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.

Summer Reading List 2024: Third

Finished with about a week to spare. Good thing, too. I know next week is going to be awful for reading, and the weekend won’t be any different. Anyway…

Fantasy

Title: In the Shadow of Lightning
Author: Brian McClellan
Genre: Fantasy
Year: 2022

I got this one for Christmas two years ago. Never actually read it, mostly because so much in my life was turning upside-down around that time. So I promptly forgot about it and, when Christmas of last year rolled around, put it on my wishlist again. My brother, always willing to try for a laugh, swiped it out of the pile in my room, wrapped it back up, and gave it to me again. And I’ll admit that I was fooled.

The book itself, now that I’ve actually read it, is great. Brian McClellan is one of my favorite current authors, because he really seems to care about his worldbuilding, while also being able to tell a good story without getting bogged down in minutiae. Plus, he specializes in a style of fantasy that’s post-medieval, more 17th than 12th century, which is refreshing and fun. If anything, that’s how I feel reading his books: like I’m having fun.

With In the Shadow of Lightning, that trend continues. The pace is lively throughout the book, and there’s almost never any real downtime. Things happen, and then something else happens on the next page, and so on. No long monologues, very few digressions. The book is long, but tight. I could easily imagine it being another 200 pages if written by most other authors.

The story itself starts out almost typical, with the fantasy cliche of an imperial hero putting down the wicked rebels seeking a measure of autonomy. Things go wrong quite quickly, however, and the main story begins a decade later, with that same hero now living in exile. He gets drawn back into the political game, and there’s not a minute where things let up from there.

Along the way, there’s a lot of fighting. McClellan is definitely a military fantasy writer, and it shows here far more than it did in the Powder Mage series, which was about a war! Essentially the whole book has as its main event a war between the empire and a neighboring country that has retained its independence through trade. Kind of like Venice or the Netherlands, is how I see it.

The lead-up to the war is part of the plot, so I won’t get too into spoilers here. I will say that I guessed "false flag" about five pages into the first post-prologue chapter. Not because it’s telegraphed, but the details simply aligned with what I know of how false flag operations are pushed. 9/11, 1/6, 10/7…anyone who really digs into terrorist attacks and assassination attempts will see that some patterns emerge, and a lot of those patterns point to the supposedly "random" shootings and "unprovoked" attacks actually being started by other agents. Agents of chaos.

Brian McClellan clearly also knows this, as he throws in every single one of the elements we now know to be signs of a false flag operation: a killer who just happens to be of a specific nationality, economic chaos at just the right time, conflicting or outright forged orders, media propaganda to hide the truth. If he isn’t making a statement, then I can’t wait to read the book in which he does.

And that brings me to what I feel is the worst part of In the Shadow of Lightning: the Ossan Empire itself. Rather than your typical fantasy autocracy, possibly with a secret cabal of ministers who are the real power behind the throne, McClellan just jumps straight to the cabal. Ossa is an oligarchical empire where the powerful families vie for dominance.

It’s more of a Renaissance Florence than a High Middle Ages England, in that sense. In the social sense, however, it’s closer to the Weimar Republic…or modern America. The nature of magic in the setting requires body piercings and tattoos, and that’s fine. It’s an interesting twist. But the empire seems to be a place that has given in wholly to decadence and hedonism. Religion has become just another form of commerce. Gender roles are completely absent.

So are sexual roles; essentially every character whose preferences are mentioned has no preferences. At one point, I joked to my girlfriend, "Everybody in this book is bi!" And it’s true. Combined with the guild family dynamic that is ever-present, and I got the same feeling as I did with The Expanse: this whole place is rotten, and there’s nothing even worth redeeming.

If that is another way of representing an empire in decline, then I’m okay with it. It’s a pattern that has recurred throughout history. The failure of the family unit, and the transfer of the nurturing role to government or society at large has happened before. It’s happening now. And the backlash from those who understand human nature has invariably been disastrous.

But this book is anything but a disaster. Read it for what it is: a fun, fast-paced ride through a dying empire, in a world where magic is flashy and deadly. You get some great battles, a lot of political intrigue, and even some Lovecraftian horror near the end. Just remember that the secret cabal of people who masquerade as normal humans to sow dissent and chaos, using degeneracy to bring an empire to its knees while controlling its government and economy from the shadows, is the least fantastic element of the story.

Summer Reading List 2024: Second

The world’s a mess, my life’s a mess, but at least I’m reading. Right?

