Return-Path: Date: Thu, 21 Feb 91 15:27:05 -0800 From: chuq Reply-To: chuq@apple.com Precedence: bulk Subject: OtherRealms #29 (Winter, 1991) [2 of 10] Apparently-To: bzs@world.std.com Electronic OtherRealms #29 Winter, 1991 Part 2 of 10 Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved. OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact. OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use. No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other publication without permission of the author. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author. I'm Not A Nice Girl Commentary by Laurie Sefton Well, it's been about four months, so it's time to sharpen the claws and have another go at it. Lots of responses to my original editorial, and a few requests for reprints. Typical net.jackal response, but we expected that, didn't we? The biggest surprise was the gender roles discussion; apparently there are more people than I thought who have slugged it out with society's expectation of what they should do with their lives. To those who have been there and responded in kind -- thanks. And to those who wrote and said "I wish I could do something like that.", well, there isn't a magic cookie, piece of armor, or fairy dust that will get you on your way. You just have to hunker down and decide that it's your turn to have a life, and if people aren't going to let you, you'll have to teach them otherwise. Yes, you'll lose some battles, and yes, your scars will itch for years, but it's a lot better than wishing and wondering what might have been. Speaking of battles: I was listening to the local news/talk station on January 16th, when they broke in to announce that Baghdad was under attack. Life has definitely not been the same since. I suspect that most of my friends and acquaintances didn't get much sleep for the first few days. We all appeared to be glued to the television (CNN and ABC being my choices) at home, and to the radio at work, (although some intrepid souls brought the televisions they bought right after the 89 earthquake in to monitor the television reports) and didn't bother to get much rest in between. We're 11 hours behind Iraq time out here on the west coast, so when it was 8 AM here, it was 7PM in the middle east, and just gearing up for another bombing run. By the time we left work for the day, it was time to check out the news briefing from the Pentagon, the analysis of what had happened the "day before", and speculations on what was going to happen "today". I had put up my long-wire for my shortwave at work a few days previous to the start of the war (let's face it -- this is not a police action), and was monitoring the BBC and KOL Israel during my working day Anything to get some new or different information. Information -- that certainly is the crux of the matter, isn't it? I was rather shocked and amazed at the total lack of knowledge about middle eastern affairs. Most people were operating on what I call the "first paragraph" syndrome -- which meant that they were reading the first paragraph of whatever news story interested them, and took that information for their total knowledge-base. Very few realized that they middle east didn't come all nicely and neatly carved, and that Saddam Hussein's claims that Kuwait was unjustly ripped out from under Iraq, when it "had always belonged to Iraq" were playing off of the lack of knowledge of the history of the region. Ever hear of the Ottoman empire? The parcelling out of the middle east occurred mainly because the Ottoman Turks backed the wrong side in World War I. That's what Lawrence of Arabia was all about. So, if you're going to discuss middle eastern situations properly, get thee down to the library, and read some books on the topic. [Looks like you will have to go to a library, as most bookstores are woefully deficient on middle eastern history. And we're not talking about the franchises here; one well known local book store has western European history, American history, and "Middle Eastern studies". That means that someone is telling middle eastern history to you, but is injecting their own thoughts on the matter. It's the effective difference between history and political science. Lucky for me, someone at Stanford is teaching "The history of the Middle East" this quarter, and I was able to pick up the texts.] Middle Eastern history, if it's covered at all in world history (otherwise known as "Let's do the ancient Greeks, the ancient romans, skip to medieval England, and then pick up on the rest of Europe as the various countries explore the western hemisphere"), tends to stall out just about the time that the Roman Empire fell. That's a pretty sad state of affairs. As