Hero and Monster

Text in the tags is like whispering to your friend who is sitting next to you.

There's Science as an ideal: a way of approaching the world and learning about it. The idealization of observation and questioning, of coming up with theories but being willing to change them as you observe more.

There is Science as a practice: a way of implementing the ideal. Methodologies for observation, theory-building, and testing. The discussion of these methodologies which also seeks to analyze which are effective, how they can be improved, what their limitations are.

There is Science as a body of work. The accumulation of science-as-practiced, where many generations of work have built on each other and continue to analyze and relate to earlier work.

And there is Science as an institution, as an arm of the Academy. Who decides which approaches and perspectives are legitimate? Who does the observation, who pays for it? The academic project has historical roots deeply tied in imperialism: a philosophy of Knowing the world as part of the project of Owning the world.

Science as a body of work is deeply tied up in science as an institution - not because this fundamentally follows from the accumulated practice of science as an ideal, but as a matter of historical fact. This is the body of work we have.

All of these aspects are in conversation with each other - and with realms of life and society outside of "science" specifically. How exactly the ideal of science should be defined, has varied over history. The iterative effects of changes in methodology and philosophy accumulate in the body of work. The changing body of work changes the goals and outlooks of the academy. These aspects of science are not separable. But neither are they synonymous.

Very often, I see critiques of science-as-practiced rebutted with appeals to the legacy and legitimacy of science-as-institution. Meanwhile, critiques of science-as-institution are brushed off with appeals to science-as-ideal.

On Friday, I got a notification that I had a package. My apartment has package lockers that FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL/etc. deliver int and when they register a package to me, I get a code emailed/texted to me that I can use to pop the locker open.

I didn’t remember getting a package, but that happens sometimes. I preorder a lot of things and Bookshop doesn’t always let you know when they’ve finally shipped something, or a friend surprises me, or whatever. So I put some clothes and shoes on and went over to the leasing office building to get the package.

It was not for me. FedEx is gonna FedEx.

So I picked it up out of the locker and went to the leasing office staff to hand it to them. They were kind of closed for lunch, so I was contemplating what to do if they weren’t in. It had the address. I could walk over there and deliver it maybe?

‘Cause see. A lot of people apparently just shut the locker and are done with it. But if I did that...how would this person know they had a package or where it was? How would anyone get the package back out of the locker, now that the system registered it as retrieved? They don’t have the code, and the code is expired anyway.

I could just leave it in the locker. Or take it out of the locker and dump it to the side where it could be pilfered; the exact function the package lockers exist to prevent. It’s not my package. Not my problem.

But it costs me a tiny bit of inconvenience and time to place it in the hands of and appropriate custodian and save a bunch of other people a lot of inconvenience and time. I live in a society. Society is designed to save everyone across the society as much time and effort as possible cumulatively.

Sure, it’s easier and faster to just shove your shopping cart out of the way and pull out. Not your problem. You don’t need the cart anymore. Except now the cart is blocking other people’s cars and other parking spots and can ram into cars and people and some poor worker is going to have to go track it down. You have saved yourself a tiny amount of time and inconvenience and in doing so wasted everyone around you’s time and convenience.

Sure, you could put your neighbor’s mail from a government agency with an URGENT stamp in your mailbox and mark it “NOT AT THIS ADDRESS.” Or you could. Just. Pop it in their mailbox or slip it under their door (I’ve been having mail problems recently okay. Give the USPS more money).

You don’t have to wait an extra 5 seconds to hold the door for someone just behind you. But. Like. Come on, man, really? (Unless you're entering a secured area with restricted access, because that causes a separate cache of problems)

Weighing how much time and effort something is going to cost you compared to how much time and effort it will save everyone else around you cumulatively is...well...pro-social way to think. There are obviously always going to be exceptions and a balance to things, especially if the cost to you is much, much higher proportionally.

We live in a society. We live in many societies.

You can leave your dishes all around your house. But whoever has to do the dishes later (even if it’s you!) is then going to have to remember or know this happened, figure out where they all are, pick them up, deal with any spills/etc. that incurred, and return them to the kitchen and then was them. Was that really worth just putting them in the kitchen earlier? Maybe. But probably not.

“But what do I get out of that?” Firstly, you’re a tarpit. Secondly, you get all of the time and energy everyone around you has saved you by also being a functioning member of a society.

Societies work because we’re all contributing so the burned is distributed, just the way people can walk over a bed of nails but not an individual nail. We all take up a small part of people’s burdens that aren’t necessarily ours so we all have better lives.

Consider: how pro-social is your behavior? Sometimes pro-social behavior is a huge undertaking for massive gains elsewhere. But so much of the time it takes an extra 30 seconds, an extra minute.

Step 1: Cargo pants, or purse, fanny pack, cool jacket, backpack, etc.

Step 2:

Folded-up plastic bag

Tweezers

Chapstick

Small knife

Lighter

Band-aids

Hand sanitizer

Hard candy

Travel-size Tylenol

Needle and thread

Safety pin

Bus fare

Charger

Pen/flashlight combo

Sticky notes

Granola bar

Tampon

Pad

Mini multi-head screwdriver

Zipock of tissue

Bottle opener

Hockey tape

This can be a lot to unload and re-load if you're a cargo pants person, but if you like me are not really a purse person I highly recommend either a cool jacket you can sew secret pockets into or a spare water bottle you can grab 'n' go whenever

Yes! A list!

