A Review of 'Soliloquies in England' by George Santayana

 “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Remember that Plato quote? Well it WASN’T Plato, it was George Santayana! In one of the better parts of one of his better essays; ‘Tipperary’, in which he observes a group of British soldiers singing in a coffee shop after the Armistice is signed and they realise they don’t have to die.

A grim riposte but, in responding directly to his living circumstances, these singing soldiers manage to focus his mind, at least for a while and thus produce an unusually coherent, analytic and downbeat sequence of thoughts.

(All quotes severely broken up. GS does not use paragraphs much.)

From ‘Tipperary’

“They are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace.

If experience could teach mankind anything, how different our morals and out politics would be, how clear, how tolerant, how steady! If we knew ourselves, our conduct at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent; and a pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect our passions, if we knew the world.

As it is, we live experimentally, moodily, in the dark, each generation breaks its egg shell with the same haste and assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impressions and rushes down any untrodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or becomes wise too late and too no purpose.”

GS goes on to (correctly, but surprisingly ruthlessly) say that there is no reprieve in this armistice. The other nations may be at peace, but the Germans definitely are not. Nothing is over.

“Be sad if you will, there is always reason for sadness, since the good which the world brings is so fugitive and bought at so great a price; but be brave. If you think happiness worth enjoying, think it worth defending.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility, life would not be worth having without the freedom of soul and the friendship with nature which that readiness brings.

The things we know and love on earth are, and should be, transitory; they are, as were the things celebrated by Homer, at best the song or oracle by which heaven is revealed in our time. We must pass with them into eternity, not in the end only, but continually, as the phrase passes into its meaning; and since they are part of us, and we of them, we should accompany them with good grace: it would be desolation to survive.”

This might be true but such words count for more with me if the speaker themselves is visibly willing to claim ‘man’s charter of nobility’ (i.e. get shot). Coming from a man behind an orchard wall, it strikes a little different.

I have no exact recollection of why I first got my hands on this book. I think it may have been Georges Essay ‘Queen Mab’, about fiction and the British character, (I was working on Queen Mab’s Palace’ about this time). But my interest was redoubled, initially, by the largely warm viewpoint of this exquisitely civilised man going though a spate of pre-War Anglophilia.

From ‘Grisielle’

“England is pre-eminently a land of atmospheres. A luminous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives, transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing the accidental, making beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavements become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross world are shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels, more appealing than precious stones to the poet, because they are insubstantial and must be loved without being possessed.”

...

“In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and rainbows appears but seldom; such contrasts are too violent and definite for these tender skies. here the conflict between light and darkness, like all other conflicts, ends in a compromise; cataclysms are rare, but revolution is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified; all is luminous and all is grey.”

…

Its always slightly pleasant to see one’s home through the eyes of an admiring foreigner, though in this case, sad, because Santayana is describing the last flower of pre-war Europe and England, a culture which, culturally, and largely environmentally, is now overwritten and essentially gone. (Though the sky does still act like that.)

From ‘The British Character’

“What is it that governs the Englishman? Certainly not intelligence; seldom passion; hardly self-interest, since what we call self-interest is nothing but some dull passion served by a brisk intelligence. The Englishman’s heart is perhaps capricious or silent; it is seldom designing or mean.

There are nations where people are always innocently explaining how they have been lying and cheating in small matters, to get out of some predicament, or secure some advantage, that seems to them a part of the art of living. Such is not the Englishman’s way: it is easier for him to face or break opposition than to circumvent it. If we tried to say that what governs him is convention, we should have to ask ourselves how it comes about that England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.

Nowhere do we come oftener upon those two social abortions - they affected and the disaffected. Where else would a man inform you, with a sort of proud challenge, that he lived on nuts, or was in correspondence through a medium with Sir Joshua Reynolds, or had been disgustingly housed when last in prison?

Where else would a young woman, in dress and manners the close copy of a man, tell you that her parents were odious, and that she desired a husband, but no children, or children without a husband? It is true that these novelties soon become conventions of some narrower circle, or may even have been adopted en bloc in emotional desperation, as when people are dissident and supercilious by temperament, they manage to wear their uniforms with a difference, turning them by some lordly adaptation into a part of their own person.”

…

As with almost everything Geroge says, he layers positive and negative, the one implying the other, or counter-informing the other, layer upon layer, till one receives, never a judgment, (George would make a terrible Judge, his cases would never end and no final opinion would be reached), but more a rich, deep, painting of whatever he apprehends, in this case a culture, mixed with and informed by its environment, and its good-bad qualities mixed among its bad-good errors.

This is also the opinion of a very much a slightly anglicised, but still very Spanish Latin Man, (from a culture that knows how to feel and how to live) dealing with a horde of strange Anglos (who live and feel mysteriously, if at all, but sometimes know how to do.)

From ‘Death-Bed Manners’

“That a desire to ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this convention seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude towards death which I have observed among English people during this war. Some of them speak of death quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip to Brighton. “Oh yes our two sons went down in the Black Prince. They were such nice boys. Never heard a word about them of course; but probably the magazine blew up and they were all killed quite instantly, so that we don’t mind half so much as if they had had any of those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn’t have liked it at all being crippled you know; and we all think it is probably much better as it is. Just blown to atoms! It is such a blessing!”

..

The precise, living, vivid yet ironic voice of the past springing briefly from this quote, highlights what, (for me, if definitely not for him), if part of the tragedy of George Santayana; that he spent a huge amount of time thinking deeply, but mysteriously, and elliptically, though beautifully, about those wise and high generalities in which the limits of philosophy and cognition are defined.

Head in the clouds, where nothing is accomplished. With a mind as precise, sensitive, knowledgeable and tolerant as his, and a pen as brilliant and expressive, the world lost an incredible reporter and probably a great novelist (he wrote one but I fear it is a novel of ‘ideas’), while GS dedicated himself to the sky-castles.

Eventually, George seems to have had enough of England. Perhaps, in part of the long cyclic back and forth of admiration and alienation which any traveller feels when dealing with a foreign culture for a sustained period, he, after dealing with what I call ‘England England’ (home counties, oxford, misty fields, hidden wealth), he gets a view of what I would consider (to me), the ‘real’ England (mad councils, housing estates, public transport, mediocrity and depression). Here he writes an essay about how terrible the Hegelians are and how wrong, bad and inappropriate it is that England is filled with them, (who should not be there). I am not really fully familiar with what exactly an Hegalian is, but based on Georges writing I am willing to accept that they are very bad.

