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Well, at least there’s this.

Dark Eden sets the stage by noting that Angela passed down a warning to her daughters about men who “want the story to be all about them.” Beckett explains, “Angela came from our world, a patriarchal society, and thought it was likely to replicate on Eden.” That’s not to say that women can’t also be domineering: “I know there are women who do it. It can be quite destructive.” He also argues that the desire to lead is “not always a bad thing. Sometimes big egos are what we need.”

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Though apparently society hasn’t become less “patriarchal” between now and whenever Angela’s time is, which needs some ‘splainin’. I think it should also be noted that Angela MIGHT be a little bit biased, on account of being stranded on an alien planet because one day a few chucklefucks-who-happened-to-be-men decided to steal a spaceship. Thanks for sowing the seeds of mistrust between the genders, Angie. Which wouldn’t have ever been a problem, had she not gone and had kids, thus becoming a chucklefuck herself.

Also, if anyone ever tries to tell you that women are morally superior (a notion straight out the Victorian era), remember how to spell/pronounce the name Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. Look her up. Yeah? Yeah. I know, holy shit.

It’s almost as if men and women are members of the same terrible species.

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N.K. Jemisin’s NYT Review

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It’s easy to get lost in the scenery Chris Beckett introduces in his third novel, DARK EDEN (Broadway, paper, $15), which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in England last year. Eden, the sunless rogue planet on which a pair of stranded spacefarers played Adam and Eve (other biblical allusions are less obvious, thankfully), is the poetic if improbable setting. Here life has evolved to channel energy from the planet’s interior to its surface in endless variety and sufficient quantity to make up for the lack of a sun. Beckett describes in exhaustive detail glowing forests of lantern trees and light-reflecting predators that sing to their prey. He renders the terror of the darkness beyond the forests with a riveting deftness that evokes all primordial fears of the unknown. So entrancing and fresh is Eden’s beauty, in fact, that it might take a while for the reader to notice the tired devices playing out against its backdrop.

The Family, as the 532 primitive descendants of the spacefarers call themselves, has dwelled for generations in one forest on Eden, never daring to venture into the lightless, frozen lands beyond. This is a problem because their growing population has taxed the forest to capacity, and something will have to give soon. Enter young John Redlantern, the stalwart visionary who dares to question the nonsensical traditions passed down from their Earth-born forebears. It takes a while for this part of the story to get going, but you can see it coming from nearly the first chapter: John, his devoted but forgettable cousin and his equally clichéd love interest eventually challenge enough of the Family’s status quo to be kicked out of it, forcing them into the dark.

The journey is exciting, and Beckett cleverly offers his characters additional threats to face as the dark becomes less of one, but it’s all a bit predictable. What really dims Eden’s glow, however, is the 1950s ethos underpinning the whole thing. The Family has developed into a relatively peaceful communal society that venerates its elders and has necessarily relaxed sexual norms; the society John seeks to create instead is monogamous, individualistic, rife with subtle bigotries and rooted in murder. Survival and progress, the story seems to suggest, require these things. John himself is that most threadbare of science fiction types: the impossibly handsome, impossibly forward-thinking young man who gets the prettiest girl with no particular effort, and saves the day through sheer bloody-mindedness. Beckett tells the story from the ­alternating viewpoints of John and his companions, but it’s unclear why he bothers with the others; everything’s about John anyway.

Still, for the sort of readers who like their heroes retro and their world-building literally colorful, there’s plenty here to intrigue and entrance.

Yes. Yes. Thank you. I’m glad I’m not the only one who got a real mid-20th century sci-fi feel from the story--especially John. I want to make a retro cover with the subtitle “One stalwart visionary who dares to question tradition!”

Also super glad that she didn’t pull the “Family is a martiarchy” the way everyone else does. Just because John is totally on his way to creating a patriarchy doesn’t mean he’s coming from a matriarchy; you can create a patriarchy/matriarchy out of a more-or-less gender egalitarian society!

