outofambit
A personal temporospatial claudication for Young Wizards fandom-related posts and general space nonsense.
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Latest Posts by outofambit
Is there an alphabet or lexicon of the human version of The Speech? And if so, where can I find it?
No, there's not.
(And as I've been asked about this before, I'm just going to paste the answer in here—since though the original post is buried in the depths of Tumblr somewhere, I do have my saved draft.)
Per these, which came in very close to each other:
@melbetweenstars
This is something I’ve always wondered but never realized I could actually ask about until I read through that long meta response. (go me.) How much of the Speech do you have fleshed out? Do you create it as you go on more of a need-to-know basis, or do you have vocabulary and grammar structures ready to go? Basically I’d be really interested to hear any Speech-related meta if you have the chance because fictional languages are hella cool!
and:
@sansa–clegane
I just read your post on dark wizards and field terminologies, and am totally loving the Speech translations you provided! Now I’m wondering, though, how much of the language you actually have mapped out or established? I’m very curious as to what, for example, the standard “I - you - he/she/it/etc. - we - you plural - they” conjugation endings would be– or if there even are any in a language as complex as the Speech. I’M JUST REALLY INTERESTED IN FANTASY LINGUISTICS AAAHH
Linguistics is a big deal for me too, as people who read my stuff will have guessed. And needless to say, the Speech is on my mind a lot (along with other “magical languages” and their history/histories).
So let’s take a moment to first to make it clear what the Speech is not. It’s not what’s sometimes referred to as an Adamic language (whether you take the meaning that God used it to talk to Adam, or that Adam invented it to name things.) It’s also nothing whatsoever to do with Enochian. It’s not an occultic language, or anything invented by human beings.
The basic concept is that the Speech is the language, or the very large body of descriptors, used to create the universe (and very likely others, but let’s leave that to one side for the moment). Such words are also assumed, having been used in the building of the universe, to be able to control the bits they’ve built. Every word, therefore, when used ought ideally to sound as if it contains some tremendous power.
Writing something like that every time the Speech is used, even for a much better writer than I am, would be very, very hard.
(We need a cut here. Under the cut: Ursula Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, and others. ...Also a fair number of beetles. And a bear.)
It’s worth mentioning as a matter of information that I met the concept of secret / divine magical languages in Le Guin’s Earthsea long before I ran into it in C. S. Lewis. (I came pretty late to Lewis’s non-Narnian work.) Yet here Lewis, as more than occasionally before, is my master, having been over this ground right back in the mid-1940s.
There’s a point in the final novel of the so-called “Planetary Trilogy”, that big fat (now endlessly problematic but still fun-in-the-right-moods) book That Hideous Strength, where Elwin Ransom—philologist, unwilling visitor to Mars and Venus, unnerved conscript into the wars in Heaven, and Lewis’s take on both the Pendragon and the wounded Fisher King—is instructing his friend and co-linguistics scholar Dimble on how to behave in a meeting with the newly awakened, and potentially quite dangerous, Merlin Ambrosius. (The POV in this passage is that of a lady named Jane who's just recently fallen into company with the group supporting Ransom.)
“You understand, Dimble? Your revolver in your hand, a prayer on your lips, your mind fixed on Maleldil [just think “Christ” for the moment: surprise surprise, that’s the parellel Lewis is using here]. Then, if he stands, conjure him.” “What shall I say in the Great Tongue?” “Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits today in the seat of the Pendragon, and command him to come with you. Say it now.” And Dimble, who had been sitting with his face drawn, and rather white, between the white faces of the two women, and his eyes on the table, raised his head, and great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth. Jane felt her heart leap and quiver at them. Everything else in the room, seemed to have become intensely quiet: even the bird, and the bear***, and the cat, were still, staring at the speaker. The voice did not sound like Dimble’s own: it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance—or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon, and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.
Now if that’s not like being hit over the head with a hammer, I don’t know what is.* That moment has been before the eyes-of-my-mind for a long time as I’ve worked with the Speech.
Note, however, that Lewis does a very wise thing here. He doesn’t actually spell out any of the words out for you. Because in the reader’s mind, there’s always the six-year-old saying, “Go on, say the word: see how it sounds, see what happens…!” And when you recite the magic spell, it doesn’t work. The words come out sounding, well, like any others. And maybe not your interior six-year-old, but your interior twelve- or fifteen-year-old—the ego-state that’s about keeping you from getting hurt or looking stupid in front of other people who aren’t privy to or supportive of your dreams—says, “See, it was just another word, just a bunch of nonsense. You got fooled. Dummy!” No wise writer, I think, willingly sets their readership up for such easy and constant disappointment. It's tough enough to weave, and hold in place, the spell that is prose. Handing the audience a potential spellbreaker, over and over again, is folly.
