The History of the Alphabet

When people are asked about the greatest design achievements of all time, they might mention anything from the Periodic Table to the Tube Map. Those are certainly great examples, but no-one ever seems to bring up perhaps the greatest design in human history: the alphabet. Yet the alphabet is behind everything our civilisation has achieved in writing, from the works of Shakespeare to the last text you sent. Any of us who are writers rely entirely on the alphabet.

There was writing long before the alphabet, and there are still important writing systems around the world that have no connection to it. Widespread systems range from the ideographic Chinese characters to the semi-alphabetic Devanagari in India and beyond ¹, as well as more localised systems, such as Sequoia's wonderful Cherokee script. Nevertheless, Latin script is by many orders of magnitude the most common system in the world, while two of the next four most common (Arabic and Cyrillic) are also descended from the original alphabet.

The earliest writing systems were probably ideographic, as Chinese characters still are. This means that the symbols indicate a concept, rather than a spoken word, a technique we use occasionally in the West. For example, "2" means exactly the same in every language, regardless of whether it's pronounced two, dos, zwei etc.

Chinese proves that ideographic writing can produce everything from great literature to great record-keeping, but its drawbacks can be illustrated by the history of printing. The Chinese didn't take to movable type, as the Europeans did, even though they had printing long before Europe. It wasn't that they hadn't come up with the idea of movable type, but it was impractical for the simple reason that printers would have needed to have been surrounded by thousands of different characters.

Many early writing systems, on the other hand, used syllabic scripts. This means, for instance, ba, be, bi, bo, bu and by would each be represented by a separate symbol, and words word be written simply with two or three of these. It was more straightforward than ideograms, but still required a hundred or more symbols to be learnt before you could read or write it.

No-one knows exactly who came up with the alphabet ², nor exactly when, but it seems to have been invented by the Semitic ³ peoples of late Bronze-Age Canaan — roughly what's now Israel, Palestine and Lebanon. One hypothesis suggests that it was begun by a Semitic tribe in Egypt, simplifying the hieroglyphic system. Inevitably, this has prompted speculation that Moses was responsible, but that's a pretty long shot. Even if the breakthrough did happen in Egypt, there were many Semitic tribes living there during the relevant period.

Whatever its exact origins, the invention transformed writing in Canaan and beyond. The decision to reduce the symbols so that only those for each consonant were used had the advantage that there were now only a couple of dozen to learn, making reading and writing easier for non-specialists to master.

It came at a price, though. The Canaanite alphabet, whose closest modern descendent is the Hebrew system, didn't have any way of indicating which vowels to include in the words. If English were written this way, it would be impossible to tell whether bd meant bad, bed or bud — or, for that matter, bide or abode. All reading would be like the final round of Only Connect. ⁴

Still, the plusses must have outweighed the minuses, because the alphabet not only thrived but spread, most importantly in two directions. For one thing, it eventually formed the basis of the Arabic script, which is now one of the most widespread writing systems in the world. Arabic script developed out of the system used by the Nabataeans, a northern Arabian culture that flourished in what's now Jordan and the surrounding areas — their most important centre was Petra, the "rose-red city, half as old as time". The Nabataeans borrowed the alphabet from Syria, where it had spread from Canaan, and passed it on to the Arabian Peninsula.

More relevantly to the English-speaking world, the alphabet also spread west. The seafaring Canaanites from ports like Tyre and Sidon were known as Phoenicians — from the Greek word for purple, because their speciality was the insanely expensive purple dye everyone wanted — and they settled and traded all over the Mediterranean and beyond.

Somewhere around 800 BC, the Greeks encountered the Phoenician alphabet. The original Greek syllabic script (Linear B) had been lost in the dark age that followed the fall of the Palaces, and the Greeks took up this new idea with enthusiasm. However, aware of its shortcomings, they came up with the crucial idea of turning some of the letters they didn't need into vowels.

The original Greek alphabet wasn't quite the one used today. Over the next couple of centuries, they dropped a few letters and added others. One of the best-known Greek letters, omega, was a late addition, which is why it comes last. Before that process started, though, the great Italian civilisation of the Etruscans adopted the primitive Greek alphabet, and through them it came to a small city-state called Rome.

The Roman alphabet preserved letters lost in later Greek, such as F and Q, but it had its own problems. The Etruscans hadn't needed a G (originally the third letter, as in the Greek gamma) and took to pronouncing it the same as K, creating the modern C/K duplication. The Romans, however, did need a G and so converted the seventh letter, properly the Z, into their G.

