The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger

The monthly challenge continues with the next two books in the series.

If you haven’t noticed by now, the covers for each pair of books are designed as a diptych. The idea is that you’d line each pair up side by side in your ereader library.

Of course, you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.

I’ve also updated the first two with a slightly tweaked stylesheet (should look better now in apps such as Aldiko, Readmill, or Bluefire) and a fix for a very embarrassing error in my automatic smartypants quotes converter.

Four of the fourteen books are out.

1. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
2. The Marvelous Land of Oz
3. Ozma of Oz
4. Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz

I need to get Jenný to blog about her process for illustrating these covers. A lot of thought, sketching, and experimentation has gone into making sure they work both as regular covers (displayed large) and ebook covers (displayed small in your library).

Hint hint, Jenný.

Which reminds me: every illustration you see on this site, on the Heartpunk site, or in the OZ Reading Club is available as a print as well. Covers, illustrations, you name it. Just email the illustrator, Jenný, at baukur@gmail.com for more info.

Also, Jenný is hungry for feedback and comments on the illustrations. If you don’t feel like writing a comment then you can email her instead. (She’ll hate me for having written this but what else are meddling older brothers for? )

Happy reading!

(The two attributed quotes in this post are thanks to Íris Erlingsdóttir’s awesome blog post where she collected them all in Icelandic.)

The first time I moved back to Iceland was in 1984 when my parents returned after finishing their studies abroad. Of course, knowing our luck, we returned at the start of what ended up being one of Iceland’s longest general strikes, lasting from the 4th of October to the 30th.

Iceland was in an economic crisis, what we call ‘kreppa’. What most foreigners don’t realise is that Iceland has been in a bipolar boom-bust cycle ever since we declared independence from the Danish. And before that we were in a poverty spiral of misery, hunger, and sky-high childhood mortality rates.

Usually the crises happened because of our dependence on just a few species of fish for the entire country’s income. When the fish was in our waters, everybody was rich. When it was out of our waters, everybody was poor.

Incidentally, this is why most Icelanders find it hilarious to hear the EU and Norway whine about mackerel having wandered into Icelandic waters. You ignored Icelandic pleas when ‘our’ fish entered your waters and now Icelanders ignore your whining when ‘your’ fish enters our waters.

I’m not about to excuse Iceland’s many misbehaviours when it comes to fishing but a lot of people at home just see this as karma.

Back when I was a kid, my first memory of Iceland was of a kreppa and they have been happening regularly all my life.

This is the real reason why we’ve dealt tolerably well with the current economic crisis and will deal tolerably well with the upcoming crisis (in a couple of years or so). We’re old hands at this and the 2008 collapse didn’t even come close to being the worst kreppa anybody over thirty has experienced.

I’ve been watching this for 50 years. This is a disgusting society, it’s all disgusting. There are no principles, no ideals, nothing. Only opportunism and struggle for power. (Styrmir Gunnarsson, former editor of Morgunblaðið.)

Most Icelanders excuse this boom-bust cycle as simply being the nature of the Icelandic economy—as if it were a corporeal being with its own genome and self-awareness—and dismiss concerns that it’s because the people in charge are incapable of running anything bigger than an off-license.

‘It just is.’

A fatalistic outlook is one of the few characteristics we share with our nordic kin, but that’s where it ends. The fatalism of your average Icelander is that of a Calvinistic peasant who, paradoxically, is also still holding onto some old-style norse beliefs.

Success, or the lack of it, is seen as a sign of God’s (or the Fates’) opinion of you. Hard work and merit will never earn you anything. Only God’s will matters. It’s a belief that has created a society where nepotism, cliques, and tribal alliances dominate and any attempt to set up a meritocracy is quickly subverted.

And, the perennial mantra of Icelandic parents of dead children: ‘Those who God loves die young.’

These two beliefs are what kept the starving Icelandic nation going for centuries while under the Danish yoke. ‘Everything happens according to God’s design. Who am I to argue with God? If I work hard enough, maybe he will forgive me for whatever it is I did.’

Icelanders are, at heart, God-fearing peasants who think the poor deserve their poverty, the rich deserve their money, and that death is brought on by God’s will and not your own idiocy.

It’s no wonder that the majority of Icelanders have always voted right wing.

The Icelandic left lost the 2013 election almost as soon as they won in 2009. The mistakes they made were numerous.

• The Left-Greens, one of the most rabid anti-EU party there is, agreed to support an application for EU membership in exchange for being a coalition member in the government. This obviously had disastrous consequences, causing anger and defections among their MPs and supporters.
• They had to implement the IMF’s austerity regime to get a loan. Also disastrous because both parties had run on promises of protecting the welfare, education, and healthcare system. Instead they gutted it.
• IMF didn’t let them implement any of the aggressive business regulations they had promised or implied. The only regulations implemented were those that impact freelancers and small companies, throttling them and guaranteeing that economic growth would only come from the fishing companies and the banks.
• They did do more than many governments in addressing Iceland’s burgeoning mortgage crisis but they only addressed the symptoms. It’s as if people don’t realise that the problem is systemic and that debt forgiveness just is hitting the snooze button on a bomb timer.
• They completely fucked up their attempt to reform the constitution. It simply withered and died because it didn’t get the attention it needed.
• They completely fucked up their attempt to reform Iceland’s feudalistic fisheries policies. (Quotas are owned, sold, and inherited like land awarded to a baron by a generous monarch.)