And by rights the Speech ought to be like Lewis’s example above. If in reality you were to hear the words used to restructure matter or undo gravity, they ought to shake the air in your chest like a Saturn V launch, they should raise the hair on the back of your neck to hear them used; they should freak you out. But a long string of invented syllables isn’t going to do that. I’m stuck with using English to produce even the echo of such a result.
Which means I have to go Lewis’s route… mostly. Here and there I’ll add in a Speech-sourced word or phrase when it supports the narrative or makes it easier for characters to talk about what’s going on—as, when working with wizardry, you do sometimes have to call in precisionist-level language for words that have no casual English cognates: just as you would if you were working in particle physics or organic chemistry at the molecular level. But that’s all I’m going to do… because if you do too much linguistic work in this regard, you constantly run the risk of your readers being distracted from the real business at hand, which is the interactions between/among the characters.
The tech inherent to a work of fantastic fiction is always an issue in this regard. Ideally L. Sprague de Camp’s very useful definition of science fiction, tweaked here for fantasy, ought to be a guideline: “A fantasy story is a human story with a human problem and a human solution that could never have happened without its fantastic content.” Yet inside the definition, there’s still a lot of ways to go wrong. Too much merely human stuff, and a work of fantasy turns into a soap with some casual magical gimmickry—all too often these days labeled as “magic realism”, when it’s not publisher code for “We’d call this fantasy if we had the nerve and we didn’t think it was going to tag us as ‘genre’ and keep us off the best-seller lists”. Too little human-problem-and-human-solution, and it turns into a modern version of what James Blish (God rest him), when writing as the gently merciless science fiction critic William Atheling Jr., used to call “The 'Greater New York and New Jersey Municipal Zeppelin Gas Works’ school of speculative fiction”, where you tour your readership through the Wonderfulness Of Your Tech (magical or otherwise) until they expire of boredom while waiting for someone to fucking do something.
You have to find a centerline between the extremes—indeed pretty much a tightrope—and walk it with some care. I’d guess that J. K. Rowling ran into the need for this balancing act; while never having read the Potter books, I nonetheless get a sense that you get the occasional Wingardium leviosa without also being burdened with long strings of magical Latin. (Though I confess that the answer to the question “Where does the magic come from? And what’s it for?” as it applies to her universe could be of some interest. I have no idea whether this ever gets explicitly handled.**)
Anyway, it’d be way too easy for the YW books to become long discourses on the Speech and its use. This aspect of the “tech”, I think, gets more than enough time onstage. Having once established that words are a tool, indeed the tool for a wizard, the ur-Tool, making every spell they build a resonance between what they do and the initial/ongoing work of Creation—my business is to stay focused on the challenge of driving plot forward by interactions between human beings (and all kinds of others) who have conflicting agendas.
…So much for the tl;dr. I do have some very basic grammatical structures tucked away, but they’re not in any fit state for other people to look at. The Speech, I think, is really best treated as an ongoing mystery that unfolds a little at a time, as required, and leaves everybody wanting more.
HTH!
*It also leads into one of numerous affectionate nods in this book toward Tolkien, as philologist, fellow novelist, and Lewis’s good friend. It's no accident that when Ransom meets up with Merlin himself, a little later in the narrative, the question of this language—the proper name of the Great Tongue is “Old Solar"—comes up again. When discussing what language they’ll speak with each other during their upcoming negotiations [they apparently start out in a rather beat-up and denatured medieval Latin], Ransom says to Merlin about the language he’d prefer to be working in, "It has been long since it was heard. Not even in Numinor was it heard in the streets.”
The Stranger gave no start … but he spoke with a new interest. “Your masters let you play with dangerous toys,” he said. “Tell me, slave, what is Numinor?” “The true West,” said Ransom. “Well,” said the other.
Yeah, “well.” Better scholars than I have dealt with the relationship between these two, as scholars and writers and friends, so enough of that for the moment. But it’s very sweet to see Lewis do something in his books that I’ve done with mine.
**It’s always possible, of course, that in the HP universe this issue is a surd: like asking “where physics comes from”. (Well, not a surd precisely, if your spiritual life tends a certain way. Mine tends toward “Whoever or whatever made the universe, that’s who made physics. And they must really like it, because they made a metric shit ton of it!” (This answer also works for beetles, though that's a slightly different issue.) :)
But if there’s a most-fundamental difference between my wizardly universe and Rowling’s, it might be best revealed in the third question that came up for me directly after “What if there was a user’s manual for human beings/the world/the universe?” and “If there was, where would it have come from?”: specifically, “And why?”
***There's a bear in the Pendragon's kitchen. Thoth only knows what initially brought that on for Lewis, but it's a character insertion that pays off later, so (shrug) wtf.
In the OH SWEET POWERS THAT BE, HOW DID THEY FIND OUT...? dep't...
