Book Review: The Dark Between the Trees, by Fiona Barnett

 No number of completed risk assessments can keep you safe.

Cover design by Dominic Forbes

As an academic myself, I love books about academics going on adventures, but for the same reason I’m also hyper-alert to misrepresentations about academia. My teeth itch every time a book blithely assumes that the bulk of our job responsibilities are teaching; that we have ‘summers off’ (hah!); that it’s a straightforward matter to get a ‘new job’ at ‘the local university’; that a normal age for a new professor is 25 (hah, try 40!); and that field trips are wild jaunts into the unknown (oh god, the paperwork!).

What The Dark Between The Trees manages to do is provide everything that any horror writer who's ever dabbled in the Ivory Tower could dream of – drama, danger, discovery, mystery, magic, beasts and witches and unholy mysteries that lie well beyond the reach of any scholarship or human comprehension – while also getting the nature of academia exactly right.

Dr Alice Christopher is a historian, who has always been fascinated by an event that took place in Moresby Wood during the English Civil War in 1643: the ambush and defeat of a troop of soldiers, of whom a third were killed and the rest fled into the woods. Only two came back out again, and only one survived after to tell a chilling tale of impossible landscapes and shadowy monsters. Now, after decades of trying to find funding to do a proper on-the-ground investigation of this location, Alice has finally secured a very small grant, sufficient to lead a very small research team on a very small trip to explore the spot. With her come her PhD student, Nuria, weeks away from submitting her thesis; two members from National Parks department, and a representative from the Ordinance Survey. That last is quite important because maps of Moresby Wood are hard to come by, and the two that do exist -- one from 1731 and another from 1966 – don’t agree with each other. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is foreshadowing.)

The narrative proceeds across the two timelines. Alongside Alice’s team, we get interspersed paragraphs following the troop of soldiers, starting with their desperate retreat into the woods. The events of the two groups parallel each other: They each camp under an enormous oak tree in a clearing; they each wake the next morning to discover that the tree is gone. They try to make their way out of the wood, and instead find that the geography is changeable. They tell stories about local legends associated with the woods: a family of charcoal burners who went in and never came out; a monster named the Corrigal, whose nest lies in the heart of the forest. Their unity becomes fractured, riven by doubts in the leadership – an internal stress exasperated by existing battle wounds (for the soldiers), or the failure of GPS equipment (for the researchers), and the terrible weather (for both). Then people start disappearing and dying mysteriously, perfectly fine one moment, and the next moment gone – or, worse, cut in two with no warning beyond a shimmer in the air. (I should mention – there is a lot of blood in this book.) 

Things progress from bad to worse, until eventually . . . well, let’s just say that a book with centuries-separated timelines and a creepy forest that seems not to worry about reality and sanity has options when it comes to allowing those timelines to interact. 

The plot and world-building (well, Forest-building) are largely vibes-based. The details of why Moresby Wood is so weird are never really clarified; the strangely veiled identity of those ambushing soldiers 1643 goes unrevealed; the eventual fate of many of the characters remains ambiguous; and the nature of the mysterious shimmer that slices people in half is left as an exercise for the reader. And yet, oddly, these narrative choices didn’t leave me unsatisfied. In the same way that trying to render something as incomprehensible as Moresby Wood compatible with a mere map only betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about its whole deal, trying to render something as misty and vibey as The Dark Between the Trees into a concrete set of events and actions also misses the point. It’s not that kind of book. Read it for the experience, not for the story.

But also, read it for the pitch-perfect rendition of UK academic research. This level of accuracy  can only come from someone who has been there. Take, for example, the PhD student Nuria. Her second supervisor is an academic nemesis of Alice’s, which means that any time Nuria disagrees with Alice, her opposition is seen in the light of a larger feud that really has nothing to do with her. (This type of thing absolutely happen: A PhD student in my programme had to avoid taking certain classes to satisfy her coursework requirements because they were taught by her supervisor’s extremely toxic ex-spouse, both of whom, bafflingly, still remained members of the same department.) Or take the other three members of the team, who represent non-academic ‘stakeholder’ project partners: yes, the involvement of the Ordinance Survey works well to support the plot point about disagreeing maps, but it also reflects a growing pressure in UK academia to demonstrate ‘impact’, or a demonstrable benefit or change that one’s research can effect outside the university context. I can just imagine Alice writing her ‘Impact and Knowledge Exchange’ section of the grant bid now: In partnership with the Ordinance Survey, this project will prove vital to supporting the badly-needed modernisation of existing maps of the Moresby Wood area. Currently, the most recent map is half a century old, and ...

And then, of course, there are the risk assessments. Because, as every University insurance administrator knows, if you’ve filled out the risk assessment, then nothing bad will happen! I can only hope my next research trip does not bring me near Fiona Barnett, because somehow I doubt the University of Glasgow’s SafeZone App is going to prove sufficient to protect me from her vision.

