Entry tags:
Yuletide: Three Tellings about Dead Things in the Earth
Okay, back to December meme, where were we?
hannah wanted me to talk about Always Coming Home by Ursula le Guin, but Always Coming Home was my yuletide fandom, so I had to screen the comment until now. :D
I wrote Three Tellings about Dead Things In The Earth for
cenozoic_synapsid and it was a great experience to write!
Three Tellings About Dead Things in the Earth (5376 words) by melannen
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Pandora, Stone Telling
Additional Tags: plays, Visions, Coal - Freeform
Summary: Some things a geomythologer brought out of the archives of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha: a life history from a woman of Sinshan; an account of a play performed in Tachas Touchas; a story left behind from a traveler in the Valley.
Always Coming Home is a strange sort of book; it’s a novella mixed with a worldbuilding bible mixed with an ethnography mixed with a poetry collection, basically. My assigned request said "I don’t know how to write fic for Always Coming Home at all, so I’ll leave you without any specific prompts." I didn’t really know how to write fic for Always Coming Home either, but they mentioned in a prompt for a different fandom that they like paleontological trivia, and they got assigned to me, so what resulted was fairly inevitable.
I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to do a "Five Things" related to the Valley of the Na and palaeontology (each of them over the yuletide limit individually), because the book is also set up as a collection of related shorts, and also that way I’d have a better chance that recip would get at least 1000 words of something they liked.
The first step of course was to put on reserve at the library all the LeGuin nonfiction they had, and also all of Adrienne Mayor’s books about the way premodern cultures conceptualized fossils, and figure out what interesting palaeontology stuff was near the Kesh, and also to pull every open-access science paper about the geomythology of fossils that I could find online.
"Reread Always Coming Home" should probably have been higher on that list, but you live and learn.
I came up fairly quickly with five-ish ideas I thought would probably work, although some vaguer than others, and they changed a lot after I did re-read canon, each of them connecting somehow to both palaeontology and some of the major themes of the book, which ended up outlined as so:
1. Stone Telling and the Stone Trees (from Stone Telling’s story and the Calistoga forest)
2. A Woman Who Lived On The Coast (vaguely based on Mary Anning and some of the fossil cliffs around the Bay)
3. Life, Heya, Finds a Way (based on the Chindi/Job play in the book, and Jurassic Park)
4. Visiting Pandora in the Water (based on the Mt. Diablo coal mines southwest of Napa and the Pandora section in the book)
5. The City Underground (about the geology - and infrastructure - underlying the Valley.)
...then all the papers got lost in work’s computer issues, and also I got distracted by multiple things and didn’t actually get through all the background reading in time, and also my plan to make a full multi-layer GIS map of the Valley did not happen, and I ended up only writing three of the five. #2 got dropped because I wasn’t having much luck finding good accounts of the fossil cliffs near the Bay, beyond that they existed and what age they were, and also that figuring out the coastal geography (both physical and cultural) during the time of the Kesh was going to be very complicated. #5 got dropped because it was going to take a disproportionate amount of research and worldbuilding and I couldn’t figure out how to make it not be boring anyway.
Planning a series of connected-but-independent shorts makes it very easy to scale back as needed; I recommend the strategy.
So here’s more about each of the three that I did end up writing:
Stone Telling’s novella is the most "conventional" part of the book - almost too much so; on my first read I stalled out in it early on, because I didn’t think I needed another unsubtle story about patriarchy making lives into misery. And when I was assigned this fandom, I almost thought I’d skip over it. But having come back to it now, reading out-of-order after reading the whole book, and knowing the Kesh better, and also knowing how it ended, I liked it a lot more - because as stories about patriarchy making lives into misery goes, it’s very gentle about it, and I really like that at no point are the concerns of the Condor People given any consideration at all; Stone Telling’s POV simply dismisses out of hand any concept that their values actually matter, and it was just taken for granted that any culture like that will burn itself out on its own sickness quickly enough, and it was really nice, this year, to sit with that POV for awhile.