This mess, disorganisation, and a series of major betrayals lead to the left splintering like a oak in a wood chipper. The coalition has spent the last few months as a minority government protected by one of the splinter parties, incapable of getting anything done, unable to pass any law of consequence.

Because of Iceland’s 5% rule (a party will only get MPs if it has more than 5% of the vote nationally), only two of these splinter parties got into parliament last Saturday and over 10% of the vote was simply discarded and ignored.

There’s a lesson here and it’s very simple: when your country’s economy is in hell, your government can either obey the IMF’s diktats and be so unpopular that you lose power, or your government can throw the IMF out and risk complete and utter bankruptcy and an uncertain future. Iceland’s leftwing backlash government was screwed either way, from the start.

The second lesson is that the Icelandic left is dominated by idealists who will not take realpolitik as an excuse for betraying the cause. They won’t hesitate to drive a knife into the back of a benefactor turned tyrant, turning into a gaggle of small petty people ganging up with blades in their hands and bloodlust in their hearts, Brutus-on-Caesar-style.

We Icelanders never lose because we never follow through on victories. We are by nature a nation that feels the most at home in a pillory. (Halldór Laxness, Salka Valka – Fuglinn í fjörunni)

That the left wing would lose in last Saturday’s election was predictable to those of us who know Icelanders and Icelandic politics and it only blind-sided those idiots who bought into the Occupy-style propaganda wholesale.

It’s inaccurate to say that Iceland swung massively to the right. This was just a return to norm. Most Icelanders have traditionally voted centre-right.

That said, the election did offer a few surprises. We had two new parties join parliament:

• Bright Future, a splinter off the Social Democratic Alliances. Their pitch was simple. ‘We’re pro-EU social democrats like those other guys but not sleazy ruthless New Labour-style Thatcherite social democrats like they are.’
• The Pirate Party. You know who they are and since they only seem to have opinions on a few issues, they aren’t likely to betray any campaign promises. The downside being, of course, that we have no idea what to expect from them on non-digital issues.

Also, the Progressive Party had one of the biggest electoral wins in its history, largely due to their promise of a blanket write-down of all loans which they will pay for in some hand-wavey ‘foreigners will pay it’ sort of way. They were also helped by the fact that they are massively popular in rural Iceland where each vote can count as much as three city votes.

The Independence Party, which is the architect of the latest crash having led a privatisation and deregulation drive in the 90s and early 2000s, had its second worst electoral result in history, only managing to become Iceland’s largest political party by virtue of left-wing fragmentation. Thankfully, it seems that not all Icelanders have forgotten who to blame for the mess we’re still in.

Still, this does highlight just how massively right-wing Iceland is traditionally. This is the Independence Party’s second worst result in their history and they still managed to get the biggest share of of the vote of all parties.

This is Icelanders returning to the masters they know. The Progressive Party and the Independence Party have divided the country and its resources between themselves for most of the last 69 years.

Still, it’s not all bad. It’s inaccurate to say that Iceland swung massively to the right. The centre-right parties got 51% of the vote while the centre-left parties got around 46%. The left is just too fragmented, splintered, and disorganised. Same as it ever was.

If by “the smartest people” you mean “the smartest young, single geeks in Silicon Valley with time on their hands but no idea how to party,” then it’s basically true, or close enough. It can even stay mostly true when you broaden it to “the smartest geeks in Silicon Valley.”

But if by “the smartest people” you mean “the smartest people in Silicon Valley,” you quickly run into the first zone of epic fail. Steve Wozniak did it as a hobby; Steve Jobs did it as a business. So the idea can only be legit if we assume Wozniak was smarter than Jobs. This is not only a dickhead thing to say, it’s also extremely debatable.

Geeks, like any other social group that consist mostly of young males, generally assume not only that anybody who disagrees with them is dumb but that anybody who is different is also an idiot. Not all of them grow out of this delusion.

It’s time to announce Studio Tendra’s second major project: The OZ Reading Club.

The idea is simple:

We are going to release two ebooks in the Oz series per month until we’ve released all fourteen of L. Frank Baum’s original ebooks. Each ebook will have a new cover illustrated by Jenný and will be designed and formatted by me, Baldur.

You, if you are so inclined, are invited to read them along with us, two per month, as we release them. Every book page also has a comment thread where you can tell us what you thought of it. (Comments are moderated, of course.)

We’ll announce every new release here, on the OZ Reading Club site, on twitter, and on Google Plus.

The first two books are available now.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Marvelous Land of Oz

Go check out the Oz Reading Club.

Our plan, ages ago when Studio Tendra was little more than an idea in our heads, was to do projects with public domain ebooks alongside our original work. The only problem was… which public domain ebooks.

Fortunately, there was only one series we were really interested in. A series full of colourful characters in a crazy setting with mad antics and weirdness all over.

