Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s in his kiss.  That is the easy one.

In the last two weeks I’ve got two people saying something like “but she says you shouldn’t believe established historical facts that everybody knows, and she doesn’t present any proof, and I think this means she is–”  One said “an ideologue” and the other implied mad or perhaps Stalin.  It was in the comments here, but I don’t feel like looking at it.

I’m not telling you everything you ever heard is a lie — for one I have no idea what you’ve heard — I’m telling you “How do you know?”

The things that offended people in both posts are things I have reason were not quite as advertised by modern Marxist historians and the romantic socialist novelists they believe piously.  I wasn’t saying it was an outright lie, but I was saying “I have reason to believe this isn’t so.”

In this case it was the whole thing of people getting condemned to death or transportation for stealing a loaf of bread.  It might (maybe) have happened in ancien regime France.  In Victorian England?  Oh, my sore toes.  Yeah, some people — resident Aussie on FB immediately chimed in to tell me people WERE transported for stealing a loaf of bread because they were starving — might have that on their conviction record, but one of my amusements (look, pal, I don’t judge YOU) is reading and watching stuff about the underbelly of Victorian London.  Yeah, people stole bread.  They stole a lot of things.  And those people transported for stealing bread probably had A LOT more serious things in their past, but they couldn’t be nailed for those.  (Kind of like Al Capone was nailed for tax evasion.)  Because — stands to reason — in a society where policing is so tight that stealing bread gets you transported, there wouldn’t be the thriving underworld of whores, pickpockets, con artists and yes outright murderers that existed then.

Of course, the person who answered here thought I was saying Victorian England was some sort of paradise (rolls eyes.)

I remember the first time I realized that the things everyone knew and the things we were taught COULD NOT LOGICALLY BE SO.

Look, I, like you, heard about how terrible the aftermath of WWI was, and how broke people were right after, and how they were moving to cities and living in tenements.  It wasn’t until I was reading a book about the between the war period in England that I realized they were telling me TWO stories which couldn’t both have happened.  In the part about the common folk, they were telling me how much poorer they were than before the war.  In the part about the great families, they were telling me how the huge rise of the middle class and the building of suburbs had hurt them, and how the newly rich common folk no longer wanted to be servants.

That was one of those “wait a minute.”  Sure I was taught both things in school, but you know you write down the bullet point for the test, and that’s it.  Now I was going “Who the heck wrote these narratives and why doesn’t anyone question them?”

The truth, btw, from going to primary sources is closer to the second.  And the people who wrote the narrative were the unseated noblemen, who did not like all these noveau rich but who wanted to justify their disgust by showing how it hurt the poor.  (It did increase the underclass somewhat, not because of economic conditions, but because a lot of men don’t integrate well after war, and well, WWI was something special by way of trauma.)

There are tons of these when you start poking.  For instance the idea that the industrial revolution was unremittingly bad for the poor/people.  Looking at China and India and such places right now, all I can do is roll my eyes.

Yeah, sure, the conditions of the early industrial revolution were appalling.  And yet people crowded to the cities to take these jobs.  What the historians never ask themselves is “How much worse was what they were escaping from?” We know that in India and China and other recently industrialized countries.

Sure the countryside has relatively clean air and more open space, but there are still real famines, and the work was unremitting and brutal and yes, little children worked too (says the daughter of middle class in a rural community whose first “job” was weeding the onion patch at five.  And I was a pampered moppet.  Kids my age from farming families had what we’d call full time jobs.  Factory jobs at least had a stopping time.)

The idea that the industrial revolution was awful comes from upper class historians who could see the little kids twisted by working in the mills but who never consorted closely enough with the rural poor to see the misery behind raising baah lambs and the pretty pretty flowers.

Yeah.  So the past isn’t written in stone.  And it’s not a conspiracy.  Not precisely a conspiracy.  Yeah, sure, the Marxists influenced a lot of modern history with their ideas, but that is not necessarily conspiring.  They view the world a certain way and it influences how they view the past too.

I know it makes people uncomfortable to question the past, particularly when that past is enshrined not just in their history classes but in great emotive fiction (the whole thing with the loaf of bread.)

HOWEVER the past is always changing.  In my own time I’ve heard the invasion of Rome be changed to “well, the immigrants just kept getting in and eventually overwhelmed Rome.”  And I have seen the dark ages change into the vaguely chiaro escuro ages and the latest exploration of the period show that what caused the dark ages was the Muslim expansion cutting off trade routes. And a lot of other revisions, as things are looked at a different way.

One of them, which I know to be true from modern revolutions and studying them (modern meaning from around the eighteenth century) is that the uprisings happen not when things are at their darkest, but when they’re starting to get better; not under the horrible tyrant, but under his more liberal successor.

People REALLY have trouble with this, particularly writers.  Which is why most revolutions in writing and theater are portrayed absolutely wrong.

The same wrongness goes for wars.  I’m fairly convinced nowadays kids are taught wars go on until America decides to stop fighting, and then the other side also stops because they’re nice people, or something.  I don’t even want to imagine what distortions that will cause in future fiction and action.

So — is my questioning of the past proof that I’m an ideologue or maaaaaad, maaaaaaad I tell you?

Are you joking?

I know I am a little… enthusiastic on libertarian ideals and that I can lose sense of proportion.

But I question history because between history and the media all of us have been sold several packs of lies.

Western civilization is dying, partly, of self-loathing.  Understanding the other side of the “atrocious things our ancestors did” and that other people’s ancestors did the same or worse is the only way back to health.

And questioning what you were told — and all you know about the past you were TOLD unless you happen to have a time machine — is healthy and sane.  Why would you think people studying the past have no agenda?  Think of how the Sad Puppy movement is characterized on Wikipedia.  Now imagine it was in the past and you didn’t know anything about it.

Trust but verify.  And always try to find primary sources.  The results might surprise you.

This is important because, to quote RAH “A generation that doesn’t know history has no past.  And no future.”  And a generation that knows wrong, distorted and tendentious history is no better off.

About the past as about the present, think for yourselves and dig.

It’s the only path to truth.

We were blessed, Larry Correia, Dave Freer, Brad Torgersen and John C. Wright and I to be the object of an attack by Damien Walter, Teh Grauniad’s village idiot.

I’m not going to fisk his idiotic eructation, (mostly because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of reading it) save for saying that that portion which applied to me was just what left wing blogs report about my writing, to whit that I “mangle” sentences.  Which is by and large true… on this blog.  Because it’s written spur of the moment and I don’t have much time to spend on proofreading it, etc, since this is not my paying work.  (Should I actually fix the patreon account and start doing a serial for it, I will then spellcheck that, because, well… it will be paid.  The thing is I don’t want to commit to that, as awful as I’ve been with my subscription space, until I know my health and living conditions (or at least place) are stable.  So not before a year or so. Because my inability to keep the subscribers’ space going is one part health and two parts “moving four times in a year and a half.”  Mind you, we think we’re fixed for a decade, maybe for the rest of our lives, but the unpacking still goes on.)  It never seems to occur to these geniuses that even if my turned-in manuscripts were as bad as the blog (they’re on.  In fact, except for the one written during/while recovering from surgery, they’re cleaner than other people’s raw manuscripts), the editors would catch it.  So, of course, they assume my books are the same.

There were several other egregious errors, like assuming we’re all small press or indie published, which would be trivially easy for him to check on.  In fact, to date, I have ONE book that came out exclusively indie, and one that came out indie after being published by a small press.  All my other work is for major presses and most of it for presses-not-Baen.  (And yeah, I know I need to get pumping on the indie.  Interesting note, btw, all historical mystery writers seem to be doing one or more indie series parallel to their traditional one.  It’s just the same health issues, etc. that stopped traditional writing also stopped indie.)