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Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws

Highlights:

• Vibey vibes

• Unfathomably scary Woods

• Historical mysteries that do not illuminate the present

• Pitch perfect academics

Reference: Barnett, Fiona, The Dark Between the Trees, [Solaris 2022].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social 

Book Review: Seven Against Thebes by Stephen Dando-Collins

Stephen Dando-Collins’ Seven Against Thebes brings the original and once ubiquitously famous story to new audiences and readers

Seven Heroes, coming together to face a tyrant and his forces. You think you’ve heard this story before, or watched it.  Seven Samurai. The Magnificent Seven. And many variants.  But most of those stories (with one major exception, which I will discuss later) have the Seven coming together in defense, defending a group of innocents against an incoming force.  But the original story of seven heroes coming together is a somewhat different story. A story of a king wrongly deposed by his brother, and managing to gather a force of champions and soldiers to assault the city he once called home and to gain his birthright back. A city that in modern day is not as famous as Athens or Sparta, but was, once, their equal...

This is Stephen Dando-Collins’ story in SEVEN AGAINST THEBES: The Quest of the Original Magnificent Seven.

Once upon a time, 2500 years ago, the story of Polynices and his fellow Champions was one of the core stories of Greek History and Myth.  The Iliad and Odyssey you, reader, probably already know. And you know that even beyond those two texts themselves, the stories and myths of the Iliad and Odyssey had been adapted in plays, stories, and other works in Ancient Greece and Rome, and of course, all the way up to today. 

The story of the Seven Against Thebes was, for the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the co-equal of the Iliad and Odyssey, once inspired numerous plays and other works based on the events. The Theban Cycle was once as big a deal as anything by Homer. But while the Iliad and Odyssey have proved immortal, the story of the war against Thebes lost its luster and cultural consciousness except for it’s origin point, and the general idea of a band of heroes fighting together (which Kurosawa and Sturges would bring, and flip from offense to defense).  Dando-Collins’ goal here is to bring the original story back to light, for new readers and present a story whose original is perhaps unjustly obscure in a new and modern light.

The author takes a strictly historical fictional tack in the novel right from the beginning of the story. While a lot of the plays and fiction written around these events in the time of the Greeks and Romans had the action replete with Gods and Monsters and the like, Dando-Collins takes a tack that the characters certainly believed in the Gods and act (often very strongly) on their religious beliefs, Zeus, Athena, Hera and the rest of their family do not appear on stage at all.  

So where does the story of Seven Against Thebes begin, in Dando-Collins’ retelling? Well, as I mentioned before, this is the part of the story that you almost certainly know.  Who has not heard of the man who, unknowingly, slew his father and married his mother?  Yes, the start of the story of the war against Thebes begins with none other than Oedipus.  Just why Oedipus did these things are presented in a Historical fictional point of view. While in the original sources, Oedipus was cursed by the Gods to do all this, it is in the end a series of tragic circumstances, and it all begins with a chance encounter on the road. Oedipus, who has been raised far away from his birth home as a foundling, gets into a deadly encounter with his father (not that he had a clue who it was) and proceeds from there to Thebes, the populace unknowing that he killed the King of the city. But they do know he is a big damn hero and so they marry him to the widowed Queen Jocasta, who is indeed his mother, their blood relationship unknown to either at the time.1

I can hear the record scratch. Big Damn Hero? Hero of what? Well, it turns out you may not have realized it, but Oedipus did defeat a monster, or so he claimed was a monster, in a riddling contest.  A monster called the Sphinx. And yes, the classic riddle whose answer is “A Man”.  Again, given the historical fictional perspective, Dando-Collins speculates that the Sphinx was just a woman who was a dangerous robber, nothing more, not that anyone knew that. Defeating the Sphinx is certainly more Heroic than a single female bandit, right?  (Later on, during the actual war, Dando-Collins has a couple of soldiers argue whether the Sphinx was real or was, in fact, just a bandit)

So, Oedipus and Jocasta ruled Thebes for a time, until drought and famine had them seek answers from the Oracle of Delphi as to why and how to solve it.  The results of that led to the two finding out the long buried truth about themselves and what had happened. Oedipus blinds himself and flees Thebes. 1 This leaves Oedipus and Jocasta’s two sons, Polynices and Etoceles. They decide that they should share the throne, ruling in alternate years. In a move that everyone with the sense of a dazed dormouse should have seen coming, the moment Etoceles takes the seat, he banishes his brother. 

And so the Seven Against Thebes gets its defining motivation. Polynices winds up at the court of King Adrastus in the city of Argos.  Along with another royal exile from a different city, Tydeus, he cools his heels for a while, but is always dreaming of the chance to go and wrest control of the city from his no-good brother.  Finally, a plan is hatched by Polynices and Tydeus to get their thrones back, by finding and gathering a group of companions, going together to liberate Thebes, and then go on to liberate Calydon on behalf of Tydeus. (And Adrastus, who would get lots of prestige by having the two cities beholden to him for his help, sees this all as a good investment in money and manpower)

As you can see, Seven Samurai, the Magnificent Seven and its kin usually have our Heroes defending the weak, training the helpless and playing defense for an incoming force, but the original source text is all about an assault on Thebes. L.R. Lam and Elizabeth’s May SEVEN DEVILS, though, does take inspiration from the original source text, having their heroes go on the offense against an oppressive Empire. And the former Heir to the Empire is one of the Seven, continuing the theme of having someone connected intimately to the ruler as part of the attacking party.  

