This week in 1776, the Continental Congress - in the words of John Adams, who had been campaigning for this for months - effectively declared independence.

To be specific, they resolved on May 15th that “It appears absolutely irreconcilable to reason and good conscience, for the people of these Colonies now to take the oaths and affirmations necessary for the support of any government under the Crown of Great-Britain; and it is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said Crown should be totally suppressed.” Therefore, they unanimously recommended that all the thirteen colonies “adopt such Government as shall in the opinion of... the People best conduce to [their] happiness and safety.”

This wasn’t independence in so many words, but it was in effect.

Independence requires new independent governments. Before this May 15th resolution, some of the states already had them, but others still needed them - and would soon get them. Congressman James Duane of New York, not yet ready for independence, asked Adams “Why all this haste?” and called this resolution “a machine for the fabrication of independence.” To that, Adams responded it was “independence itself.”

He added prophetically, in a letter to his wife two days later, that “I have Reasons to believe that no Colony, which shall assume a Government under the People, will give it up.”

For years before this, John Adams, and a few Sons of Liberty around him in Massachusetts, had been convinced that independence was necessary. However, they had not been vocal about this view, knowing that most people hadn’t been ready for it yet.

But since war had broken out in April 1775, that had changed. The people of America had been turning more and more towards independence. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in January 1776 had only accentuated that course. And that pressed for action - as James Warren1 of Massachusetts wrote to Adams in April 1776, “People can’t account for the hesitancy they observe” in Congress.

Still, that would take time. As Adams replied to Warren (on April 22), “The Management of so complicated and mighty a Machine, as the United Colonies, requires... the Patience of Job... They are advancing by slow and sure steps, to that mighty Revolution... Forced Attempts to accellerate their Motions, would have been attended with Discontent.”

Adams, and his allies in Congress, knew what they wanted. Adams had laid out a plan sometime around February 1776, including many points on the war, but also “An Alliance to be formed with France and Spain2” and “Government to be assumed in every Colony,” as well as (toward the end) a “Declaration of Independency.” But, as he declared in March in a letter to General Horatio Gates, “The success of this War depends upon a Skillfull Steerage of the political Vessell” - because at that point, the people were not ready for independence in so many words.

Adams had instead been taking the steps to act as independent. As Thomas Jefferson put it, America already had de facto independence: they were fighting a war and collecting taxes and conducting diplomacy without any outside direction. Meanwhile, Adams had already been writing extensive “Thoughts on Government,” which - for all the haste in which they’d been written - would stand for years as a monumental work. And, the military success (his letter to Gates was written just before he’d learned of the British withdrawal from Boston) and the continued fervor around Paine’s Common Sense turned attitudes more toward independence.

And then, in May, Congress was ready to recommend that the colonies “totally suppress[]” any government that was formally tied to the Crown. Further steps could be taken after that. As Adams had said in that same letter, “Each colony should establish its own Government, and then a League can be formed, between them all.”

Congress understood the meaning of this.

But those further steps would wait one more month till Congress was finally ready to consider a motion (by Adams’ close ally Richard Henry Lee3 of Virginia) to declare independence, and one more month to get the approbation of the newly-constituted state governments and actually declare independence with all thirteen states together.

The thirteen States - once colonies, now states - didn’t all act at the same time, but they did act. Some had already reconstituted themselves as independent and simply needed to pass a resolution affirming as much. Connecticut, as far as I can tell, didn’t bother to even pass that resolution, since they’d been vigorously pro-independence for a long time already. But others needed more concrete action.

Massachusetts had taken the lead, already in 1774 before the war assembling a Provincial Congress with no formal constitution at all except the authority of the people. Most states had occasional Provincial Congresses, but only in Massachusetts was it regularly meeting and conducting all the business of government.

New Hampshire, just north of Massachusetts, had followed in its footsteps and gone further. On 5 January 1776, they adopted the first written constitution in the United States without reference to Britain. While they still maintained “that we shall rejoice if such a reconciliation between us and our parent State can be effected,” they proceeded to “take up CIVIL GOVERNMENT for this colony” without any reference to British authority.

South Carolina adopted the second such written constitution on 26 March, “by common consent” “until an accommodation of the unhappy differences between Great Britain and America can be obtained” - but it contemplated maintaining itself for years, so that limit was in name only.

North Carolina had also anticipated the Continental Congress after the threatened Loyalist uprising had been suppressed. On April 12, 1776, in the famous Halifax Resolves, the North Carolina Provincial Congress authorized its Congressional delegation “to concur with the delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency.”

On 1 May, Georgia likewise wrote a new “Framework of Government.”

On 4 May, Rhode Island followed suit by deleting references to Britain from its colonial charter4. Thus amended, the charter otherwise gave them perfect self-government, so they would proceed under it until 1843.

On 6 May, Virginia’s new Convention assembled, instructed its delegates to support independence, and drew up a new plan of government starting with a stirring declaration of rights. On 15th May, they went farther and voted to urge their delegates to support full independence.

This was the situation when Congress passed its resolution: seven of the thirteen states had formally separated themselves from Britain (in green, yellow, and orange on my map), but six more (including Connecticut5) had not yet formally done so.

After Congress’s resolution, the people of the four “middle colonies” (in red) took that as a call to action.

On 15 June, Delaware voted for independence. On 18 June, Pennsylvania formed a new convention (as I’ll discuss below). Also in mid-June, New Jersey arrested their royal governor6. A few weeks later, on 2 July, New Jersey formed a new independent constitution; on 3 July, Maryland also commissioned a convention for a new constitution.

Nothing was done in days - and nothing at all in New York - but that merely explained why this long leadup to independence was needed.

“How few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children?” John Adams mused in April 1776. But, as he continued, America was now indeed doing just that.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, right outside the State House where the Continental Congress was meeting, the colonial Assembly had been firmly in Patriot hands (despite Loyalist holdouts in the backcountry, and Quakers refusing to fight the king). But, the Patriots were divided within themselves.

Before the Revolution, there had been fault lines between radicals who supported expanding the right to vote and policies favoring small farmers - in other words, fundamental change in the government - and conservatives who opposed them both. Now, the radicals also strongly supported independence; the conservatives wanted to keep seeking reconciliation.

But now, Congress’s resolution put its huge weight in favor of a fundamental change in Pennsylvania’s government. The radicals, who like all Patriots already esteemed Congress, quickly pressed forward.

On June 8th, among radical pro-independence protests in the streets of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Assembly authorized its delegates to Congress to take any measures necessary. They would not be more specific.

But that didn’t save them. On June 14th, the Assembly met for the last time.

Four days later, a “Conference of Committees” chosen by the already-radical-controlled Committees of Correspondence called for a new constitutional convention; on June 24th, they unanimously approved in advance “a vote of the Congress declaring the United Colonies free and independent states.” Still, delegate John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (who had earlier written the Olive Branch Petition), along with his fellow delegate Robert Morris7, would abstain on July 2nd. A new radical constitution would follow in September, specifically reiterating independence.

I didn’t mention New York.

That’s because it was the one state to hold back from all this process.

In New York, Loyalists were a strong force in the state and in the state legislature. The New York delegation to the Second Continental Congress had initially been sent by a Patriot convention in New York City, rather than from any all-colony legislature or Provincial Congress. A New York Provincial Congress did meet in May 1775 and complied with the Continental Congress’s requisitions, but still worked toward reconciliation with Britain.

New York City had been provisioning the British fleet offshore up to February, when Washington’s mission to fortify the city had spurred them to stop. The Third Provincial Congress meeting on May 22nd would merely continue the divide, deciding it didn’t have authority to act and referring the whole matter to a Fourth Provincial Congress that wouldn’t meet till July (after the Declaration of Independence).

New York would be the one colony to not give any new instructions to its Congressional delegation before independence. On July 2nd and 4th, when Congress voted on the Declaration of Independence, New York’s delegates had to reluctantly abstain and apologize that New York had not authorized them to vote for independence.

One state was still silent, for the time being... but twelve others had formed new governments for themselves.

American independence wasn’t a single action. One Declaration issued by a Congress in Philadelphia would not have itself done anything. Nor, at the start of the Revolution, would it even have been accepted. As Adams and Lee and Jefferson knew, it was a long process to get there. Before America could declare independence, it needed to build its governments to be ready for independence.

Nor was it merely the work of a few leaders. It was first conceived by a few leaders - such as Adams and Warren in Massachusetts, and Henry and Lee in Virginia - but for all their skill in pushing independence, it would have fallen flat had they tried to push it through on their own. Even worse, it would have sunk the Patriot cause by making them appear far more radical than most people were willing to accept. (as Warren knew full well.) Just like the Patriots in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had started acting like the government in 1774 without formally calling themselves that, the Continental Congress in 1775 and early 1776 was acting almost as independent without ever using the word.

Meanwhile, the people of America came to see the necessity of independence without any leaders needing to push them. Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense , was a brand-new immigrant unconnected to anyone in Congress. Even more so, the war in itself pushed many Americans to want to separate from Britain. The war and its suffering “have given the last stab to agonizing affection,” as Jefferson put it in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, “and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren.”

This was true not just to Jefferson and to his fellow Patriots in Congress; in fact, it’s not clear how much “agonizing affection” Jefferson or Adams or Lee still had for Britain. It was true all the more so for the common American Patriots throughout the thirteen colonies that were establishing themselves on new foundations as “free and independent states.”

At least as much as the Declaration of Independence, our independence rests on the thirteen state governments built before July 1776. Before the “authority under the said Crown” was formally thrown off in words, it was “totally suppressed” in fact. Those new state governments made independence not merely words, but an established fact.

Throughout April and May of 1776, the Patriot cause seemed triumphant. Fighting was mostly quiet. There were hardly any British forces anywhere in the Thirteen Colonies. The Patriots had driven the British out of Boston; there was no British army in the colonies apart from Governor Lord Dunmore’s small camp at Tucker’s Point in Virginia; the British effort to form an army in North Carolina out of local Tories had been defeated in detail.

Of course, this wasn’t a final victory. But for the moment, at least, the Patriots were victorious and confident. As one new Continental Army recruit, Joseph Martin of Connecticut, said, “The Americans were invincible in my opinion.”

This wouldn’t last, of course. The Royal Navy was still sitting offshore of New York City and elsewhere.

On this week in 1776 - May 6th - the first ships of the British relief fleet arrived at Quebec City. Over the next weeks, the Patriots’ siege that had lingered since their defeat on New Year’s Eve fell apart - as did the Patriots’ hold in Canada. A further British force was preparing to attack New York City.

But for the moment, the Patriots were filled with optimism - and this glowing moment paved the way for the Declaration of Independence.

After the victory at Boston, Washington and everyone else were sure that the next British strike would be at New York City. It was a guess, but a reasonable guess - New York was one of the most strategically important cities in the colonies, and it was surrounded by the staunchly Tory regions of Staten Island and Long Island1. What was more, a few Royal Navy ships were sitting offshore, and had been provisioned from the city through February.

What’s more, it was a correct guess: General Howe had indeed been planning a descent on New York City.

Washington had already sent General Charles Lee2 to prepare New York defenses in February; Lee had then been sent south, but the task was continued by General William Alexander (who styled himself “Lord Stirling” despite his claims to the earldom not being recognized by Britain). And then, as soon as Boston was won, Washington marched his army quickly from Boston to New York, leaving only a small force under General Artemas Ward3 to watch Boston.

Washington would continue south in May, to confer with Congress, while the army at New York would prepare defenses. Some New Yorkers joined in (among them Alexander Hamilton, a college student and active Patriot pamphleteer who was commissioned by the New York Provincial Congress to form an artillery company), but others remained aloof - New York, unlike Massachusetts, included many Loyalists.

Still, New Yorkers commented on how well-behaved the army was, and specifically on how the predominantly New England soldiers would regularly attend church services every Sunday.

But defending New York would be much more challenging than attacking Boston. As General Lee said, when he was briefly there to organize defenses in February, “It is so encircled with deep navigable water that whoever commands the sea must command the town.” Washington had no navy; the small boats he’d armed around Boston would be useless against an active Royal Navy detachment in the far deeper waters around New York. A Continental Navy had been launched, but it was very small and badly needed for many other missions.

What was worse, this was in many ways a microcosm of America overall. As long as Britain held the sea, they could land troops anywhere along the American coast. They would keep the initiative. Meanwhile, they could choke American trade, which - for all the Patriots’ encouragement of local manufacturing - was very significant to the American economy. And further, if Britain did send a strong army (as informed people expected, and as it indeed was sending), America would be hard-pressed to face it alone.

Several members of the Continental Congress, led by John Adams and Silas Deane, had been working to ensure that America wouldn’t be facing it alone. Since the previous year, they’d been pressing to seek foreign alliances.

In practice, that meant Britain’s longtime rival and enemy: France.

This would be difficult for the moment, since France didn’t want to be seen supporting rebels. Like most European powers, France had its own colonies and discontented subjects, and didn’t want to lend support to rebels. (This was one reason Adams was pressing to quickly declare independence: so they could win more foreign support.) Still, on March 2nd, Deane had been commissioned as envoy to France (to supplement William Lee, brother of Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, who had already been in Europe when the war broke out and lent his talents to Congress.)

Deane and Lee received a cautious but welcoming reception from many figures in the French court, especially the playwright and diplomat Beaumarchais and the foreign minister the Compte de Vergennes, who welcomed this opportunity to weaken Britain. By May 1776, they had convinced King Louis - over the objections of his finance minister Turgot, who warned that France couldn’t afford to support America4. It would stay secret - the Patriots were still officially rebels - but King Louis would start supplying America with sorely-needed ammunition. Further support - including the also-needed French Navy - would have to wait.

Congress clearly considered Washington and the Continental Army around him to be the main theater of the war, and most informed Americans agreed. Regiments from Virginia and North Carolina were going to join Washington even while Lord Dunmore was attacking Virginian plantations and the North Carolinian Loyalists were known to be raising an army.

Ultimately, I agree: Washington’s army at Boston and New York was more significant than any one other theater. It wasn’t inevitable it would prove that way; a British army actually landing in North Carolina would have made that theater much more significant, as it became when Lord Cornwallis and a British army actually did land there in 1779. But it did prove the most significant.

Still, the Continental Army would have quickly fallen apart or proved futile without the rest of America behind it. And, while the Continental Army relocated to New York, two significant events happened.

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First, on May 3rd, the British Royal Navy finally showed up off Wilmington, North Carolina. They were months behind schedule; the North Carolinian loyalists they’d been sent to meet had already been defeated in detail in February and firmly suppressed by local Patriots.

So, despite bringing 2500 troops from Ireland, all the Royal Navy could do was raid various local Patriot farms and destroy the (largely Patriot) town of Brunswick. Soon, their commanders - Admiral Henry Clinton, General Charles Cornwallis, and Admiral Peter Parker - decided that prospects in North Carolina were slim. They would go instead to South Carolina and try there.

What none of them seriously considered was going to Virginia. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, was still holding out at Tucker’s Point (west of Norfolk), at the head of a smallpox-ridden group of freed slaves. He kept urging Britain to reinforce him and urged that British success in Virginia could turn the tide of the whole Revolution.

Yet, that success was looking less and less possible. When General Clinton visited in February, he wrote that “the whole Country [was] in arms against him... I could not see the Use of his Lordship’s remaining longer there.” By late May, with the Patriots’ building fireships, he was forced to reposition himself to Gwynn’s Island; in July he would finally have to pull out of there too.

Patriot optimism was high in the South.

But more significantly and more ominously, another Royal Navy fleet finally arrived at Quebec City.

After the unsuccessful Patriot attack on New Year’s Eve, the Patriot general Benedict Arnold had continued to command a Patriot army besieging Quebec City. His army decimated by smallpox, he pleaded for reinforcements, but few came - and those that did merely fell sick themselves.

Meanwhile, Arnold and other Patriots were trying to rouse the nascent Patriot support in the rest of the Province of Canada5. Many Canadians had been expressing support - but it’s unclear how many, as they hadn’t organized any government or taken any other mass actions. Throughout the winter, the Continental Congress had sent letters of vague encouragement, but they hadn’t given them any instruction. In their defense, none of the Thirteen Colonies had needed any more clear guidance since the First Continental Congress had ordered them to set up local committees. But, this clearly wasn’t enough for Canada.

Finally, as the winter ended in April, there finally arrived a delegation from the Continental Congress - Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll of Maryland, and Samuel Chase of Maryland, accompanied by Carroll’s cousin John Carroll, a Roman Catholic priest. Their mission was to give the Canadian Patriots more definite encouragement and urging to organize a Patriot government.

This delegation could perhaps have had great success had they arrived earlier - but as it was, events intervened before they could claim any success. Worse, they distracted Arnold at the crucial time; he returned to Patriot-held Montreal to receive them, leaving his newly-arrived subordinate General John Thomas of Massachusetts in command besieging Quebec City.

Thomas had led the crucial mission to fortify the Dorchester Heights and force the British to evacuate Boston - but having only just been reassigned here, he was set up for failure. He hadn’t had time to win the confidence of the army, and he had hardly any men. “A few more than two thousand Men, & Twelve Hundred of which are unfit for Duty, with the Small Pox, &c,” he wrote.