Military History

Title: The Guns of August
Author: Barbara Tuchman
Genre: Military History
Year: 1962

World War I has always fascinated me. Ever since I was in the 6th grade, when I had a to choose a topic for a social studies project (that year was world history, and I had reached the early 20th century), I was hooked by the stories and the sheer scope of the Great War. My grade on that project was terrible—I almost failed, simply because there was just so much to learn that I couldn’t narrow it down enough, and didn’t have time to rehearse—but the memory remained.

Over the past decade, the war that had languished in relative obscurity all my life finally started to get back into the public eye. Mostly, that’s because of the centennial, the 100th anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in June 1914. That milestone brought about the desire to make new media, whether movies (1917), video games (Verdun and its sequels, Tannenberg and Isonzo), web series (Indy Neidell’s The Great War), or music (Sabaton’s…er, The Great War). Many of these are excellent, and I’ve spent the past ten years basking in the knowledge that I finally got to be a history hipster.

But I haven’t read a book about WWI in decades. And I hadn’t planned on doing so this summer, either, until Elon Musk shared a list of his must-listen audiobooks. Since I don’t really care for audiobooks—I’m a visual learner—I downloaded them in written form, and I picked the first interesting one I saw that wasn’t 11 volumes. Sorry, Will Durant.

The Guns of August is a fairly detailed narrative, drawn from diaries, newspapers, the occasional eyewitness report, and other primary or good secondary sources. Its topic is, broadly speaking, the first month of the war. In practice, it starts somewhat before that, with the death of Edward VII, King of England. His death, and his succession by George V, created a power vacuum in a geopolitical landscape that was already growing increasingly tense. Europe had four years until war finally broke out (ignore the Balkan Wars for a moment), but the buildup had already begun. Edward’s death, as Tuchman argues in a roundabout way, set Europe on the path to war.

Most of us know the broad strokes of the summer of 1914. Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo. Austria demanded reparations from Serbia; recall that this was before Yugoslavia existed, much less Bosnia. Favors were called in on both sides, drawing in first Germany, France, Russia, and Great Britain, then seemingly every other country in the world. Four years and many millions of dead young men later, the original belligerents peaced out one by one, ending with Germany signing the Treaty of Versailles.

As not enough of us know, that treaty was designed to be so ruinous that the German Empire would cease to be a nation able to project power abroad. Indeed, it was the end of the empire as a whole. Instead, the Kaiser’s rule was replaced with the decadent debauchery of the Weimar Republic, which served to suck out the marrow of the German economy while leaving its society fractured, fragmented. Exactly as we’re seeing in modern America, but I digress.

Anyway, Tuchman’s book isn’t about that part of the war. In fact, it leaves off as the Battle of the Marne begins, ending with a series of what-ifs that are tantalizing to the worldbuilder in me. What if the German armies hadn’t tried to do a forced march just to stick to their predetermined schedule of battles? What if Britain’s Field Marshal French hadn’t been swayed by a rare emotional outpouring from the normally stoic General Joffre? (Now I really want to write that alt-history!)

No matter what might have happened if things had gone differently in August 1914, the author makes it clear that what occurred in the weeks immediately prior to the German advance to the outskirts of Paris were pretty much set in stone. Before Franz Ferdinand was so much as cold, Europe was going to war. It was only a matter of when.

As far as the book goes, it’s a good read. It’s nothing brilliant, and certainly not worth a Pulitzer, in my opinion. The writing can be almost too highbrow at times, as if Tuchman is trying to capture the last gasp of the Victorian Era in words. To be fair, that’s how most of the major players talked and wrote, but readers even in the 1960s wouldn’t have been exposed to it except in literature classes. Certainly not when discussing military history. There are also scores of untranslated sentences in French and German, an oddity in a book written for English speakers.

The pacing is also very uneven. The Russians get a couple of fairly long chapters, but are otherwise forgotten; Tannenberg is practically a footnote compared to Liege. Conditions on a forced march get page after page of narration, including diary excerpts from soldiers, while the battles themselves are mostly reduced to the traditional "date and body count" sort of exposition.

If there’s any real critique of The Guns of August, it has to come from its very obvious and very intentional Allied bias. While the happenings in Germany and among the Kaiser’s generals are well-represented, they’re often cast in a negative light. When the Germans demolish a village in retaliation for partisan attacks, it’s a war crime and an international outrage. When the French demolish a village because they think they might need to put up defenses, it’s a heroic effort to save their country.

This is, of course, the same kind of thinking that still permeates the discussion about the Great War’s sequel. The "bad guys" aren’t allowed to take pride in their country. Their nationalism is evil; ours is sacred. (This line of reasoning also leads otherwise sensible people to praise Communists.) The simple fact is, the Weimar Republic was far worse than it’s portrayed, and the governments to either side of it on the timeline, whether Empire or Reich, were not as bad as they’re portrayed. Barbara Tuchman, being a student of her generation, can’t get past that. Even if she tried, I imagine her publishers wouldn’t let her.

