Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota Discord Server AMA

So, the actual Thomas Carlyle does, and is the namesake of the imagined Romanovan founder figure. The actual Abraham Arden Brill does too but I hadn’t actually heard of him when I picked Felix Faust’s name – Felix is named (very nerdily) after the academic publisher Brill, which is notable for publishing incredibly niche important research that no other publisher will take because it’s not going to turn a profit but which is still really important and needs to be known. It reminded me of how the Brillists are working hard on research no one cares about while everyone recognizes that the fruits of said research is important. Tullus Hostilius remains as real in Terra Ignota as in history.

They were also instrumental in various important invasions and other interesting historical incidents, I keep finding them popping up in my research. It was a family that died out at about the time I wanted it to die out, and that had a distinctive name and a clear vein of royal blood, but that also wasn’t well known and hadn’t been used in any other prominent fiction so it wouldn’t have too many other associations.

Well, since Vidocq is both Valjean and Javert, there’s entanglement with Mycroft too. Papa and Mycroft are the main intended entanglements there, but also important is the reminder that people cn have utterly implausible lives that stretch the plausibility of novels and yet still be real, which I want people thinking about in terms of Mycroft but also many of the characters.

We get a bit more on it in book 4, but there are lots of version administered by lots of Hives, so they vary a lot. Many are an interview, or partly an interview, but there are also written-only versions, and there are many language options too. The focus, though, is on seeing whether you understand moral problems enough to make ethical decisions at an adult level, so for example some versions involve the Trolly Problem or other ethical thought experiments, not with the expectation that there’s a right answer, but that articulating ANY answer demonstrates moral reasoning at a sophisticated level and the fact that you can recognize that it’s a complex question. A lot of it is to make sure you have enough practical critical reasoning to avoid being taken advantage of if you become your own legal decision-maker, i.e. that you fully understand what it means to choose a law and be bound by it. Different people can take different forms, so, for example, someone who struggles to articulate things aloud can take a written-only version, someone who struggles with writing can take an oral-only version, etc.

Good question. Yes, the tracker system is administered mainly by the Alliance itself, though the facility is a joint Cousin-Mitsubishi undertaking.

I already talked about how most restaurants do only one meal for a long time, to accomodate time zone hopping. It’s also much more common for highly-rated restaurants to be primarily by reservation and have a waiting list (museums too) since people can go to them from anywhere, so a favorable newspaper review can result in thousands of people. Elite restaurants might have bookings months in advance, while more modest ones focus more on feeding people in the immediate neighborhood. In effect it mostly makes sense to go either to a restaurant that’s within walking distance or to go to one that’s really exciting and worth a 15-20 minute trip which means 1/3 of the Earth – medium-quality restaurants that people drive to because they’re the best X in the area but not actually outstanding are what’s gone, so you get more local mom & pop shops and super specialty things like Try Our Famous Goat & Feta Sausage Dog, Unique in the World!

There aren’t sidewalks because streets are largely entirely pedestrian, though larger cities do have trams or subways and sometimes bicycle lanes, since for short distances within a dense urban space local transit can be better than the car. The acceleration and deceleration at the beginning and end are the slowest part, so a 1 mile trip in a car is actually most of the time length of 100 mile trip. Public bikeshare programs are thus very common still, as are trams for main thoroughfares, while everything else is pedestrianized.

Only if someone fan-writes it

Hmmmmmm good question!!

Dueling is a big Blacklaw thing since it’s the main way of reveling in, and publically showing, one’s willingness to kill and be killed. It’s not always rapiers, but it often is, a general dueling culture thing.

Yeah, that’s a typo. They happen.

So, there are a number of jobs that everyone agrees aren’t at all enjoyable but need to be done, like being a plumber, or rubbish inspector, or fixing stuff that goes wrong in automated factories, double-checking that janitorial robots have done their job right, etc. Some jobs people feel they have a vocation for or at least find gratifying (policeman, caregiver) but generally the ones that are considered the least desirable are the ones that need to be done but just aren’t fun. Those generally pay well, though, to make up for it, and people put in their 20 hours and everyone else feels grateful to them for taking on the stuff that’s just no fun.

No, that’s a treat for the reader to have fun imagining!

As for Dominic, he’s based on the general milieu of 18th century stories about what we would now call trans people, i.e. the Chevalier d’Eon and later imaginations about the Chevalier, plus Diderot’s speculations about ethics in Rameau’s Nephew.

Yes, the French translator was incredibly wonderful and in really close touch with me throughout, she’s amazing and really really worked hard to make the text faithful, both to my project, and to my effort to make the prose resemble Diderot’s. She’s made lots of little fine-tuned additions like that which make it work in French and it was a joy discussing them with her and also getting to see them at last as I’m reading the French mself. She’s a finalist for the best translator award in France right now and SHE SUPER MEGA DESERVES IT!!

Yes slightly but the fight over who gets to be the new Rome is a very old one. My favorite version of it is Renaissance Florence claiming to be the new Rome and Rome being like “I’m RIGHT HERE!” fascinating fight. So it’s a very old fight and there are always rival claims, which is another thing I talk about a bit in my current little nonfiction book about the Renaissance

Romanova does run some schools and there are also private schools with no Hive affiliations, but yes Hiveless kids can also go to Hive-run schools and are usually very heartily encouraged in hopes they’ll then join the Hive.

You’ll enjoy book 4… :upside_down:

Probably? Again cool discussions coming in book 4.