And then, on May 6th, the Royal Navy arrived.

The people of Quebec City “half drest ran down to the Grand battery to feast their eyes with the sight of a ship of war displaying the Union flag”, wrote one British sailor. Governor Carlton immediately called for the militia to join the newly-arrived army in an attack.

But the Patriots were already retreating. General Thomas had ordered a retreat, but it was more of a rout. Even Thomas’s dinner was left “at the fire” to be found by the British. They would be saved only by the British needing to take a few weeks to themselves regroup and make sure of the allegiance of the countryside. In June, there would be an actual battle at Trois-Rivieres, but there too the Patriots would be defeated.

Thus ended the Patriots’ invasion of Canada. Its ignominious defeat provided an ill omen for New York: the Patriots could not counter British sea power. Yet, in the end, it had provided one great service to America: the British troops sent to Quebec had originally been intended for New York City. The invasion of Canada had delayed the counter-invasion of New York, and thus perhaps gave time for the Declaration of Independence.

All in all, outside Canada, the Patriots appeared successful in April and May of 1776. This wave of success was vital in building optimism and zeal towards the Declaration of Independence that July. If America could conquer the British everywhere (outside Canada), perhaps it would be safe to commit what would in British eyes be treason: to declare independence!

This seeming success would be short-lived. The British efforts in the South would be repulsed, but Canada would continue to be a disaster, and the British would soon land at New York. By early fall, British armies would be marching south from Canada and threatening in all directions from New York. The Revolution would be a long war. Had Americans known how long, they would not have been so confident.

But by the point that was clear, the success of early 1776 would have already borne its greatest fruit: independence.

There were good scenes and characters there. But - more precisely, I was looking at the beginning, where our protagonists are still in their hometown. I meant it to be a fantasy-medieval world (i.e. one whose nonmagical technology is roughly medieval level), low-magic at least in that draft, so ideally the hometown would have been something recognizably close to a real medieval village. The few-sentence outline worked; for example, my protagonists’ father was the miller, a real profession found in medieval villages.

However, rereading it, I found myself cringing at so many details. Where were the gardens? The animals? Why did the mill seem to involve so many complicated belts? How could such an out-of-the-way town support a full-time inn? At least this one character’s hoarding habits of random objects were written out after the first draft!

I hadn’t understood medieval villages in high school. What’s more, I’d totally forgotten that I hadn’t understood them back then.

Perhaps I’m overstating the case; if you’d asked me point-blank, I imagine I would’ve answered “yes, most medieval peasants owned lots of animals and kept them nearby their houses.” But I suspect a lot of my lack of understanding was in exactly that: in the questions I didn’t ask.

Or perhaps I’m still overstating the case, and if I’d written about a real medieval village I would’ve gotten it better. But I do remember that one reason I hardly ever wrote historical fiction narrative back then is that I had no idea how to answer those details, or at least I wasn’t confident I could get them right. Almost the only straight historical fiction I’ve ever written is plays, because I was (and still am) more willing to take acceptable breaks from reality when the limitations of theater require them. Straight stories or books don’t have that excuse.

The other month, Eleanor Konik talked again on her blog about learning culture through story, referring back to her old longer piece on the topic. I agree with the points she makes, but I think there’s a larger point here she’s not talking about.

Eleanor talks about understanding the cultural mythology of other cultures through fiction, and understanding different facts and incidents of the world through fiction, and sparking one’s interest in learning more through fiction. I completely agree: fiction can and should do this!

Sparking an interest in history from fiction, especially, is near to my heart.

I remember when I was a kid, I had so many books that I eventually decided to sort them by subject. As I was dividing up subjects (such as history, contemporary life, and religion), I remember that my dad noticed and asked me why I was putting both fiction and nonfiction books together in each category. At that age, I was stunned by the very question: of course (I felt), historical fiction and nonfiction history should go in the same category, because I reacted to them in the same way! I learned (I felt) just as much history, and my interest in history was whetted just as much, from the (novel) Snow Treasure as from the (nonfiction) Landmark Book: The Battle of Britain.

Less directly, I’m not confident my interest in premodern life was sparked by the Standard Fantasy Setting - both reading it and trying to write in it - but it’s definitely helped. When I tried to write the hero’s small hometown at the beginning of Gem and Crown, that raised so many questions about what details of daily life looked like. Even if I failed to answer them in my early drafts in high school, they were percolating in the back of my mind, and came to my attention again every time I reread or revised it, or even when I read another author’s take on the Standard Fantasy Setting. I’m convinced that helped motivate me to eventually dig up satisfactory answers.

(And for a lot of satisfactory answers, may I recommend Frances Joseph Gies’ Life in a Medieval Village, and Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Much of my worldbuilding has been guided by Gies; I only read Weber recently, but I expect he’ll be guiding it in the future.)

But beyond that, fiction can spark another level of understanding.

When I read about historical figures, I try to envision what was motivating them or what it might’ve been like to be living around them. When I read about life in historical times, I try to envision what it was like to actually be living there. But my imagination only goes so far, and often forgets important points.

I’m reminded of Dorothy Sayers’ preface to The Man Born To Be King, her radio-plays about the life of Jesus. After briefly discussing what different theological understandings of Jesus would imply for her plays, she points out that some of them would simply make the character of Jesus incomprehensible to the audience of the play, as a character. In other words, the process of pulling together a story helps someone realize more of what sort of person the theories might be implying. Here, the theories were theological, but I’m sure theories of history can be tested in the same way.

Of course, the author and reader needs to be paying attention. I think the form of a play helped Sayers and her hypothetical audiences, because I’ve noticed that when I’m writing a play, it forces me to pay attention to every character because I know there’ll be an individual actor trying to make sense of each character. I’ve seen some historical fiction which frames some characters as, essentially, walk-on one-dimensional roles. Those don’t help. Writers need to use their potential.

G. K. Chesterton said, “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” He was playing up the use of bad novels in learning about authors - but learning the truth about the hero, when the hero is a realistic person, is a very good thing too.

Of course, sometimes the hero isn’t a realistic person.

I’m reminded of a bad historical novel about the American Revolution I read last year, Paper Woman. The worst part of it, I thought, was that the main character was unrealistic - both in terms of not reacting to her circumstances like a realistic normal person, and in terms of not being a typical American of the Revolutionary era. The first, I could pardon for the sake of a good plot - most protagonists aren’t normal people, though most try to be less abnormal than this protagonist. The second, however, makes it fail as a historical novel.

When we’re reading about a woman in 1780 Georgia, we’re not just reading a novel about this one fictional protagonist. We’re also - whether intentionally or not - learning something about the American Revolution. Many times, I looked up from Paper Woman frustrated that what I was learning didn’t mesh with what I already knew about the Revolution. The things I was learning from that novel weren’t correct.

In other words, because historical fiction is so powerful and opens people’s eyes so much to other cultures, the writer of historical fiction has a responsibility to accurately depict what they’re writing about.

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Does this fault stories like the sequels to The Lark which have their protagonists coming to historically-unusual (or at least historically-unattested) attitudes about religion and the Reformation? Not as such. Hendry shows full well that her protagonists end up with unusual attitudes, shows how they could somewhat-realistically come about, and shows rather realistically what might ensue. Where I think they fall short of where they could be is their one-dimensional portrayals of John Knox and Francis Walsingham. Though, that might be my own sympathy toward Knox speaking - for his role in the plot, not much more is needed.

Does this fault stories like Ivanhoe which overly romanticize their era? To some extent, yes. It’s a good story - I like it - but as a historical novel, it’s less than it could’ve been. (On top of the romanticization, not merely the character of Rowena but her whole place as heir to the Saxon royal house did not exist!) I feel like Bret Devereaux criticizing the skirmish in the Two Towers movie for being unrealistic: It’s dramatic, and it’s good at being dramatic, but in ways that hold back from its historicity. There might not have been a better option to both be dramatic and realistic, but it’s still a flaw.

Still, I have to praise both Hendry and Scott for excellent portrayals of daily life in their respective eras. They got right what my high school self got very wrong.

Story has power.

I’m thinking of how much time fandoms devote to the stories they’re fascinated with - talking about them, reading about them, studying about them and their backgrounds, and more. The fandom for Eric Flint’s time-travel series 1632, as I mentioned earlier, has delved into so many details about the Thirty Years’ War as well as 1990’s West Virginia! But all this interest centered around the fictional stories of fictional characters, as well as fictionalized historical characters, in a version of that time.

I’m not saying authors have a responsibility to use that well, except perhaps out of respect for whatever historical personages they might include in their stories. But it often makes the story richer when they do. Aside from its hanging together better, it helps people appreciate better the great story of history.

West Virginia split from Virginia during the Civil War to stay with the Union - but the way it was done was surprisingly complicated.

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Forming West Virginia wasn’t a new idea. For decades, there had been hard feelings between the western and eastern regions of Virginia. The east was large plantations run by slaves and owned by wealthy planters, and its trade went to the Atlantic; the west was smaller farms run by single less-well-off families with few if any slaves, and its trade went to the Ohio. The east had the majority of the population, though, and regularly outvoted the west - and malapportioned the state legislature1 so the west was even less represented than it should have been.

In 1861, when the Virginia state legislature convened a secession convention, the west was staunchly Unionist - and knew they were about to be outvoted again.

They called one convention at the city of Wheeling. The First Wheeling Convention, of May 1861, comprised some delegates elected from Unionist parts of western Virginia and other delegates who’d simply appointed themselves. They decided that, as much as they opposed secession, it would be unwise and “triple treason” to take any definite action before secession happened. So, they decided to wait and see - and call another convention if secession passed.

The Second Wheeling Convention, in June 1861, comprised elected delegates from more counties - 32 counties in what’s now West Virginia, plus Alexandria and Fairfax Counties2 (in modern Virginia, near DC.) Most of them were convinced that Eastern and Western Virginia needed to separate, and Dennis Dorsey of Monongalia County immediately called for that - but instead, John Carlile of Harrison County convinced the Convention to take another, and more constitutional path.

The United States Constitution says, “No new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State... without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.” So, when the people of Kentucky had wished to separate from Virginia, and when the people of Maine had wished to separate from Massachusetts, the Virginia and Massachusetts state legislatures had needed to consent. When the people of northern California, much later, wanted to separate from California - California hadn’t consented, so the “State of Jefferson” never became real.

In 1861, the Virginia State Legislature was sitting in Richmond having just joined the Confederacy (which had an identical clause in its constitution), so it obviously wouldn’t consent to the Unionists of western Virginia separating.

However, Carlile had an ingenious scheme.

Since secession was unconstitutional, he argued - and done in a manner against the Virginia state constitution, furthermore - it was null and void. So, by supporting the Confederacy, all of Virginia’s current government officials had forfeited their posts. So, those elected representatives of Virginian counties who hadn’t supported the Confederacy - that is, the Wheeling Convention itself - could take up the banner of being Virginia’s government.

(And then they, as Virginia’s government, could give their own consent to form West Virginia, but that would be down the road; it wasn’t like eastern Virginia would show up and outvote them again.)

The Wheeling Convention adopted this plan on June 19th. On June 20th, they elected a Governor and other officials for what would be popularly called the “Restored Government of Virginia.” They were quickly recognized by the federal government. Their first official elections as the Restored Government of Virginia would be held the next year - but they had already been elected, so they proceeded to act as the government. And then, two months later - riding on federal recognition - the legislature of Virginia sitting at Wheeling gave their consent for the formation of the State of West Virginia. A referendum would follow in October.

West Virginia’s statehood wasn’t quite as easy as that. The new state constitution took till April 1862 to get written (by a new convention, also at Wheeling) and voted on. After that, the federal government also had to approve - and there it almost ran aground on the issues of slavery and legitimacy.

Slavery was less common in West Virginia than the east, but it was still present, so the new West Virginian constitution had left it alone. The Republicans in Congress were (fittingly) leery of admitting a new slave state, so they eventually only admitted it on the condition that the constitution provide for some form of emancipation. Senator Willey (of the Restored Government of Virginia) wrote a gradual emancipation clause. In the end it was so gradual that it freed no slaves before a new general emancipation bill was enacted in 1865 (slightly ahead of the Thirteenth Amendment), but it was enough to satisfy Lincoln and congressional Republicans.

On top of that, there were some questions about the legitimacy of the whole process. Carlile’s scheme meant that western Virginia was essentially consenting to its own separation. The Restored Government of Virginia had been recognized as sufficiently legitimate to be an emergency caretaker government, but was it sufficiently legitimate to dismember the State of Virginia? How would this feel to eastern Virginians when they came back to the Union? “I will not stultify myself by supposing that we have any warrant in the Constitution for this proceeding,” declared Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican from Pennsylvania (who nonetheless supported the bill).

But in the end, a majority of Congress, and Lincoln, bowed to the wishes of (western) Virginian Unionists. And thus the State of West Virginia came to be.

Wheeling had been the capital of Virginia; it would now be the capital of West Virginia - still the only city in the United States to have been the capital of two states.

Yet, the questions of legitimacy remain unanswered today. “Amazingly complicated,” two modern constitutional scholars called it.

What does the recognition of West Virginia tell us about this - or rather, about what story we can consistently tell about the United States?

I agree with Lincoln that the United States Constitution doesn’t have any concept of “emergency caretaker governments” for states. By a simple reading of the text, if the Restored Government legislature was competent to appoint Senators3 (and Congress did seat them), then it was competent to consent to West Virginia’s separation unless the Virginia state Constitution itself imposed higher limits (which it didn’t). Therefore, the federal government should be careful about recognizing disputed state governments at all, should there be future disputes.

This does have implications for Reconstruction, when Congress would impose much more severe limits on state governments - but that was justified under the separate clause “ The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”, so if Congress considered the Restored Government sufficiently republican, that would not inherently be a contradiction.

What’s more, what about the whole basis of Carlile’s scheme? If the Restored Government was a legitimate government, what does that mean?

There’re two options. One option would be that any popular election carries with it a mandate to be the government. That’s obviously not the case - especially since the majority of Virginia wasn’t represented at all at Wheeling. Even if it was, that option was foreclosed by Dorr’s Rebellion4.

The only other option I can see is that Carlile’s explanation is correct: Something about the secession process caused the Virginia state government to forfeit their offices. Or, at least, they were forfeitable when the Wheeling Convention put up its rival claim - postwar practice was to recognize most acts of the Confederate state governments. As the Supreme Court explicitly approved in Texas v. White (1869), “ acts, which would be valid if emanating from a lawful government must be regarded in general as valid when proceeding from an actual, though unlawful, government.” But apparently, the rival claim at Wheeling overruled this general principle.

Perhaps one could view this as an extension of the same principle by which, during the Glorious Revolution in 1689 England, the Convention Parliament self-organized even though in general a Parliament had to be summoned by the King? They justified that because there wasn’t a legitimate king at the time; similarly, could the Restored Government of Virginia be justified because there wasn’t a fully “lawful government” at the time?

Fortunately, this hasn’t happened again.

If someone did try it, I’m sure that if it led anywhere, it would lead somewhere close to war. The Wheeling Convention knew they would be bringing war, but they knew that war was coming anyway. That might not be the only reason to justify something like this - I’m not going to criticize Dorr’s Rebellion - but it’s almost the only such reason.

But, in time of fortunate peace, we can enjoy musing over the implications of the deeds done in time of war.

Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, by Eugen Weber (614 pp; 1976)

Who should read this? People interested in the lives of medieval peasants, modernization, the origins of civil society, or the development of national identity.

This lengthy and detailed work illuminated to me how much the conditions of rural French villagers in the mid-1800’s had stayed the same since the Middle Ages. We see them living in squalor, barely going beyond their village, with primitive roads and virtually no trade aside from local fairs and occasional peddlars except for those lucky enough to live on an ill-positioned rail line. Few even spoke French; local dialects and superstitions were common if not near-universal.

Weber argues the most significant period in the modernization of the French countryside was during the Third Republic, between 1870 and 1914, with its roadbuilding and school campaigns. He collects an array of stories, anecdotes, reports, and statistics to prove his thesis. But the pictures he paints are the most vivid to me.

Also, he shows how the different aspects of this peasant life were linked together - so that (for instance) when affordable lighting came, of course the evening story-circles would subside, and of course the village stories would cease to be told so regularly... though that was already happening anyway as people dropped their local dialect in favor of French.

Children of the Night: The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania, by Paul Kenyon (496 pp; 2021)

Who should read this? People looking for a story of institutional failure around autocracy.

The chapter heading quotes to this history book are from vampire stories. They feel fitting.

After a first chapter of Vlad Dracula, this modern Romanian history runs mainly from the 1892 arrival of Queen Marie in what was then an Eastern European principality newly raised to the status of a kingdom, through both World Wars and the Communist regime, to abruptly end with Ceausescu’s execution as Communism was being overthrown by mass protests. It’s a dark story, that keeps getting dark in new ways, and it ends when the first glimmers of light are just starting to show.