From ‘The real England’

“In the real England the character I dreamt of exists, but very much mixed, and over balanced by its contrary. Many have the minds of true gentlemen, poetically detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal things only their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English character had been general, England could never have become Puritan, not bred so many prosperous merchants and manufacturers, not sent such shoals of emigrants to the colonies; it would hardly have revelled as it does in political debates and elections, and in societies for the prevention and promotion of everything.

In the real England there is a strong, if not dominant admixture of worldliness. How ponderous these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels, these bishops, these politicians, these solemn snobs! How tight-shut, how moralistic, how overbearing these intellectuals with a mission! All these important people are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the world, and yet without the least idea of what they would change it into in the end, or to what purpose.”

They have not changed, but this leads us into GS’s alienation from whatever modernity is becoming in England during and after the war, and while his ‘final opinions’ on anything are as misty and negotiable as always, he does have a lot of interesting things to say…

From ‘Liberalism and Culture’

“... Fortunately, liberal ages have been secondary ages, inheriting the monuments, the feelings and the social hierarchy of previous times, when men had lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism has come to remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most people remember their preliberal heritage and hardly remember that they are legally free to abandon it and to sample any and other form of life.

Liberalism does not go very deep, it is an adventitious principle, a mere loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings to all who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and relief. It offers them an escape from all sorts of accidental tyrannies. It opens to them that sweet, scholarly, tenderly moral, critically superior attitude of mind to which Matthew Arnold called culture.”

....

“Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice.”

Reading this from the far end, in a sense, from the other end, of a great age of Liberalism, where the Liberalism still exists, but the culture has run out, feels a little spooky.

From ‘The Irony of Liberalism’

“... the transcendental principal of progress is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in its own house; no-one can be really free or happy but all must be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage, to the same destination.

The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns.”

....

“It admonished the dogs not to bark and bite, even if, in the words of the sacred poet, “it is their nature to.” Dogs, according to the transcendental philosophy, ought to improve their nature and behave better.

A chief part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace, safety, comfort and general information; it aimed at stable wealth, it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder instincts of man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting, of plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an acute, a sickening horror of suffering; to be cruel was devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal.

I am afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian; it was tame. In inviting every man to be free an autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would wish to be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How could he possibly fail to covet a way of life in which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best? It must have been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable, that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal system has ever liked it.”

When GS is not talking about England, Politics or, really.. who can say truly what precisely a lot of his essays are essentially about? He does not think in categories. But at least some of them are lean more into what we would call cognition, thought, the experience of the world and what it is to be, think, sense and exist.

From ‘Cross-Lights’

“... Things, when seen, seem to come and go with our visions; and visions, when we do not know why they visit us, seem to be things. But this is not the end of the story. Opacity is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals the existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact live and spread their roots in the darkness, which em-bosoms and creates the light, though the light does not comprehend it.

If sensuous evidence flooded the whole sphere with which souls are conversant, they would have no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did not see, and they would live in a fool’s paradise of lucidity.

Fortunately, for their wisdom, if not their comfort, they come upon mysteries and surprises, earthquakes and rumblings in their hidden selves and in their undeciphered environment; they live in time, which is a double abyss of darkness; and the primary and urgent object of their curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which from its ambush governs their fortunes.

The proud, who shine by their own light, do not perceive matter, the fuel that feeds and will some day fail them; but the knowledge of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light and almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm themselves at a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its favourable shining.”

In his views on the embedding of the mind in reality, and what ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ knowledge and ignorance, the known and unknown truly mean, GS is brilliant, Heraclitean, perhaps wrong, but holy shit can he write. Even if his arguments are wrong, his prose is correct.

From ‘Psyche’

“Long before sunrise she is at work in her subterranean kitchen over her pots of stewing herbs, her looms, and her spindles; and with the first dawn, when the first ray of intuition falls through some aperture into those dusky spaces, what does it light up? The secret springs of her life? The aims she is so faithfully but blindly pursuing?

Far from it. intuition, floods of intuition, have been playing for ages upon human life: poets, painters, men of prayer, scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have been intent on their several visions, yet of the origin and of the end of life we know as little as ever.

And the reason for this; that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange child - who could have been his father? - is a poet; absolutely useless and incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new burden on her shoulders, because she can’t help feeding and loving him. He sees, which to her is a mystery, because, although she has always acted as if, in some measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen and never can see anything.”

From ‘The Tragic Mask’

“Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings.

Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation.

I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, of the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phrases and products are involved equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer wilfulness to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is vital, and to denounce the explicit phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile.”

....

“Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams.”

..

“Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become “persons” or masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble.”

From ‘The Comic Mask’

“Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness.”

....

“Where there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for direct expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang and a humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to sanity, and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor by saying something grotesquely different from what you mean. That is long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one.”

This ‘long way round to sincerity’ seems utterly appropriate to the current poisoned moment of relentless mutual surveillance and censorship combined with reactionary, resentful and permanently ironic ‘freedom’.

From ‘Carnival’

“This world is contingency and absurdity incarnate, the oddest of possibilities masquerading momentarily as a fact.

Custom blinds persons who are not naturally speculative to the egregious character of the actual, because custom assimilates their expectations to the march of existing things and deadens their power to imagine anything different.”

Santayana’s ‘job description’ is ‘philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist’ – I am not sure how he actually got paid. The man writes like an angel, thinks like a cloud and rambles like a lost dog. There are no short, accurate Santayana quotes, because every single idea is lengthily toyed with, and even if you excise that, each idea is lodged or woven in with, sometimes an elegant tapestry, sometimes a foul slum, of other ideas, many of which contradict or cast shade on anything stated or suggested by the one you are looking at now. No-one can criticise Santayana’s conclusions because we do not know what they are.

“I notice that the men of the world, when they dip into my books, find them consistent, almost oppressively consistent, and to the ladies everything is crystal-clear, yet the philosophers say that it is lazy and self-indulgent of me not to tell them plainly what I think, if I know myself what it is.

Because I describe madness sympathetically, because I lose myself in the dreaming mind, and see the world from the transcendental point of vantage, while at the same time interpreting that dream by its presumable motives and by its moral tendencies, these quick and intense reasoners suppose that I am vacillating in my own opinions.”

You are vacillating in your own opinions! You are not getting to the point! You should have gotten a proper job where people would have made you do things! Being bound to some actual functional purpose would have sorted you right out, instead we get this.

Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

An overwhelmingly sad book about the worlds most heroic dude. A study in ressentiment. Rome’s summer in the east, before its very slow descent, produces an actual hero; and absolutely everyone hates him. Ok maybe not everyone, but surely the core of the story is the staggering level of fear and resentment so many Romans feel towards their military saviour, especially the Emperor Julian.

