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(SPOILERZ // They’re not technically zombies, but they register that way when you read the book. They’ve sort of self-lobotomised themselves; it’s pretty freaky even though he’s basically describing regular human beings. He just happens to do this in a transhuman setting. It’s quite distressing. // SPOILERZ end)

Though with ‘favourite’ I mean ‘what’s the fuss about all the others?’. It’s not really my genre/topic, but I’m glad others are enjoying it a whole bunch.

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It seems as if Watts is building a larger interconnected ‘verse for his writings, with his website [0] now focused on “Echopraxia”, his newest long-form meditation on sentience-as-a-dysgenic-spandrel and the military application of P-zombies.

[0] http://www.rifters.com

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“Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.” – James Nicoll

However, I would be interested in your critique re: “uninteresting”, having myself only just discovered Watts.

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(2) Re: witches consorting with fairies and being burned at the stake. There’s been a whole lot of crap written about both ‘the witchcraft craze’ and the burnings (as one form of execution), e.g. “Nine million murdered in the Burning Times!!!!”

As ever, it depends where you were and when you were. Irish folklore is replete with people associating with the fairies; often, these men and women were treated as having secret knowledge of cures and the like, not as conspirators wtih the devil. There was one case of witch-burning in Ireland; it wasn’t about consorting with the Daoine Sidhe but with the devil, it was part of the tension between the new Norman-Irish colonisation and the native Irish (part of which was the imposition or introduction of English secular-church structure to replace the Irish monastic-based government), it happened in 1324 and it was the servant, Petronella de Meath, of the main accused Alice Kytelerwho was executed rather than Dame Alice (who fled to England and so far as we know didn’t end up burned anywhere).

Witchcraft was lumped in with heresy, the execution for which was burning. James VI and I may have had a very strong interest in witchcraft but at the time Shakespeare was writing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Elizabeth was still on the throne and belief in fairies was already changing – witness the satirical poem “Farewell, Rewards and Fairies”:

Witness those rings and roundelays
Of theirs, which yet remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary’s days
On many a grassy plain;
But since of late, Elizabeth,
And later, James came in,
They never danced on any heath
As when the time hath been.

By which we note the Fairies
Were of the old Profession.
Their songs were ‘Ave Mary’s’,
Their dances were Procession.
But now, alas, they all are dead;
Or gone beyond the seas;
Or farther for Religion fled;
Or else they take their ease.

Granted, attitudes amongs the educated were different to those amongst the peasantry and lower classes, but consider that Spenser felt in no peril about writing “The Faerie Queen” and identifying her with the monarch, or invoking the myths of the Trojans and fairies as founders of London and England.

Depending on the time, and what part of Europe you were in, belief in fairies fluctuated; it wasn’t consistent across the Continent (Irish and Scots fairies are not German fairies are not Scandinavian fairies); witchcraft was always more linked to heresy and paganism (or what were considered pagan/diabolic beliefs) rather than ‘pure’ fairy lore and so became more of a problem in areas during the Wars of Religion where Protestantism was struggling to establish itself or was newly established as the dominant power – suddenly all the old traditions and charms were gone and you were left with a strong belief in the powers of evil but were now stripped of all the traditional remedies and left only with ‘the power of your faith will protect you’. Invoking the power of the state to protect you from evildoers and ‘fifth columnists’ was just one more stick in the bundle of transferring authority from The Church to The State.

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braaaaaiiinnns

brraaaaaiiiiinnnnsss

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I lump them in my head with the draugar of Norse folklore, but that probably has more to do with my choice of reading than anything else.

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