Anyway, in terms of what I wrote: I decided a Stone Telling section, set in the Valley, was a good idea just in case all my more experimental attempts failed. Which meant, off my list of fossil sites in the area, something about the Stone Forest near Kastoha (as it’s marked on the map in Stone Telling’s section, the only fossil site outright mentioned in the book) aka the Calistoga Petrified Forest (as it’s currently marketed to tourists.) There’s some good websites with pictures and things from it, so I felt reasonably okay writing about it, and also petrified forests are SO COOL and I really want to visit one some day. There is also an account of a visit there in 1880 by Robert Louis Stevenson, when the tavkach people were only just starting to invade the area, which I used heavily for writing about what visiting it in Stone Telling’s day might have been like. (It was really interesting to think about how it’s easy to think of the Kesh as, like, a pre-White-people tribal society that has rejected everything of ours, but of course they haven’t, our bricks and roads are still there, and there’s more of modern culture in Kesh culture than is obvious; it’s just not the parts of modern culture that modern culture tends to celebrate. Someday somebody’s going to trigger that rant about matrilocality and class in the modern US and we will all regret it.)
Alas, I couldn’t actually find much on fossil folklore in the Bay Area, or any specifically about the Petrified Forest. And I didn’t manage to work in possibly the best-known fossil folklore from the current U.S. - that stealing any wood from the Petrified Forest curses you with bad luck until you return it and apologize - although that may only apply to Petrified Forest National Monument anyway. But there is a LOT of recorded fossil lore - a lot of it very creepy - from the areas where the Condor People came from before they moved to Volcano Country, which is the vague sort of area where a lot of the classic dinosaur boneyards are. So I wanted to work that in, if I could. (Most of what I used came from Adrienne Mayor’s Fossil Legends of the First Americans’ chapter on the High Plains. Really good book! I kinda had to rush through it because of ILL and writing deadline; I need to get it back again and read it properly.)
So writing a story about Stone Telling coming back to the Valley after her time with the Condor people, and resettling herself in the Valley’s version of the world, seemed like a good idea. It also let me directly address the Kesh concepts of earth history and geological time, which are covered in the "Time and the City" chapter of the book. I called it a "Life History" because the book sets up Stone Telling’s novella as something different from the way history is usually passed down in the Valley, so I wanted to try to make this more like the Life Histories in that that section of the book, although I’m not sure there’s really enough difference there to be apparent.
2. Owing Greatly and the Bird Women
So, technically, you aren’t supposed to do unrequested crossovers in yuletide. But technically, "the Kesh remix old stories from the Time Before" is canon, so this isn’t really a crossover, right?
The canon basis for this is the play "Chindi" that is given in full in the book, and is compared to/ based on the very ancient story that’s told as Job in the Tanakh and the Old Testament. So this being me, I knew I was going to do something like that only with a story about paleontology, and, well, if you want a paleontology story that’s deep down in the culture of the City of Man, you want Jurassic Park. So re-doing a movie as a play made sense to me, too (Especially since there’s a theory that the Book of Job was also originally a play of some sort.)
The first step was going over the canon plays and figuring out what made a Kesh play: I ended up basically only writing down: costumes; stage and staging based on the "heyiya-if" hinge symbol, with limited sets but elaborate costuming and creative use of props; a chorus, but with a less formal/structural role than in Greek plays, but more direct influence on the main action than in musicals; and the concept of "peg lines".
"Peg lines" are mostly only discussed in the Chindi play, but the idea of a play where the "script" was a dozen or so quotes that everybody knows, and the rest is just improvised around a general idea of the plot and characters to make the peg lines work, really resonated with me! In that it’s pretty much how I experience a lot of pop culture movies.
In fact, now is probably the time where I confess that I have never actually sat down and watched a Jurassic Park movie (or read a book) all the way through. I have been in rooms where I was trying to do something else and one or the other was on the TV; everything else I know is from oral transmission and cultural osmosis. (And reading a lot of fanfiction about velociraptors.)