It’s pretty common, many kids end up suddenly taking it very young when having a fight with their ba’pas or ba’sibs, a kind of kid protest variant on deciding you’re going to run away from home. So it’s not uncommon for many kids to do it rashly once very early, like age 11, and no one thinks of it as anything but growing pains and actually a cool way for an angry kid to reflect on things like ethics and dial down from being angry to being contemplative. When you’re taking it more seriously intending to pass then failing it is still not a big deal, and for most of them you don’t get a numerical score (except with the Mitsubishi one) instead you get written feedback and a chance to discuss the results with both the interviewer who administered it and a neutral party. And, of course, you can take it again within 24 hours if you feel it was somehow unfair, or that a different version of the exam would be better. The main time it’s actually a bit tricky is if it’s a kid who’s trying to take it very early, not in a one-time quarrel with bash’parents, but in a serious effort to separate from an unhealthy bash’environment, i.e. when the minor really does have a problematic home situation and needs to be liberated from it. For that reason, whenever a kid is taking it quite early, 14 or earlier, the examiners always also have a social work councilor type person talk to the kid at length about the reasons to see if there’s a possible abuse/unhealthy situation happening, and if the kid doesn’t pass then they talk to the kid about other options, like a foster bash’ etc. So it’s carefully watched as a social tool for helping kids in good bash’situations self-examine, and for helping kids in bad bash’situations get out. They work hard to make sure there’s no stigma on failing, & popular celebrities make a point of talking about times they failed to normalize it.

It’s a totally new futuretech but lingering vocabulary. We still say “car” short for carraige even though we don’t use carriages anymore.

Those would be small strats, equivalent in importance to strats like shiba inu dog breeders, or cyclists, or fans of a particular band, etc. They don’t have political significance, don’t vote in Europe for example, but exist like clubs or loose associations with social webs that form diasporic communities. That said, war veteran-ness for wars of the age of barbaric geographic nations is a bit stigmatized in 2454, so those societies would not be so common as descendants of other things less war-related like descendants of former farmers or something, and the war-related ones that did exist would have nuanced explanations of what they’re about, to engage with the stigma.

Tech is indeed at the point where any pair of people can be parents, or indeed more than a pair (we’re already at the tech level where we can do 3 parents if the mitochondrea come from a 3rd).

Easily doable, and the surgery for a full transition is far better than now, but I imagine it as fairly rare because, while it’s an open question whether sex and gender have successfully/completely separated, it’s true that the degree to which one is treated differently and the amount that gender intrudes in your life is lessened, people don’t use gendered pronouns on you daily, there’s less pressure about things like clothes, so it’s much easier to just feel feminine while having a male-sex body or vice-versa than it is today where society reminds you about the category it’s put you in so constantly. The less society actively shoves gender in your face the less pressure there is to feel that you can’t be the gender you feel you are with the body you have. So I think active transition would happen less often, because people aren’t experiencing as much constant pain/stress from it. That lessened examination isn’t necessarily all good, though. A complex question, with, again, a bit more coming on it in book 4. :slight_smile:

Very very common.

You can deduce from travel times that it must be either in Europe, the Middle East, or north Africa, but I’m intentional about not saying. But it’s in the Latvia/Estonia area.

Chapter 4 of book 4 has a bunch of action surrounding Sydney

The fact that work weeks are only 20 hours make this easier and more flexible. You’ll notice the times in the book are usually given in UT, i.e. Universal Time, so everyone is used to naming times by that standard rather than by personal time zone. In general any given bash’ will pick the sleep schedule it prefers, often based on sunset and sunrise times where the bash’house is but also to accomodate everyone’s jobs best. People will then sleep by those times and do recreational activities at different points. Meanwhile theaters tend to offer shows at a wider variety of times to get more people from other time zones, and similarly rather than doing breakfast at breakfast time and dinner at dinner time most restaurants specialize in one meal but do it all day, so you can have breakfast at a breakfast place anytime within a 12 hour window, depending on when breakfast time is for you.

That’s certainly one of the questions that I want you as reader to be judging over the course of the books. Particularly in book 4 when we see the world under pressure we’ll get another chance to think about whether they have succeeded or not, and if so how much. A good book 4 question!

Yes but it’s a bit past edgy into making people really uncomfortable. I’d compare the way people in Terra Ignota would react to a cross more to how we today react to swastika than how we react to a satanist symbol, in their minds it’s associated with a giant NEVER AGAIN! traumatic historical incident, so the degree of the taboo is very severe.

Montaigne is indeed one of the major cases that Brill looked at, and early bash-studiers too. They discuss it as an example of how intentional rearing can have powerful effects, but yes, they say it’ smuch better to do a group of kids together, which is also an argument for bash’es in general.

Hmmmmmmm

we get a bunch more on the future of Judaism and Jewish culture in book 4

Huh… I don’t specifically remember that though I do have a vague memory of being contacted by model UN but I might be remembering being asked about my 1492 Papal Election LARP. Sounds awesome though!!

Mainly set-sets do things that human sensory interfaces have still proved best at, which was a discovery of trial and error as the technologies developed. With some of them it’s things it’s intuitive that a human brain would be good at like an Amadeus set-set making music that appeals to humans, or a Rosetta set-set analyzing language, but in things like the Cartesian they wanted to maximize the data a human could look at and it has different strengths from AI. There’s certainly some of what we now call AI within the Saneer-Weeksbooth computers working along with the set-sets, but the set-sets can keep up with what it’s producing and displaying and give real-time feedback to the predicted movements of 400 million cars; no human relying only on regular senses could keep up with the computer that well.

Hmmm. The only ones that would really make sense would be Voltaire or Diderot. But I’m doing something very particular with Hobbes, very happy with what it’s doing in the series (she says vaguely).

It’s not totally unheard-of, but most people grow up in bash’es and expect bash’es and feel lonely transitioning to living w/o. That said it’s not uncommon to have a small studio apartment in a city where you work so you can sometimes work late and sleep there and then go to the bash’ other days. Vivien & Bryar, for example, have a small flat in Romanova in addition to the big bash’house in Mumbai. This is more common with vokers but sometimes even non-vokers do it and have private space that way while also enjoying bash’life.