Otherwise, The Guns of August is a worthwhile read for its subject matter. It’s a good look at the backdrop to World War I, something that occasionally gets lost among the trenches. Personally, I find it a bit overrated, but I’m glad I read it.

Summer Reading List 2024: First

It’s been about a month, and I finally made time to read something. Thanks to my brother’s timely discovery of a Youtube channel called "In Deep Geek", I got a little inspired for this one. Man, I hope that guy starts posting on a site that respects its users soon.

Biography

Title: The Nature of Middle-Earth
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien (ed. Carl Hostetter)
Genre: Biography/History?
Year: 2021

I don’t really know how to classify this book. It’s basically a collection of notes and scraps that Tolkien left behind. Much like his son Christopher’s History of Middle-Earth series, a ton of editing had to be done to make something readable. And…well, that didn’t quite work. The book as a whole is very disjointed, full of footnotes and editor comments and just a mess overall.

That makes perfect sense, though. Tolkien was probably the first great worldbuilder. He worked in an era without computers, without the internet. He had to write out his notes longhand. And there were a ton of those notes, because his constructed world began all the way back in the days before World War I. 1909, or thereabouts, was when he first started sketching out the conlang that would become Quenya. By his death, those earliest notes were senior citizens. There was a lot of cruft.

This book, then, is about organizing a lot of that cruft. In that, Hostetter does a good job. His is the job of an archaeologist, in a sense, as well as a forensic scientist. Oh, and a linguist, because Tolkien’s languages were ever the most important part of his creation.

The Nature of Middle-Earth, as its name suggests, gives us notes and drafts related to some of the fundamental questions and thorny problems Tolkien had to solve to give his invented world verisimilitude while also keeping it true to his long-standing ideas and ideals. After all, Middle-Earth is intended to be our world, just a few thousand years in the past. How many, exactly? It’s never stated anywhere in his published books, but this book tells us that Tolkien saw his present day—well, in 1960—as being about 6000 years after the end of LOTR. Convenient, that number, since it’s basically the same as what creationists claim.

And that brings me to the point I want to make. Our editor here repeats his own note a couple of times, emphasizing that Tolkien saw his world as a "fundamentally Catholic" creation. He was a Catholic, so that makes sense in some regard.

Much of the book—much of Tolkien’s corpus of personal notes—is thus about harmonizing a high fantasy world at the cusp of the Dominion of Man with the low, anti-human dogma of the Catholic Church. So Tolkien writes at length, and sometimes in multiple revisions, that his Elves were strictly monogamous, and that they didn’t reincarnate into different bodies. The men of Numenor were the same (except that he didn’t have to worry about reincarnation for them) because they had grown more godly.

In a few cases, Tolkien shows glimpses of a modern scientific worldview that was probably heretical in the churches of his youth. Sure, it’s all in an explicitly theistic framework, but he even accepts evolution for the most part; he can’t quite make the logical leap that humans are subject to it, too, but he meets science halfway, which is more than most would dare.

There is also a glimpse of what I’ve previous called "hardcore" worldbuilding. Tolkien was, of course, a master of that, but The Nature of Middle-Earth shows the extremes he was willing to go to for the sake of his creation. Multiple chapters are taken up with his attempts at giving believable dates for some of the events that were considered prehistorical even in the tales of The Silmarillion. In each, he went into excruciating detail, only to discard it all when he reached a point where the numbers just wouldn’t work. I’ve been there, and now I don’t feel so bad about that. Knowing that the undisputed master of my craft had the same troubles I do is refreshing.

All in all, most of the chapters of the book are short, showing the text of Tolkien’s notes on a subject, plus the occasional editorial comment, and the copious footnotes from both authors. We get to see how the sausage is made, and it’s sometimes just as disgusting as we’d expect. Not one reader of LOTR or The Silmarillion cares about the exact population of each tribe of Elves, or what the etymology of Galadriel’s name indicates about her travels, but Tolkien isn’t writing these things for us.
When worldbuilding, we authors do so much work not because we expect to show every bit of it to our audience, but so that the parts we do show are as good as they can be.

If this book has any lesson, then, it’s that. Worldbuilding is hard work. Worse, it’s work that accomplishes almost nothing in itself. Its sole value is in being a tool to better convey a story. Perfectionist and obsessive that Tolkien was, he wanted an answer to any plausible question a reader might ask. But he also wanted to create for the sake of creating. Remember that the intended goal of Middle-Earth was to become a new mythology, mostly for the British peoples. When you set your sights on something that sweeping, you’re always going to find something to do.