The Roman alphabet expanded as they added letters needed to write foreign words. The Z was reinstated, but put at the end, and the Emperor Claudius (of "I" fame) invented the letter Y — which, by the way, is really a vowel occasionally pronounced as a consonant, not the other way round, whatever your teachers might have told you.

As the Roman Empire spread, so did both the Greek and Roman versions of the alphabet, Greek spawning various other forms, such as the Armenian and possibly Georgian scripts. When it was necessary to translate the Bible for the newly converted Slavs, Saints Cyril and Methodius (allegedly) came up with a new alphabet, which combined Greek letters with other symbols for Slavic sounds the Greek alphabet didn't cover. There's been considerable scholarly debate over whether these were derived from one or more other writing system, or whether they were invented. Whichever is true, varieties of the Cyrillic alphabet are now used throughout much of eastern Europe and a good deal of Asia, including most of the languages from the former Soviet Union.

Many of the letters have been written in several different ways even by the same people, and different forms were passed on as the alphabet spread. Both the Greek and Cyrillic versions include a number of "false friends", such as perhaps the most famous Cyrillic acronym, CCCP. This is the Russian name for the old USSR, but in fact C is the Cyrillic letter for S (derived from a form sometimes used in early Greek) and P is the R in both alphabets. CCCP should actually be pronounced SSSR.

Meanwhile, the Roman alphabet spread throughout western and central Europe, though like Cyrillic it was adapted to the needs of different languages. Old and Middle English, for instance, had four letters that we don't use now, including the þ, representing th. This was later often written lazily as y — hence all those "Ye Olde Tea Shoppes".

On the other hand, there were modern letters missing. Until the 17th century, I/J and U/V were each considered no more than different ways of writing the same letter. ⁵ The Romans had pronounced the consonant form of U/V like our W, but this gradually changed, both in Church Latin and the vernacular languages, to V as in Victor, so the W was invented to replace it.

By the 18th century, the 26-letter alphabet we know now was in place, although some languages (in Scandinavia, for instance) still use extra letters, and different descendants of the original Semitic alphabet are used all over the world. It may change again, of course, if it needs to. Just like all those other design classics — including the Periodic Table and the Tube Map — it has adaptability built in to accommodate change. One thing is certain, though — there's some long-dead Canaanite who deserves to be picking up a hell of a lot of awards.

 

¹ One theory suggests that Devanagari is ultimately descended from the Semitic alphabet, while another insists that it's indigenous to India. The jury's out.

² Technically, scholars of writing systems classify the Semitic system as an abjad, rather than an alphabet, since it doesn't use vowels. However, as we'll see, there's a direct lineal descent to the alphabet we use today.

³ Semitic is usually used today as synonymous with Jewish, but it actually refers to a group of languages (and, to a lesser extent, the peoples who've spoken them) which includes Hebrew, Aramaic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Arabic, the main languages of Ethiopia, and even Maltese.

⁴ For anyone not familiar with this fine quiz show, the final round involves two teams racing to be the first to recognise phrases from the consonants only.

⁵ Which makes a nonsense of the "Name of God" scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I and J were the same letter in Latin, as they would have been when the trap in the film was first set.

 

Image courtesy of Tom Magllery, Creative Commons licence

 

We Were Badass Too, Back in the Day

Grimdark is definitely flavour of the month (or the decade) in fantasy. Wherever you look, fantasy worlds are populated by characters who range from cynical jerks to psychopaths — and those are the good guys. In the words of a section-header quote from Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself, it's "a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse".

I've read and enjoyed both Abercrombie and Peter V. Brett, and I intend to read more Grimdark, but I do have a couple of quibbles with their attitude. For one thing, I don't see that having everyone a cynical bastard who cares nothing for others is any more "realistic" (as they claim) than having noble, virtuous heroes. For me, realism is a broad range of characters, including some at least trying to do the right thing.

For another, like most "new waves", they seem to be under the impression that no-one's done this before, and every work of fantasy before Martin introduced his "knights who say fuck a lot" uniformly offered us the variety of knights decked out in shining armour.

While I'm not saying there was necessarily anything quite as bleak as Prince of Thorns, or "sympathetic" characters working as torturers like Glokta, it certainly wasn't all honour and virtue. Below, I've picked out a few dark heroes or rogue heroes from classic fantasy.

Vathek — Arguably* the first fantasy novel in the modern sense was Vathek by William Beckford (1786), in which case the genre starts with a hero as dark as midnight. Set in an Arabian Nights version of the classical Islamic Empire, it tells the tale of the Caliph Vathek (very loosely based on the historical Al-Wathiq, 842-847, grandson of Harun al-Rashid) who practices black magic and sacrifices children to a demon in order to gain immense supernatural powers. He eventually gets what's coming to him, but not before he's corrupted a naïve young girl into sharing his quest and his punishment.
 