That’s a big pile of questions! Most media is digital but there are also physical copies especially of books, for people who like having a physical thing. Digital media is sometimes bought and owned, sometimes short-term rented, but there’s been a push back against the you-can’t-own-it-you-just-lease-it Kindle model, since when the Church War made so many things go sour that model proved its toxicity in terms of what corporations (and states exploiting them) could do to censor and destroy media. Media has to go through pre-publication censorship, modeled on the system England used after the mid-17th century, but censorship and ownership are decoupled. Did I cover everything?

Much like it is now, continuing to explore other ways the world could be, broadeing the space of speculation and preparing people better for the reality that the human experience constantly changes generation by generation.

I’ve been mulling on this one but it’s really hard. A lot of them were corporate at first, which aren’t that fun, the ones with strong interesting ethics were the ones that tended to survive. OBP aka One Big Party is the one I’ve given the most development, which was about helping people zip around the world to go to raves and concerts and had an interesting relationship with celebrity and participation in live events (what it means to be in the audience at a concert vs. streaming a concert) parallel to but separate from the Olympians, so their discussions with each other as they merged would have been really interesting.

They exist definitely, though in different ways. In 2454 much like now medical advancements do mean many things that used to be incurable are curable, but it also means there are many more conditions that are survivable resulting in adults with different new kinds of unusual conditions or disabilities that didn’t exist earlier. MASON’s psychosomatic limp from his cloned foot is an example of the kind of new disability which has come about as a result of tech advances, as are Tully Mardi’s challenges resulting from extended time on the Moon. So like today the disability community is an evolving one as new technologies and conditions change and expand what’s possible. I don’t think the deaf community would exist as much as an internal separate community because there would be both a wider variety of substitute technologies and a wider variety of new kinds of sensory disabilities, so I like to imagine a broader more inclusive community composed of people with a huge range of atypical sensory stuff using a broad range of different technologies and communications methods. The disability community and tension around set-sets would absolutely be linked in discourse, as discourse about autism and neurodiversity is linked to other kinds of disability discourse today, and we’ll see a bit of that in book 4 in fact.

Yes, in fact, and separately it’s ALSO taboo. With this and other swears I had to work hard on modern equivalents, especially in Spanish where I had to ask for help from friends. There’s a point in book 4 where I really wanted the equivalent of when someone would say “Oh, my God!” and it’s hard to find substitutes for that, even harder in a language you don’t know well!

Yes, and various variations on wishing people good health, or good luck

I think there would have been a mix, and at first the Great Renunciation would’ve been a source of major fear for anyone who was against the war but also wasn’t in one of the groups in the original set who renounced (i.e. Cousins, Gordian, E.U., Olympians). There would definitely have been uncertainty, tension, accusations of being traitors and cowards, violence as well, but indeed they were largely affluent and had strong infrastructure and it blindsided everyone else so they were able to respond quickly and succeed. But I do imagine it very scary. The one supplementary bit of Terra Ignota writing I’ve been mulling seriously over is a kind of a mini-LARP walking tour kit which would be set during the Great Renunciation and offer a glimpse of the anxieties of the time – I’m hoping to write it for when book 4 comes out, but we’ll see.

We don’t see them yes. We don’t see Danae’s little dog but she has one, and there are several pets at the Kosala-Ancelet bash’, and Papadelias’s bash owns a farm with farm cats but also goats and things, and of course Sniper and Ganymede have horses. Julia also has cats, trying to remember who else… those are the ones I’m thinking of at the moment.

Universal, so universal Mycroft doesn’t think it’s worth mentioning, but we see him reference Saladin having had the normal gene editing as a kid but then not taking his anti-aging meds and so still aging somewhat faster than societal standard.

Since the work week has shrunk and there are always multiple adult caretakers, it’s worked for school days to shrink as well. Thus kids get a lot of their education at home while also going to school for social interactive parts of it too. If a current school week generally has a kid at school for maybe 30-40 hours, theirs are closer to 20 hours at school with more learning done at home. The schools are run by many organizations - the Cousins provide a lot of the earlier levels of school but all Hives offer the equivalent of middle school but there are also lots of private schools and regional schools to choose from. It’s generally recognized that the socialization aspect of school needs to be recognized as separate from the informational learning aspect of school, so more of the latter is at home, and school is free to organize activities designed more to facilitate good socialization and social interaction learning.

No, they’re largely severely taboo. The cultural hangup is very extreme, and intended to set off our warning bells.

There’s tons of gendered pornography, it’s considered an exciting fetish costume, like a nurse outfit or a maid outfit. People think of it as unimportant but it’s a big part of what keeps gendered coding live in people’s minds, and what Madame builds on when seducing people .Remember that gender is taboo but NOT illegal, unlike religion which is taboo AND illegal.

Like with any brothel, the customer when arriving expresses their preferences including anatomical sex of partner but also other things. A brothel is a vast taboo anyway so requesting a gender and requesting a police outfit aren’t that different.

Let me pull up my timeline! Let’s see, the flying care systems become commercially affordable in 2074, so the commercial airline industry as a staple of how people travel would die out in the 2090s, though novelty flights (ooh, a plane!) continue even to 2454, just as we still have horse-drawn buggies for fun

Some social services are provided by towns, cities or regions (fire protection, emergency hospitals, local police, local libraries), but a lot of others are provided by the Hives, yes, covering healthcare costs, education, unemployment, childcare, specialized libraries, health coaching, wide variety. Romanova provides such services for Hiveless (including for Blacklaws) but theirs don’t have as many bells & whistles as the fancier Hive offerings which tend to cover a lot more. So social services, especially having them work the way you want, is one of the reasons to join Hives, but another reason so few remain Hiveless is the tendency of people towant to feel like they’re part of something large and strong. The Hives are so powerful that there is a sense of semi-disenfranchisedness of graylaws. Even having Tribunes makes you the equivalent of the Plebs in ancient Rome, subtleties that drive people to choose to be part of the big powers. Not all people, but many people.