long as we're discussing the sad state of affairs in US education, it's a good time to relate what happened in my class last semester. The class was made up of about 1/2 political science graduate students, 1/3 engineering economics grad students and the other 1/6 >from various engineering disciplines. The course grade was determined by two papers written during the semester, a 3-5 introduction paper, and a 15 page position defense paper. Sounds simple, right? Just pick out a topic from the course syllabus (the course was titled "The Role of Technology in National Security"), state a position, and defend that position. This was much harder for most of the students than anyone thought. My topic for the semester was "The theory and implementation of a national computer security governmental policy", and I wrote up my little 3-5 page intro, with the thesis that while the government had all sorts of good ideas what computer security policy was, they sure didn't know how to implement it. The class after I turned it in, the class received a handout from the grading TA and course professor, saying that there was a problem with the papers being turned in so far, and that they just seemed to be a regurgitation of research material. After about a week of worry, I received my paper back -- with the only "A" given in the course. The TA noted that I had the only paper turned in which gave a thesis at all, much less defended it. I expanded on that thesis for the final paper, and received an "A" on that, too. Bragging aside, I have to wonder about students who should be some of the best in the country, as Stanford graduate school isn't that easy to get into, and why they are stymied at the idea of presenting original thought. Is it that the undergraduate institutions prefer to get papers without original thought, as they may be easier to grade? Are students who have no original thoughts easier to herd through college? And exactly what do the universities expect to turn out, if original thought is selected against? Who do they expect to lead, if they weed out the leaders? I have to wonder. A side note: One of the lectures was the standard "How are we going to compete with Japan" monologue, given by local multi-millionaire Silicon Valley CEO and former congressional representative Ed Zschau. He ranted a bit on where our future chemists and biologists were going to come from, as no one was piquing their interest in high school or college. When Q&A time came at the end of the lecture, I asked him, given that I used to be a chemist, and that I have a biology degree, and that I am now in the computer industry because: 1.) It pays about 4X better than the bio/chem industries do; and 2.) I'm not going to die an early horrible death from working with a Macintosh -- the mean age of death for a chemist is in her mid to late 50s; how I could, in good faith, tell future scientists that they ought to go into the biological or chemical sciences for a living. He was stunned, and stuttered out that he hadn't had any idea the conditions were that bad, and then to recover, noted that I seemed to have done pretty well, given my background. I have done well in spite of my education and training, not because of it. I didn't appreciate being thought of as a Reaganomics poster child. Yet another class department: I've just finished with the Apple University course "Survival Skills for Managers", and since I'm still here, so I must have passed. I was hoping for a course that discussed how to track down the HR rep, which forms need to be filled out, and when, and how to work that excuse for a Hypercard stack that I'm supposed to use for reviews. Well, we had two HR people at class, and since one of them was the manager of my HR representatives, he received some "constructive input" on his charges. Other than that, it was a pleasant way to spend three days -- I didn't have to think much (all those grad classes in industrial/organizational psych pay off), and it gave me the opportunity to see how managers at other parts of Apple handled their work. And you get to do lots of psycho-whatsit fun stuff, like: 1. I took a very short personality inventory and found out that I am a "driven analytical" (those of you who know me can now say -- "no shit"). Personality inventories are almost as much fun as getting your colors done, and are allegedly useful, to boot. 2. We played "guess the compensation package". Some people still don't realize that under-paying an employee is a false economy. In one of the case studies, some of the colder managers stated that an employee who moves from a "non-exempt" (hourly) to an exempt position shouldn't expect a raise (in this case we were arguing about 2,000-3,000/year), as