religious slavery can exist as a form of penance. In a sense, this is basically prisoner slavery but with extra steps. The added wrinkle here is that the penitent can submit himself to slavery. Monks could, for instance, require acolytes to offer themselves as servants for a period of initiation. Those who violate the precepts of the church could face a period of indenture on earth, or instead opt to face judgment in the hereafter. (In a fantasy setting, this might not be a simple choice!)

Work makes you free

While most of us think of slaves as forced to do whatever their owners wish, it’s not always that simple. Some cultures and societies reserve certain areas of work as the province of slaves. Typically, this is menial labor such as farming (in the American South), building (in ancient Egypt), or something of that sort. Domestic servants—maids, cooks, babysitters, and the like—were also often enslaved. Skilled craftsmen might employ slave labor for the unskilled jobs around their shops, as well, especially in lower-tech settings.

Those aren’t the only options, though. Literate slaves could be used as scribes in a society that predates printing. Others, especially women, could do the “grunt work” of spinning wool or working a loom. In all cases, the object is to free up the free citizens’ time by offloading the more repetitive or less creative labor on those who don’t have a choice.

That’s not to say slaves couldn’t earn respect. Many could, and many did. At court, for instance, slaves could rise high in the ranks simply by being attached to the elite. Often, nobles of high rank would have slaves they trusted as much as (or more than) their peers. Fantasy literature tends to overemphasize this kind of slavery, as it’s more palatable to the general reader, but it does have a basis in fact. Just remember that this is the minority, the same as the nobility is a vanishingly small minority of the free populace.

Slaves in some cultures thus earned a measure of trust and respect. They did their jobs well, proved their loyalty, and received higher positions as a result. This is directly at odds with the common picture of the beaten and bloody chattel slaves on Southern plantations, but that situation once again has a reason for existing as it did. In this case, it’s because the South was already a fairly “flat” social structure. Yes, you had a kind of aristocratic landowning class that stood above the tradesmen and shopkeepers, but there wasn’t a lot of mobility to begin with. Thus, there wouldn’t have been anywhere for slaves to climb to. And the labor they did on tobacco and cotton plantations was both menial and specialized—it didn’t really translate to anything else.

The dark side

There is one universal sort of slavery, however, something that transcends barriers of color and culture alike: the sex slave. This is also the one kind that not only still exists, but has tacit endorsement and even participation from politicians in power right now, as the Epstein and Maxwell cases proved.

Sex slaves could come from anywhere. They could fit into any of the groups listed above. Although the practice was very often officially banned, ways around the legal prohibitions abounded. Prisoners were—and still are—very often abused in this manner. Victims of kidnapping continue to be sold into sexual slavery by the thousands.

You’d have to be a very brave or very foolish author to even begin to delve into such waters. (Unless you’re writing a true crime piece, I guess.) Still, it’s worth remembering that any society practicing slavery is almost certain to have at least a black market for a very specific sort of merchandise. If nothing else, single or married men of sufficient means would purchase a domestic slave fully intending to use her (or him) as a bed-warmer instead.

In some cases, it becomes something of a semi-consensual relationship. The owner provides room and board, as well as some light work giving a sense of purpose, to someone who otherwise would have nothing at all, and he or she gives nothing more in return than sexual favors. Yes, that’s kind of a Stockholm Syndrome sort of love, but some people in such settings don’t have anything else to aspire to. After all, they’re slaves. They know where they stand in society.

The alternative of force happened more often than we’d care to admit, and it can get as dark as you dare. But even then, only the sadistic would physically torture their slaves. Remember, the whole point of a slave, especially in chattel systems, is that you own property. Just as you’re not going to set your house on fire because you hate the wallpaper, you’re not going to beat the help to the point where they can’t work. Say what you will about slave-owners, but most of them realized that was bad business.

In fantasy

The biggest problem with slavery as it’s handled in fiction today is that it…well, isn’t. Too many authors have decided that the practice is so horrible that it shouldn’t even exist in fantasy literature and gaming. Large publishing houses like Wizards of the Coast and Paizo have taken this limiting step, unfortunately, deeming the topic off-limits in their roleplaying games. Others instead use a caricature of Southern chattel slavery as a thinly veiled racist commentary against whites, which might actually be worse.

The right way to do it, on the other hand, is to think about it. Yes, you as an author can be completely against the very notion of slavery. I am. But the characters you create may have different outlooks. The practice of slavery has existed for thousands of years for a reason, and it only started going away because of a sea change in morality, the product of the Enlightenment. If your setting hasn’t had one of those, then you need to come up with some other reason why the abolitionists would come to power.

Instead of wholesale banning just because you don’t like it, think about how slavery would come to be in your created world, then work from there. Subjugated cultures and defeated peoples make a tantalizing pool of slaves, and that’s true whether they’re heathens or orcs or simply members of a different tribe. Unless there’s severe social pressure not to, having prisoners of war can very easily become using prisoners of war to finish building the wall. And when that wall’s done? Well, surely there’s something else for them to do. Eventually, the war’s over, but they’re still working the fields or hauling stone from the quarry, and they’ll stay because they’ve all but forgotten how to reintegrate into their home society.

If slaves are property, then a market will form. That’s just a fact of economics. It may not be as dehumanizing as we’re told the slave markets of the South were, but what form it takes will depend on the setting. And chattel suffers from the same problems as livestock in being cumbersome to transport and difficult to secure.

