Baru 3 megapost WIP (on The Tyrant Baru Cormorant)

I have read The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. (Despite the best efforts of the publishing industry.)

What a series! Like, damn.

1. How we got here
2. A brief note on structure
3. A slightly longer note on epigraphs
4. Defamiliarisation and distillation
5. Let’s talk about wizards!
6. The resources of the Cancrioth
7. Baru’s periapsis
8. Let’s talk about tulpas!
9. What is a wound?
10. Genocide
11. The number of interest
12. Kimbune’s Theorem
    1. The first ingredient: exponential functions and calculus
    2. The second ingredient: Taylor series
    3. The third ingredient: trigonometry
    4. The fourth ingredient: complex numbers and the path of inventing new numbers
    5. Cooking Kimbune’s theorem
13. Barhu’s big plan
14. An economic cancer
15. History lessons!
    1. John Law in France
    2. South Sea bubble
    3. What to conclude?
16. The reason for empire
17. The motor driving ‘will’
18. Where’s all this going?
19. Racialised gender: the downfall of Cairdine Farrier

Last year, I read the first two books in Masquerade series, seeing Baru Cormorant as first a Traitor and then a Monster. Since then, and a great deal of really appreciated feedback, those books have sat in my head accruing emotions.

Like the last two posts in this series, this is part review, part meta, part speculation—just an attempt to write down all the things bubbling in my head after I finish a book as rich as this one. Not an attempt to reach a final judgement, but to process the many questions raised, point out some of the things I appreciated, and so on. Just… to give the book the kind of engagement I feel like it deserves.

How we got here

Because it’s been a year since the last, I wanted to recap what this series has been about so far! A lot of this is only revealed gradually, but this is the picture as we have it at the end of Monster. Reading this is not necessary for the rest of the article, but it might be handy to refer back to.

…phew, that’s a lot. And that’s just stuff that’s directly relevant to this book.

In short: in Traitor, Baru betrays the people of Aurdwynn, by playing at traitor to the Masquerade well enough to flush out the genuine rebels. But in truth she is genuinely aspiring to betray the Masquerade, and ultimately she believes herself loyal to Taranoke.

In Monster, she has painted herself as something abominable to even the vicious, blackmail-dominated world of the cryptarchs, someone who would betray her own lover. Or is she a monster because she has been turned into a loyal tool of Farrier, too fucked by his abuse to ever do anything that would make her happy or fail to act in his interests? In any case, from all sides, including herself, she is despised.

Now, we reach Tyrant. By tradition, the name of this book should mean that Baru’s tyrant-ness is ambiguous, arguable in many ways depending who you ask. Let’s see…

A brief note on structure

Traitor was divided into three sections: Accountant, Autarch, Warlord. Monster was broken into the fall of various places: of the Elided Keep, of the Llosydanes, of Kyprananoke. Tyrant is broken up into four sections; three are named after choices—Baru’s, Svir’s, and Yawa’s, each of the three main cryptarch characters—and one named after plague.

A slightly longer note on epigraphs

The first book opened with an epigraph:

A promise: This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.

The second book opens with a followup epigraph:

A question: If something hurts, does that make it true?

The third book opens with a different sort of epigraph, an anecdote from the real-world history that inspired the book:

In 1502 the samudri of Calicut, desperate to stop violent Portuguese incursions into the Indian Ocean trade network, sent two letters. One begged his neighbor the raja of Cochin to close all markets to the Europeans. The raja of Cochin, who saw Calicut as his historical enemy, leaked this letter to the Portuguese.

The other letter offered a blanket peace to the Portuguese admiral, Vasco da Gama.

Da Gama sailed to Calicut to demand reparations and the expulsion of all Muslims. When he was not immediately indulged, he seized hostages, hung them from his masts, and bombarded the city. That evening he sent the severed hands, feet, and heads of the hostages ashore in a boat, along with a note, fixed to the prow by an arrow. “I have come to this port to buy and sell and pay for your produce; here is the produce of this country.”

The note also demanded compensation for the powder and shot used to destroy Calicut.

If the people of Calicut did this, da Gama said, they would become his friends.

What bearing does this have? For a fantasy novel series, Baru Cormorant is unusually rich in culture, history, and especially, thought-through economics. But it’s still not as absurdly complex and messy as our own world’s history. This is something of the nature of ‘world building’…

Defamiliarisation and distillation

What is the purpose of creating a fantasy novel, rather than merely writing about history directly? After all, even the densest, most thought-through fantasy world will always be a slim imitation of the cacophonous mess of ‘everything that ever happened on Earth’!

For me, it’s something akin to a line drawing vs. a photorealistic painting. The painting tries to create something as close to the light field we might perceive at the eye as possible. The drawing strips away a great deal of information; instead, it attempts to draw out something essential. It tells a story about how things fit together, about what the artist notices.

A fantasy novel is similar. There are many takes on ‘world building’, some very negative (‘the great clomping foot of nerdism’) and some positive. In recent years, various articles and youtube videos have sprung up offering advice on how to make your ‘world’ plausible in terms of geology, climate, etc. But all of this can seem very self-indulgent—not at all a bad thing, I like world building for fun!—without an actual purpose behind it.

Baru Cormorant is, of course, a series about colonialism. It wants to understand the mechanism of the history that created this present world order, of capitalist domination by the rich countries, and poke at the question—I believe—of how it may be broken. The question Baru asks at the beginning of the first book—why do they have all the power, and not us?—frames the series, especially since she offers an answer near the end of this book.

In this vein, worldbuilding represents a kind of thought experiment, or hypothesis. The underlying question is: how do people and societies work? The claim is: this is a plausible course of events. And by observing it, and considering it carefully, we might get an angle on the real world, also.

Why should Baru go to such lengths to build an imaginary world with a complex history, extensive cultural and ideological variation, and economics? I think the subject matter demands it. If you are to understand colonialism, you have to understand how its economics work; you need to understand how it produces its own colonialist subjects and keeps them working towards colonial expansion; you need to understand that (contra books like Imperial Radch), colonialists rarely took control through overwhelming military strength, but played off factions against each other, lending poisoned ‘support’ to make useful allies and puppets. If you try to write a simple story about resistance against colonialism, you will fail to understand your subject.

But it’s not just dryly relating things that actually happened; it is a dramatisation, compressing centuries of not much happening into a few decades, placing intense, dramatic personalities at the centre, and enticing us with weird alternative possibilities. Approaching it indirectly.

As such, it takes various measures to defamiliarise us from the history it’s drawing on. ‘Defamiliarisation’ is a technique in science fiction and fantasy where an everyday thing is described in unfamiliar language, to draw attention to it. Baru Cormorant does this a lot.

Not for everything: reading Baru Cormorant, I noticed that obscure technical terms would often be used without replacement. For example, I would occasionally have to look up words for parts of a boat, such as ‘coaming’, which refers to the bits around a watertight doorframe. However, more familiar ones would be given alternative names with similar etymologies.

For example, the Masquerade does not call people ‘homosexual’, but ‘isoamorous’; its homophobia is rooted in its eugenic philosophy. It does not call people ‘lesbians’, but ‘tribadists’; not ‘gay men’ but ‘sodomites’. Obviously, there is no biblical city of Sodom in this world, nor a Greek origin to offer ‘iso-‘ roots as an alternative to ‘homo-‘. But this substitution is defamiliarising—it lets us look at the Masquerade’s vicious homophobia in a slightly different light, calls attention to its specific ideological component to illustrate how something like homophobia functions.

The same trick is performed with certain common mathematical and scientific terms. Rather than \(pi\), they speak of the ‘circle number’, rather than \(e\) (Euler’s number) they speak of the ‘number of interest’ (as in, compound interest, where money rises exponentially). Rather than the North Pole, we hear of the ‘lodepoint’. These alternative names are rarely all that difficult to parse, and more obscure technical terms—particular in economics—are usually used without obfuscation, even with explanation.

To me, the purpose of all these tricks is to make the setting feel familiar enough to be comprehensible, but distant enough to be subject to scrutiny. The role of science is particularly interesting—in some ways, these books are much more science fiction than fantasy. Many of the weirder things in the book, like transmissible cancers, Baru’s mental state, or the Faraday cage people in lightning land we briefly glimpse at the end, have a basis in scientific research.