they are now in a state of employment that offers "more chances for advancement". I called on one of the HR representatives and asked exactly how much it cost to hire an average employee at a Silicon Valley company, and more importantly, how much it cost to replace them. The cost surprised the managers; it costs about $46,000 to hire and approximately $100,000 to replace (factoring in lost time, advertisement costs, time spent interviewing, etc) an employee. Makes $3,000 look rather small, doesn't it? 3. We played motivational psychology games. Those of you who had children in the 1970s may remember Dr Haim Ginott. Ginott's main principle was to never put blame on the child, but to give reactions to the child's behavior. This is where we heard such great statements as: "Timmy, I become very upset when I find dead and dismembered bodies in the basement.", with the hopes that little Timmy will decide that maybe serial murders upset mommy, and that he shouldn't do that anymore. Well, this has crossed over into the workplace, so now we have the manager saying to the employee: "I become very upset when deadlines are missed, and it impacts the rest of the group, too." Notice the amalgamation of guilt -- not only is the manager upset, but so is the rest of the group. Also notice the clever use of impact as a verb. The trouble with this approach is that as soon as a child figures out how how to talk, he has usually figured out the fire art of indirection. If you can't expect a two year old to put up with this, why should you expect your employees to? All in all, it was a nice vacation from the desk, and at least I now know to expect from some of the other managers. I hope I also know how to counteract it. So, what have we learned in the last few months? That information is important, but so is the ability to use it wisely. Think about it. Behind the Scenes: A Chronicle of Deverry Katherine Kerr Copyright 1991 by Katherine Kerr Anyone who has read my fantasy series, Daggerspell, Darkspell, The Bristling Wood, and The Dragon Revenant, knows that the history of the kingdom of Deverry is as important to the over-all story as the personal dramas of the characters are. In the new set of books I'm currently working on, the Westlands series, this same history plays a part as well. Yet, thanks to the needs of good narrative, I can't always make the historical happenings as clear in the text as I would like. What you have here is a quick outline of Deverry history, complete with king lists and dates, to make it easier to follow the historical sequence of events in the books themselves. First of all, many readers and reviewers have assumed that the series is set in some sort of alternate Britain or that the people of Deverry came originally from Britain. In fact, they emigrated from northern Gaul, as a couple of obscure clues in the text tell the compulsively careful reader who also knows an awful lot about Celtic history. Since only a few of you fall into that category, allow me to explain further. For one thing, the great heroes often mentioned, Vercingetorix and Vindex, are real, historical Gauls. For another, those "vergobretes" who become in Deverry "gwerbrets" are mentioned in Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars as magistrates among the Gauls, though, he says, the Britons have no such kind of leaders, relying instead upon "kings." The Gaulish king, it seems, was more what we'd term a "warleader," the "cadvridoc" of Deverry, than the ruler of an organized state. Even in Britain, however, the Celts elected their kings more often than they accepted them by inheritance, a Celtic political tradition that lies behind the instability of the Deverry kingship. The language of Deverry also derives from that of Gaul, but Gaulish was not, as far as scholars can tell anyway, very much different from the Old Brittonic that evolved into the language we know today as Welsh. Thus the language of Deverry looks and sounds much like Welsh, but anyone who knows this modern language will see immediately that it differs in many respects. Now, not a lot of Gaulish survives. The Gauls had never been big on writing things down, and, when the "cursed Rhwmanes" conquered the place and imposed Latin as the official language, the native speech and oral literature died out. What does survive are personal and place names -- the very thing a fantasy author needs! As for the Deverrian forms of these names, remember that not only do all languages change over time, but each family of languages changes according to its own rules. In our own family, IndoEuropean, which includes among others the Romance, Germanic, Persian, Hindi, and Slavic groups as well as the Celtic