Under the harshest conditions, slave rebellions can occur. This is most common in chattel and POW situations, as both of these leave little in the way of positive outcomes. The fewer freedoms you have, the easier it becomes to foment rebellion by using the promise of freedom. This can make for some interesting stories, but bear in mind that the punishment for rebellion is very often death. In other words, rebel slaves have nothing to lose, and that is not an environment conducive to breeding white-hat heroes. Also remember that fugitives can’t always find sanctuary where they think: the Dred Scott decision in the years before the Civil War made escaping to the North a nonstarter, for example.

All in all, slavery is a deeper subject than most people think, and it bears more exploration in fantasy literature than it gets. Too often, we’re conditioned to see something monstrous and immediately look away, so we don’t really study the whys, the causes and effects that created what truly is, for better or worse, one of humanity’s most enduring practices.

But slavery did exist. It still exists, though more in the shadows today. There are very good reasons why so many of the greatest men and women of history owned slaves and thought nothing of it. It wasn’t because they were racist, or conservative, or supremacist. No, they were products of their society, of the time and place in which they lived. To many of them, slavery was natural, the way things were, and our insistence that no man be taken against his will and forced into servitude would seem hopelessly idealistic.

It’s that disconnect which offers fertile ground for the fantasy author. Rather than writing stories in settings where slavery has never existed, perhaps consider one where it is practiced, but it’s on its way out. Examine the potential changes that would cause in society. (For many Southerners, abolition was an economic issue first, not a moral or ethical one!) Or look at the post-emancipation generation, how they would struggle to fit into a society that, until very recently, considered them little more than animals. Imagine a society more like that of the Greeks, where slaves were taken in battle, then trained alongside free men, earning respect as they went.

There’s more to slavery than just beating people down. That’s not to say it’s a good practice, but it’s lasted all these millennia for a reason. Maybe, instead of trying to ignore it, we should learn why it continues to endure despite our best efforts at stopping it.

After the after

Many, many people believe the world as we know it will come to an end soon. Some of those people happen to be in positions to make such a dire prediction come true. So let’s talk about the apocalypse for a moment, why don’t we?

The cause doesn’t really matter for our purposes. Suffice to say, some catastrophe causes a severe drop in the world’s population. How far? Well, we’re close to 8 billion now, so there’s a long way to fall. Obviously, an I Am Legend scenario of the last remaining man is pretty pointless to consider: humanity ends when he does. For similar reasons, a very small remaining population (up to a few hundred) is essentially extinction-level.

The last time humans numbered only a thousand was about 74,000 years ago, at the genetic bottleneck caused by the eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia. (By the way, climate catastrophists have been unsuccessfully trying to debunk this theory for years, because the idea that a volcano can cause a drop in global temperatures up to 15°C is awfully hard to reconcile with the idea that people are the sole cause for all the climate’s ills.)

Since that fateful day, we have progressed in an almost monotonic fashion. The only major setbacks in recorded history were the Black Death of the 14th century and the lesser-known plague, volcanic winter, and famine years of the 6th century. But our growth as a species really started getting exponential within the last 200 years: the Industrial Revolution. Around the start of that glorious era, humanity numbered less than a billion.

Let’s assume, then, that our apocalypse knocks us under that threshold and, from there, halfway to our doom. In other words, a population of around 500 million, which is just what the “population control” (i.e., genocide) believers want. This mass slaughter can come from a bioweapon or its supposed “cure”, a nuclear exchange, an asteroid impact, or some combination of factors, but we can assume it happens with no last-minute heroics to stop it.

One day, we wake up to find 7.5 billion human lives have been extinguished. Now what?

The first stage

The survivors will need to, well, survive. We’ve all seen that in television (The Walking Dead); literature (The Decameron, not to mention Genesis!); movies (way too many to name); video games (Fallout, The Last of Us, 7 Days to Die); and novels (my own The Linear Cycle, for the shameless plug). Those who survive the calamity band together, scavenge what they can, and fend off the hordes of aliens or zombies or mutants while trying to rebuild society.

While that makes for great drama, cinema or otherwise, it’s been done to death. No pun intended.

As a fan of worldbuilding, I’m more interested in what comes next. What happens after the post-apocalypse? That is, in a sense, literal worldbuilding, don’t you think?

So I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I don’t have time to start yet another story (I already have three that are basically stalled because of my new job!), but it’s still a fun topic to contemplate. What would the next iteration of civilization look like, especially if it retained some continuity?

At present, we’re seeing the beginning of a slide into a kind of neo-feudalism. Take away 93% of the population in one fell swoop, and two things could happen. Either the powers that be consolidate that power, or the hollowing-out of society causes a complete collapse that leads to revolution. The latter has precedent: it’s basically how the first feudal period in Europe came to an end after the Black Death. So many people died (one out of every three, in some places) that labor became scarce, and peasants could essentially name their price. They gained leverage over the nobility, pushing them into irrelevance in a gradual process that took about four centuries.

The modern-day nobles, the men and women who claim the right to rule our lives, don’t call themselves lords or bishops or anything of the sort. And they probably won’t even after the vast majority of humans have fallen victim to whatever disaster awaits. No, they’ll keep calling themselves businessmen, politicians, and celebrities even after capitalism, democracy, and mass media are destroyed.

