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Was this a nerd snipe? This feels like a form of nerd sniping, where I'm stuck trying to work out if I love this or hate it. I mean, on the one hand, if the Professor says walk, you walk! On the other hand, argh, Tolkien oversimplifications, grr.

Thanks for sharing. ^_^

~Neshomeh

I left a review on AO3 just cuz, but I had some additional thoughts about aquatic HQ zones.

I assume the underwater section Nikki visited was saltwater, given that mermaids and octopi are generally found in oceans. But it links up to the Pool, which is, well, a pool: freshwater, and possibly chlorinated at that (but maybe not, since the Flowers have been known to use it). I suppose the plothole linking the one to the other could act as a selective barrier to the different waters...?

But even before the Pool came up, I wondered whether there are freshwater halls, too, and if they're linked with the saltwater halls (the Flowers not bothering to make a distinction) or not. If so, do the aquatic agents have to be careful about wandering into the wrong ones? Or, IDK, if the difference in water density is great enough and the separation is vertical rather than horizontal, maybe no additional barrier is needed.

The hypothetical freshwater zone would probably be even less populous than the saltwater one, though. Not a whole lot of myth or fiction positing sapient freshwater species.

~Neshomeh

what the what

what

Scapegrace that was very cruel. -_-

I will admit that the baseline depiction of the Hobbits was very well stylised, and yes, fun. :)

hS

In which they try to snap a photo of Kaguya on a mission into a Vocaloid badfic, but disaster befalls them.

I considered having Nikki notice the irony, but I couldn’t make it happen in a way that would be in-character for her.

And yeah, of the odd sections of HQ, I do believe the underwater one is indeed the most likely to have gotten inhabitants fairly early in PPC HQ history - I suppose the Disney Little Mermaid animated movies likely had a hand in that, as they sparked interest in the fairy tale which with its unrequited love themed is just perfect for tragic, angsty stories! And fanfictions means potential recruits...

BTW, what I had Nema and Otto mention about mermaid-themed Cardcaptor Sakura fanfictions is true. There are several retellings of the fairy take with Sakura in place of the titular mermaid on the Pit, so no wonder Nema and Otto just thought Nikki came from one of them!

I read and enjoyed the interlude a couple of days back - I know "Department of Floaters" made me giggle, and I grinned at the Pool showing up.

And then I got to thinking about when, exactly, HQ acquired an aquatic zone...

My starting position is that all the HQs take place in the same intersecting Cascade as, well, HQ. Digital HQ exists in our networks; Aquatic HQ is... well, an unusually wet part of HQ, which is sectioned off by necessity to avoid everything getting a bit too wet (or, in their case, dry).

Contradicting my position on methane worlds, I suspect Aquatic HQ did form during the Cascade. Maybe it came from just one portal, opening between a land area and an oceanic one, and the Weeds decided to enclose the water rather than let it flood the land canon; more likely it's a deliberately-connected zone of all the underwater portals they encountered. We could probably do some tests on salinity to figure it out.

I would imagine the area was initially abandoned, Flowers being mostly land-based. There are probably sealed doors leading there which Building Maintenance occasionally patch leaks on, without knowing what they're protecting. But when widespread recruitment from badfics began in 2002 HST, the Flowers recognised the need for an area for water-breathers, opened it up, switched on some lights, and terrorised Makes-Things into adding some waterproof consoles. Ta-da, Aquatic HQ was born.

And other HQs. The Cascade reached the entire Multiverse; for every environment you can think of, there's a cluster of corridors where the Weeds linked up all the related portals and sealed them away. Some of them are tiny, only a room or two; some of them are colossal, almost matching "normal" HQ. Some of them are in use, like the High-Pressure HQ formed mostly from sci-fi super-heavy planets; others are empty, waiting for the PPC to recruit enough agents who need them and can't be accommodated in the standard areas.

By and large, the occupants of the different Zones keep to themselves; most in "normal" HQ don't even know the zones exist. There are, naturally, numerous conspiracy theories about why this should be so; pick up the next issue of the REAL Real Multiverse Monitor to learn the TRUTH!

hS (with a little interference from Starwind and Estelnar)

The Fellowship by Tom Cardy

Please note there is strong language throughout, because Tom Cardy is Australian.

This is an older song but a new animation, complete with some really fun depictions of the Nine Walkers. Heartily recommend it, especially for hS, who might struggle to get it out of his head around his impressionable young children.

I'm not evil, I promise. =]

It's very cool that we even have a way of detecting that kind of travel over lifetimes that took place so many millennia ago. From the tooth enamel! That's amazing! Especially knowing the Archer had to cross the English channel, which had to be an absolute labor during a time when the boats could only run on human arm strength. And the man in that second burial made the crossing twice! (Dying in his 20s is unfortunate, though. Maybe he put a little too much strain into that second rowing trip? It's downright miraculous we can glean as much information about their lives as we can through archaeological evidence, but also frustrating that so much of their lives, and their contemporaries', will remain unknown. Imagine the stories they could have told if they had vlogs back then!)

