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@naominovik
The officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game set in the world of the Temeraire novel series by Naomi Novik!
This is launching tomorrow! Super excited; Magpie Games are doing this and they've got a really great approach to the RPG that lets players play both people and dragons \o/ Check out if you're into TTRPG!
Popping this up again for the final hours for anyone who didn't see! :D
I said finally, a question, "Solya?" The name felt strange on my tongue, moving, like the high shadow of a bird, circling; even as I said it, I felt the brush of a piercing eye. "It means falcon, in the spell-tongue," the Dragon said.
In Naomi Novik's fantasy book Uprooted, the protagonist's culture is probably based on Polish culture (the kingdom is called "Polnya"). But the language of magic seems to be based on Hungarian?
The wizard called "the Dragon" is named Sarkan, and the Hungarian word for dragon is sárkány. The wizard called "the Falcon" is named Solya, and the Hungarian word for falcon is sólyom. There's also a spell called "loytalal":
"Loytalal," I said softly, to the small coiled braid of Kasia's hair: good for finding the whole, from a part, the scribbled note on the spell had said.
This is probably related to the Hungarian word talál, which means "to find".
Maybe someone who speaks Hungarian could figure out the meanings of the other magical words in the book.
Author sticks her head in to say that the magic language of Sarkan and the other wizards (which comes from the sorcerer king and his people's magic tradition) is indeed based on the Finno-Ugric languages, but not a direct translation of any one of them -- I came up with most of the individual words by translating one or more of the underlying meanings that I wanted into combinations of Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, then mashing them up together and choosing sounds that I liked.
Granby & Iskierka, circa 1809
This is so amazing especially his face, poor Granby! 😂
The officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game set in the world of the Temeraire novel series by Naomi Novik!
This is launching tomorrow! Super excited; Magpie Games are doing this and they've got a really great approach to the RPG that lets players play both people and dragons \o/ Check out if you're into TTRPG!
The Kickstarter is live and already funded! \o/ About to hop into a twitch livestream with the team to talk about the project! :D
The officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game set in the world of the Temeraire novel series by Naomi Novik!
This is launching tomorrow! Super excited; Magpie Games are doing this and they've got a really great approach to the RPG that lets players play both people and dragons \o/ Check out if you're into TTRPG!
I’ve just started my fourth or fifth circumnavigation with the Temeraire series, and I have a question about Temeraire‘s Chinese name. Lung Tein is obviously 龍天, meaning celestial dragon, but there are at least three different meanings for Xiang which are appropriate to the context. Is the Xiang in Temeraire’s Chinese name Xiáng (翔), meaning soar or glide, Xiáng (祥), meaning good luck or good omen, or Xiáng (湘), referring to the Xiang River in southern China?
To be honest it's been so long that I am now an unreliable narrator, so I would rely on whatever it is in the Chinese translation, but I'm 95% sure it was "good luck".
Book 1 of Naomi Novik's beloved 'The Scholomance' trilogy comes to Wraithmarked as an illustrated deluxe hardcover! And in FULL-color!
Sharing this over here for those of you for whom this will be relevant to your interests! Wraithmarked Books is doing a Kickstarter to raise funds for an incredibly fancy deluxe edition of A Deadly Education. I know it's very pricey, sorry! ;_; But even if you can't pledge, everyone can enjoy the fantastic art on view in the KS page!
Signal-boosting much appreciated. <3
Hi Naomi, big fan! Deeply in love with the scholomance series 🥰. I was just wondering something, I had been mulling around the differences in casting and mana building and wondered. Although it's not specifically stated, is there always a somatic component to both?
No, you could absolutely build mana purely by lying still and focusing very hard on a difficult math problem for instance, or someone sitting still and meditating (especially someone for whom that requires enormous effort). That said, I think that physical labor is probably a very easy way that children pick up early on because you see a physical result in the world.
Similarly, in casting, there could absolutely be spells that are only cast by speaking a word or singing, or spells that are just very clearly articulated in the mind. With artifice and alchemy I suppose it depends on what you consider somatic -- but even there, a shield holder that activates when it's hit doesn't require a gesture.
If the maths problem and the exercise took the same amount of effort would the maths problem generate more mana as you don’t have the physical effort as a by product ? ( eg if I am cleaning the floor is the clean floor a cost or a freebie ).