But feudalism requires a certain population density to be worthwhile. So does industry, as a matter of fact, and our figure of 500 million is actually below that, by all accounts. Our apocalypse will have the side effect (or possibly intended effect) of reversing the Industrial Revolution. Maybe even the Enlightenment before it. The medieval era before that? It’s possible. And we should hope so.

Where to go from here

As I said, I’ve been thinking about this one, so…let’s make a new post series. I haven’t done that in a while. This one won’t be anything like “Let’s Make a Language” or “Magic & Tech” in size. Well, it shouldn’t be, but you know me.

The goal for the posts will be to sketch out one plausible post-post-apocalyptic scenario. I’m not saying that’s what will happen once the Omega Variant kills 90% of the world, and The Climate Crisis (capitals to emphasize how stupid the notion is) does for half the rest. No, this is just a possibility.

Again, my focus isn’t on the immediate aftermath of the disaster. It’s the part that comes after, the true rebuilding of civilization. So you won’t hear me talk about killing zombies or building sunshades or whatever. Let’s say that the disaster itself is in the past. What then? That’s the question I want to ask and answer.

This one’s going to be a little different, though. Or that’s how the idea looks in my head. On top of the posts, which I anticipate to come out once a month or so, I want to do something I’ve never done before: make videos.

Yeah, I know. We’ve all seen Bear Grylls and Les Stroud with their camera crews and helicopters. That’s not what I’m about. No, my goal is to build, not survive. To do that, we need technology. We need to create. And that is what I want to do in these videos. I want to talk about technology, its history, its re-creation. Using the materials you might have in the rebuilding era, what can you make? What will have to change?

Assuming I get that far, I’ll post these on a few platforms. Not Youtube, because I don’t believe a series of informational, scientific videos belongs on a platform as hostile to knowledge and free speech as Google’s video silo. Instead, you’ll (hopefully!) find them on places like Odysee, LBRY.to, and Rumble.

But that’s for the future. Until then, dream with me, and let’s hope that we never have to use the wisdom I’ll be giving.

Character portraits: Levi

Name: Levi Maclin
Series: Orphans of the Stars
Age: 15
Height: 6’1″
Weight: 194 lbs.
Hometown: Vancouver, BC, Canada

About the character

Levi is a high school student and total space freak. Living in the 24th century, he still knows more about one specific part of the 20th than most people alive today, because he reads everything about our era he can get his hands on, at least if it’s about the space race.

But there’s more to him than that. The oldest of three, he’s the perfect age to be the family babysitter, so he’s used to watching over Justin, age 11, and six-year-old Holly. He doesn’t mind, though. They’re not just siblings; they’re his friends, too.

At home in Vancouver, he sometimes gets a little lazy, especially in summer. He’d rather read or watch a movie than get out and play with other boys his age. School, in his opinion, is for learning more than socializing. That’s not to say he doesn’t have friends. He’s made a lot of them, in fact. Something about him just makes it easy to like him.

If anything can describe Levi Maclin, it’s that he’s a dreamer. He dreams of going into space, even if it’s nothing more than a simple lunar shuttle ride, something people in his time do every day. In his wildest dreams, he’s the captain of an interstellar ship, saving the galaxy and discovering new worlds for humans to colonize. Maybe even walking on the surface of those worlds, meeting aliens no human has ever laid eyes on.

Too bad only adults get to do all that, right?

Author’s thoughts

Levi shares my love of space. Indeed, that was the first bit of characterization I did for Orphans of the Stars. I chose him as the main character of the series before deciding on placing him as the prologue character for Innocence Reborn, and that comes solely because I wanted the captain of the “kids’ ship” to be a space nut like myself. It fits the setting, I think. Sure, people in his time have done a lot better with space than ours are willing to do, but that just gives him more imagination fuel.

Almost everything else about his character came from my initial vision for the series. I wanted something focused a little earlier than the typical young adult fiction: teens and preteens, for the most part. (In my head, I envisioned Orphans of the Stars as “The Expanse for kids”.) The main character, then, had to be one of the older ones, but not too old. I gave him siblings so he would have skin in the game, so to speak. Rescuing Holly became the main goal of the first novel as I was writing the prologue.

Levi isn’t exactly like me, though. He’s far more impulsive, for one thing. He doesn’t always think things through, while that’s something I pride myself on. He’s more sociable, as well, with that kind of magnetism I’d kill for. Being who he is, he doesn’t use that gift for ill, however; for some strange reason, I’ve avoided giving him anything close to a romantic interest, even though his preteen brother gets one! Maybe some part of me recognizes our similarities.

When I started the series in 2017, I didn’t see myself as commanding in the same way Levi is. Either I’ve changed, or writing him has helped me understand myself. Yes, I’m often ready to take charge (if people would just listen to me…), but I never felt that I could be a commander of anything. It didn’t fit me until a very special person helped me understand a part of my personality I’d overlooked.

Character portraits: Alex

Name: Alex Caulson
Series: Otherworld
Age: 22
Height: 5’9″
Weight 206 lbs.
Hometown: Pueblo, Colorado

About the character

Alex is a self-described nerd. He’s overweight and insecure. He likes video games, anime, electronics, and other geeky things. At the start of Out of the Past, he holds a bachelor’s in astronomy, a subject that has always been his passion. As history is another one of his interests, he’s trying to specialize in the field of archaeoastronomy, which is how he got roped into an archaeological excursion to Mexico in the first place.