So, again, not going to fisk him.  Partly because Larry Correia has already said he’s going to do it.  When he does, I’ll link it here.  Also, Dave Freer fisked it at MGC.

Instead I’m going to strike at the heart of his conceit, that what we write is by definition sub-par and not worthy of the august Hugo.  This is also partly in response to a comment on my echoing Brag Torgersen’s post on Dragoncon, in which the commenter said something about how he hadn’t read anything on that list, and to call him back in fifty years and tell him which of those books had survived. His implication, of course, was that the novels winning the Hugos will have longer longevity or speak to readers more, or whatever.  (He also said he hadn’t read any of them and to that I call bullshit, given that I know the gentleman’s reading habits and most of the books are from Baen.)

Sighs.  Does sinal salute.

Yes, indeedy, the mark of “true quality” such as schools used to give it, in writing at least, is to have survived … well, I’d set it at a 100 years, but I come from a place with much deeper history, where an “antique” takes 400 years or so to gel.

Part of the reason colleges and universities used to consider books that had survived that long “true quality” is that they assumed these books had the votes of uncountable readers throughout the centuries, so there must be some quality in them that made them popular.  An enduring quality that defied time and space.

To a large extent that is true.  My own fascination with Shakespeare speaks to that.  Not just his wonderful use of the English Language (which I could appreciate as JUST music, long before I learned what it mean) but the way he captured something essentially human transcends the limits of where and when he wrote and overcome even his egregious errors in geography and — at least initially — how royal courts worked and a million other details.

But this is only “to a large extent.”  There are other works that survive mostly because they are the only surviving works of the era, and because they have been reverently taught from a couple of centuries after their time.  A lot of medieval literature falls under this heading, and I’m not giving anyone my head on a pike by specifying WHICH parts of medieval literature because they’ll regurgitate what they heard in college.  I’ll just say not having learned the same things in college, I could never get into large portions of what are in the English Speaking World considered pre-Shakespearean masterpieces.

And then came the twentieth century.  Ah, the twentieth century.  When western civilization decided it was really important to process most of its youth through colleges in which they were taught what “well bred people should know.” (At least outside STEM disciplines.)

This and a sort of ridiculous civilization-wide adolescent rebellion, in which we decided that because we now have electricity and photographs all past art is irrelevant, led to the anointing of contemporary “literary” masterpieces and the establishment of “literature” as a genre.

Yes, I just said that literature is a genre.  It is in fact, all it is.  Its markers: beautiful language, a tendency to introspective writing, (Unless the goal is minimalist camera-eye and the author sells it as artistic), and a concentration on “plausible, everyday problems” are no more a mark of quality than are “transparent language, fantastic, unbelievable events, active less introspective protagonist.”

That they’ve been sold as “quality” is because these are things “Literature professors like.”

Things literature professors don’t like — I know, my MA is language and literature — include science fiction, fantasy, mystery and in fact all the genres once defined as “pulp”.  My own dad, an avid mystery reader, for a long time classed all sf/f as pulp.  (I’m happy to report he seems to have suffered reverse-infection.)

In fact literature professors dislike it so much that they tend not to read it at all, and to assume that it’s all about bug eyed aliens and half naked women.  For SF/F of course.  Though it would make an interesting mystery.

One of my favorite pasttimes through college was take some professor rebuking me on my reading habits and give him a story or two by Bradbury.  My favorite and — d*mned if I remember the title — for this the one of the people falling to Earth after a space disaster, who review their lives while dying.  Professors were usually blown away and often ended up championing Bradbury to the school library.

BUT those of us in genre know Bradbury is literature.  I think even most of the glitterati admit it.  Harder for them is to admit that people like Heinlein or Terry Pratchett or whoever the latest bestseller in sf/f that they don’t approve of could be considered “literature.”

And to me the most important thing is “who knows?” “Who cares?” “Who actually gives a very tiny rat’s *ss?”

Look, “literature” label and all that crap about “surviving fifty/a hundred/a thousand” years is virtue signaling and bullcrap.

All of it.  My realizing this was the moment at which I started writing and selling a whole lot more novels.

So, literature — let’s leave aside the beautiful language because tastes on what’s beautiful are more fashion than anything else — is supposed to be something that survives the centuries.  And you’re sure you know what that is.  And you want to give awards to that now.

How?  Where do you hide the time machine?  How do you know?

The “literature mavens” in science fiction and elsewhere, have staked their claim on “what survives will be socially relevant.”

This is because they are (it’s an habit) putting the cart before the horse.

To give them the history lesson they never got in school, what used to be considered literature were things anchored in the renaissance which was in turn anchored in the Greek-Roman tradition.  Obligatory references to classical history figures was big (you still find that in some older, revered books.)  And the more obscure the reference, the more “literary” the book.

This was hogwash, of course.  Why?  Because those books were not in fact likely to survive, or even be appreciated but by a tiny minority who was counting coup “Oooh.  A reference to Sisyphus, this is deep.”and by a slightly larger minority who wanted to peacock as though they were exquisitely educated/high class.

Sometime after WWI this had become obvious to everyone, and so they cast about for literature markers that meant this book “spoke” to people.

Now remember, these were by and large intellectuals, whose acquaintance with “people” is either limited to growing up (I hear some of them are born of normal human parents.  Yeah, I know, another d*mn thing for pregnant women to be afraid of) or not intensive.  I.e. they meet with say their cleaning woman or their waiter, but only long enough to take care of business.

This is part of the reason Marxism is so appealing to them.  It gives them all these big categories into which to classify those slippery, unclassifiable people.  They might not know any plumbers, but by d*mn, they know the “Working Class.”

So what they decided would speak to people were books… about those people.  Most literary books are books about college professors pretending to be plumbers or gamblers, or whatever.  They appeal mostly to college professors.  But college professors remain SURE they appeal to everyone, and are therefore “good.”

Yeah, I’m going on the evidence of what I studied in “literature” thirty years ago, but at least judging by a ten year younger friend who keeps getting given these “masterpieces” because he has a degree similar to mine (US variety) it has if anything gotten worse.

Which brings us to the infection of our field by glitteraty larvae too weak and stupid to actually make it in the literary genre, and who therefore have decided to make it in science fiction and call it newly literary or something.

I blame people like Bradbury and Heinlein who made our field more respectable.  But the infection wouldn’t be complete without the editors who went to Very Good Colleges and learned the same clap trap literature I learned, but never saw through it and weren’t there to figure out new ways of bullshitting professors, while reading science fiction under the desk.  They honestly either believe that the mark of quality science fiction is its mock appeal to some “class” or “minority” or they view it as a way to signal how much better than others they are at selecting rarefied “literature”.  Actually the second would explain why the appeal they select for keeps getting more exclusive.  They have long ago accepted this cr*p doesn’t sell, and are now on a mission to “appeal to minorities by having someone like them in the story.”  (As a double — triple? — minority, I object.  I can identify with green tentacled aliens as well as the pale skinned mostly Caucasian guy now working the office beneath mine. I can identify with him too at least enough to empathize.  Otherwise, why marry him?)

Will this “literature” survive fifty years?  Oh, for crying in bed.  How can it?  It’s not even particularly popular now.  Hell, unless a nuking leaves some of these books as the only testimony of what our time and place was like, I doubt anyone even will remember their names any more than we remember the names of “praised” literature from the Victorian period.

Meanwhile Agatha Christie, a favorite “intellectual” punching bag is doing QUITE well fifty years on, despite lacking all those markers college professors think so important.

People like the village idiot of the Guardian are emotionally stunted morons who think “good” must be what his professors held up as such.