Summer Reading List Challenge 2024

Is it already that time of the year? 2024 seems like it’s just flying by, or maybe that’s because I’m old now. Whatever the case, it’s Memorial Day, and that means time to start a new Summer Reading List challenge! Take a look at the original post if you want to see how this all started. If you don’t really care that this is the 9th straight year I’m doing this challenge, then read on.

The rules are the same as always, because they just fit the challenge perfectly. As always, remember that the "rules" presented here are intended to be guidelines rather than strictures. This is all in fun. You won’t be graded, so all you have to do is be honest with yourself.

The goal is to read 3 new (to you) books between Memorial Day (May 27) and Labor Day (September 2) in the US, the traditional "unofficial" bounds of summer. For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere reading this, it’s a winter reading list. If you’re in the tropics…I don’t know what to tell you.
A book is anything non-periodical, so no comics, graphic novels, or manga. Anything else works. If you’re not sure, just use common sense. Audiobooks are acceptable, but only if they’re books, not something like a podcast.
One of the books should be of a genre you don’t normally read. For example, I’m big on fantasy and sci-fi, so I might read a romance, or a thriller, or something like that. Nonfiction, by the way, also works as a "new" genre, unless you do read it all the time.
You can’t count books you wrote, because they obviously wouldn’t be new to you. (Yes, this rule exists solely to keep me from just rereading my books.)

Social media is an awful place these days, and even my usual fediverse haunt is in flux at the moment. I’ll try to post on my alt @nocturne@bae.st, but don’t hold your breath. Instead, just wait for me to write something here. Of course, you can post wherever you like, even if that’s to Facebook, Twitter (I’m not calling it anything else), or something weird like Threads.

Have fun, and keep reading!

Twine thoughts

As I mentioned a few months back, I’m writing interactive fiction now. I’ve been planning one called The Anitra Incident, which I envision as a kind of prequel to my Orphans of the Stars novel series. (The second, which I’m actually in the process of writing, is…something else that I’ll never attach my real name to.)

In the previous post, I looked at what I consider the top four tools for creating interactive fiction: Inform 7, Twine, Ren’Py, and Ink. I think I made it clear then why I felt Twine was the best choice for what I’m writing. Now that I’ve been working with it for a while, I have some thoughts to share. These are more of a ramble than even my usual posts here, so bear with me.

Ditch the editor

Twine’s biggest draw is that it has its own editor, with a nifty little drag-and-drop visual tool to organize your stories. It looks good, and it helps to get people interested in creating, rather than whining about how they don’t want to have to learn anything.

But it sucks.

Yes, the editor works just fine for small-scale constructions. Twine divides its stories into passages, which are just that: bits of text that can be anywhere from a few words to an entire chapter, with all the necessary logic for interactivity sprinkled in. A big story with a lot of branching points, arcs, and the like is going to have hundreds, if not thousands, of passages. (Case in point: my unnamed side project has 232 total passages already, and that’s not much more than a set of locations and a handful of conversation scenes.) Trying to keep all that straight will quickly become impossible.

On top of that, the editor’s structure makes it difficult to write code. There isn’t much room for "metadata" on a passage; for the most part, that’s limited to a series of tags, which you have to edit using the "chip" style of tagging that web devs love for some inexplicable reason. But that means you have to put all the code in that little box, even if you’re using a tool that expects tags. In my case, that’s TinyQBN, a library for implementing what the creators of Sunless Sea call "storylets".

I could rant about the editor for another few posts, but I just don’t bother using it, so I won’t bother discussing it further. Yes, setting up a custom workflow is a bit more difficult. Yes, it’s worth it in the end. After doing the work, I can now write my story in Vim and my code in, er, Code. And it all comes out the same, except that I also have better handling of external JS libraries, static analysis tools that can run automatically, and so much more that I’m used to from my life as a developer.

People are stupid

Which brings me to my next point. The average Twine user is not a professional developer or a professional author. Worse yet, neither are the Twine power users. As far as I can tell, I’m just about the only one using Twine who does both. Believe me, it shows.

Most Twine tutorials are written for someone who has never so much as looked at code, and who barely even knows what fiction is, let alone how to write it. I don’t know why Twine’s community targets journalists as its intended audience, but that’s how it is.