languages, these changes have been studied and codified by linguists. For instance, any "g" sound caught between two vowels tends to first soften, then drop away; "-nt" or "-nd" at the end of a syllable changes to a simple "n," and so on. What I have done, then, is taken old Gaulish names and subjected them to these rules of change to produce the Deverrian names you find in the books. That some of them have ended up sounding like actual Welsh names goes to show just how much alike Old British and Gaulish were. To return to our history, the people of Bel, that is, the Gaulish tribes who chose the god Belinos to be their special patron deity from all the wide and rather randomly-organized Celtic pantheon of gods, lived in a vaguely defined area of Gaul known as Devetia Riga. While the precise location has been lost, we do know that it was somewhere on the Atlantic coast, and more north than south. The Devetii, as they would have been known to the Romans, first came in contact with the classical Mediterranean cultures around 200 BC or so when Greek traders came their way, bringing wine, the art of writing, and other such luxuries. Civilization had little effect on them, however, until they were conquered by Julius Caesar round about 55 BC just as so many other Gaulish tribes were. Although the great hero Vercingetorix made a gallant last stand at Alesia, in the end Roman organization and Roman stubbornness wore him down the way they wore down the heroes of so many other peoples of the ancient world. With a great deal of grumbling, the people of Bel accepted to some extent the Roman yoke. They learned some Latin, adopted a few Roman customs, and studied Roman herbal medicine. They also sent a few of their wise men to Rome as ambassadors, where, as so many other Gaulish ambassadors did, they met Cicero before his untimely end and purchased, upon the ex-consul's recommendation, learned books to bring back to the tribe. Yet unlike so many other Gauls, the people of Bel always remembered their days of freedom. When in AD 69 Julius Vindex, a Gaul who had risen high in the Roman government, led his rebellion against the corrupt emperor Nero, the men of Devetia were among the first to support him. When his rebellion failed, they would have followed him into an honorable suicide, too, if it weren't for the counsel of that rather mysterious figure, Cadwallon the Druid [1]. It was Cadwallon who, along with the cadvridoc, Bran, led the Devetians on the Great Migration which ultimately, and by means that could only have been magical, took them to the shores of the continent that would eventually be home to the new kingdom, Devetia Riga reborn, though over the years its name wore down to Deverry. A Brief Chronology An Extract from an essay by Durryc of Cerrmor The years 1-254 are known to modern historians as the Dynasty of the White Mare. Although King Bran himself died soon after the founding of the Holy City of Dun Deverry, his direct descendants ruled the infant kingdom as the small colonies around Dun Deverry spread up and down the Belaver. Cerrmor was founded in 25, Lughcarn in 106, as exploratory parties searched desperately for a good source of iron. One was finally found in the mountains of the north, at the source of the river then named the Caminos Isarnos, the "iron road", which became the most important waterway in the kingdom. (Eventually, of course, this name evolved into the Camyn Yraen of today.) The period of the First Interregnum, lasting until 297, was touched off by the death of Bran's last lineal descendant. Every powerful clan in the country joined the fighting to see who would control the kingship; eventually the Striking Wyvern clan won. In disgust, the Dragon and the Hippogriff clans migrated to the south-west to found their own kingdom in the formerly elven province of Elditina. In 301, after much searching for omens, Cynaeval of the Hippogriff clan founded a royal city called Abernaudd while in 302, Cadvaenan of the Dragon, Cynaeval's foster-brother, founded Aberwyn as a princely hold, the second city in the new kingdom. In Deverry itself, the years 298-402 saw peace and prosperity. Expansion continued rapidly. Colonists founded villages and opened up new farmland in Cantrae and Gwaentaer proper while old villages grew into cities and towns in Deverry itself. By the 380's the population spread reached the Eldidd border from the east while of course, the population of Eldidd reached it from the west. Bitter fighting over the defining of that border and the subsequent Deverry defeat brought down Wyvern rule when the great clans rebelled against a king they considered weak. The years 403-600 were known as the Age of the Warring Clans. To some scholars, this