Julian and Belisarius

The toxic relationship between Belisarius, (brave, rational, Roman, focused, moisturised), and Julian (cowardly, clever, fanatical, irresolute, possibly possessed by a demon, flaky skin), is the core of the story. The more of a Paragon Belisarius, is and the more capable, unbribable, virtuous and honest he is, the more Julian absolutely hates, resents, fears and despises him.

This core personal resentment of Julian, and the slightly deranged, almost inhuman passive acceptance of this by Belisarius, is just the axis of a wider and deeper resentment. People have always loved to hate their heroes, in some sense, the yearning for a hero is a product of the same weakness that produces the ressentiment of the hero. We must either become our own heroes or despise those we erect above us.

Never was there a society more desperate for a hero, or less willing to accept one, than the Constantinople of ‘Belisarius,’ - the man is adored when he is absent, hated when he is close, despised for his virtue, loved again once he has been shamed and ruined - it is the story of celebrity writ large, though, purely as-a-narrative, Justinian’s utterly deranged resentment does make this a much more interesting story. He is almost comically disruptive to his own schemes when they go too well, it does give the book a central ‘villain’ (most of the Gothic generals aren’t really up to it), and the later relationship between the two, with Belisarius,’ almost perverse levels of aggressive loyalty, almost increasing the more badly Justinian treats him, adds a tone of dark comedy.

Likewise; doomed

One reason ‘THA WEST’(tm) cares a lot less about Byzantine/Eastern Rome history may be because it is inexpressibly sad for a long long time. Its hard to inhabit long a story of reversals and ruination. Julian’s war in Italy destroys much of the old Roman culture it was there to save, making the victory nul. The material and moral erosion is gigantic.

Constantinople itself, and the culture it represents, is craven deluded, hysteric and obsessed by the most deranged trivialities (no-one and nothing on this earth will ever make me believe that it actually matters exactly what view of the Trinity you have). The moral quality of its people; backstabbing and short sighted to an extent you would not believe was actually sustainable, (long term it wasn’t), seems deeply current. This is an age after the big dreams have fled. A lack of idealism is one thing but no-one seems to actually genuinely believe in anything. (This may not be a true history but this is the sense of the book.) I know Byzantine became a byword for crazed levels of intrigue but good god they earn the title.

Above all, no-one has any ideas, at least not ones related to reality. No-one has any sense of the Christian world as a unified thing and no sense of a future for the Roman Empire. Even if Belisarius, manages to tape bits of it back together with raw charisma, effort and intelligence, they no idea of what to build, anywhere, except fortifications in the wrong place and a gigantic (admittedly, insanely beautiful), Cathedral in Constantinople.

The constant ethnic changeover creates a slight air of cosplay, of varied peoples adopting older patterns, with more or less effectiveness or utility, and putting on the clothes of a fallen culture, while the ethnos that made that culture lies quiescent, utterly indifferent, ready to be ridden over. Belisarius is a Perfect Roman, from the old stories, but he’s not actually Roman, or even really Greek, instead he is an Illyrian-Roman or Thracian-Roman. The actual Romans; in Rome, just want to be left alone, so their future, and the future of Rome will be decided by a contest between a Thracian and a German, both of whom have reasonable claims to be defenders of Roman culture.

Obviously has nothing to do with modern Britain. Neither does the character of Justinian; clever, manipulative, inconstant, idealistic about all the wrong things and treacherous and vague about all the important things, have anything to do with any U.K. leader, either in the 2020s or 1930s.

Ambivalent Military History

Robert Graves combines experience, interest in ambivalence to fascinating effect. It feels as if he has, in some ways, a distinctly un-military personality, yet, as a scion of the Great War, he has more actual direct military experience than 90% of other historical authors. He knows a lot about military affairs and he knows a lot first-hand, yet he is not very ‘pumped up’ about them. This intelligent awareness and emotional ambivalence is mirrored in the character of the narrator, through who’s eyes we see the hero - a Greek eunuch slave.

I’m reminded of the line from Frieren where someone asks the great mage Frieren if they actually enjoy magic; “only somewhat”.

The image of war that emerges is at times, like that of an epic; glorious, brave, deadly, magnificent, but combines this with a world-view which is not quite cynical, (the narrator is quite compassionate to most of his subjects), but detached, and through this we get an image of deep historical contingencies, of miscommunications, strange events, odd ideas, of people going the wrong way and getting the right thing, or doing the right thing and getting the wrong result - much is chaos.

A key story; in the attempt to conquer Carthage, Belisarius arrives by ship in Africa. He sits down with his generals to discuss what to do next. The Generals want to advance along the coast, shadowed by the ships. Belisarius, disagrees and, using calm reason, persuades them to his own plan of advancing inland. Now, ultimately, the Roman army encounters the Vandals they are there to fight, and in fact they win, but the way in which this happens, is utterly chaotic, disordered, comic, strange.

A random encounter leads to the death of a figure in shining armour. The Romans advance, are cut off, the Vandals advance, miss the Romans, find them. They find the body of the man in shining armour; he is the son of the Vandals king. The king is so distraught by this that he breaks down in grief and becomes totally unable to command his army. During this grief, Belisarius, attacks, wins, re-unites the Romans, advances on Carthage and is let into the city.

On considering events, Belisarius, realises he made exactly the wrong choice; his army was broken up and if the Vandal King had not been grief stricken, the Romans should have lost, so he should have advanced along the coast. However, on examining the defences of Carthage, he realises that if he had advanced along the cost, he would have run into them, and there would have been nothing he could do against them - so he still would have lost.

There were no good choices, logic failed, he won. Strange for us, but for this most rational and reasonable of men, who bent enormous energy into making a sane, disciplined fighting force, and using them calmly and rationally, truly troubling - none of his ideas actually worked, or if they did, they did not work in any way he expected. There is a fundamental chaos under human affairs, which no plan may outrace.

The Strange Character of Belisarius

He never betrays the Emperor, even when, perhaps, for the good of Rome, he should have. Likewise he never betrays his wife, his men, or stabs anyone in the back. Eventually he suffers the final humiliation of a circus-trial for crimes he did not commit, (if he actually had, perhaps Julian would have been able to tolerate him), and is blinded. The general suffers, at all times, in quiet self-possessed dignity. Truly moisturised and unbothered. Its a bit creepy!