I was just ordering some flour from our local miller, Kells Wholemeal. Their big bag of plain flour is way cheaper/better value than buying it bag-by-small-bag from the grocery store. (We "decant" the flour bags into five-kilo plastic birdseed buckets, and stack them up out in the boot room at the back of the cottage.)
The other thing we usually get from them (besides yeast and bread flour) is chocolate for baking. I was adding a bag of this stuff (which is extremely good)...
... and then noticed something slightly unnerving.
...The notation: "Only for use as an ingredient in food making."
And my first thought, off But what the hell else are we going to be using chocolate for...?
...OH SHIT, THEY'VE FOUND OUT ABOUT CARMELA. THE JIG IS UP.
And then I relaxed. Because (a) She doesn't get that much of her chocolate in this country. If she's after this stuff, she'll grab it elsewhere in the EU.
And (b):
...They've got to catch her first. :)
(per the note from @anoddreindeer: Huh, weird about that. I need to check what the SSL on the main [under-construction] Errantry Concordance site is up to. Meanwhile, dropping the "s" off the "https" seems to sort it for the moment...)
the trees you grew up with have not forgotten you. their branches still whisper your name in the breeze and their roots remember the paths your feet once traced through their shade.
"Eavesdropping on whale songs over the last six years is providing new information vital to answering questions about these giants of the ocean.
The number of whale songs detected is associated with shifting food sources, according to the California scientists—and the number of days humpbacks have been singing has nearly doubled.
When monitoring baleen whale songs in the Pacific Ocean, researchers found year-to-year variations correlated with changes in the availability of the species they forage on.
In vast oceans, monitoring populations of large marine animals can be a “major challenge” for ecologists, explained Dr. John Ryan, a biological oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California (MBARI).
Their team deployed underwater microphones called hydrophones to study and track baleen whales, which communicate over long distances through sound.
“Surprisingly, the acoustic behavior of baleen whales provides insights about which species can better adapt to changing ocean conditions,” said Dr. Ryan, a lead author of the study.
They also monitored songs from blue, fin, and humpback whales off the West Coast of the U.S. to see what the song data could reveal about the health of their ecosystem.
The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, showed “large” year-to-year variations in whale song detection.
“The amount of humpback whale song continually increased, with their songs being detected on 34% of days at the beginning of the study and rising to 76% of days after six years,” said Dr. Ryan.
“These increases consistently tracked improved foraging conditions for humpback whales across all study years—large increases in krill abundance, followed by large increases in anchovy abundance.
“In contrast, blue and fin whale song rose primarily during the years of increasing krill abundance.
“This distinction of humpback whales is consistent with their ability to switch between dominant prey. An analysis of skin biopsy samples confirmed that changes had occurred in the whales’ diets.”
He explained that other factors, including the local abundance of whales, may have contributed to patterns in song detections observed in some years, but changes in foraging conditions were the most consistent factor.
“Overall, the study indicates that seasonal and annual changes in the amount of baleen whale song detected may mirror shifts in the local food web.”
WHALES ON THE COMEBACK TRAIL: • Gray Whale, Extinct for Centuries in Atlantic, Is Spotted in Cape Cod • Sighting of Many Blue Whales Around Seychelles is First in Decades – ‘Phenomenal’ • Majestic Sei Whales Reappear in Argentine Waters After Nearly a Century
“The results suggest that an understanding of the relationship between whale song detection and food availability may help researchers to interpret future hydrophone data, both for scientific research and whale management efforts”, which could better protect endangered species."
-via Good News Network, March 1, 2025
BTW, I finally did this
A number of people have suggested it over the last while... and finally I thought "WTF, why not?"
So if folks want to contribute to what's going on around here without buying ebooks, here's a way! ...And if you're in the UK and have been feeling annoyed by not being able to assist in that way, well, here's an option for you, as Ko-Fi doesn't care about Brexit in the slightest.
(And thanking all of you in advance, for those of you who choose to support.)
...This setup isn't particularly customized as yet. I really need to get a page banner sorted out, and do some other stuff. Give me a week or so and it'll probably have wizards and dragons all over it. :)
...Anyway, thanks again to those who suggested this.
Young Wizards is my favorite book series because where else are you going to find a book where a twelve year old, an alien elf prince, a talking tree, and a crystal centipede all get together to do surgery on the sun.
from The Memory Palace, by Nate DiMeo
Fridge thought fully like, twenty years later, when thinking about the concept in Young Wizards about how a wizard is picked to be offered wizardry and given an Ordeal because they're exactly the right person for a particular problem:
So Dairine, given the power of wizardry, decides to go find Darth Vader and kick his ass, right?
And there’s like some discussion about how, if she uses her raw wizardly power to ‘go find Darth Vader’ then she’s inevitably going to end up attracting the attention of the universe’s equivalent thereof.
