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starladyGarrfinkle, Richard. Celestial Matters. New York: Tor Books, 1996.
Marie Brennan recommended this book to me, and she was right that I liked it (I borrowed her copy, in point of fact). Celestial Matters is an alternate history novel of science fiction in which Aristotelian physics are true (so the sun orbits the Earth), and the Delian League, which controls half the world, has been locked in unending war with the Middle Kingdom for approximately all of the nine centuries since the death of Alexander the Great.
The plot follows Aias, the scientific commander of the lunar ship Chandra's Tear, who is tasked by the league with a task of Promethean scale: i.e. to steal fire from the sun and bring it back to Earth, where it can serve as the engine of the ultimate weapon to end the war by devastating the capital of the Middle Kingdom, Hangzhou. Aias is accompanied by his friend and co-commander, Aeson (representing the Athenian and Spartan traditions, respectively), and his bodyguard Captain Yellow Hare, who is Cherokee by birth but Spartan by avocation. The ship's Chief Dynamicist, Ramonojon, is Indian, and the rest of the crew are of similarly varied origin--and also even gender.
This book was really interesting in a lot of ways. Garfinkle has clearly put a lot of thought into his alternate physics, and the worldbuilding of the science aspects is really great and thorough. I also thought the way he handled Aias' fundamentally Hellenic worldview, and particularly his interactions with the gods, was a really well done update of the mindset of ancient Greek literature, and I thought the characters in general were well-drawn. That said, a little more attention to social and cultural development might have been good, though I did like the much greater gender equity of this version of the Delian League.
The pacing of the book is somewhat uneven, however--despite spies and assassination attempts, the story lags until a skirmish just off Selene a little more than halfway through the book, at which point it races to the finish. I would have liked more Middler science earlier, and even more banned Buddhism, though I thought the depiction of Daoist science, when that does come, was also really well-done. (Reading any Daoist text for me is basically like reading elementary quantum mechanics, so on the one hand, Garfinkle has it somewhat easier.) I also thought the way that Garfinkle depicted the hardening of science into ideology on both sides was pretty great. All in all, this was a very interesting and unusual read.
I am in the doubtless unusual position of knowing more than the average reader about both the civilizations that figure so heavily in this book, and I also am somewhat unusual in that I have studied both ancient Greek (and can speak a teeny bit of modern) and Chinese, both modern Mandarin and classical literary Chinese. So, as far as this book is concerned, I'm an expert, and I am baffled by Garfinkle's transcription choices for both languages.
After thinking about it way longer than it deserved, I realized why he did it--he was trying to represent Chinese (and other languages) as though it were Greek, which makes sense from a character standpoint but unfortunately doesn't work very well because a) languages change over time and b) the book isn't written in Greek. It's written in English, which uses the Roman alphabet.
All of this means that the Roman letter X (itself adopted from Greek) does duty for several different sounds that are wildly different. The first is Greek χ, as in English "chaos" or Greek χαος, which Garfinkle writes "xaos." The second is Mandarin q, as in 气 or in Sima Qian, which is (utterly bizarrely) written Ssu-ma X'ien in the text. The third is Mandarin zh, as in Hangzhou (pronounced hahng-joe), written 'AngXou. The fourth is English ch, as in Cherokee, written Xirokee. The fifth is Mandarin sh, as in Shan (aka Zen) Buddhism, written Xan in the text. Similarly Latin Z (for Greek ζ) is used for the J in transcriptions of Indian languages, i.e. "raza" for "raja"--even though one of the main characters is named Ramonojon. WTF.
I have problems with all this not only because it's wildly inconsistent but because it only serves to alienate the reader. There's no good reason to transliterate the Aegis of Athena (familiar to everyone who's slogged through a course on ancient Greece or world literature) as Aigis, or Hades as 'Ades: as someone who knows Greek, I know what he's doing, but to anyone else, it's literally all Greek to them, and defamiliarizes to no purpose. You shouldn't be trying to alienate your readers from your worldbuilding. Similarly, mucking around with the Chinese is needlessly obscurantist, to the point where I thought he was doing it out of ignorance until I sat down to write this out. And his insistence on trying to transcribe modern languages into ancient Greek and then retranscribe them into modern English is sort of laughable, given how much ancient and modern Greek don't resemble each other (ditto classical and modern Chinese, for that matter), though it fits with the book's notable failure to imagine cultural change of the same scale and scope as the scientific and technological advances (despite the greatly increased gender equity in Hellenic society, which frankly of all the social changes Garfinkle could have envisioned is, to me as a classicist, the least plausible. Greek misogyny was and is no joke). (Also, it's not like ancient Greek didn't have a letter that could have been used for Mandarin q, namely qoppa, which is where the Latin alphabet gets Q.)