For someone who knows both fields, it’s just frustrating. I’ve already read the intro material. I know what a macro is. But no one out there is creating any resources for the intermediate or advanced users. How should I structure a story in terms of source files? What are some common design patterns in interactive fiction, and how do I apply them in Twine? When should I break a scene across multiple passages, and what’s the best way to handle that?

I get that much of writing fiction is an art. I’m well aware that there’s no one-size-fits-all method for creating a novel. But to assume that everyone is forever going to be stuck at the beginner stage is doing the rest of us a disservice. I’m aware that zoomers, degenerates, and progressives (the main components of the intfiction.org "community") don’t know how to learn; people who look to Tumblr for knowledge and wisdom have shown pretty definitively that they have neither. Surely somebody out there cares about the rest of us, though.

If not, maybe I should work on that myself.

Wokeness taints everything

Allegedly, the interactive fiction community is thriving, and Twine is a big part of that. In reality, there’s not much of a community. Much like any other hobby (people don’t generally make a living off adventure stories, unless they work for Failbetter), the anti-human rot of progressivism infects every large gathering that would have the chance to become a community. Those of us who prefer free expression to censorship are, as usual, labeled extremists for the radical view that words are just words. Strange for a hobby built around words, but that’s the whole point of the woke ideology: to tear apart any gathering of like-minded individuals by setting them against one another.

So there’s an interactive fiction forum, but it’s so heavily censored that you get banned just for saying something that someone might think is "bad" in some ill-defined way. There’s a group on Reddit, but that’s…well, Reddit. It’s the Mos Eisley of the internet. Your other major option is Discord, which might be even worse!

Interactive fiction started in the days before the web. It became popular because of technologies like Usenet, where you were expected to be civil, yes, but you weren’t coddled. To have its gathering places be nothing more than wastelands of diversity, mere online versions of Portland and Detroit, is just sad.

(This isn’t specific to Twine, mind you. The Inform community goes even farther. They not only stand against freedom of speech, but also anonymity.)

Tech is tech

Beneath it all, Twine is nothing more than a very weird SPA framework. Sure, you have to compile the source, but the end result is an HTML page and a bunch of assets. It’s like Svelte in a way, except that (as far as I’m aware) the Twine authors don’t openly support child trafficking and religious persecution. As a developer, I think looking at it as a web framework has helped me better understand how to use it as an authoring tool.

This is where my earlier point about getting rid of the Twine IDE as soon as possible comes back into play. Once you abandon that crutch, you realize just how much freedom you have, with all that entails. For my current story, I’ve added the Pure CSS library to help with some layout issues. On my initial draft of The Anitra Incident, I’d used Moment.js for timekeeping; now, somebody finally made a decent native date system macro that does most of what you’d need in a story.

The output is HTML, meaning that you get to use CSS for styling, Javascript for scripting, and all that good stuff. People have managed to integrate Phaser, a 2D sprite-based game engine, into Twine stories, and I’ve been looking at how they did that. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody even tried combining Twine with React and a full-stack framework. (Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea. Okay, maybe not React, but Vue and Nuxt…)

One true format

Twine comes prepackaged with a number of "story formats", which are combinations of style templates and authoring DSLs. I briefly went over them in the previous post on this topic. In short, Chapbook is new, and mostly unused. Snowman is not much more than raw Javascript with a parser.

The other two are the most popular: Harlowe and Sugarcube. Harlowe is the default format in the Twine IDE, so it’s the one most newcomers learn first, but I think that’s a horrible decision. If you want to do anything even remotely complex, you’ll quickly run into the limitations of Harlowe. Far worse, however, is the fact that those limitations are by design. The authors, much like Apple, go out of their way to break any attempt at getting outside their sandbox.

In other words, there’s really no reason not to go straight to Sugarcube and stay there. It works. It’s not difficult to pick up. Most of the libraries out there are for it. (A few are format-agnostic, I’ll admit.) And you won’t be supporting the intentional hobbling of technology.

Conclusion

To sum up, then, what I’ve learned about Twine from using it is that it’s a great tool for what it does. It has some extraneous bits, and these are unfortunately the same bits that newcomers are pushed towards. If you’re willing to take the time to set up your own dev environment, use Sugarcube and a compiler like Tweego, and live with the fact that you’ll get no help from the community beyond "here’s how to make text red" and "here’s how to let your players make up their own words to use as pronouns", you won’t have any problems.

Writing a novel is a lot of work. Writing a program is a lot of work. Trying to do both, which is all interactive fiction really is, can be a monumental undertaking. But it’s fun, too. That’s what I’ve discovered in the past few months.