But though this book is based so heavily on science, it is deeply skeptical of the institution of science. In Baru’s world, as in ours, science is bound up with power, always. In the present, the Falcresti ideology of Incrasticism is a blend of familiar scientific truth and outright delusion, such as ‘Torrindian heredity’, but its proponents are oblivious to which parts are wrong. One chapter is directly titled ‘epistemic violence’, in which Baru witnesses a massacre by the Canaat rebels of Kyprananoke, who have correctly learned that Incrastic ‘hygiene’ is almost always a tool used by their oppressors to control and mutilate them, and in response have developed an ideology where all tools of Falcrest, from surgery to quarantine, are to be violently purged from the political body. (This seems to be an allusion to, for example, the Khmer Rouge treatment of ‘intellectuals’ during the Cambodian genocide, and the resistance to vaccination faced by white-controlled health NGOs.) I have more to say about this, but we’ll come to it later.

Through making science just a little unfamiliar to the presumably scientifically literate reader, we’re pretty obviously (to me) invited to view our own institutions of science with the same wariness that the characters view Incrasticism. Though this might be me just seeing confirmation of my existing beliefs :p

Mind you, it’s not a case of ‘rational European-analogues, mystical foreigners’. Science is not just a weapon held by Falcrest—we are often reminded that scientific techniques originated in the Oriati Mbo, contra the low opinion held of them by Falcresti racism (or ‘racialism’ as its termed in this world). At one point, we’re related the history of the Cancrioth… which means it’s time to talk about wizards.

Let’s talk about wizards!

In the last review, I declared my reservations about the concept of the Cancrioth. Their reputation is built up over the course of that book as shadow rulers equal and opposite the Falcresti cryptarchs, blessed with radiation-themed magic. As we meet the Cancrioth at the end of Monster, it starts to seem like their reputation has some truth: they do seemingly impossible things like cultivating transmissible tumours, even implanting them into a whale; they light their ship with radioactive light.

In this book, the Cancrioth are pretty quickly deflated in some ways, but in others their role becomes more apparent. Far from the secret rulers of the Oriati Mbo, as the cryptarchs project, the Cancrioth are a fairly obscure cult of cancer worshippers who rule almost nothing, but cultivate transmissible tumours in their bodies, trying to keep each ‘line’ alive since it is believed to contain an immortal soul. Beyond this knowledge, their only real asset is a very large ship, the Eternal, with a lot of expensive things on board. But this ship is a relic, and its cannons are useless against Falcresti warships.

Yet in a certain sense, the Cancrioth are wizards—or perhaps it would be better to say magicians. For this reading, I’m going to go slightly left field and refer to an entirely different book, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick. In this book, a bureaucrat goes to a planet held in a technologically limited state to pursue a magician who has stolen some forbidden tech. As he makes his pursuit, he’s drawn into mysticism, and various psychological tricks that work to convince him that his quarry is powerful and dangerous—a reputation he’s carefully built, drawing on this world’s mythology around transformation, traditional alchemy, etc. etc.

The bureaucrat is constantly questioning the nature of ‘magic’, while getting increasingly drawn into its rituals. As he learns about his target, the Gregorian, it becomes increasingly apparent that the magic is mostly various kinds of nasty ritualised abuse, self-serving philosophy, and manipulation. What makes the Gregorian an effective magician is his ability to convince other people he holds power, to get the whole world to play along with his performance.

Now let’s talk about John Dee, the man who coined the term ‘British Empire’ and advocated for its creation. John Dee was an alchemist and a mathematician and astronomer/astrologer etc., who spent much of his later life trying to figure out a way to commune with angels. And he had power, in large part due to his learned reputation. He was one of the advisors to Queen Elizabeth I, including on astrological matters such as the most auspicious day of coronation, and a navigational advisor on many of England’s voyages to conquer and claim various parts of the ‘New World’. He was associated with another alchemist, Edward Kelley.

In this time, to be a successful alchemist was to convince a feudal noble that you could advise them on spiritual and scientific matters—the philosophy of the time recognising no such distinction, though the question of whether one was a good Christian was more pertinent. After Dee’s death, he was surrounded by rumours about his sorcery—whether, for example, his communications with angels were actually evil spirits. A modern scientific view of people like Dee is of course to dismiss him as either deluded or a con artist: of course there were no angels. But Dees rhetorical positioning of himself as an occultist full of secret knowledge gave him influence.

The Cancrioth are practicioners of this sort of magic. There are a handful of major Cancrioth characters, each named for the location of their tumour: the Womb, the Eye, the Brain. They have no chain of command as such, but the crew of Eternal is divided into factions: the Brain wants to push Falcrest and the Oriati into war as the only answer to Falcrest’s imperial aspirations; the Eye and Womb would prefer that Eternal pick up Abdumasi Abd (who, it turns out, is a Cancrioth member) and go home.

At one point, Baru and Iraji engage in a spiritual confrontation with the Brain. Although Iraji was selected as the bearer of a particular tumour, for which he is well-suited as a host (the Cancrioth’s tumours can enter into benign symbiosis with their host, or kill them), he does not have a tumour, thus he has no magic power in the Cancrioth’s eyes. Tau figures out a way to grant Iraji power: Iraji puts a cancerous pig’s brain, full of malignant tumours, in his mouth.

It wasn’t the first magic Aminata had ever seen. The Oriati pirates she’d fought commonly used sorcery, the sympathetic destruction of Falcresti flags and uniforms and the use of spirit circuits to hold back fire. But this was the most violent, the most sudden, the most appalling in its effect.

He screamed at them through the cancer, and when the Termites heard that wail, when they saw the moaning man coming at them with cancer in his teeth, they all began to shout and to pull at each other, a diffusion of fear, so they would all have the excuse of someone’s else tugging arms to explain the retreat. “Incrisiath!” one of them screamed. “Incrisiath! A sorcerer!”

We see this scene through the eyes of Aminata, an expatriate Oriati who holds Falcrest’s skepticism towards Oriati magic, but also fears, based on Falcresti notions of heredity, that somehow her Oriati background will make her subject to magic:

Iraji screamed at her. Speak through it, Tau-indi had told him, speak so your voice becomes its hunger and when she hears that hunger she will feel her own immortata rise to answer it. It is the nightmare of all the onkos to be devoured by their own immortality, and for their Line to end in malignancy. Worst of all for the Brain, for her tumor is in her thoughts.

The Brain’s hands flew to her head. She fell to her knees on the clay-tablet flooring, and Aminata saw, distinctly saw, that there were tears of pain in the Brain’s eyes.

The magic worked.

At that sight she felt a cold twinge of migraine behind her own right temple. “No,” she said, out loud, “no, not me.” But she could feel it, she could feel the scream in her head.

It worked on her, too. The magic worked on her too.

This confrontation works, because to refuse the magical performance would be to deny the terms of the Brain’s own power as an ‘onkos’ (cancer holder).

There was a chance, even then, that the Brain might have refused him, and fought. One of the Termites might simply have shot Iraji. But there were people watching: the Brain’s people, her navigators and sailors, the educated folk who believed hard in her and in the terms of her power.

If a Termite dared interrupt this confrontation, then the Cancrioth would see sacrilege. And if the Brain did not yield, then her people knew, the way all believers know what they believe, that she would be struck down. Her tumor would swell up and drive her mad.

And she knew they knew it, in the way that one brain considers the knowledge of another.

“I yield,” she said. “I grant you passage.”

Like all stage magic, it’s in the presentation. In simple, physical terms, all that happens is that one person puts something gross in his mouth, risking infection by a malignant tumour, and shouts at everyone. But Tau-Indi, though not a sorceror themself, has understood the symbolic logic of the Cancrioth well enough to turn this gesture into a challenge to the Brain’s own power.

Later, Baru has a discussion about the nature of magic with Ulyu Xe:

Barhu grounded them in a flood meadow and showed Xe how to take temperature readings with a mercury thermometer.

“It’s like magic,” Xe said.

“It absolutely is not!”

“You told me that masters in Falcrest spend two years calibrating each thermometer to the tenth of the degree. That they must be stored with a certain ritual. That they can kill you if you break them open. That they must be destroyed before falling into foreign hands. That they can tell when people are sick before they even know.”

“But this thermometer works by clear, well-understood logical rules. Magic doesn’t work at all.”

Xe lay down on the bank and trailed her bare toes in the water. “You’d only be satisfied if magic were like a rag novel. A wizard shoots a bolt of lightning to animate a corpse. A warlock calls down a star from the sky to blind his foe. But that’s not really magic. It’s just made-up science.”

“No it’s not!” Barhu sputtered.

“Yes it is. If you can see how it works, it’s science. If a wizard were to show you a book of rules by which he combines various gestures and words and gems and metals to make his spells, it would be science, not magic.”

“What isn’t science, by your definition?”

Xe rolled onto her back and squirmed out of her skirtwrap. “When a witch raises a rabbit with the same name as a man, and kills and skins the rabbit, and then pisses through the rabbit’s skin into a pit of gravel, and the man gets kidney stones. The witch never touched the man. She never acted upon him. She only touched symbols of him.”