Finally, there's a real irony in the fact that Garfinkle lavishes all this attention on his elaborate alternate transcription schemes only to have the text use English ' to represent the Greek breath mark ῾. They are definitively not the same, and seeing ' in front of the Greek words that need a breath is, to someone who knows Greek, like continually missing a stair on a climb upwards. The insistence on the breath mark rather than just writing H is also kind of odd, because the use of accents to mark inflection (or possibly tones; it's unclear, but it's known that the accents were used in musical notation, which offers the possibility that pre-Hellenistic Greek was tonal) dropped out of Greek in the wake of Alexander the Great's Hellenization of much of the world, and though the breath mark is still used in modern Greek, writing H is definitely the kind of change that was made to make Greek less formidable to non-native speakers. It's also ironic that the text uses such Anglicizations as "aegis" and "Europe" without any remark whatsoever. Tl;dr: just fucking use the established English transcription systems. They are familiar, standard, and established for good reasons.
Marie Brennan recommended this book to me, and she was right that I liked it (I borrowed her copy, in point of fact). Celestial Matters is an alternate history novel of science fiction in which Aristotelian physics are true (so the sun orbits the Earth), and the Delian League, which controls half the world, has been locked in unending war with the Middle Kingdom for approximately all of the nine centuries since the death of Alexander the Great.
The plot follows Aias, the scientific commander of the lunar ship Chandra's Tear, who is tasked by the league with a task of Promethean scale: i.e. to steal fire from the sun and bring it back to Earth, where it can serve as the engine of the ultimate weapon to end the war by devastating the capital of the Middle Kingdom, Hangzhou. Aias is accompanied by his friend and co-commander, Aeson (representing the Athenian and Spartan traditions, respectively), and his bodyguard Captain Yellow Hare, who is Cherokee by birth but Spartan by avocation. The ship's Chief Dynamicist, Ramonojon, is Indian, and the rest of the crew are of similarly varied origin--and also even gender.
This book was really interesting in a lot of ways. Garfinkle has clearly put a lot of thought into his alternate physics, and the worldbuilding of the science aspects is really great and thorough. I also thought the way he handled Aias' fundamentally Hellenic worldview, and particularly his interactions with the gods, was a really well done update of the mindset of ancient Greek literature, and I thought the characters in general were well-drawn. That said, a little more attention to social and cultural development might have been good, though I did like the much greater gender equity of this version of the Delian League.
The pacing of the book is somewhat uneven, however--despite spies and assassination attempts, the story lags until a skirmish just off Selene a little more than halfway through the book, at which point it races to the finish. I would have liked more Middler science earlier, and even more banned Buddhism, though I thought the depiction of Daoist science, when that does come, was also really well-done. (Reading any Daoist text for me is basically like reading elementary quantum mechanics, so on the one hand, Garfinkle has it somewhat easier.) I also thought the way that Garfinkle depicted the hardening of science into ideology on both sides was pretty great. All in all, this was a very interesting and unusual read.
I am in the doubtless unusual position of knowing more than the average reader about both the civilizations that figure so heavily in this book, and I also am somewhat unusual in that I have studied both ancient Greek (and can speak a teeny bit of modern) and Chinese, both modern Mandarin and classical literary Chinese. So, as far as this book is concerned, I'm an expert, and I am baffled by Garfinkle's transcription choices for both languages.
After thinking about it way longer than it deserved, I realized why he did it--he was trying to represent Chinese (and other languages) as though it were Greek, which makes sense from a character standpoint but unfortunately doesn't work very well because a) languages change over time and b) the book isn't written in Greek. It's written in English, which uses the Roman alphabet.