Jurgen — The eponymous hero of James Branch Cabell's best-known novel (1919) isn't particularly dark, but he's something of a rogue, living on his wits and abandoning without regret his succession of female conquests when he gets tired of them. Ostensibly on a quest to find and recover his kidnapped wife — kidnapped, he thinks, by the Devil, although it turns out not to be quite that simple — he makes little effort to advance his quest, preferring instead to have fun with a succession of beautiful women. Jurgen has a very inflated idea of his own cleverness and frequently demonstrates it by outwitting his opponents — though this tactic doesn't always succeed, and once results in him being consigned to Hell. Even here, though, he outwitted "Grandfather Satan" and finds a way out.

Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser — One of the three key series of classic sword & sorcery (written by the man who coined the phrase) began in 1939 when Fritz Leiber's story Two Sought Adventure (later retitled The Jewels in the Forest) introduced the giant barbarian Fafhrd and the diminutive, sophisticated thief and swordsman the Gray Mouser. Like Jurgen, they're rogues more than dark heroes, but are willing to sell their swords to anyone who pays well enough. Though they're usually on the better side of any conflict, they're not generally motivated by altruism. Leiber continued working on the series, on and off, until 1988, four years before his death. Fafhrd and the Mouser grow noticeably older in the course of the stories, though their characters don't greatly change.

Skafloc — "The other" fantasy novel about elves published in 1954 was The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson, a bloodthirsty saga combining the Viking age and Norse mythology. Skafloc is a mortal taken as a changeling by the Elf-King and raised as an elven warrior. Anderson's elves, though beautiful and magical, are a far cry from their noble namesakes of Middle Earth. They're no-holds-barred warriors with no conscience whatsoever, and Skafloc, in his personal feud against the trolls, arguably commits more atrocities than his foes with his demonic Black Sword that must drink blood before it's sheathed. He also has an affair with his sister and makes her pregnant — though, in his defence, neither is aware of who the other is.

Túrin Turambar — Hang on, Tolkien appearing in a list of dark heroes? Well, Túrin, from the Silmarillion, is certainly his darkest, and actually has striking similarities with Skafloc. There's no possibility of either influencing the other — Tolkien wrote his first version of Túrin's story in 1917, but nothing was published till 1977 — but they were drawing on the same ancient influences, particularly the Finnish Kalevala and the Norse Volsunga Saga. Like Skafloc, Túrin is a grim warrior with a Black Sword that has a mind of its own, especially when it comes to drinking the blood of his friends, as well as having an unwitting affair with his sister. Túrin perhaps has a little more sense of morality than Skafloc, but he's not always particular about who he kills. The fullest version of Túrin's story, illustrated here, was The Children of Húrin (2007). 

Elric — Completing a trio of Black Sword wielders, Michael Moorcock's Elric stories are another of the essential S&S series (the third being, of course, Conan). Moorcock's acknowledged his indebtedness to The Broken Sword in creating his tortured albino prince and the demon sword Stormbringer. Aside from physical colouring, Elric's about as dark as they get. A vassal of Arioch, a lord of Hell, his first action in print (1961) was to betray his people by leading enemies to sack his home city — and then make his escape, leaving his allies to perish. Stormbringer, in common with other Black Swords, likes nothing better than to drink the blood of those its user loves, and Elric, though against his will, ends up slaughtering pretty much everyone close to him.

Cugel — Many of the protagonists in Jack Vance's Dying Earth series — even the nice ones — display dubious morality, and that's certainly true of the most ubiquitous of them. Thief and swindler Cugel the Clever is the hero of both The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) and Cugel's Saga (1983), and one of the tricksiest. Vance is said to have been strongly influenced by Cabell, and there's a distinct similarity between Cugel and Jurgen — even Cugel's favourite epithet reflects Jurgen's repeated assertion that he's "a monstrous clever fellow". Like Jurgen, many of Cugel's deceits are to seduce women, but with much darker overtones — in one or two cases, his conquests are closer to "seduction with a capital R". Similarly, he ruins lives for his own advantage, and once actually kills an innocent creature merely for playing a childish prank. Cugel is fascinating, but definitely not a nice person.

Kane — Possibly the least-known of the dark heroes listed here, Karl Edward Wagner's Kane (original publications 1973-1985) is perhaps one of the most intriguing (and, on a personal note, an important influence on my character the Traveller, though partly by contrast). Literally meant as the biblical Cain, wandering through prediluvian civilisations, Kane is an immortal swordsman and sorcerer who's sometimes the hero of his stories and sometimes the villain. Weary of his undying existence, he has little time to spare for conventional morality and kills without conscience. He's not entirely immune to pity, but tends to fight destruction with destruction. On one occasion, disgusted with a terrible siege causing untold suffering, he ends the war and brings a kind of peace by opening the gates of the city he's supposed to be defending and allows it to finish in a bloodbath.