Can you really describe any two things so different as taking the "same" effort? The amount of mana generated by any work depends so much on the specific situation and person involved that I don't think there is a concrete answer. Maybe a useful answer might be, I think that if you really wanted the floor clean, if that was the main goal of your work, probably you wouldn't generate as much mana as you would if you just wanted mana and were cleaning the floor as a meditative/mana-generating exercise.
Okay so omg i didnt know you had a tumblr this is GREAT. I just finished your book “Spinning Silver” and 1. Omg i love Miryem and the Staryk King, sm. 2. i have SO MANY THINGS i’d love to pick the Staryk King’s brain about. I’m sure you’ve seen this question before but imma ask it again but I absolutely have to know:
1) Staryk King’s thoughts when Miryem accepted his storeroom challenge without negotiation (and prolly his thoughts when he came down to each storeroom turned ro gold) + and the most important one; his thoughts when he found out Miryem emptied out his third storeroom. I know we can pretty much pick up on it from Miryem’s POV but i LOVE seeing people’s personal thoughts.
2) Staryk King’s thoughts/pov when Miryem turned the tunnel of melted silver into gold with Chernobog in it and the mountain suddenly filled with sunlight from the inside + his thoughts on her initial taunt of Chernobog and her claiming to seal the mountain. I can’t imagine he was anything but scared when he was rushing towards the storerooms
I’m sure there are more thoughts I haven’t thought of but the Staryk King is SUCH a fascinating and amusing character (Miryem’s sideye when he does a 180 I will never get over it) that I just wanna pick his brain and learn everything about his thoughts and feelings in specific scenes from the icy man himself.
I can't really tell you any of this, I'm sorry! :) There's a reason he doesn't have a POV in the story: you don't get to see him from inside because he isn't a human being, he's a being of magic, and you can only learn with Miryem from the outside to still recognize him as a person and to feel a connection with and care about someone who is so alien in how they think and feel.
Hi Naomi, big fan! Deeply in love with the scholomance series 🥰. I was just wondering something, I had been mulling around the differences in casting and mana building and wondered. Although it's not specifically stated, is there always a somatic component to both?
No, you could absolutely build mana purely by lying still and focusing very hard on a difficult math problem for instance, or someone sitting still and meditating (especially someone for whom that requires enormous effort). That said, I think that physical labor is probably a very easy way that children pick up early on because you see a physical result in the world.
Similarly, in casting, there could absolutely be spells that are only cast by speaking a word or singing, or spells that are just very clearly articulated in the mind. With artifice and alchemy I suppose it depends on what you consider somatic -- but even there, a shield holder that activates when it's hit doesn't require a gesture.
The Scholomance in Minecraft
So after finishing the second read through of the series, I decided I wanted to get a true feeling for the scale of the place and the first thing I had to do so was Minecraft. So I've been working on it for a while and I'd figure I'd share some of the results.
Three things to keep in mind:
This is Minecraft Java Edition, unmodded, no texture packs. There are somethings it just cannot do, or do so in a nice way, like angles and circles.
I based it on the illustrations in the book more than the text and those don't match as much as you might think. Thus this is not book accurate, and not super accurate to the illustrations either.
It's not done, not by a long shot. Most of what you'll see are mock ups and samples of the overall structure. It's way, WAY too big to do more than that.
With that, I present the Scholomance, done in Minecraft.
Amazing!
Naomi Novik's incredible, brilliant, stupendous "Temeraire" series
One of the finest pleasures in life is to discover a complete series of novels as an adult, to devour them right through to the end, and to arrive at that ending to discover that, while you’d have happily inhabited the author’s world for many more volumes, you are eminently satisfied with the series’ conclusion.
I just had this experience and I am still basking in the warm glow of having had such a thoroughly fulfilling imaginary demi-life for half a year. I’m speaking of the nine volumes in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which reimagines the Napoleonic Wars in a world that humans share with enormous, powerful, intelligent dragons.
https://www.naominovik.com/temeraire/
If you are like me, this may not sound like your kind of thing, but please, read on! Novik is a gifted, brilliant storyteller, and even if you, like me, had never read a tale of naval or aerial battles that didn’t bore you to tears, you should absolutely read these books, because I have never been so gripped by action sequences as I was by Novik’s massive military set-pieces.
Likewise, if you’re not a fan of dragon fiction — I’m not, though I do enjoy some heroic fantasy — or talking animal stories (ditto), you owe it to yourself to read these books! Novik’s dragons straddle the line between fantasy and sf, with decidedly nonmagical, bioscience- and physics-grounded characteristics. In the hands of a lesser writer, this can be deadly, yielding an imaginary creature that is neither fantastic nor believable.