It is perhaps the fact that for Belisarius,, the question of the meaning of his life was a solved one, that makes him, when he stands alone before the viewer, a slightly un-interesting character. Like Galahad, since he is already right, and knows what he must do, the only interest comes in how, and in the rogues gallery of people around him, of which the most captivating is his wife, Antonia;

Antonina

She is perhaps the actual Protagonist of the book. (Though if graves had called it ‘Antonina the ginger witch’ I doubt sales would have been as high.

Since the slave who tells the tale is hers, we hear her story from the start, the dancing girl daughter of a man betrayed; here the strange, intense, pseudo-ethnic and religious resentments of the Coliseum crowd, and their curious effect on Imperial History, come into play. Antonina’s father was a Green, (or possibly a Blue), betrayed by the villainous Cappadocian John, he turns to the Blues (or possibly the Greens), and loses everything, linking Antonia in this with the Empress Theodosia, the resolute wife-to-be of Justinian, and setting a deep, deep resentment of both the Blues and Cappadocian John.

Graves springs more fully into life describing the life and dramas of the court, the lives of these clever, shifty, practical, sometimes insincere women. Antonina meets Belisarius, as a nearly-naked dancing girl and is set up with him again, later in life, by Theodora. This subtle, brave deceptive woman forms a politically-practical shadow to Belisarius. (An odd mirror to the relationship of Justinian and Theodora). They are never better than when working together, it is sad when they are parted, (Antonina being slutty and unwise), and their reunion later in life is one of the few purely happy moments in a story otherwise set against a fading empire.

"‘That evening I sought out Belisarius at his mean lodgings. Though weak from a return of his malarial fever, he rose from his couch to welcome me. With a smile that concealed the depth of his feeling, he asked: ‘And are you not afraid to visit me, Eugenius, old friend?’

I answered: ‘No, Illustrious Lord. With the message that I bring I would have risked passing through fire or a camp of Bulgarian Huns.’

He grew a little impatient: ‘Do not address me by titles of which I have been deprived. What is the message?’

I related, as from myself, all that I had agreed with my mistress to say. He listened most eagerly, crying ‘Ah!’ when I told him that his wife had asked pardon of God. Then I showed him the State papers in which Photius’s confession was recorded - having bribed the copying clerk to the Assistant-Registrar for a day’s loan of them. Belisarius read them hastily, and then again with great care, and at last he beat his breast and said: ‘For my jealous rage and my credulity I deserve all that I have suffered. But alas, Eugenius, it is too late now. our mistress will never forgive me for what I did to her at Daras, even if I make her a full apology.’

I urged him to be of good courage: all would yet be well. Then I repeated my mistress’s message, which at first he would not believe to be authentic. he said: ‘If your mistress Antonina will indeed listen to any words of mine, tell her that the fault was wholly on my side - but that it was only an excess of love for her that made me guilty of such madness.’

That night Belisarius and my mistress met secretly at his lodgings. Nobody but myself knew of it. Both embraced me, kissing me on the cheeks, and said they owed their lives to me.”

 

The Future of False Machine

Dragonmeet left me relatively alienated and thinking a lot about my ‘career’, such as it is.

Sir John Soanes House was pretty great

I don’t think I can really call myself a ‘gamer’ any more, nor do I think it likely I will have any very huge success. I do still love writing and making things, so will continue to do that, but I’m guesstimating that in the future my print runs will be around 1,000 copies. More of a Small Press for Weird Fiction.

Here is everything I have coming up;

Queen Mab’s Palace

A fully, and excellently, illustrated novel, derived from an adventure that became too complex to complete. The last and final art has been completed and numerous drafts have been considered. The next draft will be the one we take to print and I hope that printing takes place in January 2026. (The ideas behind this date from 2021!!, good god!)

We only have enough to print 1,000 copies and 500 of those are for backers so look out if you want one.

Knights of the Snail - Book One

Another novel. A long, long time ago I produced one or two stories based around the concept of Snail Knights. (You can read them here.) People seemed to like them so I tried to keep going. I developed the idea for a highly-interlaced book make up of twenty seperate short stories, each telling the tale of a different Knight.

Then, in the middle of the third story, I got utterly stuck, had a meltdown and put them aside. That was ten years ago.

That was how things stayed until around March this year when someone persuaded me to look at them again. I dug back into the Snail Knights and managed to complete the first five stories, the first two, the Tales of Sir Bird Spiralling and Sir Duno Chrime, have not changed. Added are the Tales of Sir Babbling, Sir Lucent Void and Sir Whirl.

Each story is meant to be of a very different character, and they got longer and more complicated as they went on. Book One is about 115,000 words, so a bit longer than Queen Mab’s Palace will be.

I will try to crowdfund the first book of KotS in 2026, hopefully after the early-year malaise has passed. The book is written but as you know, artists are mute, savage beasts and cannot be controlled.

The savage beast producing art for Knights of the Snail will be Amanda Lee

Hopefully the crowdfund will be popular, if it is I will try to set it up so that the more funding we get the more art Amanda makes (of course this will end up taking even more time.)

Hopefully KotS Book One will be both funded and printed in 2026 and if people like it, and it makes money, I will start work on Book Two.

Veins of the Earth ReDux

The gargantuan VotE-ReDo is still grinding forth. I am trying to re-write everything both to fill in gaps in the first book and also to make the whole thing more generally useable. You may have seen my development blogs on the Substack and here.

It will be slow, but, with Mab done and no more interruptions from Snail Knights, this can go back to the top of the list. I don’t know when it will be ‘finished’ but hopefully text complete at least in 2026.

This project will happen, it just takes time, (and no more interruptions).

I wonder if this will actually do well at all in Crowdfunding. In general, people quite like being sold the same thing twice, (strangely), but I also feel very much like yesterdays man. We will see.

Unnamed Scrap Princess Project

A project of various horrific and/or unbelievable dimensions and qualities may or may not exist. Various horrible Things may have been produced for it, various words may have been appended to the Things. Certainly something is or may not be happening.

Pig Seekers

A very wafty, wavy may-or-may-not happen project that is nevertheless technically in the planning stages. This is intended to be another book, hopefully with Tom Kemp, hopefully a bit like (though not a direct sequel to) Gackling Moon.

A book of trading caravans, gunsmoke and conspirital chromatic magic set in a monochrome fantasy Afghanistan. (Taken slightly from ‘Balach’, the first setting I ever imagined on my blog). The visible story is about learning the strange monochromatic culture and heaving your pack beasts into yet another valley with yet another peculiar ecology/government/tribe to trade yet more melons.

by Seamus Murphy

The under-story is a leveless magical system based around Pigments; stolen a little from Witch Hat Atelier; the only colours in this land are illegal and form the basis of reality-warping magic that everyone denies (though actually literally everyone is a secret Chromophile and somehow involved in the magical pigment trade). If you have the right ink, and know the right signs, anyone who can draw can cast spells (with complex embodied effects); of course this is all totally wrong and everyone is against it (50% of the nations GDP comes from the trade).