The rest of humanity finds it predictable and too boring for words.  Except for those who are counting coup “Ah, one eyed, one legged Hatian Lesbian.  This book is quality!” and those who want to be seen as reading “intellectual” stuff.  Both of which are an ever-decreasing minority in an era of overworked, overstressed people with a lot of other books to read and a lot of other forms of entertainment at their fingertips.

Me? (And probably most of my colleagues mentioned and a few not mentioned.)  We read and write what appeals to us.  I have my own definition of good, which is something that either rivets me and won’t let go (I tend to re-read Jim Butcher by reading all books from first to latest over the course of a couple of days, because I miss them, like one misses friends) or does something emotional to me I wasn’t expecting (The Black Tide books kept me sane and reasonably emotionally together through the death-march of fixing the other house for sale, through MAJOR autoimmune attacks and fears of going bankrupt before the house sold.  How?  D*mned if I know.  Perhaps the sheer uplifting of hope, of doing something, of rebuilding before an all-encompassing tragedy put my own issues in perspective and set an example.  Or perhaps it just reached into my feelings and changed them.  How am I to know?) or provides me with unexpected insights into things people do (Terry Pratchett, particularly Guards Guards for why people feel they need kings, and Tiffany Aching to understand why older son feels driven to become a doctor.)

The rest?  I don’t care.  If reading about the oppressed class makes you feel excited, all  power to you.  Just remember it’s not a popular taste, or a particularly “refined” one.  It doesn’t make the books you like “good” and everyone else’s “bad.”

When I was three or so, my dad taught me de gustibus non est disputandum and most of us “get” it for matters of palate.  For instance, my son adores biscuits and gravy.  The fact gravy makes me shudder doesn’t make his preference “bad” or “wrong.”  It just means we have different tastes.  Why can people not accept that in books (except of course, for having learned in school there was a “good” book.)

If you can read a book and “enter” into it, and it holds your interest to the end, it is a good book for SOMEONE.  Maybe not for you, but for someone.  Live and let live.  And stop acting like an idiot.  Liking something or disliking something won’t make anyone believe you’re better than other people.  Unless your peacocking is directed at the immature, the insecure and (but I repeat myself) most college literature professors.

Yeah, some of what we read now might make it to college classes in fifty years.  Will it be good? will it suck?

Who knows?  It depends on the state of civilization then, and what they pick as markers.

So I ask again, do you have a time machine, tovarish?  No?  Then shut up about surviving fifty years, and just read what you like.  In the end that’s all that counts.

Which is why popular choice awards like the dragons make perfect sense.  The “this is good literature” awards (which used to be the Nebulas) not so much.

Popular choice tells you “you might like this. A lot of people do.”  All “good literature” awards say is “Some intellectuals will think you’re very smart for being seen with this book.”

As an author I’d prefer to get the first.  As a reader I say “read whatever the heck you like.  Your former literature professor will NEVER know.”

I know, you guys tell me it’s free ice-cream and I shouldn’t care if it’s late, but I try to post every morning.

As I’ve said here before, I’m a low-carb eater.  In fact, more low-carb than Atkins although I can stray to Atkins levels without huge issues, unless I make it a pattern.

I have continued on atkins despite not losing an ounce over several years, because if I od on carbs it serves as a trigger for my autoimmune.  (In fact, I went low carb because the skin manifestation of my auto-immune was all over my body and I couldn’t sleep or do anything else either)

The skin part of it is “eczema” at least in presentation, but to quote my eye doctor when I went to him with some very specific and weird eye issues, my auto immune manifests as “dryness.”  Dryness on the skin, dryness on the joints… and dryness in the eyes.

Like an idiot I strayed what I thought was a safe (wasn’t) amount the day before yesterday.  Yesterday my eyes were so dry that even the eye drops only provided temporary relief.  This means that my eyes are “on the edge of focusing” at any given time, but never fully focus.  This is fine for answering comments on facebook (or here) but it’s incredibly difficult to write even something the length of a blog post.  It comes with other symptoms, like joint pain and itching, but yesterday I also felt as though I was drunk (and I’m not sure why.) The “drunk” feeling might be because my asthma also makes an appearance and I’m on low oxygen.

It was never enough to say “OMG, let’s go to the hospital” — it was just unpleasant and annoying and work-stopping.  I didn’t want to sleep which is the only safe activity, reading was not very easy because of not being able to focus, and there wasn’t much else I could do.

So, when you offer me cake at birthday parties or biscuits at a con suite, this is what I’m fighting.  I can have the occasional serving of French fries, or even bread, provided I’m not already going through an auto-immune flare up.  If I am already there, though, I end up, like yesterday, having one of the most unpleasant days of my life.

Okay — I don’t want to become like those elderly ladies who talk about their health non-stop.  I just thought this needed an explanation so next time I say “ODed on Carbs” or “Autoimmune flare up” you get the full picture.

I’m feeling much better today, though my eyes still feel dry.  They’re past the point where I can’t focus, though, and I can focus.

When I’m done with this, I’ll put eyedrops in and do a real post ;)

*I SPENT THE LAST HOUR TRYING TO POST THIS.  I’M LATE BUT NOT THAT LATE.  D*MNED WORDPRESS WAS NOT WORKING IN CHROME AT ALL.  FINALLY BROUGHT UP ANOTHER BROWSER. GRRR. SAH*

*FIRST AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, THIS IS NOT CANON.  THIS IS COMPLETELY UNSANCTIONED (okay, not completely.  Larry said I could do this for you guys without his ripping my head off) MHI FANFIC.
Good, now that we got that out of the way, why am I doing this?  Both Grant and Fado Negro (Portuguese Monster Hunters) have minuscule parts in Guardian, the MHI book I’m collaborating with Larry Correia on.  However, obviously the Portugal of Monster Hunter is not the real Portugal (Really, no arcane creatures come stumbling out of the undergrowth there.  If there were arcane creatures, the country would be chock-a-block in them, when you take in account the continuous human occupation since… well, forever.)  And this story gives me more of an opportunity to firm the worldbuilding.  (Yes, it would be MUCH easier to do this with a notebook and noting things down, but that’s not how my mind works, d*mn it.)
Okay, that’s the rational excuse.  The real reason is that d*mn Grant Jefferson won’t leave me alone.  (Always had a thing for men from Patrician New England families.  Ask my husband.)  So I’m torturing him.  Also Guardian won’t come out until I do this more or less at same time (I’ll be sending first chapter of that to Larry soon.)
Will this ever be a book?  Don’t know.  First Guardian will get delivered.  Then, this being finished, I throw it at Larry.  And then it’s his SOLE DECISION. (Which means, don’t you monkeys hassle him.)  It’s his world and his character.  I’m just grateful he lets me play in it in Guardian and here for your amusement.*

First chapter is here.

Second Chapter is here

III

The hotel I’d booked, down near the river, in what used to be the medieval part of the city, came highly recommended, and was supposed to be actually a set of mini-apartments, kind of like a more ritzy embassy suites.

The area itself was beautiful.  Narrow streets flanked by housefronts that ended about one inch from the street and that linked to their neighbors on either side.  Only the different colors, and the entire area was painted in bright, primary colors, told you where a house ended and the next one began.  Some of the windows were surrounded by carved stone work that in the States would be locked up in some museum.

But it wasn’t all sculpture and high class.

Part of what I was getting used in the country is that they did just about everything in less space.  It reminded me of when my parents took me to Japan on vacation when I was ten.  The lobby of the hotel was appropriately grandiose, furnished with bits and pieces of antique or antique-looking furniture and ornamented with bits and pieces of masonry probably salvaged from the neighborhood during renovations.  From what I’d gathered online this area, though now one of the primary attractions of the region, had once been decayed and scabrous, the haunt of prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets and any other unsavory type of person, whether their occupation started with p or not. There were interesting scraps that looked like parts hacked off Roman columns, and other interesting shards that looked like they might have been medieval and roughly carved.