Which okay I always just nodded along to the logic of, big bad guy=big bad guy.
But what my brain somehow failed to conceptualize, and this may have been obvious to some other people, is what happens to Darth Vader at the end of the movies
Namely. He gets redeemed, because someone is willing to reach out and help him along towards that.
She didn’t just summon the attention of the Lone Power by trying to manifest Darth Vader into the universe by sheer ten year old stubborness, she summoned SPECIFICALLY the version of the Lone Power where Reconfiguration was a built-in possibility.
Fun fact of the day
At Ebooks Direct: Our Pride Month Bundle is 50% off!
Caution! These works contain: homosexuals, bisexuals, lesbians, pansexuals, asexuals, polyamorous folks, genderfluid humans and nonhumans, and two (or maybe three) varieties of queer magic-users, as well as gay science-users, wizards, and Dragons.
And they’ve all been there since 1979.
Welcome to one universe where whom you love and how your genders intersect is between you, your lover(s), and the Goddess. And another where wizards come in so many species and sexualities that getting sniffy about something as wildly variable as local sex and gender may well be seen as kind of provincial… when you’re just one more of a million kinds of humanity, and the serious question is: “Never mind the tentacles—do you think we can date?”
The Pride Month Bundle contains:
The Door Into Fire*
The Door Into Shadow*
The Door Into Sunset*
Tales of the Five #1: The Levin-Gad
Tales of the Five #2: The Landlady
Sirronde’s World #1: The Span
Sirronde’s World #3: Parting Gifts (SW #2 not yet written)
Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #1: Lior and the Sea
Additionally, it contains the Tales of the Middle Kingdoms novella, Overdue—available only at Ebooks Direct as a standalone purchase, in this collection, and in the whole-store “I Want Everything You’ve Got” collection.
And finally, from the Young Wizards universe, the Pride Month Bundle contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the series—Advisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo—on their first canonically-“out” (ad)venture as a couple:
Owl Be Home For Christmas
Click here to get the 2024 Pride Package!
(And if you've got one already, or aren't interested in the offer, would you consider reblogging for the attention of others? Please & thank you!)
UK friends: due to Brexit, we regret that we are no longer able to sell ebooks into Britain. Our apologies that this offer is therefore not valid in the UK.
*Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winner
You know how there's like some mathematician or something, who like did some useful stuff but is primarily known for overshadowing that work by going to great lengths trying to convince people to blow up the moon or something?
I wanna be like that but the hill I'm dying on is that the moon should be considered a planet
Fun fact of the day
"The Seychelles has become a major tourist destination for beachgoing and scuba diving, but it’s not only humans that are beginning to flock to this island.
In what marine biologists have described as a “phenomenal finding,” a survey of whales around the territorial waters of this archipelagic nation revealed the presence of blue whales—over a dozen.
It’s the first time they’ve been seen in these warm seas since 1966, and it’s a wonderful milestone in a long and increasingly successful recovery for the world’s largest animal.
The Seychelles are located in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, and they were historically a stopover point for Soviet whalers en route to Antarctica. The years 1963 to 1966 were particularly difficult for whales here, and many were taken before the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling put an end to the practice of hunting baleen whales in 1973.
Since 1966, no dedicated investigation of whales in the Seychelles had been made until 2020, when a partnership of four universities conducted an acoustic survey over the period of two years.
They made five different sightings of groups of up to 10 animals.
“This was a phenomenal finding,” Jeremy Kiszka, a co-author of the paper from Florida International University, wrote in The Conversation. “We were prepared to not see any blue whales due to the high level of hunting that occurred fairly recently and absolutely no information was available since the last blue whale was killed in the region in 1964.” ...
The team behind the survey sent images taken of the whales’ dorsal sides to a database to see if any of them had been recorded before, and amid the reel, not a single one was a match with any other photographed whale.
This, the team suggests, means they have probably never been seen before, which for a species that big might seem strange, but along with there being only 5,000 to 15,000 on Earth, they migrate vast distances while diving deep, making recording their movements incredibly challenging.
The survey identified 23 whale species in total using hydroponic mics over 2 years with peak activity coming between December and April. This is a fascinating finding that suggests something about the seas around the Seychelles makes for excellent whale habitat."
-via Good News Network, April 30, 2024
Young Wizards is my favorite book series because where else are you going to find a book where a twelve year old, an alien elf prince, a talking tree, and a crystal centipede all get together to do surgery on the sun.
Just a quick reminder that the "All The Wizardry" bundle is still available at Ebooks Direct! (Curiosity rover not included...) :)
Contains nineteen DRM-free ebooks:
The nine New Millennium Editions of the main-sequence Young Wizards novels
The Feline Wizardry trilogy
The two collections of interstitial fiction: Interim Errantry and Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal
The only two Young Wizards short stories (as the title item and "Theobroma" in Uptown Local and Other Interventions
The non main-sequence novel Young Wizards: Lifeboats and the standalone novella Owl Be Home For Christmas (These last two works are included as independent ebook volumes even though they also appear in the Interim Errantry collections.)