The Swords and Fire Trilogy (starts with The Tethered Mage) by Melissa Caruso: These are a trilogy of dense political fantasy novels. Caruso is the master of presenting you with a story, telling that story in the first third of the book, and then revealing the much larger more complex story underneath the original premise. Swords and Fire has a very different tone to Goblin Emperor, its much more in line with conventional fantasy, and there's more magic and violence. But it has a lot of the same preoccupations as The Goblin Emperor, one of the main plotlines centres around a vote on a civil rights bill, and the main character's arc is around negotiating how she's going to cope with an inherited political position and what compromises she's got to, or is willing to make. They also feature Ciardha, who is the character you get if you weaponize Csevet.

If you actually just want big, complex fantasy worlds and are less concerned with the plot specifics I would recommend Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke which involves the return of magic to an alternate version of Regency England. And also Rebecca Roanhorse's Between Earth and Sky Trilogy (starts with Black Sun). There is Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir which is sci-fi and quite different but is similarly demanding.

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst is a smaller scale cozy/romantic fantasy about a librarian who returns to the tiny village she grew up in while fleeing a civil war. Its very sweet and has more romance than Goblin Emperor, but it does have some of the similar notes of fixing a problem inside a system when fixing the system is out of reach. It has sequels, I've read the second and it was charming but not as nuanced.

The book I've read which is closest in terms of vibes is actually a YA post-apocalyptic novel called An Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet. The actual story is completely different, its about two sisters trying to maintain their farm which is periodically being invaded by monsters. But the dynamic of how Hallie interacts with people, and the thematic line about how communities and families react to and discuss (or fail to discuss) abuse is very Goblin Emperor like, and the preoccupation with the logistics of daily life under stress will feel familiar from Cemeteries of Amalo. There are a group of friendly neighbourhood mad scientists. Also its just very, very good and it drives me insane that no one I know has read it.

Also YA and a rather different in terms of specifics are Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic and Protector of the Small quartets. Even though these are a lot different in terms of style they do have a similar focus on dealing with problems in a setting, and they do again, share some appealing overall vibes with both Goblin and Cemeteries. I love Pierce's other Tortall books as well but they're much more conventional fantasy.

If you just want gaslamp fantasy and fun clothes my recommendation would be Gail Carriger's Finishing School and Parasol Protectorate books. These don't engage with the politics of the setting basically at all and they don't reward engagement the way Goblin, they're much more romantic silly books. I like them as cupcake books and they have a lot of airships.

If you want more necromancy I have two recommendations: Sabriel by Garth Nix starts with the titular Sabriel having to scramble to get home because her father has been killed and she must inherit a position she doesn't totally understand and isn't prepared for. She is now the Abhorsen, the state anti-necromancer - unfortunately, the whole country is overrun by zombies. Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson is another book that I can't believe isn't more popular. I've recommended it before as Sabriel + Murderbot and it features a very traumatized ghost-hunting nun. The actual plot has very little in common with Cemeteries but it does spend a lot of time on the question of what different people do with power and the difference between being in the right and actually doing the right thing, which I was enraptured by.

If you actually want the crime-solving portion of Cemeteries of Amalo, I actually would not recommend the mainstream forensics based series (I know of two if you want them Kathy Reich's Temperance Brennan and Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway). I do like these series but the structure of mainstream crime thrillers gives the crime solving a slightly voyeuristic tone that Addison manages to avoid with Thara. The books which are actually the most similar that I've read, are memoirs by real life forensic professionals, who are much more concerned with the dignity of the people they identify than their fictional counterparts. I've read 4 in the past year or so I would recommend: All That Remains by Sue Black (Dr. Black is a professor of forensic anthropology and this is a memoir which describes the various roles she's played over a long career which has included forensic work for law enforcement, responding to disasters, identifying victims of genocide but also anthropolgical teaching and research), The Bone Woman by Clea Koff (this is a much more narrowly focused memoir of Koff's work for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia), Working Stiff by Judy Melinek (details Dr. Melinek's training as a pathologist in the medical examiner's office which ended up encompassing identifying the victims of 9/11) and Personal Effects by Robert A Jensen (Jensen is a manager of forensic specialists who made a career of managing the recovery and identification of the victims of mass casualty events).

The other non-fiction books I've referred to while reading Goblin are: Servants by Lucy Lethrbridge, which is a history of domestic servants and their relationship to the economy and labor movements, Jacquard's Web by James Essinger which is a history of the developments which lead from the Jacquard Loom to the computer, The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel and The Golden Thread by Kassia St. Clair which are both more general histories of textile production, Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and A Good Time To Be Born by Perri Klass which are both examinations of infant mortality, maternal decision making and public health. I would say these are only recommendations if you're independently interested in these topics except for Perri Klass's book, which I recommend to everyone because I think it should be mandatory.

Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.

(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)

She's the grizzled, rough killer contracted by a young girl who wants revenge on the scumbag who killed her family.