These are just a few examples of the more obvious dark heroes from classic fantasy, but others come in all shades of grey. The thief as hero goes back as far as Lord Dunsany (and a lot further if you include traditional legend); E. R. Eddison's characters, on both sides, are schemers who'd make Machiavelli proud; and classic S&S was full of heroes, including Conan, who were mainly out for what they could get, even if they ended up protecting the world from evil. Even the genuine heroes often needed their armour polished before it was shining, like Simon Tregarth, hero of Andre Norton's Witch World, a disgraced soldier who finds his salvation in a new world.

And yes, I admit that I do love the occasional Aragorn in among all this. Humanity is a complex mixture of every shade from heroic to despicable, and it all deserves to come out to play in fantasy. Eventually, I suspect, the pendulum will swing away from Grimdark to a more middle ground. In the meantime, excellent though many of its works are, they're really just riffing rather heavily on a theme that's as old as fantasy.

 

* Or arguably not. It isn't important.

 Note: All book covers are copyright by the individual artists or publishers, and are reproduced on the principle of "fair use" as subjects of this article.

Review of Steeleye Span, Harlow Playhouse 11th March 2015

There are three things that can happen when a longstanding band is largely replaced by newer members. Firstly, the strengths and tastes of the new people can turn it into an almost completely different band, for good or ill. Secondly, they can end up coming over as a tribute band to themselves. Thirdly, the new members can settle in, bringing new ideas but not overwhelming the band's identity.

I was delighted to find that Steeleye Span, with only two members left from their classic Seventies line-up, are very much of the third kind.

I loved Steeleye back in the Seventies, and I've continued to enjoy their classic albums; but, unlike fellow folk-rockers Fairport Convention, I'd somehow lost track of what they've been doing since, until I chanced on and fell in love with their most recent album, Wintersmith (reviewed here last year).

So, when I found they were playing on the 11th March at the Playhouse in Harlow, only a few miles away, I went to see them for the first time in many years.

They played a mixture of classics from the Seventies — some heavily reinvented — and a substantial number of tracks from Wintersmith. The latter makes the evening bitter-sweet in retrospect. Wintersmith was a collaboration with lifelong fan Sir Terry Pratchett, and it was just the next day that he died.

Nevertheless, on the night the performance was electrifying and uplifting. The two remaining members from the Seventies are singer Maddy Prior and bassist Rick Kemp, and neither have lost any of their power. Maddy's singing is, if anything, stronger than it used to be, even if she no longer hits those notes only your dog can hear. She still dances to the instrumentals, too — rather more stately dancing than she used to do, but impressive for someone in her late 60s.

Rick is as steady and inventive as ever on the bass, and he's become an effective lead singer, taking nearly a third of the songs. The other half of the rhythm section, drummer Liam Genockey, while relatively a "new boy", has actually spent longer behind the kit for Steeleye than the classic drummer Nigel Pegrum, and he plays a big part in keeping the band rocking.

Pete Zorn is newish to Steeleye Span but not to the British folk-rock scene (in spite of being American). His role is perhaps the least defined of the current line-up, but it reminds me a little of Tim Hart's multi-instrumental role in the Seventies, although he plays a different set of instruments — guitar, dulcimer, saxes and flute — and sings no leads. The saxes, in particular, give the band's sound a new dimension.

The two newest members both have extremely hard acts to follow, but succeed triumphantly. Julian Littman makes light work of being the successor, both as guitarist and vocalist, to Martin Carthy, Bob Johnson and Ken Nicol, while fiddler Jessie May Smart fills Peter Knight's seven-league boots as if they were made for her. Both clearly understand and respect Steeleye's history but are going to do things their own way. On the evidence of the Harlow gig, they've found the perfect balance I referred to at the beginning of this review.

The band played the whole evening, with no support act, and rattled through their two sets with a mix of polish and relaxed banter. They included around half of Wintersmith, which sounded as good as (or better than) on the album, and a mixture of light-hearted songs, such as One Misty Moisty Morning and Saucy Sailor, with the dark, bloodthirsty ballads Bob Johnson used to initiate, such as Long Lankin, King Henry and Edward. And they finished the first set with what Maddy called "that song" — their 1975 #5 hit All Around My Hat, with the audience yelling back the chorus.