Let me tell you this: Jenný has been having a lot of fun drawing these characters.

One of the recurring issues in news coverage on Iceland is how absolutely rubbish foreign news media is at reporting about Iceland.

We’ve seen how detached from reality economic news on Iceland is, ignoring our burgeoning mortgage crisis and the consequences of the government’s harsh austerity measures.

Their frothy and exuberant reports about Iceland’s proposed new constitution also tend to gloss over the details and ignore domestic discourse in favour of completely fabricated spin.

If you read what foreign language blogs and newspapers wrote about the constitution you’d believe that it was a daring experiment going from success to success and that we were now enjoying a completely new crowd-sourced constitution that had been passed into law with a referendum last autumn. Which is not true.

A complete and total clusterfuck is much closer to the truth.

It started well, with a national forum where a thousand attendees where chosen by lottery. These meetings gathered together a cross-section of society and let them outline what they felt ought to be the priorities in the constitutional process—what issues and matters should be covered.

This worked. It resulted in a predictably vague and wishy-washy list of touchy-feely priorities—little more than ordering a list of pre-selected words in order of importance along with a bunch of meaningless single sentence slogans—but it worked.

The problems began with the election for a constitutional parliament. First, those running weren’t given nearly enough time to promote and canvass, meaning that the list tat voters could choose from consisted mostly of strangers. Second, the ballot itself was extremely confusing, requiring extensive explanations. Thirdly, and most importantly, a lot of people didn’t believe any of it mattered.

Y’see, it was known from the start that whatever the constitutional parliament drafted would be non-binding—that the constitution draft would be rewritten by politicians anyway, rendering the entire exercise somewhat meaningless.

So, voter participation reached record lows in Iceland, where we’re used to voter participation in the 80–90% range.

Fewer than 37% percent voted in the election for the constitutional parliament.

And the clusterfuck continued. One thing that most foreign reporters omit is that there is considerable resistance to constitutional reform by a lot of influential groups in Iceland. Another thing omitted is the fact that the government at the time was a mess and couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the election was challenged in the courts and that Iceland’s High Court declared the election, and its results, null and void because of serious issues with voter privacy—that the secrecy of the individual vote had been compromised. (You can get more details at the Icelandic Wikipedia page on the election which is pretty accurate. Of course, as with most data and references on the subject, it’s in Icelandic.)

The government responded by ignoring the High Court and passed a law establishing a constitutional council composed of the exact same people as those who would have been members of the constitutional parliament.

That council then decided to do what most bloggers do: post their ideas online; listen to feedback on twitter, facebook, and in comments; and make sure that changes, drafts, and edits were noted online as they went along.

This is what the news outlets labelled crowd-sourcing. It’s no more crowd-sourced than boing boing is. Open, sure. Transparent, absolutely. But, crowd-sourced?

No. Not by a long shot. If the draft constitution was crowd-sourced then this blog is crowd-sourced as well and the term is meaningless. The draft constitution was written by a committee using a transparent process. It was a good thing that didn’t need to be spun into something it wasn’t.

Of course, over half the nation still believed that the work of the council was meaningless since anything with a bite to it would be removed by the politicians once they got their hands on it. But the council did its job as well as it could. It published a draft that contained a lot of interesting ideas while still remaining a somewhat conservative evolution of our existing constitution. It was exactly the sort of document that was enough of a compromise to have a chance of passing while still containing the reforms that Iceland badly needs.

A lot of the wording in the draft is vague and open to interpretation, which would be disastrous in a real constitution, but that’s only because it was still just a draft.

The next step should have been to put the draft to a committee that would then have solicited feedback from constitutional scholars, lawyers, and other experts. Parliament should have then spent several months of continuous work hammering out the gaps, loopholes, and wording of the document before presenting it to the nation.

Instead the government put it in a drawer and sat on it for months. Constitutional scholars kept commenting that the draft needed work and that work would take time. Lawyers openly worried about some of the consequences of the wording used in places. Foreign academics picked the draft apart when it was presented to them as a completed proposal.

And time was running out.

Here’s another fact that most foreign outlets leave out of their coverage of Iceland’s constitutional process: it’s very very difficult to change the constitution. Any change to the constitution needs to be passed as a law in two separate parliaments separated by a parliamentary election. Given that the next parliamentary election is going to be in the spring 2013 (this April, in fact) and that Iceland’s parliament today is so dysfunctional that passing even non-contentious laws can take months, the government had a very narrow window of opportunity to pull this off.

Especially because they wanted to hold a referendum on the proposed constitution before they actually passed it as a law.

At first the goal was to put the completed constitution proposal to a referendum alongside the presidential election in June 2012. Then it became clear there wouldn’t be anything concrete for people to vote on by then because little to no work was being done on the draft.

The second idea was to put a constitution proposal to a referendum in the autumn 2012 but, again, because no work was being done on the draft there was nothing to vote on. Instead they decided to hold a referendum asking voters six vague and bland questions on what they wanted from the constitution (and yes, that’s exactly what the national forum was supposed to discover).