The PC’s will be ‘Pig Seekers’ secretly or otherwise, playing at trading while secretly searching out the signs and pigments that enable spellcraft. To use them, or to destroy, and thus restore the Monochrome beauty of the Real? Probably all of the PCs have different motivations and levels of knowledge so this might turn into a ‘Conspiracy’ style intra-party explosion. (Of course you need to understand the Pigments in order to combat them. That’s why I personally will be researching them. (Could it be that the creation of these pigments is the very reason the land is Monocrhome, and that these two utterly opposed world-views actually secretly support each other???)

A simple trading system, a magic system and the subtleties of a monochrome reality. Will this end up with me ripping off Chris McDowall again somehow? Massively overextending myself and having a breakdown? Yes probably.

No idea if this will happen!

Broken Fire Regime, Parts Two and Three

Literally triples of people have been asking about the always-intended and largely-written sequels to ‘Demon-Bone Sarcophagus’.

If I ever manage to actually get through the above, I will return to the world of Broken Fire Regime with the intention of producing..... a basic PDF! Or a pair of them really.

VERY basic. Functional. Cheap. I will produce the (much larger, and intended ‘Main Part’ Frictionless Blue Glass, and then the final difficult and weird part Palaces of Fire.

These will exist as simple ‘playtest’ PDF’s for the literal dozens of fans who want to know where I was going with all this.

Beyond..

Who knows. I would like to complete the intended ‘Elemental Quartet’ of adventures before I die; so Earth (DCO and VotE), Fire (Broken Fire Regime), then Air (Littoral Storm Corsairs) and finally Water (Cold Pelagic Maze).

If people like Snail Knights then I would like to finish all four books to make one Grand Saga.

Beyond that, I have no particular plans.

Lastly;

The False Machine CHRISTMAS SALE is still on!

And will be till Christmas eve. Though if you want to order stuff to the U.S., now is pretty much the latest you can do that.

Just enter the code HOHOHO at checkout for FIFTY PER CENT OFF EVERYTHING!

A Review of 'Local Heroes' by Amanda Lee Franck

"put on a mysterious hat or a wizard robe or a regular robe"

(Disclosure; I am friends with the creator so you can add this review to the ever-expanding ‘OSR Circlejerk’ sub-category).

…

Local Heroes - is a 16-page PDF game that Amanda Lee Franck put out on her Patreon, so far you can only get it there! (Or on her Comradery, which is communist Patreon.)

A single-session game about about a single night; the players play themselves, the game-world is their own. They are given gifts and sent to fight a multidimensional monster which must be dead (banished) by dawn.

Imagining the Known

Character generation has already been done. In rules terms this means (unless you have that Fireman/Marine buddy) everyone has relatively ‘flat’ characters, and that everyone knows who everyone is, and that everyone knows what everyone can do. A basic exchange system exists to discourage inane min-maxing or self-delusion, though, since its near-assumed that the players will be a semi-familiar friend group, the honour system, and embarrassment, will be the more effective restriction.

The game begins (in-world) at midnight and the creature need only see the sun to win. Thankfully is is bent on wiping out the heroes opposing it and won’t just get a taxi out of town, and hopefully you are playing in Winter and dawn is many hours away.

What remains is planning and manipulating the environment and a small selection of magical tools. You get an hour of lead time - all those fragments of local knowledge can actually be utilised - zombie escape plans, the locations of building equipment and industrial machinery, of train tracks and ruined buildings, unfilled pits, canal locks, teetering long-term structural collapses, places that might be set on fire, walled gardens, funnel spaces, dead zones in the middle of vast roadworks, strange places difficult to get into or out of, water mains, electrical junctions and pylons, barbed wire, hardware stores, fire axe locations. Its a memory-and-play game for local residents.

As it pulls on local memories so much, and as the honour system and mutual knowledge are quite useful in shaping ‘character generation’, this is not a good ‘Con Game’ and therefore mildly unamerican - it is not highly systematised, depends on local knowledge, is not great for a mixed group of strangers meeting in a place unfamiliar to all, and might not work well in rural America, the south, or anywhere where gun ownership is common or widespread - your average game with a bunch of enthusiastic gun owners might be pretty short. (Or might not, the Monster is not always vulnerable to bullets).

The Multi-Stage Problem-Monster

There is only one enemy and you know its coming. It has a range of ten, or sometimes more, possible forms. Each form is that of a hero who opposed it in the past. It can change forms five times until it ‘slinks back into the void’ and and most forms have specific win conditions. (Though in most cases you can still beat it to death or smash it to bits.) One of the possible ‘transformations’ is a tower with three archers and a series of complex traps and environments inside. If the creature kills a PC’s it might take on their form.

The monster transforming into a place, then back again, is I think, new, (though if someone else has come up with it, I am sure you will tell me in the comments, or would have if this was 2015 and people still commented on things.)

Few of the forms can be straightforwardly fought, but then the special relics gifted to the team are barely weapons at all, but curious tools with strong specific game effects.

Parlour Game

While its not a ‘Con Game’, Local Heroes feels much more like something like ‘Werewolf’, a parlour game of problem-solving you could play with normies. They barely need to imagine anything at all, only recall who they are and where they live, and the Aristotelian compression of time and space, and single, set, obvious and declared win-condition (defeat the multidimensional monster in five of its forms, before sunrise, using these particular tools), hopefully nukes most decision paralysis. Its quite Dowlian in that sense.

False Machine Christmas Discount!

Orders to the U.S. are back up (and have been for a while. I originally intended this to be a discount for Americans only (as everyone else in the world has had the equivalent during the Tariff Chaos a few months ago).

However! BigCartel makes it very difficult indeed to set up discounts specifically for one nation (without a LOT of dicking around on the back end), so now, this is a UNIVERSAL 50% DISCOUNT for EVERYONE till CHRISTMAS DAY.

And if you actually want stuff by Christmas, then in effect you have about two weeks to order.

The discount code is; HOHOHO

When you make your order, after shipping has been added, but before you pay, type in HOHOHO to the discount bar and that will take 50% off your total order.

It’s ONE PER EMAIL.

It EXPIRES CHRISTMAS DAY.

I reserve the right to CANCEL and IGNORE if you order like an insane shitload of books.