What kept striking me in the first half is how unhelpful the monarchy was. So many people of the royal family didn’t care about the country, or had no idea how to - and meanwhile they kept being bad moral examples in many ways. Much of Romanian politics seemed to be trying to work around the king and queen and crown prince. Overthrowing the monarchy might almost have been the one good idea the Communists had.

But then, the Communists kept showing new problems with giving any one person absolute power. Romania was in real ways the worst country of the Eastern Bloc, because Ceaușescu had fewer checks on his personal power, and he had closed off the country to a larger degree. There were no institutions or people to check him (like there had been under the monarchy)... until the people themselves rose up.

The abrupt ending frustrates me since I wanted to learn what happened next. But the story so far reads to me - though I’m not sure whether it was intentional - as a study of government institutions and the dangers of putting power in single sets of hands.

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle (218 pp; 1962)

Who should read this? People who want the sense of a rich universe and a well-rooted plot and characters.

I’d enjoyed this kids’ science fantasy as a kid, and I enjoyed it just as much on rereading it now.

The pictures L’Engle paints throughout are beautiful - from the outlandish Mrs. W’s on Earth, through the glorious planet Uriel, the Happy Medium, dark Camazotz, and warm Ixchel. The effect together gives us the sense of a rich universe - though we don’t fully understand it, but we aren’t supposed to except by intuitive harmony like with the five-dimensional tesseract itself. (The sprinkle of science is a mere sprinkle, both here and on Camazotz, but it barely pretends to be more.) This’s what came through to me most in my reread now.

And the story itself is beautiful. I’d remembered the outline but forgotten how it builds upon itself, let alone the character arcs - Meg especially, but also Charles Wallace and even their father. They take second place to the pictures, but they’re also well done and beautiful.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (280 pp; 1818)

Who should read this? People looking into the early history of the science-fiction and fantasy genre.

I started this novel for the historical significance. I’d heard at Worldcon last year how it was in real ways the first science fiction novel ever, and how it had an amazingly large cultural impact.

But when I read it, it shocked me by how different it was from my expectations. I knew that, as the meme goes, Frankenstein is not the monster (physically) but is in fact the monster after all (because he acts monstrously). But I was shocked by how little the (physical) monster is onstage in the novel, how little science fiction there is, and how much the novel focuses on Frankenstein’s feelings and shifting mood. It’s more a Gothic novel than science fiction or horror.

(And what’s more, the monster’s character is not well-developed. His philosophical analysis of life is mildly interesting, but his character is a pasting together of two very different angles. You could argue that’s intentionally inhuman, but it doesn’t feel that way.)

This actually reminds me a little of early Golden Age and pre-Golden-Age science fiction. It takes a science-fiction premise (here, the creation of the monster), and rather than building a plot on it just holds it up for us to see the consequences and builds a plot around handling the consequences. To an audience necessarily unfamiliar with a brand-new genre, this can work very well - and as we know, it did here. Future novels can define the genre’s unique tropes by building on it in new directions.

But I’m not going to recommend this book for a modern audience for more than historical interest.

That’s a universal human instinct: when something bad happens, finger someone to blame for it.

This week each year - Holy Week - Christians throughout the world commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels.

As a Christian, I’ve read and pondered the accounts many times. There’re many things that can be said about it, and have been said about it. But at the least, it is a historical account (at least presented as history), and also a story, of someone’s death.

And people have asked through the centuries: who’s to blame for his death? I’m not going to address it from a theological perspective as such here, but from a literary and historical perspective. Who can we say (from theological, historical, or literary angles) killed Jesus? I believe this is in itself a fair way of doing theology, because whatever else it might be, it is a story presented as history.

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In brief, to recount the story as given in the Gospels: The Jewish “chief priests” and Pharisees1 have been seeking to arrest Jesus; Judas, his disciple, betrays him to them2; they give him a trial and convict him (by false witnesses). But the Roman Empire doesn’t let them sentence anyone to death themselves, so they bring him to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Pilate initially wants to free him, but then surrenders to the crowd’s clamor (that the chief priests stir up) and has Jesus executed.

As a reader, there’s a lot of blame to go around. When people condemn and convict an innocent man, much less have him executed, any number of people involved can justly be blamed. Any objective witness seeing this as a news report would fault the priests and Pilate both, and probably Judas too. Ancient readers, with a greater sense of loyalty to one’s leaders and benefactors, would see no problem at all in faulting Judas (as well as everyone else); Dante for example condemned him to the deepest pit of Hell. None of this is wrong. This tension is, I believe, part of the poetry and drama of the story. Throughout history, there’ve been Christians who’ve said any and all of these things, and each of these things is correct.

But what’s more, there’s another thread of responsibility here. Even within the Passion narratives, Jesus prays that the will of God his Father will be done. Left implied - in the context of the Gospels as a whole - is that this prayer was presumably answered. So, in another sense, the responsibility for Jesus’ death falls at his own feet, and his Father’s.

So one correct answer we could give to “who killed Jesus” is “everyone involved.” That’s not wrong. But it’s a natural instinct to ask who’s more responsible, and it’s an interesting question. If we did want to pick one person to get more of the blame than the others - be it only out of curiosity - who might that be?

Many Christians throughout history have attempted to answer this. More significantly, some of us (perhaps most of us) have effectively given this an answer without fully attempting to.

The first early Christian work we see outside the New Testament is the Didache, which doesn’t mention anything on this topic.

To pick a few of the Church Fathers (as the eminent ancient theologians are called), Ignatius, Athanasius, and Augustine all mentioned this topic. There are of course many other Church Fathers - maybe some who were more influential in their day; I wish I knew more about them - but these are three whom I’ve read and greatly appreciated.

St. Ignatius, in the early second century AD, slightly later than the Didache, describes Jesus’ death significantly: Jesus “was truly, under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch, nailed to the cross for us in His flesh.” Echoing the New Testament, Ignatius doesn’t merely cite the blame but cites the beneficiaries: us. The Nicene Creed (still later) reiterates both points: “For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.”

Slightly later comes the Apostles’ Creed3. It says merely that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate” and “was crucified, died, and buried.” No other names or designations are mentioned. If any blame is intended, it goes to Pilate the governor. It might not be intended - it might be a mere chronological statement - but it’s at least implied.

St. Athanasius writes much later, in the days of Constantine. In his (magnificent) On the Incarnation, he barely mentions Pontius Pilate or humanity as a whole, and when he’s attributing it to any humans mentions “the plotting of the Jews.” However, to him, the far more significant thing is the plan of God for salvation through the death of Christ. He spends a few sentences on the Jews and their plotting; he spends multiple chapters on God’s plan and why it necessitated Christ coming as a man and condescending voluntarily to die on the Cross.

Slightly later, St. Augustine of Hippo, in his (voluminous) City of God , barely mentions the physical circumstances surrounding the death of Jesus. When he does, it’s with occasional mentions of “the Jews who slew Christ the Shepherd”. However, he’s more concerned with (as his title says) the City of God as contrasted with the city of men. It was, fundamentally, the city of men which slew Christ; the Jews who were there are only their representative.

Once we get later to the Middle Ages, we see this tradition somehow led to the medieval popular dramas which (in England) paint Pilate as a villainous sorcerer, or (in Spain) show Pilate leading the Jews of Jerusalem in defending the city against a Vespasian who’s a Christian besieging it in vengeance for Christ’s death4! Worse, during that same era, we get the recurring expressions of violence against Jews every Good Friday in vengeance for their killing Christ. Usually the violence was symbolic, it’s true, but still symbolically directed against Jews in particular - and hinting at the possibility of more.

Why they picked the Jewish people rather than Pilate or Judas or even Caiaphas the High Priest in particular - if we try to attribute sensible motives, perhaps we could say they were building off the theme of how Jesus “came to that which was his own [people], but his own did not receive him” (John 1:11). We can perhaps see Christians singling out Jews as far back as the Didache, which tells Christians not to fast on the same days as “the hypocrites”5.

But really, I feel the real reason was because of human nature. It felt more convenient to blame the Jews who were still around as an outgroup, rather than the individual High Priest who was long dead, or Pilate who was also long dead - let alone Pilate’s representative class of Italians, who were still around as prominent Christians!

Not singling out Pilate, at least, has a good reason. Jesus does tell Pilate that “he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.” It’s not clear whether he was talking about the Jewish priests or Judas - commentators disagree - but either way, he isn’t talking about the Jewish people as a whole, and Pilate isn’t the most guilty. This makes sense to our modern intuitions; someone who reluctantly gives in to injustice is guilty but less so than the person who enthusiastically enabled it.

Still a better target, though, would be to follow G. K. Chesterton who answered “what’s wrong with the world?” with “I am.”

In fact, all of the Church Fathers - Athanasius and Augustine - are more in line with the larger picture of the New Testament and indeed the prophecies of the Old. We see early on in the book of Acts, where the Apostles cite “there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus , whom You anointed , both Herod and Pontius Pilate , along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” - name-dropping a few individuals, but also expanding it to include literally all humanity - but they gathered merely “ to do whatever Your hand and Your plan had predestined to take place .”

We see the same theme in the Old Testament, when (for instance) Isaiah sings of the Suffering Servant in prophecies which Christians have universally held to be foretelling Jesus. Isaiah doesn’t emphasize the suffering that people caused the Servant, but how he stays faithful to God through that suffering, and what God will bring about despite or because of it.

To summarize all this analysis of the death of Jesus, like a historian trying to piece together what really happened - Clearly, Judas and the Jewish leaders were trying to get him killed; just as clearly, Pilate was willing to have him killed in the end. Whatever bias the writers might have, if they’re at all accurate6, all share the blame.

As a Christian, I believe the events around Jesus’ death were carefully stage-managed by God... and I suspect one of the things He was aiming for was to ensure that no one group could fairly be given the blame.

But in the face of that, people too often still insist on finding one specific group of people to blame anyway. They closed their eyes to the theme of the story as given and laid out, reinterpreting it in ways more palatable to their prejudices. Writers and prophets through the ages have kept calling people to focus on their own sin, and yet people keep wanting to direct their gaze at others.

Sometimes, around Good Friday, I’ve written short poems about the death of Jesus from different angles and different sometimes-symbolic pictures.

Once when I read through several poems from previous years together, I noticed that I’d variously blamed his death on “the king,” “Darkness” (symbolically, a dark lord; doubly-symbolically, the Devil), and on God’s plan. These are all correct, and there’re more that could be taken.

Usually, authors are advised to show, not tell. But I’ve concluded that Wilson in the third book shows things that are best left to the imagination.

He isn’t the only author to face the question of what should be shown and what should be left an abstract vision.

The first two books in the trilogy, Hundred Cupboards and Dandelion Fire, show a beautiful picture of increasing wonder. Our protagonist, an overprotected boy sent to live with his parents in small-town Kansas, sees the wonders of ice cream, cousins, and baseball - and also the wonders of mysterious magic cupboards that lead to other worlds. All of them are described in the same register, because Wilson wants us to share the wonder.

But meanwhile, evil villains from the worlds beyond the cupboards have gotten an interest in our protagonist. By the end of the second book, he and his relatives have been dragged off Earth through the cupboards.

They finally manage to find each other at the much-anticipated city of Hylfing, where they meet some even-longer-lost relatives and defeat the villain in an epic battle. We don’t see much of the city, nor should we - except that it’s withstanding siege by the villain when our protagonist first arrives there, and nobly resisting but still ready to welcome him.

All of this is very well-told. I first read it as a teenager right after Book Two had come out, and I was eagerly waiting for Book Three.

But when I got my hands on Book Three, Chestnut King, it was a letdown.

In the third book, we see more of the city... and its interaction with the Emperor (who we learn has some suzerainty over it)... and it gets conquered from within by the Emperor’s forces, who kidnap the protagonist’s family. Then it turns out the Emperor is working for that same villain who couldn’t conquer the city in Book Two. There’re other things that happen; I don’t want to diminish the plot but I don’t want to spoil it either

In other words, the enchantment for me as a reader is gone from Hylfing. What replaces it is an Emperor I don’t care for, and a conflict that isn’t as fun to read about.

I liked the trilogy as a teenager, and I like it again now, but the third book could’ve been so much better.

It would have been better to leave Hylfing unelaborated on. Wilson could’ve done that - the family could’ve been kidnapped while outside the city, perhaps lured out, perhaps through more worldgates. I think most of the plot could’ve stayed the same. But he didn’t think to do that.

This reminds me of - well, several things. We won’t even speak of Star Wars.

But one specific thing it reminds me of is how cartoonist Bill Watterson kept up a running gag in his Calvin and Hobbes cartoon about how Calvin’s favorite bedtime story is “Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie” - but he never explained anything about what that story is. He commented once that was because he was sure readers’ imagination would make it more outrageous than anything he could come up with himself.

Watterson was right, in more ways than one. Just like “Hamster Huey” can be more outrageous in the readers’ imagination, Hylfing can be more noble in the readers’ imagination. It can be more of that beyond what the individual author might think of, or be skilled enough (or allowed by the publishers) to write.

Or, it can be something that speaks more to the individual reader.

At one point I observed how Star Trek left the United Federation of Planets very vague for the longest time.

It didn’t even exist for the first several episodes, nor did Starfleet; Captain Kirk even once mentions the Enterprise was sent out by the “United Earth Space Probe Agency.” When the Federation is finally mentioned, for all the Original Series, we barely hear anything about it except that it’s a peaceful union that includes all of Earth and some aliens. At the height of the Cold War, amid racial tensions in America, that in itself would’ve meant a lot. But we don’t see more. This was more a product of the show format than anything else, but it worked out beautifully as a literary choice.

This was a good thing, because it let each viewer project all his hopes and dreams onto the Federation. One person might’ve thought of it as paleoconservative, another as New Deal liberal, another as socialist... and none of them would’ve imagined the practical politics that would inevitably go into any real government in any of these systems, or the conflicts that would inevitably come with any appearance on screen. When Roddenberry did show more of the Federation (in the Next Generation), it ended up being much more disappointing and got partially walked back in Deep Space Nine.

When the Federation was defined, it was inevitably defined one single way. The superposition of readers’ takes was collapsed to one take, which couldn’t help disappointing a lot of them. Plus, it was defined by Roddenberry, at a time when he was following his own takes on the future at the expense of the story, so it was even less than it might have been at other times. (Sometimes Roddenberry’s takes arguably had merit - such as when he vetoed Harlan Ellison’s posited underground drug market aboard the Enterprise . But in early Next Generation, Roddenberry had outrun his editors to follow his pet ideas like Heinlein did later in his own career.)

Leaving the Federation as vague as it had been early on probably wouldn’t have been the best idea. It would have foreclosed some good story ideas. But, defining it as sharply as Roddenberry did later on probably wasn’t the best idea either.

There’s a literary maxim to “show, don’t tell.” In other words, if you want the audience to know something exists or something happened in the story, show it on the page.

I’m not denying that. But sometimes, like in these examples, you don’t want to show it either. Where do you draw the line?

Let’s look at another question of “showing” versus “telling”: magic systems in fantasy stories.

“Sanderson’s First Law of Magic“ states that if an author plans to solve character or plot problems with magic, then the rules of the magic should be clearly laid out to the reader. As he states elsewhere, if the author wants to just use the magic to introduce problems or play another role in the story, then it doesn’t need to be explained. If we extrapolate this from magic to story elements in general, that would explain why it’s totally fine to leave the Federation (in the Original Series) and “Hamster Huey” both unexplained.

That’s not wrong. But I think there’s more. Magic can play an important role in the story without either solving the characters’ problems or causing them more problems. In that case, Sanderson’s First Law isn’t broken; it’s simply irrelevant.

In both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, most magic doesn’t either directly solve or directly cause problems. But it’s still vitally important (for atmosphere and worldbuilding, among other things), in ways that would be greatly shortchanged by a more mechanistic “magic system.” What’s more, the one magic central to the plot resolution - the Ring - is an exception, almost the only point of magic that is explained! Tolkien wrote well before Sanderson, but with the instinct of a good author, he followed this same First Law where it was relevant.

Similarly, if you’re trying to use elements of your setting or character backstory (or something) for elements besides plot importance - that’s when you should consider whether it’s actually wise to dig into them onscreen.

I think the question is whether something is more important as a clear element in the story, or as an abstract vision. If you’re using the magic ring’s specific magic in the story, you should probably talk about it. If it’s important how the Federation is colonizing other planets, go ahead and talk about that. But if not... and if readers’ imagination might build it up... then maybe don’t.

Or at least, don’t lay it all out. Telling more stories around the edges - like Lewis in Magician’s Nephew or Brian Jacques in Martin the Warrior, to name two very good prequels - can still leave the central abstract vision intact. Lewis tells us the origin of Narnia, but not the story of the kingdom before the White Witch came; Jacques tells us the first quest of his hero Martin but not his later great deeds.

You could say Tolkien did something similar in Silmarillion (as it was eventually published) by giving us an outline, but not a full story. Even after reading Silmarillion and the whole History of Middle-Earth, we still can’t envision a day in Doriath or Gondolin anywhere near as clearly as we can one in Hobbiton or Minas Tirith. Once again, the central abstract vision is still there for readers to build up in their own ways, and perhaps this is one way Silmarillion proved as successful as it is.

