What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan

Kind of a mouthful of a title, isn't it?

I stumbled on this book when I was browsing the stacks at a local bookstore, and the title intrigued me. I owned a copy of Kind of Blue and played it when the mood struck me, and hearing some of my youngest's high school friends play Freddie Freeloader as part of the jazz band* they put together their junior and senior years only reignited my interest in that era of Jazz. While I'd known about the basics surrounding the lead-up to the creation of Kind of Blue, courtesy of the Ken Burns documentary series Jazz, the detailed biography and intersection of Miles, John, and Bill was relatively unknown to me. 

The book begins with a retelling of James Kaplan's interview with Miles Davis for Vanity Fair back in 1989. As James tells it, his brother somehow convinced an editor at Vanity Fair that James knew all about jazz and so the editor gave him the job of interviewing the often difficult Miles. James promptly freaked out and crammed for the interview prior to showing up for what was originally to be one hour. Apparently Miles was taken with James and was very generous with his time, forming a lasting impression on James which led to this article (found in the Vanity Fair web archives) and a lifelong interest in jazz.

James then proceeds into both a biography of the three men, interweaving their tales with the progression of jazz from the Big Band era into Bebop and beyond. Some biographers would stop at the point of creation of Kind of Blue, but not Kaplan. He puts the album into perspective by showing the direction the three --and jazz itself-- went after that inflection point. After all, 1959 was also the year of the release by Ornette Coleman of The Shape of Jazz to Come, which announced to the world the presence of what is now known as Free Jazz. At that point, jazz began to move toward the avant-garde in the same way modern Classic Music did in the same time general time period. 

If you're a student of the music, or just enjoy music in general, you might find the book fascinating. And more than a bit sad.

Why sad? Because the history of jazz is littered with corpses, slaves to another mistress: drugs.

Miles also noted that the session was punctuated by the arrival of "all these hustlers and dope dealers looking for Bird [Charlie Parker]"--who kept disappearing into the bathroom, then coming back "all fucked up and shit. But after Bird got high, he just played his ass off."

And there it was, inexorably entwined with the growing fame that this album would accelerate, a coded message to young aspirants, the first two premises of a siren syllogism: Bird does heroin. Bird plays like a god on heroin. Young musicians could draw the obvious, but spurious, conclusion. And to the sorrow of so many, many did.  

 --From 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, Pages 65-66.

There are times when it was difficult to read about these incredible musicians as junkies who could create masterful improvisational pieces night after night, particularly given my personal aversion to needles.** Knowing also that other jazz musicians of that era such as Dizzy Gillespie or Dave Brubeck eschewed drugs and still performed at a high level turns the triple biography into a tragedy, one that you can see coming a mile away.

Another theme of the book is the racism experienced by the jazz musicians, and how they responded to such racism. You could draw a direct line between the racism experienced by all three and their consequent drug addictions, and from there to their eventual decline and death. 

Still, there's the music. Oh god, the music.

I get it: jazz isn't for everyone. I'm not about to make any converts here, because like, say, an Irish Stout or an India Pale Ale when you are exposed mainly to American Lagers, it takes some getting used to.

Jazz and popular music split a long time ago, much longer than I've been alive, but I've made a living of finding music, books, and games off the beaten path.*** The beauty and tragedy of Jazz is wrapped up in the beauty and tragedy of countless artistic endeavors, and as long as there's music to be made, Jazz will endure. 3 Shades of Blue was a great book to absorb, and I spent way too many late hours reading it before I realized I had to get at least some sleep before I had to wake up for work the next day.

*The band's name was called Kinda Jazzy, in a self-deprecating fashion. They played in at least one jazz club around Cincinnati, somehow managing to be allowed to play despite none of them being old enough to actually drink at the establishment. 

**Yes, I know, I have to deal with needles due to my medical conditions, but that doesn't mean that I have to like it.

***If you don't think MMOs aren't popular, just remember that WoW had at its peak 13-14 million subscribers globally in a world of 8 billion people. That's less than 0.2% of the global population.

What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

For someone who's been reading Science Fiction and Fantasy since the early 80s, the fact I've never read a novel by Terry Pratchett is kind of a surprise.

It's kind of hard to avoid Sir Terry's works, given that on top of his Discworld novels he has that collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, that was turned into a mini-series on Amazon Prime. Back when I actually participated on Facebook there were days I saw quotes from Sir Terry's works every couple of hours.*

The strange thing is that I don't get people proselytizing me to read the Discworld novels like, oh, people reading Robert Jordan back in the day. Maybe that's an acknowledgement that Sir Terry's works aren't for everyone. 

This feels rather uncomfortably like people
proselytizing about FF XIV. From Reddit; the
original poster got it from a Discworld FB group. 

So I kind of drifted along, with the Sir Terry memes on the edges of my vision, and not really wanting to read the books. After all, reading over 40 books is a bit of a commitment, no matter what people say.

Then Modiphius released the Kickstarter for the Discworld TT RPG.

It looked interesting, but given that I'd never read the books there wasn't that much of a pull on me. However, the Kickstarter raked in over $3 million in USD, which caused me to sit up. Maybe I ought to go check out these books for myself.

Having read my share of Douglas Adams, when I read the descriptive term "British SF&F humor" I have a reference already in place. And that is the standard I compare others against. Is that fair? No, it's not, but since Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came first, that's what happens.

***

So, what did I think of the book?

It was a light read. Fun in spots, tedious in others, and I spent far more time recognizing the characters and situations Terry poked fun at than simply enjoying the book. I know this book was written for people like me because I recognized Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser**, Conan, Elric (okay, elements of Elric), the Dragonriders of Pern, D&D's quirks (the Luggage and spellcasting), and even any stereotypical fantasy city with lots of backstabbing this and that, so... Lankhmar, Sanctuary (from Thieves' World), Tarantia (Conan), and others. 

Yes, I put this here for that quote at the beginning.

From The Scorpion King.

Every person that our two companions Rincewind and Twoflower came across, I kept trying to figure out what story Terry was poking fun at. Maybe that's not a fair thing to do, but after having run across so many classic Fantasy references, it came to me quite naturally. I'm pretty sure that the gothic horror elements of the novel were relating to both H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror as well as other touchstones of the 19th century, such as The Time Machine, Frankenstein, and Dracula. 

The novel does end on a literal cliffhanger, so I presume Sir Terry had intended to write multiple novels when he started Discworld. What I've seen in some other authors is that they write, hoping to get a sale, and then once a book finally sells, they then have to scramble to write more in that world. Kristen Britain's Green Rider series comes to mind, because her first book Green Rider is pretty complete as it is. You can tell in the narration that the second novel came about after the first novel sold; that doesn't mean it was a poor book, but it's just that you spend so much effort to make that first sale that when you finally do and the publisher says "okay, what happens next?" you have to scramble a bit. 