Again, the referendum was non-binding and Bjarni Benediktsson, the leader of the country’s largest party, the Independence Party, declared beforehand that he thought the exercise was undemocratic and pretty meaningless.

Voter participation was around 50% and two-thirds voted that they wanted a new constitution that was based on the draft written by the constitutional council.

The Independence Party immediately declared that even though it was clear that voters wanted some kind of constitutional reform, it did not feel bound by the constitutional council’s draft since over two-thirds of voters had either rejected the draft or not shown up to vote. It was obvious from the debate in Icelandic news media that the referendum was going to be a completely ineffective tool for getting the Independence Party to support constitutional reform.

Which meant that the constitutional reform process was dead, because reform won’t get anywhere without the support of Iceland’s largest political party. The Independence Party is guaranteed to be one of the major parties in Iceland’s next government (most polls show a distinct swing to the right among Icelandic voters) and, remember, to change the constitution you need to pass the changes as a law in two separate parliaments with an election between. Even if the government had pulled its thumbs out of its ass, completed the process of turning the draft into a proper proposal and passed the law, the proposal would have died after the election at the hands of the Independence Party in the next government.

The only thing that the autumn 2012 constitutional referendum accomplished was to prove that the new constitution was dead.

But that’s not how foreign media reported it.

The government still had the chance to pull off an ideological victory of sorts. They could have completed work on the draft and passed the law proposing the change to the constitution. That would have forced the next government to address the issue directly and made sure that they would have had to explicitly reject the new constitution at the start of a new parliament.

But, no, they couldn’t even pull that off. The end of the current parliament grew nearer and nearer and the constitutional process didn’t show any life to speak of.

Until, at the last moments before the end of parliament, the government proposed an amendment of the current constitution with the intent of making it a bit easier to change the constitution. This amendment, which was passed in the last hours of the parliament, means that, if passed again by the next parliament, they will be able to change the constitution by ‘just’ passing a law with a super-majority in parliament (two-thirds of MPs have to vote in favour) followed by a referendum where over 40% of registered voters approve of the change. (So, if voter participation reaches 80%, over half of those who show up have to vote in favour.)

This amendment was passed with the slimmest of majorities in parliament, 25 votes out of 48, and would not have qualified as a change to the constitution under the rules it proposes.

It’s up to the next government to pass this amendment after the next election to finally ratify it as a constitutional amendment and then use it to do the reforms the constitution badly needs. They may or may not do this. It depends largely on the attitudes and priorities of whichever party ends up in government with the Independence Party (probably the Progressive Party) but the work of the constitutional council is now completely off the table.

Even if this amendment passes, Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution is officially dead.

I have a question only you can answer. Which isn’t saying much, since every question I can’t answer is one only you can answer, ‘you’ being the quintessential ‘not me’.

The question is this:

What reviewers do you think might be interested in reviewing the Knights and Necromancers series?

Any sort of fiction reviewer will do (blog, website, whatever) just as long as they do reviews and might not be averse to reading pulpish sword and sorcery.

I don’t mind if they’re critical. I don’t need a guarantee that they’ll like the stories, just some pointers to reviewers that are likely to give it a shot in the first place.

And if they do hate the stories I promise I won’t go apeshit online and just cry quietly in a corner of my flat.

What I’d like to do is the following:

• Build a list of reviewers (with your help).
• Go over their existing reviews and drop those who are inappropriate (e.g. only does epic fantasy or doesn’t review self-publishers).
• Then compose a personal query to each, based on what I’ve read of their available reviews, asking if they’d be interested in reviewing parts of or all of the series.
• The ones that reply with a yes get a copy of the stories they are interested in in the format they desire.

(I hope that sounds like a reasonable plan.)

If you don’t want to give me suggestions in the comments below you can send them to me on twitter or in email.

You help would be very much appreciated.

Before you go! The grand complete list of all available Knights and Necromancer stories everywhere. Unless otherwise noted, the ebooks cost $2.99 and the bundles cost $3.99.

The list

Knights and Necromancers 1: Days of wild obedience.

• Free EPUB3 download
• Free mobi for older Kindles
• Free kf8 for newer Kindles
• $0.99 from Amazon.com
• £0.77 from Amazon.co.uk
• Free from iTunes
• Free from Kobo

Knights and Necromancers 2: Loot, kill, obey.

• Direct from me via Gumroad
• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• iTunes
• Kobo

Knights and Necromancers 3: Breathe worms.

• Direct from me via Gumroad (a pack of both Knights and Necromancers 3 and 4)
• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• iTunes
• Kobo

Knights and Necromancers 4: They die for nothing.

• Direct from me via Gumroad (a pack of both Knights and Necromancers 3 and 4)
• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• iTunes
• Kobo

What does a matriarchy look like?

Or, more to the specific point I ran into with those two stories:

How would a woman from a matriarchy respond to visiting a patriarchy?

The first answer, one that serves quite well for the most part, is that she would be like any foreigner in an alien culture. Assuming that the patriarchy in question is a moderate one, closer to the Nordic countries in culture than Saudi Arabia and that the matriarchy is similarly moderate, the differences in culture, language, and traditions would probably outweigh any specific differences caused by the matriarchy versus patriarchy clash.