But he doesn’t fit there or anywhere. He never has, and he knows it. Almost all the friends he’s ever had were online, and he met most of them while gaming or on obscure forums—the only reason he even has social media accounts is to keep up with his family. He keeps to himself, rarely speaking up even when he probably should.

When he and ten fellow students get lost while investigating their earth-shattering find, he blames himself. After all, it was his idea to go back out there a day early, before the experts leading the team were willing to set out. Though the others don’t blame him, he blames himself. Why? Because, in his mind, he deserves the blame. If they won’t give it to him, he’ll just take matters into his own hands.

Of the eleven members of the Otherworld expedition, he’s the most out of place. A gamer and internet junkie suddenly cut off from everything electronic that he wasn’t carrying? A fat geek (his words) stuck in a place where everyone walks? He would consider it a miracle that he survived the expedition, but he doesn’t believe in miracles.

Author’s thoughts

Quite simply, Alex is me in almost every respect. He’s younger, of course (22 to my 30, when I first started writing Otherworld), and he has more formal education, but we’re otherwise a lot alike. We’re both huge nerds—in more ways than one. We both read a lot of science fiction. I’d never been in a serious relationship when I created him in 2013; his first started in the summer of 2020, around the same time I was beginning to throw mine away.

That’s absolutely intentional on my part. I wrote Alex as something between a personal deconstruction and wish fulfillment. I’ll grant that the latter took over after a certain point; that point, in case you were wondering, was around Situational Awareness.

In other words, Alex began as a representation of who I saw myself as. Now, as I’m writing the 20th main Otherworld story, I see him as who I want to become. He’s happily married, two words he never would have dreamed could describe him. Though he’s had to sacrifice almost everything he had, he was able to build a life for himself. A simple life, but a life nonetheless. He didn’t realize what he was missing, how important it was to his well-being, until he found it, lost it, and found it again. I…have only made it to the second step of that process.

Of the hundred or more characters I’ve written, this is one of the easiest. The dialogue and exposition don’t always flow, but the inner monologue is easy: I just write what I would be thinking in that situation. That’s usually what Alex would be thinking, so it works out. I can put him into situations and draw on my own experiences to resolve them. Not only does that save me time as a writer, but it’s cathartic for me as a person. It lets me imagine a world in which things actually work out for me once in a while.

HCW #2: Shot in the dark

Once again, I’ve posted an extended article over at Hardcore Worldbuilding, my Substack column. Or whatever you’re supposed to call them. The topic this time is guns. Specifically, I’m talking about guns and gunpowder weapons in fantasy. Considering how many stories I’ve written in that vein (Hidden Hills, some of the Otherworld episodes, the unfinished Shadows Before the Sun), it’s obvious where I stand on that argument.

Check it out, subscribe, and help me grow. Please. I’m begging you. I need validation!

Seriously, though, it’s one of my better articles, I think. On March 1, I’ll post #3, about the intersection of magic and education. From that point on, new posts will come on the 1st and 16th of each month. February’s short, so you got this one a day early.

The last Dark Age

In the title of this post, “last” means “previous” rather than “final”, for I truly believe we are on the precipice of a new Dark Age. With that in mind, it’s not that bad an idea to look back at the one that came before.

Defining the moment

A lot of modern academics don’t even like talking about the Dark Ages. They prefer the bland descriptor “Early Middle Ages” instead. But that line of thinking is faulty in multiple respects.

First, the given reasoning for referring to the Dark Ages as something else is because the “darkness” of the times was a localized concept. Outside of Europe, it wasn’t all that dark. Islam, for instance, had a bit of a renaissance around the same time, and China barely noticed the troubles of the West at all.

However, this same logic should dictate that the Middle Ages are no less localized. After all, the term comes from post-medieval sources who placed that time between their modern era and the classical period of the Greeks and Romans. Similarly, is referring to the Iron Age (which began around the time of the Greek Dark Ages, starting in 1177 BC) any less patronizing? Iron tools were never developed by natives in the Americas or Australia; what was the Iron Age in Anatolia would have been nothing more than the later Stone Age in Mesoamerica. The Middle Ages aren’t “middle” at all, except through the same lens that gives us the Dark Ages.

The second reason why it’s an error to conflate the Dark Ages with the Middle Ages is character, and it’s the subject of this post.

Beginning and ending

Before we can get to that, though, we need to define the limits of the period. The beginning is fairly easy, because Europe’s decline can be traced directly to the fall of Rome in 476 AD. This event was the culmination of decades of barbarian activity, with the entire empire facing threats from waves of migrant Vandals, Goths, Huns, and others. Those peoples slowly encroached upon Roman territory, nipping away at the borders, until they were able to reach the capital itself. Rome was sacked, and the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, fled into exile. Or was sent there. Conflicting tales exist, but the gist is clear: Europe no longer bowed to Rome.

Things didn’t change overnight, of course. The barbarian kings often paid homage to the Byzantine emperor who continued to style himself Roman all the way to the 15th century. For a time, they considered themselves successors to the western throne, or at least to the provinces it had once controlled.