But there is a note of heroism in fighting against a corrupt space Empire in Seven Devils, that Seven Against Thebes, as told by Dando-Collins, lacks. The reasons why the Seven get recruited and join Polynices’ quest to become King of Thebes are varied but are relatively mercenary--be it in terms of material wealth, or glory. This does have the knock on effect, I think, for a modern reader like me to sympathize with the Seven a little less than I would with a more modern tale. Polynices got a raw deal, to be sure, thanks to his brother, but this is not an altruistic campaign by any means for any of the others. 

When the actual marching and fighting occur, Dando-Collins, who has written on ancient armies and combats, really does shine. He looks at the logistics of marching and the terrain the army has to traverse, and the set pieces of the conflict. He shows a mix of individual combats a la the Iliad with army actions on a larger scale as the forces led by each of the Seven face off against the Seven gates of Thebes. He goes into loving detail on how Thebes was arranged and defended and the heroism on both sides of the conflict (and also side quests!) plays out. It was especially, here, that I could start to see what Classical Greeks and Romans saw in the story. War, reverses, combat, heroism, tragic deaths, pathos, and much more. It’s excitingly and engagingly written. 

Especially good is how the battle plays out. It’s a method much copied in film, because it works.  If you have a group of opponents on each side, you pair them off, so that you narrow the wide screen to a series of one-on-ones. The Seven do this, by each Gate in Thebes getting a defender to hold off the member of the Seven assaulting it.  It will surprise you not at all to find that, for example, thjat the gate Polynices assaults is defended by his brother Etoceles, himself. 

There is also another bit I got to thinking in reading this. If you remember your Iliad, there were funerary games held for Hector after Achilles slew him. Here, in the course of the battles and conflicts, we get a couple of high profile deaths, and funerary games to match.  The sheer joy and exuberance the participants have in the funerary game make it clear to me that this is how the Ancient Greek Olympics must have surely started--it started out of funerary games that eventually decided to become a regular thing, without needing a funeral to have an excuse to hold them. 

The other takeaway is when this book takes place in the timeline of Greek history/myth. Given that several of the children and immediate descendants of the Seven are present at Troy, this takes place in the generation before the Trojan War.  Theseus is contemporary to the Seven. One of the Seven is the son of Atalanta, the Huntress of the Calydonian Boar. If we mix myth and history for a moment, the Seven are the penultimate crop of heroes in Greek Mythology. After them, we get the Trojan War and the end of Mythic, Heroic Greece. Mythic Greece fades away into real history.2  Perhaps since they are the second closest to real history and also are less myth-touched than earlier generations of heroes like Heracles, Bellerophon, and the like, the Seven were and are more relatable as real people by readers and storytellers alike. 

If you are looking for a mythic, magic, here, this is not the rendition of the story that you want. Dando-Collins is relentlessly materialistic, attributing everything to men or to chance, and the Gods and magic play no part in his story. He fashions this mythic story into historical fiction of the first order, readable, immersive and a great look at larger than life characters and their epic and immense struggle.  This is source material and inspiration that more authors could mine for their own ideas. 

And if you want to learn more about Thebes, the city that was neither Athens nor Sparta but just as important, back in the day, let me commend to you Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, by Paul Cartledge. He does briefly touch on the Theban cycle events before going on to written history of the city.

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Highlights: 

• Epic storytelling grounded in the real.
• A real spotlight on a story whose details have faded from public consciousness

1. This is too big a digression to avoid putting elsewhere than a footnote, so here goes. The Oedipal complex has nothing to do really with Oedipus. He had no idea he killed his father, and married his mother. And as I said in the main text, once he and she find out the truth, it is with horror, revulsion and repulsion that this truth comes out, not any sort of secret desire like in Freud. Oedipus’ story is of tragedy of circumstance, not any sort of lusting after one’s parent. 

2. And yes I am sort of thinking of Niven’s The Magic Goes Away, here. 

Dando-Collins, Stephen, SEVEN AGAINST THEBES: The Quest of the Original Magnificent Seven. (Turner, 2023)

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Review: Space Craze

A sojourn through the history of star-spangled science fiction

Gene Roddenberry called outer space ‘the final frontier,’ and those three words have become an iconic tagline of his most famous creation; after all, he pitched Star Trek as ‘wagon train to the stars.’ Such a comparison, of the gulf of space with the American West, is so common that we tend to forget how quintessentially American that conflation is, indeed how very American the science fiction genre has been. All that, and more, is the subject of the 2022 nonfiction book Space Craze: America’s Enduring Fascination with Real and Imagined Space Flight by Margaret A. Weitekamp.

Weitekamp is perhaps the most qualified person on the planet to write such a book; she is the chair of the Space History Department at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., a place I spent so many happy hours with my dad as a child growing up in the DC suburbs (although I probably made my dad sit through the planetarium movie too many times). Every chapter, she starts with a discussion of a piece of memorabilia in the museum’s archive that she has personally handled, grounding the book in a reality that many of us have seen if only second-hand.This book is, ultimately, a cultural history of America’s love affair with the heavens, the story of the dreaming that led to that one small step for a man.

Weitekamp clearly knows her stuff; she goes all the way back to the nineteenth century and the earliest literature that could be described as ‘science fiction.’ It allows her to do what she does best in this book: contextualize works of fiction that many of us have read or watched, indeed loved, but never thought of the world it came from. She talks about the strong influence of Westerns on early science fiction, and how its fingerprints are still felt today. She talks about the evolving role of extraterrestrials as the ‘other.’ She goes into great detail about the influence of Buck Rogers and the tropes that it spawned. One particularly striking moment is when she gets to the 1970s and is talking about the original Star Wars. She mentions a Black critic in California who calls that film, now a beloved classic (by myself included) as the most racist film he had ever seen, because it implied that no people of color would exist in the future (fortunately, this would improve in franchise history, but I can’t deny that the original is very white in its cast).