The "CD extras" work The "How Lovely Are Thy Branches" Advent Calendar, featuring outtake dialogue from How Lovely Are Thy Branches (which appears in Interim Errantry)
The Young Wizards OTP Challenge, Days 1-17: short fiction in the OTP format
...And as always, should you misplace any of these, or need to change platforms, we'll replace them for you free! Details here.
So stop in and grab yourself an armful of wizardry!
Get the "All The Wizardry" Bundle
(For our UK friends, the normal sad caveat: we can't sell directly to you from the Ebooks Direct store any more due to Brexit. Our apologies.) :(
Sometimes I read stuff and I just wanna shake someone like "WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS"
My boyfriend would like to know what a Godiva chocolate bar would run on the galactic market? I wasn't sure, given what you had said about Hershey bars, since I don't have a frame of reference.
Well, obviously there’s a lot of room for subjectivity about this. Some collectors (Galactic or otherwise) will feel differently. But generally speaking, I suspect the collectors’ opinions will roughly match mine.
Ranking gets complicated because old chocolate companies and brands keep getting bought by bigger companies / conglomerates, and the brands and the quality of their chocolate tend to suffer as a result. By and large, though, the best chocolate tends to be made by companies that do so-called “bean-to-bar” production. The longer the history of this, the better. In general, artisanal chocolate, especially single estate/single bean chocolate, and organic and free-trade chocolates, will also be preferred by the discerning intergalactic collector.
Ranking chocolate from worst to best: (and yes, for those who’re wondering, I’ve eaten all of these, normally on their home turf):
North American chocolate: Almost routinely no better than poor-to-middlin’ quality: the bigger the producer, routinely, the worse, as they keep trying to do it cheaply and good chocolate can’t be done cheaply. It’s too energy-intensive, especially as regards the time and energy required in the conching process that’s absolutely key in giving merely okay chocolate a chance to become great. Hershey’s is the worst of the lot because they’re purposely catering to that spoiled-milk taste that’s become traditional for them. …The exceptions to the poor-to-meh quality rule are invariably smaller producers like Ghirardelli. Meanwhile it should probably be no surprise that when the Lexington Avenue Local worldgate was resited following the refurbishment of Grand Central Terminal, it wound up behind Li-Lac Chocolate’s satellite branch in the food hall. One might suspect Carmela’s straightforward hand in this.
European-based chocolate generally: Significantly better. …Subdividing into:
British Isles chocolate: Pretty good most of the time. Many small classic brands (Fry’s, Rowntree) were subsumed into bigger British chocolate companies over time, with only slow degradation of general quality. Cadburys is probably at the top of the heap, despite what’s happened to the Creme Egg over the years. (mutter) …And naturally I would be remiss in not mentioning, on the Irish side, Lir, Lily O’Brien’s, and Butlers. (When we go to visit friends in Switzerland, we bring them Lir.) Additionally, there are people who are vocal about their claims that Irish Cadburys is better than British Cadburys, due to local/regional differences in the mix. Myself, I refuse to get mixed up in local chocosectarian stuff. Life’s too short.
Italian and French chocolate: Perugina, Valrhona (as in “I’d rather be in Valrhona than Valhalla”), Callebaut, Agostoni, Amedei, and Bernachon stand out. There are many more smaller makers in the region worth looking out for: check this list for some.
Belgian chocolate: Almost always really good, even at the mass-produced end (Guylian); sometimes terrific (Leonidas) or more than terrific (Neuhaus, Galler, Dumon). This is where Godiva fits in. (I first had it when its initial New York store opened in 1972: it was far better then than it is now. Then again, having been owned by Campbell’s Soup can’t have been good for them.)
Swiss chocolate: Probably the best: certainly routinely seen as such (and collectors will be aware of the implications of this). Again, the smaller the producer the better. The great/old houses like Lindt and Sprüngli are being given a run for their money by newer competitors like Teuscher and Läderach (attn @petermorwood: Stengli!!).
…I’ll complete this later as I just splashed some tea on my keyboard and I seem to have a membrane problem. (sigh)
(Resuming after prying off all the keycaps and cleaning out what could have been the start of a small tool-using civilization if it was let go much longer:)
So anyway, we were attempting to tease out how Godiva would do on the Galactic chocolate collectors’ market.
It’s all so relative. But there are a number of different factors in play, so better to take them one by one.