I noticed particularly part of a woman’s face hanging on the wall.  It was the face of a statue that must be at least as old as Rome, and had once been creamy marble, but which was now stained and blotched with age, with something green growing on the corner of the mouth, giving her smile a wicked twist.  It seemed to me that the carved eye — only one remained, since the salvaged portion was little more than a quarter of the face — followed me up to the registration, as the line wound its slow way forward.

All through this, my phone — a blackberry because Monster Control Bureau was not the most up to date thing in nature — kept trembling with arriving texts.  I ignored them, having decided that I’d save all the unpleasantness Franks could rain on me all at once instead of piecemeal.

I had no idea at all what was going on in Portugal that Franks wished he could evacuate all American citizens from the country.  And all I could think is that it was a hell of a time for Julie to be here.  And she certainly shouldn’t be here on her own.  I intended to make sure she got through this in one piece, if it was the last thing I did.  It very well might be.

Check in was handed by a sharp-faced young man who looked at me critically from behind his glasses, visibly wondering if I belonged in this high class hotel.  I could only imagine what I looked like, not only having been batted around by the troll things, but having lain who knew how long on the — probably mossy – floor of a medieval cell, and then to boot having had water thrown over my head.  I felt my cheeks color under the man’s dubious appraisal, but fortunately Amex platinum covers a multitude of sins.  Once that came out it was all smiles, and eagerness to accommodate me. American Express, no explanation necessary.

I asked for two keys, mostly because I’d been in Europe before and was on to their little trick of not letting you run the air conditioning or heating unless the key was inserted into the unit.  I had no intention of freezing or baking — I wasn’t sure which one was more likely in June in Portugal, and it could be either, depending on the time of the day — because the room’s systems couldn’t function unless I was in them.

After another short wait for the elevator, and a creaky trip up — the place was modernized but the structure itself was probably eighteenth century — I found myself in a long hallway with marble floors and tasteful imitation-roman frescoes on the wall.  I had to admit that the Europeans did opulence better.  When Americans try it there’s always a chintzy look to it and the sort of Caesar’s palace in Las Vegas feel of “come on, rube.”

I slipped my key into the door.  It opened.  And I started to apologize, feeling vaguely embarrassed but also irritated.  It wasn’t the first time this happened to me, but it only happened to me in Europe.  I had been given an already-occupied room.

She was beautiful and half naked. Olive skinned, almost as tall as myself, with long black hair, and luscious skin.  She seemed to be wrapped in a towel, and as I opened the door she turned to look at me over her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I–”

That’s all I had time for.  I had an impression of almond-shaped, mysterious-looking eyes, and a red mouth.

And then she was on me.  At first, as she put her arms around me, I thought it was just that the hotel had prostitutes, and she’d got into the room and was waiting for me, after perhaps a discrete call mentioning a platinum amex.

But as she wrapped herself around me, right there at the door, and I tried to step back, it felt not like I was being held by a luscious half naked female, but more by a–

Cobra.

I flung myself sideways.  I couldn’t fully escape her coils, but it was enough that her attempt to tear my throat open was thwarted.  I felt a sharp pain behind my left ear but I didn’t have time to deal with that right then.  I had an up-close-and-personal view of a beautiful girl’s face, her mouth impossibly open, revealing needle-sharp fangs. She looked like the marble piece in the hall.

I lifted my hand, that held my suitcase, and slammed her face with it.

Through my head, like a narration, went the lecture on lamias I’d got while training as a federal agent.  MHI hadn’t bothered with them overly much because Lamias aren’t an American problem.

I remember being bored out of my head while the instructor droned, “Lamias are the Roman version of vampires.  Beautiful women from the waist up, they’re snakes from the waist down.  They hang out in cemeteries, though they’ve also been reported in any place where a lot of Romans died violently.  They often attack tourists visiting Rome.”

Well I wasn’t in Rome, but I didn’t particularly care.  She was still a woman from the waist up and a cobra from the way down, and if she was only a lamia’s second cousin, I couldn’t care less.

I banged my suitcase over her head hard enough to get her to let go of me, stumbled back and looked around wildly for anything I could use as a stake.  I hadn’t heard any of the lecture see?  Mostly because I was bored and thought that I’d never run into a lamia.  Which just showed you what an idiot I was.

I assumed stakes would work. But there were no stakes in the room.  None.

It slithered towards me, somehow remaining upright, but undulating with the kind of movement that no bipedal ever had.  I tried to get back to the door, but she was in my way. I had a glock and silver ammunition in my checked luggage.  But there was no way, no way in hell I could get to it.

One thing they teach you in monster hunting, both MHI and federal is that there are no such things as dangerous weapons.  There are only dangerous people.  And they’d taught us to be dangerous.

I grabbed the floor lamp, wielded it like a lance.

It hesitated.  I speared it through the chest.  Or more like I lightbulbed-and-poled it through the chest.

Blood poured out of her, soaking the carpet. Damn it, that was going to put a dent on the Amex.  She fell down writhing.  And my phone was ringing continuously.

I got it out of my pocket.  I could barely speak through panting as I said, “Yes, Agent Franks, sir, if you’ll excuse me, I was just killing a Lamia.”

“What?” A feminine voice said from the other side of the connection.

I didn’t say anything.  I flung the phone down. Out the corner of my eye, I’d seen the lamia regenerate, and come towards me.

I jumped behind a huge armchair.  I despise the self-healing ones.

*Sorry this was so late.  The best I can describe today is like this:

*

I got taken to dinner.  Dark Fate 3 tomorrow morning.

*Note from Sarah — yes there will be Dark Fate. Later, today.  Now run and play while I finish it. – SAH*

I’ve Been Working On the Promo – Jason Dyck

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Crossing the Naiad

Ancient, cold, and perilous.

Its truth forgotten in the mists of time, the old bridge harbors a lethal secret. Neither marble statues awakened for battle nor an ancient roadbed grown hungry, something darker and more primal haunts the stones and the wild river below.

Kimmer knows the stories, but she doesn’t know why the crumbling span feels so fraught with menace. Her way home lies across the ruin. Dare she take it? Or will horror from the lost past rise up to claim her, when she does?

David L. Burkhead

Big Blue

Two monsters on a collision course with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance.

A stolen submarine and an accidentally detonated nuke in Baffin Bay releases something never seen before, a monster ten times the size of Tyrannosaurus Rex, seemingly impervious to every weapon in mankind’s arsenal.

Undersea Earthquakes in the remote South Pacific of ever increasing magnitude, generating massive tsunamis. A new continent arises and on that continent something stirs, bringing madness in its wake.

Laura Montgomery

Far Flung

In the very near future a seastead offers consumers a choice in governing systems. Adam Tenney’s daughter takes that offer, but what can he do for her when pirates threaten the seastead, the U.S. refuses to recognize it, and he is trapped in a desk job on land?

Wired Magazine Checks In With NK Jemisin, Again – By Rhiain

WorldCon is upon us once again, and our own Kate Paulk is on scene for the duration of the event to represent the Sad Puppies.

In the meantime, in a brazen attempt to increase traffic to their website in the run-up to MidAmericon II, Wired Magazine recently published a fawning rehash of Nora K Jemisin’s thoughts on a recent brouhaha regarding the “lack of diversity” in SFF magazines. Since Larry Correia already did an exceptional job fisking the original Verge article about said brouhaha, I’ll leave it to you, dear readers, to mosey on over to MHN for the particulars of the, ahem, study commissioned by Fireside Fiction at the center of that controversy regarding the “lack of diversity” in SFF.