So the next thing I did was sit down and write out a short summary of what I thought happened in the movie, at which point I realized I was missing some vital part of the plot, because all I had plotwise was "people visit the dino park - dinos escape and chase them - there is a thing with a computer system that is DEFINITELY NOT UNIX - some of them survive," and I was pretty sure there was at least a little more to it than that. So I asked
stellar_dust, who is much more a fan of it than me (she even wrote it for yuletide once) to give me her two-paragraph plot summary (without looking at the internet). Interestingly, she did almost the same thing I did - she started describing vivid scenes and characters but didn’t actually give me any plot! I finally had to ask her specific questions like "but *why* did that happen?" before we got to things like "oh yeah, there were bad guys involved."
So then we put a list of "peg lines" together. Some of them either I couldn’t quite make work with the Kesh context or would have require too many details to make sense, but there are 14 peg lines in the finished fic, some of them used multiple times (like in Chindi.) Can you find them all? Most of them were preserved pretty much verbatim over all those centuries!
(I am still sad I couldn’t get "woman inherits the Earth" in, but I couldn’t really make it make sense in a Kesh context, because, well, to the Kesh, that has happened already! And I really wanted to work in "It’s TOK! I know this!" but it didn’t work with the ending I chose, so maybe it’s a variant peg line. Always a laugh line used for things that are DEFINITELY not TOK.)
Then I made
stellar_dust put the peg lines in her best guess at chronological order, and then set about using my oral-tradition knowledge of the story to improvise it into a coherent plot! It seems to have worked pretty well. I also made her hum me the theme song so I could transcribe it into a Kesh songtype.
I made it a children’s play partly because that’s what I have most personal experience with, and partly because I like the resonance of a summer blockbuster turning into something that is the property of kids and teenagers. And the idea that dinosaurs are still somehow the property of kids, first and foremost.
Also, putting on a play was a common kids’ activity in the era before radios and screens - I’ve read a lot of century + old children’s books, and that’s really incredibly common in them. Plus I work at a library where we have a puppet theater in the play area, and kids put on the best plays.
And I’m also fascinated with kids’ folklore in general, and also the way stories like Jurassic Park and Star Wars are being learned by kids starting at preschool age, when they are far too young to have seen the movies - they’re learning from other kids, or from listening to adults talking, or when they’re a little bit older, from "easy reader" books that tell very reduced versions of the stories and merchandise aimed at kids too young for the originals. We had a kid come in at Halloween looking for a book to match his Halloween costume for a school thing and all he could tell us was that it was the big robot guy from Star Wars (we found an illustrated character guide and eventually decided it was Darth Vader.)
Also, it being a children’s play meant I didn’t have to aim for the same level of depth as Chindi.
So I aimed for about that level of craft and accuracy! Mixing up bits and pieces from the different movies, combining characters, simplifying everything. The multiple endings part was partly because I honestly don’t know which movies ended which way (or which of the endings were canon. And, of course, not having seen canon, I don’t even really know how accurate it even is.) But I went with the water-monster-vs.-land-monster-fight version because that’s actually a recurring motif in the fossil folklore in Adrienne Mayor’s books, probably because of the way fossils are preserved - they’re more likely to be preserved in aquatic environments, so you’ll have a mix of land and sea animals jumbled together, and they’re more likely to be eroded out near water, so you’ll see these huge tangled skeletons on riverbanks and cliffsides over water.
Also in my version THE VELOCIRAPTORS HAVE FEATHERS. The Kesh may understand that the truth a story needs is sometimes different from fact, but even they know that velociraptors have feathers.
I also really like the way the velociraptors in particular have come to be treated (at least, in the cultural osmosis version) as liminal animals-but-also-people, like in stories about Coyote and Anansi and kitsune and so on, so making the velociraptors into Bird Women went really easily.
In fact, if I hadn’t been right up against deadline, I would have been tempted to make it an outright Crane Wife story - that’s basically the same plot as Jurassic Park anyway, "arrogant men think they can capture and enslave you and own your children, but they are never right in the long term" - but that would have probably been too far off to work as the crossover -it should probably be done as an outright JP fanfic by someone who knows JP.
The hardest part of this (other than getting someone to tell me the plot of the original movie) was deciding which town it was set in!