(a) Provenance / authenticity. Real Chocolate From Earth (SM*) still has to be specified, these days, in some parts of the Galaxy: as with any unique collectible, there are always counterfeits out there. But none of them work perfectly, not even those produced by atom-by-atom matter duplication. There’s just something about genuine Earth-grown cocoa beans that cannot be duplicated. (If we pulled Dr. McCoy into this discussion he’d simply snort and say, “It’s soul. Why d’y’think I hate that damn transporter so much?”) And the bad fakes… (shudder) Well. You know the correlation between flavors (and everything else) of chocolate versus carob? The comparison between real chocolate and bad fake chocolate is like that. But generally worse.
(b) Reputation and/or scarcity on planet of origin. Godiva is not hard to find, but its lower-end-of-high-midrange reputation would affect the going price. Many artisanals or single-estates would bring in much, much more on the collectors’ market. But Godiva still would not be cheap.
© Freshness and state of packaging. Fresh and perfectly packaged Godiva obtained before the first of the large corporate acquisitions via timeslide would bring a way higher price than the stuff available on the high street right now.
(d) The present state of cocoa futures. Believe me when I tell you that none of Earth’s financial markets are so closely scrutinized off-planet as the cocoa futures market. A serious ripple in the world’s cocoa production figures can send shockwaves through the collectibles and personal-chemical-enhancements markets galaxy wide (in the latter case, for those species who use chocolate as an aphrodisiac, mood-altering drug or hallucinogen). If anything was going to bring on the classic aliens-arrive-from-space-to-save-Earth-from-itself scenario, it would be news that we had fucked up our climate so totally that the cocoa bean was going to die out. The intervention wouldn’t happen because of any particular altruism, oh dear me no… but because with the death of Earth’s cocoa, many extremely currency-sensitive aspects of the Galactic economy would take a hit that would make the Earth’s recent nearly-worldwide-bank meltdown look like an insolvency involving a kid’s lemonade stand.
Anyway, the state of the market pushes the day to day price of collectible chocolate up and down in unpredictable but interesting ways, and the smart investor keeps its ears (or legs or abdomen or whatever it listens with) to the ground to stay informed about what’s going on in Earth’s so-called “soft commodities” markets.
(e) Preparation. How much actual chocolate is in the confectionery and how has it been prepared? Plain solid chocolate is always preferable for collectors’ purposes. (The two-pound solid chocolate ingots that Kron Chocolatier in Manhattan used to sell back in the day would have been seen as very choice.) Dark chocolate is always preferable to milk: the milk is seen as an adulteration, as 18K gold is seen as inferior to 24K by precious-metal collectors. Some additives, if psychoactive or otherwise seen as valuable on their own, are viewed as positive (see the chocolate business with Nita and Kit at the Crossings here.)
(f) Demand. Is the product hot right now? Has some buzz about it in the collectors’ networks kicked the price up for some reason?
…And there are other factors, but you get the general idea. So if you were offering a Godiva bar on the open market, say one of these, depending on where you planned to do your shopping afterwards you could probably exchange it for enough currency in one of the smaller spacefaring cultures that’s chocolate-using in one of the valuable ways (meaning as a recreational chemical) to get yourself a small private island on some planet where the climate suited you. Or a nice little space yacht. (Nothing really huge. After all, you need to pay for crew services too, and berthing, and… Never mind.)
Hope this helps. :)
*Service mark is the property of Gaia Protectorate CRLLC: for more information see here.
Do you think the Powers that be would ever offer Carmela the Oath even though she’s past latency?
I have to say that I don't see it as something the Powers would do, or indeed, need to do.
Some people, I think, are potentially far more effective without wizardry than with it. We are after all dealing here with a young woman who once shot the Lone Power point-blank (and snickered and said "Oops!" afterwards), and who stopped a violent alien insurrection with a block of Valrhona chocolate.
What we have to remember is that, in its way, wizardry's a bit of a kludge. If everything was working as originally intended, it wouldn't have been needed. But then the Lone One came up with that new and interesting concept It added to the worlds, and since the aftermath, all the greater Pleroma's code has needed constant tweaking. (eyeroll) After all, the addition of wizardry to the equation inevitably costs more energy... and the whole concept of things since the Lone Power's annoying addition of entropy has required saving energy. It's a pain to maintain the balance.
Doubtless there are some of the Powers—most likely the ur-demiurge we'd identify with Thoth, this seems like it'd be in Their bailiwick: code is after all language—who sit around tsk-ing at the mess the code's gotten into, and meanwhile side-eyeing with a certain dry satisfaction those creatures creative enough to intervene unusually effectively in the world without needing to have wizardry added on.
My image of the larger meta of this whole situation, therefore, is of the Powers standing around some kind of viewing instrumentality (why do I keep coming back to that pool in Jason and the Argonauts? Who knows) waiting to see what she's going to do next.
...And laying bets. :)
The Young Wizards series turns 40!