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It doesn’t even have to be this complicated, people. You don’t even need to start with sole technology or anything. Just think to yourself: boy, it sure is cold up here on the mountain, and ow, I just stepped on a sharp rock, how do I address this situation? Oh, I know! I wear animal skins around my waist to stop my junk from getting cold and from sticks being shoved up my butt, how about I transfer that concept to my feet? And then once those start wearing out, you can experiment with various reinforcing techniques and resin recipes and shit. That’s how shit gets invented! You start with a kinda shitty solution to a problem, and then you slowly improve it over time, usually by way of an obscene cavalcade of patents. Don’t have patents? Invent that shit!

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This little fruit bat needed a helping hand. After an emergency C-section, Lucas needed to be hand-raised to survive. Now at 8 months old, Lucas is learning to fly so he can join the rest of the Rodrigues fruit bat colony.  Learn more about Lucas’ story here. 

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Holy shit I drew a thing. Even though I cheated on account of having discovered these things (but I did eyeball it– no tracing!):

Because I don’t know how anatomy and poses work. And I’m always lucky to run out of room before I get to the feet. I’ll probably do the other panels some time. I will be copy-pasting.

I feel like David was victim to many games of keep-away, as I have decided he’s short on top of everything else. Unless that’s actually canon, I don’t know, it’s hard to remember what other details were given besides BY THE WAY HAVE I MENTIONED THAT HE‘S UGLY??? Yeah, yeah, something about him being stocky and having big hands. I’ve also decided that he’s got a sorta old-timey strongman build– muscular but also squishy (and the only reason he hung out with fat fat Dixon Blueside is because having him around made him feel less fat because he has zero self-esteem). It’s not a body type I’ve ever drawn before, so. I’ve, uh. I’ve put a lot of time into finding reference images *closes PornHub tab*. That’s a fetish of mine I haven’t seen in a while– good to have ya’ back.

I dread having to come up with outfits for any other characters; there’s really only so much you can do with leather loincloths. Like, bros, you have sheep-deer. Figure out how to spin that shit. Now invent weaving. (Hell, they even have bits of Future Human™ clothes for reference left in their little museum log, though it’s probably sci-fi polyester that’s too finely woven/knit to reverse-engineer.) None the less, I’ve decided that Fox is something of a fashionista, which means FRINGE. The biggest crime of the book is that Fox will never discover sequins (although, iridescent insect or mollusk shells…?)

I am physically holding myself back from going on. Because OH COULD I GO ON.

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If your angry batface boy is getting too ornery, just fold him up in a little blanket burrito.

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ME: THIS BOOK PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH

ALSO ME: Time to make a side-blog.

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I can’t not process everything through Always Sunny title cards.

And as I was making these, it struck me that Family is basically just the McPoyles.

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Well, for once one of my entirely random OTPs with no canon backing gets to have a cool name:

FLYING FOX YEAH!

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Prometheus doesn’t live here anymore.

“It could take half a waking to get a new fire going with twigs or blackglass sparks, so no one liked to let a fire go out.”

Chris Beckett, Dark Eden pg.26 (US paperback)

vs.

“[…] he lays the knife on the ground in the center of the circle as another tribesman extracts a narrow, four-inch length of pale wood […] The wood has sockets bored into it. The two men set the wood over the knife blade to stabilize it on the soil, and, finding a three-foot cane of dry brown reed and some bits of dry grass and tindery tree bark, they crush the grass and bark […] then drizzle it into one of the sockets. […] One of the men sets the base of the cane into the same socket as the crushed grasses and begins to spin the cane back and forth quickly, rubbing it between his palms.

[…] In less than a minute, the first whiffs of pale-gray smoke lift from the socket. […] the men add slightly larger bits of tree bark, puffing on the new flame with light breaths […] Atop the socket, they add hand-size stalks of dry grass, which have been crushed […] to create an airy, fire-friendly nest. […]

From start to full and blazing success takes about three minutes.”

Donovan Webster, Meeting the Family pg.33 (US hardcover), describing the fire-making technique of the Hadzabe people.

THREE MINUTES!

But hey, let’s be fair, the only reason they’re so speedy at it is because they have to start and maintain fires everyday in order to survive, so– oh, wait. And they don’t even life on a planet of eternal night. Also note that a lot of these guys are teenagers.

Unless a “day” on Eden is 6 minutes, that’s. Wow. You guys are bad at a lot of things.