But Novik’s deft handling of her dragons — variegated in biological characteristics, sociological arrangements, and umwelt — renders them as creatures both majestic and relatable, decidedly inhuman in outlook but also intensely likeable characters that you root for (or facepalm over, or sometimes both — a delicious sweet-sour cocktail of emotions!).
Finally, if you’re not a fan of historical fiction — again, as I am not! — you should absolutely get these books. Novik is an exhaustive researcher with a gift for rendering the people and circumstances of the past simultaneously comprehensible and unmistakably different, making the past “a different country” indeed, but nevertheless a place whose contours can be firmly grasped and inhabited.
In other words, Novik has written a work of historical-military fiction with dragons in it that I enjoyed, despite having almost no interest in historical fiction, military fiction, or high fantasy. She did this by means of the simple trick of being consistently and variously brilliant in her execution.
First, she is brilliant in the themes that run through these nine volumes: the themes of honor, duty and love, and the impossible dilemmas that arise from trying to be true to yourself and others. Captain William Laurence — the sea captain who finds himself abruptly moved into the dragon corps — is a profoundly honorable man, bound by the strictest of mores. Nominally, Laurence’s moral code is shared by his fellow gentlemen and officers, but where most of the world — all the way up to the Lords of the Admiralty — pays lip service to this code, Laurence truly believes in it.
But there is something of Godel’s Incompleteness in Laurence’s Georgian morality, in that to be completely true to his ethics, Laurence must — again and again, in ways large and small — also violate his ethics, often with the most extreme consequences imaginable at stake. Novik spends nine volumes destruction-testing Laurence’s morality, in a series of hypotheticals of the sort that you could easily spend years arguing over in a philosophy of ethics seminar — but these aren’t dry academic questions, they’re the stuff of fabulous adventure, great battles, hair’s-breadth escapes, and daring rescues.
Next, there is Novik’s historicalness, which is broad, deep, and also brilliantly speculative. Novik has painstakingly researched the historical circumstances of all parts of Napoleonic Europe, but also the Inca empire, colonial Africa, settler Australia, late-Qing China, and Meiji Japan.
It would be one thing if Novik merely brought these places and times to life with perfect verisimilitude, but Novik goes further. She has reimagined how all of these societies would have developed in the presence of massive, powerful, intelligent dragons — how their power structures would relate to dragons, and how the dragons would have related to colonial conquest.
The result is both a stage that is set for a Napoleonic War that is recognizable but utterly transformed, a set of social and strategic speculations that would make for a brilliant West Point grad seminar or tabletop military strategy game or an anticolonial retelling of imperial conquest, but is, instead, the backdrop for nine exciting, world-spanning novels.
Next, there’s Novik’s action staging. I have the world’s worst sense of direction and geometry. I can stay in a hotel for a week and still get lost every time I try to find my room. I can’t read maps. I can’t visualize 3D objects or solve jigsaw puzzles. Hell, I can barely see. Nevertheless, I was able to follow every twist and turn of Novik’s intricate naval/aerial/infantry battles, often with casts of thousands. Not just follow them! I was utterly captivated by them.
Next, there’s Novik’s ability to juggle her characters. While these novels follow two main characters — William Laurence and the dragon Temeraire — they are joined by hundreds of other named characters, from Chinese emperors to the Sapa Inca to Wellington to Napoleon, to say nothing of the dragons, the sea captains, the Japanese lords, the drunken sailors, the brave midshipmen, and so on and so on. Each one of these people is distinct, sharply drawn, necessary to the tale, and strongly individuated. I am in awe (and not a little jealous). Wow. Just wow.
Finally, there’s Novik’s language: the tale is told primarily through Laurence’s point of view, which is rendered in mannered, early 19th century English. Again, this is the kind of thing I usually find either difficult or irritatingly precious or both — but again, it turns out that I just hadn’t read anyone who was really good at this sort of thing. Novik is really, really good at it.
At the end of one summer, years ago, I ran into Vernor Vinge at a conference and asked him how he was doing. He lit up and told me he’d just had one of the best summers of his adult life, because he’d started it by reading the first Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, and had discovered, stretching before him, dozens more in the series. It was an experience he hadn’t enjoyed since he was a boy, discovering the writers that preceded him.
As I read the Temeraire books, I kept returning to that conversation with Vinge. I listened to the Temeraire books as audiobooks, downloading them from Libro.fm and listening to them on my underwater MP3 player as I swam my daily laps. Simon Vance’s narration truly did the series justice, and I could only imagine how complex it must have been for Vance and his director to juggle all the character voices, but they pulled it off beautifully.