All of this means that the Roman letter X (itself adopted from Greek) does duty for several different sounds that are wildly different. The first is Greek χ, as in English "chaos" or Greek χαος, which Garfinkle writes "xaos." The second is Mandarin q, as in 气 or in Sima Qian, which is (utterly bizarrely) written Ssu-ma X'ien in the text. The third is Mandarin zh, as in Hangzhou (pronounced hahng-joe), written 'AngXou. The fourth is English ch, as in Cherokee, written Xirokee. The fifth is Mandarin sh, as in Shan (aka Zen) Buddhism, written Xan in the text. Similarly Latin Z (for Greek ζ) is used for the J in transcriptions of Indian languages, i.e. "raza" for "raja"--even though one of the main characters is named Ramonojon. WTF.
I have problems with all this not only because it's wildly inconsistent but because it only serves to alienate the reader. There's no good reason to transliterate the Aegis of Athena (familiar to everyone who's slogged through a course on ancient Greece or world literature) as Aigis, or Hades as 'Ades: as someone who knows Greek, I know what he's doing, but to anyone else, it's literally all Greek to them, and defamiliarizes to no purpose. You shouldn't be trying to alienate your readers from your worldbuilding. Similarly, mucking around with the Chinese is needlessly obscurantist, to the point where I thought he was doing it out of ignorance until I sat down to write this out. And his insistence on trying to transcribe modern languages into ancient Greek and then retranscribe them into modern English is sort of laughable, given how much ancient and modern Greek don't resemble each other (ditto classical and modern Chinese, for that matter), though it fits with the book's notable failure to imagine cultural change of the same scale and scope as the scientific and technological advances (despite the greatly increased gender equity in Hellenic society, which frankly of all the social changes Garfinkle could have envisioned is, to me as a classicist, the least plausible. Greek misogyny was and is no joke). (Also, it's not like ancient Greek didn't have a letter that could have been used for Mandarin q, namely qoppa, which is where the Latin alphabet gets Q.)
Finally, there's a real irony in the fact that Garfinkle lavishes all this attention on his elaborate alternate transcription schemes only to have the text use English ' to represent the Greek breath mark ῾. They are definitively not the same, and seeing ' in front of the Greek words that need a breath is, to someone who knows Greek, like continually missing a stair on a climb upwards. The insistence on the breath mark rather than just writing H is also kind of odd, because the use of accents to mark inflection (or possibly tones; it's unclear, but it's known that the accents were used in musical notation, which offers the possibility that pre-Hellenistic Greek was tonal) dropped out of Greek in the wake of Alexander the Great's Hellenization of much of the world, and though the breath mark is still used in modern Greek, writing H is definitely the kind of change that was made to make Greek less formidable to non-native speakers. It's also ironic that the text uses such Anglicizations as "aegis" and "Europe" without any remark whatsoever. Tl;dr: just fucking use the established English transcription systems. They are familiar, standard, and established for good reasons.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-20 22:57 (UTC)This bit, at least, is consistent; Wade-Giles would render it Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and thus it's only the ch/x collapse that you've identified anent the prior example.
The fifth is Mandarin sh
This one does seem a bit like willful ignorance, insofar as English sh ~= pinyin x (the converse).
Agreed that he seems to've collapsed graphemes without sufficient attention to the phonemes underlying them, perhaps more simply than you outline. Does it seem possible that the intended effect is to consolidate unfamiliar things for people who don't know any Mandarin or Greek? (Or Latin--I haven't studied Greek but your examples there are clear enough.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-20 23:37 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-22 19:59 (UTC)trying to transcribe modern languages into ancient Greek and then retranscribe them into modern English
Lord. I don't even... what makes someone try to do something like that? Kind of incredible. I've hardly got your expertise, so I'd have probably just wondered about 'Ades and Xirokee, never really figuring out what's behind them.
(Umh, hi. Yes. In the case you're wondering about random comments from random strangers, I added your journal a little while ago, just cause you seemed like an interesting person, so... hi.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-22 20:25 (UTC)I think "Xirokee" is possible to get from context (possibly easier for a U.S.-ian, however), since Yellow Hare has reddish skin and black hair, smokes tobacco from a long pipe, etc, but the Greek stuff and the Chinese stuff, I think most people who aren't specialists would have trouble with. It's frustrating! But the book is really interesting even with all that.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-22 21:01 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-24 04:41 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-27 05:59 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-28 21:38 (UTC)