It wasn't just crowd-pleasing, though. Steeleye have always had a habit of reinventing their songs — like the reggae reinterpretation of Spotted Cow in the Seventies — and some of the classics had a different sound. Most of all, Boys of Bedlam from their second album — the dark, eerie track Terry Pratchett cited as first hooking him on Steeleye Span — appeared in an excellently rocked-up version with a rapped interlude about being insane.

Steeleye Span have been around for forty-five years now, and don't show signs of running out of steam any time soon. They have energy that would do credit to a band half their age, and musicianship that would do credit to any band.

I'll be excited to see where the new members take them. Julian already contributes to the creation as well as the performance, with several songs on Wintersmith — one of which, The Summer Lady, has shades of Fairport Convention's Chris Leslie (in general sound, not in a derivative sense) — and he seems to handle a wide range of material with ease.

Jessie only had one fiddle instrumental this time, though her playing is a significant part of the overall sound, and I'm looking forward to hearing her come more to the fore, as Peter Knight did.

I'll certainly be watching out both for their next album and their next tour.

What Is Civilisation?

If you write secondary world fantasy, the chances are that you'll be creating civilisations for your stories. It's possible, of course, to write exclusively about nomadic hunter-gatherers, but most fantasy involves civilised nations and cities.

So what is civilisation? We all know it when we see it — or do we? Most of us (and this certainly includes me) talk about customs and behaviour we approve of as "civilised" and those we disapprove of as "uncivilised". It's even possible, the way the word's generally used, to argue that those nomadic hunter-gatherers might be more "civilised" than us.

That's not what the word means, though. It's nothing to do with how a society treats its people, whether it's spiritually aligned with its environment, or even whether people are polite to one another. Fundamentally, a civilisation is a society that has cities.

It's a lot more complex than that, of course. Perhaps the best way to define what civilisation is would be to define what factors cause its development.

Food Surplus & Specialisation

The first stage to a civilisation developing is, quite simply, that a society produces more food than it needs. It's simple, when you think about it. If it takes every man, woman and child's work simply to prevent the community from starving, that's all they're going to do. They'll get other things done in what little spare time they have, whether that's making clothes or repairing tools, and they may even have just enough energy left to make music or tell tales in the evening, but no more.

If there's a food surplus, though, everything's different. The person who's best at mending tools will start mending everyone's tools, and they'll have enough spare food to give to this person in return. The same for the person who's best at making clothes. Then again, if you have more food than you need for now, you'll need somewhere to keep it, and specialists will start making pots and other containers.

Before you know it, you'll be realising there are all kinds of other services you don't know how you lived without. Perhaps, eventually, you might even start giving someone food so they can concentrate on making the music or telling the stories.

Merchants and Traders

So you've started swapping your spare food for services your neighbours can offer, but you still have some left. What else can you do with it?

Well, the chances are your area won't produce everything you could possibly want. Perhaps another region has different food you'd like to try. Perhaps it produces some material that makes better clothes. Perhaps it's a little in advance of you and has wonderful manufactured goods to sell.

Trade seems to go back a very long way — there's evidence of it in Palaeolithic times, long before civilisation — but certainly the food surplus and the growth of specialisation gives it a new impetus. Before long, you're relying on all kinds of imported products, and producing many other goods besides food to export.

Towns and Organisation

It's all a bit of a mess, though. Specialist craftworkers are scattered through countless villages; merchants have to make long journeys just to gather up their merchandise, and outside traders have to do the same to find buyers.

Sooner or later, centres begin to grow up. These may be the most prosperous villages, and the specialists will gradually gather there, while these places can conveniently act as trading centres, with produce brought in and merchants doing their deals in a fixed place.

Eventually, these growing towns will cease to take part at all in food production, and must rely on being fed by the villages that still do produce the food. This takes organisation, as does having such a large number of people living in close proximity, not to mention the foreigners coming in to exchange goods. Someone has to run all this, and usually this results in the emergence of a king and the people he relies on for support. Not always, though: for instance, some ancient cities — such as Mohenjo-daro on the Indus (above) — seem to have been ruled by merchant oligarchies.

Going to War

Warfare, in a very general sense, may predate civilisation, and it's possible its motivation could have been as a substitute for the Palaeolithic tribal hunts, which had become impractical when large prey like the mammoth died out. War certainly gives the same opportunities — communal strategy, action and comradeship, together with the chance for young men to show individual feats of skill and courage.

Early warfare, though, was probably small-scale raiding, and it took organised civilisation to initiate wars of conquest or ideology. In many cases, the ruling classes would be specialists in war, although it doesn't seem to have been a universal practice. Some civilisations — like Mohenjo-daro again — seem to have relied on commercial influence rather than force of arms, while there's evidence of others, such as the Olmec, using ritual games rather than war to settle disputes.

