Young Wizards Is My Favorite Book Series Because Where Else Are You Going To Find A Book Where A Twelve

Reasons the Young Wizards series is wonderful: there’s a scene that can be described as “Tiny kitten Roasts Satan” and it’s the best thing ever

Rebloggable-d by request: Names in the Speech

So this may be an odd question, and not one you’ve thought about much — but how would the Speech interact with someone who uses/identifies as a different name than their birth/legal name? I don’t mean like Kit — presumably his name in the Speech would include a phrase along the lines of ‘Christopher, called Kit’ — but a case where the birth name has been ‘rejected’, and isn’t part of the wizard’s identity at all.

intheafterlight

A wizard’s Manual can come in all shapes and sizes. For those who know which links to click, there is a section of Wikipedia where the globe puzzle is full and finished. Articles in this section never have a problem with trolls or misinformation, and cover subjects ranging from a listing of every Power to a deep dive on echolocation spells.

so, I’ve taken up tailoring recently. and while I was working on a draping today, I got to thinking about entropy.

(drapings are those things where a tailor takes a blank section of cloth and sculpts a piece of clothing directly onto a model’s body. it ensures a perfect fit. entropy refers to the level of organization in a system. the less organization a system has, the greater its entropy. entropy can only be overcome with energy. it takes effort to organize a system. the natural state of the universe is one of complete entropy, i.e., the lowest energy state possible.)

A piece of broadcloth, before it’s used for a draping, is the cloth in its state of greatest entropy. it’s featureless. uniform. whatever small variations exist between one part of the cloth and another are random and will ease out over time. wrinkles. chalk markings. small snags.

a finished piece of clothing is the cloth at its lowest state of entropy, and by extension, its highest energy state. it is structured and organized. it has many features, all of which interact with each other in a coherent system. seams and darts and buttons and lining all cooperate to give the dress, or whatever it is, a fixed shape and function.

most things are like this. your body. the planet Earth. the Milky Way. they are systems made of organized parts which give them form and function. 

(the difference between you and a few buckets of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and a few other atoms combined into an inert slurry is the entropy of the system.)

but in order for those systems to become organized, they needed energy from an outside source. without energy, everything slides towards entropy. the energy that makes your body possible comes from the food you eat. the energy from your food comes, though a few middlemen like cows or cabbages or whatever, from the Sun. the Sun’s energy comes from the fusion of hydrogen into helium. A hydrogen atom is just a proton: maybe paired with an electron, if it bumps into one. And those component particles were created in the first few wild moments after the Big Bang.

All of the energy in the universe can be traced back to the Big Bang. every organized system owes its life to the Big Bang. we’re just sipping from its cup until we die.

(where did the energy that ignited the Big Bang come from? no one knows. there’s room to see God there, if you’re so inclined.)

but the energy of the Big Bang wasn’t infinite. we are, slowly, using it up. the universe is sinking to a lower and lower energy state, all the time. according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the energy of a system can only stay the same or decrease. entropy will win. people refer to this as the heat death of the universe. according to current science, it’s the most likely end point for everything.

so anyway, I got to thinking about this while I was tailoring today.

I spent all day on this project. I put a lot of energy into it. my energy, as mechanical energy, or the physical act of sewing, into the cloth, where it’s now stored as potential energy, which is the energy of positioning. I turned chemical energy (food) into motion and then into shape. each of these transitions is a step down the ladder. a little bit more of our universe’s inheritance, spent.

and I got really sad. that probably sounds ridiculous, right? but I think about this a lot. every time I spend energy, that’s energy the universe can’t get back. a sequin off the Big Bang is now a new dress on my ironing board. was that energy well-spent? should it have gone to something else? it doesn’t matter. it’s gone now. the universe is a little bit closer to death.

then I stopped being sad, and I just felt a deep responsibility to take care of that dress. because, mathematically speaking, there’s nothing superior about organization over entropy. the particles don’t care if they’re in a high or low energy state. your atoms don’t know who you are, and it doesn’t matter to them if you’re you, or a few buckets of slurry. the value of organization is subjective. systems are important because we believe they are. the universe’s life and death only matter if they matter to us.

I like tailoring. my new dress came out well. I’m looking forward to making another one. I’m sorry that someday there won’t be any more new dresses, or anything else.

maybe that’s good enough.

This is why it's important to keep notes

Because I’d forgotten how I coined this word:

Peridexis (tweeted on 5/11/2010)

"Peridexis" is a pun, out of the "dexis/-on/-ontis" root (skill, expertise, dexterity) and "deixis/on/ontis" (display, demonstration, a reference or reference work"). The "peri-" suggests that the solution is temporary or unusual.

…Now if I can just find the note explaining how I coined mochteroof, my life will be complete. (I have a vague memory that both Coptic and Greek were involved, but I’m not sure any more…)

Thank the Powers for Evernote: that’s all I can say.

Celestial Monsters by Chris Keegan

The thrill of outer space is that we really just have no goddamned clue what’s out there. Aliens? Sentient planets? Intergalactic space police? Probably all of these, plus unfathomably more bizarre creations we couldn’t possibly produce with our earthly imaginations. Chris Keegan took a pretty good stab at it though, manipulating images from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory of floating space debris and vast, lightyears-spanning nebule into dark and majestic forms, surely just an echo of the monolithic entities just beyond our telescopic grasp…

Artist: Website (via: Wired / io9)

So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane

I’m a little nervous about doing a review of this book, actually. For one thing, it’s one of the foundations of my ethical code today. Who I am is, in a large part, based on this novel and the ones that come after. That makes it a little hard to be objective and give a nice unbiased review, but I’ll do my best. Another thing I’m nervous about is that the author, who I (obviously) respect, is a regular Tumblr user, and is probably going to see this at some point. Finally,this series has a devoted fandom comprised of intelligent, wonderful people who know a lot about the series.