But that’s also a bit of a facile answer for someone like me who is prone to over-thinking everything.

Warning! The following post is going to include a lot of fantasy gobbledygook names and enough anal world-building to make your eyes glaze over.

First, some context.

In the world of the Knights and Necromancers series (Alaentera) there are a few dominant cultures.

• The Kaden Republic which is a western-style patriarchy. Pick the gender power balance of any of the less liberal periods in any western country before the 1950s and you wouldn’t be far off the mark. Their social structure is being shaken up, though, over time due to the influences of the Atani and the Raians.
• The Atani Nations, where the stories take place, are a moderate patriarchy. They used to be much more egalitarian but have been ruled by the Kaden for several years and are beginning to pick up some of their bad habits.
• The Corcorans. Their cultures vary wildly depending on which Immortal is in charge in each respective territory. Ranges wildly from hardcore totalitarian patriarchies to women-only islands ruled by misandrist Immortals.
• The Raians. A loose coalition of island nations which share a common national identity, a strong relationship with one of Alaentera’s global super-powers (the Dark Tower), and a social structure that is matriarchal in varying degrees (less so in the northern islands, where things are pretty egalitarian, more so in the southern ones).

Then there are the other cultures on Alaentera which don’t feature much in the series but show that the world isn’t aligned according to a single kyriarchical model.

• The Balan, where their God-Emperor has organised society along gender-blind eugenics-driven caste lines.
• The Principalities which are a cluster of small nations on the Balan continent that either take up after the Balan system (caste-oriented) or the Kaden system, depending on which power has dominance.
• The Corcoran Inland Nations. Which are just… different. Mainly because they aren’t human. They are also pretty isolationist.
• The Islands of South Central Sea. Varies enormously from island to island.

So, we’re not talking about a single matriarchy in a patriarchal world. Other things to bear in mind that affect the picture:

• Reliable contraception is common in Alaentera and where access is legal it is cheap and safe.
• Magical manipulation of the human body has been practiced for thousands of years. This can make the physiological boundaries between the sexes in some cultures even blurrier than they are here in our world and can introduce other dynamics into the picture that don’t involve sex or gender..

Trying to imagine what a proper matriarchy would look like is trickier for me than you’d think, since, as a cisgendered white male, I’m going to be a bit oblivious to what it is like to be anything else. Doing so requires trying to discover some of the privileges and advantages I have.

The following strike me as possible facets of a matriarchy:

• Property, wealth, and power is inherited along the female line first. A moderate matriarchy might let sons inherit but would still always operate under the assumption that the true authority and governance of their assets belonged to their wives, sisters, or mothers.
• The female body would not be sexualised or objectified while the male body would be seen as fundamentally sexual and erotic, no matter what the context. The perfect female body would be a utilitarian ideal, giving priority to athletic performance and good health. The male physical ideal would exaggerate the sexualised characteristics of their body, sometimes in less than pragmatic ways. And because most parts of the male body would be sexualised, this would lead to depictions of the male body that are unrealistic caricatures.
• The male would be seen as a fundamentally irrational emotional being, prone to outbursts and aggression, whose drives and testes-led behaviour prevented them from thinking rationally. The narrative that is used in a patriarchy to justify the actions of the privileged (testosterone, boys will be boys, etc.) would be used in a matriarchy as reasons to never give them any power to begin with.
• Men would be cast as natural parents, that their protective nature made them prioritise their families over their careers.
• A matriarchy that has ‘reformed’ and given males some rights, would still see a massive skew towards women in all higher offices, political appointments, and positions of power. The reason given is that men simply aren’t that interested in those positions since it would take them away from their families and that they have different priorities. Also, that they simply aren’t clever or rational enough to be able to compete with their female peers.
• The positions of power where men gain influence are generally those whose influence is waning.
• Most business contracts and dealings, most legal decisions and cases, will favour women over men.
• It would be generally assumed that men don’t really enjoy sex and don’t really miss it when deprived, given the tame and lacklustre nature of their orgasm. Male sexuality would be considered to exist primarily to serve women, since, unlike men, women have proper sexual drives and experiences and suffer when deprived of sexual satisfaction.
• A mother can choose who is supposed raise her children. If she decides to give the child to the father and walk away, the courts will force him to assume all responsibility and let her walk away with no consequences. It will be seen as natural that since the mother carried the child for nine months she should have the authority to choose which parent is ‘burdened’ by a child.
• If a man and a woman both behave in the same identically bad manner, the man will be described as being fundamentally irrational, a ‘dog’ who is hurting everybody around him and doesn’t care about others. Most people won’t even notice or comment on the woman’s behaviour.
• A man’s sexual availability is seen as being controlled by his sisters and mother. Even if suitors don’t have to ask them permission, they need to take care not to offend them or risk losing access to the man. This lack of control and independence is seen as protective and fundamentally to the male’s benefit.
• Polyandry (one woman with many husbands) among the rich and influential would not be seen as unusual. If it isn’t legal then it would still be culturally codified and practiced. For example, the rich and powerful men in our culture frequently have a wife, a long-term mistress, and a series of shorter-term mistresses, each with culturally codified responsibilities and obligations towards the man. This could be seen as common law polygyny, even if it doesn’t have a legal mandate.
• Even if it isn’t seen as normal for women to have many sexual partners throughout her life, sexual experience will never be more than a minor infraction, often seen as a sign of vitality and vigour even by those who disapprove.
• Male on male homosexual activity would be seen as primarily being for the benefit of the female participant or spectator.
• Female-only spaces would be seen as a natural part of society, a required part of a fully-functional social structure, while male-only spaces would be considered hostile, aggressive, and anti-social. The only exceptions are spaces that are only partially exclusive to men and are governed by women or are for the benefit of women in some way.
• People would frequently refer to nature and human physiology to justify the status quo, no matter what the status quo actually is.