Still, the growth of warfare is usually part of the growth of a civilisation. Whether it relied on a specialist military class, or whether the citizen body was militarised, the city or kingdom would have prepared for war.

Religion, Ritual and Monuments

A fundamental requirement of any stable society is that most of its members must get something out of it. Not everyone, necessarily — if it's a slave-based economy, for instance — but if the majority of the population don't feel invested in the system, it's unlikely to last.

This can often be achieved through religious rituals. Like war, religion is older than civilisation, but it seems to have been when it was brought into organised cities that it developed codes and hierarchies. Where before you might have made a personal offering to the guardian spirits of a place, you now took part in communal ceremonies that both affirmed that you were part of something greater and taught you what you place was in that greater whole.

Not all communal rituals are overtly religious, although often religion lies behind them. The Athenian theatre was a crucial ritual to bring the city together, and a whole range of sports have been important in forging a sense of unity and cultural identity. As they still are, of course.

Monuments tend to fulfil the same kind of need, whether they're religious or political in nature (or both, of course). The real cultural of significance of the great monuments, from Stonehenge (left) to the Pyramids, is that they'd be impossible without a massive level of organisation. It's not only the logistics, but also the ability to take vast numbers of workers — slave or free — out of food production and feed them while they're building.

The size and permanence of many of these monuments may be a statement by rulers or priests, but they're also a source of national pride, a statement by the whole civilisation of their importance.

The Rise and Fall of Civilisation

Most of us think of history in chunks. We learn that the "end of the Roman period" was 476 AD (or 410 in Britain) and that mean that Roman civilisation vanished and was replaced by something unrelated. And it can seem even more like that when we have only archaeological snapshots here and there, as in the pre-Columbian Americas, or the early Middle East.

Now, I'm not saying that civilisations never disappear completely, but what usually happens is that they go into a decline and then mutate into something different. A civilisation, as we've seen, is only as good as what it offers most of its people. If it's no longer offering the prosperity and communal pride it did before, the people are going to look elsewhere for their model.

This certainly happened to Roman civilisation. The empire had been in decline for a very long time before the 5th century, and it would have been completely unrecognisable to Augustus, who founded it. Economic recession was making the cities gradually less viable, resulting in more and more "Romans" (a largely meaningless term by then, since few had any connection with Italy) moving to the country, either to own estates or to work on them.

This change in lifestyle gathered pace, until the cities, if not entirely abandoned, became peripheral to the culture. At the same time, other peoples and their cultures — the so-called barbarians — were looking far more attractive. In any case, by now many people were subjects of barbarian warlords, so they gradually began to learn the new languages, wear new types of clothes, convert to the new religions.

By the time the cities were growing again and civilisation was back, the descendants of the "Romans" were identifying themselves as "English", "Franks" or a whole variety of other peoples. Their cultures looked different, but they hadn't arisen out of nothing, and much of what was useful from Roman civilisation had slipped seamlessly into the new order.

There's a Catch?

It's not actually quite as simple as I've made it seem. You wouldn't really expect it to be, would you, when we're talking about human beings?

In reality, civilisation doesn't always behave the way we'd expect. It's always been assumed, for example, that the first cities developed as centres for an agricultural hinterland, yet the earliest walled city known (the oldest phase of Jericho, around 9400 BC) dates from before agriculture had fully developed. This was the Mesolithic era, a transitional phase when hunting was mutating into herding and gathering into growing. Perhaps Jericho's importance was actually as a centre for trading hides. Or maybe it was a stock town, if herding had developed enough.

Jericho is the earliest city to have been found, but there's circumstantial evidence that the fertile plain that's today the Sahara Desert may have also been developing towards civilisation at a similar time. Of course, any remains that might have been left would be buried deep under the sands, and it can't be automatically assumed that getting on the road to civilisation will always result in the finished product.

In any case, can we always recognise civilisation from the remains? Stone buildings are pretty difficult to dispute, but more perishable materials such as brick, wood or earth can serve contemporary needs just as well, and are no less "civilised". The culture that built Stonehenge, for instance, undoubtedly had the social organisation and the food surplus to undertake the venture, but as far as we know they built no cities. Were they simply a different kind of cities that have left no trace? Or did that particular society use the building-blocks of civilisation in a radically different way?

Perhaps most intriguing of all, there's evidence of places — in central France, for instance — where at periods of the Palaeolithic era, long before agriculture or cities, societies not only seemed to have had specialisation and trade, but to have had them on an almost industrial scale. Was this a lost civilisation, long before any civilisation should have existed? Or was it a culture that had some of the conditions of civilisation but never developed civilisation itself? It's doubtful that we'll ever know, but it's intriguing to speculate.