Still, all those reasons to be nervous should make it clear that this is a series you really shouldn’t miss!

So You Want To Be A Wizard is the first book in what is, at the moment, a nine book series. The tenth book, Games Wizards Play, is due out… sometime… Well, we know it’s coming! Recently, the series got a revamp. The first book is copyright 1992, so the timeline needed a bit of help after twenty-two years. If you’re looking to get into the series, starting with the NMEs is a good choice.

But let’s talk about the book itself.

It opens with Nita Callahan, reader extraordinaire and space devotee, running away from bullies from her middle school. She manages to duck into the library, and as she’s hiding, her finger is snagged by a book - when she pulls it out, it’s a book called So You Want To Be A Wizard. Naturally, she thinks it’s a joke, but. Well. It doesn’t read like a joke. And if she was a wizard, if she had magic, maybe she could stop getting hurt. So she takes the Wizard’s Oath, and though momentarily lulled into a sense of complacency by finding another teen wizard and learning about exciting magic things and meeting a white hole, presently finds herself engaged in a struggle against the forces of entropy, embodied in the form of the Lone Power, where the stakes are the Earth itself.

But that’s the plot. What makes this series so exceptional is the motivations of the characters, wizardly and otherwise, and the level of responsibility with which they interact with their world. In retrospect, that first scene with the bullies is pretty telling for the series as a whole. It’s seriously treated - Nita is a victim, and she is not responsible for their actions or what happens to her. She is, however, responsible for her own actions; she chooses to antagonize the bullies to claim some power from the situation. What her Ordeal (the quest when you accept the Oath) lets her realize is that she already has power - she controls her own choices, her anger and what she does with it - and it shows her how to claim it. As a wizard, she has the power to terrify those who want to hurt her; as a human, she has the power to break the cycle of violence. The very nature of wizardry in this universe demands that she choose to “guard growth and ease pain”, but it doesn’t require her to forgive the bullies. That she does choose to use her power for forgiveness shows how strong she is as a person. 

Choice is in many ways the center of the book, and of the series. A species makes a Choice that defines their relationship to wizardry and entropy. Each wizard chooses to take the Oath. In the course of wizardry - and life in general - choices come up all the time. There are consequences to all of the choices you make, but what you do with your free will is in the end up to you. Figuring out what to do with your free will isn’t easy, though, and it becomes increasingly difficult as the series progresses and the characters age - the choices we make as children are always more straightforward than those we make as adults, when our ability to see the complexities of a situation grows, which is another thing I appreciate about the series. The characters are in no way static, and the books do become more difficult as the characters gain the age-appropriate abilities to handle the problems that come up.

Those problems aren’t always wizardly, either! There’s at least one very long-running romance subplot between Nita and her best friend Kit, not to mention a plethora of truly excellent sibling and parental contretemps. The familial relationships are absolutely phenomenal, by the way, and are pretty varied. Both Nita and Kit have complex, realistic, and person-specific sibling relationships. And the parents! One problem I often have with YA literature is that parents are very sketchily characterized, mostly a name and a figure to rebel against. Which makes sense - one’s perspective as a young teenager is limited, and one’s ability to see other people as people is also limited. Part of adolescence is learning to recognize that other people are distinct individuals, and in their lives, you’re on the periphery if you register at all. In this series, the parents are well-characterized from our perspective, and as the kids age, how they perceive their parents also changes. I’d like to see more of Kit’s parents - we get some of them, but not nearly so much as we get of the Callahans. There’s a good reason for that, but it’s a spoiler.

Their parents aren’t the only adult figures in these kids’ lives, either. Tom and Carl are Senior wizards who live just up the road, and provide an excellent sort of hands-off mentorship. They’re very clear from the beginning that they don’t have all the answers. The kids can ask for aid and answers, but they might not get them. I’m making a note of their care in establishing themselves as fallible early on, because the kids do forget this, and I feel like they should get some recognition for the effort. Good try, guys!

It’s an eminently quotable book, funny and heartbreaking by turns. It’s a great book to give kids - magic and mystery! Travel the universe, meet the gods! Be scared witless and thrilled breathless! Develop a strong ethical code based around the Hippocratic Oath, individual responsibility, empathy, and the strength of forgiveness, belief, and second chances! Save the world, with or without magic!

That last is actually the last thing I really want to talk about. Although it doesn’t come up much in the first series, one of the things that makes this series so very influential is the idea that you don’t actually need magic to change things. The wizards get to play in the grand scheme of things, but regular folks are no less important or influential. Sure, we can’t stop a sun from exploding, but we can slow entropy in a thousand other ways. We can conserve energy, spread order and kindness and cooperation, help the hurt, counsel the despairing, and if all that fails, we can stare evil down and refuse to go along with it because that, too, is a choice we have the capacity to make.

tl;dr - amazing book, with surprisingly nuanced discussion of ethics and excellent characterization. Purchase it for one and all! The only content warning I have for this one is bullies, though feel free to contact me if you want content warnings for the remaining books. This book is available as a multi-format package from Diane Duane’s ebookstore for $6.99. Hard copies can be purchased from Amazon for $7.19, but it’s not the NME, so be warned! You can also get the hard copy from your favorite local bookstore! If you want an ebook, I recommend getting it straight from the source. They’re excellent quality ebooks, reasonably priced, and frequently on sale as well.

According to the laws of physics, a planet in the shape of a doughnut (toroid) could exist. Physicist Anders Sandberg says that such planets would have very short nights and days, an arid outer equator, twilight polar regions, moons in strange orbits and regions with very different gravity and seasons.

Read more: http://bit.ly/1kPLXGT via io9