was the Second Interregnum rather than a true civil war, because there was always a titular king in Dun Deverry. The Great Clans, however, did pretty much as they pleased in defiance of what central government there was. Thanks to the amount of empty land available, the constant fighting -- mostly a matter of blood feuds, a common and well-loved pastime brought over from the Homeland -- could rage without tearing the society apart, as those who preferred peace simply moved away from disputed territory. In this period Gwaentaer was heavily colonized; the population built along the iron routes down >from Cerrgonney; there was even limited settlement in the Auddglyn. In the Early 400's, over in Eldidd, the first contact with the elves occured, who withdrew to the west rather than fight over territory that they had barely settled. Bad feeling between the two races remained, however, which would explode into war in later years[2]. In 558 came an event with much more immediate consequences when a group of Deverry merchants, bound for Eldidd, were blown off-course and carried to the far islands of Bardek. There they discovered a Roman-style civilization, founded by mysterious and magically transported refugees from Mauretania. For the first time in Deverry history, a true middle class emerged, based on the newly-important merchants and traders. In 602, after many years of fighting, Adoryc I founded the dynasty of the Blue Wyvern[3], the first effectual dynasty in some two hundred years. His power was based on a coalition of the rising new merchant class, the priests of Bel and Wmm, and the lesser clans. Concessions to his allies included royal support of the new Bardek trade and a royal ban against the head-hunting tht provided so much fuel for the fires of the blood-feuding. He also divided the estates of some the conquered Great Clans to reward the lesser, among them the Falcons, Boars, and Wolves[4]. By 655, the new religious ban had taken effect, and ritual headhunting had become a crime rather than an obligation. In general, the years 610-644 were a time of prosperity, relative peace, and growing trade with Bardek. The kingdom of Eldidd, meanwhile, continued to spread east rather than north, and border clashes became common again along the Giryspel range. From 665-76 the First Eldidd war dragged on rather than raged, resulting in a boundary compromise that pleased no one. In 72028, the Second Eldidd War began when Liddmaryc of Eldidd laid claim to Cenerrpaen, the triangle of coastal plain by the Girysbel. Eldidd won and forced a humiliating treaty, one provision of which was the betrothal of Covramur of Deverry's infant daughter to Liddmaryc's grandson, Waryn. This marriage gave Eldidd a distant claim to the Deverry throne. Then, in 750, Covramur died without a son, ushering in the Time of Troubles[5], the long civil war that nearly destroyed our entire culture. Covramur left three daughters, and their husbands all laid claim to the throne in the names of their sons, as ancient Celtic law allowed them to do. There were three claimants, one in Cerrmor, one in Cantrae, and one in Eldidd. While Cerrmor and Cantrae fought over the Holy City, Eldidd waged a war of attrition on the western border until in 773, the capture of Mael, Prince Aberwyn, produced a twenty-year truce between Cerrmor and Eldidd. Eldidd was forced to make peace by default with the Cantrae faction as well in 793, when the province of Pyrdon rebelled from Eldidd and declared itself a kingdom[6]. The wars dragged on for years of raiding, feints, but no decisive victories for any one side. In the late 840's, however, a new claimant, Maryn, appeared from the obscurity of the kingdom of Pyrdon. In the midst of hysterical talk of omens and magic[7], the war-weary common people embraced him as the one true king, and many an exhausted noble lord joined his cause in the hope of peace as well. In 854, after a long but final war, Maryn took the Holy City and was acknowledged there as the one true king of a united Deverry. In Eldidd, however, the pretender refused to acknowledge Maryn and make peace, forcing the new king to conquer the kingdom and reduce it to the status of a province[8]. At this point Casyl, king of Pyrdon and Maryn's father, abdicated in favor of his son, thus bringing Pyrdon into the new kingdom as well. Even though the king died fairly young, in 862 to be exact, he set his new kingdom upon a sound course. In general, the next hundred-odd years were a time of reconstruction and peace throughout the kingdom. Population began to rebuild after the long bleeding of the wars, in Eldidd as well as Deverry. In a dark note for the future, however, the remnant of the losing Cantrae faction fled north to settle Cerrgonney province and found a loose coaliton of independent lordships, who then proceeded to squabble over who among them would be gwerbret. With the treasury exhausted from the civil wars, the kings were forced to ignore this constant warfare, except for punishing the occasional raid down into Gwaentaer. (The name Cerrgonney is an interesting hybrid of Deverrian and Dwarven, by the way, meaning Gonn's Fortress, Gonn being a legendary demigod of the dwarven race.)