One thing that I do realize is that these books aren't very dense at all. This is good, because I could go for more light reads, and it kept me preoccupied on my 2 to 3 hour layovers at the airport in Charlotte last week. 

I do have the next book published in the series, The Light Fantastic, and if it reads as quickly as this one then I can spend a few hours here and there, reading it while I take care of other things around the house.

Such as taxes.

*I guess you could tell that I hung around a lot of geeks. Shocking, I know.

**I always considered Fritz Leiber's creations --and the city of Lankhmar-- as a spoof of the sword and sorcery genre, so.... a spoof of a spoof?

Getting Back on That Horse

"[Now, there are two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse.] One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and, at leisure, figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial."

--Wilbur Wright, 1901.  From The Wright Brothers, by David McCollough, pp 67-68.

I've been thinking about what works and what doesn't work in a story lately.

(Yeah, it's gonna be one of those posts, so buckle yourself in and hold on tight.)

Normally, I'd start writing something about this, get partway through, and then shelve the post for an indeterminate amount of time. I sometimes come back to them --like this past Meme Monday-- but a lot of times they just sit there in the Draft portion of the blog, never to see the light of day again.

This is a screenshot of some of the posts still in draft form from early 2023. Some of them are musings, some are fiction with placeholder titles, and oh look, there's an RPG From the Past still in there.*

However, I've more of a mind to plow though this, since I've been in more of a contemplative mood lately.

My first contemplation, that work sucks and takes up too much of my time, is hardly a new revelation. Those people who absolutely love their job genuinely worry me, because it feels that they've got blinders on and fail to notice the reality and drama of day-to-day life working with people whose goals are different than yours.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. It's about stories and what makes them tick.

Kaylriene had a post yesterday about what worked and didn't in the story/lore for Retail WoW's Dragonflight expansion, and that got me to thinking that what ails Retail WoW isn't something that could be fixed by returning Warcraft to its "more manly" roots or any other politically charged bullshit, but rather by going out and actually stepping away from Warcraft itself.

No, I'm not talking about any bullshit such as when people who want to break into upper management go to get their MBA**, but actually going out and working on their craft the only way you truly can to improve yourself: by expanding your horizons.

As I mentioned in my comment on Kaylriene's post, my high school guidance counselor back in the 80s used to constantly tell me to go and read more. "It'll help you get into college," he added, and whenever we met*** he'd check in to see what I was reading and how much I was reading.

Did he care about the quality of the books? No, not really. I mean, he knew me well enough that I wasn't going to read middle or elementary grade material****, but he wanted me to get out and simply read. And before you ask, I could tell he had absolutely no clue as to Science Fiction and Fantasy novels that comprised the bulk of my reading habits, but that wasn't the issue for him. 

Now, my senior English teacher in high school --it would now be considered AP English, a combination of English Literature and English Composition-- did care about the quality of my reading, because it reflected in the quality of my writing. He and my other English teachers insisted I keep writing, because the more I wrote the better I wrote. This was reinforced by, of all people, one of my Physics professors. 

No, really.

He was my professor for Advanced Lab I and II, which were Junior and Senior level Physics lab courses. Unlike a lot of the Engineering labs that my friends had which were cookbook in nature, my Advanced Lab's experiments were along the lines of the professor saying "Here's some journal articles and literature, go and reproduce the Photoelectric Effect with the lab material in Room 101B."

Given that I had to write an average of 15-20 pages per lab report, my professor would push me to write better. "The only way you'll get better at it is to do it more often," he told me. I certainly didn't see how my writing improved over the course of those two semesters, but he did and told me as much.

Why bring all this up? Because from what I've seen, Blizzard's story team needs to break out of their rut and do the two things that will truly improve their writing.

***

It's far too easy to claim that Blizzard's story team as a whole was better back in the days when gaming was far more a masculine endeavor or some other politically charged bullshit*****, but my opinion is that they were better because they abided by the 'less is more' dictum. But the longer they worked on their games, the more internally focused they became and the more the writing became bloated.

Their writers need to write more, and not simply Warcraft. Or Diablo. Or whatever.

Stop abiding by the Rule of Cool.

Stop trying to shoehorn in a backstory that's simply not there.

Stop writing cutscenes that have nothing to do with the player. 

Stop writing novels and other media that end up being a requirement to understand what's going on in a game. If you can't follow along in a game without leaving the game, there's a problem with the game.

Stop trying to write cutscenes and story text with gigantic info dumps and passing it off as being normal. As one of my English teachers once told me, people don't talk like that. If they're giving a lecture, sure, but if they're just talking to people? Come on...

Info dump aside, they're freaking DRAGONS.
Why are they in, well, our form? I think we could
cut Blizz some slack if they were in their 'normal'
form for these conversations.
Pic from GameRant of a Dragonflight cutscene.

But more than anything else, they need to read more than just Blizzard material. Or other material written for video games. Break out of your rut and try different genres.

***

I can actually speak to that last one from experience.

Last April, when I posted about my experience reading a Romantic Fantasy novel written by a friend of mine, I mentioned that I'd not read very many Romance novels. I think Sharon Shinn's novels count, and I've read Jennifer Crusie as well, but beyond that, not very much. I mean, the novels I have read have had sex and romance in them --to varying degrees of authenticity-- but not nearly enough to qualify for the Romance genre. 

But I know enough to know that I need to read more to be able to write better dialogue and human interaction, and while I'm comfortable in my own skin for the most part, I have perused the Romance section of our local bookstore and... Yeah, I'm kind of lost. At least with the Literature section I know what I'm getting into with the mishmash of classics with purely literary stuff with popular novels, and I've a working knowledge of the Mystery section as well given that I do read Mysteries from time to time. But Romance?

Sorry, couldn't resist. This was all over
social media last Fall.

Well, I figured that if I was going to do this right, I ought to go back to the original Romance novelist.

Jane Austen.

My mom, the one who gets flustered by anything in a novel beyond a PG rating#, requested a Regency Romance novel for Christmas, so when I bought the novel I kind of slid on over and took a look at what Jane Austen novels were available.

From the Amazon page for the Oxford World Classics
edition of Pride and Prejudice. No pressure. None at all.

I knew going in that while Jane Austen is highly regarded, she's very much a creature of her time. To be blunt, writing has evolved mightily over the couple of centuries since Pride and Prejudice came out, so using Jane to improve my writing is kind of like taking editing lessons from Herman Melville. (Or Tom Clancy, for that matter.)