...And yes, we're having a sale to celebrate. But that can wait. :)
I'm sitting here looking at the date and considering how amazing it is that, despite the changes in the publishing world, anything can stay in print nonstop for forty years.
But this book has. Here's how it started:
...Well, not how it started. It started with three things:
A newbie YA writer being deeply annoyed with a non-newbie one for (as she thought) stripping their teenage characters of their agency without good reason.
A suddenly-appearing joke involving two terms or concepts that wouldn't normally appear together: the 1950s young-readers' series of careers books with titles that always began So You Want To Be A..., and the word "wizard."
And the idea immediately springing from that juxtaposition. What if there was such a book? Not a careers book, but a book that told you how to be a wizard—maybe some kind of manual? One that would tell you the truth about the magic underlying the universe, and how to get your hands on it... assuming you felt you could promise the things that power would demand of you, and survive the Ordeal that would follow?
Six or seven months after that confluence of events, there was a novel with that joke-line as its title. A month or so after that, the novel was bought. So You Want To Be A Wizard came out as a Fall 1983 book, as you can see from the Locus Magazine ad above (from back when Locus was only a paper zine). The first reviews were encouraging.
And by the middle of 1984, the publishers were asking, "So, what's next?" A question I'm still busy answering.
There's been a lot of water under the wizardly bridge since. In SYWTBAW's case, this involved a couple/few publishers, a surprising number of covers, a fair number of awards here and there; and lots more books. (I always knew there'd be more, but how many more continues to surprise me. Which is a bit funny, considering how much stuff that universe has going on in it.)
So here we are at forty, and looking ahead to The Big Five-Oh with some interest. More books? Absolutely. Young Wizards #11 is in progress at the moment, and YW #12 is in the late concept stages. More covers for So You Want To Be A Wizard? Seems inevitable. A TV series, perhaps? (shrug) Stranger things have happened: we'll keep our fingers (or other manipulatory instrumentalities) crossed. The New Millennium Editions in translation? and in international paperback? Working on that right now. The sky's the limit.*
And meanwhile, to celebrate, just for today we'll have a sale. (Except in the UK. To our British friends, the usual sad apology: the expensive bureaucracy of Brexit has made it impossible for us to sell directly to you any more. Details here, with our apologies.)
As has been mentioned before, changes are afoot at Ebooks Direct, so this kind of sale won't be happening again for the foreseeable future. (In fact I thought we were all done with them already. But the number 40 suggested one last opportunity that wouldn't be recurring, so I thought, "Aah, what the heck? Let's.")
New things first! Today, to mark this occasion, we're introducing the "All The Wizardry" Bundle. This is Ebook Direct's entire inventory of Young Wizards works; the contents of the bundle are listed on its product page. The $29.99 price listed there is for today only, to celebrate SYWTBAW's birthday, and will go up as of 23:59 Hawai'ian time tonight. As always, should you ever lose your ebooks or need to change reading platforms, we'll change your formats as necessary, or replace the books, for free.
Just click here, or on the image below, for the "All The Wizardry" Bundle. (Please ignore the category listings under the "Pay Using..." icons on the product page: they plainly think they're in a different universe. Kind of an occupational hazard around here...)
The other, older kind of sale folks will have seen here is on the "I Want Everything You've Got" Bundle, which is the whole Ebooks Direct store—obviously including all the Young Wizards books as well: more than 2.5 million words in 36 DRM-free ebooks. Just for today, in honor of the birthday book, we're dropping the whole-store price to USD $40.00. This, too, will go away just before midnight Hawai'ian time tonight... and it will never be lower. So if you want everything we've got at that price, don't wait around.
Make sure you use this link or the one associated with the image to get the baked-in discount at checkout. (If it fails to display correctly, use the discount code "40FOR40" in the checkout's "discount code or gift code" field.)
Meanwhile? Onward into the next decade. The new A Day at the Crossings novel unfortunately won't make it out before the end of 2023; other work in-house currently has taken priority. But as for early 2024... stay tuned.
And for those of you who're Young Wizards readers, and have kept this book, and its sequels, alive for pushing half a century?
Thank you, again and always!
*Though actually, it's not, is it? As the proverb has it, "Wizardry doesn't stop at atmosphere's edge..."
My friend made a uquiz that assigns you a whale species. Take it. Take it now.
I know you guys want me to draw different characters, but I love Nita so much :’)
[GWP said something about her wearing a floofy flowery dress so I had to]
This week’s recommended book has been brought to you by Dozmjir’s entire council of brethren. Not Dozmjir himself, just the council. “So You Want to Be a Wizard” by Diane Duane is the first book in the rather lengthy Young Wizards series. It reminds one at first of one of those light reading books meant to encourage reading in the reluctant. Yet it has a depth to it. Philosophy and religious discourse, magic, the power of friendships, and even the nature of fear and despair. These books are quite heavy for the age group they are marketed for, and yet somehow it is that very quality which makes them so interesting.