Interactive fiction revisited

I’ve always been one to do things just to say I did them. It’s why I became an author, why I ran for office last year, and why I still, despite having failed on multiple occasions, try to create electronic music. (Now I really want to get back into LMMS…)

I’ve also felt that teaching programming is an important goal. Not because I believe everyone should, or even can, become a developer, but because the critical thinking, reasoning, and logical skills necessary to write code are in short supply throughout society these days. If young people learned a little about programming, my thinking goes, that would better prepare them to look at every other part of the world in the same way.

These two desires of mine combine in a few very narrow ways. I’ve tried writing pedagogical programming languages, for example, and I’ve urged those I feel most receptive to try out Scratch, Grasshopper, and other teaching tools.

For the most part, that hasn’t worked. But lately I’ve been getting back into the idea of creating interactive fiction. For those who don’t know, this is a nebulous catch-all term for visual novels, old-school text adventures, and a few other types of games. (For those who disagree with me calling them "games", you’re wrong, because they’re games by any reasonable definition.)

Interactive fiction isn’t so much a genre as it is a medium, but all types have something in common: they use programming to turn simple prose into something a player can interact with. Some work by presenting the user a list of choices. Some, like the older text adventures, are played by typing commands. This isn’t so much a dichotomy as it is a spectrum; "choice-based" games can incorporate a parser. Thanks to the power of programming—every Turing-complete language is equally capable—there are no absolutes.

But there are differences. As I prepare to write, and in some cases rewrite, my first piece of interactive fiction, The Anitra Incident, I’ve studied the tools available, searching for the ones that fit me best, and the ones that work for the needs of the story. In that process, I’ve come to see four of them as standing above the rest, each for a different reason.

Inform 7

Inform 7 is the king of "parser-based" interactive fiction. It continues the tradition of old-fashioned text adventures like Zork, occasionally updating them to work better with modern computing. Programming is done through a natural-like language intended to vaguely resemble English prose. Games are compiled to an antiquated virtual machine and run through an interpreter that can be anything from a web browser to a native app to an executable on an old Amiga floppy disk.

Until last year, I wouldn’t even look at Inform 7 for development, for one very specific reason: it was closed-source. I don’t use closed-source tools for any other part of my development (Python, Vim, Clang, Git, open-source VS Code forks, and every other tool I use, they’re all freely available), so I was happy to finally have the chance to explore Inform when it was released under the Artistic License in 2022.

The good:

Being mature is a good thing in programming, and resisting the temptation to add faddish things just to keep up with trends is a noble goal. Inform has, as far as possible, perfected the parser style of interaction.
Inform serves as a de facto introduction to text adventures, so it has a large community, with lots of extensions and examples to draw from.
Tools like Vorple allow the intentionally limited language to access the rich multimedia features of modern web browsers, which opens up a whole new world of interaction.

The bad:

The Inform 7 programming language is just different enough from English that you can’t really write it as prose, and it’s peculiar enough in its function that you can’t take it as just another programming language.
While the primary documentation is vast, it’s also horrible. The developers’ guide, called Writing With Inform, is baroque to the extreme, and it’s written in a stuffy British style that gives me the impression of a Brontë character sneering at the rabble who would dare to write code.
The community seems to embody that same style, turning their noses up at the perceived limitations of non-parser adventure games.

Overall, Inform 7 isn’t bad. It excels in a very narrow niche: anything that resembles Zork, Colossal Cave Adventure, and old text adventures of that sort. If you want to write something that isn’t based around puzzles, rooms, and the guess-the-verb game of using a text parser, though, you’re going to fight the system every step of the way. And you’ll be doing it without much help.

Twine

Twine is, in many ways, the opposite of Inform 7. It’s been around a long time, but it embraces the open community that comes from having open source. Instead of being based around a parser, it uses the concept of passages, linking between them mostly through player interaction. (That makes it "choice-based", in the parlance of the interactive fiction community. Problem is, "choice-based" is used mostly as a slur, from what I’ve seen.)

For programming, Twine allows a variety of "story formats", which all work around a core set of capabilities. In the default installation, you have four options:

Chapbook, which I’ve never used
Harlowe, hobbled by design to the point of uselessness
Snowman, a too-thin veneer over Javascript
Sugarcube, an HTML-looking middle ground

I chose Sugarcube because of the way it comes closest to the sweet spot of being powerful and extensible while also providing a decent standard library.

There’s an editor for Twine, but you can also use the Tweego compiler and just write your games in a text editor or IDE, which is what I do. Output is an HTML file plus some ancillary Javascript and CSS, reminiscent of a single page app of the kind you’d make with React or Vue.