The store is HERE; https://falseparcels.bigcartel.com/

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Currencies of the Dark

Design concepts for money in VotE: ReDux

Light is the Currency

Light is often only way to find a path and stay alive. Light is a resource that is always being eaten away. Light must be carried, in the form of lamp and fuel. Light is literally a currency; the Lume.

Distance relates to time. There is no solar cycle down below. Seasons and cyclic calendars, are partial, conditional and strange. The most important aspect of travel is how long it takes to get somewhere; this is measured in a loss of Lumes; “eight lumes distant” means you will need eight hours of strong light to find your way there.

Prime Currencies of the Veins

The Lume = 1l

The ghosts of fireflies made extinct in a long-forgotten apocalypse. The pale wraiths are imperishable, distinct, and gather and gust through currents in the Veins, moving in swarms through ocean and stone. Only rarely are they accessible en-masse; the means of capture and containment are particular and queer.

The ghosts are held in little bags made from fine intestine; ‘glow bags’, or in little Lantern-pots of clay or bone. They are transferred with great care; sucked into pipes of silver, bone or reed, held at the end in clumps, or trapped on little honey-dabs held at the ends of sticks, then gentle ‘poofed out’; transferred to another’s ‘Glow Bag’. Merchants and settled peoples have scales for measuring the unweight of a Glow Bag so that the bags themselves can be exchanged.

The massless nature of the ‘Lume’ and the extreme difficulty of forging Lumes, helps to make them the base ‘physical’ currency of the Veins; they can be carried without impediment, but not without care. The fact that ‘Glow Bags’ can be damaged in combat, or opened, and the ‘Lumes’ set free, to float away into the stone, makes them difficult to steal. The slow and ritual nature of exchanging Lumes is favoured in the Veins as, in this careful breathing and depositing, both sides of become vulnerable to the other; to exchange is a matter of trust.

A Glow Bag of Lumes of a little bone or clay Lamp-Pot, gives out its own small ghost-light; a vague glow up to five or ten feet of clarity, if that, but enough to accomplish small tasks or to provide comfort in the dark. Veinslings may sleep, or do small deeds, lit by their purses glow.

The Lume as literal currency is paired with the ‘Lume-as-Concept’. A ‘Lume’ is worth one hour of strong light, in whatever form, though the most usual form of exchange is Whale-Oil. What counts as useful light varies enormously according to the buyer, the seller and local conditions, but the universality of this conception; One Lume = One Hour of Light, forms the pillar of stability in economy of the Veins. All is based on the Lume, counted in Lumes, and reduced back to Lumes. Even distances are given in Lumes as that indicates how many hours of light you will need to reach wherever it is.

Occultum = 10,000l

A massless shadowy disc, its edges blurred, the texture of Occultum is felt by the Soul, rather than material flesh, (Golems, like many Janeen Viziers, cannot use them directly).

No-one really knows exactly where Occultum Coins are made or found. Rumours say they are forged in some hell, or minted in a ‘House of Leaves’ where the substance of reality is strange. They come always from below.

Like ‘Lumes’ they weigh nothing like are impossible to forge. Occultum is magic-neutral, it cannot be picked up, manipulated, scried or otherwise altered via magic. The coin itself resists duplication. The black discs cannot be chopped, melted, cut or ground down; if chipped or ‘snapped’ they simply ‘burst’ collapsing into little static clouds and staining the area nearby with fluctuations in natural chance.

The one danger of owning too many Occultum Coins is that, if kept in large numbers, they are inherently uncertain, meaning the total value and number of the coins may fluctuate. The extent of this fluctuation increases the more you have. Usually if you get into triple digits, you can expect a variation of about 5% over time, with there sometimes being up to 105 coins and sometimes as few as 95. (In rare cases variations can be more extreme). Nevertheless, the variation itself tends to be stable over time, so many wealthy cultures maintain their core currency reserves in Occultum; they can eat the cost of temporary fluctuations, it all evens out over time.

Occultum has a heavy cultural weight which goes beyond the movement of economies and trade routes. Just as in our world, Gold is Gold, and signals and displays wealth, permanence and seriousness, regardless of the fluctuations of the times, in the Veins, Occultum is Occultum. Even the most high-toned merchants or Lords would not refuse payment in the Black Coin. Of all currencies, perhaps only Lumes themselves are more stable and only Cloudcradle silk of equal status.

Occultum is known to, and accepted by, supernatural and extra-planar entities. Demons, Ghosts, and Things from Beyond, all accept its worth and for some rare magical services Occultum is the only coin accepted; a disc equivalent to mortal souls.

Intermediate Currencies

The Veins has a massive and permanent problem with making change. The two most well-known, accepted and strongest currencies, the ‘massless two’; Lumes, and Occultum (which is still ultimately measured in Lumes), occupy the far ends of the value scale. What on earth do you do when you need to buy intermediate things? To some extent ‘Glow Bags’ can make up for this, but the Veins has developed a range of complex intermediate currency-equivalents to make up the difference.

None of these are ‘massless’ in the same manner as Lumes or Occultum, but all are very light and a great many are slightly luminescent themselves. While every culture will accept Lumes, Occultum and Silk, an exchange for these intermediate currencies is not universally guaranteed, you may have to chop and change to work things out.

Gleams = 8l

Also called ‘Gleamers’ or ‘Butane Gleamers’. These gems are blue as the flame. Their edges seem to shiver in the dark. Usually these are bagged up into ‘Bags of Gleams’ worth about 80l each.

Slave-Month Links (or just 'Links') = 31l (varies)

Usually made in chased and engraved silver. Each culture, (often Knotsman, Aelf-Adal and various Janeen Courts), engraves its links in a varied and highly distinct style. Each link represents a nominal month of particular labour owed. Often gathered into great linked chains and worn by potentates. Ray-Men and some other cultures with weird principals might refuse to take these.

Toxolucent Emeralds ('Greens') = 200l

Acidic and slightly poisonous to the touch, its widely thought these are cut from rare bezoars recovered from abyssal creatures of the Nightmare Sea. Olm will almost always refuse these.

Topaz Flames ('Flames') = 500l

These seem to glimmer and flicker slightly in the hand. Though they are utterly cold, when smashed, they reliably produce a burst of pure flame. Undead prefer not to deal in these.

