A World Without Christmas

The Hallmark channel has already begun its annual Countdown to Christmas movie marathon. For us (Episcopalians) the season runs from the first Sunday of Advent (early December) to Epiphany (January 6, aka Twelfth Night), and I keep the tree up at least until Epiphany. But starting before Halloween?!

Last Saturday night, I watched WHERE ARE YOU, CHRISTMAS? The protagonist wishes Christmas didn't exist and wakes up from a minor car crash to discover she's got her wish. She finds herself in an alternate reality where nobody else has heard of the holiday.

Does the script take into account any of the implications of a world with no Christmas? If they even thought of that aspect at all, they didn't bother, maybe to avoid complications that would distract from the theme of rediscovering the joy of the holiday. No Christmas implies no Jesus and no Christianity, a change that would make the history of Europe, Britain, and the Americas almost unrecognizable. As far as religion is concerned, you'd have Judaism, Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and modern-day versions of the various pagan cults. As for Islam, I conjecture it might not exist without Christianity, at least in a form we'd easily recognize. So we should see pagan temples all over the place and people celebrating Saturnalia and/or Yuletide. (Earth's history as portrayed in the cartoon series STEVEN UNIVERSE takes this sort of thing seriously. There's no Christianity, so we don't see Christmas, Halloween, or Valentine's Day.)

For a less drastic point of divergence from actual history, suppose the Reformation as a whole concurred with the Puritan belief that the feast of the Nativity shouldn't be celebrated because it's merely a Christian veneer over a pagan festival, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation adopted that position, too. In that case, we can imagine Christmas being abandoned in the early modern era. Therefore, some people would recognize the word "Christmas" when the heroine mentions it, but for the most part they'd be medieval historians, which she probably wouldn't encounter in a typical Hallmark-movie small town. Moreover, in every human society outside of the tropics (as discussed in Stephen Nissenbaum's delightful book THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS), the winter solstice has been celebrated by feasting and other forms of excess. In the absence of Yule or some other pagan observance, what, in this alternative universe, replaces Christmas? Apparently New Year's celebrations dominate the winter festive season, although this point is mentioned only once. The dialogue includes a slyly self-referential remark about New Year's-themed TV movies starting to air in June.

Aside from the practical difficulties of fitting this kind of speculation into a two-hour feature film (including commercial breaks), I suspect there's not much overlap between writers of alternate-history SF and made-for-TV romance movies.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Facing a New Year

Happy New Year! -- even though it is an arbitrary date. Why not the precise day of the winter solstice instead of over a week later? Or, better yet, the spring equinox? The ancient Romans originally set the beginning of the year in March, the debut of spring, which has a certain fitness. That year contained ten months of 30 or 31 days each. Wikipedia has a detailed article about the changes and reforms in the Roman calendar over many centuries:

Roman Calendar

Earth's movement through space has the inconvenient feature that a full revolution around the sun (year) isn't evenly divisible by the moon cycles (months). So having twelve months in a year doesn't work properly; days are left over, making each month, except February, longer than a moon cycle. The original Roman calendar had "intercalary" clusters of days or even whole "extra" months, depending on which era we're looking at. According to Wikipedia, "winter was left as an unassigned span of days," later replaced by January and February. Moreover, in the early calendar, weeks had eight days, a figure that doesn't fit properly into the phases of the moon or divide equally into 30 days.

To make matters worse, the solar calendar doesn't have an even number of days, requiring insertion of "leap days" at fixed intervals.

In ancient Rome as well as some other societies, the intercalary days were considered unlucky. Is it unlucky to be born on February 29? Even if leap year babies, like the hero of PIRATES OF PENZANCE (who got trapped by that technical point in his apprenticeship contract), have far fewer birthdays than the number of years in their lives, I suppose they still get annual birthday celebrations. I sort of like the idea of a cluster of "unassigned" days in a year. They could be holidays with no obligations of any kind.

As I've mentioned in the past, I don't make "resolutions" anymore. I do set "goals," modest, mainly short-term ones. My immediate goal in January, as usual, is to finish my annual vampire fiction bibliography update and send it to interested parties before the end of the month. In terms of writing goals, I have two more "orphaned" (by a company that went out of business) erotic paranormal romance novellas to revise slightly and submit to my new publisher who's been re-releasing them. I plan to re-release on my own a spicy, humorous paranormal romance work with Lovecraftian elements that consists of a linked pair of stories from the same former publisher. With a different publisher, I have one older paranormal romance novel, non-erotic, awaiting re-release. Although I have no new fiction in mind at present, that situation could always change later in the year.