So I bit the bullet and did this:

And oh look, an excuse to pick up an issue
of BBC History Revealed. Yes, I am SUCH a nerd;
I swear Dan Snow's History Hit and PBS'
NOVA and Secrets of the Dead
were made for people like me.

***

Now, tying this back to Blizzard's writing team, if I can go out and break out of my comfort zone so I can write better, surely they can as well. 

This isn't something that can't be fixed. It really can be fixed, but you can't simply take a seminar and suddenly everything is better, despite what advertisements for LinkedIn Learning or Brilliant would have you believe. You have to put in the time to read more diverse works and write more.

But for all of those who are celebrating that Chris Metzen is back at Blizzard, I have to ask: did he learn the writing and plotting lessons that are necessary for the ship to be righted at Blizzard? Will he allow the Blizzard writing team to do the necessary work to improve their craft? Or did he merely go to CEO School just to make investors happy?##

*I ought to do something about Pendragon, since Chaosium has the new edition coming out soon and they already released the Starter Set for Pendragon last Gen Con.

**The people involved are long retired, so I can actually tell this story. This happened upwards of a decade ago. The company I contracted for --and was outsourced from, BTW-- had an all-hands meeting at 8 AM for all of us contractors. Those of us who worked near their company headquarters came into the hall, sat down, and we met with one of the Executive VPs for the company, who proceeded to give us a pep talk about how well we were doing and how much she enjoyed working with us, her "favorite account". I may have made a few whispered snarks to people around me about that, given that she was my boss two levels up when we were outsourced, and she managed to jump ship from being outsourced herself to being safe on the "mother company". But when talk turned to the new CEO, who returned to his old role to help the company regain financial footing, she described him as being a totally new person. "He'd gone to CEO School and now he knows how to lead this company like a real CEO," she enthused. Given that their "new" CEO's first two orders of business were an announcement of impending layoffs and a gigantic compensation package, I thought the entire thing was bullshit. 

***Which was about 3-4 times a year. I don't know how it worked for you, but for me he'd send an invitation to the high school's main office, and they would track me down as to what class I was in and forward the request along. As long as I didn't have a test that day, I would then inform the teacher and show them the scheduling slip and then head on out to meet with the guidance counselor. Hey, I got out of class for upwards of half an hour, so I was fine with this.

****Remember, this was before the Young Adult genre explosion of novels, so novels that today would be classified as YA --such as the five books of David Eddings' Belgariad-- fell under the fictional genre or in the generically "Adult" section. Yeah, there really wasn't even a YA SF&F subgenre, either. 

Also it needs to be said that I was exiting high school when the original Watchmen comics and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight were coming out, so if you want a delineation of when comics suddenly swerved into being "serious" and "adult", I was a teen during that time. It's all bullshit, since comics had been covering adult themes since forever, but it was in the mid-80s when some critics finally "discovered" what comics had been doing all along.

*****I'm starting to throw around "bullshit" in this post like Holden Caufield tossed around "phony" in The Catcher in the Rye. Sheesh.

#I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but one time my mom was visiting her mom --my grandmother-- and noted a novel on the table. Inquiring as to how good it is, Grandma quipped that it was good but "Oh, you wouldn't like it. It's got sex in it." And this was when Grandma was in her upper 80s. I still sometimes wonder how on earth my parents had my brother and myself, given how icky my mom is about sex, especially when compared to her own parents.

##See ** for the CEO School comment.

I Did The Thing After All

"Well, I did it."

"Did what?" my questing buddy asked.

"I sent in a sample to Ancestry."

"Ooo! You will have to tell me how it goes!"

"I got the results today."

"And?"

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? The desire to fill in gaps, to figure out --in a nation of immigrants-- where we came from, and to answer family questions that have been left hanging: all of that were an impetus to deciding to get my DNA sequenced. 

I'd covered that in my What on Earth is Red Reading This Time post about The Lost Family, so why did I finally decide to pull the trigger now?

Part of it was that there was a sale. (Well, duh.) I know enough that waiting means sales, and I figure that if I waited long enough the price point would drop to a level that I'd be able to justify. If I wanted to.

The second part that went into my decision was that I wanted to be proactive about what might happen. I could simply wait around and then have somebody chase me down at a random time in the future, but instead I decided to test now so I had that already finished.

The last part was the Ancestry option to have your results hidden from other matches. If I were forced into having any potential matches visible as the only option, I'd never consider conducting the test. However, since I could keep my results "private" so that I would remain hidden from any potential matches until I decided to open it up, I became more comfortable with the process. 

Kind of ironic, perhaps, that I'm discussing this here in a publicly available blog. 

There's more to it than that, of course, because just showing some charts aren't going to make someone say "Hey, I'm related to that guy!"

I mean, have you any idea just how many people of German descent are there in the Ohio River Valley?

A ton.

Now, given that my wife's ancestry is 100% German American, it would be far more an interesting event if she were to show up as not being the same. Alas for me, things are not that simple.

Here's what I mean:

If you need to click on the graphic to see it
better, go ahead. No worries.

The first thing I noticed, even before the graphic, was the Ethnicity Update indicating that Ancestry is able to identify people from 4 regions (3 in Asia, 1 in Europe), and provide better matches in Hawaii and New Zealand. This means that as Ancestry gets more data from people who test, they are able to more accurately assign DNA to geographical areas than before. Of course, that's also dependent upon the accuracy of the person providing the DNA sample, because any inaccuracy there will require even more data to remediate.

That's fancy terminology for a pretty basic premise: every person who lied about or unintentionally misrepresented certain things when providing your DNA sample turns their data point into an outlier. Ancestry would need to compensate for those outliers with more and more data about a specific region to obtain a more accurate understanding of the regions affected. So, if you were told that you came from, say, Fiji, but it turns out that your ancestors were really from New Zealand, that inaccuracy will show up in the data. If there aren't enough samples from Fiji to distinguish you as an outlier, Ancestry's results will be broader than you might expect. 

Ancestry does couch their findings in fuzzy language, because those inaccuracies will change over time. The header "Your DNA looks most like the DNA from these 8 world regions" is the first real kicker that hey, this is what we know now, but check back in a bit and this might change. There was nothing I did to change my DNA*, it's just that this is what Ancestry can safely say at the moment.

But hey, let's have some fun, shall we? Here's what happens when I click on Germanic Europe:

Well, that's actually... okay, I think I understand this.