This isn’t unlike what I was musing over earlier when writing about prequels. I’d say that the central danger of prequels is a special case of this: when backstory can be something better left as an abstract vision.

Specifically, I’m reminded of what Tolkien said once about Silmarillion while he was still trying to tie it together, musing over how it might inevitably be a letdown:

Part of the attraction of [The Lord of the Rings] is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.

There are other things besides the distant past where “to go there is to destroy the magic.” The Hylfing of our yearning can be, when artfully written, the Hylfing that we run through for a couple quick chapters. But it cannot be the same Hylfing of the tawdry politics and life where the sequel starts out.

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The other month, I was reading Hitler’s First Hundred Days by Peter Fritzche. It gave me an eye-opening view of just how quickly German society changed after Hitler was given power. Hitler moved swiftly, in a matter of days, to seize and restructure things, and German society changed swiftly along with him.

It wasn’t just a response to Hitler’s individual actions (though ordinary German people did so respond), but an all-encompassing shift of attitude. It wasn’t just out of fear (though there was some of that with some people), but at least in some sense being actually willing to accept his leadership. And, all of this happened (or at least came to the fore) in a matter of days. I appreciate Fritzeche’s repeated echoes of “This was Day Three” (or Fifteen, or Thirty-Two) “of the Third Reich,” reiterating how much had changed in how little time.

By Day 2, Nazi uniforms and flags were already blanketing the country, On Day 24, the Nazi street-fighting militia was deputized as official police - giving the force of law to their regular violence. On Day 36, the Communist Party was outlawed and its leaders arrested. Many more events intervened and followed in almost-breathless succession.

Fritzche shows us how this shift happened. What he doesn’t really go into is the reasons for it. I don’t mean “why were so many people willing to put up with Hitler”; that’s obvious. (I don’t just mean the secret police; I’ll be going into more later.)

As it’s said, the past is a foreign country. Before we try to draw lessons from the past or make comparisons with it, we need to understand it - and doubly so with a place like Nazi Germany which understandably raises so much indignation. So, why did this shift happen as Hitler came to power?

People clearly didn’t just vote for Hitler as a way to keep their ordinary lives together. They totally restructured their lives around him and the Nazi view of society. What I was left wondering is, why?

Naziism isn’t really a coherent ideology.

This shouldn’t surprise us; most Nazis didn’t really care about coherent ideology. They accepted some academic ideas - including many fringe ideas such as Hanns Hörbiger’s “World Ice Theory”1 - and Hitler while in power was happy to declaim over every idea under the sun, but at its core, Naziism simply glorifies power and action rather than specific ideas. Under its umbrella, ideas (such as the World Ice Theory, or Positive Christianity2) could compete with other ideas (such as neopaganism3) in a mishmash of political infighting.

The political infighting also affected military ideas; this is how submarines and battleships and tanks ended up competing for steel and workmen, to the great harm of the Nazi war machine. Of course, this isn’t unique to Naziism - to pick on a contemporary, President Franklin D. Roosevelt also ran his executive branch in a similar way, and I think it hurt his efforts too - but the Nazis took it farther than most.

But the Nazis held some concepts much more centrally than others. One was, as you might expect, racism - but not just ordinary racism, but racism as the center of life and history; the idea that life and history were centrally defined by the struggle between different races. Another idea was that society isn’t a means for individuals to live their lives, but it’s a thing that should be organized and led by one single leader to one single purpose.

Both these concepts demand a radical change of worldview, and readiness for a change of life, in anyone who really accepts them. But most people across Germany did appear to really accept them, within the first hundred days of Hitler’s rule.

Why?

This isn’t quite the same as the related questions of “why did Hitler come to power?” and “why were the German people willing to accept him?”

Many people, at the time and later, have asked those questions. Some scholars have blamed the times, and said it happened in Germany and not elsewhere due to chance, or Germany’s recent history. Other scholars have blamed Germany’s unique path (Sonderweg) through history as a whole - a fundamental flaw in its deep social development.

Both theories have some evidence to them. There’re disturbingly authoritarian trends in the foundation Bismarck gave to the German Empire in the 1860’s-1870’s4. But if I seriously consider whether they’re the cause of Naziism, I follow the lead of Julian Jackson’s argument about the fall of France by saying “similar trends probably happened elsewhere; we just don’t remember them because there weren’t such big events afterwards.”

More recently, the Weimar Republic founded itself after World War I in a way that lent itself to large fractions of society seeing it as illegitimate. The far-left Communists and far-right Nationalists both rejected the Republic - and between them, they frequently got almost half the vote. With nearly half of voters rejecting the Republic’s legitimacy, it was no wonder political society was in an uproar. It was no wonder that President Hindenburg eventually called on Hitler, at the head of the largest far-right antirepublican party, to lead a government: by that point, he couldn’t find another option.

But let’s look deeper. Why were so many German people willing to take on the Nazi worldview so quickly?

In large part, I trace it to the same recent causes that led to Hitler gaining power. The chaos of the Weimar Republic allowed open battles in the streets between paramilitary groups linked to every party. Even the centrists had their own paramilitary - because they needed it to defend themselves!

After years of this, it was no surprise people were willing to vote the Republic away... and perhaps also no surprise they were open to the idea that society as a whole should be organized for a common purpose.

Also, more deeply, it makes sense - after this chaos, and after what they saw as the illegitimacy of the Republic - that people would look back to the last time they did have a common purpose. For many of them, that was World War I. Most German men had served in the army, and many if not most remembered it with pride. Both in the army and on the homefront, society had been organized for the war. And then, the whole war effort went down in ruinous defeat. It had been betrayed, the Nazis and other nationalists insisted, by the Republic’s founders. Regardless, if Germany could only pull together again, they could do it again - and, this time, win!

It was a compelling vision, doubtless, to someone who looked back on the war years with nostalgia and didn’t like his postwar life.

What’s more, the Weimar Republic’s huge political divides - even before the rise of the Nazis - left people aware that there was an unsettled choice between different visions for the world.

Historically, in the United States or Britain any time in the last centuries, or other countries during times of stability, most people have been aware more or less what the country is, and more or less bought into that vision for it. Whether or not someone in the 1950’s United States was happy with things, he knew how things were, was reasonably confident that (absent nuclear war) they’d stay that way, and was ready to live a life within that system. Many people (from McCarthy to the NAACP) wanted reforms, but they were reforms that would be done within the system. If someone with a radically different vision took power, that would seem like a huge change, and the new ruler would need to work hard to convince people things were worth the disruption the change caused to everyone’s life and plans.

When that isn’t so much the case in a republic, that’s a problem.

In Weimar, through most of its life, that wasn’t the case. People could see the Nationalists and Communists both rejecting the system and demanding fundamental changes. There was no republican tradition to weigh against this; even the youngest person voting in the last Weimar election could remember the Republic being first proclaimed in 19185. Change was a very real possibility to them. There was very little tradition for them to believe in. There was no reason to believe in the Republic or buy into its vision unless you really wanted to.

And, the Nazis were the ones best-prepared to capitalize on this, with their energetic vision.

To make this worse, the paramilitaries weren’t the only division between parties in the Republic. Different political parties had their own social organizations, their own bars, their own vacation sites, and more. People were used to living a lot of their lives inside a political group, and less used to interacting with outsiders. All this was already happening when the Nazis were just a tiny local party. This destroyed civic society, or channeled it inside political groups, which is also a bad thing for a republic.

And on top of that, these weren’t usually independent groups that had just attracted a politically-aligned clientele; they were branches of the organized political parties themselves. The Social Democratic tennis club in some town would be reporting up the chain to the national party organization. When the Nazis organized all life around the Nazi Party, that wasn’t an unprecedented thing to Germans.

I still struggle to imagine how swiftly people joined in as the Nazis restructured German life. These are the answers that came to me as I searched for answers, and I do think they help explain it... but they don’t fully satisfy me either.

Regardless, these do point to some danger signs. Fortunately, a lot of the signs are - if not unique to Germany - at least rare. History rarely repeats exactly. But individual aspects often do repeat... and some of these causes are likely to recur.

God willing, they won’t lead to a similar outcome again.

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This week in 1776 - March 17th - the British army and royal governor finally evacuated Boston. General Artemis Ward, on orders from General George Washington, took possession at the head of a Continental Army regiment, in the name of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

For the first time since 1768, Boston - and Massachusetts - and New England - were free of British troops. For that matter, outside of Lord Dunmore in the Chesapeake Bay, there were no British troops remaining onshore anywhere in the Thirteen Colonies. They had not yet declared independence, but - for the moment - they were free to govern themselves.

To this day, this is still celebrated in Massachusetts as Evacuation Day.

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Since May 1775, shortly after the war broke out at Lexington and Concord, the Patriots had been besieging the royal governor General Gage and the British Redcoats inside the city of Boston. Gage had departed that fall, but his second-in-command General Howe remained under siege. There had been periodic skirmishing, but since the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, there had been no pitched battle. The British army inside numbered about 9,000; the Patriots outside had numbered 16,000 after Bunker Hill but after the new year had decreased to about 10,000.

General Washington, who had arrived to take command (of what was becoming the Continental Army) shortly after Bunker Hill, had wanted to attack. In September 1775, and again in January and February 1776, he argued in his councils of war for a pitched attack on the Redcoat lines. “A stroke, well aim’d at this critical juncture,” he pressed, “might put a final end to the War.” However, his staff - especially General Horatio Gates - rejected the argument each time, arguing that the ill-trained Patriot army wouldn’t be able to stand up in an assault, and that a defeat would be disastrous for the Patriot cause.

To Washington’s great credit, he accepted his subordinates’ insistence. He was crestfallen, but he gave in. “Behold!” he wrote to his aide-de-camp Joseph Reed, “Though we had been waiting all the year for this favorable event, the enterprise was thought too dangerous!” There would be no pitched battle around Boston.

Washington would continue to gather a talented staff. Many generals who had been picked out for it would continue to be notable throughout the war - John Sullivan at Trenton in late 1776, Horatio Gates at Saratoga in 1777, Nathanael Greene in the South from 1780 up to Yorktown, and many more. Some of them would try to unseat Washington from his glory (most notably Gates), but Washington kept benefitting from their advice.

Here at Boston, Washington was flat-out wrong; his staff were right. The British fortifications were much stronger than Washington had known. When he inspected them after the British evacuated, he admitted they were “amazingly strong” and “almost impregnable.”

The plan that Washington’s staff came up with was to threaten Boston - and hopefully draw the British out. They would fortify the Dorchester Heights south of the city, and place cannon there from which they could bombard the city and the Royal Navy ships in the harbor, in safety because the naval guns couldn’t elevate that high. Howe had repeatedly sworn that he would “sally forth” if the Patriots tried to occupy the Dorchester Heights, and spies had brought word of Howe’s pledge to Washington and his council.

Fortunately, the Continental Army now had on hand the cannon they needed for that. Back in the fall of 1775, Colonel Henry Knox - a 25-year-old Patriot bookseller from Boston, who had taught himself gunnery and tactics and engineering from reading his books - had come to Washington confident he could bring the heavy cannon captured at Fort Ticonderoga all the way across New England to the lines around Boston. Washington agreed at once.

Knox set out on November 16th; on January 24th, he returned with the cannon. It had been an epic journey across frozen New England, rowing down Lake George before the ice set in, cutting wood for sledges, retrieving cannon that had sunk in rivers, and hauling them up and down hills. But he had done it.

“The Noble Train of Artillery,” Knox called it. He, in turn, was dubbed “Knox the Ox.”

Washington, recognizing Knox’s skill and resourcefulness, appointed him chief of artillery.1

The army was ready.

Unbeknownst to Washington or his council, the British had been hoping for months to evacuate Boston.

As General Howe had put it in June, around the time of Bunker Hill, “The only use is its Harbour... In all other respects its [sic] the worst place either to act Offensively from, or defensively.” The geography of New England fields, and the hostile populace and organized Patriot government, made it almost impossible to launch any campaign from Boston - as Gage had found at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775.

The British General Clinton summed up the conclusion later that fall, as General Washington was sealing up the harbor with his small boats: “The disadvantages of our staying here are many and great... We shall, in the course of a long winter, moulder away to nothing.”

Another city felt much more promising to the British and Loyalists: New York City. Gage had mentioned it to London on June 12th, before Bunker Hill; by August, all the British agreed it would be better to base their army there. New York had a reputation of being much more Loyalist than anywhere in New England, the harbor was much more open, and holding the Hudson River valley would split New England from the other colonies.

The problem was transportation. Too few boats were available to relocate the army and supplies, to mention nothing of the Massachusetts Loyalists who’d fled to Boston, for whom Howe (with good reason) felt responsible.

So, Howe and the British army stayed in Boston, waiting, as Washington and the Patriot army waited impatiently outside. Howe was confident that any attack would be easy to repel - in fact, he was rather hoping that Washington would attack.

Washington’s council’s plan to occupy the Dorchester Heights was still very risky.

This was exactly what had been tried at Bunker Hill - and first the Patriots had gone to the wrong hill, and then the British had attacked before their fortifications were finished or properly manned. This time, Washington gave orders to construct as much of the fortifications as possible in advance, and drag them up the Heights by oxen in one single night.

The night to put up the fortifications, March 4th, was unseasonably mild. “A finer for working could not have been taken,” wrote Reverend William Gordon. “It was hazy below [the Heights] so that our people could not be seen, though it was a bright moonlight above on the hills.” 4,000 soldiers (of a total of roughly 10,000) paraded silently up there to work and guard the work. Patriot General Heath summed up, “Perhaps there never was so much work done in so short a period of time.”

It went off perfectly.

About 10 PM, one British Lieutenant-Colonel reported that the “rebels were at work on the Dorchester Heights,” but Brigadier-General Francis Smith2 chose to ignore it. So, the Redcoats didn’t have the least idea until they woke to see fortifications already in place on the heights. One officer called it, “ an expedition equal to that of the Genii belonging to Aladdin’s wonderful lamp.” The British engineering commander estimated that their “most astonishing night’s work” must have required at least 15,000 men - not realizing Washington had pulled it off with just 4,000.

Howe ordered a bombardment of the Dorchester Heights. But, the ships could not raise their guns sufficiently, so - even aside from the range - it was harmless.

He then ordered an attack at nightfall that same day (the 5th), even though his officers thought it madness to assault such well-prepared fortifications without artillery cover. As an American watching the troops embark put it, “they looked in general pale and dejected, and said to one another it would be another Bunker Hill or worse.” And so it would have been.

The Patriots thought the same; as Washington put it after inspecting their lines, he “never saw spirits higher.”

But that night, “the wind blew almost a hurricane.” Two of the British troop transports carrying soldiers to attack the Heights were blown ashore. As General Heath put it, “kind Heaven” had prevented a battle.

The next morning (the 6th), Howe called off the attack and ordered preparations to evacuate Boston.

In a few days, the tide had turned. Howe had been ready to reposition out of Boston, but now he was fleeing under threat of bombardment. The Patriots - Washington and his council - had won a victory. It was a much larger victory than Lexington and Concord, and one of a different sort: they could not merely ambush a British column and drive them back behind their fortifications; they could outmaneuver the British fortifications, defeat an army, and seize a whole city.

“The British were completely disgraced,” said the New York Constitutional Gazette . The news of the disgrace indeed did thunder in Parliament - and elsewhere as well, where the first American mission would soon arrive on the shores of France.

On one level, this was a victory for General Washington. But on another level, it wasn’t just Washington. Washington had won because he had listened to his officers when they said a direct attack would be unwise, and because he had listened to the 25-year-old bookseller who had a plan to bring heavy cannons. It was a victory for the Republic: the United States of America.

On Friday, March 8th, the selectmen of Boston - who had been effectively imprisoned in the city, along with other Patriots - came out bearing a letter from General Howe saying he had “no intention of destroying the town” if he was allowed to evacuate in peace. Howe didn’t address Washington, as he refused to recognize rebel ranks; Washington, conscious of his dignity, thus made no reply.3 But he did forbear and let Howe depart in peace.

Or rather, he departed in great confusion. There were barely enough transports - 120 ships, crowded with almost 9,000 troops, 1000 dependents, and 1,100 Loyalists who had managed to find a place on board to an undisclosed destination. Contrary winds kept them in place until the 17th, but then - with one final salute - they finally set sail.

Washington declined the honor of leading the triumphal entry into Boston. He gave the honor to General Artemis Ward4, who had commanded the Massachusetts army that had started the war before Congress had made it the Continental Army and appointed Washington to command.

Howe had hoped to reposition to attack New York City. However, his fleet was insufficient for that. Reluctantly, he went to the one friendly destination available: Halifax, Nova Scotia. There were only two friendly ports available in North America, and the other - Quebec City - was still iced in and still besieged by a Patriot army.

But Howe was determined to attack New York anyway, as soon as the long-hoped-for reinforcements from Britain arrived.

Shortly, Washington would conclude the same thing and move to New York to await the British attack.

Thank you to all my 1100+ loyal subscribers, my followers who aren’t included in that number, all my readers, and all my commenters. I say it every time, because it’s still true: you’re the ones who keep me writing post after post every week.

This next year, I’m definitely continuing my American Revolution series. We’re building up now to the thunderous moment of the Declaration of Independence, but the Revolution will continue for many more years. I definitely plan to still be here chronicling it month after month, all the way till Yorktown if not the Treaty of Paris.

I have the next draft written, and plans for more.

Also, I’m planning to attend Worldcon again! Once more, I have the right to nominate titles for the Hugo Awards.

Unlike last year, I’ve read a few eligible entries for the “Best Novel” category: Incandescent, Mad Sisters of Esi, and Winter of the Dollhouse. (Mad Sisters of Esi was originally published in India a few years ago, but I believe it was only published in the United States last year, which makes it eligible.) I’m happy to nominate the first two... and I’m willing to nominate all three.

EDIT 14 March: I’d forgotten that A Far Better Thing was also published in 2025! I’m definitely nominating that; it’s the favorite of my four nominations.

However, this does leave voids in all the other categories! Here are the rules; if you have suggestions - especially for short stories which I might be more able to read before nominations close on March 28 - please let me know!

Looking forward to another six months, and more! I have several more drafts written, and plans for more posts.

Also, I mentioned in the last blogiversary post that I had some fiction ideas... I’ve started a few of them, and liked one enough to keep going. Hopefully it’ll be finished within the next six months!

Please, leave some comments here - I’m hoping to hear more of what you like about my posts, things you’re hoping to hear more about, what brought you here, or anything else!

Perfecting Parliament, by Roger D. Congeleton (670 pp; 2010)

Who should read this? People interested in how governments are formed and how they change themselves.

Congeleton calls this a sociology book; I agree it’s very much from a sociology perspective, but I disagree and file it as history.

His thesis is that countries move toward more democratic governments not due to revolution, or to class conflict, but to deal-making between persons and groups with political agency at times when changing circumstances mean everyone can be better off with a new division of gains from “trade” - i.e. renegotiating the political system. The first and last several chapters were highly abstract, trying to prove this in the abstract, with quasi-mathematical symbols at great length. I admit, I skimmed those.

But in the middle of the book, he goes over the history of different countries in detail to explain how most every step of their democratization was due to negotiation. As he points out, even the English Civil War was ultimately resolved more or less peacefully, because the side that’d won through force of arms could not maintain their victory. To prove his case, we get detailed histories of government change in England, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Japan, and the United States. About half the histories were delightfully new to me - I knew very little about Sweden, and less than I wanted about Japan or Holland. This part of the book I liked.

Congeleton seems to have at least half proven his case: democratization often does happen in stages, by negotiation.

West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire, by Kevin Waite (384 pp; 2021)

Who should read this? People looking for a starting list of some things the antebellum Southern planters got up to in the West.

This’s a history of the antebellum South’s dream and efforts to expand the slavery system to what’s now the American Southwest. They had some success, Waite shows: I hadn’t realized how New Mexico and Utah Territories actually enacted slave codes, nor how a biased court system effectively nullified California’s free soil laws in many cases, nor how well-established peonage was in New Mexico.

But Waite’s book is short enough on numbers and percentages that I was left wondering how successful they were outside the statute-books. Yes, there were some slaves in New Mexico, Utah, and California, which is very sad... but the only numbers he quotes are two-digit or occasionally low three-digit.

Could there have been more, without the Civil War? Perhaps... but perhaps not. The on-the-ground opposition in California from miners who didn’t like competition makes me doubt it there. Could the peonage system of New Mexico have turned uglier? Perhaps... but Waite doesn’t go into any detail.

Despite the new information it offers, this book ends up being too thick on denunciations and too short on facts. This means I have to mentally flag most conclusions it came to as “tentative”. New Mexico’s slave code (for example) was indubitably real, but I still can’t say what things looked like on the ground outside the handful of farms Waite specifically names. Maybe he’s absolutely warranted - but he hasn’t shown that.

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh (416 pp; 2025)

Who should read this? Fantasy fans who want to explore new aspects of the magical school trope, and who don’t mind romance.

At last, a magical school book focusing on the teachers!

The reviewers call this dark academia; it isn’t.  They also talk about how this emphasizes the grinding mundanity of school life; that’s quite correct.  The first scene has our protagonist filling out a safety form for a demon-summoning!  When I was gushing to a friend about this book, he asked what magic can do in this world, and I had to admit it isn’t clear. That isn’t what matters to the school procedural that’s the core of this story.

This new angle on magical schools drew me in, and it kept me reading even when the exciting magical fight and fun school procedure gave way to too much romance.  Though, the end ties it nicely back to the school... but I was chewing for a while on how the ending symbolically ties leaving the school (even as a teacher) to maturity.

This’s set in something very close to the real world; the school feels like a posh British traditional boarding school where - for all the current staff’s expressed postmodernism - they’re still very conscious of themselves as the heirs to school tradition even if they pretend not to care about it.  What they absolutely do care about is the students; I loved how that showed up in magically-significant ways throughout the book.

It was a very interesting atmosphere to chew on, kept me reading despite the too much romance, and I might take inspiration from here if I ever do write about a magical school.

House in November, by Keith Laumer (117 pp; 1970)

Who should read this? People who like speculative-fiction about mysterious changes to the world, and who are willing to read it for the atmosphere.

Our protagonist wakes up in a suddenly-changed family and town. Everyone has strange new jobs in a suddenly-appeared tower; they remember things he doesn’t; his eldest daughter has suddenly disappeared and everyone else has forgotten her... and strange new people have appeared. Is it aliens? A foreign invasion? Hallucinations?

I enjoyed the mysterious quest Laumer takes us on to find out what’s really happening, amid a world suddenly gone strange. The actual answer almost befits the quest. Unfortunately, after we learn the answer, the rest of the book feels anticlimactic. We barely get to interact with the strange world anymore; things are dealt with far too quickly - and the answers to some subsidiary questions feel hollow.

Someone should take this premise - with or without the precise answer Laumer gives - and tell it even better.

He’s not wrong. I enjoy fanfiction too - both reading it and occasionally writing it. But, I think that his short blog post conflates several different aspects of fanfiction which we usually think of together but which can be separate.

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Say you find a story online, by a pseudonymous author, about someone’s adventures in Middle-Earth or Hogwarts. It’s written with bad grammar, and the characters borrowed from Tolkien or Rowling aren’t characterized well. That’s clearly fanfiction. It qualifies by just about any standard. It’s the central example.

But to tease apart the different aspects of fanfiction, we need a more specific definition of fanfiction.

The definition David Friedman gives is “stories set in a fictional world created by another author, often using his characters”. That’s one fair definition; it clearly includes the central example. You can say a lot of things about it - as David Friedman does, such as asking whether using someone else’s world is less of an accomplishment than making your own? (Aptly, he points out that published authors often essentially do the same with things like the Standard Fantasy Setting.)

But this definition also throws in a lot of other things. By this standard, the story I wrote the other year about King Arthur’s knights is also fanfiction: I was setting it in the world of the Arthurian mythos, using some characters I’d borrowed from the medieval minstrels. By this standard, the medieval minstrels themselves were writing fanfiction of the previous minstrels’ songs, all the way back to the Welsh Triads! By this standard, Shakespeare was also writing fanfiction since other writers had already written plays about Hamlet and stories about Romeo and Juliet, as were just about all of his contemporaries.

It’s perfectly reasonable to say that all those are fanfiction. I’ve seen a lot of defenses of fanfiction that do say that. But if you’re trying to evaluate what people say about modern fanfiction, this’s too broad a category.

Let’s look at another story.

Earlier this year, I read a Diane Duane Star Trek tie-in novel ( My Enemy, My Ally , the first of her famous Rihannsu series - I recommend it if you like Star Trek stories.) It’s a work set in someone else’s fictional universe, using their characters. It doesn’t define canon; other works totally ignore what she said about the Romulans. Is it fanfiction? By David Friedman’s definition, yes.

It would, indeed, be reasonable to call this fanfiction. But on the other hand, it was written by a professional author, professionally edited (and very well so), and commercially published with the permission of Paramount. Nobody would actually call this fanfiction unless they’re trying to make a point. And when people are trying to make a point with it, it feels like they’re stretching things. If you’re trying to evaluate what people say about modern fanfiction, you shouldn’t be thinking of books like this.

But then, let’s look at another story - several other stories, in fact. It’s an open secret that Naomi Novik, a published fantasy author and cofounder of the fanfiction site Archive Of Our Own, writes fanfiction there of other modern authors’ works. I’m not linking her profile because she’s asked that her identities not be publicly linked - but I’ve found it and read some of her fanfic, and it is indeed things that if any other author wrote them would be central examples of fanfiction.

If you’re trying to define fanfiction as something written by amateurs, this wouldn’t be considered fanfiction. If she’s used editors for her fanfic, she isn’t telling. But it’s very well-written, as you would expect from a published author of good books.

If you want to draw a line between Novik’s stories and Duane’s, you can’t draw it based on anything in the stories themselves.

Let’s look at another story I wrote.

When I was a very young kid, when I’d barely even seen the Internet, I wrote a very short story about my self-insert having an adventure on the Starship Enterprise. I didn’t even consider giving it to anyone else except my parents, let alone posting it online. Was this fanfiction?

By a lot of definitions, absolutely. It was a story set in the fictional world of Star Trek , using some of their characters. It was even in a genre of story that’s frequently seen in online fanfiction. My very vague memories might even suggest comparisons to other self-insert stories. It’s perfectly reasonable to say I was writing fanfiction in elementary school.

But - I didn’t even know fanfiction was a thing online. I wasn’t part of that culture. If you’re trying to say things about modern fanfiction as a whole, you shouldn’t be looking at me as a kid or other kids like me.

In short, fanfiction isn’t a single category. Every specific set of criteria you can give for “fanfiction” will either rule in or out some arguable or atypical works. When David Friedman talks about “fanfiction,” he’s using a definition that sweeps in all of my examples - but does he really intend to be talking about a category that includes Shakespeare, or professionally-published novels, or something written by a seven-year-old?

You could argue that Friedman was just careless in his definition, but any other definition is going to be similarly debatable.

To Friedman’s credit, he doesn’t major on any of these arguable examples in defense of fanfiction; he spends most of his post talking about the more central sorts of fanfiction people usually think of. But because fanfiction is so amorphous, his arguments don’t clearly apply to every sort of fanfiction.

For example, he discusses whether fanfiction violates the author’s rights. Well, Duane’s arguable-fanfiction was published by Star Trek‘s own producers. Other fanfiction (some I’ve read myself!) provides meaningful commentary on the author’s work. But still other fanfiction (some I’ve read myself!) merely rewrites the author’s original work with a couple changes; if anything violates their rights it’s this.

Perhaps I’m nitpicking here. But my argument is that these nits matter. Because fanfiction is a multilayered category, it’s hard to say anything about “fanfiction” as such. It’s even harder than “published novels”, where at least the comparatively-small number of publishers enforce some standards.

For another example, Friedman discusses whether fanfiction is “free-riding” on other authors’ worldbuilding. Well, there’s some that is; I’ve read some fanfic that just lazily repeat the original authors’ worldbuilding or makes random changes without apparent meaning. There’s some that isn’t; I’ve read some extensive and detailed alternate-universe fanfic. And aside from that, a fanfic writer usually tries to be consistent (on some level) with the original work’s world, which is a different sort of challenge.

Friedman does make good arguments about much fanfiction... but they don’t apply to all fanfiction.

To extend what Friedman says near the beginning of his post, if you want to talk about fanfiction, you first need to find the authors and types of fanfiction you want to talk about. In other words, you need to specify what sort of things under the amorphous umbrella of “fanfiction” you want to talk about.

But perhaps you don’t want to be so specific. Sometimes you want to say something about the central examples of “fanfiction”, gesturing vaguely and generally.

I think the most cohesive thing you can say about fanfiction as most people think of it is to talk about it as a social phenomenon.

Fanfiction shouldn’t be considered a specific type of story so much as the stories (whatever sort they are) put out by this online social group. That includes Naomi Novak because she’s writing in that community (and helped found it), but not my seven-year-old self or William Shakespeare because we weren’t. (My seventeen-year-old self who had just started looking at that community is more arguable.)

Whether it includes Diane Duane is a question to be answered by looking at how she wrote, rather than what she wrote. And what’s more, I think that’s the right question to ask.

Whether Duane’s (very good) Star Trek novels technically check off enough criteria to count as fanfiction is a matter of how you define those criteria; that’s not an interesting question because it’s not one people are actually using for any purpose except box-checking. Whether she was connected to the Star Trek fanfic community is a question I don’t know, but it’s a more objective question that will give you a more interesting and useful answer.

I agree with David Friedman’s defense of fanfiction written works, by his definition. What’s more, it applies just as well to fanfiction as a social phenomenon. The stories put out by the fanfic-writers social group meet his defense.

Many of the “virtues of fanfiction” (as Friedman puts it) are present in some of their work. They’re also found in not-centrally-fanfiction works, reinforcing that any non-social definition of “fanfiction” is vague, and also that those virtues are indeed good things.

Most of the works put out by the social group of fanfic writers, indeed, are trash. There’s even a higher percentage of trash among fanfic than among published works, because for all their flaws publishers are filtering out the bottom tier of quality.

But, yes, there are some gems - and readers should find those gems.

Two hundred fifty years ago this week, on 27 February 1776, the Loyalist uprising in North Carolina was decisively defeated at the Battle of Moores Creek Bridge. Together with the defeat of Dunmore in December, this cemented Patriot control of the South, ending the ill-scheduled British plan that would have seized it back.

Like in Virginia, Patriot sentiment in North Carolina came to a head after Lexington and Concord. A Provincial Congress had already been openly meeting in New Bern, mere blocks from where the royal governor Josiah Martin was residing. County committees were also very daring: on May 31st, the Mecklenburg County Committee of Safety declared “all Laws...derived from the Authority of the King or Parliament, are annulled and vacated”1. The royal government had no men or supplies - even the small amount of ordnance at the governor’s mansion vanished in early June.

On June 2nd, Governor Martin fled his mansion to Fort Johnson near Wilmington, in fear for his life. Shortly after, he fled to a Royal Navy ship just offshore - in time to watch the Patriots burn the fort. Just like in Massachusetts, the Patriots had seized control of the colony; a Provincial Congress met at Hillsboro on August 20th to organize their new government. And unlike in Massachusetts, there was no Redcoat army on the scene.

Meanwhile, Governor Martin wrote to London asking for arms and ammunition to arm local Loyalists, whom he was convinced were a majority of the colony. With support from a British fleet - and regular soldiers landed by the fleet - he was convinced he could take back North Carolina.

The government in London agreed this was a promising idea, and sent Lieutenant Colonel Donald MacDonald to recruit Scottish settlers in North Carolina for the “Royal Highlands Regiment”, as well as other Loyalists. They began leisurely fitting out a fleet and arranging for a new Irish regiment to be sent to North Carolina that winter. But, they didn’t treat it urgently. The schedule of course slipped - the army wasn’t ready for a war - but they decided that could be handled. After all, the Patriots would still be there when they got there.

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Unfortunately for Martin’s (and London’s) plan, the Loyalists were more on-schedule.

Many North Carolinians were Loyalists. This was especially true of the recent Scottish settlers in the Piedmont, many of whom had come to North Carolina after the Jacobite uprising in Scotland and been required to swear allegiance to King George. (Among them was Flora MacDonald, who’d famously masterminded Bonne Prince Charlie’s escape.) Even those who’d previously been Jacobites now took their oath very seriously. Many of them were eager to take up arms for the King, and in December 1775, Martin’s messenger reported to him 6,000 were ready.

Martin duly sent out orders for them to march and seize the town of Brunswick2 by February 15th, 1776. According to schedule, the Royal Navy would soon be there to meet them.

Hundreds came, many with traditional Scottish kilts, bagpipes, and swords that were now banned in Scotland itself. But, fewer came than expected, and more slowly than expected. In part it was due to a shortage of arms (like in Massachusetts, the Patriots had seized most local weapons.)

But more Loyalists held back because there wasn’t any British support on the scene except for MacDonald himself. Many Loyalists would be happy to join a British army already there; they were more reluctant to take up arms without one present. Still, perhaps 1400-2000 gathered at Cross Creek (modern Fayetteville3) on the 15th, with arms for maybe 700.

The Patriots heard of this gathering just a few days before it happened - but that was long enough. On the 15th, the same day the Loyalists gathered at Cross Creek, the Patriot Colonel James Moore marched north from Wilmington at the head of 650 men of the 1st North Carolina Continental Regiment to suppress this “insurrection” or at least block them from the sea. Moore was a veteran of the French and Indian War living northwest of Wilmington who had helped organize the Provincial Congress. The militia from the surrounding southeastern counties flocked to join him, or harry the Loyalists, day by day.

On the 18th, MacDonald ordered his still-unready and understrength Loyalist force to march east. He hoped to delay any battle until he could meet the Regulars he was sure would be waiting for him on the coast. But, Moore was already in his way - by then with 1100 men, all well-armed, with more joining regularly.