“Oh, fine.” Barhu crossed her arms and glared. “So magic doesn’t work except when it can be disguised as the coincidence of symbolic manipulation and natural occurrence? That’s very powerful.”

“The most powerful thing in the world,” Xe said, untying her strophium and sliding deeper into the water.

I think there is something deeply true at the heart of this. Ultimately, the difference between a wizard calling forth a holy light, and a person turning on a lightbulb, is the social meaning that we give to these acts.

And there is still a great deal of ceremonial magic even surrounding our ‘more accurate’ scientific understanding of the present. How does a crank mathematician, trying to explain how Einstein is wrong, actually, attempt to build an image of credibility? How does Andrew Wakefield build up his reputation as he peddles pure bullshit about vaccines? They replicate the symbols of science: degrees and doctorates, dry passive voice language, so on and so forth.

The Cancrioth too are scientists as much as wizards. When Baru speaks to the brain, she learns more about their actual history, not as magicians but as scientists.

I talked in the last article how one of the deep concerns of Falcrest is civilisational collapse—a collapse mirroring the fall of historical empires, especially such terms as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, or the fall of the Roman Empire, in our world. In Baru’s world, the most recent great empire to fall was known as the Cheetah Palaces, more than a thousand years prior to the events of the book. In their wake, various slave societies sprang up known as the Paramountcies. The Cancrioth developed out of the various parties in the Paramountcies assigned the work of stopping the slaves dying quite so much: advisors, educated slaves, and mystics. The weapon they discovered in their ‘Work Against Death’ is nakedly the placebo-controlled clinical trial:

It was Alu, lamchild of a priest-linguist, who suggested the method of home-group and journey-group that would revolutionize the world. Alu wanted a better way to test the medicinal effect of jungle plants. Alu knew a story about twin princesses, one of whom went out into the world to journey, one of whom stayed at home in the palace to study, each swearing to learn whether worldliness or scholarship made a better queen. The story was about the value of a monarch connected to the people and the seasons: but Alu extracted a different lesson from it.

The traveling sister had to leave a twin at home so she could learn how her journey changed her. How could you know if a medicine was successful without a group of untreated slaves “at home”? Maybe your new drug was no better than rest and bed care. If you were going to bring a plant to your lord as a panacea, if you were going to ask your lord to spend farmland and labor raising that plant, you had better be damn well sure it worked.

And it did work. Alu’s method worked. It condensed the whole Work Against Death, the entire menagerie of apotropaic magic, poisonous brews, and ritual surgeries, into a rigorous grid of tests that filtered the gold from the water.

The success of this form of scientific medicine motivated a similar reaction as it has in our world: the rich and powerful got big ideas about becoming immortal. But while our would-be liches look to tech like reparative gene therapy, the rulers of the Paramountcies ended up pursuing a different route. They discovered a part of the continent Oria where uranium deposits were close to the surface, ‘hot caves’ (presumably natural nuclear reactors like Oklo Mine) and ‘secret fire’. In our world’s language, what they discovered was both radioactive material and an ecosystem of bioluminescent animals and plants which responded to the presence of ionising radiation, like the radioluminescent paint used in old glow-in-the-dark radium clocks.

But the discovery of this water that inculcated cancer took a different route. The Cancrioth, and their masters, became convinced that tumours could carry an immortal soul, passed between bodies. They managed to selectively breed tumours which could exist relatively benignly in a human body, and treated the carriers of these tumours as incarnations of the same, immortal individual. And they started using those radioluminescent pigments, along with samples of uranium, to create a tradition of magic, in the terms described above. Of course, handling radioactive materials so carelessly risks radiation poisoning and cancer—but cancer is the whole subject of their cult, not something they fear! Sometimes, individuals may die to a cancer turned malignant, but as long as the transmissible cancers live on, those lives are not lost.

So, what do I make of the Cancrioth now I know better what’s being done with them? Previously, I thought of them as a sort of intrusion of overtly fantastical elements into a relatively grounded story. I have come around: I think the Cancrioth are compelling characters, as much as the others in the book, and that a cancer/radiation cult is not much more a stretch than what takes place in Falcrest. This book feels, to history, like a carefully-composed chiaroscuro painting vs. a photograph of nothing in particular. It’s not that the painting portrays something overtly unrealistic, but it is all arranged as a novel, an exciting story full of emotional swerves and character drama and secrets, taking artistic liberties where it needs… rather than simply repeating the banal repetitive messiness of much of history.

At the end of the book, Seth comments in an author’s note on both the Cancrioth, and the new society briefly glimpsed at the end:

In the acknowledgments to the last book I cautioned the reader that stranger ways of life than the Cancrioth’s exist in Baru’s world. We have now received a small glimpse into one of those strange ways. As ever, I leave the question of supernatural power versus scientific unknown in your hands. But I admit I am particularly proud of this one: it gives me special delight to invent things which probably could happen on Earth, had things gone a different, stranger way.

I am actually pretty into this! It just took me a bit to readjust. It’s funny—it seems now that each book addresses the reservations I had with the previous.

The resources of the Cancrioth

So, the Falcresti cryptarchs believed the Cancrioth to be their equal and opposite, secret aristocrats who ran the Mbo from behind the scenes. Even certain Mbo characters, like Tau at the depths of their despair, are disgusted by the thought that the Cancrioth were secretly intervening to manage things, rather than simple Oriati goodness:

“When the Maia invaded, and we thought we’d embraced them into peace, why, it was probably the fucking Cancrioth that set the beetles on their heartland crops! When we appealed to our common decency to stop the displacement of the jungle people, it was probably the fucking Cancrioth who bribed the migrants to turn back! And how about Taranoke, hm? Were you a Cancrioth breeding experiment? Maybe it was a game for them. Maybe one of them bet another, oh ho, watch, I’ll turn the fierce Maia into pineapple-eating sluts!”

But there is no evidence Tau is right. From what we actually see of the Cancrioth, their powers are highly limited. Their ship is ancient, overly large, and its diverse crew is not enough to run it properly. They are constantly low on water, and the loyalties of the crew shift between the different Onkos. The ‘shadow ambassador’ Baru was tracking, who we now refer to as the Womb, probably was not actually doing any spy shit after all. They have an alliance with an actual Oriati spymaster, but there’s no sign they’re actually in control. Eternal is sailing around looking—like everyone—for Abdumasi Abd, so they can recover his tumour, but meeting little success.

What of the times when the Cancrioth does wield influence? In Tau’s flashback ‘Story About Ash’ (which turns out to be a story-within-a-story, related to Baru near the end of the book), a sorcerer comes to Prince Hill—not actually a member of the Cancrioth, but using their methods—alongside a mob seeking the deaths of the Falcresti guests, Torrinde and Farrier. This sorceror does the flashy radioluminescent stuff, but they also demonstrate a strange immunity to pain, which is not explained. If we wished to give a scientific explanation, we might suppose she was on drugs, or had surgery.

Another time is of course the Brain passing on samples of the Kettling, though the Womb is emphatic that the Cancrioth did not create the disease. And the final time is the end of the book, when the Brain—who has herself cast in bronze—becomes a messianic figure for the anti-Falcrest war movement.

And their boat? Eternal is described as almost implausibly enormous, labyrinthine, and junk-rigged with eight masts, about 400 feet long (120 metres). A ship of this size has plenty of historical basis, particularly in the treasure ships of Zheng He, of China’s Ming dynasty, which had up to nine masts. The largest of Zheng He’s ships has been estimated at 135 metres by 55 metres; they would not have been particularly manoeuvrable, and nor is Eternal (Baru discerns some technical notes about its metacentre at one point).

For all its size, Eternal cannot compete with Falcrest’s torpedoes, copper hulls, and incendiary weapons. It only survives its one battle by the intervention of a second Falcresti warship in its defense. The Cancrioth are rich, and weird, but not particularly powerful players, except insofar as what they represent. Much of the book is spent trying to prevent Eternal from being sunk.

Baru’s periapsis

I’ve talked a bunch about the nature of the Cancrioth, but most of this is revealed in the first few chapters of the book. What does this all mean for Baru herself?

Of course, as with the previous, the book traces Baru’s development as she tries to stay true to her project of destroying Falcrest, while slowly going ever further to pieces. Where we left her at the end of Monster, she was in an awful state indeed: on the run, with few friends who don’t despise her, narrowly avoiding being lobotomised, in a deeply fucked up relationship with Shao Lune, drinking heavily, missing her fingers, increasingly losing to depression (here known as the ‘Oriati emotional disease’ because Falcrest, racist, you know). She’s been persuaded by everyone around her that her every action secretly advances the cause of Cairdine Farrier, no matter how she tries to escape his shadow.