See that dark green section up in the northwest part of the map? Before you think that's where my German ancestry is from --ironically enough, some of it might be, but that's neither here nor there-- the color hues represent the potential percentage of your ancestry hails from. So ancestors form the dark green area have potentially 75% or more Germanic Europe ancestry. The middle area is in the 50% range, and the light green area is 25%. If I were like my wife, who is German American on both sides of her family, Ancestry could likely even delve down further into the region and be more specific about where her ancestors came from. Me, having significantly less of a match at 30% --and split between both parents-- doesn't have such a luxury.

***

Okay, one thing you might have missed is the ethnicity estimate.

There's a lot of variability there, given that while the median estimate for Germanic Europe is 30%, the range is 24 - 56%. There is a white paper on this process, so if you're thinking it's a simple standard deviation.... eh, it's not. The TL;DR on this is that the more data Ancestry can get that they can use as representative samples, the more precise results they can achieve. Even so, there are limitations due to natural regional variations. 

Variations aside, there were a few surprises in the results. Not "OMG YOU'RE ACTUALLY FROM ANOTHER PART OF THE GLOBE!" sort of surprise, but more along the lines of "Huh, I didn't expect that to pop up in there."

Like that slight amount of Slavic ancestry that centered around Poland and Ukraine.

Or the Norse and Swedish/Danish ancestry.

And while I expected Irish, I didn't expect that much of it. Or Scottish at all.

Still, the one thing that made me raise an eyebrow was this, a little bit lower on the results page:

That date range made me go ????

I mean, I understand that my ancestors had to settle somewhere, but I wasn't expecting it to be Pennsylvania. Or potentially that early. 

From what I've been able to tell, the farther back the date range goes, the farther back the community originated. So instead of looking at the range and saying "yeah, THAT helps a hell of a lot," it's the earliest part of the date range that is the most relevant. 

So... that some of my ancestors could have been over here in North America before the American War of Independence is... well, unexpected. You think German and Irish ancestry, your American brain goes "Oh, the 1840s: the civil unrest in what is now known as Germany and the potato famine in Ireland." Both groups migrated to the Ohio River Valley --far more Germans than Irish, to be fair-- but that doesn't surprise me much at all. But seeing that "Early Pennsylvania Settlers" with an early date of 1700 pop up and... okay, I might have to rethink some of what my family's past was like.

***

"Never say never, but never... Okay?"

--Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, when asked if he was interested in coaching a college football team

One thing that I can put to bed is the family story about having a Native American ancestor. As you can see, it doesn't show up at all. That doesn't mean it might show up sometime in the future given enough data points --and said Early Pennsylvania Settlers community-- but to put it politely, the future does not look bright for that piece of family lore.

***

Now that we have some of the general stuff put out there, let's delve into inheritance, shall we?

They were originally Parent 1 and Parent 2
until I assigned which was which.

The DNA test can identify which parent each set of ethnicities came from, as seen above. Ancestry does not identify which parent was which --that was my job based on what I knew of family history-- but they can tell you that Parent 1 provided you with such and such genes, and Parent 2 provided me with other sets of genes.

To go into more detail, and to make it blindingly obvious that Ethnicity inheritance is random, here's the other half of that comparison:

Given some of the family names on my Mom's
side of the tree, I'm amused at how little German
I inherited from her.

I'd figured that the "mutt" side of the family was the unknown part, on my Dad's side, but since I knew for certain that French was on my mom's side, that's the side I identified as hers. That there's so much English in there on both sides of the family was kind of a surprise to me.

But you know, as Ancestry points out, ethnicities are passed down unevenly. Sometimes an ancestry breeds true in a family as well. My mom is the only one of her siblings with her particular hair color, and even among the mini-Reds you can tell the different variations in the red hair color and identify which side of the family they got their particular shade of red from. 

---Begin Rant---

One thing I want to stress about this exercise is that some people will read a certain amount of superiority into their results, but they should absolutely not do that. I really don't give a fuck about the reason why you took a DNA test or are interested in your ancestry, but I'm here to tell you that people are people. We are all equal, and nobody is genetically superior to another person.

---End rant---

***

Oh yeah, one final part of Ancestry's results that I could observe within the limitations I set is this:

Oh, THIS could be fun...

I wasn't exactly sure what to make of this, since we're delving into territory that could easily go toward the nature vs. nurture argument. 

While I won't show too much stuff, I'll show a few items here. Mainly because I was amused by them:

Oh, they SO do not know me on some of these...

The first one, Dancing, had me laughing. I have what is known as "two left feet". I SUCK at dancing. However, this trait was pointed as coming from my Dad's side, which is actually quite accurate: he was a really good dancer. I can appreciate dance, but actually dancing? Eh, no.

Some of these have an obvious genetic tint to them, such as Asparagus odor (which I can smell a mile away**) or Cilantro aversion. As far as birth weight goes, I was kind of average; IIRC I wasn't a jumbo kid, or my mom would never let me hear the end of it. 

My caffeine addiction... Let me tell you about my caffeine addiction...

All I can say is that genetics are not destiny.

***

You might have noticed in perusing these results that there's a LOT of incentive to open up your results and share them with other people.

I look at that and go, "Yeah, right."

I'll do it when I'm good and ready, and I am most definitely not ready at this point in time. 

All of the above may provide a bit of insight into myself and my history, but in the end it's nothing that terribly exciting. That's why I posted as much as I have about the results: there's a lot there, but nothing that could distinguish me from a ton of other people from the Ohio River Valley. It's in the family tree itself where any drama might appear, and that is a long, ongoing process.

*Crispr notwithstanding. And to be fair, that old SF/F trope of genetic manipulation for fun and profit has gotten that much closer with the advent of Crispr.

**It doesn't stop me from eating asparagus, however. I just have to hold my nose when I pee later.

EtA: Lost the last part of the last sentence. Have no idea where it vanished to, but I restored it.

What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: The Lost Family

What if something potentially fun and lighthearted, or just a personal curiosity, takes a sharp turn off the highway and deposits you in the middle of nowhere, adrift without any cell signal nearby?

This isn't the plot of a novel, but metaphorically speaking this is what happened to Alice Collins Plebuch when her work on her family tree took a decidedly unexpected direction. All she had to do was spit into a vial and send it off to a DNA testing site, such as 23andMe or AncestryDNA, and await the results. What she got back, however, wasn't the Irish ancestry she expected. Alice experienced what genealogists call a NPE, a Non-Paternity Event, where your parent isn't the one you thought they were. Sometimes it's an adoption that was hushed up, it's the usage of donor sperm for insemination, or the byproduct of an affair. Or sometimes the NPE was something darker. The result of experiencing an NPE, however is that it can turn the recipient into what is known as a "Seeker", trying to find out the answers behind the NPE no matter where the path leads.