In other areas of life, I aim to get back to riding my stationary bike a full 29-30 minutes in each session rather than slacking off to barely above 25 minutes, as I've done too often lately. Also, I tentatively agreed to sign up for the coffee hour duty roster at church, and I plan to follow through with that activity. I'd like to declare a goal of catching up with the dozens of manga volumes in my to-read stack, but that's probably a fantasy under the category of, "If I can't die until I've read all these, I'm destined to live forever." The collection is infinite, because several new manga are added every month. There is, however, some possibility of catching up with the prose books in the pile before they multiply beyond control, because I usually manage to keep up and got behind only within the past couple of months.

Wishing you the best of luck with your goals for 2023. And, to repeat one of my favorite quotes from MASH, "Here's to the new year. May she be a durn sight better than the last one."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Goals

As I've mentioned before, I haven't done New Year's "resolutions" in a long time. Thinking of the coming year in those terms feels discouraging, a potential set-up for failure. What I like to think of are "goals," and preferably modest enough to be fairly sure of accomplishing. Positive reinforcement for one's efforts is always a good thing. So here are a few goals I have for the near future:

Transcribe and release this year's vampire fiction bibliography update by the last week of January at the latest. Write a story in collaboration with my husband to submit to the forthcoming Darkover anthology well before the end-of-summer deadline. Write a brief essay the editor of a vampire journal asked me to compose for the magazine's "Notes" section. Discuss with one of my publishers the possible re-release of my erotic paranormal romances "orphaned" by the demise of Ellora's Cave that I haven't already self-published. I'm also awaiting reprint of a few more "orphaned" non-erotic romances contracted with a different publisher, but the schedule for that process isn't in my control. I don't have any active plans for original fiction in progress right now. Whether I produce any in 2022 will depend partly on whether one of my publishers comes out with a submission call that intrigues me. I considered adding "get through the manga in my TBR stack" to this list, but that objective is probably unattainable, because it's infinite; new books keep appearing. (Heavens to murgatroyd, I wonder how that happens?)

In terms of the bigger picture, I recently read an article about society's goal in regard to COVID-19. The question under consideration was: What do we expect when we anticipate the end of the pandemic? What do we mean when we talk about an "end," and what would it look like? What we do know is that the virus will probably never disappear from the face of the Earth. Which numbers of case rates, hospitalizations, and deaths would we regard as a sign that the pandemic is over? Most likely, it will subside to an endemic level like ordinary flu, kept in check by annual boosters. In another recent article about how pandemics end, examples of past infectious disease threats and their outcomes were analyzed. Some were eradicated, some died out on their own, some had their risks drastically reduced by vaccination, and some became endemic (always present in the environment but not a serious danger to most people). All we can be sure of is that COVID-19 won't last forever—even if it's beginning to seem like it.

Whether in our personal lives or on a nationwide or global scale, we can't meaningfully achieve goals unless we define them in specific, measurable terms. Unless we're sure where we want to go, how will we know when we get there?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Games Cyborg Brains Play

Researchers at Cortical Labs have designed "cyborg brains," composed of living human brain cells atop a microelectrode array in a petri dish, informally labeled "mini-brains."

Brain Cells Play Pong

The mini-brains were exposed to a simplified version of the game Pong, with no opponent, in which signals from the cyborg brains' neurons hit the "paddle" to propel the "ball." Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs, remarks on how fast the biological brains learn the game in contrast to current AI technology. Kagan compares the mini-brains' virtual environment to the Matrix in the movie by that name.

The next step would be to produce organic neurons "integrated with traditional silicon computing" for even more efficient learning. The mini-brains offer an example of intelligence of a sort—they can learn—without consciousness. But suppose they became aware of their own existence, environment, and purpose? What if they aspired to more of a purpose in life than playing solitaire Pong? Of course, they're far from complex enough for that step, but it's fun to imagine. . . .