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are other likely facets.

There are two kinds of people; human beings and women. And when women start acting like human beings, they are accused of trying to be men. Simone de Beauvoir

So, how would a woman from a matriarchy behave while visiting a patriarchy? This is assuming that we’re in a world that isn’t dominated by a single kyriarchical paradigm.

She’d just probably be herself and expect others to adapt to her behaviour, especially if she is a part of a community of people from her home culture. The visiting women would find things much more grating than the visiting men, obviously.

A woman used to power and influence would be personally offended several times a day by the behaviour of the locals and would find some of the hindrances she encounters annoying and unacceptable.

Both the matriarchy visitors and the patriarchy locals would be inclined to dismiss the other as barbarians and savages.

If the matriarchal visitors feel secure in their own expatriate communities they might consider playing along with some of the local gendered roles while they’re there to be a bit of harmless exoticism. If they can easily slip back into their native kyriarchy then the power imbalances of the patriarchal roles might be seen as safe, even playful, because they fundamentally haven’t lost their privilege.

If there is a longer-term profitable cultural exchange between a matriarchy and a patriarchy they would each probably begin to make allowances for their differences. The patriarchy would essentially treat women from the matriarchy as men and the matriarchy men as effeminate and lower class. Visiting dignitaries from a matriarchy would take up local male clothes and customs while in the patriarchy, provided the male fashions in the patriarchy were sufficiently different from male clothing in the matriarchy. They won’t think of it as taking up male roles but as taking on non-gendered roles in the local culture. But since it is a patriarchy, gender-neutral is synonymous with male.

It would be simpler for a patriarchy to treat matriarchal visitors as alien non-gendered (i.e. male) beings than as human males and females, especially if treating some of the visitors in the same way they treat their local women had dire consequences such as trade disputes or even war.

The same would happen in the other direction. Provided the fashions are sufficiently different, visiting patriarchy officials would take on what they see as non-gendered roles and customs in the matriarchy, the dress and manners of those in power, but would in reality be taking on female roles, since in a matriarchy, female is the neutral gender.

I’m sure there’s more to how a matriarchy would function, especially in this context (a world of many varying kyriarchies).

Any ideas?