Uh, yeah. Basil Rathbone I ain't.
From Pinterest.

This story, and a study into the practice of what can be classified as recreational genomics, is the focus of The Lost Family by Libby Copeland. The book evolved from what was originally an article for the Washington Post*, and Libby interwove Alice's search with an investigation into how genomics has evolved in the past decade to where it is today, including both the positive and negative aspects of this opening frontier into what our genes say about us. 

I'm surprised the photo turned
out as good as it did. It's a wee
bit cloudy outside today.

Sometimes the positive and negative are part of the same story, such as the usage of DNA genealogy databases in the apprehension of the long elusive Golden State Killer. That Joseph James DeAngelo was caught was one thing, but that DNA genealogy databases could be exploited by law enforcement without people's knowledge was quite another.

Remember those fingerprints we all provided 
when we were kids back in the 70s and 80s
so that law enforcement could find us if we
were abducted? Yeah, like that only much more so.
From imgflip.

But this book, while it makes for an engaging read**, has a personal angle to it that goes far afield from anything that this blog typically covers. 

***

Over the past decade I've seriously considered having my DNA tested numerous times, and even within the past month I've gotten to within a few clicks of signing up for AncestryDNA's DNA test. (Luckily for me I didn't, because a couple of days later that money --and some Father's Day cash-- was sucked up by car repairs. Yay, car repairs.) Some of it is curiosity, as I've always considered myself a bit of a mutt as far as my ancestry is concerned, and my mother insisted we have some Native American ancestors on her side***, and putting the question of where my ancestors came from to bed would solve these two items. But there's there's more to it than just that. 

We know absolutely nothing about my father's father.

("Oh, a puzzle!" my questing buddy exclaimed when I mentioned this to her.)

My dad was always told that his mom and dad met, moved out to Colorado, got married, and his dad died when he was an infant. As you might be able to read between the lines, that was simply a fabrication by my grandmother and my great-aunt, her sister. One of my dad's cousins finally spilled the beans to him about 25 years ago before my grandmother passed away: apparently my grandmother got pregnant, she and my great-aunt went out west, had my dad, and then came back home with him. My dad, being the sort who would apologize if he ever cursed with a word stronger than "darn it", was incensed and demanded an explanation from his mom. 

"Who told you that?!" she responded.

"I want to know the truth!"

I don't know all the details, but what I do know is that in addition to the above story my grandmother had "doctored" my dad's birth certificate, which made it difficult for him to receive Social Security benefits because his name didn't match that on the certificate.****

So... Who was my grandfather? Outside of a name that may or may not be real, I don't have a clue.

I also don't know if there are any genetic risks for cancer or heart disease or whatnot that I don't know about either.

As for relatives I don't know about, well... I'm of two minds on that one. Unlike my wife, who calls her parents multiple times a week and chats with her sister and her other relatives on social media all the time, I tend to keep my distance from my family. They all tend to be far more religious than I am, and far more prudish as well, so I'm happy to keep them at greater than arm's length. 

And, oh look, here's this little DNA test that has the ability to upend entire families' understanding of who they are if I were to spit into a vial and send it off to get studied.

That's the thing that keeps me from pulling the trigger: I already know that something will likely come up, and that I won't be interested in reaching out to these people, but will those people then find me? Or if I don't get test but another relative does, and suddenly I'm the one getting the metaphorical knock on the door by someone claiming to be a cousin I never knew existed? 

In a post pandemic world, where I saw the worst of humanity broadcast for everyone to see, do I really want to know these people? I can select my friends, but I can't do the same to family. Unlike many Seekers I don't feel adrift because I'm missing part of my life, but I am curious. But am I curious enough to find out answers I might not like? 

***

Finally, there's a question about my genealogy that has nothing whatsoever to do with my non-existent grandfather, and that has to do with my family's search into their own family tree. 

One of my mom's sisters has been conducting research into my mom's family, and supposedly she's found all of this interesting stuff about where the family came from, yadda yadda yadda. However, my aunt isn't exactly known for her academic rigor, so without me reviewing her research I look at her claims with a skeptical eye. So for my edification if nothing else, I'm interested enough into my own verification of these claims that I've begun collecting a database on the family history. Yes, I use Ancestry's database, but no, it's not public. DNA testing might help to solidify some of this genealogical research, but then again, it might open up a can of worms. 

Jeez, Rowan, the least you could have
done is gotten me into the Opening
Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics...
From memegenerator.net.

***

Some reviewers think of this usage of recreational genomics --and the book itself-- as basically First World Problems. "I don't think that the world really cares who your great grandpa bonked," is what one reviewer on Goodreads said. The world may not, but this isn't really about what the world thinks. The book isn't really written for Genealogists either, as they likely already know everything in the book and would look at it as rather simplistic.

From Cafepress, where you can get this
on a coffee mug.

I don't get to say how your ethics and morality play into what you might find in your family tree, and to be fair what people think of genealogy in the US and Canada --where a lot of people's ancestors came from somewhere else-- is going to be different than the viewpoint of someone from Europe or Asia. 

If I were to look at it as purely an academic exercise, I'd most likely pass on a DNA test. From that perspective, the potential downsides outnumber any upsides. Still, I'd be a fool to not acknowledge an emotional component to this: the desire to know as much as possible. While I may keep my family at a distance, knowing a bit about their collective history --my history-- is a very strong pull. Plus, I want to set any records straight: I'd be going in ready to accept things such as hidden names or even different family names than what is commonly accepted today, because history is messy like that.

What? Oh, the book! Right.

About the book...

Yes, I liked it. For people worried about there being too much Biology in the book, don't worry; if you lack detailed knowledge about genetics you won't have any issues following the book. You had better expect to think critically about the subject, however, and for people who thought that getting your DNA tested on a lark or as a present to a family member the book is a bucket of cold water dumped on you. If you want to go ahead, do so, but go into it with your eyes wide open as to any consequences you might encounter. And to be fair, you don't even need to have been tested to personally feel the effects; Big Data is seeing to that.

*In much the same way as Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer was originally written as an article for Outside Magazine. Alas that the original article appears to go to a follow-up article about people who are obsessed with Chris McCandless.

**Not everything in the book is as annotated as some people might like, but I was comfortable with it given that NPEs and other genealogical surprises are kind of a touchy subject, and genealogists weren't always so keen to put their names and faces down on these discussions.

***Which I no longer believe, I might add. Apparently, that is a fairly common family backstory that people have, and it frequently turns out to not be the case.