There are still local libraries, which tend to be funded by the local community as one of the perks to entice people to stay there and increase property values, like having a neighborhood swimming pool. There are also many research libraries, and archives. There are also Hive-run libraries including vast digital libraries wher ethe Hive pays for the content and you access it as part of the perks of being in the Hive (or you pay the Hive per use in the case of Mitsubishi). And there are historic libraries, and university or school libraries. Most books are released digital-only or with luxurious beautiful hardcovers, often produced on demand or in a limited art press type run, so libraries have big digital components, but also do have physical copies for those who enjoy them. But everyone grows up accustomed to reading on lenses and tablets, so paper book reading is something only some people enjoy.

Not a lot as a profession, a lot of it is done via the Hives since the Hive governments of several Hives, notably the Humanists, Utopians, Mitsubishi, and Masons, are more entangled with private funances than most 21st century gov’ts, but there is still debt collection as an issue for various Hiveless, EU, Gordian etc.

Hmm… This deserves a good answer but I’m getting tired and dont’ have one. If I think of things another day I’ll pop in and share.

It was a flashy entrepenurial big corporation comparable to Google, though with a even more of a social services we-care-about-being-good-guys presentation. Its corporate identity merged with Hives Were Our Idea We’re First to be their dominant brand, so they were sort of the default Hive for a while, until Brillism gave them specificity

No they play super aweome future way cooler than those are versions of them with near-holodeck-level griffincloth environments and real unicorns!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s the latter. It uses in-group vocabulary references the way social groups do, to reinforce social cohesion, and separateness from other communities. There aren’t any grammatical differences and Utopian language still uses all standard English, it just adds a lot of specialized word uses. It’s an extension of how a bash’ too will develop particular linguistic habits – you’ve experienced this if you’ve ever had a close-knit friend group with many social media shared experience and noticed, for example, that you’ve started using particular Japanese words picked up from anime within your standard English, or references to jokes or media as shorthand for things. It’s a more developed version of that.

A few of them, but many more of them just use complex colors while keeping the animal anatomy very faithfully duplicated. It looks more like a real green cat than like a creepily-off cat, and they don’t do the thing where they make the eyes eerily extra big to make things cuter. They strive to make everything look “natural” or at least like you’d intuitively imagine that thing would be if it were real.

Well, also dragons, and unicorns, and all the exciting creatures we’ve invented and enjoyed for ages.

The majority do, Utopian culture has a strong impetus of passing the project on. A larger bash’ will often have a rebel kid who goes and becomes a Humanist or something, but the majorty will remain within Utopia, the least mixing of any Hive.

Yes, I think that works well. I’m really looking forward to how people who’ve thought hard about the Utopian oath react to further discussions of it in book 4. But yes in general the Utopians are basically full-on communists, sharing resources among each other with an equally alotted leasure budget, and affluent enough to make it all work smoothly.

Yes, it’s tricky. The color used most often for them when Romanova needs one color per Hive is either black or white, but those make tricky things with the blacklaws. As for multiplex occlusion it’s intentionally obscure so you can think about the many different ways it could operate. Clearly one must be approaching an answer from many directions and then cut them off bit by bit to arrive at a final one, but how?!

Yes, and Antarctica’s centrality is part of them dealing with that legacy, the biggest example we have of exploration which didn’t involving disturbing an indigenous group, and can be used as a model more for space. But there is indeed a big entanglement of the legacies of imperialism with the Utopian project and with the Masons and the Masonic-Utopian alliance, more meat for book 4!

It’s on my list of things I wish there’d been more room for, but book 4 is already 2x the length of the others. But it’s a great space for imagination.

Set-sets are very comfortable with the term. When people are being nasty about set-sets what they usually do is pair the term with some secondary piece of dehumanizing language, like referring to different types of set-sets as different “species” or talking about “set-set behavior patterns” or “the set-set reproductive process”.

I tried lots of different lengths and that one looked right. It didn’t resemble any number string we use now (telephone, credit card), and it felt long enough to be very complex and code a lot of info but not so long as to be way too much. It really was mostly a visual decision, which is what affects the real readers most.

Their interfaces can be hacked, which has the same effect as hacking a hearing aid, or a pacemaker, but the brain doesn’t have any direct connections to electronics, it still all goes through the body’s senses. Team Brillist’s mind-machine interface work is still underway

They do different things, and set-sets are more focused on developing extant human cognitive capacity in new directions. Remember Utopia has yet to make an AI that could pass the Adulthood Competency Exam — they have complex creatures but not that accurately duplicate all the desirable characteristics of a human brain. Basically why have only one tech when you can have both!

There are patterns that you can somewhat work out, but the complete opacity is intentional, to give the reader a sense of exclusion (another of these invisible majorities Mycroft talks about: the majority are NOT Brillists)

No, in fact, I didn’t give very deep development to the different kinds of set-sets that I knew we wouldn’t see. Since cognative neuroscience and electronics are both advancing so fast, anything super specific that I develop is guaranteed to become outdated and read as weird in a few years, so leaving it to the reader’s imagination guarantees that the reader will always imagine things that make sense at the current level of scientific understanding. So it’s a really fun arena to speculate intentionally left to be the reader’s domain.

Yes certainly set-sets choose their Hives freely, it’s really mainly the O.S. system that rather coercively forces people into Hives. But, for example, it’s entirely possible for a set-set that was trained by a Mitsubishi bash’ wanting to use it for Mitsubishi business purposes to agree to do that work but decide to be a Humanist.