Anyway, if you want to write Kesh fic, I strongly recommend the strategy of "think of a memetic story that you know all the quotes from without ever having seen it, write down a list of peg lines, and turn it into a Kesh play." :D
3. Alexander-Ammon Visits Pandora In The Water
….and I only just now realized that somehow the chapter title of this got mixed up. (I really really hate the chapter interface on AO3….)
So, the Pandora sections are from the POV of Le Guin’s self-insert character, who is an anthropologist from more or less our present day - someone with the worldview of tavkach, anyway, though it’s never really specified what her relationship is to the Valley - who is recording the culture of the Kesh, but they’re also very introspective and poetic and not super linear, and sometimes she’s also Pandora of myth.
I read Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters first in my research, which is about Classical fossil lore, so I thought it would be interesting to work in the Greek mythology angle with Pandora. I also read Finding My Elegy and Final Poems, Le Guin’s last two poetry collections, which talk a lot about growing old and moving beyond (and also have new Kesh poems in them.) And the first paper I read was about Alexander the Great’s mysterious visit to the Siwa oasis, which was in a well-known fossil oasis, and his later connections to the god Ammon, and Ammon’s links to ammonite fossils. And the Pandora sections were the first part of the book I re-read, since I knew they were short, and as I was panicking about whether I was going to get anything at all written, I knew that I could throw together a thousand-word Pandora bit without running into to much trouble with Kesh worldbuilding, because it’s sort of disconnected from Kesh life.
And the other main publically-open fossil site I found in the area of the Valley was the coalfields below Mount Diablo, and I couldn’t resist the idea of writing a story about a gift of coal for yuletide. (Sorry, recip! I am not strong. Also I am the kid who actually asked for coal for Christmas one year because I thought coal was really neat and I didn’t have any.) (I still have that piece of coal, too!) In Stone Telling’s time, the peak of Mount Diablo would have been one of an archipelago of islands in the much-expanded Bay, so I put a lot about flowing water in, too (especially since I’m not sure of much, but I’m pretty sure that wherever Le Guin is now, it isn’t a Dry Land.)
And then throwing all of that in together to roil for awhile, it mixed up with the way, whenever I’m depressed about how we’re going to destroy our world with greed, I’ve always taken comfort in the idea of geological time - that if we don’t get our civilization straightened out soon enough, the worst case scenario is that in another billion years we will be nothing but a smear of asphalt between two geological layers, and everything will still be fine, and nothing that matters will know the difference.
Maybe that’s a horrible thing for an eight-year-old to learn to tell herself at night to keep the nightmares away, but in that case maybe y’all should’ve stopped burning fossils fuels sooner. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was also thinking about the way Always Coming Home is very recognizably a utopia written in a certain moment in the 20th century, but for all that it doesn’t feel at all dated like most of them do - it feels like it’s a world that could result from 2018 just as much as it did from 1985 - it’s mostly just Pandora herself who feels dated, a woman coming from the ideas of the 1970s and 1980s who was old enough to be tired but not old enough yet to lay down - especially comparing it to Le Guin’s poems from the last few years. So I wanted to write something about someone from 2018, someone who wasn’t ready to listen yet in 1985, looking to ask Pandora - an older Pandora who has spent more time in the Valley, who has willingly run out her her time in the City of Man - what advice she has for his world.
That was a lot of put into less than 200 words written in semi-panic two days before the deadline and I have no idea if it worked or how much of it came through, and there's definitely some bits you can only get if you've read that specific paper, which I lost the citation for in the computer crash and cannot now find again. But I always get the impression from the Pandora sections that there’s a lot there that’s not coming through to me there either, and Alexander-Ammon here isn’t meant to be as wise as she was, even then.
I waffled a LOT about whether this section merited a "Major Character Death" warning, and I still can’t decide. Is a story about the authorial avatar of an person who has recently died in real life, which never explicitly identifies the avatar as the RL person, but does sort of imply she died, and is certainly reacting a lot to her RL death, but also implies that her death wasn’t really death, it was just becoming something else that she’d prepared for, is that Major Character Death? (Which is also something you probably shouldn’t do unasked in yuletide, oops.) Finally I gave in and tagged it "Choose Not To Warn" (although I really wish that was phrased to be "choose not to warn/not sure how to warn", because I seem to use it for the latter a lot more often.