****It took months, but eventually things got sorted out.

EtA: Changed a couple of words for clarity's sake.

What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

There are times when your past catches up to you in unexpected ways. 

A few years ago* my wife and I were perusing our local bookstore when I came across a title that stopped me dead in my tracks. I pulled out the book from the shelf and stared at the cover for a hot minute. 

"It couldn't be."

I flipped the pages until I found the "About the Author", read it, and sucked in my breath.

"Wow. It IS him."

My wife saw the look on my face and came over. "What is it?"

I held up the book and pointed at the author.

"Holy shit."

"Yeah."

It was her ex-boyfriend. The boyfriend immediately before me.

"Do you want to buy it?" I asked with a mischievous grin.

The look she gave me could have curdled milk.

I was reminded of that story when I read Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, by K.J. Parker. It's not because I knew the author or anything, but I certainly did know the protagonist. Or rather, I knew of him.

It was sunny outside, but clouds
and gloom rolled in this afternoon.
Hence the off color to the photo.

The protagonist of the story, Orhan, is an outsider who had risen through the ranks of the army to reach the title of Colonel of Engineers of an Empire which was heavily based on the Roman and/or Byzantium Empire. Orhan was a member of a tribe that have been uncharitably called "milkfaces", which pretty much loosely identifies him with the Germanic tribes. And he kind of gets roped into leading the defense of, well, Constantinople. I say Constantinople rather than an equivalent to Rome because the two main factions within the city are Blues and Greens, which do have a historical precedent in the Byzantine Empire itself. (Seriously. And no, I'm not channeling old episodes of The Tomorrow People.) 

Orhan himself, however... Well, I have met people exactly like him in the past. In college.

It's not that he's snarky or has an issue with authority, because a lot of people I knew in college were both. In fact, that was part of the appeal from the back blurb, that Orhan has those traits. But Orhan also has one thing in spades, that when combined with the others, just really give me flashbacks to a couple of people I knew in college: arrogance.

***

I suppose you could argue that a person has to be confident in their abilities if they rise to being a Colonel of Engineers, particularly if they are an outsider. But I will counter that there's a big difference between confidence and arrogance, and Orhan may profess the former but adheres to the latter. 

The novel reads like a "how I did it" story, in which Orhan either did something himself, directed people in how to do something, or he happened to know the exact perfect person to do something he wanted done. 

A screencap from Young Frankenstein;
no idea who did the initial screencap.

The first couple of times I kind of ran with it, but as the coincidences kept piling up I began to question the story itself. I mean, I know that it's possible that in a large city the right people might be out there, but that Orhan happened to know exactly the right person for each conundrum became less and less likely as the novel progressed. Likewise, that Orhan happened to have exactly the correct amount of foresight and the corresponding strategy ready to defeat what was thrown against him became more and more eyebrow raising the deeper into the novel I went. 

It was then when I began to wonder whether I was missing the point of the novel, and if this was actually a commentary on Fantasy novels that seem to have the protagonist pull everything out of a hat by the end. Well, that's all fine, but those sort of Fantasy novels aren't in that much demand these days compared to the grimdark aspect of Fantasy, so I kind of set that analysis aside. Then I began to wonder if the author was using Fantasy as a commentary about real history, given the obvious parallels with the Roman/Byzantine Empire and the Germanic invasions that brought about its fall. I couldn't quite disprove this angle, as I couldn't disprove the concept of the novel being satire --ala Gulliver's Travels-- but for some reason I didn't really get satire vibes that much. 

One thing is certain: the novel is certainly well written, and the author did keep the pages turning. The story itself is quite good, and outside of some issues with the plot --such as how Orhan kind of falls into "relationships" with women, which kind of oozes "privileged" and Marty Stu-- and the characterizations of the various races Robur (Romans/Byzantines) are darker skinned, and the oppressed barbarians are all light skinned (aka "milkfaces"), I wanted to see how the story ended. So kudos to K.J. Parker for that.

But K.J. Parker is not K.J. Parker.

K.J. Parker is a pseudonym for novelist Tom Holt. 

"Well," I mused, "that explains a lot."

A listing of Tom's quotes from Goodreads establishes the humor behind his pen, and through those I could see exactly where Orhan got his voice. 

Orhan has the voice of someone who is so confident in their intelligence and wit that they can't help but share it with you all the freaking time. It's fine to have that wit and to make occasional commentary with it, but when you spend all of your time trying to prove how witty you are, you tend to turn people off. And with those people I knew in college, they are interesting to talk to in small bites, but if you lived with them or were in a class with them, all we got was a steady stream of said witticisms.** After a while you just want them to give it a rest, already. I mean, I'm not a killjoy, and I do have my own snark (I mean, have you read this blog?), but there comes a point where the overall effect of the steady stream of witticisms is diminished by their sheer volume. 

Then again, this might be a question of pacing for Fantasy versus some other genres. I didn't have much of a problem with Robert Lynn Asprin's Myth Adventure series, but after about Book 5 or so the humor started to wear a bit thin.***

So if you don't mind the steady stream of snark and witticisms, and that Orhan's inner voice has an answer for just about everything, this book might be for you. For me, it was uncomfortably close to a few people I knew in college so I couldn't disassociate the novel from my experiences with them, which were not uniformly happy ones.

***

But oh, there is one thing of note: this is a Fantasy novel without, well, Fantasy.

It's a work of fiction to be certain, and the countries and personnel are completely made up, but there is absolutely no magic or fantastical dealings of any kind. This leads me to one big question: why is this book a Fantasy if the only thing "fantastical" about it is that the countries and people are made up? People don't stick the aforementioned Gulliver's Travels in Fantasy, and neither do they put 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, or The DaVinci Code in Fantasy either. But for some reason, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is shoehorned into the Fantasy genre.

So... What makes a Fantasy novel a Fantasy?

Now THAT is a question that begs a good discussion. Preferably over a drink (your choice) with some food. At a bar or a coffee shop (again, your choice).

I'm open to suggestions, given that someone had to have had an idea that this story belonged in the Fantasy genre, so let's hear them. Obviously a fictional city or society wouldn't count, or a lot of "General Fiction" suddenly lumped into Fantasy, and the tension in the novel doesn't mean that it suddenly has turned into a Thriller, so why Fantasy? Anybody got any ideas?