[9] The early years of the tenth century were marked by two short wars. In 918, there was an abortive rebellion in Eldidd, crushed by Aeryc the First with the aid of the loyal Pertyc Maelwaedd, Lord Cannobaen, who was rewarded with the gwerbretrhyn of Aberwyn.l! In 921, war flared in Cerrgonney when the newlydetermined gwerbrets attempted to impose their own taxes on the towns along the Camyn Yraen. When these towns appealed to the king, Aeryc marched north and defeated, at least temporarily, the rebel lords. The year 936 saw a rather more important development, when the king and the royal council reviewed all trade treaties with Bardek and transferred them into the direct control of the king. The council also assimilated all preexisting trade pacts between Eldidd and Bardek into the Deverry model. The revenue brought into the royal coffers by this step was enormous, making the king and his city completely independent, for the first time, of the shifting good will and treacherous loyalty of the great clans. The years 962-84 tested the new central power with a round of wars in Cerrgonney. In 962, King Maryn II, infuriated by the continuing efforts of the northern gwerbrets to control the iron trade to their own advantage, declared the rank of gwerbret abolished in Cerrgonney. His son, Casyl II, finally brought this matter to a sucessful conclusion after twenty-two years of mountain warfare. Hitheron, all Cerrgonney lords would swear direct loyalty to the king[11]. Thus we bring our brief chronology up to the eleventh century. All through this hundred-year period, peace reigned, secured by the continuing expansion and stabilization of royal power. The Gold Wyvern dynasty, as this set of kings is known to later history, laid the foundations of our modern nation-state and its parlimentary democracy. Perhaps the most notable event of this period was, in 1039, the founding of the province of Cwm Pecl. The king, with a fine historical touch, awarded this new gwerbretrhyn to the Stallion clan[12], the descendants of the onetime kings of Pyrdon who had done so much to ensure peace for the growing kingdom.... Deverry King Lists (Dates are of reign, not life.) Blue Wyvern Adoryc I 602-621 Adoryc II 621-56 Adoryc III 656-69 Gwaddoryc 669-692 Paryc I 692-724 Adoryc IV 724-33 Covramur 733-50 The Time of Troubles: Claimants to the Deverry Throne Cerrmor Cantrae Eldidd Glyn I 751-97 Slwmar I 751-79 Aenecyr 751-815 Camlann 797-822 Dribyn I 779-93 Talyn 815-19 Caturyc 822-36 Alyn 793-818 Ogretoryc 819-38 Glyn II 834-43 Slwmar II 818-34 Cadlew 832-54 Maryn I 843-62 Dribyn II 834-47 Aenecyr II 854-55 The Red Wyvern The Gold Wybern Maryn I 843-62 Lallyn I 1011-39 Casyl I 862-93 Cynan 1039-57 Gwardyn I 893-913 Lallyn II 1057-92 Aeryc 913-49 Gwindyc 1092-1107 Maryn II 949-66 Casyl II 966-8 Gwardyn II 987-1011 Footnotes [1] These events may someday be covered, if I live so long, in the last, as yet untitled, volume of this Celtically convoluted series. [2] In the 720's, to be exact, an incident that plays a part in A Time of Exile, first volume of the Westlands series (coming in 1991.) [3] Nevyn's father was Adoryc II. See Daggerspell for more details. [4] These are, of course, the three clans who are so important in the first three books and who appear in scattered references throughout the entire series. [5] Events from the Time of Troubles are detailed in Darkspell, The Bristling Wood, A Time of Omens (forthcoming in 1992), and are touched upon in A Time of Exile. Eventually I will devote an entire book, tentatively called The Red Wyvern, to finishing up this on-going story of the original Silver Daggers, but it's more than a bit premature to tell you when. [6] The events surrounding Prince Mael are central to Darkspell. [7] For the true story, see in particular The Bristling Wood and A Time of Omens. [8] There is more information on this in A Time of Exile. [9] The relationship of the Mountain People to human beings in the North will get some play in A TIME OF WAR, the third book of the Westlands series. [10] Detailed in A Time of Exile. [11] A circumstance of crucial importance in The Bristling Wood. [12] Which includes Rhodry's cousin Blaen, so important in Darkspell. ------ End ------