Wolf Road sounds good! Might look for that once I've cleared out more of my unread shelves.

—If doctorlit had a nickel for every fiction with friend-shaped wolves . . . He would have a lot more than two nickels, because there are probably a lot of those. People like wolves. Wolves are cool.

I'll admit, I was a little too lost in the adventure to think about the more Doylist ramifications of the "abused woman hinted to have a mental illness is a dangerous bad guy threatening lives" plot. After a novel full of travel, horse care, and reassuring every new community that no really, THIS wolf is a good boy, having an "episode" with a more modern-feeling villain added a bit of heightened excitement to the plot. The "political intrigue," insofar as that term works for cavefolks communities, was also a fresh bit of world-building, and an interesting examination of how the natural behaviors of our species can lead to unbalanced and oppressive social hierarchies being constructed, even without the modern "technologies" of organized military, etc. But your observation is valid, and a reminder that I tend to be overly Watsonian in my analyisi! (I also maybe shouldn't have used the phrase "fascist dictator" to describe Attaroa; it's an overly modern and emotionally charged term to be applying to these Stone Age characters!)

I'm going to drop some quotes from that sequence below, just to demonstrate the vibes. Since I'm getting the feeling you're not interested in picking the series back up, I guess you don't care about spoilers? Feel free to stop reading here if I'm wrong about that.

(Context: Jondalar has been captured by Attaroa's tribe and caged, and Attaora asked for him to leave the cage.)
"What if I don't want to go outside?" Jondalar said.
"Then she'll probably have you killed here and now." [. . .] It was the shaman! "If you go outside, Attaroa will probably let you live a little longer. You interest her, but eventually she'll kill you anyway."
"Why? What am I to her?" Jondalar asked.
"A threat."
"A threat. You threaten her control. She'll want to make an example of you."

(And then, a few pages later:)

[A description of Jondalar while Attaroa looks at him.] She felt strongly attracted to him, but the very strength of her response dredged up painful memories long suppressed and provoked a powerful but strangely twisted reaction. She would not allow herself to be attracted to any man, because to have feelings for one might give him control over her—and never again would she allow anyone, particularly a man, to have control over her.
[. . .]
Jondalar not only threatened her leadership, he threatened the fragile world that her sick mind had led her to create. He even threatened her tenuous hold on reality, which had recently been stretched very thin.

Those are the types of descriptions that made me associate Attaroa with the role of a dictator: feeling a tenuous hold on power that can be easily threatened by anyone who doesn't feel fear of her. That last paragraph is also the first hint of some kind of mental illness, though it's limited by the vocabulary of the time, as it were. I think there's a more explicit comment about that later, if I can find it while leafing through . . .

Oh yeah, found it! Ayla has her Big Damn Hero moment on horseback, entering Attaroa's camp in time to save Jondalar from being used as target practice. Attaroa's tribe has never seen a person riding on a horse before, and Ayla is an expert at reading facial expressions and body language, due to being raised by the mostly nonverbal Clan/Neanderthal . . .

On her approach, Ayla had watched the tall headwoman's face reflecting her inner reactions, showing shock and fear, and the despair of her moment of clarity, but as the woman on horseback drew closer, dark and deranged shadows clouded the leader's mind again. Attaroa narrowed her eyes to watch the blond woman, then slowly smiled, a smile of twisted, calculating malice.
Ayla had never seen madness, but she interpreted Attaroa's unconscious expressions, and she understood that this woman who threatened Jondalar was someone to be wary of; she was a hyena. The woman on horseback had killed many carnivores and knew how unpredictable they could be, but it was only hyenas that she despised. They were her metaphor for the very worst that people could be, and Attaroa was a hyena, a dangerously malignant manifestation of evil who could never be trusted.

So . . . yeah. Not great, either in terms of Attaroa being a victim of abuse, or sympathy for people with mental illness, though it's partly because the narration is constrained by speaking in terms the primitive characters can understand. Though Ayla does comment on the situation: "Cruelty mothers cruelty, pain breeds pain, abuse fosters abuse," which does acknowledge that the situation has been brought about by the harm done to Attaroa in her earlier years, and isn't originating with her.

. . . This isn't as fun as when I started hunting for quotes, so I think I'm going to stop there. Sorry for being a bummer!