At the beginning of this book, Baru decides on a desperate plan to make it all worth it, to ‘write Tain Hu’s name in the ruin of them’ as she once silently promised the dead Duchess. Her old plan was to provoke open ‘hot’ war between Falcrest and the Mbo, along with various other parties; a war that would be catastrophic for most of the world, but would absolutely annihilate Falcrest.

After meeting the Cancrioth, she seizes on a more direct idea: if she can bargain with the Brain, she can get a sample of the Kettling (not at all radiation poisoning, that was my misreading, the symptoms and transmission make it clearly ebola), and release it close enough to Falcrest that the plague will wipe out the city. And, of course, with its long incubation time, the pandemic would soon spread to everything else that is connected to Falcrest by the trade lines… but Baru at this point has set herself on destroying Falcrest, whatever the cost.

On Eternal, she wakes up to (rather inept) torture, and has a brief meeting with Tau. Tau, who, distraught over the ritual the Cancrioth performed to sever him from the web of Oriati social relations—a ritual he fervently believes in, pretty much alone among the cast, Oriati and otherwise—tells Baru that the events at the embassy demonstrate that all her fears about herself are true:

“Dare what? Talk about the woman whose death you use to justify your atrocities? She gave you permission to do a terrible thing. Now she is dead, so she cannot withdraw her permission. But you know her permit only reaches so far: it does not extend to Iraji, or to me. So you’re waiting for me to give you permission to sell Iraji and Abdumasi to the Cancrioth. You want me to say, at least we’ll be together again, damned together in chaos, Abdu and Tau. Really, you’ll be doing what’s best for both of us. Is that right? I think it is.”

“Tau…”

A smile sweet like sugar rot. “You need me to be your little amphora, your bottle of reserve goodness, to shatter and use up. You’ve been dying a slow death since you killed Hu. You need to take another soul to finish your work. Only it’ll never be done. You’ll always need more. And no matter what you do here, Baru, I expect that by some strange coincidence it will end up being what Mister Cairdine Farrier wants. Don’t you think so, too?”

Which hits Baru’s anxieties like a shaped charge.

With all that on her mind, she ends up taking an offer of stolen cocaine (here known as ‘mason dust’) from Tain Shir as a way to spur herself into action. On that high, she confronts the Brain, and tries to negotiate for the Kettling. The Brain’s price is simple: Baru must infect herself with a deadly, malign transmissible tumour, guaranteeing that she has no interest in defecting to Falcrest to survive, and committing her to the end of Falcrest’s world.

When Baru can’t go through with it, her entire world loses its last vestige of structure. Her promise to herself was that all her sacrifices were for the ultimate good of Taranoke, and for Tain Hu specifically. Tain Hu sacrificed herself for Baru’s mission, and in Baru’s warped logic, she ought to be willing take the same sacrifice—and if she won’t give herself cancer, well, she must just be Farrier’s creature after all!

(The right side of Baru’s brain does not agree that Tain Hu would want her to die of cancer, funnily enough.)

By the time she is forced out of Eternal by Xate Yawa performing a ploy with Iraji’s life, she’s more or less outright suicidal. Tain Shir shows up with yet another ‘lesson’, and Baru, exhausted of the things she’s done, tells Shir to take her, not Ulyu Xe.

This is the bottom of Baru’s arc, and the beginning of her roundabout path to being something like a functional human being. But the impetus comes from a rather unexpected source—Xate Yawa.

Xate Yawa, we may recall, had a plan to deal with the humiliated Necessary King of the Stakhieczi: she would send him a lobotomised Baru as dowry for a marriage to her puppet governor Heingyl Ri, to demonstrate his revenge and secure his own power over his people. She’s seen Baru as nothing but a thorn in her side this entire time, and—after the rogue Clarified, Iscend Comprine, intervenes to stop Tain Shir executing Baru on the spot—she finally has Baru on her operating table. But at the last minute, curiosity gets the better of her, and she performs some experiments on Baru’s split brain, using the suggestion of a lobotomy to manipulate Baru into telling the truth. (As so often in these books, the suggestion of a thing is more important than the thing itself…)

So Xate Yawa is the first to figure out that Baru has a tulpa of Tain Hu running the right side of her brain.

Let’s talk about tulpas!

If you’re very online, like me, you might well have encountered the notion of tulpas in certain fandom subcultures (related to other fandom-occultism such as transformation hypnosis tapes—for some reason these things were quite popular in the My Little Pony fandom subculture). A tulpa is an independent sapient mind inside one’s own head. Unlike typical ways of being a multiple system (‘DID’), it is something deliberately cultivated. The term is actually one from Tibetan buddhism, but reinterpreted by Western occultists in a way that has relatively little to do with its original context. Practioners claim that, with the appropriate ritual practice, they can cultivate a tulpa in their mind, and communicate with it.

As we discerned in the last book, Baru is suffering from something close to ‘split brain’ or ‘callosal syndrome’. The two hemispheres of her brain have stopped being synchronised, except in particular moments of seizure induced by (for example) drugs. Baru’s left brain considers itself continuous in identity with her original self; Baru’s right brain considers itself to be Tain Hu. In effect, Baru has accidentally created a tulpa of her dead girlfriend. Occasionally, Tulpa!Hu will intervene in the narration through right-aligned text.

The word is used directly, when Yawa figures out what’s going on with Baru, along with an alternative, ilykari word, eryre. The fact that ‘tulpa’ is specifically identified as [a translation of] an Alphalone word suggests it’s not necessarily the notion of ‘tulpa’ we’re familiar with. Yawa offers a slightly more mystical interpretation: Barhu has cultivated Tain Hu’s soul inside herself, like the Virtues worshipped by the ilykari:

“Don’t look that way,” Yawa said, “you asked. To us a soul is not a great ineffable mystery. People are, after all, not very mysterious. A soul is simply the text of a person’s inner law, and a mind is the act of reading that law into the world. Through study and meditation you can read another soul’s law and copy it into yourself until it comes alive, so that you now have two books of law, two selves, two souls. Himu, Devena, and Wydd all studied and practiced their virtues so completely that they became those virtues. That’s why we emulate them.”

“But I haven’t studied the ykari. I haven’t meditated on a virtue … I just swear by them, very often, I take their names in vain.…”

“No, child. Your obsession was with a woman. Through study and obsession you have built inside yourself the soul of Tain Hu.”

Upon learning this, Baru realises that the second character of her name is the same as that of Tain Hu’s surname (at least in the Alphalone syllabary), and from then on, the narration calls her Barhu.

It’s easy to see (and, probably somewhere explicitly pointed out) parallels between what Barhu’s got going on, and the Cancrioth’s own belief in the transmissibility of souls.

Barhu’s near-lobotomy experience does not link the two halves of her brain and give her integration. But it is enough to do two things: to give her reason to start trusting herself again, rather than seeing Farrier behind every action she might take; and to win Xate Yawa around, as Yawa recognises her at last as someone pursuing the same cause by similarly awful means.

This is one of the first true friendships Baru has had since the death of Tain Hu—one where she is no longer keeping secret her fundamental goal.

What is there to say about this, if this is truly to be a commentary, and not a plot summary? Of course, this is a necessary step: if Barhu is ever to achieve something resembling recovery, she has to reconcile herself to tulpa!Tain Hu. This was well set up by the previous book—Yawa’s explanation is really nothing new—but it is a relief to see Baru finally reach the bottom of her downwards spiral, and understand herself a little better.

I mean, she also gets meningitis from it, but in terms of character arc, she’s past the worst, and on to the long hard project of building meaningful relationships not built on trauma, lies, and blackmail. Which is, overall, the theme of this book: Barhu slowly builds up genuine personal connections with the people she’s wronged, and starts thinking of a way to ‘butcher’ Falcrest that is not apocalyptic.

And as for the nature of the ‘tulpa’ itself? Yawa describes Tain Hu as a ‘law’—a person, here, is described by a way of thinking and behaving. This will align with the book’s notion of culture, which we’ll come to in a little while.

What is a wound?

This takes us up to chapter 9. Having broken the back of Farrier’s despair-conditioning, having at last adopted a little of Tau-Indi’s philosophy and put the immediate good of those around her over her long-term schemes, Barhu still has to figure out what she and her comrades are going to do about Falcrest. But first, she has a few atrocities to witness. She needs to understand the nature of genocide, and such-like things. We will consider Barhu’s plan, and whether it really represents a positive future, shortly. But in terms of Barhu’s personal development, what is now at stake?