In the meantime, Wired Magazine decided to check in with Jemisin regarding The Underrepresentation(!) of Colored Writers Published By SFF Mags – because who better could opine on this Terrible Crisis if not their quotable go-to non-white writer?

The article is essentially a grandiose introduction followed by a string of recent Tweets by Ms. Jemisin, in which she indicates that the uptick in invites to submit work to SFF mags has increased for her personally, and while it’s a nice problem to have, she prefers that SFF mags go beyond recognizable names of non-white SFF writers like herself and find others not so recognizable to invite instead. Where Jemisin derails is here:

13. Here is what I think is happening: The chant against the +10 diversity attack is being spoken again, in the shadowy halls of powah.
14. Somebody says to somebody else, “Whoa, that report was right, we haven’t pub’d anybody black in *years.* What do we do?” Somebody else
15. says, “Yeah, but we can’t just pub *any* black writers. That’s quotas. Quality!” “Oh, I know! We’ll invite [“name” black writers].”
16. That’s how it happens, see. There Can Be Only A Few. The defense-against-diversity attack spell has more names in it now. A *few* more.
17. The front gates are still shut, see. You’re just letting a few more exceptions in the side door.

Do non-white writers consider the SFF magazine market to be the only way to become a published SFF author? Surely not. Doesn’t the indie market, for example, exist as one way among many to open those floodgates, permanently?

Jemisin’s descent into conspiracy notwithstanding, lamenting the paucity of diversity is not a particularly new thought shared by the liberal SFF writerly set amongst themselves. Beyond the flawed tally of white versus non-white writers within the specific niche of SFF magazines, it is instructive that liberal non-white SFF writers view the push for Diversity in their field as tokenism and not as a serious attempt to integrate the current crop of established authors – whatever the hell that’s supposed to accomplish.

The problem with this approach, however, is that one still relies on tallies and quotas of authors and writers by ethnicity, race and/or skin color. However one quantifies Diversity here, relying on melanin count seems counterintuitive and, ultimately, irrelevant to the average reader of SFF.

As Chris Nuttall pointed out in his own blog response to The Verge article, how often do SFF magazine editors check to see if the author of a submission is non-white? More to the point, how often do SFF magazine editors only publish stories by certain authors because of their race and/or skin color?

In her Tweetstorm, Jemisin referenced an article called “Decolonise, not Diversify” by Kavita Bhanot, published late last year. It’s an astounding exercise in logical leaps and assumptions, and again, it emphasizes that any current drive to diversify the current stable of published SFF writers by race/ethnicity is a futile exercise in tokenism. Bhanot writes:

Who are the ‘people’ who are curious about the community that Sharma is writing about, allowing him to ‘benefit’ from his ethnicity? Certainly not the community he is writing about. It is clear in what Sharma says, who his work is directed towards, who he writes for. ‘People’ here equals white people. So much of our writing consciously or unconsciously reproduces this assumption, and subtly reveals internalised white supremacy.

Jemisin echoes this claim with,

20. Decolonization asks, “What are you (markets) doing wrong that black ppl don’t want to submit stories to you? Fix *that* first.”
21. And start with your assumptions that only a few *can* write up to your standards. ‘Cause that’s a f-ing problem.

In a similar vein, Phenderson Djèlí Clark writes,

The burden of change here is on SFF markets not on black writers. I repeat, the burden of change is on SFF markets not black writers. Don’t tell black people to open up their own SFF markets. Don’t say, “well you guys gotta submit more.” If SFF markets want diverse stories, they’re going to have to do more than simply state it and then wait patiently for it to happen. Words and intentions are nice. But without concerted action there’s not going to be much change. SFF markets are going to have to take part in engaged activism to bring in black writers, to increase the submissions of black writers and to publish more black writers. It ain’t gonna happen by osmosis.

But what does he mean when says “engaged activism”? Will this include forsaking the overall quality of a single magazine volume by concentrating more on marketing their magazine to non-white SFF writers and readers? Increasing one’s readership is a worthy goal, but at what cost? As a niche market, who is the target audience of each SFF magazine, and what does increasing submissions by non-white writers entail for that publication’s editors?

How does including non-white editors on one’s mag staff, a point that Jemisin and Clark both explicitly support, guarantee that the ethnic and cultural nuances shine in one’s work – especially if promulgated by a writer who happens to be white? Does this stab at editorial inclusiveness connect the reader to the story and get the writer out of the way so that the reader can engage the work?

Have Jemisin, Bhanot and Clark considered the sociological, not to mention the social, implications of their superficial opinions on diversifying SFF? I have to wonder.

Obviously I disagree, strongly, with many of their conclusions, and I question whether their well-intentioned solutions will actually increase the number of non-white writers willing to submit their work to SFF mags and publishers in general. I do not consider it a negative if non-white writers self-publish their work in their own created spaces. It is both amusing and puzzling that the Publishing Establishment, already liberal, is still viewed as too segregated by some of its own members and too entrenched in its ways to become more diverse. Keep in mind that conservative and libertarian authors are such an outlier that they are not even considered a legitimate demographic by the publishing houses’ gatekeepers and pseudo-analysts. Thus, in policing themselves, and aghast that they’re still found wanting, the ensuing hyperventilating by its more vocal (non-white!) members are cause for the average SFF reader to wonder what the fuss is all about. Or to drink and laugh. Or both. Take your pick.

Many of us SFF readers and indie-published SFF writers are so passionate about the field that we’ve tossed off the burdensome entry requirements imposed by the Publishing Establishment and thrown ourselves into the fray. As mentioned earlier, the indie market has thrown the publishing gates wide open, and whether the Establishment wants to admit it or not, we are here to stay.

Do we care about the skin color of our fellow writers and readers? No – it has no bearing on the stories we read and enjoy. It has no bearing on the stories we write, unless as an inspiration or motivation. Whether the current drive for Diversity will bear the fruit desired by its proponents or vindicate our belief that it’s a non-issue depends on whether the self-appointed gatekeepers will realize that their dictates are being disagreed with by SFF fans like you and me, or outright ignored and dismissed.

But they’re our betters, see – especially us non-white SFF readers who don’t care about tokenism, diversity, or today’s flavor of identity politics. Surely we’ll eventually understand that they’re only looking out for our best interests – or not.

A friend of mine was recently incommoded by a neighbor (in an upper-middle-class neighborhood) who informed her that yes, everyone should have free education, and that people like her should pay for it, because she could afford it.

We’ll leave aside the immorality of arrogating to yourself the right of determining what your neighbors can afford and also of thinking you’re entitled to take it from them by force for purposes you think (but have no direct proof) are trustworthy and serve the community.

We’re not talking of providing for the common defense, here, or even stopping rioting on the streets. Yes, I know, I’ve seen the bumperstickers too.  “More schools fewer jails” or something like that.  If we needed more proof that they were nonsense, the 9/11 planners were among the richest, best educated of Muslims.  They weren’t striking out of privation or despair, but out of hatred (most of it probably inculcated by our own schools) and a thirst for power and self aggrandizement. By and large this is true of our criminals too.  There might have been — truly, I doubt it — back in the time of Dickens people who stole bread because they were hungry and were therefore horribly punished.  Maybe.  Most of what we hear of that is via authors like Dickens who thought they knew better ways to organize society and who had an ax to grind.

Read into the biography of any Victorian criminal, or even the seamy underbelly — I’ve skimmed it, when reading about Jack the Ripper, or other true-crimes of the period — or for that matter any Elizabethan criminal, of the sort that would be easy to paint as “he stole because he was hungry” and what you find is an habitual life of crime and the sort of weaving line of morality that we find among our own under class.