That ritual is unique to O.S. and was developed in the early generations of the O.S. system as a sort of psychological test to make sure the kids were ready to take a life.

We get a bit on this in Book 4 but generally Sniper is still thinking about its pronoun preferences and really loves the it pronoun but finds it a bit too powerful for everyday interaction, the burst of positive feeling being so overwhelming, so Sniper likes Mycroft using it in the history but is still in the process of deciding whether to ask people to use it more broadly or not

Hee :slight_smile:

Great question! For book 4 related reasons I’m not going to answer it.

Mm, both are entangled, but don’t forget about Holmes and Moriarty being entangled too! :wink:

Yes they were, and different Hives have different attitudes about what’s appropriate, though kids are under graylaw which has a fairly age-of-consent gradient where 15-20 are the ages at which you interview people carefully to see if there really is mature consent, but they’d never do the stupid thing where one of two 16 year olds turns 17 and suddenly it’s illegal. Mycroft’s relationship with Saladin when it becomes widely discussed certainly lends fuel to those who think that early sex esp. among ba’sibs can be unhealthy, but it’s an active debate.

No good answer to this one I’m afraid. But there is one song a friend played me once that reminded me of them, Alkaline Trio - This Could Be love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRB1wS2bFVs

Well, you can hear me sing on my albums or online in links like this https://sassafrass.bandcamp.com/track/hearthfire-five-parts-with-guitar but there are also some podcasts and interviews around like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59xWZmHx9oI

Botticelli’s “Madonnas with Angels” always get me most among Renaissance paintings, but I find sculpture even more powerful. My favorites are Verrocchio’s Doubting of St. Thomas, Cellini’s stone Ganymede, and Cellini’s Perseus, I’ll share photos. I like them because they’re incredibly powerful but also incredibly narrative.

Oh and also the three classical Berninis in the Borghese!

There’s one hallway in the Vatican with more than 20 statues of Ganymede, I have an entire folder of photos of them!

Narrowing to one is hard, but I love Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun (starting with Shadow of the Torturer) which was my model for (A) depth of world building and (B) complexity of narrator, and Bester’s The Stars My Destination which was my model for the manic pacing I sometimes use, grandeur and party scenes, and the epic sense of thinking about humanity’s future. I love and reread those a lot.

I enjoy hanging out with Steve and discussing nifty writerly tricks, we have a lot in common in terms of planning, and it’s fun singing with him when he plays guitar, and some of his stuff is on my list to read especially *Agyar *which I’m confident I will enjoy when I read it, but I haven’t had a chance yet. I really want to do another panel with him at a con about nifty writing tricks but cons keep not putting us together, alas.

One favorite anime is hard. I love Kaworu but much of Evangelion is very painful. I really, really, really enjoy Gundam Seed, and it was amazing having it to watch as I was actually writing book 1 because so many of the themes were so parallel. I sometimes refer to my plushie of Rey Zaburrel from Seed Destiny as my Apollo plushie (Raw le Kreuze is my favorite, especially his gundam!! I love Revolutionary Girl Utena, of course, and Paranoia Agent. Recently I really loved Concrete Revolutio, and From the New World. But I also love goofier ones like Yakkitate Japan. Early ones were formative too (compare Kenshin to Mycroft for example), and the Metropolis movie led me to my vast love of Osamu Tezuka, though mainly the manga. I know they’re animating Pluto and I’m in great suspense - if it’s good it’ll be amazing but I feel great fear. Same with the Uzumaki anime, I LOVE Uzumaki but Junji Ito adaptations are ALWAYS TERRIBLE!

This is about Evangelion, not book 4. I have more than 60 Kaworu Nagisa figures! They have their own special cabinet and I enjoy counting them! I also have some duplicates in my office and other parts of the house from when I see one and get excited and buy it and forget that I bought it already! I really enjoy intertextuality so for me the best thing is cross-comparing all the versions, even the ones from the silly manga!

Hmmm…. Dangerous Liaisons (or the great film of it), Rousseau’s first discourse and/or Emile, Voltaire’s philosophical dictionary and letters on England, and within diderot beyond Jacques the Fatalist, Rameau’s Nephew and d’Alambert’s Dream. Also Tristram Shandy.

I own but haven’t yet seen Baccano – I have started it 3x but all three times I was tired and realized I wasn’t tracking on it and it was too good to watch while tired and not tracking it, so I’ve been saving it for when I knew I could do it justice.

I write in MS Word on my laptop. I can’t handle writing by hand, my hand cramps up and also it’s slow and also I can’t sleep at night if there isn’t a backup!!!!! MS Word is not a good program but it is a program that constantly updates and will never have the risk of being incompatible with whatever’s current, so that’s my main priority. And the new version finally has proper breathing marks for ancient Greek so that’s a big improvement!

I haven’t seen that resetting, I should look at it. But right now I’m working on recording better versions of my older music, and on recording an album of Renaissance music. Not actively composing at the moment though as I get deeper into working on the new Viking novel series I may end up returning to a couple unfinished Viking pieces.

Hmmm… hard to pick just one. Thomas & Jerome are great, and St. Monica is awesome, but also St. Olga, and I have a historian’s fondness for Bernardino of Siena, and Lorenzo is great because spotting him in art is fun, and Julian is so cool because a patron saint of repentant murderers is such a cool idea and so needed! So no favorites, they’re best because they’re plural and you collect them all, like Pokemon!

No. I collect Gundam universe flags, though.

Rather not discuss. :RomanovaFlag:

No, but friends have described enough of the best bits of it to me for me to be confident that my favorite character is Doc Scratch.