As I previously remarked with the chapter openings, she also does a wonderful job of humanizing this history. A lot of the book is about the history of science fiction fandom, from the earliest conventions to the myriad websites of today. I joined my local science fiction society in 2019, and I believe I am still its youngest dues-paying member; I was stunned to learn that people I was talking to had met Isaac Asimov. With the long view Weitekamp provides, you can see the world of fandom from an age where you could read every SFF book released that year evolve slowly into the world of today, with a plethora of work to lose yourself in.

There’s a part of me, though, that wishes Weitekamp were a bit more radical. A big theme here is the notion of frontier and its role in American mythology. Recent works on the American frontier, such as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: from the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, and John Grenier’s The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier 1607-1814 have problematized the rosy, white-centric view of the frontier, rather revealing the truth that it was, to put it bluntly, a successful continent-scale genocide, a history that has defined America’s self-conception ever since (it makes sense, then, that a country that has never known a day of peace would create military science fiction).

This is a period of wholesale annihilation of entire peoples that is the basis of so much of America’s literature of futuristic dreaming. Weitekamp discusses Garrett Putman Serviss’ novel Edison’s Conquest of Mars, a novel that ends with the white male protagonist releasing floods to commit genocide against the Martians, because they are a ‘dying race.’ In his book A History of Bombing, Sven Lindqvist contextualized that book, among with many others, with the history of waging war on entire peoples that started in the colonial world and culminated in the Holocaust. Indeed, the American West was one of the great inspirations for Hitler’s plan for Eastern Europe (for the curious, I recommend Carroll P. Kakel’s book The American West and the Nazi East), a genocidal process of ‘civilized’ white people exterminating the ‘inferior’ natives and creating an idyllic land of hardy soldier-farmers living off the land. I’d imagine that an employee of a government-funded museum cannot be so candid about such history, but I feel like this was a missed opportunity (or the subject of another book - Lindqvist touches on this nasty history in the formation of apocalyptic narratives in American culture, but not enough to sate my curiosity).

Space Craze is a good, solid history of American science fiction, albeit whitewashed in the way that our mainstream history usually is. As a history of people, who played with toys and went to conventions and loved dreaming of new worlds, it is astounding, and I recommend it to every science fiction fan.

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The Math

Highlights: seeing how SF fandom became what it is today

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Review: The Lion House: The Coming of a King by Christopher de Bellaigue

A study of Suleyman the Magnificent from oblique angles.

Suleyman the Magnificent is one of the most interesting and fascinatingly charismatic rulers in all of world history. If you know anything about the Ottoman Empire and it’s history, and can name a ruler, it’s probably Suleyman. The decadent opulent court, the brilliant mind, tactician and leader, the threat to Europe.

His story is told in The Lion House: The Coming of a King, by Christopher de Bellaigue

A straight up biography of him would be hard, and has been done before. What Christopher de Bellaigue does in this book, though, is a far more tricky sort of biography and study of the man. The author takes a road far less travelled in bringing us the world of the great Sultan. We meet Suleyman and get to know him throughout the book by looking at a selection of individuals across the region who have connections to him and his world.

So, the book does not open in Istanbul, as you might expect, or anywhere within the Ottoman Empire at all. Instead, the story starts in Venice, in April of 1522, with a briefing on the doings of the Ottomans, and in short order, the election of a Doge. We will continually go back to Venice in the course of the narrative, but the stories of individuals interacting with the Ottomans and Suleyman will range from Venice, to Hungary, to, of course, within Istanbul itself.

In this way, their stories, and their interactions with Suleyman, sometimes directly, and sometimes only obliquely, together, are meant for us to construct a narrative of the man at the center. Do we get fully in his head at any point? No. Do we get to see in full much of who Suleyman was, and what he did and his impact as a political actor? Again, no.

The book really turns out to be Suleyman as a “battlefield”, a chess piece (the King, naturally) on a chessboard between two of the primary point of view characters. Alvise Gritti is the son of the Doge of Venice elected in the first act, as previously mentioned. He is a bastard child, mistrusted for being a ‘Latin’, and yet for all of that, his ambition, charisma and skill puts him high in the councils of the Sultan. It’s a precarious perch to be sure, because the highest person in those councils, second only to the Sultan himself, is the Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha. Ibrahim Pasha has an intimate, and very personal relationship with the Sultan, and recognizes the danger that Gritti represents to his own power and authority. And so, even though we get other points of view, their tangled machinations against each other fill much of this book.

What this means, and given the time frame, is that we get a necessarily narrow and focused look at the Sultan himself through this conflict, through these characters and their conflict. Within that and around that, though, we get a vivid and amazing wealth of detail on the court of the Sultan, the frontier in Hungary, the halls of power in Venice, and what life “on the road” was like for soldiers, for diplomats, for high officials, for soldiers. For Suleyman. It’s an immersive and detailed use of worldbuilding to bring us into the lives of these characters who intersect with the great Sultan, directly or otherwise.

