My well-worn copy of Agents of Empire has traveled a lot with me over the past few weeks.
Everyone who has spent time working on research projects has experienced the excitement, trials, and tribulations of falling down a literature review rabbit hole. Usually, these start in one of two ways. One way is that you start by learning a cool new fact that inspires you to check the bibliography and before you know it you have one or two dozen downloaded papers that have nothing to do with your research topic that you definitely have time to read. The other way, and perhaps more painful way, that this happens is that you come across a reference to a text that might just solve all of your problems if you could only find it. Sometimes these references are hard to find because they were cited incorrectly. Other times it’s because the text is so old that it is hard to find anyone who still has a copy. Sometimes you find the text you’re looking for only to discover that it is written in a language you are unable to read.
I was thinking about these research rabbit holes a lot while reading Agents of Empire, a book that was written because just over twenty years its author Noel Malcolm was reading a late 16th-century book that referenced a treatise by an Albanian author named Antonio Bruni. Not recognizing this name, Malcolm undertook an effort to find this text and eventually found it in the Vatican’s archives. After he had located the text at last he realized that he needed to do more than just transcribe it, he had to figure out who Antonio Bruni was. This kicked off two decades of research that took him all over the Mediterranean. What he found was not enough to reconstruct the life of Antonio Bruni, but Malcolm did succeed in creating a picture of Antonio Bruni’s extended family. A network of individuals who started as local elite in Venetian-controlled Albania and ended up scattered to the wind due to, in part, conflicts between Catholic Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Relatives of Antonio Bruni’s family found themselves in a diverse collection of roles ranging from Arch Bishop to Venetian Diplomat to spy and soldier.
The result is a glimpse at the Mediterranean during the late 16th century when nationality often mattered less than religious affiliation, the Pope still commanded armies, diplomats seemed almost certain to serve multiple masters, and family connections dominated politics. From taking part in the Battle of Lepanto to serving as an advisor to the voivod of Moldavia, members of Antonio Bruni’s family found themselves in positions of responsibility and influence everywhere they went. One of my favorite things about Agents of Empire is that throughout it Noel Malcolm addresses the limitations of the sources available to him and makes clear how much we don’t know about historical figures like these even with access to archives all over the Mediterranean.
For history buffs, this is a must-read. It’s a nice break from great man histories and grand-scale narratives that gives the reader a look at the lives of people who would not seem out of place if they were characters in Game of Thrones.
This is it. My time to shine. My opportunity to rise to the occasion. What if I get it wrong? What should I do? The imposter syndrome creeps in. Seconds creep by wasted as I hesitate. I have to do this. This is what I’ve been training for. I raise my hand. “I’m a doctor.”
“Please come this way.”
I follow the attendant to the back of the plane. The passengers we walk by are becoming increasingly distraught. Children are crying. Adults are trembling in their seats. No one is willing to look at the poor soul in the last row who is suffering so visibly.
“Can you help them?”
“I’ll do what I can,” I say solemnly as I approach the passenger. They are hunched over and clearly in pain. I kneel beside them. “What seems to be the problem?”
“I…” they pause, the plane has hit a bit of turbulence. I grab the armrest of their seat to steady myself and it’s then that I notice they have a worn-out composition notebook in their lap and the last few inches of a number two pencil held tightly in their sweaty palm. They speak again. “I don’t remember how to calculate a dilution.”
“Oh,” I say relieved. “Just use the formula M1V1 = M2V2.”
All at once they stop trembling. They look up at me, smiling, tears of joy running down their face. “Yes! Yes! That’s it! Thank you!”
The passengers around us look on in awe as the attendant escorts me back to my seat. The plane erupts into applause. I sit back down and smile as the attendant hands me a complimentary beverage. Finally, all those years of school have paid off.
I graduated this past weekend! After four years of undergrad and six years of grad school, I finally have my doctorate!
I’ve earned my wizard robes at last!
To be precise, I now have a PhD in Chemistry. I defended my dissertation and passed back in March. Once you pass your defense, people like to start calling you “Dr” already but in my experience, it doesn’t feel real until graduation. I’m not sure what will come next, but it feels good to have reached this milestone.