Honestly, I can’t remember. :sweat_smile:

Hmm… I mean, the shark is integral to the plot :wink: But now that you bring it up I’m envisioning a nudibranch & it’s pretty fun. And watching any creature with hand-like grasping ability eat a banana is pretty fun because of what it does to the brain’s human/inhuman categorization.

I’m actually working (very suddenly!) on a casual (non-academic, footnote-free) nonfiction book right now provisionally titled Why We Keep Telling the Myth of the Renaissance, responding to people who’ve been asking whether the Black Death caused the Renaissance golden age and if so whether we can expect a similar result from COVID. It’s a question that deserves a long answer because the fundamentals of the question are so wrong, namely that the Renaissance was a TERRIBLE time to live and had a WAY LOWER life expectancy than the Middle Ages, which isn’t what people imagine. I don’t want to try to summarize the whole thing but I’ll do a short version on my blog soonish, but in total I think we can expect something radically different because we have no fear that COVID will stay around killing people for 400 years the way Y. pestis did, we know we’ll have a vaccine, it’s just a question of how many months or years it takes. I do hope that COVID will result in more employers allowing partial or complete work-from-home since the option of working from home a few days a week works so well for so many jobs, and this will hopefully make people take that more seriously and help begin to erode the it-must-be-in-the-office-9-to-5 attitude, and I also hope it’ll push the US and other countries to improve our medical infrastructure. A change toward work from home being more aceptable is also a shift toward starting to flex and change the totally unnecessary 40 hour work week.

Because of progress. Increased trade and circulation of people meant more diseases which traveled more quickly and had new outbreaks more often, while centralization of governments meant bigger states raising larger armies enabling bigger wars, and improved technology made wars deadlier as it got easier to shatter city walls and do mass-destruction. The answer to this in the book is about 7,000 words long but that’s the precis.

I did sleep, exercise, and take brief dinner breaks to watch delightfully vapid murder-mysteries a half-a-mystery per day. Not too much oathbreaking, but it means I’m on lots of mandatory rest and fun this week.

Poirot, the David Suchet, also the Branaugh Orient Express so watced it and the David Suchet one on consecutive days, fun to compare. It was interesting to see how often the Branaugh one made the wong choices. It had an all-star cast and alll they had to do was le the awesome actors chat with each other to make somthing I’d watch over and over like Gosford Park, bu instead they wasted time on lots of grand vistas and a superfluous action sequence and didn’t take enough time to just let the actors be amazing. Definitely wased opportunity, alas.

It became one of the founding impulses behind One Big Party (the transit membership club for people who cossed national borders to attend concerts & performances), which then merged with the Olympians to become the Humanists.

I take it very seriously personally. It really helps me keep up with self-care, reminding myself I need to take my rest and play, and it also helps when I’m upset about setbacks and need to remember it’s little by litle.

Les Miz is considered candidly religious so it gets an R3 rating but it’s considered non-prosylatory because it speaks from a religious point of view, but it doesn’t attempt to actively persuade the reader to accept said POV. Hence Terra Ignota’s culture involves people being exposed to a lot of older religious materials, just always with warning labels and with the expectation that one will not discuss the religious content without a supervising sensayer.

Ooh, neat! A magazine is a neat idea! And doing them at different points in time is also a heat idea. I have a couple backburner notions for tiny things set earlier in the TI continuity, not novels just little things.
[a few months pass]

I haven’t looked at it, and will need to ask some questions about it before I do. there are complex risks with an author looking at fanworks, unfortunately, because if anything in it coincidentally resembles anything the author is working on publishing it can create weird copyright problems. In he past there have been incidents where forthcoming works/projects had to be cancelled ebcause of coincidental resemblance to fanworks that the author was proved to have read (even if the fan doesn’t object!) and conversely on the other side it has happened that courts have taken copyright of works away from authos who were publically known to support fanworks because Hollywood studios could say "Our movie of X is fanfiction, the author said fanfiction is okay" and the courts side with Hollywodd, and the author loses out on a life-changing amount of money (the key here is that books don’t pay much but movies pay a lot and often authors can afford to go full-time writing or hire assistants with the money from a movie, enabling more books to be written, so when that gets squashed by copyright nonsense it takes away that opportunity for ore future books to be written faster which is very sad). So for those obnoxious legal reasons it’s hazardous for authors to read fanfic, unfortunately, so I lean toward being very careful, since I don’t want to jeopardize more books getting a chance to be written and published. Hope that makes sense?

[off-the-record, redacted]

I posted that just now because I had actually typed it months ago but wa sad having to say it so never hit enter to actually post it but Discord saved it so here it is.

For those interested in the process of the draft becoming a book, now that I have finished the page proofs of book 4 (the very las time I will get to change the text at all!) I’m working now with the audiobook team, getting them notes about characterization and pronunciation, and helping to adapt for audio a couple bits o the text that don’t read aloud well (think of the 7-10 list charts in book 1). And meanwhile I’m also working with the French publishers on their version which needs to cut book 4 in half into two parts, trying to pick the best cover art and title for the 5th book. We also just on the German translation so I’m answering a few questions for the German translator - sometimes translators don’t contact me at all but sometimes they have lots of questions, and someitmes just a few. I’m also workking on assembling a list of typos and minor errors that people have spotted in the English versions so that the translated editions can fix them. Just a neat snapshot of the differnt things the author works on even once the book is done.

Yes! Probably I can share it somewhere afer the French version coems out.

I believe it isn’t legal, actually, since Recorded Books has a contract with the original actor who did it who is getting royalty payments (I assume) from doing so, and even if a large petition of people asked them to make a rival recording, it would require rengotiating that contract with the first actor to buy out his contract, which would be more expensive than the amount of money they would likely make from the new recording.

They were not yet married. They married soon after.

There pretty-much aren’t any: no age minimum, affiliations, or other requirements. You just need to atract enough Hiveless supporters to win the selection. It’s largely democratic.