1. Doing good work is its own reward, while sharing it leads to suffering. Most of the time nobody will notice, so it’s hard to see why anybody should bother.
2. My ideas got a lot more attention than I expected, which has been very cool.
3. Best case scenario for doing stuff online is that people will start knocking on your door, asking you to work for free, never offering to give anything in return. Which is fine when those people are making art, doing research, or generally working to the benefit of humankind in a self-effacing manner, but less fine when the request comes from people whose annual salaries are in the multiples of your own, or if they’re working on a startup, trying to edge their way into a multi-million dollar, early retirement payout.
4. The cranks came out in force. Odd emails from odd people with odd opinions who think they are preaching God’s honest truth.
5. The vast majority of those I encountered were incredibly nice and friendly, even when we disagreed.
6. I have almost no readers but some of my work is read a lot. The number of people that will read every post of mine is miniscule. Most of the traffic comes from retweets or links. I have more than a thousand followers on twitter, but of those only about ten will click on a link to a post of mine to read it. I suspect that there is a substantial crossover between this group of readers and the group of people I like to call friends. (Although not nearly as big a crossover as you’d think.) No matter how hard I work, the best I can hope for is to catch the attention of somebody more influential who will momentarily lend me some of their traffic.
7. A few of my blog posts did catch people’s attention, which was interesting and gratifying.
8. There is little to no discourse online. What you get are dug in factions and people’s opinion on you are based solely on whether your argument supports what they have chosen to be ‘their team’. If you try and stick to facts and logic, most factions will reject you. It’s ideological trench warfare and the best you can hope for is that the machine-gun nests don’t notice you.
9. Large organisations are even more dysfunctional than I expected.
10. Writing isn’t highly regarded by anybody, even in publishing. There’s a lot of romanticism and inane adolescent fantasy about being a writer, but little to no follow-through by anybody, especially not those who call themselves writers. It seems like very few people actually enjoy writing, they just want to enjoy the fruits of popular writing (not necessarily good writing). I’ve even heard people suggest, on more than one occasion, that those who manage to get attention for their work through good writing are basically cheating. This was from people whose careers hinge on being published.
11. The world is on the verge of another, major, economic meltdown. Happy happy, joy joy.
12. People love to send you argumentative, angry, or otherwise negative emails. That is, if they aren’t asking you to work for free.
13. I often don’t mind doing stuff for free, as long as I get to do and say things my way in return. Those who agreed to that have been a lot of fun to work with.
14. Praise is generally only handed out on disposable media, like Twitter, and rarely anywhere where it counts (like blogs, reviews, or other writing), unless you pay for it. (See the repeated review-scam scandals in publishing this year.) A remarkable number of people will only say nice things to your face, in private, and never in public (related to point 3 above). The end result is that positive feedback is ephemeral while negative feedback gets preserved forever on angry blogs, comments and forums.
15. People will always prefer you to state the obvious and spout common sense. If you say anything that requires a bit of thinking, or that would require them to learn new skills or ideas, your audience will evaporate into nothing, no matter how important those new things are. (Also see point 8 above.) You can trust that ideas that are new and unfamiliar to an audience will be either ignored or met with anger.
16. Nobody cares when you’re right but a lot of people really enjoy it when you’re wrong. They will rub it in your face.
17. There’s no way to tell beforehand which bits you make will take off and which won’t. That nicely written, funny, and informative post will go down like a feminist speech at a men’s rights convention while the quick info-dump written and posted in less than an hour takes off and gets stratospheric traffic.
18. There is absolutely no correlation between how much work you put into a post or a piece of writing and how much attention it gets.
19. Nasty people are incredibly persistent while nice people go off having lives of their own (they have lives because they are not nasty).
20. The only thing people like more than a post that states the obvious is an angry post that states the obvious. Angry and unreasonable will easily get ten times the attention of even-handed and rational. It doesn’t matter if they agree with you or not, they will still flock to your cuss-filled rant.
21. Communities get the discourse they deserve. When either the inane and obvious, or frothing lunacy are all that get attention, then that’s all you end up getting. Moreover, it’s your own damn fault. People may well instapaper the good stuff fully intending to read it at some point in the future (hah!), but bile is the stuff they actually read and it certainly is the only thing they respond to.
22. The ones who do read and respond to the more thoughtful stuff are glorious angels to be treasured forever and ever.
23. I learned that praise goes a long way. Try and make sure to mention to people the parts you like about their work, even if it’s only a tiny part, even if you don’t like the rest. People don’t improve without work and they don’t work without motivation. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and not mention the crap parts. People tend to be really appreciative if you convey the praise in a non-disposable medium (which, with the data retention we’re living with these days, is anything but Twitter and Facebook).
24. Being honest with writers is a surefire way of becoming incredibly unpopular incredibly quickly. More than a few of them are neurotic and none of them realise that critique is the only way to fix flaws. You can read as many books and blog posts on writing and language as you like, if you don’t see the flaws in your own writing you will never improve.
25. Trying to figure out when you’re supposed to be honest to people and when you’re supposed to be diplomatic requires a higher level of telepathy than I was born with. People expect you to read their minds and are utterly unforgiving when you can’t. (I’ve known this since childhood, but it was a point hammered home several times this year.)
26. Most people don’t know how to critique, they tend to resort to personal attacks, jabs at your family, and instantly switch to critiquing the subject instead of the writing (i.e. they focus on what you’re writing about, not on the writing). I’m actually okay with that last part.
27. Designers, illustrators, animators, and the like, OTOH, often thrive on brutal critiques where the blood and meat on the floor reaches abattoir levels. Of course, this varies depending on where the person went to school, but a lot of art and design schools don’t believe in protecting their students’ fragile egos.
28. Working with a good visual artist who can take and dish out harsh criticisms, and understands the problem domain the two of you are working in, is a glorious joy that isn’t often repeated.
29. Feeling incredibly poorly, to the level of being debilitated, is a frightening experience that hammers the fear of $deity into your soul.
30. There is also serenity in suffering when you know it isn’t a death sentence.
31. And there is immense joy and appreciation when you’re well again (or thereabouts) and don’t have to worry about having the energy to walk to the corner shop to buy essentials such as food. There is a glee in being able to buy your bread without counting spoons.
32. Github is amphetamine for improving your programming. Not because it’s full of code you can reuse. Not because it has enabled a new generation of development tools. (Although both of those things are important.) The magic of Github is that it makes it really really easy to find and read good code. Find a reputable project in the language you’re working in and read through the codebase, figuring out how it works as you go. Keep the language’s documentation on hand and look up anything you aren’t familiar with. Do this for long enough and you’ll begin to recognise beautiful code, clever code that’ll be difficult to maintain, and ugly code that works, just by looking at it.
33. On the whole, it was a very good year, filled with good people.

The third and fourth book in the series have both been submitted to Kobo, Apple, and Amazon for their pre-publication vetting process (which, frankly, can take days).

But you can get them sooner, if you really really want.

I’m selling all of the books in the series so far in multi-format megapacks. Each pack contains two books in EPUB2, EPUB3, mobi, and kf8 formats, as well as a full resolution image file of the covers.