Anyway in conclusion, Le Guin's poetry is great, Always Coming Home is a great book and you should all read it and then write fanfic for it, and I got a lot of comments on this story, which I still need to answer, and which I can only attribute to a) a fandom at the beginning of the alphabet and b) people wanting to tell me they got the joke in Chapter 2.
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I wrote Three Tellings about Dead Things In The Earth for
Three Tellings About Dead Things in the Earth (5376 words) by melannen
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Pandora, Stone Telling
Additional Tags: plays, Visions, Coal - Freeform
Summary: Some things a geomythologer brought out of the archives of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha: a life history from a woman of Sinshan; an account of a play performed in Tachas Touchas; a story left behind from a traveler in the Valley.
Always Coming Home is a strange sort of book; it’s a novella mixed with a worldbuilding bible mixed with an ethnography mixed with a poetry collection, basically. My assigned request said "I don’t know how to write fic for Always Coming Home at all, so I’ll leave you without any specific prompts." I didn’t really know how to write fic for Always Coming Home either, but they mentioned in a prompt for a different fandom that they like paleontological trivia, and they got assigned to me, so what resulted was fairly inevitable.
I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to do a "Five Things" related to the Valley of the Na and palaeontology (each of them over the yuletide limit individually), because the book is also set up as a collection of related shorts, and also that way I’d have a better chance that recip would get at least 1000 words of something they liked.
The first step of course was to put on reserve at the library all the LeGuin nonfiction they had, and also all of Adrienne Mayor’s books about the way premodern cultures conceptualized fossils, and figure out what interesting palaeontology stuff was near the Kesh, and also to pull every open-access science paper about the geomythology of fossils that I could find online.
"Reread Always Coming Home" should probably have been higher on that list, but you live and learn.
I came up fairly quickly with five-ish ideas I thought would probably work, although some vaguer than others, and they changed a lot after I did re-read canon, each of them connecting somehow to both palaeontology and some of the major themes of the book, which ended up outlined as so:
1. Stone Telling and the Stone Trees (from Stone Telling’s story and the Calistoga forest)
2. A Woman Who Lived On The Coast (vaguely based on Mary Anning and some of the fossil cliffs around the Bay)
3. Life, Heya, Finds a Way (based on the Chindi/Job play in the book, and Jurassic Park)
4. Visiting Pandora in the Water (based on the Mt. Diablo coal mines southwest of Napa and the Pandora section in the book)
5. The City Underground (about the geology - and infrastructure - underlying the Valley.)
...then all the papers got lost in work’s computer issues, and also I got distracted by multiple things and didn’t actually get through all the background reading in time, and also my plan to make a full multi-layer GIS map of the Valley did not happen, and I ended up only writing three of the five. #2 got dropped because I wasn’t having much luck finding good accounts of the fossil cliffs near the Bay, beyond that they existed and what age they were, and also that figuring out the coastal geography (both physical and cultural) during the time of the Kesh was going to be very complicated. #5 got dropped because it was going to take a disproportionate amount of research and worldbuilding and I couldn’t figure out how to make it not be boring anyway.
Planning a series of connected-but-independent shorts makes it very easy to scale back as needed; I recommend the strategy.
So here’s more about each of the three that I did end up writing:
A Life Story: Bones Dancing
Stone Telling’s novella is the most "conventional" part of the book - almost too much so; on my first read I stalled out in it early on, because I didn’t think I needed another unsubtle story about patriarchy making lives into misery. And when I was assigned this fandom, I almost thought I’d skip over it. But having come back to it now, reading out-of-order after reading the whole book, and knowing the Kesh better, and also knowing how it ended, I liked it a lot more - because as stories about patriarchy making lives into misery goes, it’s very gentle about it, and I really like that at no point are the concerns of the Condor People given any consideration at all; Stone Telling’s POV simply dismisses out of hand any concept that their values actually matter, and it was just taken for granted that any culture like that will burn itself out on its own sickness quickly enough, and it was really nice, this year, to sit with that POV for awhile.