Still, in spite of the exceptions, the rule still more or less stands. If you want to create a convincing civilisation for your secondary world, the chances are it'll have had these preconditions — food surplus, specialisation, trade — and will have developed at least most of the typical characteristics — cities, social organisation, hierarchy, warfare, religion, social rituals and monuments.

And, from there on, each one will be unique. That's the joy of history.

Goodbye, Musa

This weekend, I was among a number of authors to be shocked by the news that Musa Publishing is closing down. I have two books out with them, The Treason of Memory and The Lone and Level Sands, the latter only published just before Christmas, and they'd recently accepted a short collection of stories.

Before I go any further, I'd just like to say that, as far as I can see, Musa have acted correctly. Their explanation was that, although still solvent, they couldn't see a way of continuing and still maintaining commitments to their authors and staff, a matter they weren't willing to compromise on.

You hear a lot of horror stories about small presses imploding in far more damaging ways. Although the closure is heartbreaking, it would have been far worse to have had it anyway, perhaps a year down the line, amid a financial mire that could have seen all our books held hostage while the mess was sorted out. As it is, within a day of the announcement I had a full and clearly worded letter of rights reversion that will allow me to do what I want with my work the moment the doors shut on the 28th February.

Which brings me to the question: what am I going to do with these stories? As I see it, there are two options. I can find another publisher that considers reprints, or I can self-publish.

Before I even decide that, though, I have to make a decision on how I want to present them. These are all short pieces, either longer short stories or novelettes, and most have been published before — of the four pieces in the collection, two would have been reprints (something Musa were always willing to consider).

The six stories are loosely connected. They have no characters in common, but all take place in a later era of the world featured in At An Uncertain Hour. ranging from an early modern period to that world's computer age. Besides this, all involve something ancient, something magical — whether good, evil or in between — intruding on this modern, rational world, a theme common in real-world settings, but less so in secondary worlds.

This was the rationale behind the collection, so perhaps the simplest thing would be just to expand it to include the two stand-alone publications. That would give me a collection of around 50,000 words.

First stop, of course, will be to find out whether any publishers are happy to take submissions of fantasy collections that are partial reprints. I'm not expecting to find many — Musa were quite special in that regard — but I'm hoping there'll be one or two.

If not, I'm looking at self-publishing them. Four of the six stories have already been published, so the editorial process wouldn't be too difficult, and I have the comfort of validation that all have been considered good enough for publication. That essentially leave a cover, the book design and a lot of hard work, before the real fun starts — the promotion.

Quite apart from losing my publications, I'll miss Musa. It was always a company with good ethical values, and staff and authors were very much a family, everyone helping one another out. I wish luck to all the staff and fellow-authors, and I hope I'll be running into them a lot, whether it's seeing their books coming out or working with them at other houses.

And I'd like to single out for particular good luck Daniel Ausema, whose wonderful Spire City serial story has been cancelled in the middle of its second season. I can't believe that someone won't have the taste and common sense to pick this up, but whatever happens, good luck, Dan.

And good luck and goodbye to Musa.

 

P.S. The one slight upside of this is that Musa is having a closing-down sale. Until the 28th, both The Treason of Memory and The Lone and Level Sands are available for a mere 40c, and other books are going similarly cheaply. At least you can grab some great books for very little before they're gone.

Diversity in Fantasy

Following my post about diversity on Nicholas Mena's blog a few days ago, I decided to write some more about the topic, which has plenty of scope to have more written about it. Some of this post overlaps with the other, but the focus is a little different.

 

Discussions of diversity in fantasy (and fiction in general) generally talk about the moral and social importance of showing positive diversity, in particular the need for positive role-models for members of under-represented races, genders and orientations. All that's vitally important, but there are two other reasons why it's important. Lack of diversity is unrealistic. Lack of diversity is boring.

Of course, I'm certainly not suggesting that every story has to have a "diversity quota", especially not short stories. If you were write a story set in the World War One trenches, for instance, your cast would have to be predominantly male and probably mostly white (though any opportunities for more diversity would be welcome) and there are even situations in secondary worlds where this makes sense. I've written stories with all-male casts, but then again I've also written stories with all-female casts. When the cast might be only two or three people, it has to meet a specific need.

Diversity is best measured over an author's opus, or even over a widespread trend. It doesn't matter if I write one story focusing on white males, if I write others where black females come to the fore.