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What’s really sad about the Dark Eden people is that when you compare them to actual hunter-gatherer cultures, even just a shallow surface glance, you can tell how much more advanced (both technologically and culturally) they are.

The Baka people are a good example. Like, do you have any idea how difficult polyphonic singing is? My harp group would go on forever, trying to devise basic arrangements, like one section coming in X measures after another, and making sure everyone knew what the deal was before we started playing (success rate: 40%)– and we had visual aids! And don’t even talk about improvisation!

Also? These mad scientists have figured out how to extract a special non-toxic chemical from plants that they use to fish. Because when you pour this chemical into a river, it somehow deprives all fish in the area of oxygen, which I’m pretty sure is more or less the same way the Japanese killed Godzilla. Like. Dude. How long did it take to figure that out? How did anyone think to try it in the first place? Was it an accident, or something that can sometimes be seen happening naturally? Or was there some ancient mad scientist, crushing up plants and experimenting with them until they got some kind of result? And regardless, how much trial and error and failure did they have to go through before they got it down?

It’s easy to look at modern technology and just accept that it’s a thing that exists, the end, because trying to trace the ancestry of the iPhone would produce a massive family tree and it’s hard to think about so many separate things having to be invented beforehand and pretty soon you’ve gotten so tangled up in the history that you’ve lost the point. That being: if you look at more “basic” things, it can be really mindblowing, trying to imagine how people figured it out. Like knitting– it’s so simple, using two sticks to loop string together. But before figuring that out, we had to figure out how to spin fiber into yarn, and before that, realize that animal and plant fibers could be manipulated to create a continuous string in the first place.

So, yeah. Expect a few more weird anthropology-themed posts in the near future. I haven’t even gotten to the bees yet.  

(And, yes, while the Baka traditionally don’t have shoes either, they don’t have to hunt up in icy mountains. Pretty sure that applies to most all non-shoe-wearing people groups.)

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Also, supposing alien space magic did split the population into black and white, why wouldn’t they have just gotten a black girl to play Angela and a white guy to play Tommy? Then you don’t have to do the makeup!

Oh yeah, so another mystifying criticism of Dark Eden was that everyone was either “fully black or fully white” and whaaaat? Again, my first reading of a book, I often miss some things, but I don’t at all this.

What I do remember was that when they put on their awkward play, the actor (”actor”) playing Tommy used makeup to lighten his face, while the actress playing Angela darkened hers. Now, I really wouldn’t put it past them to take things literally and think that they were literally #FFFFFF and #000000, but since oldster Mitch actually met his great/grandparents, that’s probably not the case.

I always figured that most everyone had medium-brown skin and black/dark-brown hair. The weird thing is that there are a few characters said to be blonde (Mehmet and Jeff) or red haired. Now, if I remember my middle school biology, those are both recessive traits, meaning both Tommy and Angela would’ve had to carry those genes. So Angela was probably mixed-race if things are to make sense scientifically, though I don’t know if it would have to be through her parents/grandparents, or if those traits could just pop up via an ancestor generations back.

I also wonder: Tommy and Angela’s kids would probably have shown some variation, favoring Tommy’s traits, favoring Angela’s, or just fitting somewhere in between, because that’s how being mixed do. But as the generations went by, would they become more evenly mixed, or would those variations remain (I suppose they have, hence the blondes and gingers), because it’s not like they’ve gotten any more genetically diverse since that generation? My knowledge of genetics ends well before that point.

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Ugh, never seek out other people’s opinions. I made the mistake of looking through the Good Reads reviews for Dark Eden, hoping to find people with the sames beefs as I do, but also a love-hate relationship.

Man, I’ve been known to miss key details (like the fact that the half-sister of a lightish-skinned character was black, or the Strong Medicine Incident– I’ll tell you about it some day), but this was rough.