No, the Dark Ages only truly began once continuity was lost. That was a slow breakdown over years, decades, generations. The barbarian hordes lacked Roman culture. Without an imperial presence in Europe, that culture began to disappear, fading into memory as those who continued to consider themselves Roman aged and died. Later in the post, we’ll look at what that entailed.

As for when the Dark Ages ended, that’s a tougher question. Some might point to the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 800. Indeed, this did rejuvenate Europe for a time, bringing about the Carolingian Renaissance, and the 9th century gave us a few technological advances; Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, by Joseph and Frances Gies, details some of these, including the three in the book’s title.

Another date might be 927, marking the defeat of the Vikings by Æthelstan, first King of England. This was significant from both a political and religious standpoint, as England became a unified Christian kingdom for the first time in its history; Spain, for instance, wouldn’t manage that for nearly 600 years. And Æthelstan’s victory over the Danes did begin to bring about the changes that define the Middle Ages, such as the feudal system.

Still others would argue that the Dark Ages didn’t really end until William the Conqueror was crowned in 1066. By this point, all the pieces of the Middle Ages were in place, from the manorial society to the schism of Catholic and Orthodox. The Reconquista had begun in Spain, Turks were overrunning Byzantine lands, and the Crusades were about to begin. Clearly, the world had moved on from the Fall of Rome.

Continuum

Personally, I think that’s too late, while the Charlemagne date of 800 seems a bit too early. But it may be that there is no single date we can point to and say, “The Dark Ages ended here.” Rather, there’s a continuum. The period ended at different times in different places throughout Europe, as connections to the past were rediscovered, and connections among those in the present were strengthened.

When the period began, the results were devastating. As Roman rule fell, so too did Roman institutions. The roads, so famous that we enshrine them in aphorisms, began to succumb to the ravages of time. Likewise for the bath, the forum, the legal framework, and the educational system.

The replacements weren’t always up to par, either. One of the reasons the Dark Ages are, well, dark is because of the relative lack of written works from the time. We have tons of Roman-era books: Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars, Ovid’s masterpieces, the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, and even the New Testament of the Bible all come from the Roman world. By contrast, the best-known writings to come from the period 476-1066 are histories like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, religious texts such as those by Bede, and Beowulf.

That’s not to say that people in the Dark Ages were stupid. Far from it. Instead, they had different priorities. They lived in a different world, one that didn’t have much opportunity for philosophy. Even when it did, that was almost exclusively the domain of the Church, one of the few institutions that retained some measure of continuity with the previous age.

With the breakdown of Roman society came a change in the way people saw themselves. While the barbarians did become civilized, they didn’t become Romanized. Gone were the trappings of republic and the scholastic zeal we associate with Late Antiquity. Dark Age society focused more on tribal identity, family honor, and individual heroism. The world, in a sense, shrank for the average person. Some of the changes came from the pagan background of the Gauls, Goths, and others, but they retained them even after converting to Christianity.

The unifying power of the Church may have helped usher in the end of the Dark Ages, in that it created the backdrop for the centralization of secular power, turning petty kingdoms into nation-states. Seven English kingdoms became a single England. Vast swathes of Europe fell under the rule of the emperor in Aachen. And this could be seen as lifting the continent out of the mire. A powerful nation can build bigger than a small tribe; the grand cathedrals begun in the ninth and tenth centuries are evidence of that.

But that didn’t change the fact that so much had been lost. In some places, particularly rural Britain, standards of living (which weren’t all that high in Roman times, to be fair) dropped to a level not seen since the Bronze Age, some 2000 years before. With Roman construction and sanitation forgotten, life expectancies fell, as did urban population. This was the Dark Ages in a nutshell. When Hobbes describes early man’s life as “nasty, brutish, and short,” he’s also talking about post-Roman, pre-medieval Europe. A life without even the most basic trappings of civilization, with little hope for advancement except through heroic deeds, with the specter of death lurking around every corner…that’s not much of a life at all.

Light returns

The Dark Ages did, however, come to an end. As I said above, the ninth century brought about the Carolingian Renaissance, a small uplifting. Much later came the 12th-century version, which brought about the High Middle Ages. Bits of darkness lingered all the way to 1453, when the last vestige of ancient Rome fell to the Ottoman Empire.

Odoacer’s sack of the imperial capital in 476 brought about, in a sense, the end of the world. When Mehmed II did the same thing to the other Roman capital, Constantinople, a millennium later, the effect was quite different. Instead of a new Dark Age, the end of the Byzantines fanned the flames of the Renaissance. The true Renaissance, the one which deserves this name. By then, so much of classical times had been forgotten by Europe at large, but it was now rediscovered, the bonds reforged.

Dark Ages end when light shines through. Or when enough people decide that they are destined for greater things. In Europe, the three centuries after 476 were a period of stasis, even regression. What little of our modern media touches on this period tends to focus on heroes real or invented: Vikings, The Last Kingdom, and so on. That’s understandable, as the life of the ordinary Saxon in Winchester, the Frank in Paris, or the Lombard in Pavia is relatively dull and uninspiring. The ones whose names we remember are those who rose above that. Heroes exist in every age, no matter what the society around them looks like.

Darkness, in this sense, can be defeated. This is a darkness of ignorance, of barbarism, of tribal infighting. Knowledge is the light that washes it away. To this day, we still can’t recreate some of the progress of Antiquity: we don’t know precisely how the Romans made their concrete, the composition of Greek fire, or the purpose of the Antikythera Mechanism.