My dissertation was on redox-coupled spin crossover in cobalt coordination complexes. Like most interesting things about transition metals, this process primarily concerns the d-orbitals. Seeing the shape of these orbitals helps us understand much of their behavior.
Shapes of the d-orbitals. Note that the high energy eg orbitals are aligned with the axes along which ligands coordinate to the metal center. D-orbital-splitting.png
The names of these orbitals come from their positions relative to the XYZ axes in three-dimensional space. Unlike s- and p-orbitals, the d-orbitals do not play a direct role in sigma bonding but can form pi bonds with suitable ligands. In a lone metal ion, these d-orbitals all have the same energy. Once a ligand, which can be any Lewis base, coordinates to the metal it interacts with the d-orbitals through electrostatic interactions that change their energies relative to each other. These energy differences determine the electronic configurations in these orbitals. In certain first-row transition metals this can lead to either high-spin or low-spin configurations. Spin is a property of electrons and some subatomic particles denoted by upwards and downwards pointing arrows.
d-orbital diagrams for an octahedral d5 complex showing low-spin (left) and high-spin (right) configurations. Paulin eta Hunden printzipioak.png
This is a fundamental aspect of inorganic chemistry that seems simple on the surface. But like much of science, these seemingly simple concepts conceal much depth. Because d-orbital electrons determine many of the properties of a transition metal complex including magnetic susceptibility and what spectroscopic transitions are possible, the arrangement of electrons into low- and high-spin configurations is something that a great many researchers are interested in, giving rise to the field of spin crossover.
Spin crossover was first discovered in the 1930s and occurs in first-row transition metal complexes with ligands that induce an intermediate splitting between orbitals so that an appropriate stimulus (i.e. heat, light, pressure) can induce a drastic electronic rearrangement in the complex. This can result in changes in color, magnetic properties, and molecular geometry. A lot of the interest in spin-crossover comes from a desire to create molecular sensors and switches, as well as novel display technologies. My research concerned redox-coupled spin crossover, a lesser-studied variant in which adding or removing an electron causes a subsequent rearrangement of the d-orbitals.
That’s not all I did, though. I also got to be a teaching assistant for multiple classes covering topics like epoxy resins, fractional distillation, chromatography, and organic synthesis. I presented my research at a Gordon Conference and had the honor of being invited to speak at the ENY ACS Future Leader’s seminar. I met a lot of talented scientists and made some great friends. I performed with multiple ensembles as part of the Rensselaer Music Association. I got into tabletop gaming first as a player and then as a game master. And the whole time I’ve been serving as an alumni coordinator for my fraternity in Upstate New York.
I’m looking forward to whatever my next adventure will be. In the meantime, I’ll be catching up on my TBR pile, writing more, and shoveling yet more hours into the furnace that is my crippling addiction to real-time strategy games. Feel free to get in touch if you or someone you know is looking to hire a new PhD chemist.
Last year I got to run my first full tabletop campaign since before the pandemic and I had a blast. Besides being the first time I’ve run a game in years it was notable for a couple of other reasons. Not only did the campaign run to completion, the setting was one that I’ve been designing from scratch for several years. The other exciting part about this campaign was that the party consisted of a chemist, a biochemist, a biologist, and a biophysicist. Being a chemist, I decided to take advantage of those backgrounds and tried to incorporate some chemistry into the campaign as well.
I decided that the characters would all be new arrivals in a major industrial city where they had come in response to recruitment posters seeking workers for a new munitions factory. There they would have the opportunity to get involved with labor riots, political malcontents, and sorcerous scheming. More on that later.
Goals and Railroading
When I was planning the campaign I had a few limiting factors in mind. The primary one was that one of my players was going to be moving out of the country soon, and the other was that I was supposed to be working on my dissertation. With that in mind, I wanted to make sure I was planning a campaign that could be completed in a relatively short amount of time with brief sessions to best accommodate everyone’s busy schedules. So I decided on some plot points that would always happen no matter what the players did. There was always going to be some kind of labor riot, someone would definitely try to assassinate the local Duke, there would be an explosion at the factory no matter what, and the Duke’s attempts at performing a dark ancient ritual in an abandoned temple beneath the city was always going to happen. The choices the players made would instead determine how they experienced these events, which perspectives they heard, and which faction’s machinations were successful.