I have been speaking in terms as if this were a historical novel rather than an actual piece of non fiction, and I do think that this book really does borrow a lot from the novel tradition. The tradition expansive and sometimes dry history book of the past that turned off as many or more readers than they drew in is not so much a thing in modern history and non fiction. The rage these days is for the microhistory, for the history of sometimes not even just a particular person, but a moment in time, a decision, a small aspect of the world that can be illuminated, described and brought to life. Capturing Suleyman the Magnificent at the beginning of his reign, when he rising to his power and the crest of his reign (and arguably the height of the entire Ottoman Empire) is definitely in that microhistorical frame.

Where In the Lion House differs is in its use of narrative, point of view, the tricks of historical and mimetic fiction1 to tell these stories, to tell a narrative and a perspective on a character whose head we do no really get into. The book here at Nerds of a Feather that you may be thinking of, and I certainly was, was two books: The Sun Chronicles by Kate Elliott. Those novels feature a strong main character (the genderflipped Alexander the Great in Space). And while we do get point of view from Sun, in the two chonky novels in the series to date, we get particularly little page count in their heads. Instead we rely on the Companions, particularly ones like the Wily Persephone. It is through the frame of all the characters in those two novels that we get a picture of Sun herself, and what she does and who she is. De Bellaigue does the same thing, here.

One could write a fantasy novel in this way, sticking obliquely from the main characters and sticking to unusual point of view and “Camera choice”. Ann Leckie does this in The Raven Tower, and I know that was a difficult book for some people on that basis. I thought, however, it was brilliant.

So is it good? Is it successful? I happened to consume this in audio, and so it took me a bit to realize and recognize how the format, how the tone and shape of this story was going to go. I went thinking this was going to be a more traditional history book, a more traditional (even modern traditional) book than what I got. But in audio, the novel narrative lines worked for me, I wasn’t quite listening to a historical novel, but it was in that ballpark, with the immersive detail and the swirling around the main characters who themselves orbit in various ways around the Sultan. It was a transporting experience and I highly recommend that if you are looking for an audiobook that educates as well as entertains, this is the book for you. It’s not the one true and single biography of the Sultan, but it will give you a sense of who he was by the lives he touched.

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Highlights: 

- Historical Novel like feel to the narrative

- Audio version may be superior to print given unusual format for a history book

Reference: de Bellaigue, Christopher, In the Lion House, [Vintage Publishing, 2023] 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Review: Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth W. Harl

Kenneth W Harl’s Empires of the Steppes is a new and up to date look at the nomadic tribes ranging from the Huns and Mongols to less familiar names, who helped shape Eurasian civilization

You've heard of the Mongols, at least vaguely, I am sure. Attila the Hun is still a byword for destruction and malevolence. These are high points of the Steppe Nomads, nomadic tribes that roamed from Hungary to China, influencing all the civilizations they contacted. But they were far more than the narrow vision you probably have. And there are many more beyond these two names. Diverse and dynamic migratory cultures. Who were these nomadic tribes, the Huns, the Mongols, and others you may not have heard of before picking up this book? And what was their importance to history? 

Kenneth W. Harl’s Empires of the Steppes explores the history of these nomadic tribes and how they shaped Eurasian civilization. Further, it engages with the whole idea of labelling the nomadic tribes of the Eurasian Steppe as solely being warriors in the first place. Certainly, the Huns, Avars, and the Mongols caused much destruction in their conflicts with settled civilizations. But the whole history and relationship of these nomads with settled civilizations is far, far more complicated and diverse. Harl's book looks at a much broader picture of what the steppe nomads were and who they were.

The book is a narrative history, running in a mostly chronologically linear format (although the prologue, showing Attila on the road to Rome, is a flashforward in terms of this linear chronology). The lack of a lot of archaeological evidence means the first couple of chapters may put off a reader, since there is much we just don’t know, and piecing together things from changes in dialects of PIE (Proto Indo-European) is somewhat obscure and arcane. It is with the Scythians that we start to get true interactions between the nomadic tribes and civilizations, and the narrative can take off. The zig-zag forward of the narrative in time means that our location and our focus, in Eurasia, shifts as different nomadic tribes and their impact on civilization are seen: Scythians in the west Steppes, Alexander the Great in Central Asia, China and their first dealings with the steppe nomads, and a couple of chapters in the East before swinging back to the Parthians, the Huns and more.

There is a lot of detail and, although I consider myself relatively well-read in history, a wealth of new information about these nomadic tribes came to light in the reading of the book. I knew a bit about the Huns, more about the Mongols, but in this book I was introduced to the Seljuks, the Scythians, the Hepthalites, and others. The complex web of relationships these people had with the more settled neighbors is a fascinating story that Harl explores. Is there a lot of back and forth raiding, attempts at conquest, submission, booty? Absolutely. But these peoples also provided mounts, transmitted ideas, and stimulated trade, commerce and technological development. Time and again, the nomadic tribes on the borders of more settled societies are shown to be agents of change. Even as they often are absorbed or disappear into the mix of the peoples they raid and conquer, their very existence, even as it is destructive and often catastrophic for peoples, cities and cultures, is also shown to have the effect of a wildfire upon a forest.