Anyway, in terms of what I wrote: I decided a Stone Telling section, set in the Valley, was a good idea just in case all my more experimental attempts failed. Which meant, off my list of fossil sites in the area, something about the Stone Forest near Kastoha (as it’s marked on the map in Stone Telling’s section, the only fossil site outright mentioned in the book) aka the Calistoga Petrified Forest (as it’s currently marketed to tourists.) There’s some good websites with pictures and things from it, so I felt reasonably okay writing about it, and also petrified forests are SO COOL and I really want to visit one some day. There is also an account of a visit there in 1880 by Robert Louis Stevenson, when the tavkach people were only just starting to invade the area, which I used heavily for writing about what visiting it in Stone Telling’s day might have been like. (It was really interesting to think about how it’s easy to think of the Kesh as, like, a pre-White-people tribal society that has rejected everything of ours, but of course they haven’t, our bricks and roads are still there, and there’s more of modern culture in Kesh culture than is obvious; it’s just not the parts of modern culture that modern culture tends to celebrate. Someday somebody’s going to trigger that rant about matrilocality and class in the modern US and we will all regret it.)
Alas, I couldn’t actually find much on fossil folklore in the Bay Area, or any specifically about the Petrified Forest. And I didn’t manage to work in possibly the best-known fossil folklore from the current U.S. - that stealing any wood from the Petrified Forest curses you with bad luck until you return it and apologize - although that may only apply to Petrified Forest National Monument anyway. But there is a LOT of recorded fossil lore - a lot of it very creepy - from the areas where the Condor People came from before they moved to Volcano Country, which is the vague sort of area where a lot of the classic dinosaur boneyards are. So I wanted to work that in, if I could. (Most of what I used came from Adrienne Mayor’s Fossil Legends of the First Americans’ chapter on the High Plains. Really good book! I kinda had to rush through it because of ILL and writing deadline; I need to get it back again and read it properly.)
So writing a story about Stone Telling coming back to the Valley after her time with the Condor people, and resettling herself in the Valley’s version of the world, seemed like a good idea. It also let me directly address the Kesh concepts of earth history and geological time, which are covered in the "Time and the City" chapter of the book. I called it a "Life History" because the book sets up Stone Telling’s novella as something different from the way history is usually passed down in the Valley, so I wanted to try to make this more like the Life Histories in that that section of the book, although I’m not sure there’s really enough difference there to be apparent.
2. Owing Greatly and the Bird Women
So, technically, you aren’t supposed to do unrequested crossovers in yuletide. But technically, "the Kesh remix old stories from the Time Before" is canon, so this isn’t really a crossover, right?
The canon basis for this is the play "Chindi" that is given in full in the book, and is compared to/ based on the very ancient story that’s told as Job in the Tanakh and the Old Testament. So this being me, I knew I was going to do something like that only with a story about paleontology, and, well, if you want a paleontology story that’s deep down in the culture of the City of Man, you want Jurassic Park. So re-doing a movie as a play made sense to me, too (Especially since there’s a theory that the Book of Job was also originally a play of some sort.)
The first step was going over the canon plays and figuring out what made a Kesh play: I ended up basically only writing down: costumes; stage and staging based on the "heyiya-if" hinge symbol, with limited sets but elaborate costuming and creative use of props; a chorus, but with a less formal/structural role than in Greek plays, but more direct influence on the main action than in musicals; and the concept of "peg lines".
"Peg lines" are mostly only discussed in the Chindi play, but the idea of a play where the "script" was a dozen or so quotes that everybody knows, and the rest is just improvised around a general idea of the plot and characters to make the peg lines work, really resonated with me! In that it’s pretty much how I experience a lot of pop culture movies.
In fact, now is probably the time where I confess that I have never actually sat down and watched a Jurassic Park movie (or read a book) all the way through. I have been in rooms where I was trying to do something else and one or the other was on the TV; everything else I know is from oral transmission and cultural osmosis. (And reading a lot of fanfiction about velociraptors.)