Finally, I decided to use Pinnacle’s Savage Worlds ruleset for a couple of reasons. Firstly because I already owned the rulebooks and was somewhat familiar with it thanks to having briefly run a Deadlands Classic campaign a few years ago and a few Powdermage RPG oneshots before that. In practice, the rules were more like guidelines.
Setting Background
The campaign took place in a country called Whalvia, an anachronistic industrialized monarchy made up of a patchwork of regions that used to be independent kingdoms at some point in their history. At home, the Emperor/Empress wields considerable power but is limited in some ways by rights and privileges guaranteed to various city councils and aristocratic families. Overseas the story is much different. Whalvia is located on the edge of a supercontinent that comprises most of the known world. Huge storms fed by the hemispheric world sea regularly buffet the continent and Whalvia is one of the lucky few to be somewhat shielded by these massive storms thanks to its position on the coast of the Inner Sea. This has allowed Whalvian rulers over the centuries to amass large merchant and naval fleets with which they could venture out to far-flung locations for trade and conquest. This empire consisted of loose trade networks, leased territory, and proxy states whose monarchs were related to the Emperor through marriage, or outright conquest. All of this is controlled or owned either directly by the monarch or indirectly through their majority ownership of the Outer Sea Trading Company and its private armies. A lot of this doesn’t come up in the campaign but I like rambling about it so there you go.
More recently, Whalvia has come under the rule of the Empress Imerelda. Her elderly father Kirstivan II ruled for about 60 years and made many reforms during his reign but married late in life. When he died his daughter rose to the throne and while she was capable she was also not ready. Only two years into her reign a war began with Whalvia’s historic enemy and landlocked neighbor Icara. This brings us to the city of Hofni where the campaign took place.
Hofni is a large industrial city in western Whalvia situated at the confluence of two rivers. In the old days, its Kings were major rivals of Whalvia and the descendants of those Kings are now reduced to mere Dukes. The current Duke of Hofni was a close friend Kirstivan II and has become an ardent supporter of Imerelda in turn. He is also very old, is living with the injuries resulting from an explosion in his laboratory, and is very aware of the fact that he isn’t getting any younger. He also has no direct heirs. So naturally, patriot that he is, when the war begins he wastes no time evicting tenants and expanding his munitions factories to supply artillery shells to the front.
While the Duke has been working on these projects he has also departed from his normal scientific and alchemical studies and has been learning to perform sorcery himself with the help of his new advisor Zora(?). His family is old and descended from the original rulers of Hofni who built a temple that is now buried deep beneath the city where his ancestors made offerings to a now-forgotten god.
Historical Inspirations
Women working inside a London munitions factory. Source.
If you haven’t been able to tell this setting is heavily inspired by the early 20th century with fantasy, dieselpunk, and steampunk elements mixed in. And during the First World War, there was a very real shell shortage that was quite the scandal in the UK’s Parliament known as the Shell Crisis. This wasn’t unique to Britain, no one was prepared for the intensity of industrialized war and shortages caused problems in both east and west alike. I tried to replicate some of the working environment inside the munitions factories including the wooden clogs workers had to wear to prevent sparks and included several NPCs who were suffering from the effects of TNT poisoning and other workplace hazards.
Chemical Inspirations
The munitions factory I had the players working in was synthesizing TNT and then using it to fill artillery shells while the explosive was still molten (TNT melts at 80.35 °C ). Two of the player characters worked on the filling line and two others worked with the factory’s alchemists managing heat flows and mass transport.
Lots of people know about TNT but not as many know that those letters are short for trinitrotoluene. That’s a toluene molecule with three nitro groups. TNT isn’t the only explosive that was used in the first world war but for simplicity, I decided to stick with it. Despite being an explosive it’s actually fairly stable and will only detonate under specific conditions.
TNT is made by nitrating toluene using nitric acid, a process that requires a few other chemicals like sulfuric acid as well. All three may be familiar. Toluene has a sickly sweet smell and is often used to thin or strip paint. Nitric acid and sulfuric acid are also common chemicals and are produced industrially in huge quantities. Concentrated nitric acid is especially fun, is red in color, and gives off toxic red vapors. This red color is not actually nitric acid but various compounds of nitrogen and oxygen that can act as powerful oxidizing agents. These can cause some fun (dangerous) side reactions the synthesis of TNT is not done properly which I considered as a possible cause of the factory’s explosion.