—doctorlit, still amused that the characters in a series full of "sharing pleasures" have no idea where babies come from

Don't worry, this is not the interlude I mentioned in the thread just below this one. This is actually one I had been working on for a while (er... more like I had been sitting on for a while, and only recently completed)

You can blame its existence on the discussion Tomash and Huinesoron had in this thread about alternative versions of HQ, since it made me think about the possiblity of a section of HQ suitable for aquatic species. And I do happen to have an agent capable of turning into a mermaid...

So, without further ado, here it is the story of how Nikki Cherryflower accidentally found herself in An Unusually Wet Part Of HQ. It isn't a very long interlude, just a couple scenes, but it was a cute little fluffy (if a bit wet( plotbunny!

Prehistoric individuals certainly travelled at times: the Amesbury Archer was an early Bronze Age person who was found near me (buried close to Stonehenge), but grew up in the Alps. According to Wikipedia, a second nearby burial was born in England, went over to central Europe, and then came back in time to die in their 20s and be buried.

But it's really hard to know how much people travelled. From what I've seen, the best evidence is adult teeth, which preserve the isotopes of the areas where they formed, IE childhood. You can see if someone is a long way from where they grew up - but you wouldn't spot, for example, a decade spent wandering before returning back home. And it's an expensive process, and bones are rare, and the most likely to be preserved are the rich and powerful, which is a bias all of its own.

Seasonal migration, especially in the Ice Age, is probably a given; the world was just too harsh to not have to move around with the herds. But the sort of thing described from the series you're discussing will probably always be speculation.

(If you want to visit heavily-realistic prehistory, "Wolf Road" by Alice Roberts is my recommendation. She's an actual archaeologist, so she knows what she's talking about - and this wolf, too, is friend-shaped.)

hS

I've actually rather enjoyed seeing this thread become a classic PPC ramble across topics. ^_^

My impression has been that human groups certainly migrated (following their food sources, for one reason), but I should admit I don't really have the expertise to debate Stone Age culture, haha.

I have misgivings about the notion of "abused woman --> fascist dictator who must be stopped," but I mean, it could happen, I guess. Something something matriarchy isn't matriarchy if it's just inverted patriarchy? Just not sure how much I wanna trust Auel with it.

I wanna say I've heard that modern scholarship agrees that Europe has never actually been "all White," at least, and I really wish I could tell you where... Milo Rossi, a.k.a. Miniminuteman on YouTube, maybe? He makes entertaining videos snarkily debunking archeology pseudoscience. Worth a look even if he's not the source I'm thinking of.

~Neshomeh, stretching her much-atrophied conversation muscles.

Since Ayla and Jondalar had been staying with the Mammoth Hunters over the winter, they had time to prepare for the Journey, with their hosts pitching in materials and skills when they could. When a whole tribe is contributing to survival, no individual has to work too hard! During the actual Journey, the horses were able to graze as they walked for most of the way (though they did bring some hay along for the bad stretches), and Wolf of course kept himself fed on birds and rodents as they traveled. For the human supplies that couldn't be foraged along they way, they did encounter several other human communities along their path, and were able to trade or ask politely for necessary things at each stop. (Once they had explained that no, this wolf is friend-shaped, we promise!) One stop even gave them the opportunity to topple Earth's first fascist dictatorship, an abused woman who had killed her headman husband and took over her village, then locked all the other men in a cage. So that's neat?

As Auel portrays these early human communities, capital-J Journeys are a part of the shared culture across the many tribes of Europe. People on a Journey are traditionally welcomed at each village they stop at, and the villagers throw a feast to celebrate the visit, more often that not. Your points about the uncertainty of long travel, and the daily demands of survival, are logical, but there's also a logical evolutionary utility in Journeys, as well, though not explicitly stated in the novels: genetic diversity! If the populations of tribes all stayed where they were born, inbreeding would eventually become a problem. But if younger members of a tribe sometimes develop a wanderlust to go exploring across the continent, and often end up staying with another tribe they encounter (or even just sharing pleasures with multiple partners along the way!), it allows different genes to travel and mix, and keep the overall human population in a more healthy state. Heck, book three had introduced a dark-skinned character whose father had traveled from Europe to Africa and fallen in love there, and book four left off introducing a character who had traveled from somewhere in Asia to . . . I'm pretty sure we were in future Spain/Portugal at that point. Such long Journeys would be extremely difficult, and likely rare . . . but not impossible, either! No imaginary borders to get stopped at! (And I'll admit the addition of those two characters tickled me immensely, purely because they fly in the face of certain modern ideas about European blood purity!)

—doctorlit apologizes for derailing the thread that was supposed to be about your story!