Regardless, I think I'm going to take a pass on the other two novels in the "series". I put the "series" in quotes because I've discovered that each successive novel isn't built upon the others in the same way that you'd expect a series to be, and from what I've read the tone of each novel is pretty much the same as the others: if you've read the first one you know what to expect with the next two. In that respect, they're a lot like a David Eddings series: if you read The Belgariad, you already know the plot (and to a lesser extent the characters) of The Malloreon, or The Elenium, etc. That doesn't make the story bad by any stretch, it's just that you pretty much know what you're getting. And for the personal flashbacks that this story gave me, I think I'll pass this time around. Maybe with some time and distance I'll come back to the second novel in the series, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It.

*Pre-pandemic.

**I had an English seminar with a professor who basically lived by spouting off all sorts of quotes and observations from a variety of upper class and/or noble people to the point where I often wondered if he were a Royalist at heart. I remember once making a comment about Tolkien in his class, and I discovered very quickly that said professor did NOT like J.R.R. Tolkien or his works. I believe the words "juvenile trash" were thrown around more than once in his acerbic reply to my brief comment. And this was coming from a guy who --while he adored the modern novel (Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway and others of that ilk)-- binged on Romance novels whenever he could. "The trashier the better," he frequently said.

***Ye gods, that series went on for how long? Yikes.

Upon Further Review

I suppose I ought to explain a few things concerning my sudden interest in posting about books, and no, it has nothing directly to do with my own attempts at fiction.* 

Several months ago, a long-time blogger friend of mine put out a request for beta readers of a novel she was completing. Given that I’d long been an admirer of her artistic endeavors, I raised my hand and volunteered. “Why not,” I figured, since I was very curious about how her writing had been progressing.

A month or two later a PDF file was sent to me, and that meant I had to buckle down and get to work. Still, it was the holidays, and I’d already committed to installing some office furniture in the dining room of the house, effectively turning it into the home office we’d been using it as for over a decade.** So when I finally sat down to begin reading, I wasn’t sure if I had the time commitment to finish reading the novel to make any review useful. 

I guess I need not have worried, because once I got into the groove of reading, my usual issues with being sucked into a story reared their head and I found myself staying up far past 3 AM multiple nights. It got so bad that I would start reading during some particularly boring meetings at work. I have read books that I’ve simply had to give up because there was no drive to continue with the story, so kudos to my friend for writing an engaging novel. 

Oh crap, I hope I didn't look like
THAT. From Ranker.

When I finished, I sat back and said to myself “What now?”

I knew I should write up my thoughts and send them off to her, but I did ask several questions during a chat session we had after I reached the ending. I think I can count the number of romance novels I’ve read on one hand (two hands if you count Sharon Shinn, whose novels straddle the line between Fantasy and Romance), so I had questions about the genre, the word choices, some of the tropes I noticed, and how some parts of the novel fit together. She is currently well on her way toward finishing the second novel featuring the same characters, so I’m glad she’s continuing to write in the same world.***

Still, there was the nagging hole in my free time that only fiction could fill. 

Alcohol and reading books generally
don't mix well. Don't ask how I know
that one. From Imgflip.

I glanced over my long standing “to be read” pile, which had grown into a fairly large collection over the past decade, and poked at it for a while, wondering what to do. I eventually settled on The Chronicles of the Black Company rather than finish a series or two I’d started years ago as I would likely have to start over for those, and that can be a bit daunting. 

I’ve since reread my post on The Black Company, and one thing I noted was that while I tried to explain away my liking of the omnibus trilogy, the post itself was rather bland. I don’t think that I was intentionally avoiding taking a hard stand in either direction, because I realize that different people like different things about a book review, but watching the brouhaha over the Wired profile of Brandon Sanderson I realized that I was being the anti-rabble rouser. It’s not as if I have any grand, incisive commentary on the prose or the story, but even if I did I would have never have written my review in the same fashion that the author of the Wired article did. 

TL;DR: I don’t believe in being a dick.

***

"Card, you're too nice," is what a guildie once told me when I passed on gear I needed but that other people could use in the raid. He wasn’t wrong, because I don’t believe that being an asshole helps much in the long run. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry or inveigh against the gods from time to time –and I am a tower of fury when that happens—but I recognize that being in a constant state of anger is unhelpful. 

Which is also why I dislike certain aspects of the media –and social media—that rely upon raw emotional reactions to drive popularity. 

I have caught myself being angry at something I’ve seen on television or social media and only a while later I’ve gone back and discovered that the news article (or whatever) was carefully crafted to generate such a reaction out of me, or more importantly, people with my background. And that in turn has generated even more anger, but this time against those who performed the manipulation. Because of that, I’ve oriented my posts in PC to be less confrontational than they could be. There’s always a little devil sitting on my shoulder, telling me that if I was a bit louder, more arrogant, or more combative I’d see more traffic on the blog. And perched on the other shoulder is a little angel musing “You know, you could be a bit more assertive…”

“You’re not helping,” I tell her quite frequently.

“Still, in the end it’s who you want to associate with,” she presses on, ignoring my commentary. “Do you want to be with assholes, or with people you like?”

And I know the answer to that one. 

Yes, they are modeled after
The Devil's Panties. If you haven't
read this webcomic yet, GO!

So in the end, I'm going to stick to my guns and not be an asshole about these reviews. That doesn't mean I'm not going to be critical when I feel the need for it, but I can separate being critical from being a jerk.

And maybe after some months of reading I'll be able to slow down a bit and not read so voraciously. (I hope.)

*Back in high school, my guidance counselor would constantly hound me to read as much as I could, because he believed strongly that reading –any reading—would prepare me for college. He wasn’t picky about what I read, unlike my dad; he only cared that I was reading. My AP English teacher encouraged reading as well because he felt it would improve my writing. So, while I do realize that reading would improve my writing, that was only of secondary concern to why I’m reading more fiction than I have before. And stumbling on my high school journal entries a few months ago while cleaning, I can only say that my writing certainly needed all the help it could get. I was not a wunderkind like Christopher Paolini, for certain.

**It also meant my wife wasn’t spreading her papers all over the house and she finally had a space of her own. We had been using a dining room table we received as a hand-me-down from her sister for my desk, and a hodge-podge of 25-year-old pre-fab desks and microwave carts to hold everything.

***I even borrowed the name of something in the story for a baby Tauren Hunter I have on a Wrath Classic server, so I hope that imitation is surely the most sincere form of flattery.

What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: The Chronicles of the Black Company

As I've mentioned more than once in this blog I'm not a fan of the grimdark direction Fantasy and Science Fiction has gone in the past couple of decades. My quotable quote on the emphasis on personal suffering by the protagonist and a high body count among the supporting cast has been "If I want that out of a story, I'll watch the news."

So why did I find The Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook so interesting?

The Chronicles contains the
first three books in the series.
Official pic is from Amazon because
I was lazy and didn't want to take a
pic of the book myself.