For onesies, so so many people complained about the blatant misogyny. These weren’t complaints about David eye-raping people, or John trying to invent monogamy. Nah, they were talking about how women were portrayed as “just wombs to be filled” because how much sex and baby-makin’ went on. Ah, scuzi? You wanna do a reread? Because what I saw was women enjoying sex, wanting to have sex for pleasure or reproduction, women being the ones to initiate all sexual encounters, and women having full and complete rights to their children, with no expectation to name a father or “share” the child with them. So, yeah. Where sex and reproduction is involved, women hold most all of the power. I’m guessing these people are the sorts who sees a woman having a lot of sex, or having a lot of kids, and immediately thinks that some man must be forcing her to do it, or somehow subliminally influencing her decisions. Y’know, denying women their sexual agency, standard 3rd wave feminism– the Victorians would be proud, ladies.

And, oh no, Wikipedia. Here’s proof that you ought to cross reference anything you read on Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia, Family is a matriarchy. E ancora, SCUZI? Apparently since no one seems to know what a patriarchy is, they likewise have no idea what a matriarchy is. Yes, Family does tend to favor women as leaders. Of the eight groups, all are led by women, except Brooklyn, whose group leader is Tom, a dude. So there’s no rule barring men from leadership, and no information is given as to whether or not men can be the  Family leader. And while Caroline is the Family head, two of the three Oldest are men, and as this is a culture that venerates their old folk, they have a lot of power over the goings-ons of Family.

Maybe it’s because fathers don’t have much/any involvement with their children (or if they do, it’s unknowingly), but that seems less to do with not wanting men involved with the lives of their children, and more to do with the mothers having so much sex that they don’t know who the father is. And remember– these people are hella inbred, most of them share the same phenotypes with a few outliers who caught some recessive genes, so it’s not gonna be super obvious who the dad is. Even if you wanna go deeper into comparing facial structures, well. Again, the inbreeding has probably led to a lot of similarities there, but you also can’t really figure out a baby’s facial structure until they’re much older. Furthermore, their communal way of living means kids are raised by a lot of people–possibly even their father if he’s from the same group, so there’s not a huge impetus for men to seek out and claim fatherhood of a child.

The only other evidence to a matriarchy is that they seem to venerate Angela more than Tom, but worshiping goddesses (nevermind ancestors) doesn’t make a matriarchy, else ancient Greece, India, and Japan are matriarchies. They… super are/were not. Athena did nothing to raise up women in Greek society (in fact, Athena is a pretty big misogynist– ask Medusa or Clytemnestra).

Wow this went long, why am I surprised in any way. I’ll get to the other dumb criticisms in another post, especially because my right arm has the shakes.   

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I’m having a hard time putting together a playlist that fits the general, overall feel of Dark Eden. Maybe it’s because these people apparently have NO MUSICAL CULTURE aside from “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, which I can assure you is not an original composition. Damn, nevermind shoes, this is waaaaay worse. Y’know, on account of music being a fundamental element of the human experience.

That said. Gravity of Love is matching up way more than I had any right to expect. The experience of survival is the key– to the gravity of love!

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Ah, hey. Y’know how I warned you against looking up “missing nose” on Google images? And addendum: definitely don’t look up “split face”. (Funny thing is, they managed to fix that guy’s face– if you’ve seen it, you know the one).

Damn, I thought Mr Hammar over Chaos Walking way was hard to draw (and draw “on model” consistently), but this is another level. First problem is I don’t even think a cleft lip/palate will go to town on your nose (cosmetically, that is)– your nostrils might be lopsided, but I ain’t seeing anything about the, what– fissure? going up higher. And it’s not like Google is shielding me from the real freaky shit because, yeah. The other searches and the fruit they bear.

Previously, I more or less) said I was gonna go for a really severe unilateral cleft that wrecked half his nose, or possibly pushed it to the side real sloppy, but now I’m thinkin’ more of a complete bilateral situation, to the point where that… weird… flesh chunk– I guess it’s the middle of the lip, dangling and unsure of what to do with itself– is missing as well. What’s really trippin’ me up is the nose situation, because they’ve said, straight up, that boy ain’t got no nose. Which is… how? Is it a secondary mutation, separate from the cleft lip/palate?

I’ve pretty much settled on the idea that it’s so high up and split on the surface, that you can see a bit of that little nose bone– all the cartilage gone. But I’m unsure of what it would look like, having both your upper jaw split and your whole… nose hole area almost looking like it’d been cut open, along with no trace of a nose. Like, where do the nostrils go? And nevermind what would cause this whole mix-up of the skin over the nose-hole being… I don’t know, maybe it actually was split apart in utero, but fused together after he was born– like a fontanelle. But yeah, nevermind the cause– how the fuck do I render that? Because what I’m doing now? It looks like he has a vagina face. Like, dude has enough problems.