There was hunger aplenty before the industrial revolution, and yes, some people died in famines.  But barring the ultimate, desperate push and that usually affected everyone in a region, the laws held.  Most people — most morally formed, normal human beings — do not wish to hurt people and take their stuff.  Or at least they don’t wish it enough to do it.

So any possible “plus” of free college for all (I presume that’s the type of education this moral monster was speaking about, since high school is already free) was linked by this tenuous idea of the liberal left that education thwarts crime.  (It might even have been true once, when education was, unapologetically, about teaching the bourgeois virtues, but that type of education, nowadays, is non-existent, destroyed by the left itself. What is left is more on the grounds of teaching people why they’ve been wronged by society and that, as you might understand, does not inculcate probity or respect for society’s laws.)

Let’s leave aside that moral flaw, though, and the lies the gentleman in question told himself to pretend he had a right to take his neighbors’ money for the good of a nebulous third party.  (I.e. ultimately for the satisfaction of taking other people’s stuff, the savage joy of being able to cause suffering, all of it masked under altruism.)

Let’s say that he got his way and we were all taxed out of wazoo to pay for free college education for all.  What would we get out of it?

I’ll start by saying my education was if not free at least extremely cheap (I paid the equivalent of $20 a course and about the same for late exam fees) and paid for by Portuguese tax payers.

“See,” you’ll say. “You’re an hypocrite, who benefited from the program you would deny the poor of America.”

Which would just show that you know diddly squat about how “free education” works in most of Europe.  (Most because it might be different in Nordic countries.  I simply don’t know.)

In most of Europe there is Free College for some.  For the rest there are a variety of paid colleges and technical colleges.

The “Free College” in Portugal had its numbers frozen back in the sixties.  When I came through in the eighties, your grades had to be above the top one percent to qualify.  Some people waited and retook the exam for five years or something like it.

I entered first try.  Sure.  The downside of this was that I had “paid” for my education with blood, sweat and tears and a good part of my youth.  Before you say I was being melodramatic — and I know it doesn’t work this way now.  The system has changed markedly since I went through it.  For one, in our day, there was only one paying university and it was frowned at — only a little.  We were the year that the “revolutionary” changes hit hardest, right at the start of middle school equivalent.  Which means sometimes our curriculum changed five times in a year and we never got past the intro.

What this means, in practical terms, is that by the time we hit ninth grade no one had a clue what we knew.  So an exam took place, which overrode the class grades.  You had to be above a B to go on to tenth grade.  Much of the material was stuff we’d never covered, because of the crazy changes every year. There was no excuse.

I think something like 95% of people either failed that exam or were below the B.  A lot of my friends ended up going to “technical schools” after that (hard to explain to Americans.  They were still high schools, but they trained you for things like secretary and teacher’s assistant.  I think (THINK) they’re the equivalent of the British o-levels.  I KNOW that in my school, where the forms grades were pasted on the front hall some forms had NO ONE pass.  They looked all red, like they’d bled.  Our form and our rival form, being culled from the best students, were reversed and we only had four fail in each.

Leading up to that exam it’s as close to going crazy as I wish to try.  And we did have a few suicides.

Then the tenth and eleventh grade (I did twelveth in the US) “cuts” were just as brutal.  And even so, of those that graduated, most didn’t make it to college.

I didn’t have a choice.  My dad would have been heartbroken if a descendant of his couldn’t cut it.  So I made it.  But I paid for it, just not in coin.

Even so, and returning to our point, I’m not sure those are good investments of the taxpayer’s money.  Take my degree, when I went through it.  Sure, languages are the most rigorous of the humanities, and I have no problem with that.  But a lot of our training — literature, poetry — was less to develop the languages, and more, it seemed, designed to make us into “well rounded young misses.”  Which is, arguably what the degree had been when it was first founded.  Because it was paid by the state, only the state had the power to change the curriculum.

Most people who graduated with me went on to be language teachers, but we never got any actual TRAINING for that.  There was one course.  There were two for techniques of translation.  What there wasn’t was any of the training we actually needed and that most of us had to get in the first years in a job.  You know, drawing lesson plans, dealing with discipline problems, or conversely dealing with harassment among diplomats or bosses in a translation setting.  Or what to soft pedal for what cultures.

I find it really useful, in general, in life, particularly in complex situations to ask “who benefits from this?”  and “who controls this?”  It tells you everything you need to know. If those people are not the same, then you’re going to get malinvestment.

The people who benefited from the free college I received were, to an extent, students.  To a greater extent, public schools and employers for translators and multilingual employees who could be got relatively cheap since there was no debt to pay.

The problem is the people controlling the education were neither of those two groups, but government bureaucrats.  They neither knew nor cared what the two groups NEEDED and if the students ended up unemployed, or had to learn on the job and cost the employers money, no one was going to come after the bureaucrats.

And that is for a system which culled for the most academically gifted students, which means the chances of their learning fast and well on the job were pretty high, as were the chances of their adapting to whatever was thrown at them.

America is  more egalitarian and during its long march to the left has gotten quite averse to the claims of merit.  Because I’ll point out my husband also had practically free education, because he got a full ride scholarship.  These are rarer now for merit.  Merit is — AT BEST — a factor, taken in account with ethnicity and other signs of “group oppression” which have nothing to do with oppression.

The chances of a system like what I described above and what operates in most of Europe are next to none.

When these people talk of free college, they talk of free college in the same way that people talk of free high school: if you want it, you march up, sign up for it and take the college.

Who benefits from this?  Arguably the same group as above: students and employers.  Who controls it?  In all likelihood the federal government.

To what extent do those interests match?

Oh, not much at all.

The federal government will want people to be taught according to the latest theories of what makes students law-abiding or non-violent or what have you.  Most of these theories will be, as most such are, wrong and based on Marx and nothing else much.

Beyond that?  Professors’ lobbying have much more influence with the government than employers do. Already curriculums include a good dose of “grievance studies” that have no relevance to the market place and are only kept alive to give some professors jobs.  Already a good course on Western History is impossible to come by.

What more will happen with free college?  Oh, what won’t happen.  (“The fun we will have” — in a Dr. Seuss voice.)

First of all it will go the way of mandatory high school.  Most people are no graduating from high school with literacy skills that would get them flunked of middle school 25 years ago. Note “most” (I made d*mn sure my kids could read and write at a level that didn’t disgust me) and also no I’m not exaggerating.  I have for my sins been conscripted to help college students with work.  Their reasoning skills are non-existent (their indoctrination is impeccable, though.)

In short, most people graduating high school are NOT ready for college.  You put them in college and it’s “bonehead college” all the way. This means more “studies” degrees, where the learning is fuzzy and it’s very easy to pass even if you can barely spell your name, at least in some colleges.

Then there is the … use of such things.  American students, already, are taking six years to finish degrees, because they can.  Oh, sure, they can’t, but they will take it out in easy loans and they don’t fully understand the pain they’re letting themselves in for.  The reason for the extended time in school is what I call “major dance.”  People enter in a major, decide they don’t like it, go to another, then another, then….

This is insane to me.  Remember the process I went through, explained above.  You knew what you could get to, and you went there, and you finished.

Now imagine free college in the US.  Never mind the people who will stay in their whole lives, taking degree after degree (hell, I might do it) as that might be forbidden.  Imagine how many people will change degrees five times in a row and stay in for 15 years, before emerging with the least useful of degrees.

And then take the average student, who really wants to be in and really wants to take, say, engineering.  If college is free, can you deny admission to ANYONE who wants to be an engineer?  What are you? Some type of evil conservative?

People would get in with barely algebra, and the classes would all be dumbed down.  the resulting bs wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.  Depending on how far the “free” goes, employers would start demanding masters or doctorates, thereby delaying the time when young people become productive members of society and can start families of their own.

We can’t afford free college for all.  It would be an empty piece of paper.  And it would cost the future.