Still, contrary to the conception that the nomadic peoples just wanted to “destroy” civilization, Harl shows time and again how raiders wound up getting co-opted by their settled neighbors, either in conquering them and becoming settled themselves, or getting attracted to the goods and comforts of their neighbors. They didn’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, but they did want to gain control of it. But the nomadic tribes as a whole, and we see it over and over, never were able to cohere for long. The potency of a single ruler usually held fast for a generation, but the nomadic crests of power never lasted longer than a couple of generations. Protip: when designing your nomadic tribal warrior character, don’t skimp on Charisma. Charisma and personality, as much as tactical brilliance and skill, is what made Attila, Genghis, Kublai, and Tamerlane so powerful. That’s what got people to follow them and lead them to conquest and glory. Genghis’s story, which I already knew, is very much a rags-to-riches one in this regard, starting with nothing but his family half-starved and ending with an empire. But the endless changes and developments of the Steppe meant a succession of new and different challenges to settled civilization. The Avars nearly conquering Constantinople is far less well known to most people as opposed to the Huns, Vandals and Goths smashing Rome.

The book ends with Tamerlane, the last high point of the Steppe nomads. The ambitious Timur the Lame was the scourge of Central Asia, and as bad as Genghis Khan actually was, some of the things that people attribute to him, some of the worst atrocities, can be actually laid more correctly at Tamerlane’s feet. He was much more the “pyramids of skulls” type of conqueror than Genghis ever was. After Tamerlane, the nomads ceased to be an important force in Eurasian civilization. The rise of oceanic trade, the European contact with the Americas, the rise of technology making horse archers and cavalry less effective in the face of pikemen and firearms meant that the Steppe nomads ceased to be the once pivotal factor they were for two millennia. They ceased to matter much in the same way the Silk Road itself that they sat across mattered so much.

Karl doesn’t speculate or talk about it at all, since his focus is Eurasia, but a Jonbar point comes to me as a reader of SFF. Would Indigenous cultures in North America have reached higher technological levels if they had had nomadic nomads to deal with on a regular basis because horses survived in North America and some enterprising tribes (as they did once they were introduced in our TL) decided a nomadic, raiding way of life on horseback was a path to success? The Great Plains from Alberta to Iowa and Kansas could have been the equivalent of the Steppe in Asia, providing pools of warring tribes pushing out against the mound builders of Cahokia, or the Iroquois of the East, or the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, or the Ancestral Puebloans of the South. Would this constant pressure force technological development in a way that the Native Americans didn’t do in our timeline?

Overall, in Empires of the Steppes, Harl makes a strong case for the importance of nomadic tribes in pre-1500 Europe and Asia, and provides a lot of evidence and correlative information to back up his thesis. Were Attila, Genghis and Tamerlane figures who caused much destruction and devastation from France to China? Absolutely. But were they also instrumental in making the modern Eurasian world what it was? That is Harl’s thesis, and I think he strongly argues it.

One final point. Read the book with Google Maps or an atlas at your elbow. The book lacks maps, and could surely use them, especially to get a better sense of the scale of the Eurasian steppes. Genghis’s conquests are all the more impressive given the distances he was covering. While Harl does paint good word-pictures, I think the book sorely could have used some maps.

--

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Extensively footnoted and annotated thesis
• Strong narrative historical style makes for good reading
• Book frankly could have used maps, and in plenty

Reference: Harl, Kenneth W., Empires of the Steppes [Hannover Square Press, 2023].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Interview: Myke Cole, author of Sixteenth Watch

Myke Cole's first novel, Control Point, was published in 2012, he's been putting out approximately a book a year since, alongside including short fiction, non-fiction, and even starring in television shows. If you enjoy Military Fantasy or Epic Fantasy (and now, with Sixteenth Watch, Military Science Fiction), Cole is an author you should check out. A veteran himself, Cole intimately understands the choices that soldiers make, and the long term consequences of those choices. He did three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. His work includes the Shadow Ops trilogy, the Reawakening trilogy, and the Sacred Throne series, and his short fiction has appeared in Black Gate, Weird Tales, and multiple anthologies.

Angry Robot is publishing Myke Cole's forthcoming novel Sixteenth Watch (available March 10), in which the Coast Guard must prevent a lunar war. This book promises to be low G and high intensity!

I was lucky enough to see Myke at ConFusion science fiction convention many years ago, and I remember him being funny, humble, razor sharp, and an absolute stand up guy. He's super busy these days, so I was thrilled that he found time to answer all my questions about Sixteenth Watch, writing about middle aged characters, being on TV, writing non-fiction and comics, and more!

You can learn more about Myke and his work by checking out his website, MykeCole.com , or following him on twitter, @MykeCole.

NOAF: I love that the plot of Sixteenth Watch focuses around de-escalating a possible war. Your characters are trying to avoid a war by stopping it before it starts. Why did you want to tell that particular story?


Myke Cole: Military SF is a tried and true sub genre. It has a solid and reliable fan base that has a set of expectations that military stories will be about the military’s core function - to kill people and destroy property. While that is most certainly at the heart of what militaries do, it is only one of the things they do. Militaries do search-and-rescue, further diplomacy, provide aid, build infrastructure, develop new technologies and processes, and even influence pop culture. I’ve read a lot of Military SF, and I’ve been feeling for a while that these other aspects of militaries aren’t sufficiently explored, and the US Coast Guard, a military branch dedicated first and foremost to saving lives rather than taking them, was the perfect branch to do the exploring.