After a week’s marching and countermarching through the thick wet forest amid heavy rain, more and more Loyalists slipped away, and MacDonald himself fell sick. And finally, on the 26th, a group of the Patriot militia (Moore himself was not present) blocked the road toward Brunswick and Wilmington in front of them, at Moore’s Creek Bridge.

It was a brief early-morning battle. The Loyalists divided into two columns to advance on an abandoned Patriot camp north of the river; the right wing saw the camp was abandoned and fell back in confusion, while the left wing charged the bridge. The first charge was, indeed, armed only with swords - Scottish tradition coming back due to a shortage of guns. The Patriots’ fire was swift and effective, driving back the Loyalists’ three columns.

Only a few died - perhaps 50 Loyalists and one Patriot - but after mere minutes, the Loyalists fled in panic. Many never even tried to rejoin their units but merely ran home. Even among those who tried, a witness wrote, “ the Men were not to be keeped together and that the Officers had no authority over the Men.” A council of war quickly concluded that the Patriots could not be dislodged, it was hopeless to try to contact Governor Martin, and “it was needless to persist any longer in endeavoring to keep the Army together.”

As the small band who remained together retreated, a mere few miles away at Black Mingo Creek, a band of Patriot militia surrounded them and demanded their surrender. MacDonald insisted on formally handing over his sword, which they accepted.4

Moore, the Patriot commander, had arrived at Moores Creek Bridge a few hours after sunrise - but the battle was already won5.

With that anticlimax, the Loyalist uprising of North Carolina was ended. The first ships of the British fleet would not arrive for another month.

Thus ended the British scheme to reclaim the South. Loyalists had waited too long and let the Patriots seize the government; now they had gathered their strength both too late and too early. Only once again would they be a sizeable military force.

When a Royal Navy detachment from Boston did show up off the North Carolinian coast, on March 12, they found they were a few weeks too late. No help was waiting for them on the shore. The larger Navy flotilla and troops from Britain itself wouldn’t arrive until May - far too late. In the end, they sailed off for a failed attack on Charleston, South Carolina, and then to New York City. Governor Josiah Martin of North Carolina would go with them, never to return.

If the British fleet had arrived early, or the Loyalists had been more patient, would things have gone differently? It’s possible, if everything had gone perfectly. In reality, though, the Loyalists were inland and the fleet would have been on the coast, with the Patriots in-between. Marching British regiments through solidly-Patriot territory would have been difficult, as General Gage had found in Massachusetts. But, London had refused to believe Gage then, and their North Carolina plan continued to ignore that peril. So, even if the fleet had arrived on time, things still might have ended the same.

The British would return to the South later in the Revolution, but only in 1780. Then - as the British General Cornwallis marched into North Carolina - the Loyalists would finally rise again. But by that time, it would be too late to impact the Revolution on such a grand scale.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in America, other significant events were happening.

The first expedition of the Continental Navy set out this month, sailing out of Philadelphia to capture military supplies from the British-held island of New Providence in the Bahamas. Commodore Ezek Hopkins, an experienced privateer and Patriot from Rhode Island, commanded; John Paul Jones (who would later become famous) commanded the USS Alfred under him and had the honor of first hoisting the Continental Flag on a naval ship. The expedition would capture much-needed stores, as well as capturing two British naval ships on the way back in April.

In Virginia, the British royal governor Lord Dunmore continued to lurk offshore of Norfolk and raid Patriot-owned plantations with his “Royal Ethiopian Regiment” recruited from freed slaves. He had been hoping the British forces sent to the Carolinas would be sent to support him instead. Without more support, though - and with smallpox starting to spread among his men - he was reconsidering his plans.

In Canada, the Patriots’ Northern Army, commanded by Benedict Arnold, still camped outside British-held Quebec City while suffering from smallpox. After their defeat on New Year’s Eve, and many troops going home, they needed reinforcements to have any hope of seizing the city. Some reinforcements were coming, piecemeal. However, many of the reinforcements fell sick with smallpox too, as soon as they arrived. (Most colonists hadn’t had smallpox before - it usually wasn’t present in North America outside Philadelphia - so they were vulnerable6.) So, Arnold’s effective strength remained low.

In Boston, still occupied by the British Army and under siege by George Washington, conditions were harsh. Food was scarce, thanks to the siege. The British commander, General Howe, refused to let anyone leave the city, for fear that if all the Patriots left then Washington would be more willing to destroy the city. By this time, Washington also refused to let anyone leave, for fear that Howe would intentionally spread smallpox into the Continental lines.

But, there was finally hope to end the siege. A young Continental officer named Henry Knox - a bookseller from Boston, who had sneaked out of the city immediately after Lexington and Concord and volunteered for the Continental Army - had managed to bring the cannons captured at Fort Ticonderoga down to the Continental lines outside Boston. Finally, Washington had the firepower he needed to actually bombard the city. Events would quickly start moving, and I’ll talk more about that next month.

I have fond memories of these small paperbacks, sized to sort of fit in a pocket, lining my dad’s bookshelves, mostly science fiction and fantasy but some history and other genres too, stacked double-deep because they were small enough and Dad had enough books that he needed to stack them that thick. They’re what introduced me to Golden Age science fiction, and many other things too.

I have them lining my own bookshelves too, mostly snatched up from the local secondhand bookstores. They’re great, because they’re cheap and available. I frequent the secondhand bookstores so much that I hadn’t noticed any risk to them until this article.

But now that I’m thinking about it - yes, I haven’t seen them sold lately outside the secondhand market.

As the articles say, the mass market paperback brought reading to the masses. It was cheap, in an era before many cheap luxuries. It was the book counterpart of the tabloids and the pulp magazines, in the sense that it was printed primarily to be affordable. This had its flaws - which are now what the word “tabloid” brings up in people’s minds, and were what the word “pulp” brought up at the time - but it also had great benefits: people were reading. All the flaws were designed to help push people to read it.

From one point of view, this was an epitome of capitalism. Everything was designed to chase sales. And from another point of view, it was an epitome of advertising: people were being pushed into reading. As economists would say, this was a positive externality of the capitalist market. For all its flaws, it was helping bring print - from newspapers to myriads of mass market paperbacks - to the masses. And the remnants of that age are what keep them in the secondhand bookstores today.

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What the Publishers Weekly article doesn’t go into, and the New York Times article barely does, was how this also promoted niche genres. Modern science fiction and fantasy started with pulp magazines (like Astounding) around 1930, because nobody thought there would be a market for it in higher-cost magazines. And, indeed, many science fiction fans weren’t willing (or often able) to reliably pay more.

When science fiction and fantasy books started being published, they were usually printed in mass market paperbacks for the same reason. Even when they were initially published in hardcover, it was the mass market paperback editions which reached the average fan and far outsold the initial printings. Lord of the Rings was first published in hardcover, but a small printing, and under an unusual profit-sharing deal where Tolkien wouldn’t get any royalties until all the publisher’s costs were paid back. It was a later pirated mass market paperback edition by Ace Books that first brought it to most people’s attention - and then later authorized mass market paperbacks that kept sales going.

Publishers Weekly argues that it was the ebook that finally killed mass market paperbacks. I can’t argue with their statistics. But what killed its market segment just as much was the global marketplace.

In the 1950’s, if I wanted to look at books, I’d go to the local bookstore. If they didn’t carry something, I probably wouldn’t find it. If I was really interested, I might write a publisher for their catalog, or if I was able to go to Worldcon I might talk with other fans there. I remember seeing Wizard of Oz Club newsletters from the 90’s, advertising new fan-written Oz books - and those ads were needed, because otherwise fans wouldn’t hear about them anywhere!

But most people didn’t ask for publishers’ catalogs, get newsletters, or go to Worldcon. They were limited to local bookstores. In a world like that, the mass market paperback helped local bookstores invest in books cheaply - and it helped publishers take risks on books which probably wouldn’t find most of their potential audience. They were cheap enough that excess copies could famously be “pulped” (i.e. recycled to paper pulp) without being shipped back to the publisher - and that was needed because there were lots of copies that wouldn’t be sold!

But nowadays, people find books online. People order books across the country, whether from online or from a bookstore’s back catalog or even from print-on-demand where the book doesn’t exist till they order it. The mass market paperback’s best niches no longer exist.

Also, computerized typesetting has brought print costs down, and especially the fixed cost to setting up new print runs - so the price of competitors to mass-market paperbacks have dropped. If someone wants to buy a physical book, as the New York Times points out, they’ll usually pay a bit more for a different format.

The mass market paperback found new niches, or kept smaller niches, some of which Publishers Weekly names. But ebooks came after it had already aged beyond its prime. “The customer has spoken,” as Kensington Publishing’s CEO put it, because the customer is now in a new sort of market.

I do mourn the loss of books at mass retailers like Walmart. They kept reading in front of people who might never otherwise think to darken the door of a bookstore. But, from what I hear - at least at the retailers I’ve heard of - most people weren’t taking them up on that option. Costco mostly stopped stocking books a few years ago, because they weren’t selling.

Perhaps a renewed era of pulping could have kept them on the shelves... but in the modern era of retailers optimizing shelf space, they probably wouldn’t have been willing to give space to books.

What’s replaced the last remnants of the mass market paperback, apparently, is ebooks.

Ebooks have a lot of advantages. You can carry your whole library with you on your phone or e-reader. I love having whole books in my pocket! I don’t even need to remember to bring them with me, because I’m already carrying my phone! You can hold your place without needing a bookmark. You can search text without having to flip through pages or bookmark them - which I’ve found invaluable in referencing facts for my American Revolution series. You can hide what you’re reading from your housemates or friends - which I’ve heard is especially in demand among romance readers.

And, from the author’s point of view, ebooks have zero incremental cost. E-retailers will take a cut, but much less of a cut than print-on-demand. Someone can put an ebook up for sale without any middleman or up-front costs at all - only the difficulty of being found.

A lot of people will denigrate ebooks because they don’t have the same feeling as print. I do think they’re on to something real; reading on my phone or computer does feel different in some ways from reading a printed book. It’s not a bad thing for everyone - I’ve read hundreds of books in each medium - but it does feel different, and I’m sure it does make ebooks worse for some people. I’m certainly glad print books will stay around.

The market has shifted. It’ll probably shift again. But, I’m sure ebooks will keep a share of readership.

Pulp magazines have vanished; sci-fi magazines are in danger; tabloid journalism has entered a new era. If the mass market paperback does perish, it will be the end of an age. The age of the mass market paperback hasn’t ended yet, but it’s looking like it will soon.

The mass market paperback has been foundational in the growth of genres and the spread of reading. And, it was foundational in my own reading, and still is today. If they stop being published, I’ll shed a tear for them... and keep browsing the shelves full of them in secondhand bookstores.

Inventing the Renaissance, by Ada Palmer (768 pp; 2025)

Who should read this? People who want to know how the Renaissance felt, or people who are asking where it came from, or people who’ve enjoyed Palmer’s fiction.

Palmer shows us not so much a grand theory of the Renaissance, as different angles of it which show us that it’s more complicated than any one “X-factor” that brought us from the Middle Ages to modernity. Instead, she pictures it as an accentuation of every cultural trend. The closest she lands on to any one factor was a sense that human destiny was malleable. To Petrarch, that meant bringing back classical models to try to train virtuous statesmen; to Machiavelli, it meant learning lessons of success from history - but whichever way, people were trying to change the course of history in ways that (she says) they broadly didn’t do in the Middle Ages.

Having read Palmer’s fiction, I’m happy to report her prose and her sense of story draws me in even more so to her nonfiction here. Her style is different, and I do get a sense of her modern politics - but only in passing; what shines through even more so is her love for the people she’s talking about. Framing the middle half of the book as lives of particular people in the Renaissance was beautiful, and repeatedly reminding us of the order of historical events drawing them together and the time separating them was excellent.

Whether or not I believe Palmer’s grand theory (to her credit, she repeatedly reminds us to be skeptical of any one scholar’s model including hers), this gave me a much better understanding of and love for the Renaissance than I’ve ever had before.

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, by Alec Nevala-Lee (544 pp; 2018)

Who should read this? Science-fiction fans who want to know where the genre came from.

This's the story of John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding magazine, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He largely created that Golden Age, by pushing science fiction ahead in his magazine, and by inspiring and nurturing myriads of writers. Nevala-Lee focuses here on three of the most prominent of those many writers - Asimov, Heinlein, and Hubbard - telling of their lives and work as a whole.

Some of the incidents here I knew, such as the famous short story about the atomic bomb which Campbell inspired and published shortly before Hiroshima. Nevala-Lee expanded on those. But much of this was new to me. I hadn't realized how much Campbell trained new writers, and how frequently he passed off ideas and drafts for them to write. Asimov was, Nevala-Lee says, an extreme case - but not completely unusual. Nor did I realize how sympathetic Campbell was at first to Hubbard and what developed into Scientology.

Nor did I realize how desperate Campbell was for science fiction to contribute directly to real scientific progress.  It did contribute - but indirectly.  And, Campbell’s own contribution to the genre also fell short of his hopes, as science fiction grew away from him.  He ended up falling out of friendship with most of the best writers.  In part this was a case of personality issues running up against each other (nobody comes out faultless in this book, except perhaps Campbell’s longsuffering wife), but I’d put most of the blame on Campbell.

There’s a lesson there too.  Campbell put his stamp on the genre (for instance, he’s the reason telepathy is seen so frequently in otherwise-hard sci-fi).  But it didn’t develop as he wanted (such as the lack of direct influence on science), and he died bitter at having been left behind.  Hubbard and Heinlein died disappointed too, at not having gotten the reception they wanted.  All of them were only part of a larger story.

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, by H. G. Parry (437 pp; 2024)

Who should read this? People who like magic-school stories involving politics.

This starts out as a beautiful magic-school story in a world that’s recently torn down the Masquerade (thanks to a summoned fairy who was barely stopped from destroying... we don’t know how much). I loved this picture, and I also loved the setup Parry did for a magic-school story. And then, they quickly dive into deeper matters of magic, which I also enjoyed. Then, Parry skips far ahead after our protagonist’s graduation, to when the deeper matters about the barrier between Faerie and Earth are again relevant... and the consequences of their ill-planned delving as students come to roost.

The second half of the book (after that timeskip) was good but could’ve been better. I don’t know whether it was too much character development taking place in the interim, or too many new elements to their character being revealed which were previously hidden. True, they’d been out of touch from each other in the interim - but as a piece of art, this could’ve been better. And then, the ending feels hollow; too much of the magical world is proven to have been hollow since the beginning.

But for all the two halves feel weird and unsettled in juxtaposition, both of them are good stories in their own right - and the first half is very good.

Her Gilded Voice, by K. C. Aegis (380 pp; 2024)

Who should read this? People who like interestingly-designed dystopias involving false realities, and who read mostly for the worldbuilding.

I really like the setting here: a dystopia where everyone has a virtual assistant and augmented-reality setup implanted in their heads. Several aspects are beautifully explored; I love the scene where for the first time ever our protagonist runs down the street and sees what it’s really like beneath the augmentation. Unfortunately, Aegis doesn’t use it to its full potential - our rebels have a secret codeword to turn it off for they themselves, and the focus shifts too quickly to a grand riddle-game put on by the dystopia’s leaders.

The plot doesn’t live up to this, though. The riddle-game feels too tacked-on. Worse, the climax is too anticlimactic: the dystopia turns out to be ruled by a computer that uses emotions from a person hooked up to it, and when our protagonist turns off her virtual assistant before being hooked up, she’s able to get superuser status, turn off the computer, and end the dystopia.

Someone should do this premise better.

The North absolutely could have. There was one point where the North could have won the war in 1862, years before they did in real history: McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign.

But, a victory there would have sent America down a very different path.

The first thing the history books say about General McClellan is that he was slow.

He was appointed to command the “Military Division of the Potomac” (soon to be called “Army of the Potomac”) in July 1861, and didn’t lead it into battle until March 1862. To be sure, his army did need a lot of training. But, his enemy wasn’t well-trained either; as Lincoln had told his predecessor General McDowell, “you are all green alike.”

McClellan was just as slow once he was in action. After landing the Army of the Potomac near Williamsburg, he took months to march up the peninsula to Richmond. He was paralyzed - terrified that the Confederates vastly outnumbered him when, in fact, he vastly outnumbered them. For months, during this Peninsular Campaign, he was stymied by a Confederate position which turned out to not have any cannon - merely fakes made from painted logs!

As Lincoln told him once, “If you aren’t using your army, I’d like to borrow it.”

But despite everything, McClellan’s superior manpower and resources eventually did tell. By the end of May 1862, he had pushed close enough to Richmond that his soldiers could hear Richmond churchbells. Confederate general Joseph Johnston tried a desperate counterattack - the Battle of Seven Pines - but failed and was himself wounded.

Then, in a fateful stroke, Confederate President Davis appointed his special military advisor Robert E. Lee as Johnston’s replacement. Lee - by brilliant maneuvering playing on McClellan’s fears - frightened and bluffed McClellan to totally evacuate his position. Richmond, and the Confederacy, was saved. The war would continue almost three more years, killing multitudes in oceans of blood.