To Tau-Indi Bosoka, Baru was a ‘wound in trim’, the network of personal connections that unites the Mbo and everyone else in humanity. To a ‘fundamentalist’ like Tau, who believes in the Mbo’s stories about how they absorbed their would-be conquerers and drew them into mutually supportive relationships, the answer to Baru’s trauma and the harm she’s doing is a kind of restorative justice: they must connect her to others in a genuine way. Tau’s own strength, they believe, comes from the network of personal connections they have as a Prince of the Mbo. And when the Cancrioth declare them severed from trim, making them a wound just as much as Baru, they fall into despair. Later, they start to recover from it, deciding that, even severed as they are, they can still act ethically.

About halfway through the book, Tau, on hearing about Baru attempt to sacrifice herself to save Ulyu Xe, comes up with a theory:

An awful brittleness in Tau’s voice: like ice on the verge of melting, warming but losing strength. “I think it is possible that the Womb’s spell of excision had, ah”—their voice cracked—“had effects she could never anticipate. Baru Cormorant was a wound in trim, an upwelling of grief, a hole. All those who knew her would find only abandonment and regret.

“But when one bond is cut, Iraji, the loose thread may fasten on another. I was cut loose. There were many, many threads seeking a place to fasten.…”

We probably don’t accept Tau’s interpretation, but Baru is increasingly internalising Tau’s philosophy: after she survives Yawa’s lobotomy table, she starts referring to trim to guide her actions, only devising after-the-fact justifications in terms of concrete gain. She tries to go ashore in Kyprananoke, before a certain event renders that futile, and help negotiate for release of water and advise people on containing the Kettling. She reconciles herself with the Tain Hu in her head when circumstances and drugs let her reconnect.

So this book is Baru stitching herself back into trim—in the metaphor she devises to Tau, like a spider reeling itself back into the social web. She is at last reunited with Aminata, and tells her some of the truth, though Aminata has her own arc of disillusionment with Falcrest to follow before she can come over to Baru’s little faction. She gets to know Iscend Comprine, even almost has sex with her at some point, though she’s still unable to believe the Clarified can defy their conditioning to act for Falcrest, still convinced that Iscend’s gradual process of escape is just a fantasy she’s playing out for Baru. She reconciles with Tau, in part on the basis of the above theory, and finally meets Abdumasi Abd, and treats him as a person, and in so doing manages to form a crucial alliance for her new grand plot. Even Tain Shir takes a different view of her.

And she finally meets her parents again—but we’ll get to that later!

A ‘wound’ in trim is thus the behaviour of someone who cannot be vulnerable, someone who can’t exist in a dynamic, stable relation to other people, and interacts through treating people instrumentally, through acting out trauma. To close the ‘wound’ is to create relationships with someone who does not have any, which give them space to find a new way of existing. I think there is something powerful in this, something reflected in the philosophies of restorative and transformative justice—but this is not enough in itself.

The danger is already apparent in the book: trim can declare exceptions, render certain people enenen, non-persons who are not subject to trim. In the Story of Ash chapters, a group of grieving Oriati people attempt to make such a declaration of Farrier and Torrinde, calling for their death; Tau and Kindalana (who I’m getting to!) intervene ritualistically, dressing up in the regalia of Oriati Princes and reminding the crowd of their philosophical/religious commitments—to hospitality, and to deescalation. But the Cancrioth remain enenen.

In a more simple case, a rich person can have deep, fulfilling relationships with other rich people, and still treat a homeless person, or the server at a restaurant, like dirt. Personal connections as celebrated in trim are necessary, but not sufficient. I don’t think the book fails to realise this at all—this is just what I am thinking, considering the proposed philosophy of trim.

Genocide

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant does not use the word ‘genocide’ directly, but it discusses it at several points.

The Kettling plague on Kyprananoke has broken quarantine and spread out of control. Due to its long incubation period, ships could carry it to other ports before realising they are infected—Kyprananoke has become a plague bomb, threatening the rest of the world. Baru notes with disgust that the brain must have chosen Kyprananoke precisely because there’s a chance the plague may be contained.

The plague has also opened the door to a complete collapse of the social order, and factional violence between the Kyprists (former Falcrest puppets) and various groups of Canaats. Certain factions of Canaat are, with weapons such as machetes, attempting to purge anyone with signs of surgery or any other evidence of allegiance to the prior regime. To a Falcresti observer like Juris Ormsment, there is little question that the new regime will be as bad as the old, because of the necessities of holding power:

She turned her spyglass on the kypra islands. The first thing she saw was a raft of corpses swarming with crabs. Most of the capital islet Loveport had gone up in fire overnight, torched by Canaat rebels. Now that the initial rush was over, both sides were busy consolidating their territory and purging their ranks. Anyone with insufficient commitment would be killed as a collaborator; anyone who refused to denounce and punish collaborators would be killed as an enemy of the revolution (or of the state). It would go this way because that was how it had happened in Falcrest, after Lapetiare’s revolution. In a few weeks the Canaat leaders would turn on each other, and the winners would build a new government as cruel and selfish as Kyprism, because if they were not cruel and selfish they would be torn down by those who were. And the cycle would begin again.

Baru, meanwhile, resolves to go ashore anyway in her newfound deontological idealism, to help negotiate a truce for water, and manage plague. She owes, she says, these people her solidarity: after destroying one revolution on Falcrest’s behalf, she wants to do the right thing this time.

Falcrest, however, has an eventuality in place: it has created an ‘apocalypse fuse’, charges designed to explosively collapse one wall of the caldera near the island, so that the displacement wave will be concentrated by the remaining walls. This will create a ‘megatsunami’ that will rapidly wash over the entire island, killing everyone in one stroke. This somewhat complicated plan is inspired by real events: in 1958, an earthquake near Lituya Bay, Alaska caused a similar concentrated wave which completely scoured the trees up to 524 metres from the normal sea level. In 1963, a landslide into the filling Vajont dam reservoir created a wave over the top of the dam, which wiped out several downstream Italian towns.

Naturally, this Chekhov’s superweapon is fired—fired by Iscend Comprine, acting without orders, after none of the cryptarchs are prepared to pull the trigger. (In fact, Tain Shir is even asked to disable the weapon, but arrives too late.)

Even in the throes of meningitis, Baru is unequivocal on one point: the horrors of the Kyprananoki ‘democlysm’ are ultimately of Falcrest’s making. She expresses this point repeatedly throughout the book…

What took place on Kyprananoke, and what is in the process of happening on Taranoke, Baru considers far worse than one would conclude a direct reckoning of number of deaths. Baru’s world does not have a notion of genocide, which in our world was only recognised as a specific crime and entered international law in the years after the second world war (in part thanks to the writing of Raphael Lemkin linking the Holocaust to prior genocides, like the Armenian one).

But even without the word, when she speaks of destroying a culture in this way, genocide is what she has in mind. To Baru, a culture is defined by a particular way of living in the world—a set of practices that are adapted to a specific location, in ways that may not be obvious to Falcrest’s notion of scientific superiority. This comes out in a later conversation with Ulyu Xe:

“When Falcresti sailors arrived they thought the nardoo seeds would be good provisions for long voyages. But the crushing, the washing, and the cooking are all time-consuming and dull. So the sailors skipped the simple women’s work, milled the seeds into flour, and used the flour for bread. And they ate the bread, and shat their bodies out, and starved. They had all the best of Incrastic science and they couldn’t figure out what the Devi-naga all knew.

“It’s as if…” She groped for a way to say it. “It’s as if all the people who live anywhere in the world, no matter how primitive or savage Falcrest says they are, are accumulating interest. Learning things which can only be learned by being who they are, for as long as they have been. Oh, damn it, am I just calling them stupid? Am I just finding roundabout ways to say that these people are too backward to do science?”

“That’s a Falcrest conceit,” Xe countered. “We’re saying they’re clever in a way that’s not valued by Incrasticism.”

“How? How is it clever to do whatever your ancestors teach you?”

“Because your ancestors are smarter than you. Not any one of them, but all together. All those different ways of seal-hunting and flour-making combining and leaping down from generation to generation, sieved out by centuries of practice until only the best forms remain.”

Falcrest’s genocide of Taranoke is not just the extermination of a quarter of the population, but the disruption and attempted annihilation of the patterns that the Taranoki people were living out prior to their arrival.

Of course, ‘genocide: bad in fact’ would not be a particularly novel thing to say. What I want to note here is how this fits into the broader themes of the book: the ecological angle it takes on life. In this view, cultural evolution is like speciation and radiation; genocide is extinction. A culture is a pattern of behaviour, perhaps—but what is an organism but a pattern of behaviour of atoms and molecules and so forth, one which can reproduce itself through time?

This view of a way of life as ‘possessing’ something, which can be lost, is not so far from the UN’s own definition of genocide, which begins:

Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups,

Baru takes a similar line, thinking of Falcrest’s aspirations to conquer and ‘digest’ the Oriati Mbo:

(…)And there were other good things in all the peoples of the Mbo, things no one could imagine or invent, ideas which could only be produced by being who they were, in the places where they lived, with the history they had.

Oriati Mbo was a book of incredible and unread wisdom. A book made of millions of living souls.

And Falcrest wanted to erase the book. Burn the pages for kindling, the people for labor. No one in Falcrest understood that there was anything written in it at all. They believed that some societies were civilized and some were primitive and that the civilized had nothing to gain from the primitive at all.

This notion has some power—at least in terms of recognising a culture as a living process, one that is evolving, not something static and eternal. But I also think there is a danger in framing genocide all about what a group might contribute (to whom? they already have it), even while recognising that part of the justification process for genocide is to deny the creations and accomplishments of the targeted group. Even were the dynamics of a certain group somehow provably reducible to things which existed elsewhere, even if it was true that the ‘civilised’ had nothing to gain on their terms, genocide would be evil. But that’s kind of obvious, perhaps.

Barhu’s emphasis on gain and loss perhaps comes from her own, personal preoccupation with trade—something which will prove to be at the heart of her plan to destroy Falcrest. And Barhu’s faith in the power of trade comes because she can see, at least in part, the significance of exponential growth.

The number of interest

In taking this ecological reading of culture, I am reminded of something Seth wrote on their Twitter—unfortunately I can’t get the direct quote—about the parallels between cancer and colonialism: a part of an organism or community ceasing to participate in symbiosis, but attempting to gather all resources to itself. (Seth said it better.) Let’s look at the thing that unites all the powers, and evils, explored by Baru Cormorant books…

Here are a few recurring motifs:

• economic growth
• disease epidemics
• cancer
• colonialism
• radioactive materials

What do these have in common? In mathematical terms, there’s one obvious point of unity: exponential growth and decay.

An exponential function is something which appears whenever the rate of growth of something is proportionate to how much is already there.

That may sound a bit confusing, so let’s consider an example. Imagine a population of elephants, with plenty to eat. The more elephants there are fucking and making baby elephants, the more elephants will be born each generation. When you only have two elephants, the population grows very slowly… but as the herd gets bigger, the elephants appear faster and faster. Over a great many generations, it produces a curve a bit like this:

(plot to go here)

This is the the exponential function, \(\exp(x)\), or \(e^x\). Though there are many exponential functions, they can all be related back to this one through a simple rescaling.

Exponential functions are of deep importance to capitalist economics, because the one of the most awful, powerful tricks at the heart of capitalism—at least, once the brutal primitive accumulation phase has seized the means of production through direct violence—is to cycle your profits back into expanding production (‘expanded reproduction’ in the language of Marx). Everything in capitalism is keyed to an assumption of exponential economic growth, from the interest on a loan to the expectation of annual profits from a company.

All societies must reproduce themselves, all growing societies produce more than they need to just continue to exist—but capitalism made this growth the core of what a society is. If something—a company, for example—can’t keep up with the economic growth, it will be crowded out by its competitors, starved of funds or bought up and remade.

But it’s not just capitalism. Diseases, too, spread exponentially at first through a large population—something we’re all too aware of in the age of COVID-19. Cancer cells, not subject to programmed cell death, reproduce themselves on a similar trajectory, although the specifics vary for different cancers.

And radiation? Radioactive decay is something of the opposite: every atom has a random chance to decay in every instant, so the more atoms there are, the more quickly they disappear. In the specific case of uranium, the most common isotope (by far) has a half life in the billions of years—slow enough that it hasn’t all decayed already, fast enough that, in abundance, it creates some serious activity.

(While we’re at it… in a nuclear weapon (which even the Cancrioth have yet to imagine), the nuclear chain reaction exploits exponential growth in the other direction: one neutron becomes two, becomes four, each time releasing more energy until, in an instant, most of the fissile material has transformed and all that energy is ready to incinerate a city.)

Perhaps alone among the cast, the Brain is aware of the terror of exponential growth on the scale of societies:

“They understand the secret of power, Baru.”

“Which one?”

“The ability to improve one’s own power, no matter how slowly, triumphs in the long run over any other power. Time magnifies small gains into great advantages. If you are hungry, then it is better, in the long run, to plant one seed than to steal a pound of fruit. Falcrest applies this logic in all their work. They do not conquer. They make themselves irresistible as trading partners. They do not keep their wealth in a royal hoard. They send it out among their people, stored in banks and concerns, where it helps the whole empire grow. They do not wait to treat the sick. They inoculate against the disease before it spreads. All their power sacrifices brute strength in the present for the ability to capture a piece of the future.”

The thing about economic growth is that, though it starts out apparently slow, once it gets into motion it is one of the fastest-growing mathematical functions we encounter. This is what makes disease outbreaks so startling—and it’s what makes capitalism have such force.

Exponential, economic growth is Falcrest’s meta-weapon, but—Barhu eventually comes to believe—it is the weapon that can be turned against them too. I promise I’ll talk about her plan in a second!

Kimbune’s Theorem

But the interest in exponentials comes at a different angle, too. While visiting the Cancrioth, Baru runs into a mathematician who is determined to track down Abdumasi Abd for a different reason than most: in Abdumasi’s tumour is, supposedly, the soul of her husband, who died before she could win an argument. And what’s this argument about?

It’s about Euler’s formula. You know:

When I saw that formula on the page, I was like… Seth you absolute dork. Oh, sure, she’s invented the most famous, beautiful theorem in mathematics… And then I ended up spending a very fun afternoon introducing some friends to the significance of this formula, so it was pretty good in the end.

Naturally I came up with a reading of the book’s broader themes in relation to Euler’s formula. This is a bit of a nerdy aside, so it gets the box:

In Barhu’s world, the number \(e\) is called the ‘number of interest’. Interest is the result of a loan: it is money turned to make more of itself. But through Kimbune’s theorem, the process of interest is turned aside: not to expand but to transform…

Perhaps this metaphor is kind of a stretch? I think it’s a fun reading though, given what Barhu plans to do.

Barhu’s big plan

I’ve been building up to discussing how, exactly, Barhu aspires to ‘butcher’ the Masquerade. If, as we’ve seen, the Masquerade thrives by making everyone dependent on participating in its growth, how can it be destroyed without killing all those who’ve come to depend on it? For so long, Baru could not see an answer; she resigned herself to a vision of apocalyptic war.

In this book, in a meningitis-induced sex dream about her dead girlfriend, she finally figures out her answer: a plan which plays to her strengths, which she believes can bring down the Masquerade without taking everyone else with it. It’s one which plays to her passions and skills, born from her childhood in a trading port and belief in the potential for trade as a good thing, linking people together; a plan which she can pursue under Falcrest’s nose without them realising what she’s hoping to achieve.

At least, that’s the idea. Most other people are not convinced.

Barhu’s plan is to create a new trade route, between Falcrest and the Oriati Mbo—but one that she controls by virtue of an Emperor-granted monopoly. Powered by the enormous wealth she gains from this, she can increasingly take control of the Falcresti economy. This new trade route would link up most of the places we’ve visited in the story so far, bringing immense profit to each:

Barhu keeps the second part of her plan close to her chest, but she finally explains it in a final meeting with the Brain:

1. drive Falcresti investment into her trade monopoly by encouraging speculation
2. encourage use of Oriati assets as a tax haven for the Falcresti elite, and thus take control of most of the Falcresti economy
3. siphon out money from Falcrest using fraud
4. use these funds to arm the Oriati
5. the Oriati will attack Falcresti trade, cutting Falcrest out of the equation entirely, and bankrupting the Empire

The Brain is not persuaded by Barhu’s plan. While Barhu is obsessed with numbers, she drops the title of the book, and reminds her of the unspoken cost of capitalism:

“You want to be a tyrant,” she said.

“I prefer the term tycoon,” Barhu suggested.

“No. You will be a tyrant. You will be a creator and protector of tyranny. Do you understand what Falcrest does to us, if they have the access given by trade? Trim is outlawed. Family land is bought up and turned to cash crops. Children are worked in the fields. Men are killed and their killings blamed on their own conduct. Women are stripped of their children and brought into prostitution. Their sons are soldiers. Their daughters are sent as maids to the houses of the rich. You are asking me to open our doors to a pack of rabid dogs.”

In my somewhat strained metaphor of Kimbune’s Theorem, Barhu hopes to redirect the vast economic power of Falcrest not to expansion, but to transform it into something different. As she sees it, the vast expanding wealth of Falcrest could be stolen and transformed into vast wealth of Taranoke, Vultjag, the Stakhieczi, the Mbo; we later see her dream of a future world in which a kind of cosmopolitan scientific modernity would develop, complete with uranium-powered carriages, surgery anaesthetised by opiates, and ‘meat golems’ controlled by electricity. The people of this future would be diverse, but all the wealth the would enjoy came from trade.

In short, a perfectly bourgeois vision of the future.

The Brain is, quite rightly in my view, antsy:

“The best way to break a mill is to burn it down, Baru.”

“Not if you want to keep building mills and making flour! The reason Falcrest is winning is because its ways are stronger! I can steal that strength!”

“But it is still Falcrest’s strength. It is still that monstrous pillaging force which treats people like coin and coin like people. And if you try to wield it you are seduced by it. Take Alu into your body instead. Consecrate yourself into my trust.”

“Damn you,” Barhu hissed. “I can do so much more than carry a plague and die young. Don’t you see? The concern that rules this new trade could be mightier than the Republic itself! And I will own it all! I can force Falcrest to give justice to those it’s conquered!”

“Nothing you own by Falcrest’s means is owned by anything but Falcrest. When you think you possess them, that is when they possess you.”

In our own world, we have not exactly seen capitalism severed of empire. The old European empires have officially relinquished their holdings, but not before installing capitalist means of governance which live on; all of us now dance to the strings of the world economy. And the beneficiaries of that economy haven’t changed all that much. Capitalism, as an abstract force, annihilated prior modes of self-sufficient existence just as surely as Falcrest’s ships and incendiary weapons.

But Barhu would be at the top this time! Ready to technocratically ensure that nothing bad comes of her trade concern. So that would make it OK right?

The Brain does not, admittedly, have a much better plan. Her own method is to render herself a sort of messiah—by casting her current body in bronze, and having another person with the same tumour take up the cause—and stoke the various Mbo into war against Falcrest.

The question of whether something other than capitalism could have been born of the end of feudalism is one that we will never be able to definitively answer. In the history we ended up having, capitalism won, at this point anyway. The world was proletarianised: slowly, sometimes through the mindless action of the market but often through the deliberate efforts of the “workers’ movement” and its representatives, the ‘peasantry’ (self-sufficent farmers) that once made up almost the entire world population has been dissolved; at last all of us now depend on the market, and are thereby forced to work for a wage.

This is a process Baru, back in Monster, sees in positive terms, speaking to Svir of her plans to link Aurdwynn into the world market:

“Once their economy values currency instead of land, the peasantry will be able to profit and save off their own labor instead of tithing their incomes for protection—”

Here, we see her plan extend to the world. Barhu, the daughter of traders, the accountant… she cannot imagine how this trade would leave people not with opportunities for saving and profit, but propertyless proletarians structurally necessary for the whole machine to work. The hypothetical meat golems will do the work, right? Just like one day, we’ll be able to stop working because of robots and asteroid mining and clever technocratic computers, as the FALC advocates promise.

So as satisfying as it is to see Barhu absolutely annihilate Cairdine Farrier (we’re getting to that) and get back on her feet, it’s hard not to believe that the many people who point to the ghost of Falcrest in her plans are absolutely right. A ‘better’ Falcrest, perhaps: one without the eugenic obsessions and dreams of centralised control, but still a power that subsumes everything to its expansion.

An economic cancer

I’ve drawn one grandiose metaphor, linking the economic transformation that Barhu hopes to accomplish to the way, with an imaginary argument, exponential growth and decay becomes a contained circular orbit. But an economy is not just a point in a plane; it is a living system. And the book furnishes us another metaphor…

Elsewhere, Barhu muses (while pretending to be lobotoimsed—more on that shortly!) on what it was that enabled Falcrest to rise to its position in the world. She considers many angles—we’ll get to that in a sec—but one of them is Falcrest’s financial system:

There was so much she could say. The matter of money, Falcrest’s wholesale adoption of paper fiat notes and liquidity banking, which allowed them to move value more efficiently: you could not raise money from your people to fund an expedition if all their value was locked up in farmland and lumber and milk. But when it was stored in paper notes in banks then you could borrow from the people without actually taking their property.

Why do we organise our lives around the fiction of money at all? The details of the answer may vary depending on your preferred economic school, but all answers come back to the behaviours that money creates. Money defines a system of impetuses to act, and coordinating dynamics, which take a bunch of people living out our lives and bind us together into an economy moving towards, more or less, a common goal. If the chartists are right, and money was born from early states and kings to feed their armies, it was because of its utility in making sure food is grown, organised, transported etc.

So looking past Barhu’s explanation of the plan in terms of abstractions like ‘wealth’ and ‘money’, what she aspires to do is to inject a different organising principle into that developing process—a new system which will, though born of the same substance, rapidly grow to take control of its host’s functions, ultimately (she hopes) fatally.

We could, if we wanted to be cheeky, say she wants to give Falcrest cancer. But like the transmissible cancers of the Cancrioth, like real immortal cancer cell lines such as those taken from Henrietta Lacks, her economic cancer (she hopes) will outlive its original host.

So is she killing Falcrest, or rendering it immortal?

Maybe history can be a guide…

History lessons!

At the end of the book, while listing the scientific basis for their various ideas, Seth speaks briefly to the plausibility of Barhu’s plan:

The economic power of Baru’s notional trade concern is hardly exaggerated. Nor is the possibility of the near-total destruction of an imperial economy by mismanagement on the part of a powerful few: interested readers may look into John Law’s time in France and the neighboring South Sea bubble in England.

Well, I am an interested reader. Let’s find out more. (With apologies for people who aren’t concerned with 17th-century economics.)

What to conclude?

John Law got France to go bananas over a colonial expedition that found no resources to exploit; the South Sea bubble got England to go bananas over trafficking slaves to their ostensible enemies. They bankrupted many of the rich of their nations, perhaps even set the stage for the later fall of the French monarchy (though there were many other factors!), but neither episode stopped the empires from functioning as empires. At best, they just slowed them down.

Of course, the nakedly obvious conclusion is that colonialism is utterly, unimaginably evil. But that probably goes without saying.

As far as our world of fiction is concerned, Barhu’s plan is to create a similar speculative bubble to capture most of the wealth of Falcrest in her own colonial monopoly venture. By getting Falcrest to move their wealth offshore, she can create conditions for the Oriati to seize it.

But in practice, what would that mean? We know Falcrest has a fiat currency; what would actually be seized? Military control, perhaps, over the trade in actual, physical goods—and thanks to Barhu, Falcrest would not be able to finance a war to take back. I think that’s the idea, anyway. I guess we’ll find out in the fourth book.

The question that seems all the more pertinent after reading those histories is, would that be enough?

Money is, after all, a fiction. Certainly a powerful fiction, much like the Cancrioth’s magic—a system for getting people to behave in a certain way, a complex of beliefs and behaviours that reproduces itself.

But it is people who sail a warship, not money. Money makes sure that someone prepares them food to eat at the end, money gets those people to sail the boat, but the money is subject to change. When John Law wrecked the French financial system, the French government didn’t disappear: they set to work redoing the money to keep everything ticking over.

In this book, financial shenanigans are enough to force Falcrest’s navy to return to dock (a power play by Falcrest’s Parliament we haven’t yet discussed). But if Falcrest’s control over the world was truly at stake, would the economic snafu be enough to prevent them mobilising all force necessary to take it back? I guess Barhu, no stranger to war economics, thinks so: if Falcrest cannot pay their sailors’ wages, can’t move the chemical ingredients to the Burn workshops, outfit their ships, and do all the things that drive a war economy, they won’t be able to take back any control.

But the social relationships of domination won’t disappear as quickly. As Barhu herself notes, the animating principle of Falcrest is not its money, but something else…

The reason for empire

I said earlier that the series was framed by Baru’s early question of why them, and not us? Why did Falcrest arrive at Taranoke, and not the opposite?

I will quote her full answer now, since it’s one of my fave passages of the book:

Or, to cut it a little shorter…

But all of those things were just limbs and muscles on the beast. They explained how Falcrest was conquering the world but not why. A strong man might have the ability to strangle or force a weak man. But nowhere was it written that the strong man was fated to kill or enslave that weak man.

…

But Falcrest was not an innocent victim of a historical inevitability. Empire required a will, a brain to move the beast, to reach out with appetite, to see other people as the answer to that appetite, to justify the devouring of other peoples as right and necessary and good, to frame slavery and conquest as acts of grace and charity.

Incrasticism had provided that last and most fateful technology. The capability to justify any violence in the name of an ultimate destiny, an engine to inflict misery and to claim that misery as necessary in the quest for utopia. A false science by which the races and sexes could be separated and specialized like workers in a mill. And the endless self-deceptive blind guilty quest to justify that false science, so that the suffering and the misery remained necessary.