Those secrets were lost because continuity was lost. The passing of culture from one generation to the next stopped, breaking a chain that had endured for centuries. With our interconnected world of today, it’s easy to think that can’t happen anymore. After all, we can call up an entire library on our phones. But what happens when that chain is sabotaged? What happens when culture and history are intentionally altered or buried? The result would be a new Dark Age.

Culture and history forgotten. Waves of migrants. Cities sacked. The loss of classical education and scholasticism. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

Otherworld and reality

For the most part, I try to make my stories natural. They aren’t necessarily believable, as many of them are set in fantasy worlds, but I strive for realism of the sort that can make a reader feel drawn into the world. So characters act like people. Dialogue is sometimes halting or rambling, depending on the situation. And the settings get a lot of love from me, because I just enjoy worldbuilding.

Otherworld, the setting of my largest series (31 parts and counting!), is no exception. Really, it’s the poster child for my “hardcore” style of worldbuilding, as I’ve stated on numerous occasions. I started developing the world in 2013 as little more than a conlang playground, then redesigned it in 2015 as part of my serious writing push. Through it all, I’ve tried to keep one goal in mind.

This could be our world.

Sometimes, that doesn’t work out. Nobody could have predicted the coronavirus panic this year, that the entire world would shut down for months. So Otherworld stories don’t talk about that; for them (and my other “Paraverse” novels, such as the Endless Forms series), it was nothing more than another swine flu scare. Likewise, the characters don’t have to worry about riots when they’re on Earth. Even the original deus ex machina for getting them away from our planet didn’t materialize: Tropical Storm Chantal was late last year, and it didn’t go where I predicted it would seven years ago.

Despite those flaws, I try to keep Otherworld as close to reality as possible while maintaining the dramatic aspects of the stories. It fits “in the gaps”, so to speak. We don’t know that these things don’t exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The big one

Of course, keeping that fiction alive is hard to do when you look at the overarching hypothesis of the series. To sum it up, the Americas were inhabited long ago, far longer than our theories (as of 2013) suggest. The original inhabitants were advanced, and possibly not even fully human—the truth of that remains a mystery even to me. They didn’t have an empire, but they did create numerous points of civilization that have since been lost.

This culture was far better adapted to the cold, dry climate of the Ice Age. When it ended about 12,000 years ago, their largest settlements sank beneath the rising seas, which is the main reason we can’t find them. (Yes, it’s an Atlantis riff. Sue me.) Seeing this catastrophe, they evacuated, using a set of ten mysterious sites containing wormholes. These linked to corresponding sites on another Earthlike planet, a colder one in general, where they set up shop.

Along the way, they brought the plants and animals they were familiar with. Some of those we know: Otherworld has corn and potatoes, New World raccoons and squirrels, though nothing not native to the Americas, with the possible exception of bottle gourds, which may have come over during the Ice Age. But it, unlike Earth, did not suffer the Pleistocene extinctions. So there are mammoths, sabretooth cats, dire wolves, and a few others.

This ancient civilization also interacted with the “first” Americans. Indeed, they traded with them, taught them, respected them. When their perceived apocalypse arrived, they took some of their neighbors with them to their new home. Thus, Otherworld’s natives are cousins to America’s natives. They aren’t the Aztec, Maya, Inuit, or Iroquois. They’re their own people. But they’re related, and they’re much closer to these than they are Europeans, Africans, or Asians.

Once they crossed over, the two races mostly returned to their dynamic. The ancients continued to learn and teach, even going as far as genetically engineering new sub-races of humans. The less-advanced natives accepted their wisdom, in some cases deifying them.

That worked until Otherworld began to snap out of its Ice Age about 4500 years ago. The ancients, now with nowhere else to go, retreated to high mountains and the Arctic counterpart, pushed along by one of their created races. (One small part of this tale is told in my free novel Seasons Change.) Whether any of them remain is an open question, one I have yet to see a need to answer.

Keeping it real

So that’s the backstory. Almost none of it really matters to the main plot of the stories, except that the characters from Earth are trying to piece it together out of curiosity. Still, I wanted it to be something that sounded plausible and wouldn’t be debunked easily. Yes, I’m aware that we’d probably have found evidence of advanced technology before now. And there’s not a millennia-old temple hidden around Soto la Marina, Mexico. Or Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Fossil, Oregon; Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan…

Still, there could be. So what about the rest of it? Specifically, the timeline. How does that hold up after nearly a decade of new research?

Pretty well, in my opinion. The “gap” trick continues to work, keeping my ancients safely away from debunking. Even better are some of the findings that have come to light in the past three years.

We used to know the timing of the first Americans. It was a done deal. Call it about 13,000-15,000 years ago. They walked across a land bridge where the Bering Strait is now, then kept going through a narrow corridor between the glaciers in western Canada, following the plentiful game as they rapidly spread out through the two continents. Within a thousand years, they were everywhere from Alaska to Argentina, known by the distinct stone artifacts first found in Clovis, New Mexico.

By 2013, that theory was already beginning to crack. Now, it’s dead in the water. Spear points predating the Clovis style have been found in a number of locations, most notably Gault, not too far north of Austin, Texas. Bone tools in the Yukon site of Bluefish Caves go back a full ten thousand years before the earliest Clovis theories—they’re twice as old as the end of the Ice Age!