Apart from the very special CAFs and the gratuitous humping, anyway. >.>

Seems to me that hunting/gathering and preparing enough food to stay alive, plus maintaining sufficient clothing for protection, would take up quite a lot of time? Especially moving through territory you're not necessarily familiar with! I guess if Jondalar previously made the trip in the other direction, he might know some good places to forage, but still. I don't imagine people traveled just for the heck of it pre-agriculture for the reason of that uncertainty. Most people still didn't do it very much post-agriculture, cuz most people were busy farming and weaving and so on. (I've been enjoying A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry's essays "For World-Builders" about ancient and medieval civilizations, by the way!)

Of course, IIRC Ayla is a nigh-magical healer, so they don't have to worry too much about illness and injury far away from anyone else who could help, at least. {= D

~Neshomeh

Everything is kinda smashing into everything else, often literally and figuratively at the same time. And while some of it is happening to characters I care about, a lot of it isn't, partly because I just can't remember who all these people are. It's a lot. Also, Dan Abnett likes using obscure words, and I can't be bothered stopping to look up all the ones I don't know. Y'all know I'm not against using obscure words occasionally, but there's a limit!

Granted, there are so many words in these books, oftentimes describing very similar scenes, I can understand the impulse to introduce new ones to keep it interesting. There are only so many ways to say "everything was awful and then it somehow got more awful."

Gah.

And yet, I persevere.

~Neshomeh

Thank goodness someone pointed it out. I was afraid my horrible pun was going unsufferedappreciated by anyone but me.

I couldn't have the post be ALL serious business. 😄

~Neshomeh

I can taste the difference (though I don't know that I can ever forgive you for pointing out that I put a -y- in "new" -_-), but I'm not sure I'd be able to hear it. Fun stuff.

hS

I have read only part 3 of The End and the Death... in a single sitting. O.O I was stuck in a library while my car took several hours to be serviced, and it was there and I wasn't in my own library district so I couldn't borrow it so... yeah. Bit of a brain-smash experience.

hS

I dunno why it's a link like that.

You may recall Ayla met her boyfriend Jondalar because he had been traveling across the continent. Book three is them spending the winter with a tribe of mammoth-hunters, and book four sees the winter starting to warm, so Jondalar can finally make the trip to his original tribe. Since he's bringing Ayla and her animal friends along, this means we have a traveling party of:
-only two humans
-the only two tame horses on the planet
-the only tame wolf on the planet
Five compa— Sorry, sorry. Anyway, as much as I enjoyed reading about the social dynamics and technology of the Clan/Neanderthal in the first book, and of the mammoth-hunting Cro-Magnon in the third, book four is where prehistoric Europe itself really takes center stage in the narrative. The terrain, the weather, the water bodies, the biomes, the plants, the animals . . . Ayla and Jondalar are literally backpacking across Europe, and there are no roads or sidewalks. Book four is all about the scale of the world early humanity occupied, and how little power they wielded to survive in it. My favorite scene is when the party travels through a forest, which was a rarity in Europe during the Ice Ages. The humans and horses had spent most of their active hours in the wide open plains of the era, so even though the narrative description of this forest was recognizable as an ordinary forest, the feelings it evoked in the characters almost felt like a scene from a modern horror story: the shadows everywhere, the lack of visibility providing cover for potential predators, the subsequent lack of straightforward escape pathways if the horses needed to bolt. It was a really interesting way of communicating to the reader how this familiar landscape from modern times became an unfamiliar and terrifying threat for these early humans unused to the experience of walking between many trees.

But yeah, Ayla and Jondalar are still going at each other every two or three chapters. (Also a pair of mammoths got a turn early on, if I'm thinking of the right book.) That's what I have to power my way through to get to my cool scary forest scenes! For me, it's worth it; I just love imagining all that pristine wilderness, and the simple people and other organisms that strived and grew there and then. And no currency! (From a purely Watsonian perspective, I understand all the . . . "sharing pleasures." They're early modern man, they don't have books or computers or roller blades or tabletop role-playing modules to occupy their time. So once all the food is preserved, the tools and knapped, and the horses are brushed, what are they supposed to do for the rest of the day? I know the series is ultimately prehistory fanfiction, but the frequency of sharing pleasures is likely pretty accurate . . . but that doesn't necessarily mean that the frequency serves much of a narrative use! They just feel like they slow things down, and I would rather read about new tools being developed, and their beliefs in a spirit world, rather than have to sit through what are ultimately pretty similar scenes every time. (Except for the mammoths breeding, that was pretty different, but somehow a lot grodier than with the humans? Blech . . .))

It's funny, I'm usually ravenous to finish a series once I get into it, but I think Earth's Children is the first time I find myself not rushing to get to the last two books, just because I want to keep the feeling of exploring that ancient, untamed continent in my head longer. I still want there to be new things to discover there, and not turn the last page . . .

Anyway, there's a couple of big paragraphs to answer your five-word question. I'm sure you'll never ask me anything again! : )

—doctorlit, of the Clan of the Giant Cave Hamster Cuddlers