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 janetorial 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 eveyone 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 questoins! Most media is digital but there are also physical copies especially of books, for people who like having a physical thing. Digital media is soemtimes 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 temrs 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 separtely 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 infrsatructure 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 environemtns 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 wiht 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.