on the distant shore

Whoozat? Purrcy and I were resting together, until all of a sudden he wondered what the human was doing in his bed. Besides being warm, of course.

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The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott is the second part of a duology with The Witch Roads, about Elen, a Deputy Courier in the Imperial-China-esque Tranquil Empire who gets caught up in the machinations of princes and demons, when all she wants to do is keep her head down, walk her circuit carrying mail, talking to people, keeping an eye out for deadly Spore infestations and stopping them before they spread, and seeing her beloved nephew Kem on his way in life.

Sidebar: Elen is 34, and we had a to-me hilarious convo on Bluesky when Elliott (who is 2 years younger than I am) said she was taken aback by how many readers describe Elen as "middle-aged", because *she* doesn't think of 34 as middle-aged, "middle-aged" is just a euphemism for "old"!

I think this is hilarious because from my youth I figured 0-29 was young, 30-59=middle-aged, 60+=old, that's just MATH, people, stop kidding yourselves! But then we talked about it at dinner and it turns out Beth & Dirk have very vibes-based definitions of "middle-aged" as well. Frankly I'm disappointed.



Back to the duology! One reason I love Elliott is that she often writes from the POV of non-elites who don't think elites (princes, emperors, billionaires, etc.) are that great, and she maintains it, she doesn't fall into the "except for this one" trap. This is *so* rare, even writers who are making a determined, conscious effort to avoid what Pratchett described as our "major design flaw, [the] tendency to bend at the knees" will still fall into it -- e.g. by having crucial non-elite characters we've identified with turn out to be close family members of the leading elite (royalty, rich people, etc.). Which the writers do to add family drama to the mix, but which also falls back into the old, OLD trap of "only the families of the elites count as Real People".

Because Elliott really cares about the little people, even when they're spending time with the high & mighty, her plots have less narrativium than usual & more "buffeted by the winds of fate" or "let's roll the dice, WHOOPS lost that saving throw" quality. The Witch Roads story isn't "how Elen saves the world/changes her society", it's "how Elen protects her child, comes to understand herself better, and gets to a [a better place in life, spoilers]."

But that also means that on some level it's disappointing, because I've been so conditioned to expect SFF to be about how someone at least *helps* to change the world. But in Elliott's little-people fantasy, the protags don't really do that, because they're in such hierarchical societies that a change at the top really boils down to "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".

The only thing that really bugs me is a me-thing. As in Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar, we have a fantasy society where people have some ability to choose their occupations--which completely overlooks the fact that in a premodern society almost everybody has to be a peasant farmer. (I'm now going down a research spiral; stay tuned.)

Purrcy is not supposed to be on the mantlepiece, which is quite high (5ft I guess), but very occasionally he's spotted mice up there so we're not really stringent at keeping him off, even if we could.

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Every afternoon Purrcy jumps onto his little platform next to my study chair and demands Pets! Attention! & of course I obey. There are SO many purrs.

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So early in November I stalled out on reading a bunch of new SFF because they're all books about social change through war, and I can't think that way right now.

And then it was Nov.11th, so I thought about WWI. I read:

Five Children on the Western Front, by Kate Saunders. Saunders noticed that the boys from Five Children and It & the other Psammead books were headed for the Great War, and wrote about it. To keep this being a story for children, she added a younger sibling, Edie (Edith), who's really the focus of the narrative along with the Lamb (Hilary). He's 11 in Oct. 1914, as the story begins when the Psammead re-appears in the gravel-pit the same day Lieutenant Cyril is heading off for the Front.

In the Five Children and It the children make wishes, most of them with hilarious unintended consequences. This book is more like The Story of the Amulet,[1] with the children helping the Psammead, who has lost almost all his magic. It turns out that he used to be a god in the ancient Near East, and he needs to repent of many of his careless, destructive, godly deeds lest he be stuck in a magicless world forever.

The book is structured around the Lamb and Edie learning a story from the Psammead's history that he *should* feel ashamed about, and then being granted a wish that lets them see a scene from the present day that's a parallel to that story.

Saunders uses this structure because writing about *children's* silly wishes in the context of WWI would be obscene. She's showing the Great War as the massive, unintended consequence of (thoughtless) wishes by the great & powerful, men who have godlike power over the lives of people like Cyril, Robert, the rest of the young men of Europe, and all the people who care for them.

I think you really have to have read the Nesbit books to get the full experience of reading this one. It's definitely not "more of the same", any more than WWI is "more of the same" of the Edwardian period. OTOH, the characterizations of teen/young adult Cyril, Anthea, Robert & Jane don't IMHO follow from their characterizations in the books. Saunders has made all four of them less conventional, especially Anthea (going to art school) and Jane (prepared to fight both society and Mother to become a doctor).

I think this would be a very good book for a child who's loved E. Nesbit but has gotten a bit older & more thoughtful, started to wonder about things like the passage of time and how things change. It's a good introduction to the way WWI ushered in the massive changes of the 20th century. But warning: it WILL make you cry.

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[1] It turns out I never read The Story of the Amulet as a child, only Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet. So I just started reading it now, and yikes on bikes! that's a LOT of racism & antisemitism, wow. I don't know if I can finish it TBH, though it does make The Magician's Nephew a LOT clearer. Lewis was writing a homage to Nesbit, but I have to give him credit, a little: his treatment of Calormen, especially in The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle, is *worlds* less racist than anything Nesbit wrote. And note that Nesbit was a founder of the socialist Fabian Society, while Lewis, though apolitical, was *definitely not* socialist. Nesbit, at least in what I read of Amulet, is *more* imperialist than Lewis, though that may partly be due to the passage of time.

Purrcy likes all the people who visited for T-day, and no-one extra was staying overnight here, but it was just ... a lot of feet, and voices, and hands. Today has had to be very clingy and relaxing, to wind down.

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I was able to let go completely and have E&P do almost everything for T-day because of a combo of pain & exhaustion from pain. We ate at 5, so early in the day there was dining room table clearing, and giving bills to me in my study to look at and pay. And I remember asking Dirk to bring me the shoulder-shaped ice pack, and later him coming in to ask me a question and all I could was just ... stare at him, because even as the pain went down the exhaustion from it surged forward and there was nothing left.

So Purrcy & I had to lie in bed a lot of the time. I couldn't really fall asleep, but I continued binge-reading.

This week's binge-read was Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths 4-book series, now re-issued under her Katherine Addison pen name, the better to pull in fans of The Goblin Emperor and the other books in The Chronicles of Osreth. I found them a quick read and enjoyable enough, though partly because I could see how many elements there are in these early works that she re-worked for the Osreth books, and which elements she decided meh, don't have to do that again.

Reused elements: stories within the story; labyrinths; lower-class people having important POVs; palaces being full of servants who know stuff & who you'd better get to know; theatrical costumes are a great way for a woman to get upper-class clothing even if she's not upper class; aristocrats are mostly assholes.

Element she realized she didn't need to reuse: POV character who's an asshole. OMG Felix is *such* a yaoi character, I now see why when Melusine came out & I was hearing about it 2nd hand your opinions were *so* divergent. Because on the one hand, he's just the Maximum Poor Little Mew Mew ... on the other hand, when "sane" he's a total jerk and bully toward Mildmay & anyone else in range of his tongue.

So the series as a whole feels like her working out, can I develop Felix's backstory enough to show how he was shaped into a charismatic abuser, and then can I believably show him becoming a better person? And I dunno if I'll read the series again, because it just is too many chapters from Felix's POV. I 1000x prefer Maia and Thara, both of whom absolutely abhor picking fights, *shudder*.