Knotsman Debt-Threads ('Knots') = Variable & Bespoke

Knotsmen record their debts and contracts in what else, but knots? Formed in rare and precious materials depending on the depth of the debt. Neither immaterial nor magical, and sometimes frustratingly bespoke and weird, the strength of the knots as currency comes from the fanatical dedication of Knotsman culture to maintaining them. Knotsmen hate to be in debt to anyone from outside their culture. They are very eager to ‘gain knots’ as this gives them power over others from within their culture. All are utterly deranged in their pursuit of counterfeiters. Though a strong material currency, some cultures or groups just really hate Knotsmen and will refuse to deal with these. Also the nature of the exchange can just be weird; how much is a ‘Thirteenth-level Fundamental Humiliation” worth in real money?

Whale Oil  – Variable

Somewhere between a trade good and a currency, Whale Oil is useful, ubiquitous and has a regular rate of exchange. Compared to most Veins currencies, it is a bit heavy and difficult to use, but it literally burns to make a pure, bright, smokeless (important for Veins cultures who hate waste and staining the rock), flame. Usually sold in ‘day pots’ for 24 hours of clean-burning oil, (24 Lumes) or ‘watch pots’ for eight hours of light (8 Lumes). For some groups, traders or individuals who have solved their light problem by other means, the Oil is just not worth it as a medium of exchange. Olm find it useless but might take it at a reduced rate, Opal-Winged Chiropterae in particular tend not to like it.

Bank Notes = Variable

There are banks in the dark, often associated with the Great Cultures or with one or more of the Grand Coagulations (cities). Usually run by Vampires for their Aelf-Adal overlords, the worth of such a currency will often diminish the further into the Wastes you get. Though, if you can get to another Alef-Adal-run Coagulation, they will often accept these notes, more as a point of pride, since to refuse them would be an insult to another Aelf-Adal, (unless the Byzantine intrigues of that race means these Courts are currently opposed, in which case they may not only refuse, but also take offense.)

The nature of these Notes/Bonds/Certificates can vary from something like an exquisitely handwritten I.O.U, to something like an actual, printed note, though usually hand-printed on soft skin, rather than machine printed on paper. (Aelf-Adal know about various forms of surface money.)

If you are in an Aelf-Adals city-coagulation, it’s hard not to take payment in their bank notes. After all, they have the Aelf-Adals name and perhaps something like a face on them, and are signed by Vampire Banker. A whole sub-skill of ‘ritual excuses’ exists to allow Veinslings to attempt to get out of being paid in local notes.

Silks

Even cheap silk is light, resistant to decay, and compresses down deeply, allowing a large surface area to be transported in a relatively small ‘bale’.

Silk is heavily associated with the Aelf-Adal. A ‘Bale’ of silk is in most cases, much smaller and lighter than that transported on the historical silk Road in our reality. Even for ‘Rough Silk’ like Whipsilk, a ‘bale’ will only be two or three feet square and weigh 40 to 50 kilos. The highest value of silk is sold in ‘hands’; roughly thick envelope or small parcel sized packages, which, due to the incredible density of packed silk, can still weigh quite a lot; 5 to 10 kilos.

Whipsilk = 10c per bale

Silk given as a status symbol to slaves trusted to oversee their fellow slaves. An illusory boon. The silk carries the cultural taint of alien flesh and Aelf-Adal will never touch it once it has been used. A nominal advantage is that Aelf-Adal will tend to assume that anyone wearing Whipsilk is some kind of Slave Overseer, and ritually not-perceive them.

Stormsilk = 25l per bale

Colour of a storm sky and rough to the touch. A perfectly serviceable ‘commoners silk. Worn by the lowest members of a Coagulation, by normie Once-Men out in the sticks or by Aelf-Adal ‘hunting parties’ who want to make a point about getting out of the Spire and ‘roughing it’.

Chainsilk = 50l per bale

If braided can form a strong rope or chain. Practical. Carries a little cultural ‘cool’ as it is standard military gear for many cultures and coagulations.

ClipperSilk = 100l per hand

Tough, noted for its ability to survive long journeys. Not well respected. A bit of a Bourgeois upwardly-mobile low-rent social climber silk. The very top of the ‘middle class’ silks, but the bottom of the ‘upper class’ silks. Does anyone actually wear this stuff?

Maskmaker Silk = 500’ per hand

Valuable enough that if given as tribute one can be considered to have ‘made ones mask’ in Aelf-Adal terms – a sufficient bribe to be someone actually worth talking to. Makes up much of the ‘baseline wear’ for Aelf-Adal and other Volume Lords.

Cloudcradle Silk = 1,000’ per hand

Like folded smoke, flowing wearable steam. In most coagulations, this is either illegal to wear under direct sumptuary laws without being a member of the ruling class, or is simply culturally impossible to wear unless you are so.

Being gifted this silk, or given formal dispensation to wear it, makes you near-officially part of that rulers ‘Court’. Be careful; accepting this means that in a sense, the giver ‘owns’ you, and takes responsibility for you, which can be good or bad in many ways.

Cloudcradle silk is highly valued by traders as light, tough, high-value currency. It is probably used more as currency than as clothes; so few who live and breathe are willing or able to wear it.

Design Notes

Collapsing the concept of the ‘Lume’

In the original VotE, the ‘Lume’ was purely a concept, rather than a material thing, but I thought, people generally won’t understand this or grasp it, and also I thought ‘why not?’. There seemed to be little disadvantage to me in making ‘Lumes’ both a concept and an actual thing you could use in game, that way the concept and the physical item reinforce each other (though of course, in keeping with VotE aesthetic and world-scheme, they are not actually physical.

So now a ‘Lume’ is one of these tiny firefly ghosts you keep in a special little bag or pot. You can exchange one of these ghosts for one hour of strong (really 30 to 50 ft visibility or more, but you can negotiate that), light with most merchants and settled peoples.

The ‘Lumes’ themselves also make a little light eternally, but only enough to do close hand-work with, probably not enough to help you get around (though a last ditch possibility for those severely lost).

The difficulty and slowness of exchanging Lumes, and the kind of ritual behaviour it suggests, seems to me to fit the nature of the Veins, as does their weightless nature and the fact that, if lost or thrown away, they simply disappear into the stone without a trace.

If you think this was a dumb idea you can let me know in the comments.

Finding Treasure/Getting Paid

Generally players really like to find treasure and to get paid in weird, distinct and particular ways.

In most cases its more enlivening to find a curious artefact, or even a bag of jewels or bale of rare silk than just a pile of coins.

This works out more in the low to mid levels of a game, where the value of a particular treasure or gem or something as a trade item still has potency. As you get into the higher levels I have generally found that people stop caring as much.

Likewise, sometimes people actually want a little haggling sub-game where you have to try to get your hands on the kind of currency you want and avoid those less useful, but sometimes you really just want the whole thing over and done with so you can end the session. It depends on taste and circumstance.