The first is a bundle of the first two stories. The second is a bundle of the third and fourth story in the Knights and Necromancers series.

Knights and Necromancers 1-2 MEGAPACK

The first megapack is for Knights and Necromancers one and two, which have been updated to clean up a few typos that had slipped through into the release versions. Knights and Necromancers 1: Days of wild obedience is of course still available for free. If you want to read a sample from Knights and Necromancers 2: Loot, kill, obey you can find it here.

Buy now from Gumroad.

Knights and Necromancers 3-4 MEGAPACK

You can read more about the third and fourth stories here and here and see preview samples of them here and here.

But if you want short and sweet summaries of the plots they are as follows:

Knights and Necromancers 3: Breathe worms. The lords and masters of the mining town of Akton thought they could outwit the Necromancers. Now the entire town is going to pay for their arrogance. Grace and Cera are caught in the middle, surrounded by murderous mayhem and contagious curses.

Knights and Necromancers 4: They die for nothing. The wealthy young men of Tyres are so used to their power and privilege that they have turned murder into a sport. But, when one of them kills a high-ranking member of the city’s most powerful criminal syndicate, they discover that no amount of money can save them from the vengeance of the Kamgar.

If you like the sound of that, buy it via Gumroad. Not only does the megapack give you the formats you need both for Kindles and the rest, it’s also cheaper. Buying the bundle saves you two bucks.

Buy now from Gumroad.

If you prefer to buy directly from Amazon or Apple, stay tuned and keep following this blog. I’ll post when the books are available. Kobo fans are in luck since Kobo’s vetting process seems to be a lot quicker. Which means that the new books are available already over at Kobo. You can find the all of the available books in the series here:

Knights and Necromancers.

If you have any problem with the megapacks or any of the books please don’t hesitate to email me at doc@heartpunk.com. You could also use my personal email address but using the heartpunk.com address for problems with Heartpunk books is likely to get a quicker response.

Or, you can be very trendy and @ me over on twitter.

One thing that people often forget is that Iceland has a rich mythology beyond that of the nordic mythologies.

Of course, without us, nobody would remember much about the nordic gods, since Iceland is the only place that properly documented and preserved those myths, but Iceland’s myths continued to evolve and grow after we turned to Christianity.

Those later myths are odd to most foreigners. The Virgin Mary isn’t the gentle figure we see in the Christian doctrine of most countries but is titled ‘Queen of Heavens’ and behaves much like Frigg, Odin’s wife would have in the nordic myths.

Our myths also don’t feature reindeer or wolves much, since we don’t have any of those here, but focus on the various bird species native to Iceland.

The hidden people (fairies, fay, etc.), mermen, sea-cows and such also feature quite extensively, but the one fable that crossed my mind as I walked back, hot dog in hand, was the story of when Mary put the birds of the world through a trial of fire.

Two other mainstay birds in Iceland, besides the raven, are the falcon and the rjúpa. The rjúpa is a small grouse, called ‘rock ptarmigan’ in english. It is considered by some a delicacy and is regularly hunted into near-extinction since it’s only defence mechanism is to freeze and stand still, clinging to the faint hope that you are just going to go away. One of its distinctive visual features is that its legs are covered in feathers. It’s a classic arctic ground bird in that way.

The myth goes as follows (roughly retold and translated from this version):

Once upon a time, Virgin Mary summoned all of the birds to meet her. Waiting for them, when they arrived, was a shallow pit of fire. Mary ordered them to wade the fire to prove their loyalty to her. The birds knew that Mary was the queen of heaven and commanded great power. They dared not disobey her orders and instructions and so, one by one, they jumped into the flames and waded through the fire.

Everybody except the rjúpa.

Every other bird came through the fire with all of the feathers on their legs scorched off and the skin seared, which is how they have been ever since, all because of the Virgin Mary’s pit of fire.

The rjúpa’s fate was decided that day, since she was the only bird to defy the command to wade the fire. Mary was furious at the rjúpa and cursed her to be the most defenceless and harmless of all of bird-kind, and that she would be relentlessly stalked, harassed, and chased from here on, except during Whitsun. The falcon, the rjúpa’s loving brother, was now to hunt and kill her and feed on her flesh.

Mary had some mercy for the rjúpa and made it so that the rjúpa would change colours depending on the seasons, white in the winter, mossy-grey in the summer, so that she could hide from the falcon.

Since then, the falcon has hunted, killed, and eaten his sister, and his enchanted fury doesn’t waver or wane except for that one moment when he has torn through the rjúpa’s breast.

Upon seeing her torn open, her heart bare to the world, he realises that she is his sister – that he has eaten her to her heart – and is overtaken with such sorrow that his shrieks fill the sky for days afterwards.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, and again over the past few days, it’s that humanity is similarly cursed.

We descend upon those who disobey and defy, those who stand up against unjust commands, and we tear them apart.

The only difference is that we don’t have the falcon’s decency to feel guilt and shame afterwards, but hop to the next victim, hands and teeth marked with blood, hearts filled with glee, and stomachs filled with the flesh of our brothers and sisters.