But what if it had ended at Seven Pines? For all McClellan’s hesitancy, he had reached the gates of Richmond! What if Johnston hadn’t been wounded and Lee hadn’t been there to bluff McClellan away? What if, despite everything, McClellan had - like he’d looked about to do - taken Richmond?

To start with, the war wouldn’t end that day.

In real history, when Grant took Richmond in 1865, President Davis and the Confederate government evacuated south determined to carry on the war. They found that the Confederacy was falling apart to Sherman marching through the Carolinas, and nobody could carry on the war. But in summer 1862, that wasn’t the case. Grant was only just marching into Tennessee. The government could regroup - likely in Charlotte - as long as it took for McClellan to slowly press south.

That said, it wouldn’t take long.

With Virginia in Union hands, Virginian regiments would probably melt away to go home - as many Confederate regiments did later in the war. But more significantly, without Richmond’s industrial capability, the Confederacy wouldn’t be able to produce so many armaments. The armies they had left would be much worse off.

I suspect the war would be over by early 1863 at the latest. The Union would be saved - earlier than in real history. Myriads of lives would be saved with it.

But what sort of Union would be saved?

In 1862, slavery is still legal.

The South had seceded to protect slavery; they said it was under threat - and it was. But as yet, the threat was only indirect. The Republican Party had come into office determined to discourage slavery, prohibit its growth, and stop lending it special federal protection. But abolishing slavery was another thing. Even most abolitionists agreed that Congress didn’t legally have the power to abolish slavery. Within states, that was legally a matter for the states themselves.

What’s more, in 1862, most Northern voters (including many Republicans) were fine with slavery staying around where it existed, as long as it wasn’t bothering people elsewhere. Historically, that changed due to the bitterness of war, and Northern soldiers actually marching south and seeing how horrible slavery was. The Civil War became a war against slavery. But in 1862, that hadn’t happened yet.

In 1862, slavery is still very much in existence on the ground; some slaves have freed themselves and run to the Union Army, but - though the army isn’t returning them - it isn’t yet sure what to do with them.

Historically, the various Confiscation Acts (of August 1861 and July 1862, under which many slaves won freedom as “contraband of war”) only applied against rebels. The Emancipation Proclamation (of January 1863) applied only to territory still controlled by the Confederacy, and was legally questionable at that. With the war ending, all of that will also end. Historically, slavery was finally abolished in 1865 thanks to the Thirteenth Amendment... but that was a Constitutional amendment, which took much arm-twisting to pass even after almost five bitter years of war.

What’s more, historically, the anti-slavery Republicans lost their House majority in the 1862-1863 elections1, and maintained control only through a coalition with the “Unconditional Unionist” faction. If the Confederacy falls by early 1863, that coalition would break apart and the House would have a pro-slavery majority.

If McClellan takes Richmond in 1862, perhaps the Republicans would do better than historically - but even if they keep a majority, any action against slavery will be limited.

If the war clearly ends in early 1863, no more legal action will be taken against slavery. Nor will the Northern people be demanding it - and with an 1862-63 victory, that wouldn’t change quickly. The great and glorious Thirteenth Amendment isn’t happening here. Nor is the Emancipation Proclamation; without a war on, President Lincoln won’t have any legal excuse to issue that questionably-legal proclamation.

Historically, in December 1862, President Lincoln suggested a plan for “gradual emancipation” that included federal loans for states to compensate slaveholders with, and a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery by 1900. Perhaps Congress would ratify something like that?

Or perhaps not.

We don’t know what Reconstruction would look like and how the states would reenter the Union. President Lincoln toyed with several plans, but without firmly committing to any of them up through his death. What we actually got emerged out of a fight between a Radical Republican Congress and the Southern Democratic President Andrew Johnson2. Here, where Lincoln himself is in office overseeing Reconstruction, things might go any number of ways.

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So, let’s imagine how this timeline runs. We can’t be sure, of course, but here’s what I’m imagining.

At the Battle of Seven Pines, Confederate General Johnson is not wounded but stays in command. McClellan slowly, but inexorably, presses forward. Johnson is eventually forced to retreat. Richmond falls to the Union perhaps in late June or July. President Lincoln enters the city... but not to slaves cheering for their freedom; they don’t have it yet.

The scattered Army of Northern Virginia retreats into North Carolina, but myriads of soldiers - their homes now under Union occupation - desert. McClellan presses south. The Union troops already along the North Carolinian coast press inland. Raleigh and Greensboro fall perhaps in September.

Around here, President Davis probably orders forces from the West sent Eastward. The Union doesn’t greatly take advantage of it, though; Grant’s aggressiveness is still held back by General Henry Halleck. Historically, President Lincoln shoved him upstairs to Washington after McClellan’s disgrace - but with McClellan triumphant, that won’t happen. Still, I see a slow and methodical advance south in Mississippi. And, with the Confederate rail net overburdened, forces being sent Eastward from the West won’t do much good in the East for a while.

The Confederates might hold Charlotte into the winter, or might not - it depends on just how slow McClellan is, and how many fortifications they can build quickly. Either way, it’s in trouble the next spring, when their reduced industrial capacity will be telling. One way or another, the Confederacy is gone in 1863 with Union armies marching through the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Mississippi. States like Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida repeal their Ordinances of Secession with barely a single Federal soldier having set foot within state lines.

In the meantime, the Republican ticket has done better than historically in the 1862 elections, with Congressmen eager to withdraw all federal aid from slavery... but not willing to abolish it in time of peace. They’ve already abolished slavery in federal territories. Probably they’d be willing to secure freedom to the slaves who’ve run to Union lines... and maybe pass Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation... but nothing else. The slaves who didn’t run stay slaves.

When does slavery get abolished? In Virginia and Maryland, probably pretty soon, with culture changing and planters already losing their dominance. In the rest of the South, though, probably not for decades.

What sort of South emerges after this? The idea of secession is going to be discredited, and the dominance of plantation agriculture will be discredited to those with eyes to see thanks to the Union’s victory in the war. But, the institution of slavery isn’t. There aren’t going to be black soldiers, either - the US Colored Troops haven’t yet been formed, and with McClellan opposed aren’t going to be formed.

The ex-Confederate states are going to be brought back into the Union without being devastated, with the Confederate state governments mostly still in control of much of their territory, and with barely any Union occupation. Even if Lincoln might prefer to set more conditions on readmission, he doesn’t have any levers to force them - especially in states like Florida which will be petitioning for readmission without any Union soldiers in sight. The South is going to come back from this shorter war much like it was beforehand. The North is now more or less united against the “Slave Power”... but that “Slave Power” is still going to be there.

Or, at least, the only changes to the South are going to be those changes coming from within. Defeat will provoke a lot of soul-searching, and I have no idea who’s going to rise to prominence. Maybe the South will industrialize more; maybe slavery will be less a mainstay of the Southern economy. Certainly, the large number of black people freed as “contraband” will be putting slavery under much more pressure. But they can’t vote (hardly anyone will be pressing for that even in the North), have sharply-limited civil rights (the Fourteenth Amendment isn’t being breathed about here), and it will absolutely be decades before any Southern state tries to abolish slavery.

Historically, slavery in the Western Hemisphere ended with Brazilian abolition in 1888; here, I see it lasting longer both there and in the United States. Lincoln’s draft plan ending it in 1900 is the absolute earliest date I can see.

All in all, I’m glad McClellan didn’t take Richmond in 1862.

Perhaps, as Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural Address, God willed that “ every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword”. Whether or not that was so, it was the blood “drawn with the sword” that pushed people toward abolishing “the lash”. And it took a long war for people to want to do that.

My sister wrote a fun short character drama about a spell accident turning someone into a statue. I wrote a longer mystery story where a statue was brought to life to serve as a witness. We both liked both stories, and I also thought it was fun to see how we took the prompt in such different directions.

The memory’s stuck with me. It serves as a reminder of the imprint an author can put on a prompt, or even an outline.

Several years later, I rewrote without permission one of my sister’s stories (in which her protagonist rescued an elf from the goblins), trying to keep the same characters and plot. I thought it worked, but when I showed it to my sister, she didn’t like it and said that the characters felt twisted away from how she’d meant them. I shelved the rewriting; looking back, I think I can see what she meant.

I don’t see so many examples so clearly - most published authors don’t talk about their writing off the same prompt, and my sister and I unfortunately haven’t done this challenge again - but there’re several pairs of stories that feel to me like they could be almost like this: two different takes on the same premise.

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Perhaps the clearest example is Greg Egan’s short story “The Safe-Deposit Box” (first published 1990), and the YA urban fantasy romance novel Every Day, by David Levithan (2012).

In both stories, the protagonist wakes up in a new body every day, in the same city he went to sleep in, but otherwise randomly as far as he knows. He tries to keep his identity, without ruining his host’s relationships; he keeps something - whether a safe deposit box or email account - to leave something to himself from day to day. And in both, the story ends up offering some faint explanation about this - but the more important question is who our protagonist is, or what he sees himself to be. Levithan, as far as I know, never admitted to being inspired by Greg Egan, but as soon as I read Egan (having already read Levithan), it felt clear to me.

But, the two stories take this premise in totally different directions. They’re different genres: a science-fiction exploration story, or a teen romance. Egan writes of an adult, having seemingly come to semi-stable terms with his existence but faced with a revelation about his origins. (And, the revelation has at least the veneer of science.) Levithan writes of a teenager, faced with navigating decisions from parents who don’t know who he is, falling in love for the first time and trying to determine how he can handle it given what he is. What he is is never explained scientifically; we hear instead of vague magic rituals.

The tone of the two stories is dramatically different, as is fitting given their very different narrators. The two authors have taken the same premise but spun dramatically different stories about it. In the end, I recommend Egan, but not Levithan unless you’re in the mood for teen romance from this unexpected angle.

Less obviously, as soon as I read Tomorrow and Tomorrow (by Charles Sheffield, first published 1997), I realized its premise had been reused by John C. Wright in his Count to the Eschaton series (first book first published 2011). I’ve never seen Wright admit to this inspiration, but it still feels clear to me.

In both books, our protagonist falls in love, only to have his beloved become unobtainable until the far future (in Sheffield, she’s in coldsleep for terminal illness; in Wright, she’s left on a relativistic space voyage). Our protagonist follows up in coldsleep himself, only to find her still evading him into the farther future (in Wright, her voyage proves longer than expected; in Sheffield, her brain is more scrambled in coldsleep than expected). In the meantime, he eventually uploads to a computer for immortality, and is recruited to command defense against aliens in an eventually-intergalactic-scale plot before reuniting with his beloved at the end of the universe.

Sheffield covers this in one book; Wright expanded it to a six-book saga. Sheffield’s characters (except for our protagonist) feel shallow; Wright has of course developed many other characters our protagonist meets through the sweep of centuries and millennia. He’s also added many new themes explored through the human and alien societies met in the meantime.

But more significantly, around this same outline, Sheffield and Wright have built very different central conflicts. For Sheffield, the only real enemy is time and entropy - even the aliens seem quickly dealt with. A secondary enemy is society; the future society our protagonist sees on his first waking stymies him from quickly healing his beloved. Wright has an antagonist follow our protagonist into the future, opposing him at every turn and twisting human society toward evil and opposing our protagonist. And on top of that, Wright has added malevolent aliens expected through the first books. It feels like Wright read Sheffield and decided that there needed to be hidden villains behind the future societies.

I don’t uncomplicatedly recommend either story here. Sheffield’s lack of a clear antagonist and quick pace renders his story less than it could be, but Wright stretches out his narrative much too much. Both angles on this premise have great possibility, but neither author writes them as well as they could.

More questionably, as soon as I started Tashan Mehta’s Mad Sisters of Esi (2023), I felt like it was an alternate universe of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020). As far as I know, Mehta has never admitted to the inspiration, and I could be wrong - for all I know they were working off the same mythological themes - but the premise is almost the same. And again, they have taken the premise in very different directions.

In both, our protagonist is wandering carefree through a series of beloved rooms in some way associated with the collective unconsciousness of humanity, without any direct memories of life outside. But Clarke has a single protagonist there, and the idea of his being stranded there is key to the story; Mehta has two sisters, and their sisterhood is a key theme of the story.

Mehta’s best change, it feels to me, is the worldbuilding around the beloved “cosmic whale” of collective memory. Unlike Clarke, who has it be a secret; Mehta has it be widely known within her world. We get fascinating worldbuilding around it. What’s more, we eventually learn about how it was built - which is confusedly-described (Mehta’s entire narrative feels disjointedly dream-like to me), but it still reveals far more than Clarke who doesn’t attribute an origin to “The House” at all. Clarke’s protagonist feels diminished when we learn his backstory; Mehta’s sisters are rendered even more fascinating.

It isn’t mostly that Clarke chose not to exploit individual possibilities within her story that Mehta took up. I could identify a few individual elements from both stories that could improve the other. Piranesi could’ve benefitted from a more interesting origin for its “House” without dramatically changing anything; Mad Sisters of Esi could’ve benefitted from a more linear narration and our protagonist going on a clearer journey of exploration and revelation.

But these individual choices aren’t the main difference between the two books. If Mehta had only changed one or two things in Clarke’s novel - or Wright in Sheffield’s, or Levithan in Egan’s - it would’ve been a derivative fanfic. I read fanfics sometimes, but unless they’re clearly about the same characters, they’re less than they could be. Each author here has flown off in a totally different direction, making a new novel that - in my mind - is even richer for its juxtaposition against another story with the same premise.

Reading a book in isolation can often lose you half its riches.

Individual books are enriched by being in dialog with each other. They can form microgenres, almost - even cutting across the barriers of standard genres, like Egan and Levithan. I feel I got more from reading these pairs of books, and following the movement of ideas between them, than I would have any one of them separately.

More generally, you can appreciate more of a book if you’re more its target audience, coming to it with the expectations the author expects. What’s more, if you understand more of where the author’s coming from, you can sometimes grasp further riches from the book.

Scott Alexander once recommended reading the history of philosophy backwards, understanding who philosophers are responding to. You can almost read the history of literature in the same way. Modern fantasy is more than half a response to Tolkien; modern science fiction is a response to the New Wave which was a response to the Golden Age which was a response to early pulps; other genres have similar histories in some real ways stretching back through Don Quixote (frequently called the first novel) to medieval romances and ancient epics.

Here, if my guesses are right, I’ve come to these books (or come back to them) with an idea of where the author came from when writing them. And, I think I’m right because this unlocks new riches in the themes through the juxtapositions.

Too often, I hear, writers get excited novices offering them story ideas - in other words, premises. Sometimes they come with strings implicitly attached, where the novice feels that the premise is a substantial amount of the work deserving a substantial amount of credit.

These juxtapositions show how little of the work the premise is. I’m sure that these three pairs of stories share premises with each other. But they’re absolutely not the same stories. They have different characters, tones, themes, styles, and plots.

When my sister and I wrote our stories off the prompt of “an elf, a mage, and a statue,” they weren’t in any sense the same story - I could feel that, having written one of them. When I later consciously tried to rewrite my sister’s story, I feel it was mostly the same story - but that was because I consciously tried to keep it the same. If I hadn’t, there were myriads of different courses I could hare off on. Mehta, Wright, and Levithan took those different courses, and the books they came out with bear all the difference.

That’s true in math, where in some sense in calculus you can divide by zero. But, still, it’s true to tell an elementary-schooler that you can’t. It’s true in physics, where Newton’s Laws are not exactly true but mere approximations (as is general relativity, though we don’t know exactly what the more-true form is). It’s also true in writing.

There’s been a discussion lately: starting when my friend Eleanor Konik doubted back in November whether crises are necessary to reveal character in stories, continuing through Victoria Stanham talking about plot, and my friend Orion Anderson trying to expand the definition of crisis and discussing genre, and then Victoria questioning whether there’s a difference between expert and novice writers, and Orion again questioning whether conventions are needed for novice writers or whether they too should try the tricks that break convention.

Ideally, everything in a story would be there for a purpose and intertwine simultaneously toward several themes, subthemes, plots, and/or subplots. Ideally, the story would be written knowing what its readers are going to come to it with, and be designed to hook their interest and play off their expectations so they’ll better appreciate the story.

In practice, that’s not going to be the case.

Writers are human. They couldn’t keep that level of intertwining straight if they tried, and they often can’t think of a scene or line to simultaneously fill whatever three holes might be ideally desired by the intertwining they do have. Plus, there’s more than one type of reader (including politically, and including those who read it when published versus those who read it ninety years later, but also on many other qualities), so they can’t play off every reader’s expectations at once.

But, really good writers approach this. They recognize things that can serve multiple themes and subplots, and often put them in. Good, experienced writers have started to do this sometimes. You’ll get more misses than with the best writers, but still enough hits that people like their stories. Novice writers are trying but - being novices - usually don’t get so close till they’ve gotten some experience.

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The ideal writer, who effortlessly grasps several themes and plot arcs that will interest readers and thinks of how to make every point serve them all simultaneously, can of course structure their story however they want. We’ve postulated that - being the ideal writer - they’ll choose something that will work. They know their themes; they know their plot; they know their characters; they know (somehow) that readers will like it. They can retreat to the Platonic Realm of Ideals until they hand their finished manuscript down to earth. Presumably, the earthly publisher can then print it unedited.