NOAF: The main character of Sixteenth Watch, Cdr. Jane Oliver, she's in her 50s, she's counting down the time to when she can retire. How did you develop her character? 

MC: Although it’s easy to forget since 2016 when this country has been saddled with a corrupt gerontocracy, America is a country that hates old age and lifts up youth at every turn. Older people are expected to disappear, or at least fade socially, to shut down their ambition, sexuality, and vitality. I didn’t realize how much that culture that impacted me until I crossed the line to where I’m closer to 50 than 40. It’s only as I become more interested in stories about people dealing with the second half of their lives that I realize how few stories are told about them, and in particular how few stories that deal honestly with the fact that while our bodies wither, our humanity doesn’t, and we have to grapple with the frustration of a heart that wants to write checks the body can’t cash.

NOAF: One challenge to writing Military Science Fiction and Military Fantasy is that not all readers will be familiar with military terminology and acronyms. What is common knowledge to active military members and veterans may be opaque to readers with no military experience. How have you handled this challenge?

MC: I have to thank my agent for this. When I was first doing my military fantasy Shadow Ops trilogy, I used military argot to the hilt. I used every acronym that I would normally, expecting my readers to pick things up by context. My agent read it and said “Dude. Take all that shit out.” And I was horrified. “But it’s authentic!” I cried, “it will transport the reader and make them feel like they’re really experiencing a military environment!” “Hell, no it won’t,” he said, “it’ll confuse them and throw them out of the story. Trust me, this book is so military, they can’t fill to pick up on that. Your first goal should be to make the book accessible to people who lack that first-hand experience. Put a glossary in the back if you want, but for the love of god, make another pass and take out 80% of these acronyms.”

It was hard advice to accept, but I’m glad I did. Because he was right.

NOAF: How did you come up with the title Sixteenth Watch? Is the number 16 significant?

MC: Astronauts in the International Space Station (ISS) see sixteen sunrises and sunsets every day. In my fictional universe because of this, getting assigned to the ISS became called “going on the Sixteenth Watch.” Eventually, the term “Sixteenth Watch” became used by all branches of the military as slang to mean “any duty in space.”

NOAF: What was your favorite scene to write in Sixteenth Watch?

MC: I can’t answer this without giving major spoilers. Sorry. Suffice to say it’s a conversation between Jane Oliver and the Commandant of the US Coast Guard, a conversation that Jane (and hopefully the reader) expects to go one way, and takes a delightful left turn that, if I did my job right, will evoke a tear or two.

NOAF: As I was writing these interview questions, you posted on twitter that The Bronze Lie is done". What can you tell us about The Bronze Lie?  On a related note, of course I need you tell us everything you can about Hundred Wolves from Vault Comics!

MC:  The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy is my second history book. It takes Sparta’s complete military history and compares it to their mythic status as the biggest badasses in military history and asks the question “were the Spartans really so tough?” It’s essentially a book-length version of the argument I made in an article for The New Republic that came out last year. You can read it here. 

Hundred Wolves is my comics debut. I wrote the script of issue 1 and a synopsis for the whole story arc years ago, and pitched it around unsuccessfully. But then I got incredibly lucky when I pitched it to the legendary artist Tony Akins (he did Wonder Woman, Hellblazers, and Fables, among other projects). It just so happened that he’s into the same period of history that I am (17th C. Eastern Europe) and jumped on the opportunity. With him on board, I was able to sell it immediately, and it’ll come out from Vault Comics in April.

The comic is set in the 17th C. in the lawless borderlands between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. It’s about two Cossacks - Andrei and Oksana - steel-eyed killers who made their living raiding with the Cossack band Hundred Wolves. They eventually gave up the raiding life to raise their daughter Yulia on a farm given to them by the Polish Count Ostoja in return for service. They looked forward to farming and raising their little girl in peace, but the old life won’t let them go. The Hundred Wolves still have need of their bloody-handed skills, and their new liege lord also knows their reputation as killers and badly wants to put them to use. I was really inspired by the badass family story in Saga and worked hard to channel it in this period piece.

NOAF: You write novels, series, novellas, short stories, and now comics. When you get an idea for a story do you know right away that it is novella length, or too long to fit into one novel? How do you determine the scale of the story and world that you are building?

MC: This is a great question and I’m afraid I don‘t have a ready answer. I have my idea and I begin by sketching it out as a 3-5 page treatment. Based on the feedback I get on that, I decided whether the idea is good enough to merit expansion into an outline (usually around 100 pages), and if that cuts the mustard, then we go for whatever the final form will be (novel, novella, comic script). But as for what its final form will be . . . honestly the story itself will dictate that to me and it comes clear only as I work on the project. Currently I have one really good idea I want to get to once I complete work on the comic (and the sequel for Sixteenth Watch . . . and the bibliography, maps and illustrations references I owe for The Bronze Lie), and I still haven’t decided it it’ll work better as a comic or a novel yet. I will say that my experience doing novellas with Tor.com was so positive that I would be inclined to cut a longer work down if it meant I could publish with them again.

NOAF: You're also on TV! While us viewers only see the polished, edited version, you literally get to see what happens behind the scenes. Any funny or surprising stories from your experiences filming the Contact and Hunted TV shows? Is television something you hope to do more of?