I'm reminded of a spin-off series from the SWORD ART ONLINE anime and manga, in which virtual human beings are seeded into a computer-simulated world and programmed to evolve a culture. Circumscribed by strict rules built into their environment, they develop a civilization with laws, morals, social classes, and all the components of a society. Furthermore, these experimental life-forms awaken to consciousness. They experience emotions, aspirations, pains, and pleasures as their world grows over many centuries in their time but only months on the scale of outside "reality." Shutting down the experiment would effectively mean annihilating an entire population of living people.

So far, though, the mini-brains described in the article linked above have no experiences other than endless games of Pong. At the end of the article, there's a link to a page about a scientist who tried, with mixed success, to teach rats to play the first-person shooter video game Doom. Will a future mode of entertainment consist of watching lab animals and virtual intelligences compete against each other in computer game tournaments?

Happy New Year! And, to repeat the annual wish of Col. Potter on MASH, "May she be a durn sight better than the last one."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Happy New Year

Here's a page of New Year's customs from around the world:

New Year's Traditions

One immediately notices the universal theme of "noise."

In our family during my childhood and teens, the principal New Year's Day custom was to undecorate and remove the Christmas tree. After doing the same thing during the early years of my marriage, I later abandoned that exhausting, depressing practice. When my husband and I became Episcopalians, I learned that the Christmas season doesn't end until January 6 (Epiphany, Twelfth Night). I now start dismantling the tree on or about January 6 and work on the task for several days instead of trying to accomplish it in a single marathan burst. Because we have an artificial tree, we have no safety constraints on how long it can stay up. Oddly from our contemporary perspective, in parts of England it used to be considered unlucky to keep Christmas decorations past Candlemas (February 2, aka Groundhog Day), so as long as we get the job done sometime in January, we're fine.

Although I was born in Virginia and had a grandmother from North Carolina, I never heard of the black-eyed-peas tradition until I got married. My husband, from a Navy family with roots in the Midwest and West Coast regions, cooks them for himself every year. Each pea is supposed to represent a coin; the more you eat, the more wealth you'll receive in the coming year. Since I dislike the taste of them, he has to accumulate good fortune for both of us.

The Scottish "first foot" tradition holds that it's good luck if your first visitor after midnight on the cusp of New Year's Eve and January 1 is a tall, dark stranger. Sharyn McCrumb has a humorous story, "A Wee Doch and Doris," in which a bewildered burglar accidentally becomes an elderly widow's first footer. You can find this tale in McCrumb's collection FOGGY MOUNTAIN BREAKDOWN.

I haven't made New Year's resolutions as such in a long time. My immediate goals for 2021 are to finish and submit a story for a line of Christmas-cookie-themed fiction planned by one of my publishers and to work on getting more of my orphaned e-books (from defunct publishers) re-released through Kindle self-publishing.

My main Christmas present this holiday season was the full DVD set of the TV series MASH. One memorable episode begins and ends on two New Year's Eves, bookending a montage of a year in the life of the MASH unit. At each New Year's Eve party, Col. Potter proposes the same toast, which goes something like this: "Happy New Year, and may it be a durn sight better than the last one."

Amen!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

SF Seasons

Happy New Year! The days begin to lengthen, even if imperceptibly at first, but nevertheless I have to brace myself for over two months more of early darkness and damp cold. We temperate-zone residents are used to a year divided into the conventional four seasons, recurring in a predictable annual rhythm. My family had a funny encounter many years ago at King's Dominion (an amusement park) in northern Virginia, while standing in line to check out of the hotel adjacent to the park. This happened on a day at the height of summer, and the weather was as expected in a Virginia summer, high humidity with temperatures in the eighties or low nineties. An apparently British couple in line with us asked whether "it was always this hot" all year around. Mentally (not aloud, of course) I collapsed with laughter. In this area we have four seasons just like most other locations in North America, with pleasant springs and falls and miserably cold winters. If our family's experience of living in Hawaii in the 1970s was typical, tropical regions have two basic seasons, rainy and dry, with little variation in temperature or length of daylight.

