Dubious

Every stainless steel screw, nail, push tack, playground frame (yes most of those “plastic” playgrounds are built on a steel frame or if a titanium frame the bolts and screws are still steel), rebar), the zipper on your jeans -

Like look: Iron is actually so ubiquitous in modern life it’s INVISIBLE while being EVERYWHERE. If you WANTED to meet a creature sensitive to iron you would have to work to make sure you didn’t either invite them somewhere surrounded by it, or end up wearing it by accident.

Carbon dissoves into iron very very easily in its liquid form. You don’t actually get steel by adding carbon to the ore; you get steel by removing all but a small and very specifically handled amount of carbon from the steel. 

Like sure: carbon is part of what gives steel its particular qualities. But that carbon is already there in the ore, and inherent in the smelting process to get the ore to actually be iron, and to get good steel you actually remove most of the carbon and avoid adding much more, down to a few tenths of a percent. 

[nb: sometimes the actual process of this, especially back when we literally only knew how to do things by trial-and-error and did not actually understand the atomic metallurgy involved, is a weird back-and-forth of adding carbon via charcoal and then burning it away, etc, and it gets complex; the result is still “get rid of most of the carbon” and making steel always involves removing carbon from the iron smelted from ore.]

(You might be able to argue that the chromium usually added for stainless interferes, but since the premise is usually that rust - ie oxidization - destroys the effects of iron and the chromium is added to prevent that …enh. And that still does nothing to non-stainless.) 

So like sure: you can imagine that nothing but “pure” iron actually works, and any adulturation makes it useless. In which case just about nothing we have ever called “iron” or used as “iron” for most of human existence - absolutely including all of those “iron” bells, horseshoes, nails, and so on, that the legends are built around - counts as iron, because steel is quite literally the purest form of iron that has much functional use for us, and the iron we call “steel” has quite genuinely become purer and purer iron over the centuries, with all of the processes involved in making steel (especially not-stainless-steel) being based on removing the carbon already present (or avoiding the stuff that gets in naturally via the air in the process of smelting) and creating basically the purest that iron can get before it becomes soft and useless for anything except chemistry and magnetism. 

Maybe it’s something else keeping the fae away in the modern day, and someday in the future someone will be picking apart stories about how you can kill the fae with, e.g., “pencil lead” (without specifying “(technically graphite)”) and wondering why the fae aren’t back since no one uses pencils anymore and there are laws to keep lead out of consumer products.

And, despite the fondness of modern SF writers and others to neatly and tidily class various fey and other European folkloric creatures as all tricksy-false-dangerous-bad, OR all good-safe-friendly, OR even to be able to neatly state which kind are which based on rules … honestly in the past they ran the whole spectrum, depending on how each region, village or even family perceived things, and when the story got written down, and where anyone was on the most recent religious or social upheavals or … anything else. And some of them didn’t care that much about iron in general, but specifically reacted to the iron horseshoe, or iron nails, or iron bells, or … 

When you actually dig into the folklore, especially digging into it with the same rigour that you do other parts of history and historical anthropology and archaeology, rather than just taking the eighteenth century compendiums (who really liked to homogenize if they could) at face-value, one actually finds a huge range of underlying assumptions in the folklore about how and why the iron or iron artefacts are working, and how much of the other part (that is: the holiness of the bell, the magic of the blacksmith, the power of the cunning man or woman who’s messing around with this stuff, even literally how and where the “supernatural” creatures fit into the predominantly devoutly Xtian landscape - and no it’s not always just as evil devils!) is important; it’s a big mess, because it’s folklore, not a rigorously thought out worldbuilding norm, and not subject to rigorous falsifiable investigation. 

Folklore is usually messy like that. 

fucking steel have i yelled lately about how it’s

it’s not a thing, it’s not–there’s not one thing you can point to can go ‘that’s steel’ even as much as you can say that i.e. copper and tin yield bronze, it’s just—–

like

you know why we can get it to do so many, wildly different things in different contexts, thin and springy or massive and rigid or–

you know why? you know???? because ‘steel’ is just a catch-all term for ‘iron we did some intense shit to.’

the intense shit varies! it necessarily involves extreme heat and control of carbon content, but the how much and how and when of these things is what you alter to get different results.

steel is iron that we have compelled to assume specific structures on the molecular level. depending on what we want from the iron those structures vary! it’s still iron, though. usually more iron than iron, as op has discussed. it’s just iron that we’ve tortured in especially exquisite ways. it’s just iron! what the hell! what the hell!

loving this pushback against the continued promulgation of early-modern cultural homogenization ty ty and also

Also what about the iron present in most soil? Soil that doesn’t drain well usually has lots of reduced iron that is visible in the form of grey mottles. I’m from an area where the soil is bright red from clay content, so it’s not easy to see the other iron at first glance, but it’s there.

I mean from a fiction POV, you can literally do anything you want, and can also mess around with “how MUCH iron is too much?” “what does the iron actually DO?” and so on, because it’s literally garlic and vampires. 

From a lore perspective, pick your poison: as noted multiple times, almost all of the folklore we have about this shit is actually derived from extremely and emphatically Christian sources so if you go back to them you’ll rapidly find that it’s as much the fact that it’s a cross, or a church bell, or been blessed by the priest, or the human using the iron thing is saying the Lord’s Prayer or the Hail Mary, or the bones of a saint are involved, or whatever. Because the actual folklore we have is from an aggressively Xtian era - or is being passed down through families (and is therefore idiosyncratic in the way these things are) with huge variation. 

An equivalent is the whole “eat hot lead” quip. The “hot lead” isn’t some special kind of lead. It’s just lead (in bullets)… .that is hot … .because it came out of a gun. 

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. SEASON ONE 1.01 | "The Vulcan Affair", dir. Don Medford

Dingbats have come after our buddy John Scalzi, over the last twenty-four hours, giving him grief for not being AI-friendly.* (eyeroll) So John has had to spell out his feelings about this in more depth.

The same dingbats have also confused him with our old friend Charles Stross (which is deeply funny in all kinds of different ways, but never mind that). So Charlie, too, has had to spell out his feelings about this.

So why not join in? Here's my take, expressed some while back, and a little amplified to reflect the day's business.

TL:DR; Leaving aside all other considerations for the moment, I will not use technologies trained with material stolen from my colleagues. "Lie down with pigs, get up with mud," the saying has it. "Lie down with thieves..."? Fill in the blanks for yourselves. ...Me? I refuse to handle stolen goods. Period.

And—not naming some of the colleagues, but some of you will know who I mean—this excerpt (in which I also speak for @petermorwood, because I know damn well what he'd say):

We do not use, and will not use, ChatGPT, Claude, or any similar tool. Ever. ...Not even "just for research." Not even "just for outlining." Not even "just for brainstorming." You need a brain to brainstorm. "Generative" "AI" has none. As by-choice "brain-only writers", we decline collaboration with the non-brained.

And that's that.

(sigh) Meanwhile: look here! Books written by the honestly, organically brained. And on sale, too!

(Please do consider a purchase... or reblogging this for the sake of the gossip, if nothing else.)

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?