Solar, Space, and Geomagnetic Weather Part I — An Introduction

By Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

“Interstellar Woman of Mystery”

Rocket Scientist and Novelist

A lot of my friends and fans over on Facebook have become followers of my various solar and aurora alerts there, and Sarah keeps asking me to come blog more about the stuff — which I enjoy doing, immensely — so I thought I’d explain what it is and why it’s important.

[This is a basic image of the Sun, complete with sunspots. The small black circle in the top right edge of the solar disk is actually Venus beginning a “transit” (passage) between us and the Sun.]

All three — solar weather, space weather, and geomagnetic weather — are interconnected. This is because the Sun has a magnetic field that extends far past the Earth, and so the Earth’s magnetic field interacts with it. “Space Weather” is essentially a term for the conditions of space in the general vicinity of Earth, but not necessarily inside the Earth’s magnetic field.

We are also sitting inside the atmosphere of the Sun, the corona. The corona is a plasma — a gas composed of charged particles, mostly protons and electrons, with some neutrons and assorted atomic nuclei (such as alpha particles — helium nuclei) thrown in for good measure. Its temperature is around a 1,400,000°-1,600,000°Kelvin, or about 2,500,000-2,900,000°F. It has a density that ranges about 5-10 particles per cubic centimeter, and it is generally moving away from the Sun, “evaporating” under the influence of the powerful solar magnetic fields.

This generates a kind of wind, usually coming out from the Sun and spiraling away — yeah, the “solar wind.” Granted, the corona isn’t very dense, but it’s dense enough to create some effects, and we’re working on using it to our benefit, like in solar sails and such, which can use the solar wind as much as light pressure to maneuver around the Solar System like a spaceborne version of the clipper ships of old. (But that’s a different blog post.) Solar wind speeds range from 400-750km/s (895,000-1,700,000mph), and under certain conditions, can get much, much faster.

But when the Sun gets…agitated, we’ll say…it can get a lot denser. Coronal holes move from the poles down to lower latitudes, and the Sun’s face develops an astronomical case of acne. This usually occurs around the time of solar maximum.

Whoa. Waitaminit. What’s a coronal hole?

A coronal hole is a magnetic field artifact.

Earth has a dipole field, like a bar magnet, because it is a rigid spinning body, so the dynamo inside it is all rotating at the same angular velocity. Remember elementary school when you put a piece of paper on a bar magnet and sprinkled iron filings on it? It made a cool bunch of lines that arced from one end of the magnet to the other, and then fanned out at the very ends. That’s what I’m talking about here.

The Sun is a gigantic ball of plasma. It spins on an axis. These two facts, when combined, create an electric current. An electric current, in turn, generates a magnetic field. This is why the Sun has a magnetic field. A magnetic field which TENDS toward a dipole.

Only…the Sun is a big ball of plasma, not a rigid body. More, each particle of that plasma is obeying Kepler’s Laws of orbital motion. Consequently, the Sun experiences something called differential rotation. This means that the area near the core doesn’t rotate at the same rate as the area near the photosphere (visible “surface), and the poles don’t rotate at the same rate as the equator. Consequently, the solar magnetic field is MUCH more complex than a simple dipole. It can, and does, occasionally have more than one north or one south magnetic pole. This means that it can look like this:

Now, see all those places where the magnetic field lines are going off into space, instead of looping back around to the “surface”? Those are shooting all that plasma off into space, ALONG THOSE LINES, and the result, when you look at it with the right frequency light and equipment, is what’s called a coronal hole. Looking at ‘em the right way, it looks like this:

The polar areas normally have “coronal holes,” because of the open-ended lines of the dipole.

Occasionally one of these will get really large, and then the lay news media get all bent out of shape about “the huge hole in the sun” that’s going to destroy it. Nuh-uh. Ain’t gonna happen. Just shows they slept through all their science classes, assuming they had any. A coronal hole isn’t really a hole at all; it’s just a region of lower plasma quantities in the chromosphere (the lowest part of the solar atmosphere), caused because the mag fields are shoving it all off into space.

The streams of plasma coming out from a coronal hole are known as “enhanced solar wind streams.” (I never said all scientists were creative.)

So. That’s a quick synopsis of what coronal holes are.

Wait. What’s “solar maximum”?

Our Sun has cycles that it goes through. Some are short and some are long. These cycles are related to its magnetic field and to sunspots. In fact, many variable star astronomers such as myself consider that the Sun is at least a borderline variable star because of this; some consider it outright variable. We’ll leave that to a later discussion. For now, let’s just look at those cycles and why they exist.

Again, since the Sun isn’t solid like a bar magnet, the plasma doesn’t all have to spin around the axis at the same speed — and it doesn’t.

So let’s think about those lines of iron filings again. Our bar magnet has gone and gotten itself all twisted up because it isn’t solid, so the lines of iron filings get all twisted up, too. Now, scientists are still working on this, but the best we can figure out now is that sunspots are places where “snarls” form in the magnetic lines, and float up and break through to the “surface,” or photosphere. (In the last couple of years we’ve learned how to look “deeper” into the Sun to see these snarls below the photosphere. Remember that. It’ll come into play later on, when we start talking about the Sun as a variable star.) This means that sunspots have magnetic fields, sometimes very complicated. There are almost always at least two — one is a north magnetic pole, the other a south pole. (When there is just one, it is usually funny-shaped and one end will be a North magnetic pole and the opposite end will be South. And sometimes there’s a whole cluster, which gets really complicated.) And most all of the spots on the Sun will have the same N/S orientation.

It turns out that every 11 years, there is a peak in the number of sunspots, and a minimum in the number of sunspots. We aren’t quite sure why, because we don’t have all the theory worked out yet. But we’ve all heard of Solar Maximum and Solar Minimum, and that’s what those terms mean. Solar Max is when we have the most spots, and Solar Min is when we have the least.

~Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

*FIRST AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, THIS IS NOT CANON.  THIS IS COMPLETELY UNSANCTIONED (okay, not completely.  Larry said I could do this for you guys without his ripping my head off) MHI FANFIC.
Good, now that we got that out of the way, why am I doing this?  Both Grant and Fado Negro (Portuguese Monster Hunters) have minuscule parts in Guardian, the MHI book I’m collaborating with Larry Correia on.  However, obviously the Portugal of Monster Hunter is not the real Portugal (Really, no arcane creatures come stumbling out of the undergrowth there.  If there were arcane creatures, the country would be chock-a-block in them, when you take in account the continuous human occupation since… well, forever.)  And this story gives me more of an opportunity to firm the worldbuilding.  (Yes, it would be MUCH easier to do this with a notebook and noting things down, but that’s not how my mind works, d*mn it.)
Okay, that’s the rational excuse.  The real reason is that d*mn Grant Jefferson won’t leave me alone.  (Always had a thing for men from Patrician New England families.  Ask my husband.)  So I’m torturing him.  Also Guardian won’t come out until I do this more or less at same time (I’ll be sending first chapter of that to Larry soon.)
Will this ever be a book?  Don’t know.  First Guardian will get delivered.  Then, this being finished, I throw it at Larry.  And then it’s his SOLE DECISION. (Which means, don’t you monkeys hassle him.)  It’s his world and his character.  I’m just grateful he lets me play in it in Guardian and here for your amusement.*

First chapter is here.

II

I cast a jaundiced eye around at the place where I lay.  It had all the charm of a medieval cell, with bare stone walls on which — I swear — I could discern green tendrils of some sort of lychen.  The light that came in through the tiny window high up on the walls was broken by two dark “stripes” that were probably bars.

And in the cell, with me, were two men, both of whom looked eerily familiar.  “Owen Pitt!”I said. “I didn’t know you had a twin.”

At least I think that’s what I said, though it might have come out somewhat distorted.  There was blood in my mouth and something gritty like fragments of my own teeth, and my vision seemed to be swimming in and out like I couldn’t focus.  Frankly, the last thing I needed right then was Owen, or his twin, or both of them.

They had got heads together and were speaking Portuguese too fast for me to follow from my knowledge of Spanish, Latin, and the Rosetta Stone program I’d played on my phone on the plane.

I was soaked through, from someone throwing water on me, felt miserable, hurt in places I didn’t know I could hurt, and to make things worse, my phone was binging with a string of oncoming messages.  It took me a moment to realize the bings were coming from in front of me where the two Pitts were obviously holding it and reading my messages.

Like that I was up, and grabbing for my phone.  “That’s mine.  Give it here.”

This is when I realized the two kids in my cell — it had to be a cell — were not Owen Pitt.  Couldn’t be, because they were both shorter than me.  Also, because as I pulled the phone out of their grasp, they both dropped back like they’d been burned.  Something Pitt would never have done.  He’d have wrestled me for the phone.  Probably slugged me.

One of the kids — Christ, he couldn’t be more than twenty! — looked up at me, “What is Monster Control Bureau?” he asked, in what sounded — I swear — like a Russian accent.

I looked at my phone and registered that there were a bunch of pings from Franks.  Holy Fuck.  It wasn’t just that they’d taken my phone without permission.  It was that I was going to be held responsible for the security breach.  I accessed the likelyhood of getting anywhere by telling them that they weren’t supposed to read my texts and decided that — as Earl Harbinger would put it — that dog wouldn’t hunt.  It was their country, their laws, and whoever the hell they were — my only clue was two black cloaks hung on hooks on the wall — they had taken me out of the airport and brought me here when I was utterly powerless.  Hell, for all I knew they were some sort of police, or perhaps — I eyed the black cloaks narrowly — some kind of super hero organization.  What do you mean, super heroes don’t exist?  Yeah.  Neither do monsters.

Instead, I said, as I’d learned to say in the US, if someone got hold of stuff they shouldn’t, “It’s an interactive game.”  I gave them my best, innocent baby blues.  “You know, role playing game?  Played on cell phones.  We play at being monster hunters.”

They got their heads together again, and chatted too quickly for me to catch more than one or two words.  One of the words was definitely “tourist” and I thought a whole phrase was “doesn’t know how close he came.”

I remembered the trolls and wondered if they were going to ask me if they were part of the game.  They didn’t.

One of them handed me my wallet and passport.  “Mr. Jefferson, we’re sorry you were caught in the middle of a terrorist attack on the airport.  We brought you here to receive medical care, and you can change clothes and go to your hotel.  We’ll have some vouchers for you to compensate for your experience.”

I raised my eyebrows at them.  “Medical care?” I looked around at the cell and wondered if their idea of medical care was to throw water over my head.  I wasn’t happy at their looking at my wallet and passport, and I wasn’t sure who the hell they were, so I started with the last, “Who the hell are you?”

“We’re tourist security bureau,” one of them said.  I had a feeling it was an answer on the same order of “it’s an RPG you play by phone.” It had that practiced tone, but none of the officialdom.  “When tourists get in trouble, we help.”

I wanted desperately to ask if the trouble included being overcharged for a meal.  I didn’t.  Look, there are times to be a smart ass and times not to be.  They were blowing smoke, and I didn’t know why, but I had a feeling asking wouldn’t help much.  I still felt beaten-up, as I should have been, by the big troll thing, and I really couldn’t get in a fist fight right now.  My arm hurt and felt hot like when it’s about to get infected, and though someone had tied cloth around it, it didn’t feel right at all.  And my head was swimming.  “Medical care.”

“Ah, through here,” one of the guys said, opening the door.

“This is not a jail?” I asked, as I went into a room that looked much the same as the other, save for the addition of a makeshift hospital bed, a screen, and a bunch of first aid supplies strewn on a table.  The young lady standing there — there was another black cloak hanging from the wall, I noted — was petite and dark, and rather pretty.  From what I’d seen in the country all the men looked like banditos, all the women looked like little dolls.  She smiled at me, “Mr. Jefferson,” she said.  The accent was cute on her.  “I’m a pharmacy student.  Fourth year.  I have already stitched your arm, and I’ll now take care of you.”

Take care of me she did too.  Several interesting things, besides the fact that I was getting care from a pharmacist, not a doctor: The country seemed to have no body modesty when it came to doctoring.  She had me peel down to my skivvies, and no one offered so much as a paper-modesty-gown to make me feel better. Also, she knew her stuff.  She had stitched my arm, and she now removed the makeshift bandage and put another one on.  And they had access to medicines.  I was given an antibiotic shot, pain pills, and a salve to put on my bruises, all in generic bottles with no name.

She also told me my teeth were fine, they were just a little bruised.

I noticed something while she was taking care of me.  There was a mark, just on the inside of my right arm that looked like someone had given me a shot.  I had a strong suspicion that whatever it was, it was some sort of drug which they’d used to interrogate me.  It explained the woozy feeling.  And I know what we’d have done to someone who showed up at a monster attack scene with the type  of texts on their phone like what Franks was for sure sending me.  We’d probably have shot them.

Then I thought that Portugal was a small country and subsisted largely on touristic revenues.  They couldn’t afford to shoot tourists.  But pump them full of something, interrogate them, and perhaps plant a suggestion it had mostly been a dream?  Surely they could.  It would explain the woozy feeling and the sensation that everything that had happened was long ago and far away.

I grinned at the young lady, as she moved the screen to show me my luggage and told me I could now get dressed, “And go to your hotel.  The police will be in touch with you if they need your deposition.”

“About the terrorist attack?” I asked.

She nodded.  So that too was a well-practiced thing.  “Yeah.  They killed the luggage handlers and five passengers.  So if we think you can help the police–”

“Sure,” I said.  This story hung together about as well as a spiderweb in a high wind.  But I didn’t want to cause trouble.  I just wanted to get to my hotel room and lie down.  If before or after securing the weapons I’d sent ahead, I wasn’t even sure.  The thought of a real bed was the most enticing thing just then.

“They said to give you this,” she said and handed me what looked like a book of coupons.  The front one said “Visit the port wine cellars.”  I stuffed them in my pocket without looking.

I was passed along from too-young kid to too-young kid, all of them looking at me suspiciously, and handling me with too-big-a-grin.  At the end of it, I left a large stone building, in a bustling plaza with a fountain with lions in the center of it.

Blinking in the sunlight, on the sidewalk, was the Reagan lover with the cowboy hat.  He was scratching his head, under the hat.  “Now,” he said, looking at me.  “None of that made the slightest bit of sense.  If those were terrorists, where did they come from?  Tolkienonica?”

I shrugged.  “Apparently,” I told him.  “We’re not supposed to ask questions in Mordor.”  And I hoped he didn’t ask me questions.  He was an American citizen.  I wondered if I should watch him in case he’d been bitten and changed.  I didn’t want to shoot the guy.  “And why were we in something that looked like a jail?”

He adjusted his hat.  “Oh, that I did find out,” he said.  “It was a jail.  It’s the old medieval jail.  It’s now the college of psychology.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I know.  I think it’s some cockamaime experiment, like Zimbardo back in the US.  Well, I for one am not going to think about it anymore.  I’m going to my hotel.”

Which was a brilliant idea, and I was going to my hotel too.  But as he walked away, I got my phone out of my pocket and looked at the last of Frank’s texts “We can’t get all Americans out of Portugal.  Not yet, though it might come to it.  But they’ve requested the help of the Monster Control Bureau.  This thing is off the charts. So go see how severe it is. You might as well make yourself useful.”