I was so cool and fine and normal about Dairine Callahan at age ten (I was NOT, I was SO NOT NORMAL, and I have never become normal about her, she is a childhood blorbo and I have been rotating her like a 90’s windows screen saver for twenty-two years)
Regarding Blank Check Wizardries
So I’ve been rereading SYWTBAW and I stumbled across something that I’d forgotten – it is Kit, not Nita, who suggests using the blank check wizardry. Nita actually worries about the ramifications of the spell, but Kit shrugs it off and says, “I don’t think the price’ll be too high.” Cue the Song of Twelve. Imagine how Kit must have felt when he realized that Nita’s looming death was payback for a gamble that he had made. Imagine the guilt crushing in, harsher and deeper than any ocean, as he clung to his fierce denial out of sheer desperation. Imagine how painfully he must have wished that he’d insisted on casting the blank check spell alone – which was his original intent – instead of letting Nita stubbornly join in. Imagine the extra agony wrapped up in the words read the fine print before you sign. I didn’t think that Deep Wizardry could wreck me any more, but here we are.
yall arent ready yet but one day were going to talk about how the young wizards series is better than harry potter. the language is more complicated but trust me, its better
Okay, so I’ve just started Games Wizards Play book 10 in the Young Wizards series, which means it’s time for some thoughts on my FAAAAAAAV YA SERIES OF ALL TIME. (No offense HP, no offense)
ROSHAUN MY CHILD MY SON COME BACK TO ME!!! COME BACK TO ME BABY! IT HAS BEEN ONE WHOLE BOOK AND HE’S NOT BACK YET I AM NOT OKAY! I AM NOT ALRIGHT! THE MADNESS MUST END! PLEASE GOD MAKE IT STOP JUST BRING BACK MY BABY PLEASE OH PLEASE OH PLEASE! WE LOST PONCH I CAN’T HAVE THIS TOO I CAN’T TAKE THIS OH GODDDDDDD *INCOHERENT SOBBING*
And I am done. This is basically my internal stream of consciousness all through A Wizard of Mars tbh. I have basically been a blithering, sobbing, screaming wreck since Wizards at War. Life’s been hard. And since my house burned down, I don’t even have my ENTIRE COMPLETE collection to reference : |
Some further reviews on the Young Wizards series:
So You Want To Be a Wizard…
You will cry because of a car
Deep Wizardry
You will cry because of a shark
High Wizardry
You will cry because of a space turtle
A Wizard Abroad
You will cry because of Ireland
A Wizard’s Dilemma
You will cry because of a parrot. Also cancer.
A Wizard Alone
You will cry because of autism
Wizard’s Holiday
You will cry because of a barren hellscape
Wizards at War
You will cry because of OH GOD NOT THE DOG PLEASE NOT THE DOG OH GOD NO
A Wizard of Mars
You will cry because you are no longer capable of feeling anything because the last book emotionally broke you.
Great series. 10/10. Would recommend to all your friends and loved ones and then you can all cry together.
Available now for free download: "Herself"
Since tomorrow's the start of the Irish national holiday weekend with what many Irish people will refer to as The Day That's In It, this urban fantasy novella is for the next few days free for download from the Ebooks Direct store!
Set mostly in the Dublin of 2004, it contains Irish mythology, abused civic statuary, famous cemeteries, celebrated dead people, the much-mourned sushi place behind the Brown Thomas department store, seriously cranky deities, and the mysterious serial murders of numerous Fair Folk.
…By the way, though this isn't a Young Wizards work, it's set in the same universe. One scene unfolds in a space that'll be familiar to YW readers as "[the pub] where the wizards drink".
Interested?
Just head over here, shove a copy in the cart, and go through the checkout process. You won't be charged.
...And one other thing! Some of you will have seen our "Get Our Whole Store For $44!" offers, and for one reason or another haven't been able to avail yourself of them. Well, starting right now, our Tumblr folk have got another chance! (Ahead of everybody else, as the sale's not being announced to the general public on other platforms until midnight US/EST.) ...And you can even see the animated promo before everybody else! (Go on, try not to jig. I dare you.)
Details about how to get the "I Want Everything You've Got" package are over here:
Please note that if you get the Whole Store package, you won't need to download Herself separately: it's part of the package.
The usual frustrated note for our British friends: unfortunately we can't sell to you. It's a Brexit thing. Info about that is here. As always, our apologies.
And now for the jiggy bit!
...Okay, this is a lovely shout-out. And to be mentioned in the same neighborhood as both Ursula Le Guin and Terry Pratchett and @neil-gaiman is seriously something I have to take a breath to recover from.
...Okay, better now. :)