This currency pattern is meant to be adaptable to both playstyles if needed. You can enliven and solidify it by giving players a bunch of weird currencies, each desired or disliked by different cultures under different circumstances, or you can just abstract the whole thing to ‘so many lumes’.

Hopefully, finding or being given Occultum should remain deeply interesting and exciting at any level. I wanted it to be, and to feel, special.

[Occultum has always been, and still is, based on the Obol, first invented by Mateo Diaz.]

Mixing Currencies/Using Money

For the silks and intermediate currencies I fell back on a lot of ideas I first used in ‘Deep Carbon Observatory’, though with somewhat altered values.

Most of the Gems are super easy to carry but have things that are slightly wrong with them (Emeralds mildly toxic, Topaz might actually set you on fire if it breaks). Others have moral issues (Slave-Links or Knotsman ‘Humiliations’), some are just a bit awkward (Whale Oil and Bank Notes).

The ‘Bales’ are meant to be fucking annoying to carry around, but still solid currency, better in the early game or perhaps moved en-masse by servants in the later game as part of a trading journey.

…

U.S orders are now open on the False Machine Store

…

I am going to Dragonmeet at the end of November

I don’t have a store or a talk or anything, and so far have no particular plans but I will be there.

A Review of 'All Tomorrows' by C.M. Kosemen

C.M. Kosemen; as he might say; "kind of a (lip smack) weeeiird guy.... kind of a dream cormorant.”

‘All Tomorrows’ is an artbook super-scaled in time; multi-millennia, then multi-millions of years pass in the spaces between pages. The book tells the story of mankind’s ascent to space, transformation and galactic spread through slower-than-light genesis pods, then a kind of soft galactic dominance, then the arrival of eldritch super-aliens, the Qu, who are pissed off to find the galaxy full of genocidal space-apes (that was their job).

Annoyed and offended by the weeds, they transform humanity into an hundred thousand twisted forms, more akin to the punishments of Dante or the geography of Herodotus than the blank ‘scientific’ scourings of more common sci-fi vibes.

Then ‘Qu’ then just... wander off, off to another galaxy, leaving the ruins of twisted humanity behind. These altered men, mainly fall extinct, but then, over a million or so years, fragments evolve, into wild, highly different strains.

But that’s only half way through the book, and the book is not super-long. We still have several cycles of super-races, terrifying galactic genocides, remaking’s, falls ascensions etc, before we reach the end.

‘All Tomorrows’ is a book of mutations. It takes a lot from speculative evolution, but also feels a little medieval in a way; partly as a ‘book of curiosities’ (look at this weird little guy!), partly due to playful aspects (a post-human at a rock concert, a snake man jiving to some snake-jazz), and partly due to its slight shades of moralism, punishment through transformation, ascension through time.

The book speaks in the language of (speculative) evolution, meaning reaches of deep time so great, and changes so massive, that for any single sentient in the midst of them, the journey as a whole would be so vast it was invisible, even irrelevant, and, like with evolution on earth, horrible, terrible terrifying bursts of brutal and near absolute extinction. Like if two thirds of the way through Anna Karrenena, literally EVERYONE in the cast died, and every city was destroyed, except for one side character that wasn’t really mentioned before, and the book just carried on looking at this one side character; what is this guy up to? Look, he’s trying to survive, look at him eating dirt for a couple thousand years. (Because the civilisations are galactic, all the extinctions are deliberate genocides, no meteor or pulsar could be big enough to wipe out everyone).

Like any book of deep time, from Hallidays ‘Otherworlds’ to one of Forteys books on Geology, the moral challenge it sets is subtle, mysterious, vast; great and terrible things will happen, mighty alterations, dark galactic crimes, cruel perverse punishments, utterly random and meaningless death. Can all of these things even be said to be a ‘story’? or just a record of events? The reach of deeds so vast that over the incredible eons, the meaning of these things for any particular individual is... little? Like the man who carefully raised his child without reference to particular colour linkages, simply to discover what the child would describe, and then one say asked him; “What colour is the sky?” only to be told; “The sky doesn’t have a colour.” For it was truly a vault of light and not a ‘thing’ at all; so, in a way similar to Stapledon, we are left just kind of vibing.

Stories call for villains, heroes and adventures, and this book sort of has these; after all, what are a bunch of entirely mechanical black spheroid genocidal super-science post-humans who canonically want to ‘kill all life’, if not villains? But Koseman oars his way into his own text to remind us that in the grand scheme of events, they are not, nor can there really be, ‘bad guys’, and indeed you might quite like black mechanical genocidal spheroid if you sat down with one. It’s no crime to speak both in the language of epic time, beyond the concerns of daily man, and also in the language of comprehensible adventure, in fact you might call this a central polarity of the successful large scale sci-fi story, but though this is a fundamental axis of the form, it’s still a disjunction and should be noted.

Perhaps the only viewpoint which can synthesise and imbue with meaning such vast reaches of chaotic time is that of a god so gigantic and indifferent that even their existence makes little difference to the motes that float within its eye.

It would be cool to play a fantasy RPG where you got to encounter (and perhaps play as) all these varieties of humanity, (it’s not beyond the Qu to set up such a world for a laugh), and almost as cool to play some kind of Star Trek/Mass Effect game where you play as a federation of these whacky post-humans. Think about playing an asymmetric man and a composite guy and a snake lady on some kind of Star Trek away-mission; pretty wild. (It would also make sense of everyone having pseudo-human morality and having enough psychological similarities that they could actually communicate).

I suppose we can wait for the possible Adrian Tchaikovsky ‘All Tomorrows’ expanded universe or comic book series (’AT’ seems to spring from the same general noosphere as ‘Prophet’ and Calum Diggles ‘Humanity Lost’ - it will be 50 years r more before some boomer incarnates anything like this in film, they are so slow), though the Koseman-verse, despite its playful grotesquerie’s, is much more (relatively) low-fi and saves the actual FTL causality-twisting technology until deep in a species development, when it has already become so queer and clever that its mentality and viewpoint is deeply detached from whatever we might understand.

I did say the ‘language of speculative evolution’ and I think it really is a language, with wild swings from its ‘hard sci-fi’ branch (serious dudes imagining ‘what if this bird had a _slightly differently_ shaped claw), all the way to its ‘Fantasy-with-spec-evo- influences) branch. ‘All Tomorrows’ swings a little more towards the whacky end of the sci-fi branch of the sub-genre, (but will it stay a ‘sub’ genre for long? it feels like much of the intellectual and creative ferment is going on here). Dougal Dixon has a lot to answer for.