Fagles. Especially the Iliad audiobook read by Derek Jacobi.

Yup. [Madame would have done the assigning anyway.]

No, because they’re named for the mathematicians, but the fact that they eat beans really confuses JEDDM.

He picked the name himself. Casimir to seem Polish but also out of vanity, and Perry after Commodore Perry because he wanted to steam in and terrify and dominate the Mitsubishi & Ando the way hisory books describe Perry doing with Japan

It causes really wild sensory experiences and set-sets have really unusual food preferences as a result. And are picky about texture and temperature in food, saying foods become “ugly” or “muddy” or “spotted” if served at the wrong temperatures to work with the other experiences. They tend to alternate between meals of very plain room-temperature nutrient drinks desined to minimize sensory distraction, and very meticulously planned meals with extremely specific ingredients and temperatures.

I like Derek Jacobi’s even though it’s the Mandelbaum translatino and Mandelbaum is terrible. There’s an Ian McKellan audiobook of the Fagles Odyssey which is very good.

It’s not inaccurate or anything, i’s just dry compared with most. He’s a translator who puts his since of rhythm and smoothness above giving things energy or wit. I’ve read Mandelbaum’s translations of Ovid, Homer, Dante, and Virgil, and they’re all competent but sort-of- dull. He seems to have the magical ability to make anything somewhat dull. So it’s fine to read it and enjoy it, that’s no problem, I just never recommend Mandelbaum because there’s inevitably another translator who makes things more vivid and lively, like Ciardi for Dante, and Fagles for Homer.
Mandelbaum is also particularly bad at jokes and puns.

Yes, there is, which is why Eureka thought he made a mistake in what kind they were and just corrected it, instead of asking what he meant.

No, I don’t. I used to have a geocities site about Yevgeny Zamyatin, the dystopian writer, though.

There are a couple dozen. You can spot several on the world map in the Terra Ignota calendar.

No, it’s a traditional suit, just made from New Zealand wool, one of the notes showing that New Zealand is in the EU in Terra Ignota.

I gave a more-recent talk on the topic here if people would like to have/share it around.
The answer for the censorship bok is that I’m currently applying for a grant to get a sabbatical to get off teaching next year to devote that year to finishing it. If I get the grant then the book should be done being written hopefully by autumn 2025, and come out in 2026. I’m also curently polishing the opening chapter for the rant app and will try to share it here with you guys once i’s done. The slowdown on that bok was mostly COVID, but also that I started writing my Inventing the Renaissance book as a COVID project when I wasn’t up for the more serious work needed for the censorship book, so I’ve focused on finishing that instead.

Neil Price, The Viking Way, Carolyne Larrington, The Norse Myths: a Guide to the Gods and Heroes, Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword</>

No, I didn’t know that song but it’s amazing!

Very good question - I once had a long argument with Jo Walton about this actually. I see why many peopel think of authors as the gods of their books, and I think in some cases it’s accurate, and maps with how figures like Diderot and Voltaire think of the rules of the unvierse (Maker/Providence/Determinism) as the author. However, when I’m setting something in Real World Earth, even in future Real World Earth, I feel that it’s very different, because I’m not the designer of this cosmos from the ground up, and it’s full of decisions that I personally wouldn’t make if I were making a world (I wouldn’t make death, I wouldn’t make WWII have happened, I wouldn’t make earthquakes, I wouldn’t any child shiver in the dark alone). Much like Voltaire in Candideand Diderot in Jacques the Fatalist, in writing Terra Ignota I’m undertaking an act of theopsychology, trying to write a psychological portrait of what a God who would make death and WWII and earthquakes and shivering darkness, but to depict a Being consistent with those choices but nonetheless which as reasons for them and might be worthy of respect. It’s a portrait taken from an incomplete image, sort-of like taking a blurry photograph or a damaged drawing and using it as the model to portray a complete face. In writing Terra Ignota there are moments where I make the Maker Act, but I constrain myself to making the Maker Act in ways consistent with my observations of the real world and its real history – otherwise it wouldn’t be an accuate portrait of the maker of Earth. And thus that Maker Acts in ways that, if I were in charge of the reality, I wouldn’t because my personality is different. The question in any given chapter is never, "What do I want to do to CHARACTER" but "What would J’s Peer do to CHARACTER in this circumstance?" and that Peer is restricted to actions that would in-character just as much as the characters are. So, while I would say I’m definitely the portraitist, in the same way that Voltaire in Candide desperately wished the maker of the world were not one who would make wars and Earthquakes but was trying to make an honest portrait so those had to be in there, the God Voltaire is portraying is very much not Voltaire, and the Providence I depict in Terra Ignota is a thought experiment portrait of a personality that could be consistent with the cosmos as we know it, but very much isn’t what I would do with the same power.

Candidly, because Kant people in academia are super obsessive and intimidating and I don’t want to poke that bee’s nest they’re scary! 🐝 :scared:

Let me know if this link works. It has Hive distribution in book 4 and the white stuff in the Mediterranean is the route of the Shearwater marked off daily

Antoniopolis is named for Antonius MASON, the first public emperor, publicly revealed during the Great Renunciation aftermath in 2137.
Caedeculmin is from Caedere to fall or be assassinated or killed, and culmin a column or pillar, i.e. Fallen Pillar, and is named for the assassination of Mycroft MASON. It’s one of the new cities founded in the 2300s when Mukta means that you can start new cities from scratch in hard-to-reach and inconvenient areas. "culmin" as in culmination can also mean leader/head, as well as column, so "Assassination of the leader/head" is another valid translation.

Public performance of magic is much debated and heavily tabooed, but rarely prosecuted, in the same way that technically 2 parents having a quiet conversation with a kid answering theological quesitons is technically illegal but rarely prosecuted. Many things are technically illegal but rarely prosecuted, after all.