Science fiction and fantasy often feature imaginary worlds with seasons different from those familiar to us Earth dwellers, but the stories don't always take full advantage of the possibilities. The setting of the Game of Thrones saga famously suffers winters that last for years, whose timing and duration vary. Yet I don't remember noticing in either the novels or the TV series an explanation of how human civilization in Westeros survives those ordeals. How could enough food possibly be stored to sustain entire nations over a multi-year winter, especially with no way of knowing when the cold season will descend upon them? Maybe the southern regions of the inhabited world escape mainly unscathed and supply provisions for the affected areas? The economic effects would be calamitous, though, even if most people managed to scrape by. Isaac Asimov's classic story "Nightfall" takes place on a planet in the middle of a cluster of stars, so that it experiences full darkness only once in several centuries. Although a short story can't cover every aspect of worldbuilding, admittedly, even in the story's later novel-length expansion I don't recall any consideration of how different a culture that develops in perpetual light would be from ours. Agriculture alone would evolve in ways strange to us, wouldn't it? Recently I read SHADOW AND LIGHT and SHADOW RISING, the first two books in an excellent fantasy series by Peter Sartucci. They're set on a planet that revolves around a double star. No results of having two suns, in terms of either circadian rhythms or climate, are developed. As in "Nightfall" with its planet of multiple suns, not only weather but seismic phenomena would surely be affected. With more books to come, however, maybe this aspect of the setting will be elaborated later.

One novel I've read within the past year takes full advantage of its setting's weird seasons, as the title indicates: THE FIFTH SEASON, first book in the Broken Earth series by N. K. Jemisin, offers a devastating, in-depth portrayal of a world periodically ravaged by geological disasters of apocalyptic scope. Fifth Seasons appear at unpredictable intervals and can last from a few months or years to an entire century. At those times, worldwide tectonic cataclysms cause earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, with side effects such as climate change, crop failures, poisonous fungal growths, etc. Appropriately, this world's cultures are crucially shaped by the Fifth Season phenomenon, which includes the ambiguous role of the few people with the gift of controlling seismic events.

Here's a page that lists eight SF novels about climate change:

Sci-Fi Books That Highlight Climate Change

And here's a different list of fourteen novels focusing on climate catastrophes (including some overlap with the previous one, naturally):

Sci-Fi Books for Earth Day

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

New Year Customs

Happy New Year!

Do you eat black-eyed peas for luck on New Year's Day? Although my grandmother, who grew up in rural North Carolina, often cooked black-eyed peas, she never mentioned this tradition. Weirdly, I heard of it only after getting married, even though my husband was a "Navy brat" whose family didn't settle in Virginia until he was about twelve. Some cooks include a coin in the pot, with the person who finds the coin getting extra luck. My husband doesn't do that. Nor does he follow the additional custom of eating collard greens along with the peas. Peas symbolize prosperity, and the greens represent money. Another superstition mandates eating exactly 365 peas, a separate portion of luck for each day of the year. (Who counts out 365 peas for each serving at the table? And in leap years, do they add one more?) Lentils, similarly, are sometimes said to bring prosperity because they represent coins. There's an Italian sweet pastry that should be eaten at New Year's to ensure a sweet year. All these arise from sympathetic magic, of course, the concept that apparent resemblances have real-world effects.

Scottish tradition includes the belief that the "first footer"—the first person to cross the threshold of your home after midnight on New Year's Eve—should be a dark-haired man. A woman or a non-dark-haired person as first footer brings bad luck rather than good.

Here's a list of New Year's superstitions, mainly things you should avoid doing on the first day of the year:

New Year's Superstitions

Don't cry on that day, or you'll have sadness all year—okay. But don't wash the dishes or the laundry? Those are new to me.

Another common belief is that you shouldn't begin the year owing any debt. Excellent advice, but most of us have little hope of fulfilling that condition, what with all the credit card charges for holiday gifts and festivities.

My parents had a tradition of taking down the Christmas tree on New Year's Day. Several decades ago I joyfully abandoned this exhausting and depressing habit. I don't start un-decorating until Epiphany (January 6, the end of the "twelve days of Christmas").

Aside from the traditional kiss at midnight, do you follow any particular customs to inaugurate the New Year?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

New Year's Goals

In January, I prefer to set "goals" (modest, achievable ones) rather than "resolutions." The latter word sounds more intimidating (and yet fragile). Assuming the annual "Sword and Sorceress" anthology appears again in 2018, I plan to submit a story to it, as usual. Also, my husband and I will work together to come up with a submission for the next Darkover anthology. We had collaborative works in the 2016 and 2017 volumes but didn't make it into the one forthcoming in May 2018, so there's a challenge for us.