I normally read pretty widely, but almost always within a band of themes, settings and modes that I’ve specialized in. This can be a very satisfying experience, of course. Last year, I read dozens of fantastic books that were in my wheelhouse, for all that that wheelhouse is an extremely large one:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review
But reading against type, outside of one’s comfort zone, yields new and distinct delights. The Temeraire series joins the very short list of heroic fantasy novels that I count among my all-time favorites, along with such marvels as Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos/Jhereg series:
https://memex.craphound.com/2017/10/17/listen-up-you-really-owe-it-to-yourself-to-read-15-vlad-taltos-novels-seriously/
Brust is tremblingly close to finishing the Vlad books, which I started reading as a 13 year old and have been devouring ever since. I can’t wait for the final volumes to come out, so I can binge-read the whole series from beginning to end.
There are so many good new books coming out every month, and it can feel like a disservice to those writers to indulge in backlist reading, but there is a lot to be said for revisiting beloved works of decades gone by. I am so glad to have read Temeraire at last — I haven’t been this excited to read something I missed the first time around since I read Red Mars 12 years after its initial publication:
https://memex.craphound.com/2004/05/28/red-mars-a-very-belated-appreciation/
[Image ID: A grid showing the Penguin Random House covers of the first eight Temeraire novels by Naomi Novik.]
:D <3 <3 <3
Hugos
So about the Hugos kerfuffle, I want to say a few things, starting with the caveat that the contents of this post are 100% my own personal opinions and not that of the current board of the OTW or anyone currently running the AO3! Of course, they are obviously the correct opinions and everyone should share them. :P
One: it’s perfectly clear what won the Related Work Hugo: the thing that was on the ballot, which was “An Archive Of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works.” That’s what people nominated and voted for. No one now gets to say that actually the Archive won for something more specific because that’s not what was on the ballot.
Two: there is a sad longstanding history within sff lit fandom of people misrepresenting IP law to claim that copyright/trademark holders “had to” go after transformative fannish activity of various kinds, in order to intimidate and silence transformative-fandom fans who were making non-mainstream and non-commercial art that they didn’t like. I’m glad it’s not working anymore.
If you are ever faced with actual legal action over transformative fannish activity, you should go to the OTW Legal team for advice. Until then, make them show you the money C&D before you silence yourself or let them chase you.
Personally I think the WSFS needs to worry about a handful of Twitter jokes and pins about as much as JKR and Warner Bros need to worry about the handmade Harry Potter potion bottles that were on sale in the Worldcon dealers room, and if their trademark committee really does have any sincere worries, they should go talk to a lawyer instead of posting online about it.
Three: We won a Hugo! That’s a lovely happy thing. Please don’t let a handful of sour notes spoil it for you. The real thing to take away from this win remains that the majority of the fannish community of Worldcon does in fact gladly embrace transformative fandom. Loads of people at the con stood to help accept the award. There wasn’t a corner of the room without someone standing. Many more applauded and cheered us all on.
I hope loads of you have the chance to go to Worldcon in future and take #myhugo selfies with our award. Also, I encourage any of you in New Zealand or DC to volunteer with the 2020 and 2021 cons, and/or to sign up as potential program participants and offer ideas for potential transformative-fandom panels. It’s a great way to meet other sff fans of all kinds and have the positive exchanges that IMO are the vast majority of what happens at the actual cons.
Four: If you haven’t yet, you should go enjoy the poetry thread. “And smale twitters maken melodye” is true genius. <3
I’ve been rereading Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver on audiobook this time! I paused it to write down this line to do in calligraphy while I kept listening, it was one of my favourite lines the first time I read the book too.
Tharkay in #15
I find this quote reflects Tharkay’s issues with upper-class society pretty well, which makes his snarky banter with Laurence (who is like the poster child of being a proper gentlemen) all the better.
I love this and the colors!
UM NAOMI NOVIK I WOULD LIKE A HAND WRITTEN APOLOGY FOR WHAT YOU DID TO LEVITAS
Free foil cover from RH!
Hey all, I kept forgetting to post this, BUT if you either preordered Spinning Silver or buy it in a bookstore this week (in the US only, sorry overseas folks!), send in a photo of your receipt and Random House will mail you this limited edition amazing silver-foiled cover! I just got my own copies and it’s super shiny and beautiful and I am petting it with glee. :D