I’ve incorporated some of these into the Otherworld series. The remains of a child in Alaska showed DNA markers distinct from any extent Native American populations; she became, in my telling, a possible member of the ancient civilization. A similar find in Mexico dates to the “evacuation” period of my setting, and I’m on the fence as to whether that one represents an ancient or one of their neighbors who stayed (or was left) behind at the end of days.

So far, there’s nothing that really destroys the worldbuilding. In fact, some of the archaeological finds can actually be seen as strengthening it. None of them do so as much as last week’s.

Bombshell

The paper is “Evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum” by Ardelean et al. Written in 2018, it was published in the online edition of Nature on July 22. Six days ago. You don’t need much searching to find a copy…if you know where to look. (I’m not supposed to link to such sites, of course.)

Chiquihuite Cave is in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. Right in the middle of cartel country, I’ve read, so you can imagine how hard it is to run a dig there. Inside were found nearly two thousand stone artifacts: cores, flakes, blades, points, you name it. A bit of charcoal made from a Douglas fir, found near one of the points, provided an estimated date, and it’s unbelievable if you’re a “Clovis-first” adherent.

28,000 years ago. No joke. Twenty-eight thousand. In other words, about as old as the Bluefish Caves bone, which not only guts the theory that the Clovis points represent the oldest inhabitants of the Americas, but also drives a big nail into the coffin of the “Beringia standstill” hypothesis. That states that the first Americans came over from Siberia during the Ice Age, then settled down in Alaska and northwest Canada for a few millennia, sometimes ranging down the Pacific coast in boats.

Of course, the odds are astronomical that these are the oldest human tools south of Juneau. More likely, they represent a snapshot of a culture that lasted for hundreds or thousands of years, which only pushes the migration date further back in time. So we’re really looking at 30,000 years or more.

The population probably wasn’t very high, and these are nomadic hunter-gatherers we’re talking about. Not the ancients of Otherworld at all, yet Chiquihuite is evidence that people were living in the Americas—all throughout North America, for certain—not only at the end of the Ice Age, but at its height. The climate would have been much harsher then. Cold and dry in general, with a lot of erratic patterns near the glaciers. Sea levels were a hundred or more meters lower than today, so as much as three to five hundred feet, which pushes the coastline many miles out from what we see in the present. In other words, plenty of room to hide an Atlantis.

And that’s what I take away from the Ardelean paper. Beyond the groundbreaking discovery itself, I’m happy to see that my outlandish worldbuilding of seven years ago still survives to this day. With upheaval all around it, my creation stands. It grows. I already consider Otherworld to be my greatest creation. Now, though, I can take even more pride in what I made, because it’s…prescient, in a way.

I hope future discoveries can further enrich our knowledge of the earliest Americans. I don’t hold out hope that we’ll find wormholes and genetics experiments, as that’s too crazy even for me. But any evidence that the indigenous peoples of this continent were growing along similar lines to their brethren across the ocean is welcome. Add in the intriguing possibility that the Chiquihuite culture isn’t related to any known Native Americans, and then you start to wonder what else is waiting to be found. Who were the first people to settle in what’s now the US, Mexico, Central and South America? What kind of world did they inhabit?

Were they more than we believe?

Revisiting religion in writing

(I’ve spent a lot of time this year writing a bunch of “woe is me” posts about depression, anxiety, and the like. Outside of release announcements and the Summer Reading List Challenge, that’s all PPC has been for months. Sure, 2020 sucks, but…I’m tired of wallowing in the mire. Let’s get back to worldbuilding and theory-crafting. “I do not wish to evade the world, but I will forever build my own.”)

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost five years since I wrote a post titled Faith and Fantasy. In that post, I talked about how the fundamental assumptions of “generic” fantasy (that it’s a feudal pseudo-medieval Europe, but with magic) are incompatible with the religious framework that authors insist upon. In other words, you can’t have Middle Ages Europe without Christianity. Change the faith of the people, and everything else changes, too.

All of my worldbuilding posts, that one included, come from my personal beliefs about creating a setting in any genre of speculative fiction. I have a “hardcore” worldbuilding mindset, in the vein of Tolkien and Sanderson, and I believe that the benefits of a cohesive setting far surpass the cost of research necessary to create it. I also practice what I preach, as you’ll see.

Recap

To summarize the previous post, the structures of the medieval West stem directly from Christian orthodoxy. Serfdom and the divine right of kings both come from Biblical interpretation. Other religions, if put in the same situation, would create different societies.

We see this in a few historical cases. During the same period, Islam tended to be more autocratic, for instance, without a hierarchy of kings, princes, dukes, counts, and barons. But the changes are even more subtle than that. To take one example: Islamic beliefs prohibit idolatry, which was quickly extended to any depiction of Allah or Muhammed, any engraved lettering on the Koran, and so on. Thus we find the elaborate geometric mosaics in mosques, as opposed to the crucifixes, frescoes, tapestries, and portraits in contemporary Christian houses of worship. Religion influenced art, and this was by no means confined to sacred spaces.