In fantasy, it can also be measured by how the world is presented, and this is really where the unrealistic and boring issues come in. SFF is good enough at portraying a variety of exotic races, though even these tend to be cut and dried. Elves are all snooty tree-huggers, dwarves are all gruff axe-wielders, Klingons are all obsessed with their honour… and so on.

In SF, if a human protagonist visits a planet, they're likely to find an alien race who are all alike, all following a single culture and religion wherever they are on the planet. Assuming there is anywhere else on the planet. "A planet", especially in film or television SF, often seems to consist of one city, or a small group of villages, and nothing else, just like a fantasy "world" is often only a handful of kingdoms surrounded by terra incognita.

Increasingly, though, fantasy is focusing on secondary worlds populated by humans. And, more often than not, the story will be about countries populated by European-type peoples, and most of the active characters will be male.

The justification often given for the latter bias is that historical cultures in our world were always strongly patriarchal, so it would be unrealistic to show strong females. In fact, by no means all cultures were patriarchal. When the Kingdom of Sheba (or Saba) in Yemen was excavated and inscriptions giving the names of rulers were found, even the sober archaeologists were understandably excited about identifying the "Queen of Sheba" from the Bible. In fact, they discovered that nearly half of Sheba's rulers were female. It wasn't a matriarchy — it was just that the Shebans didn't seem to have a strong preference about the gender of their ruler.

In any case, a secondary world doesn't have to slavishly follow the same lines as our world. As long as there's a good internal logic, you can have whatever kind of society you want, including sexual equality. Invoking history is just an excuse.

The same is true for the distribution of race in a secondary world. Of course, to a large extent races with lighter skins will tend to live in cooler climates and those with darker skins in the hotter regions, but this doesn't mean they'll necessarily have the same cultures as their real-world equivalents.

In my main world, I have white, black, yellow, red and tan races (plus an isolated race with a green tinge) in a roughly similar distribution as in our world (except for the green race, that is) but the balance is very different. As in our world, civilisation began independently in several zones, but here there was no global takeover by any one of the zones. The predominantly black continent, for instance, not only had ancient, high-achieving civilisations (as Africa did) but, in the "modern" era, these civilisations still operate on a roughly equal level with those on the other continents.

Now, some might say that, in portraying black races who don't have the legacy of the slave trade and colonial exploitation, I'm belittling that heritage. My view is the exact opposite. It seems to me that, if I were to portray another, unrelated world whose black races have suffered slavery en masse, I'd be coming perilously close to suggesting that was some kind of natural destiny for black people. Obviously it's not. In our world, it was something done to Africa as a result of a specific lining up of global factors, and there's no reason to assume this would happen in a different world.

Nevertheless, without racial diversity, it's difficult to portray a range of cultures and show a truly varied world — and it's not only necessary to have the races, but to use them on an equal basis. Most traditional fantasy has European-style main characters, with other races as "exotic" or "barbarous". This isn't necessarily a sign of active racism. Tolkien, for instance, was fairly anti-racist for his generation and class*, but he still fell into the cultural trap of portraying only undifferentiated hordes of his darker-skinned humans.

I try to write stories with main characters of as many of my world's races and cultures as possible. One of my most recurring characters, Eltava, would in real-world equivalent be a cross between Chinese and Native American, and several of my stories have central characters who are black. For example, in my recent Musa ebook, The Lone and Level Sands, three of the six significant characters are black (and one other is most closely equivalent to North African) and the archaeological expedition central to the story has come from a university in a country with a black population.

Still, I haven't always got it right. My world and many of my characters have been evolving for several decades, going back to a time when I didn't have so much awareness of the need for diversity. The result is that I still have a disproportionate majority of white characters and cultures focused on, although I hope that will gradually diminish.

Ultimately, though, as I said at the beginning, getting diversity into fantasy isn't simply a moral duty. It's a way to make your world zing. It's a way to create conflicts and relationships that come from genuine difference, and to explore a reality as complex and fascinating as our own.

And to pass that on to your readers. After all, who really wants to read about a world without variety?

 

* For example, he referred in a letter to Hitler's "filthy racial doctrine", and in a rare political statement in the 1950s declared himself opposed to Apartheid.

Guesting on Sancocho Pot

Today I'm guesting on Sancocho Pot, the blog of my friend and fellow-author Nicholas Mena, as part of his Diversity in Fantasy series. For my post, I've discussed how I approach diversity in my work generally, and in particular in The Lone and Level Sands.

Diversity in fantasy isn't some "politically correct" fad. If you look at it the other way round, the question is why shouldn't there be diversity? In any remotely believable world, it's the default, not some special case, and the question isn't why have a diverse cast, but why not?

Please follow Nick's excellent blog in general, and particularly the thoughts on diversity from other guests that will appear throughout February.