The good:

Twine is easy to get started with. The editor is friendly, and the output looks nice even by default.
Sugarcube is actually decent, as long as you treat it like any other templating language. Think of it like Jinja, for example. The built-in macros, for the most part, cover what you’re going to need, but making your own isn’t that hard.
The Twine community is almost as big as Inform’s, and there are a lot of tutorials for getting started.

The bad:

You’ll quickly outgrow the editor, but setting up a Tweego dev environment isn’t trivial.
Although the community is big, the differing story formats mean it’s also fractured. So you’ll often find someone asking exactly the question you were going to ask…but they’re using Harlowe, so the answers they get won’t help you.
As with Inform, the documentation assumes you’re a programming newbie, and there’s little out there for those of us who know how to write code (and prose, for that matter!) but want to know how to write this kind of code.

My overall opinion of Twine is positive. I think it’s the best gateway to interactive fiction for two reasons. One, it’s more accessible than Inform, in both development of the game and playing it. Two, Twine offers more room to grow, at least if you’re using Sugarcube or Snowman.

Ren’Py

Ren’Py describes itself as a "visual novel engine". Visual novels are probably the most popular type of interactive fiction nowadays, especially in the anime fandom. In fact, some big indie games in recent years, like Doki Doki Literature Club, are nothing more than visual novels. Of all the ways, to create this type of game, Ren’Py tends to get the most press, so I’ve taken multiple looks at it over the years.

Programming a Ren’Py novel is done using a Python-based DSL that directly exposes the tropes of the medium. So, for example, you can define characters, and then the game will show them when showing their dialogue. The final result will be a native executable that runs on the platform of your choice, and there’s a web export currently listed as beta.

The good:

Ren’Py is simple to get started with. The tutorial is actually a complete visual novel, and it has more content than some I’ve seen.
The engine is geared toward multimedia. You don’t have to worry about "What if the player’s using an old version of mobile Safari?" as with Twine, or Inform’s "What if they want to play on a C64?" You just use your art and assets like you would any "real" game.
Python is, in my opinion, one of the easiest programming languages out there, so extensibility is not that difficult.

The bad:

The documentation is horribly lacking. Outside of the basic tutorial, there’s almost nothing official to go on, apart from API docs.
Ren’Py is very much a visual novel engine, and it shows. If you want to write anything else, you’re going to struggle.
The English-speaking community isn’t as big as that of Twine and Inform; many, if not most, developers are Japanese, meaning that language barriers are always going to be in the way.

I can’t really recommend Ren’Py for general use, but if you want to make a visual novel, it’s unparalleled. Well, I assume it is. As bad as the documentation is, it’s sometimes hard to tell.

Ink

Ink is the fourth and final option I’ve considered. Calling itself a "narrative scripting language", Ink’s niche is in the Choose Your Own Adventure and "branching narrative" space. In that sense, it can be seen as a very simplified Twine. But it’s also designed to be embedded. Unlike the others on this list, where you’re expected to make a game in them by extended their capabilities, Ink expects you to extend it by putting it in the game you’re making.

That’s a big difference, and it’s why Ink is so hard to classify. On one hand, it can be seen as little more than a dialogue library for games. On the other, it has enough power to create interactive fiction by itself. The Ink compiler offers a web export option, and that qualifies as a game in its own right. The JSON export option, however, is probably the one most games that aren’t intended to be interactive fiction will use.

The good:

Ink’s syntax is very clean and sparse, so the "I know I can’t code" people have little to worry about.
The embedding option is the killer feature for non-solo work, because Ink is by far the easiest to integrate with any other game development engine/library/whatever.
Also unlike the other options on my list, Ink has corporate backing while still being open source. That means there’s always going to be some quality control, if only because the game studios using it will expect it…and pay for it.

The bad:

Ink is only really good for branching narration and dialogue. That severely limits its niche when using it alone.
The engine integrations are pushed really hard, but Unity is the officially-blessed one. If you’ve followed Unity news lately, you know that’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Outside of Ink’s developers, there’s not much of a community.

Of the four options on this list, Ink is the best if you’re working directly with anything else. Want to make a Godot game with some CYOA-style interaction? This is the top choice. But anything more complex isn’t going to be done with Ink alone, and learning an entire game engine, with all that entails, is probably too much for a single dev working on a passion project.

Conclusion

Those are my thoughts on four of the most popular interactive fiction development systems. I have other thoughts on the medium as a whole, but I’ll save them for later.