Branching Paths
Like I said before, I had a few different threads planned for the players to follow in Hofni. Here are the main three.
Union organizers in the munitions factory agitating for safer working conditions.
Evicted tenants who want revenge for being kicked out of their homes.
The Duke’s efforts to reach an abandoned temple beneath the city that he believes will heal his broken body.
How It Went
The players immediately took a liking to the NPCs and got mixed up in a brawl between union organizers and the Duke’s guards sent to break up the meeting. Then, in exchange for weapons, they made a deal with the proprietor of a local dive bar to steal a quantity of TNT from the factory in exchange for supplies. Later, discontents used the TNT the players stole to make a bomb that was used to blow up the chemical storage tanks outside the factory. Heavy black smoke and choking chemical fumes filled the streets, it was great in a horrifically tragic way.
I worried about finding a way to draw the players into the Duke’s search for the temple beneath the city. Two character backstories made this pretty easy. One of the characters was academically inclined and wanted to secure a job in the Duke’s research facilities so there was an immediate hook to draw them all to the palace. The other was a character who was being stalked by a lost god.
In this setting gods and other entities are mostly gone from the world. Some are dead, others forgotten, and some just…left. The Old God of Hofni (OGH) was one of the forgotten gods. So forgotten that it had almost lost its form entirely. When one of my players said that his character was on the run from a shadowy entity he had met in a cave I knew what I had to do. The player didn’t know it, but in that meeting the much diminished OGH had latched onto him and his fear of it gave it new strength. In effect, he became a sort of pseudo-worshipper for the OGH which followed him to Hofni and took on his appearance. It was a lot of fun having the OGH appear in the distance to spook the players, give its new worshipper visions, and help them win the Duke’s favor by foiling an assassination plot.
The campaign wrapped up with the players finding the temple beneath the city. In the process, they fought a group of giant spiders and some reanimated temple guardians. Once they opened the temple the OGH was able to return to its home. Then, when the players realized that the Duke planned to use arrested union members as human sacrifices they turned on him and locked him in the temple. Also, they stuffed a roast pig full of TNT as a distraction. It blew up.
Conclusion
I had a lot of fun running this campaign. Like I said it’s the first one I had run in years and the first time I had run a game in a setting entirely of my own design. That was a little nerve-wracking and I came to each session worried that I didn’t have enough planned or that the encounters wouldn’t be fun enough. I was wrong though and we had a blast. I also really liked starting a campaign with a set ending and sessions that were limited to about two hours, it kept everything moving and I didn’t have to worry too much about story bloat or any kind of mission creep. Of course, all the fun we had was really thanks to the players. They took the setting I laid out before them and ran with it creating some unexpected scenarios that were a lot of fun to play through.
Woodcut of the Battle of Dornach. Public Domain Image From Wikipedia
If you’re like me and spent far too much time on the internet, you’ve probably encountered the same question in SFF genre forums repeatedly. Why are so many fantasy works set in a “medieval” world? There are a few answers to this. One is tradition, Tolkien and other giants of the genre grounded their stories in medieval aesthetics. Another is that medieval settings are familiar to fantasy fans. An author doesn’t need to spend time on endless exposition if they can fall back on preexisting ideas already in their readers’ heads.
This is all well and good but inevitably these settings get old. Recent authors like Brian McClellan and Django Wrexler have made gunpowder fantasy popular. It’s fantasy, but with guns. This sub-genre draws on imagery from the Napoleonic Wars and similar periods. Like the medieval era, this period of history looms large in people’s minds. Unfortunately, this jump skips past an entire era of human history between 1400 and 1700 (approximately, I’m not a historian) when gunpowder hadn’t quite achieved supremacy and armored warriors and ranks of pikemen were still common sights on the battlefield.
I’m using pike-and-shot because fantasy books and D&D Campaigns tend to be rather violent, but this new mode of warfare was far from the only thing that changed. It was during this time that modern banking was developed and Europe and the idea of the state first arose. It was also a time of discovery when the scientific method was first conceived and the ideals of the Enlightenment were promulgated. All of these ideas are perfect for a fantasy setting. And to be fair some fantasy IPs do use imagery from this period, Warhammer Fantasy stands out among them. But it still feels that this period has been woefully neglected.