Another possibility for the nose configuration bowl is a nose that’s split right in half by whatever torment your body has decided to rain down upon you because fuck nature. Aside from wanting it to look like a poorly healed wound, I actually have reference for this one. Unfortunate for humanity, but helpful for my pencil shits. Unfortunately, Google is being inconsistent and I can’t find the photos (two of them, via different searches). But essentially, it appeared that the nose cartilage had vertically split, leaving a large gap (over an inch, it looked about) in between. Whatever this specific condition is, it also seems to push your eyebones (they’re the orbital bones, c’mon, this is a thing you actually knew off hand for once) apart, which I don’t even know how you’d fix, and has gotta mess with your eyesight somethin’ fierce. Doesn’t quite fit what I’m looking for, because the skin of the nose, kind of oddly, is completely untouched; everything’s going on subcutaneously. Yeah, I got some $10 words in my wallet– and I spelled it right in one go!

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Man, I thought trying to have a go at those “imagine your OTP” was rough with David and Hammar, but the Dark Eden setting is so sooo specific that almost all of them are non-applicable. Like: “Yeah, they don’t have that thing”, “No, they have no concept of that”, “You’ve described the environment in any way”.

Motherfuckers think Hitler killed Jesus, how do I work with this??

So, I have to write my own prompts and then never do anything with them.

Maybe I should submit some to those blogs? You think you’ve got non-applicable prompts, bitch, I’ll show you some non-applicable prompts. How about…

Person A kissing Person B on their face hole.

Gross sloppy make-outs because Person B doesn’t have a complete set of lips. Person A doesn’t mind.

Person A makes a salve for Person B, because his face hole is chapped from hunting lanternhead tentaclemouth sheepdeer up in the mountains.

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If I had to choose, I probably would have gone along with David’s New World Order, rather than John’s. See, they’re both power-hungry idiots, but while David is probably… clever, John is that weird kind of genius-idiot; he does the stupidest of things (oh no, Jeff has good ideas and people think he’s cool, gotta make sure this doesn’t get outta control), but he invented shoes and would probably catch wise to someone trying to manipulate/undermine him. It would be waaay easier to manipulate. Just be nice to him, don’t talk about his face, set him up on a date, it’s all good.

And something that only occurred to me after finishing the book: why was David so gung-ho about taking out John, anyway? I doubt he cared enough about his dead goons that he’d cross the Snowy Dark to avenge them. Sure, it’s be a good power move, killing the guy who destroyed Circle, reinvented murder, and broke up Family– and if he could return with Angela’s ring? But it seemed like there was more anger in it than just seeing John as a rival who he could use to increase his own power. Jealousy that John got all the fame and the babes, despite being a shit teen who never does what people tell him? But dude had beat feet, he wasn’t around anymore to cause trouble. He could’ve even used him in his propaganda, reminding people every so often of John the Killer, Who Ruined Everything, and Who’s Out There Right Now Hating Good Family Values. Hell, if John hadn’t upset everything, David probably wouldn’t have been able to swoop in during the commotion and take power.

What I’m getting at is, I wonder if I also hates him for the reasons most everyone else hates him: he destroyed Circle, built by their sainted ancestors, he broke Family apart, and on top of that, he took Angela’s ring for himself without telling anyone (y’know, because if he had, it only would’ve given him temporary power *facepalm*). Maybe he liked it how things were, except for the part where he had no power, and hated John for wrecking it (even if it did get him that power)? He was pretty pissed when John interrupted Any Versery (shit, I can’t remember how to spell their misspelled words)… but then he also had no problem interrupting John’s trial, or talking over Caroline. So that could just be a “damn impertinent shit kid” thing… but maybe it’s that he’s a hypocrite who gets mad when other people disrespect tradition, but it’s OK when he does it?

And now for something completely different: I wonder if, meta-wise, they’re both named “Redlantern” because red lights are a sign of danger and warning?