Likewise, the East had, at times, long periods of stability and hegemony. Chinese state religion has always been…hard to pin down, especially for those of us on other continents. Suffice to say, though, that the emperor was believed to have a divine mandate to his rule. (Except those times when he didn’t, which just so happen to coincide with periods of rebellion. But that’s a different post.) But there wasn’t the same faith behind that mandate as Rome had, so you don’t see the same results. The Chinese people didn’t have a belief system based around salvation from sin; while Buddhism, for example, does have recognizable concepts of heaven and hell, it emphasizes actions more than beliefs. Therefore, you don’t see Chinese cathedrals. They don’t go on a pilgrimage to Nanjing or Chengdu. And so on.

Out of this world

Take a fantasy setting, now, and you can see the problems arising. Even the best authors tend to “make something up” for their worlds’ faiths. In some cases, that’s because they’re trying to make a point. The Prince of Nothing series I used as an example in the previous post is intended to evoke the Crusades era, so it almost has to have analogues for Christianity and Islam. A Song of Ice and Fire has a number of religions, from the animist Old Gods of the north to the heptatheistic faith of the majority in Westeros, and their conflict ties into the overall plot.

Others don’t even bother with justification. The stereotypical D&D settings (Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms) are built around polytheism. Gods are active in the world, and they’re really just beings who have a very, very high character level. Okay, but then how did they end up with a social structure that’s so close to the High Middle Ages? Clerics of Mystra aren’t going to be chaste because of the words of Christ. Call 4th Edition non-canonical if you like, but its lore has it that the Raven Queen was a witch who killed the god of death, Nerull, and took his place. If people can aspire to that in this life, they’re not going to be satisfied with a society where the greatest rewards for most will only come in the next one.

Games are games, of course, but some novels also take things that far. Steven Erikson’s Malazan series, for example, follows the RPG tropes. The former emperor ascended to become the new god of shadows. His henchman/fixer, appropriately enough, became the patron of assassins. That happened within the books’ current generation, so there isn’t enough time to show any direct social evolution, but the unnamed world of the series shows a number of similarities to Earth. You have a mercantile empire, an island where the warrior caste is all but worshipped, desert-dwellers fighting a jihad…

Fantasy religions are as varied as their creators, but few authors go to the trouble of truly analyzing the effects their made-up belief systems would have on the societies housing them. I am not always immune to the lure of the cop-out, I’ll admit.

Introspection

Ignoring those novels and shorts set in the “real” world (including paranormal stuff like “Fallen” and the Modern Minds series), my fantasy worlds have religions with varying degrees of depth.

The Hidden Hills books do fall into the polytheistic feudalism trap, I’ll admit. The people of Stada (the primary kingdom of the books) follow about twenty different gods, each overseeing a different segment of life. Despite this, they have a Europe-like system of lords—one of the main characters is the son of a viscount. I justify this in the text by not justifying it at all. That’s the way things are, and nobody really bothers to think otherwise. Speaking as the author, however, I can say that the polytheistic faith derives in-setting from a combination of ancient tribes’ animist beliefs and the guiding principles of an advanced civilization.

That’s much the same as for Otherworld. There, the primary character focus is on the Virissea, descendants of Native Americans (Paleo-Indians, technically) transplanted from Earth at the end of the Ice Age. Going to another planet didn’t entirely disrupt their beliefs—not that we know much about them—but some came to glorify, then outright worship, the creators of the mechanism which took them there. In the present day setting, the Virissea are monotheistic, but they consider those “Altea” to be of a higher level than common human beings. Not quite demigods, but even modern Christianity posits that some people have greater rewards than others. Look at St. Peter, for example.

Otherworld has other races, however. And these are physiologically distinct, far more so than what we consider races. One such people has a kind of spiritual pantheism. Another follows a dualist good-versus-evil faith somewhat similar to Zoroastrianism. A third uses meditation and strict moral codes derived from what they believe to be the rational principles of nature itself. And that’s not counting the distinctions outsiders gloss over or just don’t notice; not all Asians are Buddhists, after all.

My other fantasy setting where religion plays an important role is the unreleased Occupation Trilogy. Here, the crusade is the start of the story. The Hevestine peoples follow the dictates of God’s chosen prophet, who has been slowly deified over the course of nine centuries. They have a central church, a collection of saints who are believed to have performed miracles, and a lot of other Catholic trappings. And their society reflects that, though it’s more of a post-feudal Baroque Europe.

Against them are the Ihneti. They’re…pagan, for lack of a better term. They believe in magic, don’t follow the right teachings, and they’re just all around bad people. Well, they aren’t, but they’re the target of a six-year war and decades-long occupation because, hey, that prophet said to carry the light of God to every corner of the world. And if they would just listen, they’d realize the undeniable truth, and they could be saved, too.

I’m consciously aware of the contrasts in these settings. In a way, they represent three “levels” of worldbuilding. Hidden Hills took the easy way out, as religion isn’t a fundamental part of the plot. The whole point of Otherworld is to explore the interaction of our modern American culture with one alien, but still recognizably human, so the beliefs of the natives are important, but not pivotal. And the Occupation Trilogy is meant to make you think of the Crusades and colonialism, so I emphasized the faith of the believers and how they see their foes as heathen.

Any one of these approaches can work. You don’t have to explore every nuance. There just isn’t enough time, and I know you’d rather write the story. But a little bit of extra thought when you need it, and this aspect of a fantasy society can become so much more real. Five years ago, I stated this as a hypothesis. Now, I can confirm the truth of it.