This was a period of immense changes in Europe and the rest of the world. Changes bring conflict and inspire all kinds of questions for a fantasy setting that authors and dungeon masters could seek to answer. What use is a wizard’s fireball when a row of arquebusiers can take out rows of spear-wielding infantry? What will happen when the king’s subjects decide not to pay their taxes until they get the services they are owed? What did that disgruntled priest just nail to the door?
The classical Forgotten Realms settings already verge on the beginnings of an early modern setting so why not move the clock a few years forward?
I really liked this book. It didn’t hook me at first, and I thought it slowed down a bit in the middle, but I’ve always enjoyed Reynolds’ work and John Lee is a great narrator. Ultimately, the ending was fantastic and I think the Goodreads score of 4.2 is completely justified.
House of Suns follows three first-person POVs. Two of these belong to Campion and Purslane, clones of a woman named Abigail Gentian born nearly six million years before when humanity was just starting to explore the galaxy. Since then they and the thousand other clones of Abigail Gentian have crossed the galaxy countless times assisting and observing the many human cultures that have come and gone during that time. The third POV consists of flashbacks from Abigail Gentian’s childhood, memories that all of the clones share. At the beginning of the novel Purslane and Campion are running several decades late for the Gentian Line reunion, an event that happens every quarter million years at which the clones of Gentian Line sync their memories and conduct various pieces of business. At first, this tardiness is a major problem as the two of them have become romantically involved and the implications of them both arriving late together are obvious. As it turns out, their tardiness saves their lives. When they arrive at the reunion and discover that the entire star system has been destroyed in an effort to wipe out all of the Gentian clones. Luckily there are other survivors, and together they have to discover why someone would try to wipe them out aa well as find the collaborator in their midst.
It’s during the investigations and politicking that follow the ambush that the plot slows down a bit. Although we learn a great deal about the characters involved I found some parts of this book drags. The ending however makes it worth it. Reynolds excels at portraying the weirdness of post-human societies and basking in the enormity of the universe. Read this book, or listen to it on Audible like I did, if you want a story that takes place on long time scales (60,000+ years), have a fascination with megastructure concepts, or like to ponder the relationship between memory and identity.
If you played the game like I did you were probably looking forward to the season finale of HBO’s Last of Us adaptation in which Joel tears through a hospital full of fireflies to save Ellie’s life. The internet has been filled with discussions of whether Joel was right to do what he did.
But all these arguments are irrelevant because there is no way that the doctor had IRB approval. I jest, because the fireflies almost certainly don’t have anything like an IRB (Institutional Review Board). What organization gets ahold of the first (as far as we know) person with immunity to cordyceps and decides the best route is to immediately kill them? The doctors could have run blood tests. They could have tried to infect Ellie on purpose to study how her body reacts. They had lots of non-destructive options and the fact that the fireflies wouldn’t question this clearly insane doctor who decided to kill the patient upon first meeting doesn’t bode well for their organization’s survival.
Obviously, writers for both the game and show probably went with this ending because it is the easiest to convey. It would be difficult to convey a long series of boring, uncomfortable, unethical tests. But people make bad decisions all the time so who knows maybe this scenario is more realistic than I’m giving it credit. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that bleeding and leeches were standard practice.
On a related note, why don’t the fireflies try to build their own communities? There’s obviously plenty of room and Tommy’s commune shows that it is possible. With their networks and resources, the fireflies should be able to build and protect at least one commune of their own.
I know I’m late to the party, but I watched the first two episodes of Last of Us the other day, and I really like it! I haven’t ever paid much attention to announcements and trailer releases, so most of the time when a new series starts I’m often one of the last to know. For the record, I was aware that HBO was adapting the Last of Us video game, I just didn’t know it was coming out this January.
So, without knowing much about it besides Pedro Pascal being cast as Joel, I went in knowing basically nothing about the show. But not really nothing, Last of Us was a game I spent many a Saturday night playing during my freshman year. I don’t play games for completeness, but I loved the reclaimed cities and the unique fungus-based zombies. So I know all the story elements already. Although Pedro Pascal did a great job as the Mandalorian and is basically playing the same type of character in Last of Us, I was a little wary about watching a video game adaptation. The last one I tried to watch was just plain bad (Halo), and I didn’t want to get my hopes up.