Here on Earth, us actual writers can’t do that.

Too often, we don’t know what readers will like. We don’t know what themes a story might have when we start writing it. We don’t know how to make our characters people that readers will want to read about. Sometimes, we even forget to have a structured plot.

We actual writers can often use some help.

Good, experienced writers have usually developed habits that will help here. But most novice writers haven’t yet.

What I contend is, most good advice to writers is scaffolding to help build that goodness.

There’re many stories that will interest some readers without following that scaffolding. I’m reminded of one novel by a practicing paleontologist (The Dechronization of Sam Magruder) that violated so many rules of characterization - but I enjoyed it as a kid. Or, we see from online fanfiction that readers will read many stories with only the faintest shadows of plot. Or, as Victoria points out, LeGuin’s award-winning Left Hand of Darkness violates so much standard pacing and plotting advice.

And yet, these all had something else that made them good. The Dechronization of Sam Magruder had the sparkle of being written by a practicing paleontologist; I as a kid also liked reading about time-travel to the age of dinosaurs. The online fanfiction gives people more time with characters they love. Left Hand of Darkness (as Victoria points out) shows a culture intriguing to its contemporary readers, and keeps showcasing its core relationship excellently.

And - as Orion said, there’s a spark in good writing that can’t be described briefly in words.

Certainly, a new writer can write something like this. A lot of online fanfiction is by new writers. But most online fanfiction is also badly written - and people who aren’t eagerly devouring everything about a particular set of characters will say even more of it is badly written. (People for whom it doesn’t “happen[] to target my vulnerabilities perfectly”, as Orion put it.)

Eleanor’s correct to say that “give your characters a crisis to reveal their character” isn’t necessary scaffolding. For one, it isn’t sufficient scaffolding. As I said when talking about Shakespeare, you need to give them the right crisis; putting Macbeth in the plot of Hamlet would solve the story so quickly the audience would lose interest. But for another, it isn’t quite right. You do need to give your characters something to reveal their character and interest the audience. One good way of doing that is a crisis.

Or, more precisely, it’s something that would be a crisis to your characters. P. G. Wodehouse can give Bertie Wooster an unwanted aunt laying on social expectations, because that’s a crisis to Bertie Wooster. To Harry Potter, that’s an everyday thing - so J. K. Rowling needs to give him a bigger crisis: Voldemort.

Technically, neither of them need to do that - Rowling could in theory give us a book of character interplay without any Dark Lords, showing us “what someone does consistently over time” in Victoria’s words - but a crisis is a good beam in many good scaffoldings for a story.

All the structure of standard story formulas (when they’re good) is trying to give writers more specific scaffolding in the same way.

David Brin said that when he was starting to plot his first novel, he decided to make it a mystery (in addition to science-fiction adventure) because that would force him to pay close attention to his story structure and details of scene-setting. The resulting story, Sundiver , is very good. Afterwards, he decided not to write more mysteries, because he thought he’d gotten into the habit of paying attention to them. His second novel, Startide Rising , wasn’t as well-structured in my opinion... but his later novels absolutely are. The formula of a mystery helped him when he needed the help.

Of course, Brin was still following variations of the standard adventure plot structure for most of his career. In fact, I’d say that his later books where he didn’t (like Earth) are worse than the earlier ones where he did. But why?

To some extent, it’s because readers (often subconsciously) expect stories to mostly follow that structure. If they expect (say) a call to adventure the hero chooses to accept, or the hero to have a crisis of confidence and self-revelation before the victory, that’ll be hanging in the back of their minds. The author can fulfill it or play with it without fulfilling it, but if the author ignores it, for many readers it’ll be a point against the story.

Take, for example, the famous science-fiction story “The Cold Equations”. As I wrote earlier, readers at the time fully expected some character to come up with an ingenious solution to save everyone’s life - and the author played into that expectation, only to dash it by having the Naive Girl die. An average science-fiction story of the time would fulfill those expectations; “The Cold Equations” didn’t, but was still playing with those expectations.

Playing with the expectations of a plot structure is usually harder than playing into them. It can, as Orion says, rise well above the standard. That’s why we remember “The Cold Equations” today, and not the other stories published next to it in Astounding magazine.

But there’s another reason, too. All else equal, I think the standard plot outlines really are more interesting to more people. Some people are really interested in just reading about Harry Potter or Bertie Wooster, but more people are interested in reading about them doing things - facing challenges and (at least in some sense) overcoming them. In the same way, more people are more interested when overcoming their challenges isn’t simple; when their first plans fail and they must forge newer and more complicated plans. I know I am.

Orion is right to say that all else isn’t always equal: there’s a spark to great writing that isn’t related to whether it follows conventions. But I’ve read plenty of stories with conventions that also had that spark.

And what’s more, most of the people who happily read lengthy slice-of-life fanfics probably wouldn’t be so interested if they hadn’t already seen these characters in action in the original stories.

Once Dorothy Sayers had published many successful detective stories, she was able to bend the conventions of the genre with Have His Carcase, and then bend them even farther with Gaudy Night. They’re both great novels in their own rights (including by normal plot and action standards), but they bend detective-novel conventions. In the same way, once J. R. R. Tolkien had published Lord of the Rings, his son was able to posthumously publish myriads of notes that don’t form cohesive stories in History of Middle-Earth. Similarly, the success of Lord of the Rings - and other novels - also granted an audience to myriads of fanficcers breaking normal story conventions.

Orion is right to say that great writing can have that spark without following conventions.

But Victoria is also right to say that there’s something else needed besides that spark, some emotional and structural core to the narrative - and a lot of it can be found in the standard advice about plot and structure. I’ve read plenty of online fanfics and some self-published original novels, and there’re a lot of them that had at least one really good idea. Unfortunately, too often it got lost amid other problems that standard story formulas would’ve fixed. For the sake of your spark, you shouldn’t ignore that standard advice.

This week in 1776, the little book Common Sense was published.

It spread like wildfire across America, going through three editions in about a single month, and twenty-five in a year. It was reprinted by newspapers across America and read aloud in taverns and towns, far outdoing any other political book or pamphlet of the era. Quite possibly, it was the single most significant factor in turning the opinion of the American people toward independence.

It was written by Thomas Paine, a recent immigrant from England who’d only arrived in 1774. He’d quickly adopted America’s cause as his own - since, as he put it, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” After America had won its liberty, he would return to England and France, where he would write in favor of the French Revolution and almost be executed for it. But that second revolution was still in the future in 1776, when he wrote Common Sense.

As he said in the title, he considered everything in his book mere common sense. He published anonymously - many people took the author to be someone of more note, like John Adams (who seems to have been not altogether pleased at the notion). But Paine wasn’t striving for recognition, but for the cause of freedom. As he put it in the introduction to his second edition, “Who the Author of this Production is, is wholly unnecessary to the Public, as the Object for Attention is the Doctrine itself, not the Man.”

A government of our own is our natural right; and when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance.

Common Sense was written to be a short and easy read. It’s still a quick read, unless you want to pause to ponder all the images and arguments Paine puts on the page, which often aren’t so commonplace anymore as they were then.

Paine viciously tears apart the idea that any king has any rightful authority anywhere, and ridicules it from many different directions. Kings, he says, were mere bandits who’ve surrounded themselves and their heirs with mystique; perhaps unavoidable at some time, but not owning our allegiance. And in case any reader might still credit kings in general due some loyalty, he tears apart the idea that Britain or “the royal brute of Britain”, specifically, has any rightful authority over America.

He then looks at the practicalities. This was January 1776; the war with Britain was already well underway. But, he argues, it’s been held back by how the colonies still acknowledge some theoretical allegiance to Britain. And that theoretical loyalty is useless - even assuming America somehow reaches reconciliation with Britain, how would any peace agreement actually keep America’s rights secure? What benefit would America get from reconciliation, aside from simple peace? Rather, Paine concludes, only full independence would make the war be worth anything.

This’s passionate, and cogent - not bulletproof (I can still see some theoretical holes in his arguments), but very strong. What’s more, Paine makes it understandable to the average person. He doesn’t dwell on theoretical arguments about social contracts or natural rights (like Locke and Hobbes, and even the Declaration of Independence, all began with); he keeps the focus squarely on the practicalities of how societies work. Even when he’s painting a picture of a supposed primitive society before kings, he paints it vividly with phrases like “Some convenient tree will afford them a State-House, under the branches of which, the whole colony may assemble...”

His rhetoric is excellent. He makes it seem, indeed, common sense. I can totally see how his book swept America like a tidal wave.

By referring the matter from argument to arms, a new era for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen. All plans, proposals, &c. prior to the nineteenth of April, i.e. to the commencement of hostilities, are like the almanacks of the last year; which, though proper then, are superseded and useless now...

John Adams, writing to his wife Abigail Adams in mid-March, had the same opinion: “Sensible men think there are some Whims, some Sophisms... some keen attempts up on the Passions, in this pamphlet. But all agree there is a great deal of good sense, delivered in a clear, simple, concise and nervous [i.e. forceful] Style. His Sentiments of the Abilities of America, and of the Difficulty of a reconciliation with G[reat] B[ritain] are generally approved.”

Events helped, of course. Before the war - even in Massachusetts - Patriots like John Adams and Joseph Warren had held back from even mentioning they favored independence. They knew the people weren’t ready to hear it, and it would merely frighten them away from the Patriot cause. But after months of war, things had changed.

Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offences of Britain... if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on?... if you have, and still can shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend, or lover.

Paine was of course speaking for effect - but he was speaking of things that had just happened. The British fleet - under Dunmore in Virginia, Gage in Massachusetts, and others elsewhere - had bombarded several towns. Children had been left “destitute of a bed to lie on.” Not many had, but some had - and as the news sped through America, and the war continued, many could imagine the picture Paine was painting.

But Paine didn’t just paint that picture; he offered a new frame to interpret it. He presented people with a new paradigm: Britain wasn’t their mother country any longer; America should simply cast it off and declare independence.

And events as Paine was publishing put this question even more starkly. On the same day Common Sense was published, Philadelphia finally learned that King George, back in October, had declared the colonies officially in rebellion and promised to firmly suppress the rebellion. As Paine later assessed, “Had the spirit of prophecy directed the birth of this production, it could not have brought it forth at a more seasonable juncture, or a more necessary time... The Speech, instead of terrifying, prepared a way for the manly principles of Independence... The speech hath one good quality, which is, that it is not calculated to deceive, neither can we, even if we would, be deceived by it. “

The Founding Fathers in the legislatures and the Continental Congress never directly cited Common Sense. They didn’t need to. What Common Sense did was put new words to the arguments that were often already present, and to bring out cogently the implications of events. Common Sense changed the public mindset so that the Founding Fathers could organize new governments and declare independence.

George Washington, in March, wrote that “by private letters which I have lately received from Virginia, I find Common Sense is working a powerful change there in the minds of many men” toward “independency.”

John Adams, in April, attributed the change to “the Royal Proclamation, and the late Act of Parliament” (that is, King George’s declaration that the colonies were in rebellion, and the Prohibitory Act of December 1775 which prohibited the colonies from all foreign trade), but agreed that something had “convinced the doubting and confirmed the timorous and wavering.” Being crotchety as he was, he later wrote in another letter that “I have never heard one single person speak well of any Thing about [Paine] but his abilities, which are generally allowed to be good.” Whether or not that was correct, Paine’s anonymously-published words far outran his personal reputation.

Paine, in his preface to the third edition of Common Sense in February, commented that “no Answer hath yet appeared” to try to refute Common Sense. A few eventually did, but none had anywhere near as much circulation or popularity. Common Sense did indeed, in the minds of Americans, become common sense.

I read somewhere a long time ago - I forget where - that while the best-known symbol of the French Revolution was the guillotine, the best-known symbol of the American Revolution was the Declaration of Independence. In other words (this author put it), unlike many other revolutions, the American Revolution was characterized by reasoned argument and peaceful voting.

That author might be unfair (as Paine was too at several points), but he’s not really wrong. Common Sense reminds us of this.

I’ve been writing a lot about battles and campaigns, because they’re notable and they can be pinned down to a specific date on a timeline. But, as Adams put it long afterwards, the real Revolution “was in the Minds and Hearts of the People”. If the people of America hadn’t wanted to stand up for their liberty - if they hadn’t come to want independence - all the armies would’ve fallen apart and the battles and campaigns would have come to naught. It was the people of Massachusetts who streamed from their farms to fight the Redcoats at Lexington and Concord; it was the people of New England who were still keeping British soldiers bottled up in Boston as Paine wrote; it was the people of America who would push forward to final independence.

Paine, himself, wasn’t anyone except a voice. But his words dug a great part of the foundation on which America was built.

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A Far Better Thing, by H. G. Perry (416 pp; 2025)

Who should read this? Readers who’ve enjoyed Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, and enjoy the fantasy genre.

When reading Tale of Two Cities, did you ever guess that the reason Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton look the same is because one of them is a fairy changeling?

I got pulled into Perry’s story, and the pace and pull didn’t let up till the end. It isn’t so much a retelling of Dickens’ famous Tale of Two Cities as a new story weaving around that. Carton himself is the narrator, an unwilling servant of the fairies who stole him away as an infant... for a conspiracy woven deeper than we suspected at the beginning. In the end, we see how this rhymes and is interwoven beautifully with the discord and injustice of the human world that’s flowing out in the Revolution.

The chaotic scheming of the fairy realm, and the dark poetry of magic, is done excellently; as is Carton’s broken and desperate character. I’ve seen Perry previously (in Radical Act of Free Magic) struggle somewhat to cover a large-scale plot with justice; here she dives in deep in one arc around Carton and does it very well. What’s more, here, knowing the plot of Tale of Two Cities and knowing what’s coming adds the perfect touch as I try to guess what new things are happening before then, and how we get there.

M, King’s Bodyguard, by Niall Leonard (272 pp; 2021)

Who should read this? Mystery fans who like tie-ins with history.

In this historical novel based on a true story, our protagonist, from Scotland Yard, must uncover some anarchist bombers trying to assassinate the Kaiser at Queen Victoria’s funeral - with the help of a mysterious German investigator. It’s a romping thriller adventure through late-Victorian London; not a fair-play mystery but one with fun twists. The setup is from history; our protagonist - a real person - went on to found MI6. But, most of the layers in the conspiracy and investigation were invented.

Leonard has drawn good characters, with interesting ties drawing in additional elements of the world. However, some of his added twists make me feel they fit in too conveniently with modern anti-aristocratic leanings. They’re not impossible, but to me as a history fan they feel unlikely and unrealistic. Though, this’s one blot on an book that’s very fun as a mystery and story; it held my interest throughout.

Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, by Rachel Laudan (482 pp; 2013)

Who should read this? Foodies who like history, or history fans who like food.

I enjoyed this history of global food and attitudes about food, from the Babylonian Empire through the present. So much was eye-opening: from the interplay of cuisine between nomads and settled regions, to the waves of wheat and rice cuisines in East and South Asia, to the ancient and medieval theories of nutrition which greatly influenced upper-class cuisine. (In retrospect it feels obvious they’d have their own theories and be just as concerned about nutrition as we are - but I hadn’t considered that till reading this!)

As someone who likes very different sorts of food, I feel now how much a privilege it is to live in an age of globalized cuisine, and an age where I can eat most any sort of fruits and vegetables all through the year. But more than that, I’m reminded of how unusual on a historical scale it is to live in an era of such food security. As Laudan reminds us, even though modern cuisine isn’t perfect, it’s given more people more nutrition than we had at any time in the past. And what’s more, it’s done that on a more equal and democratic basis than any time in the past.

The Province of Quebec and the Early American Revolution, by Victor Coffin (316 pp; 1896)

Who should read this? People interested in the early history of Canada under British rule.

I started this book to study the 1775 American invasion of Canada, but most of this book (and the best part) discusses British-ruled Canada before that.

When Britain initially conquered Canada during the French and Indian War, it first ruled it by a military government, and then tried to establish a civil government more in tune with the province’s traditions of French law. Coffin analyzes this in detail, both what the government was like and how Canadians responded to it. He argues that the initial British military government was rather well-received by most Canadians, and its subsequent efforts to court favor with upper-class Canadians resulted in its losing favor with the average lower-class Canadians.

This culminated in the Quebec Act of spring 1775, restoring French law and bringing in a council of upper-class Canadians - which, Coffin argues, drove most of the lower class to support the American Revolution when it invaded later that year. He argues the invasion had much broader support than thought, until the ill order of American soldiers (in late winter after the Battle of Quebec), and policies that they felt insulted them, drove Canadian support away.

I think he’s proven his case about the British government, but not about the American invasion losing support. The section on the first point is lovingly detailed; the section on the second point is quite scanty, and takes officers’ grumbling at face value. I came out of it laying better-than-even odds that someone could’ve written the same book about Virginia or Massachusetts! To prove a point specific to Canada, you need to make a better case.

My own suspicions are that lingering Canadian prejudices and confusion at the political issues drove them to effective neutrality. But that’s a tenuous conclusion - all I can say is that Coffin hasn’t come close to proving his case. Regardless, this’s a book well worth reading if you want details on earlier British-ruled Canada.