Musically “If I Could Ask You” is most complex, my proudist technical achievement, but I think the song which is actually most powerful is “My Brother My Enemy” and the one I enjoy most listening to is “Hearthfire”.

In case it’s of interest:

Exactly

I read Italian well and speak Italian effectively but badly. I read French decently but my speaking French has been devoured by my Italian, but hilariously I have a very good accent so French people who hear me speak a couple words always assume I’m fluent becuase of my accent and start talking a mile a minute and then I can’t understand them at all 😭 . My Latin reading strength is good, spoken Latin basically nonexistant. I can read ancient Greek, and German, and Gothic slowly with a dictionary. I can understand spoken Japanese well enough to know what problems lost Japanese tourists in Florence are talking to each other about and I can often answer their questions, but becuase my Japanese is from anime my answers have the grammar of a rude 14-year-old male ninja so it’s always awkward, but hopefully it gives tourists a good story to take home. I’m doing Duolingo Japanese now.

No. The major date with the Ides is just that it’s the day Mycroft’s Mardi murders started 13 yrs back. No other major event on the Ides. Cornel MASON dies on the 18th of March and 9A is writing that chapter from March 19 through about April 5th when 9A stops for the preparations of the invasion of Alexandria

So, doctors Doth Gulshan, Orion Saneer, and Tungsten Weeksbooth are the ones who developed the computer system that transitioned Mukta cars from running on a variety of separate systems to one global system. Orion and Tungsten were descended from the original inventors, and indeed they reused the names. The new system (including the Utopians having a separate system) was put in place in its present form in 2170, but Mukta, of course, first test flew in 2066, with a more important cost-effective testr un in 2071, and the system became commercially affordable in 2074, triggering the formation of the first proto-Hives.

One big thing is maintenance and monitoring the system itself, checking constantly for any warnings of hardware malfunction. Another big one is security.

Surname wasn’t kept, but is hte beginning of there being a substantial component of people from India in the bash’, ancestor of Thisbe and Ockham.

Some are indeed regnal.

There is a long waiting list and lottery to get to go to Florence becuase so many people want to go to such a major tourist site that they limit how many people can go at once. Places like Florence, Venice, China’s Forbidden City, the Louvre etc. have long waiting lists so you reserve in advance to get a slot to go.

No, it’s a nonsense name that just sounded good in my mind. I wanted to spell it Weelksbooth after composer Thomas Weelks but no one knew how to pronounce it (it’s weeks) so I made it phoenetic.

It depends on individual nation-strats whether they allow dual citizenship, just like with countries today.

No, the Masons disapprove of letting strats be part of politics - the Empire must be one.

A number of major holy sites become reservations, like the one we hear about in Myanmar at the very end.

The idea of a skin dye came from the dye packs police sometimes put in random payments or bank vaults to stain and mark criminals. Using DMSO specifically came from asking my chemist bash’mate Michael “Hey, what chemical would do this?” STEM friends are great. Similarly astrogeologist Jonathan, with software specialty, helped tons with both the space tech and suggesting the structure of the AI coding (organic ratios) in “Diary of a U-Beast”

Yes they do. Mycroft is in his own body until the last chapter of book 3, and then in Saladin’s until Peacemaker. But Mycroft intermittently takes over 9A to work on the chronicle starting jn the last chapter of book 3 when there’s the paragraph that says "Reader, I am not actually dead." That’s Mycroft in 9A’s body while Saladin is searching for Mycroft at sea.

It’s intended to be hard to tell. 9A also appears I think five times in books 1 and 2 but isn’t named because of Kosala’s censorship. For example, in the scene in “The Enemy” with Tully Mardi appearing for the first time, 9A is one of the Servicers who jump to the fire to protect Mycroft when he’s exposed. 9A is also at Renunciation Day among those who get ice cream. And is the Servicer in the scene when they’re packing up Bridget’s stuff who tries to persuade Carlyle not to go to Madame’s.
For a long time the only people who knew 9A existed were me and the audiobook narrators but I sent them full lists of the unnamed appearances of 9A so they could make the voice consistent. Not sure if they actually did though.
I’ve listened to the cast recordings but couldn’t make myself listen to the main audiobooks. I know theirs great but somehow Mycroft with an American accent drive me bonkers. 😅🙃
But 9A needs us to believe in them to exist, its one of the challenges that makes Bridger’s form of resurrection like the Greek afterlife, dependent on memory.

Gelato. It’s Romanova after all so it’s in Sardinia. But I knew it would distract people who read my blog if I called it gelato.

We see regular people much more in book 4 than in the rest, since book 4 is when the stranglehold on power by a small elite is breaking down and we see the broad public swing into action and do great things. We see the Shearwater bash’, and Kenzie Walkiwitz, and hear about all the people who help via things like Pass-It-On. It’s regular people taking power again. And doing a lot of good. All the people who help Papadelias escape the prison camp, the Blacklaws volunteering to offer security for the Triumvirate, the volunteers Ockham recruits to rescue the King of Spain, etc.

If Servicers have professional skills yes they get individually contracted for things. If one is a computer programmer, for example, they get brought in to use that skill — we see this in Mycroft being brought in to help with the numbers in the Censor’s office in book 1.

And that 9A has much less of such bias than Mycroft did. But also that in books 1 and 2 the power is being held from the top, and by book 4 that’s been overthrown and we see a vast influx of new people and new ideas.

Yea they totally do solo jobs like helping tidy a house or do caregiving. Or indeed like Mycroft cleaning the Saneer-Weeksbooth trash not. But the Servicers are very protective of Mycroft and do as much as they can to drag him into group jobs not solo, so they can guard him.