MC: I love doing TV. For one thing, I love attention. I used to think of this as a character flaw (we’re all raised to be self-effacing and taught that seeking the spotlight is a sign of egomania), but I’ve come to accept that for better or worse, it’s who I am. TV is so much easier than writing. It’s grueling work (12-15 days when you’re shooting), but it’s compressed into a tight period (Hunted was two month’s work. Contact was one month’s work). I get paid more to do a single TV show than I do in a year of writing, and a book takes me 1-2 years to write.

But just like writing, just because you’re doing it at a professional level is absolutely no guarantee you will get to keep doing it. I thought that starring on two major network shows and having an agent at CAA (it’s really hard to get in there) meant my TV career was set. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The only real benefit of having done two shows is that I now have a gorgeous, professional “reel” (clips of me on TV) that I can show to other shows I am trying to get to book me. Otherwise, I’m basically at square one. So, I’m currently hustling for my next show and there’s no guarantee that I’ll get it.

It’s a lot like writing, to be honest. When The Bronze Lie comes out, I’ll have published twelve books all with major publishers. It means nothing. There is no guarantee I’ll sell my next one, and I have to work just as hard to make sure that what I am producing is punching at a level where it stands a real shot of being picked up by the majors.

NOAF: Thanks so much Myke!

Microreview [TV]: The Librarians

The best new show you probably didn't watch.

I have to tell you all something…I am IN LOVE with The Librarians. Like, warm and fuzzy I wish I could hug it kind of love.

The Librarians is TNT’s new series based off their made-for-TV movie franchise of the same name (minus the s) from the mid 2000’s. But you don’t need to be familiar with the movies to watch the show, which is good for me because I had no idea they existed in the first place. The movies starred the fabulous trio of Noah Wyle, Bob Newhart, and Jane Curtin, and all three are present to help launch the inaugural episode of the TV series. Wyle plays the eccentric genius Flynn Carsen, now head Librarian, charged with protecting a secret collection of famous and powerful artifacts housed at a magical Library (I know right, how AWESOME?!). The Library chooses its own staff, and sensing a need it selects a guardian for Flynn, counterterrorism specialist NATO officer Eve Baird (Rebecca Romijn!) (seriously, I wish you could see me bouncing in my chair as I write this). And just in time too, because the Library has come under attack by evil forces who want to use its magic for bad. Flynn and Baird set out to locate three other geniuses selected by the library, with the intention of saving their lives, and consequently assemble a rag-tag group of assistant Librarians. Under the guardianship of Baird, these assistant Librarians are charged with protecting the world while Flynn ventures off to save the Library itself.

I love this show for the following reasons:

Nostalgia. I spent my formative years in the 90’s. I grew up reading books like Goosebumps and watching TV shows like Ghost Writer and movies like Indiana Jones, A Kid in King Arthur’s Court, and The Goonies. TNT's The Librarians encompasses this spirit. Flynn fights with Excalibur, the Librarians get stuck in a labyrinth and have to fight the minotaur to get out, and the team even has to defeat an evil magic app created by Morgan le Fay. Needless to say, The Librarians reminds me of the stuff I used to live for. And yes the show is kind of cheesy but that’s okay because it embraces the cheese. One of my biggest peeves with genre TV (and all TV in general really) is that it’s barftastically cheesy but everyone pretends that it’s not.

Acting. Another issue with (genre) TV is that it is often rife with horrible acting. But the acting in The Librarians is really, really good. Not only does it have established actors like Noah Wyle, Rebecca Romijn, and John Larroquette (Night Court whaaaaaat), but Lindy Booth, John Kim, and Christian Kane (a.k.a. the assistant Librarians) are all phenomenal too.

Female Characters. We don't need to get into the generally appalling portrayal of women on TV and in other media, but I will tell you that the female characters in The Librarians are awesome. Eve Baird especially, and I think it’s a combination of how she’s written and how she’s played by Romijn. Baird is a strong woman, both physically and emotionally, who’s not [gasp] bitchy or manly. She’s not a woman trying to fill a man’s shoes or a bippity boop sporting a pink gun. Instead, she’s a person, and she’s badass, and if you mess with her or her protectees you’ll regret it. She is stern and gives direction but listens to what other people have to say and isn’t afraid to admit when she’s wrong. She's a great character, regardless of sex.

The Truth. The real reason I love this show so much is that, as nerds, we all know what it’s like to be outsiders. But the thing is, sometimes I don’t even fit in with the nerds because I’m not a really a gamer nerd, or a science nerd, or a comic book nerd….I’m a The Librarians kind of nerd. And I’m so happy this show exists, and I really hope there are enough nerds like me out there watching it so that it gets signed on for another season.

The Librarians season has just ended (although I expect it will be syndicated on TNT), but here are some ways you can watch the series from the beginning:

Available on iTunes and Amazon for purchase,
and free from your cable (or whatever) provider via TNT's website.

The Math:

Objective Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for Eve Baird, +1 for helping bring back folklore and history as action fantasy, +1 for impressive cast/acting

Penalties: -1 for the unnecessary, albeit almost non-existent, romance sideline, -1 for Ezekiel's annoyingness at times, even though it's probably intentional

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 "Well worth your time and attention" 

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POSTED BY:  Tia,  putting the cool back in school and rocking socks here at Nerds of a Feather since 2014