This show is extremely faithful to the original source material
It turns out Last of Us is pretty good! It’s true to the story and spirit of the show and follows the original plot closely. It’s precisely what I would expect a faithful adaptation to look like. It’s captured the spirit of the game and so far has done a great job of translating storytelling techniques between mediums. I’m looking forward to episode three, which Twitter tells me was very good.
I’ve been on a Max Hasting kick lately. If you’re a history buff, you have probably heard about him. I started with his book on the Korean War, then moved on to Retribution, his book about the end of the war in the pacific. And now I’ve finished his book on Vietnam.
This is another case of a book I first bought in print and never got to until I found it on Audible. The book itself is probably thick enough to stop a bullet, and its contents certainly deliver the tragedy that the title promises. That was largely the problem I had with getting through the physical version, it’s too big to care around in a bag easily and requires a huge time investment.
Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy gives the reader exactly what it promises. Hasting’s knack for description and emphasis on the very human stories of the people who lived through the conflict. Telling the story of a war where many of the participants lost much and in the end found themselves asking what the point of it was.
It’s a good book made even better by the excellent narration provided by Peter Noble. I give it a 5/5.
Tamsyn Muir has a distinct voice and a talent for writing prose that reveals nothing, hints at everything, and keeps you reading.
I don’t really know how to describe Muir’s writing to you. She manages to combine grimdark, internet culture, bible references, and Tumblr together into a compelling narrative. What’s more, Muir doesn’t mind reminding us that she will do whatever she wants and we will probably like it.
Nona the Ninth (NtN) is the third entry in what is now the Locked Tomb Series, it was originally a trilogy, but all of us who have ever tried to make something out of an idea know that these things inevitably grow.
The greatest warning I have to give about this book is that it is slow. Telling the story from the perspective of someone who is practically a child was a brave choice. Somehow, NtN manages to be a book in which nothing happens, a lot is revealed, and a plot where nothing but loose threads remain.
I really liked this book, it’s certainly not for everyone, but read this modern science fantasy novel if…
You want to finish a book with more questions than you started it with
You don’t care if the POV and authorial voice changes from chapter to chapter or book to book (Muir does this very well).
You want to sympathize with necromancers.
You like campy dialogue and internet culture.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, go read the first book in this series; Gideon the Ninth. If you want to tell me I’m wrong or just chat, come find me on Twitter. If you have any specific theories or thoughts about Nona the Ninth or the greater Locked Tomb Series leave a comment below.
Alastair Reynolds began his career as an astrophysicist working for the European Space Agency. He is an extremely prolific writer of short stories, many of which take place in the Revelation Space setting and provide the novels with greater context. Read this book if you are looking for epic interstellar adventures at sub-light speeds.
Blue Collar Space is a rejection of “Big Man Science Fiction” that focuses on the people who built the future those larger-than-life characters exist in. Its subjects include civil engineers on the moon, father-daughter lunar hikes gone wrong, and other examples of people living their lives and saving humanity in less glamorous ways. Read it if you want to be immersed in lives that our descendants might one day live out in space.
Of the four books on this list “Gardens of the Sun” has the most in common with the Expanse. It envisions a future where Earth has been wracked by climate change and the remaining authoritarian empires on Earth devote most of their resources to shape and rebuild the ruined environment. Genetic engineering has made many things impossible, including novel synthetic ecosystems in the outer solar system. With Earth’s governments on the verge of developing a new and improved fusion engine, the many settlements of the solar system are wary of an increased Earth presence in the outer solar system. Read this book if you want a future mix of political scheming, warfare, and hopeful but sometimes strange depictions of future science.
A classic of the hard science fiction genre. “Rendevous With Rama” is a science fiction classic that follows a group of astronauts sent on a detour to a massive alien ship that is using our Sun to perform a slingshot maneuver. While the governments of Earth and the other planets debate how to respond to the object, the scientists of Earth scramble to understand the object and advise a team of accidental explorers on how to make the best use of their limited time exploring the object. Read this book if you want a story that evokes a sense of the unknowable and the vast scale of our universe. You should also read it if you plan to watch the upcoming Dennis Vilneuve adaptation.
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