Motion Age
This used to be the space age. Also the atomic age. The age of television. Before that, the radio age. The automobile age. The digital age. Those are all what we see right before our eyes. But what about a little bit in the future? Say, five or six centuries at least. That ought to lend a bit more perspective, and maybe the defining thing will be something we don’t notice because it’s too close or too big.
Wait.
Word of the Day
If you like ancient tales set in the British Isles, and you’ve already read Beowulf, you might turn to the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge or the Welsh Mabinogion. Epic stories from thousands of years ago are a lot like super hero comics. There’s someone extraordinary who performs amazing feats, sometimes besting other superhuman characters. You find this not just in stories set in Britain, of course, but in Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Nibelungenlied, the Mahabharata, and more.
More than the basic elements of plot, you can find something else in the ancient books: ancient language. If you’re a modern-day author and you want to set your story in an authentically medieval time (or an authentic-sounding pre-technological fantasy world) you might find some good ideas, turns of phrase, and obsolete words in the old stories.
…Motion Age
I wonder if this will turn out to be the motion age. We move our bodies around a lot more than we used to before we had cars, trains, airplanes, and, for that matter, bikes. It’s something we take for granted. Everybody knows what a road trip is. Everybody knows what a road is. And a trip. But what if that wasn’t true.
Wait.
…Word of the Day
The Maginogion is a set of stories first written down in the 1100s in Wales. Inside you can find the word “cantrev”. Spell checkers weren’t very reliable back then, so “cantrev” also shows up as “cantref” and “canthrif”, but they’re the same thing. And that same thing is an administrative concept; it’s a division of a county (or a “shire”).
“Cantrev” is a compound Welsh word put together from “cant” (a hundred) and “tref” (a town). The “hundred”, in this case, doesn’t refer to the number; in England at that time a “hundred” was an indistinct measurement of an area. Nobody is quite sure where that word came from, but William Stubbs wrote a history book in the 1870s with what’s considered the best guess: “It has been regarded as denoting simply a division of a hundred hides of land; as the district which furnished a hundred warriors to the host; as representing the original settlement of the hundred warriors; or as composed of a hundred hides, each of which furnished a single warrior.” The word “hide” has a special meaning there too; in ancient England a “hide” was the amount of land that could be tilled by one plow in one year.
…Motion Age
Road trips, as in a jaunt in your jalopy, might be an alien thing someday. Physically moving your body in order to just be in a different location…an odd idea. And connected to so much that we do; so many deep ways we experience the world. Listening to music as the melody…moves? Awaiting. The time…passes? Reading, moving your eyes around the text as the plot…advances?
Wait.
…Word of the Day
None of this is particularly relevant today, except that the word “cantrev” is, thanks to modern-day authors, having a bit of a resurgence. You can find it, for example, in a Adam Robots by Adam Roberts called: “So, the land there is thickly forested to the north and the forest grows even more thickly and densely to the south. This southern cantrev of forest is so very dense, indeed, that there is no other place in the world with trees of such height or magnificence or profusion.”
It might be considered a cheap authoring trick to toss in a word that you’re quite aware not one of your readers will know without looking up. It could be an attempt to instill the story with an otherworldly aura of course…but maybe it’s just flosculation. Because I certainly wouldn’t stoop to cheap authoring tricks like that.
…Motion Age
Can I not move? Can I experience time that doesn’t pass? a melody that doesn’t? a story whose ending is?
Wait.