Writers Exchange E-Publishing is gradually re-releasing my former Amber Quill books. (By my count, there are eight more to go.) I've written a next-generation sequel to one of those, which I'll submit to Writers Exchange sometime soon. Since they don't publish erotic romance, one of my 2018 goals will be to compile e-books of my erotic romances from my other defunct publisher, Ellora's Cave, toning them down a little from heavily graphic to steamy. I've already released two self-published Kindle steamy romance books. ARDENT BLOOD (originally published by Amber Quill) comprises three novellas, featuring werewolves, vampires, and a lonely undine:

Ardent Blood

DEMON'S FALL (originally included in a multi-author Ellora's Cave anthology) stars a fallen angel who defies his infernal lords to save a woman he's been assigned to tempt. I think of it as inspirational erotic paranormal romance, if such a genre crossing can exist:

Demon's Fall

My next steamy romance bundle will probably contain my three related vampire novellas from Ellora's Cave, because it's important to me to have all my "Vanishing Breed" vampire tales available for purchase. I've combined two linked stories in that universe from the fanzine GOOD GUYS WEAR FANGS 4 into a short e-book, VAMPIRE'S TRIBUTE:

Vampire's Tribute

I'm also putting together a collection of stories my husband and I had in the discontinued fantasy webzine SORCEROUS SIGNALS.

Other than short stories for submission to the "Sword and Sorceress" and Darkover anthologies, I don't have any new works planned for the near future. I do have a light paranormal romance novella out on submission and hope to find a home for it in the coming year. What are your writing goals for 2018?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Happy New Year

2017 is almost upon us (while I've barely gotten used to writing 2016, a symptom of growing old, no doubt). Do you make New Year's resolutions? As I've probably mentioned before, I gave up that concept a long time ago. I think more in terms of goals, plans, and hopes. Some goals for 2017 include: finishing the paper I have to deliver at a conference in March (a task I can't avoid unless I want to show up at the session with a rough draft!); submitting stories to two annual anthologies in which I've occasionally been included in past years; and completing a short novel I started several months ago but haven't worked on lately because of holiday prep, proofreading a re-released novel, and typing up my usual annual vampire fiction bibliography update.

The current issue of RWR (the Romance Writers of America members' magazine) includes an article about planning. It highlights the virtues of paper planners and discusses some advantages of mapping out long-term and short-term plans on paper instead of just relying on an electronic schedule. Brain research has shown that writing by hand is uniquely helpful in making material "stick" in the mind. While I haven't tried a planner, I do like making tangible lists. The older I get, the more I need the confidence of having things written down in order to remember them.

Along with some good things—my husband and I celebrated our 50th anniversary in September, with all our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren present, along with some other relatives and friends—2016 also brought some negative events for me. My two principal publishers closed this year, leaving most of my works "orphaned." Another publisher is picking up the books from Amber Quill, but of course it will take a while before everything becomes available again. I'm still considering what to do with the books and stories from the other closing publisher, so another project will be self-publishing a few of those pieces. Recently we've had illness and other trouble in our extended family. In the public sphere, we've witnessed the loss of iconic figures such as Leonard Cohen, John Glenn, and Carrie Fisher. And then there's the American presidential election, a source of "comfort and joy" to almost 50 percent of our population, but a cause of disappointment and anxiety for me.

On Christmas Eve our priest preached on Hope—as distinct from optimism, a feeling of confidence (whether substantiated or not) that things are inevitably getting better. Looking around at the world, we see many factors to undermine optimism. As one of my favorite carols, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day," laments, "Hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on Earth, good will to men." All the more reason to practice the cardinal virtue of Hope.

Loosely quoting Colonel Potter from a New Year's episode of MASH, "Here's to the new year. May she be a durn sight better than the last one."

By the way, on the subject of the holiday season, which doesn't officially end until January 6 (Epiphany), I've just finished rereading Connie Willis's collection MIRACLE AND OTHER CHRISTMAS STORIES, as well as her two long stories not in that volume, "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know" (the cumulative effect of all those thousands of playings of "White Christmas" generates an unprecedented worldwide weather anomaly) and "All Seated on the Ground" (aliens land, and nobody can figure out what they want until they hear Christmas carols at a mall). Willis's keen wit infuses all the stories with her unique brand of humor-in-seriousness. Highly recommended!

Wishing happiness to all in 2017!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt