#C. J. Cherryh

[petermorwood]

More on pre-electricity lighting.

Interesting to see this one pop up again after nearly two years - courtesy of @dduane, too! :->

*****

After experiencing a couple more storm-related power cuts since my original post, as well as a couple of after-dark garden BBQs, I've come to the conclusion that C.J. Cherryh puts far too much emphasis on "how dark things were pre-electric light".

For one thing eyes adjust, dilating in dim light to gather whatever illumination is available. Okay, if there's none, there's none - but if there's some, human eyes can make use of it, some better or just faster than others. They're the ones with "good night vision".

Think, for instance, of how little you can see of your unlit bedroom just after you've turned off the lights, and how much more of it you can see if you wake up a couple of hours later.

There's also that business of feeling your way around, risking breaking your neck etc. People get used to their surroundings and, after a while, can feel their way around a familiar location even in total darkness with a fair amount of confidence.

Problems arise when Things Aren't Where They Should Be (or when New Things Arrive) and is when most trips, stumbles, hacked shins and stubbed toes happen, but usually - Lego bricks and upturned UK plugs aside - non-light domestic navigation is incident-free.

*****

Here are a couple of pics from one of those BBQs: one candle and a firepit early on, then the candle, firepit and an oil lamp much later, all much more obvious than DD's iPad screen.

Though I remain surprised at how well my phonecam was handling this low light, my own unassisted eyes were doing far better. For instance, that area between the table and the firepit wasn't such an impenetrable pool of darkness as it appears in the photo.

I see (hah!) no reason why those same Accustomed Eyes would have any more difficulty with candles or oil lamps as interior lighting, even without the mirrors or reflectors in my previous post.

With those, and with white interior walls, things would be even brighter. There's a reason why so many reconstructed period buildings in Folk Museums etc. are (authentically) whitewashed not just outside but inside as well. It was cheap, had disinfectant qualities, and was a reflective surface. Win, win and win.

*****

All right, there were no switches to turn on a light. But there was no need for what C.J. describes as stumbling about to reach the fire, because there were tinderboxes and, for many centuries before them, flint and steel. Since "firesteels" have been heraldic charges since the 1100s, the actual tool must have been in use for even longer.

Tinderboxes were fire-starter sets with flint, steel and "tinder" all packed into (surprise!) a box. The tinder was easily lit ignition material, often "charcloth", fabric baked in an airtight jar or tin which would now start to glow just from a spark.

They're mentioned in both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". Oddly enough, "Hobbit" mentions matches in a couple of places, but I suspect that's a carry-over from when it was just a children's story, not part of the main Legendarium.

Tinderboxes could be simple, just a basic flint-and-steel kit with some tinder for the sparks to fall on...

...or elaborate like this one, with a fancy striker, charcloth, kindling material and even wooden "spills" (long splinters) to transfer flame to a candle or the kindling...

This tinderbox even doubles as a candlestick, complete with a snuffer which would have been inside along with everything else.

Here's a close-up of the striker box with its inner and outer lids open:

What looks like a short pencil with an eraser is actually the striker. A bit of tinder or charcloth would have been pulled through that small hole in the outer lid, which was then closed.

There was a rough steel surface on the lid, and the striker was scraped along it, like so:

This was done for a TV show or film, so the tinder was probably made more flammable with, possibly, lighter fuel. That would be thoroughly appropriate, since a Zippo or similar lighter works on exactly the same principle.

A real-life version of any tinderbox would usually just produce glowing embers needing blown on to make a flame, which is shown sometimes in movies - especially as a will-it-light-or-won't-it? tension build - but is usually a bit slow and non-visual for screen work.

*****

There were even flintlock tinderboxes which worked with the same mechanism as those on firearms. Here's a pocket version:

Here are a couple of bedside versions, once again complete with a candlestick:

And here are three (for home defence?) with a spotlight candle lantern on one side and a double-trigger pistol on the other.

Pull one trigger to light the candle, pull the other trigger to fire the gun.

What could possibly go wrong? :-P

*****

Those pistol lanterns, magnified by lenses, weren't just to let their owner see what they were shooting at: they would also have dazzled whatever miscreant was sneaking around in the dark, irises dilated to make best use of available glimmer.

Swordsmen both good and bad knew this trick too, and various fight manuals taught how to manage a thumb-shuttered lamp encountered suddenly in a dark alley.

There's a sword-and-lantern combat in the 1973 "Three Musketeers" between Michael York (D'Artagnan) and Christopher Lee (Rochefort), which was a great idea.

Unfortunately it failed in execution because the "Hollywood Darkness" which let viewers see the action, wasn't dark enough to emphasise the hazards / advantages of snapping the lamps open and shut.

This TV screencap (can't get a better one, the DVD won't run in a computer drive) shows what I mean.

In fact, like the photos of the BBQ, this image - and entire fight - looks even brighter through "real eyes" than with the phonecam. Just as there can be too much dark in a night scene, there can also be too much light.

*****

One last thing I found when assembling pics for the post were Folding Candle-lanterns.

They were used from about the mid-1700s to the later 20th century (Swiss Army ca. 1978) as travel accessories and emergency equipment, and IMO - I've Made A Note - they'd fit right into a fantasy world whose tech level was able to make them.

The first and last are reproductions: this one is real, from about 1830.

The clear part was mica - a transparent mineral which can be split into thin flexible sheets - while others use horn / parchment, though both of these are translucent rather than transparent. Regardless, all were far less likely to break than glass.

One or two inner surfaces were usually tin, giving the lantern its own built-in reflector, and tech-level-wise, tin as a shiny or decorative finish has been used since Roman times.

I'm pretty sure that top-of-the-line models could also have been finished with their own matching, maybe even built-in, tinderboxes.

And if real ones didn't, fictional ones certainly could. :->

*****

Yet more period lighting stuff here, including flintlock alarm clocks (!)

[aaronsrpgs]

book I finished / book I started

[oodlesodoodles]

[geoderocks]

At first sight, C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur series might look like ‘lion-cats in space with a stray human’. And, well, it is that.

But is also about breaking linguistic and cognitive barriers, overcoming otherness and gender biases, and setting aside selfish interests to unite a galaxy.

🚀🦁🦁🦁🧔🏼‍♀️🦁

[that-dinopunk-guy]

I bought more paperbacks.

(Also I got the Peter F. Hamilton books entirely based on enjoying Pandora's Star like twenty years ago and completely managed to not realize there's another book between The Dreaming Void and The Evolutionary Void.)

[leojurand]

so i finished the morgaine cycle recently and i absolutely loved it. will definitely read a ton of cherryh next year!

i feel like these books are ideal winter fantasy recommendations, in a way. the first book (novella?) is set during a harsh winter (despite what the... subversive cover from michael whelan shows), and the setting from the second is a kingdom suffering from floods. but it's not just the setting, it's the whole vibe! i feel like cherryh has a sort of melancholic writing in this series that made me want to read it under a blanket with a hot chocolate and a candle.

and it's emotions. the morgaine cycle is a fantasy with a big scale goal, but very small cast of characters. you basically follow two main characters and a handful of minor characters in each book. the main characters, morgaine and vanye, are sad, lonely, and tired most of the time. you guys... they are so sad lol and these emotions combined with the melancholic, kind of old school prose makes these books great for the cold season, in my opinion.

i adore vanye and morgaine. their dynamic is the heart of the series, and cherryh really pulls it off. when she's introduced, morgaine is a figure of legend, and vanye is terrified of her. but they're both completely alone in the world. morgaine has no one, and vanye has been exiled. so seeing them grow closer, i would say even codependent, is beautiful.

i really like that the book shows only vanye's pov (some side characters get povs as well), so morgaine's motives and mysterious past are very vague. she's a woman that looks at the bigger picture, and hers is a worthy goal. but vanye is just a man, he cares about people, and i think that conflict between them is also so fascinating.

small disclaimer, though. these characters spend a lot of time travelling. i know some people don't enjoy that so much in their fantasy, so yeah... they travel and they're tired and possibly injured and wet and eating their shitty cold food. very lovely atmosphere!

in conclusion, i adored these books, these characters, and this dynamic, and i would definitely recommend them. i've never seen anyone talk about them and i think that needs to change

[fansideblogtocjcherryth]

so I used a calculater to type up how long it could take for me to read the rest of the series while doing the notes and it tells me that it could take me 85:10 for me to read the one I haven't read yet in hours or 3 days and 13 hours as an optimistic thing.

wish me luck.

[tuulikannel]

I got today the newest volume in Foreigner series. ^^ This series is so long, but hey, I'm not complaining! It seems it's been 14 years since I got this picture from Resa... still on my wall. ^^

HIgher quality image on DA

[futurebird]

Have you ever read Serpent's Reach, by C.J. Cherryh? I read it and dream of being "hive friend" to a race of giant extra terrestrial hymenoptera-likes. I'm not necessarily making an urgent recommendation, but if you had read it I would love to know what you thought.

Yes! I read one of the books from this series and I remember enjoying it a lot. I think it captured something of the "anty" personality, you know?

I remember not really ever feeling like I could wrap my mind around the world it described... though in a good way mostly.

[tart-pastry]

“Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.”

C. J. Cherryh.

[box-keeper]

It's been a bit since I last did a reading update, so here we are!

I hit a bit of a slump in December and am thus still chipping away at Fortress in the Eye of Time (shhhhh dont tell Fred I'm not as far into it as I said I was 🤫) Its good if slow going for me. I did read a Doctor Who novel and Hogfather towards the end of the month.

Every year I say I'm going to do a big Discworld reread but this year I'm adding in that I want to start highlighting my favorite bits so we'll see how far it get!

Hope the holiday season and the turn of the year was kind to you all and here is to the new year of reading!

[katenepveu]

(I keep forgetting I can post booklog links here too? Don't mind me.)

I read a bunch of C.J. Cherryh books and posted about them last night! "A bunch" here means "four," but they're all long and in Cherryh's epic mode, so I think it still counts.

There's also a link to a spoiler post at the end of this one if you've read the books and want to gossip.

[aaronsrpgs]

book I finished / book I started

[oodlesodoodles]

thinking about the possibility that illisidi just didnt comprehend that bren didnt know the tea was poisoned and just stayed tight lipped about it after. Cause it looks a certain way to an outside observer. Like atevi love to play games, and to her brens like aight im game SLORP.

And to atevi this is 1. BigBrassBalls move and 2. Implying absolute trust to illisidi bajinaji. This also places an obligation of care onto illisidi. It LOOKS like manchi. It looks purposeful

But what if after the incident illisidi is like oh no. Hes just dumb.

Time to make this boy Not Dumb.

[caddyxjellyby]

I think the Rusalka characters are people who are better off in their canon setting than in a modern day AU, both an AU with wizardry and an AU without it

[that-dinopunk-guy]

As long as I am a grown-ass adult with a steady paycheck, I will not stop buying cheap used paperbacks on eBay.

So now I have some C. J. Cherryh books.