This passage reminds me very strongly of the theories on states written by Peter Gelderloos in his book Worshipping Power, which I discussed a little in the previous post. For Gelderloos, empires are just one realisation of the general horror of states; his preferred distinction is between states and stateless people, not organised hierarchically and centrally. Gelderloos is highly dismissive of deterministic, materialist explanations for state development, whether the dubious geographical determinism of people like Jared Diamond, or the Marxist belief in class struggle as the determining factor of history. He writes:

Hundreds or even thousands of years of social evolution, along authoritarian or “homoarchic” lines, were required for the emergence of haves and have-nots, individual property, quantification of value, toilers and parasites. And parallel to these proto-state societies, we have examples of alternative forms of social evolution with an equal technological complexity and similar productive techniques, that chose decentralized forms of organization, and non- or even anti-authoritarian cultural values. As regards societies with little or no economic stratification, there are hundreds of examples of human societies practicing a variety of modes of production and different forms of political organization, from hunter-gatherers in California to agriculturalists in southwest Asia, with no clear pattern, no deterministic link between one and the other. Even among primates of the same species, practicing the exact same “mode of production,” one can find significant differences in the level of hierarchy between different groups.

Having argued aginst determinacy, and that the formation of state structures tends to precede rather than follow the stratification that Marxists placed as ontologically prior, Gelderloos offers his own interpretation. Over the course of the book, he describes a bewildering variety of paths to state-formation, usually generated ‘secondarily’ from the interaction of a state with a stateless people. How, then, to predict what course a society will follow? Gelderloo’s answer is to refer to a notion of ‘will’—individual intent and a collective ethos:

Turning material and other forms of determinism on their heads, Christopher Boehm, in an extensive survey of stateless societies, demonstrated that the key factor allowing a society to be stateless was not its mode of production or geographic conditions, but an ethical and political determination to prevent the emergence of hierarchy: what he referred to as “reverse dominance hierarchy,” in which special functions were compartmentalized rather than centralized and potential leaders were closely watched, and were abandoned, exiled, or assassinated if they exceeded their powers or acted in a greedy or authoritarian manner. In contrast to a mechanistic trend in academia that would dismiss freedom as a subjective illusion or meaningless concept, we anarchists assert that will, both individual and collective (at which level it is often read as culture), is an indispensable force for shaping our society, our mode of production, and our relationship to the earth.

The motor driving ‘will’

We should definitely accept these cautions—indeed, if one is a communist, one must accept the possibility of a dramatic transformation of the world we live in—see it as fundamentally contingent, not inevitable. And I don’t particularly need to have faith in the supposed historical inevitability of the great revolution, especially given the track record of such predictions.

At the same time, to draw a line around ‘will’ and leave it unexplained feels like it is a bit of a cop-out. The things we want, that motivate us to act, cannot really be justified (beyond appealing to other, more ‘basic’ wants), but we can observe that they are not fully arbitrary either. After all, much of capitalism’s functioning, is conditioning us to buy what is being sold, go to work even when the boss isn’t there to force us… to play the game and express our desires in its terms.

Stereotypically dogmatic Marxists, of course, may reduce intention entirely to the supposed material ‘interests’ of a person’s class. To be sure, many allow a more subtle account, especially those who throw around words like ‘libinal economy’. Barhu, at least, is (naturally, given her experiences) able to see ‘will’ as something arising from ideology and history; she has seen first hand how Incrasticism is inculcated, and she sees her own desires (as we discussed last time!) as arising from the ‘engine’ of the world.

What of ‘collective will’? Something beyond individual people, evolving in many minds through constant conflict between all those who desire to shape it. We’ve seen that the Masquerade is held together by the spit and glue of blackmail, and that most of its powerful people would not even blink before sending their rivals to a miserable death. Yet “the Masquerade” functions, it can be seen as an actor; it is depressing to think that even those who oppose its project play a part in propagating it, wittingly or not.

To maintain a collective will, we circle back to the theme of control that runs throughout this series: all the schools for abducted, clinical courts and hygienic torture chambers; the ‘corrective’ rapes, operant conditioning, and delusions of eugenics. All of this is intended, in part, to maintain that “collective will” of the empire, and make sure its subjects continue to act as if “the Masquerade” exists. Whether because they believe in it, or because—like the prisoner who seems to escape, only for it to be an illusion, in the first book—they see no possibility of successful resistance.

This suggests, to me, that disrupting one part of Falcrest’s system—its economy—is not enough to kill the ‘will’ animating Falcrest, and transform whatever’s left of its people into ‘good neighbours’. But given that all these parts are not separate but interdependent, connected to each other through all these feedbacks… it’s not a separate goal either.

What would it take to force Falcrest to give up its imperial aspirations, short of a bigger fish showing up to colonise it in turn?

Where’s all this going?

On this specific angle, I’m left with three questions:

1. what’s Seth going to have happen in the next book?
2. what do we think should happen in the next book? artistically, and by our understanding of this little world in a bottle
3. what does Baru’s fictional struggle tell us about our own?

Of course, we’re not going to find the recipe for overthrowing capitalism for genuine communism in a fantasy novel. Still, novels help us frame questions—though as this book repeatedly points out, the person who frames the question has a great deal of power to shape its answer.

I genuinely don’t feel like I know if these books will end up in a victory, or a final tragedy—or whether I’ll agree with the presentation of whatever future Seth chooses! Though, more than any other fiction I’ve read in a long time, I feel like they grasp what’s at stake in this world.

Perhaps Baru’s trade venture will succeed beyond her dreams, and as such we will see her world end up on the same course as our own, with the national empires eventually giving way to an internationalised capitalism as the true power (the ‘divided god’ in the words of the Chǔang collective). Perhaps, with Oriati trim rather than Falcresti self-interest shaping the motives of this economy, trade will not come to rule over people; the Falcresti economic instruments will die off (‘wither away’ we might even say) with the state that spawned them, and the products of work will move according to need, coordinated by some other principle than profit. Though it’s hardly clear how this will happen.

And perhaps Baru and co. will find themselves needing to be overthrown as the power goes to her head. Perhaps Tain Shir will finally get to exact her revenge. (Actually that seems pretty plausible! That gun has spent a long time waiting to be fired. I’m pretty sure Tain Shir will kill Baru at the end, whatever else happens.)

Of course, perhaps the possibilities raised by the lightning-soaked continent in the East of Baru’s world will throw a wrench in all of her plans, and something totally unpredictable will happen. I trust Seth enough to believe it will be well-founded in what has come so far.

But for all this to mean something beyond ‘that was a good fucking book’? Like Baru, all of us who read this are in positions where we’re deeply involved in a truly despicable system—and like Baru, we must play along for now, awaiting our opportunity to cause damage that matters and prove that their control over us wasn’t real. Like Baru, we must look to our own power—though collective power, rather than individual, holds more promise.

Much of Baru’s framing, of butchering an empire, is still relevant: we face the problem of ‘reconfiguring’ what can be salvaged of capitalism, and destroying what cannot. Whatever happens ‘next’, we must eat or die.

When writing a pseudo-historical novel like this, there are some very difficult lines to walk. The miserableness of real history means it’s hard to reach for too happy an ending—nobody wants to be like “oh, oppressed people of the world, if you’d only done this, you could have killed the European empires and been free back in the 1700s”. I don’t think Baru is likely to do that, at all. But that leaves a different space: bittersweet endings, recognition of limits.

Of course, conversely, we also don’t want to shackle ourselves to history: by imagining what might have gone differently, in other circumstances, we keep open the imagined possibility that things will go differently the next time around. A ‘horizon of communism’.

I wish I could say, having considered all these angles, taught myself this history, I now have a clear insight into our real world, a tool to focus me. I do not have anything so definite… but I still appreciate the chance to consider.

Racialised gender: the downfall of Cairdine Farrier

I have spoken at enormous length about Barhu’s big plan. But a lot actually happens in the second half of the book, as well—Barhu explaining economics is a pretty minor part, all told!

Because this is the book where she finally kicks Cairdine Farrier’s ass, and oh boy is it satisfying. The way she does it, though, is not to lean on her own ‘savant’ genius: it is the alliance she builds with Tau, Abdumasi, Yawa, Iscend… and in particular, Kindalana.

I have not talked very much about Kindalana in this article. Not because she’s not important—but because, as a non-viewpoint character, we have less idea what Kindalana is thinking and planning, and her screen time is limited to when she is around Tau (and, eventually, Barhu). Yet Barhu’s victory over Cairdine is as much Kindalana’s as her own.

To understand how all this fits together, we have to understand a bit about Falcrest’s notions of gender.