Window of opportunity

One of the biggest problems with the world today is propaganda. And one of the biggest sources of propaganda is media. Of course, that’s something which has happened pretty much forever, but the scale of it is so much greater today. Movies push communist and other anti-human agendas. TV shows parrot progressive talking points without a hint of irony. Video games give our virtual characters a choice not between male and female—the only two biological sexes for humans—but between "Body Type A" and "Body Type B", yet never explain why only the first is allowed to be topless.

It only goes downhill from there. Rap is essentially the only genre of music that is advertised nowadays (with the minor exception of anti-American "country" pop music), while also being the only one to have no recognizable evolution in a generation. Sports leagues spent the summer of 2020 showcasing their support for a terrorist organization, and continue to promote child predators and genital mutilation. The list goes on, but you get the idea.

There’s a growing pushback among viewers, listeners, and players. Starfield’s launch was disastrous, and the game was rightly criticized by gamers for not only its antiquated graphics, but also its unrealistic demographics. The NBA is seeing its lowest TV ratings in decades. Disney is churning out bomb after bomb at the box office. And even mediocre musicians like Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony are hitting the top of the charts solely because they’re willing to take a stand against the narrative.

Of course, the problem lies in the gatekeepers of media. Hollywood isn’t going to stop putting out woke garbage until Blackrock goes under, which isn’t happening anytime soon. AAA studios don’t care how poor the reviews are for their newest recycled PS3 franchise, because they know the games themselves are loss leaders at this point. And major sports literally have government protection for their monopolies.

Thus, we have to turn to the indie scene in every case. That’s where the innovation is. That’s where the pro-American, pro-Enlightenment, and pro-human media can be found. Indie authors are writing stories that lift us up and let us escape, instead of the same dreary racial metaphors. Indie musicians are creating tracks in every genre that bring to life the emotion that music should make us feel. Indie video games, even when they’re based on a timeless formula, show off new tricks of gameplay while also telling compelling stories.

It’s only going to get better.

The new hotness these days is AI. And that’s also the current target for the powers that be. Big business and established interests hate AI because of the potential it has. Ignore the complaints about copyright and consent. Those are red herrings. The real fear of generative AI is that it will give us a chance to create media without having to go through them. For instance, that’s why Steam, never a fan of freedom in the first place, is banning indie games which use AI content.

If a dev can use AI to cut out the time needed to hire artists, voice actors, and so on, that means so many more indie games will get past the demo and alpha stages. If an author uses an AI tool to generate story seeds or mines an LLM for dialogue inspiration, he might just finish that novel he’s been working on for years. And the tools are only getting better with each new release. Soon, much more of the media pipeline will be accessible to those of us without the means to break into the industry. Low-budget films used to be a laughingstock. In a few years, they might be indistinguishable from a Hollywood blockbuster. (Well, not exactly. You’ll be able to spot the indie movie because it’s the one with a straight white man as the protagonist.)

It’s been over seven years since I wrote Democratization of development. In that post, I argued that game development was reaching a golden age because of the availability of high-quality tools at a price affordable to the average person. That’s even more true in 2023 than it was in 2016, even if Unity has decided it no longer wants an audience. And you know what? Almost all the games I play now are indies. (The only exceptions are Nintendo’s licensed titles, which you can’t play on PC anyway.)

Let’s get other kinds of entertainment to that same level. With the free tools available now or in the near future, it’s a no-brainer. Blender, Godot, Synfig, GIMP, Inkscape, LMMS…these are only the ones I’ve used. Not one of them costs a single dollar. So the software is there. AI will add the assets for those of us without artistic talent.

Elephant in the room

That only leaves one last thing: distribution. It’s the hardest aspect, and it’s the one that doesn’t have a good solution. Patreon is a far-left wasteland little better than OnlyFans. Steam is owned by a company that uses practices deemed illegal in at least 3 countries. Crypto just isn’t the silver bullet its proponents wish it was.

This is where we, as indie creators, need to step up and let our voices be heard. Rich conservatives talk a big game about creating alternatives to woke business, but they never follow through on their promises. Rumble, for example, calls itself a haven for free speech, yet still bans many of those who seek to exercise it. And there just aren’t any right-wing or libertarian distributors out there—whether for movies, music, books, or video games—willing to seek out the indies who are desperate for a platform that respects them.

We have a moment, however. The backlash against progressivism is growing. Hollywood is crippled by its unions, and the video game industry may follow in its footsteps. Big Media is burning through cash at an unprecedented rate, and its outright hostility to its core customer base is keeping it from replenishing its coffers. If anyone with the means would take that next step, that pivotal step of reaching out to us indies and saying, "We’ll work for you," then democratization would get the boost that might just launch us ahead of the soulless corporate entertainment empire.

We’re ready. We’re waiting.