That I'll never know for sure, but I think some of it has to do with Glen Cook's writing style. He writes in a sparse style of prose that suggests a background in newspaper reporting, but from what I can tell he hasn't any training in that area. Glen's writing style does evoke a bit of Stephen King --who did have some experience as a newspaper reporter in his youth*-- and Fritz Leiber, whose Fafhrd and Gray Mouser short stories did influence him.**

Another reason why I guess I feel comfortable with these books is because of the very nature of the story itself. The Black Company is a mercenary company in a similar vein to the Free Companies of the Medieval and Renaissance eras; they are professional soldiers who accept a contract and follow it loyally, despite any misgivings they personally have. The Black Company is likely a bit more professional in stance and loyalty to a contract than historical Free Companies, but that professionalism is rooted in Glen Cook's own experience with the navy in the Vietnam war era. (Yes, Glen is a few years older than my mom.) I suppose you could also argue that his experience working at a General Motors assembly plant has an influence as well, where you do your job even if it's not the most mentally stimulating thing out there.

I'm not giving away any spoilers here when I say that the Black Company accept a contract that turns out to be held by the big stereotypical "evil empire" of this fantasy world. The members of the Company don't like it, but they honor their contract. I suppose you could call the series grimdark because of the nature of that internal conflict, but the Company's moral quandry is lessened quite a bit because the "rebels" they frequently fight against are little better than the "evil empire" itself. This isn't a matter of the rebels going down to the level of the Empire to survive, but rather the rebels are almost trying to outdo the Empire in morally reprehensible behavior. 

In this world, which evokes a lot of the Sword and Sorcery subgenre, the members of the Company are loyal to each other and to the contract, which keeps them together as a unit. 

I led him back to the fire and settled beside him. "What's the matter? What happened?" I glimpsed the Captain from the corner of my eye. One-Eye stood before him, drained by a heavy-duty dressing down.

"I don't know, Croaker." Goblin slumped, stared into the fire. "Suddenly everything was too much. This ambush tonight. Same old thing. There's always another province, always more Rebels. They breed like maggots in a cowpie. I'm getting older and older, and I haven't done anything to make a better world. In fact, if you backed off to look at it, we've all made it worse." He shook his head. "That isn't right. Not what I want to say. But I don't know how to say it any better."

"Must be an epidemic."

"What?"

"Nothing. Thinking out loud." Elmo. Myself. Goblin. A lot of the men, judging by their tenor lately. Something was wrong in the Black Company. I had suspicions, but wasn't ready to analyze. Too depressing.

             --From The Chronicles of the Black Company, Shadows Linger, by Glen Cook. pp 244-5

Yes, people do die in the books, but in a mercenary unit it's established up front as fact of life. There's no excessive body count for drama or gravitas, and the members of the Company basically try to keep themselves as far away from politics as possible. Well, that doesn't exactly happen, but they do try.

The protagonist in the story is Croaker --not his real name, but the one he enlisted with in the Company-- who is the Physician and Annalist of the Company. If you remember your Top Gun, everybody has their own "name" or handle within the group: One-Eye, Silent, Goblin, Elmo, Raven, Otto. I always wondered if that aspect of Top Gun was the most fake, but apparently that's not the case. At the same time, the names in The Black Company are more accurate than what you find in Top Gun because they're more ironic or snarky or referencing a screw up rather than the dramatic sounding Iceman or Maverick. After all, a physician named Croaker evokes black humor in spades. 

***

War is war. Fighting is fighting. And The Chronicles of the Black Company don't try to sugarcoat it. The first novel, The Black Company, starts so abruptly without much of a lead-in that you're thrown into the deep end of the pool before you realize what's happening. It took me about 40-50 pages before I kind of caught up with a background as to what I was reading, although people who have performed some military service or grew up in a military household will probably have an easier time of it than I did. The setting may be Sword and Sorcery, but the people evoke a more modern military viewpoint. Not necessarily the official modern military, where author Myke Cole described the modern US military as basically driven by rules, not gung ho fighting. 

Still, in spite of this trilogy being everything I ought to not like in a SF&F series, I did like it. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I guess in the right conditions I enjoy a Dark Fantasy series. Maybe it's because the story is never quite hopeless in scope, unlike some other grimdark stories. Or that Glen Cook doesn't take perverse delight in killing off characters that you cheer for. 

As you may have surmised, The Chronicles of the Black Company leans hard into the Military F&SF subgenre, and I've seen it noted more than once that Glen Cook's books have a cult following among the military. I can certainly see why, but one thing that I did note is that the first three books in the series don't hew toward a political standpoint that some other Military F&SF have (such as John Ringo's Into The Looking Glass or Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers). The focus of the story being on the Company itself and their reactions to the world help tremendously in that regard. Croaker himself is a likeable protagonist who tries to make sense of the bigger picture but recognizes that's of secondary importance when fulfilling your contract and staying alive are of primary importance.

One thing that I did note is that there's a dearth of female characters in the story. Yes, I know, there's The Lady and the White Rose as well as a few others (sorry, spoilers there), but for the vast majority of the novels the fact they are women is almost incidental. The Black Company is pretty much an all-male outfit, but the very nature of The Lady and The White Rose is such that people in the world don't think of women as a weaker sex and that "fighting is man's work". 

The stories were written in the early to mid 80s, and yes it shows. I'm still surprised that I missed these stories when they first came out because there weren't nearly as many SF&F novels released back then as there are now, but I might have dismissed them when the back blurb begins with "Darkness wars with darkness as the hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must. They bury their doubts with their dead." But I also think it possible I missed these stories because I was busy reading the "classics" from an earlier era: Michael Moorcock's Elric and Corum stories, Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and the old Grand Masters of SF (Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlein). The F&SF of the 70s/80s that I did read were of the Epic Fantasy variety, such as Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara, Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga, David Eddings' The Belgariad, Dennis McKiernan's Iron Tower Trilogy, and Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords. 

Mea culpa on my part, because I think I'd have liked it back then.

Will I pick up the other books in the series? Probably not. I'm happy that the trilogy ended as it did. Sure, there are some loose ends, but I'm comfortable with it as it is. 

*Stephen King, On Writing, pp 55.

**I found this out when I began writing this post, and when I discovered that interview I linked to above I thought "Oh. Of COURSE. That makes sense." It's become more difficult to chase down copies of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, which is a shame. They kind of stood somewhere off to the side in their own snarky little corner away from Tolkien's good and evil epic fantasy and Michael Moorcock's antihero counterpoint, although the stories were closer to Moorcock than Tolkien by far. 

EtA: Grammar corrections.