So the next thing I did was sit down and write out a short summary of what I thought happened in the movie, at which point I realized I was missing some vital part of the plot, because all I had plotwise was "people visit the dino park - dinos escape and chase them - there is a thing with a computer system that is DEFINITELY NOT UNIX - some of them survive," and I was pretty sure there was at least a little more to it than that. So I asked
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So then we put a list of "peg lines" together. Some of them either I couldn’t quite make work with the Kesh context or would have require too many details to make sense, but there are 14 peg lines in the finished fic, some of them used multiple times (like in Chindi.) Can you find them all? Most of them were preserved pretty much verbatim over all those centuries!
(I am still sad I couldn’t get "woman inherits the Earth" in, but I couldn’t really make it make sense in a Kesh context, because, well, to the Kesh, that has happened already! And I really wanted to work in "It’s TOK! I know this!" but it didn’t work with the ending I chose, so maybe it’s a variant peg line. Always a laugh line used for things that are DEFINITELY not TOK.)
Then I made
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I made it a children’s play partly because that’s what I have most personal experience with, and partly because I like the resonance of a summer blockbuster turning into something that is the property of kids and teenagers. And the idea that dinosaurs are still somehow the property of kids, first and foremost.
Also, putting on a play was a common kids’ activity in the era before radios and screens - I’ve read a lot of century + old children’s books, and that’s really incredibly common in them. Plus I work at a library where we have a puppet theater in the play area, and kids put on the best plays.
And I’m also fascinated with kids’ folklore in general, and also the way stories like Jurassic Park and Star Wars are being learned by kids starting at preschool age, when they are far too young to have seen the movies - they’re learning from other kids, or from listening to adults talking, or when they’re a little bit older, from "easy reader" books that tell very reduced versions of the stories and merchandise aimed at kids too young for the originals. We had a kid come in at Halloween looking for a book to match his Halloween costume for a school thing and all he could tell us was that it was the big robot guy from Star Wars (we found an illustrated character guide and eventually decided it was Darth Vader.)
Also, it being a children’s play meant I didn’t have to aim for the same level of depth as Chindi.
So I aimed for about that level of craft and accuracy! Mixing up bits and pieces from the different movies, combining characters, simplifying everything. The multiple endings part was partly because I honestly don’t know which movies ended which way (or which of the endings were canon. And, of course, not having seen canon, I don’t even really know how accurate it even is.) But I went with the water-monster-vs.-land-monster-fight version because that’s actually a recurring motif in the fossil folklore in Adrienne Mayor’s books, probably because of the way fossils are preserved - they’re more likely to be preserved in aquatic environments, so you’ll have a mix of land and sea animals jumbled together, and they’re more likely to be eroded out near water, so you’ll see these huge tangled skeletons on riverbanks and cliffsides over water.
Also in my version THE VELOCIRAPTORS HAVE FEATHERS. The Kesh may understand that the truth a story needs is sometimes different from fact, but even they know that velociraptors have feathers.
I also really like the way the velociraptors in particular have come to be treated (at least, in the cultural osmosis version) as liminal animals-but-also-people, like in stories about Coyote and Anansi and kitsune and so on, so making the velociraptors into Bird Women went really easily.
In fact, if I hadn’t been right up against deadline, I would have been tempted to make it an outright Crane Wife story - that’s basically the same plot as Jurassic Park anyway, "arrogant men think they can capture and enslave you and own your children, but they are never right in the long term" - but that would have probably been too far off to work as the crossover -it should probably be done as an outright JP fanfic by someone who knows JP.
The hardest part of this (other than getting someone to tell me the plot of the original movie) was deciding which town it was set in!
Anyway, if you want to write Kesh fic, I strongly recommend the strategy of "think of a memetic story that you know all the quotes from without ever having seen it, write down a list of peg lines, and turn it into a Kesh play." :D
3. Alexander-Ammon Visits Pandora In The Water
….and I only just now realized that somehow the chapter title of this got mixed up. (I really really hate the chapter interface on AO3….)
So, the Pandora sections are from the POV of Le Guin’s self-insert character, who is an anthropologist from more or less our present day - someone with the worldview of tavkach, anyway, though it’s never really specified what her relationship is to the Valley - who is recording the culture of the Kesh, but they’re also very introspective and poetic and not super linear, and sometimes she’s also Pandora of myth.
I read Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters first in my research, which is about Classical fossil lore, so I thought it would be interesting to work in the Greek mythology angle with Pandora. I also read Finding My Elegy and Final Poems, Le Guin’s last two poetry collections, which talk a lot about growing old and moving beyond (and also have new Kesh poems in them.) And the first paper I read was about Alexander the Great’s mysterious visit to the Siwa oasis, which was in a well-known fossil oasis, and his later connections to the god Ammon, and Ammon’s links to ammonite fossils. And the Pandora sections were the first part of the book I re-read, since I knew they were short, and as I was panicking about whether I was going to get anything at all written, I knew that I could throw together a thousand-word Pandora bit without running into to much trouble with Kesh worldbuilding, because it’s sort of disconnected from Kesh life.
And the other main publically-open fossil site I found in the area of the Valley was the coalfields below Mount Diablo, and I couldn’t resist the idea of writing a story about a gift of coal for yuletide. (Sorry, recip! I am not strong. Also I am the kid who actually asked for coal for Christmas one year because I thought coal was really neat and I didn’t have any.) (I still have that piece of coal, too!) In Stone Telling’s time, the peak of Mount Diablo would have been one of an archipelago of islands in the much-expanded Bay, so I put a lot about flowing water in, too (especially since I’m not sure of much, but I’m pretty sure that wherever Le Guin is now, it isn’t a Dry Land.)
And then throwing all of that in together to roil for awhile, it mixed up with the way, whenever I’m depressed about how we’re going to destroy our world with greed, I’ve always taken comfort in the idea of geological time - that if we don’t get our civilization straightened out soon enough, the worst case scenario is that in another billion years we will be nothing but a smear of asphalt between two geological layers, and everything will still be fine, and nothing that matters will know the difference.
Maybe that’s a horrible thing for an eight-year-old to learn to tell herself at night to keep the nightmares away, but in that case maybe y’all should’ve stopped burning fossils fuels sooner. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was also thinking about the way Always Coming Home is very recognizably a utopia written in a certain moment in the 20th century, but for all that it doesn’t feel at all dated like most of them do - it feels like it’s a world that could result from 2018 just as much as it did from 1985 - it’s mostly just Pandora herself who feels dated, a woman coming from the ideas of the 1970s and 1980s who was old enough to be tired but not old enough yet to lay down - especially comparing it to Le Guin’s poems from the last few years. So I wanted to write something about someone from 2018, someone who wasn’t ready to listen yet in 1985, looking to ask Pandora - an older Pandora who has spent more time in the Valley, who has willingly run out her her time in the City of Man - what advice she has for his world.
That was a lot of put into less than 200 words written in semi-panic two days before the deadline and I have no idea if it worked or how much of it came through, and there's definitely some bits you can only get if you've read that specific paper, which I lost the citation for in the computer crash and cannot now find again. But I always get the impression from the Pandora sections that there’s a lot there that’s not coming through to me there either, and Alexander-Ammon here isn’t meant to be as wise as she was, even then.
I waffled a LOT about whether this section merited a "Major Character Death" warning, and I still can’t decide. Is a story about the authorial avatar of an person who has recently died in real life, which never explicitly identifies the avatar as the RL person, but does sort of imply she died, and is certainly reacting a lot to her RL death, but also implies that her death wasn’t really death, it was just becoming something else that she’d prepared for, is that Major Character Death? (Which is also something you probably shouldn’t do unasked in yuletide, oops.) Finally I gave in and tagged it "Choose Not To Warn" (although I really wish that was phrased to be "choose not to warn/not sure how to warn", because I seem to use it for the latter a lot more often.
Anyway in conclusion, Le Guin's poetry is great, Always Coming Home is a great book and you should all read it and then write fanfic for it, and I got a lot of comments on this story, which I still need to answer, and which I can only attribute to a) a fandom at the beginning of the alphabet and b) people wanting to tell me they got the joke in Chapter 2.