Hello, all! I’m thrilled to announce the upcoming publication of The Art of Being Human anthology, celebrating the connections and creativity that make us all human. My contribution to the anthology is a piece entitled “The Maiden, the Statistician, and the Architect.” It’s about a young woman, the beauty and ugliness of her community, and the dragon who finds them all both delicious and deeply confusing.
Below the surface story, though, is an exploration of the nature of human communities. It was inspired in part by the history of Sub-Roman Western Europe, in which the wealthy of the great walled cities gradually let the city walls decay and instead built tower-houses within the cities to protect just their own families. Had they continued investing in the city walls together they all would have been safer, but instead they retreated into the illusion of safety while the cities that made them wealthy withered around them. Everyone ended up poorer, and many people just ended up dead.
Electorates around the world right now are struggling, sometimes violently, with the competing demands of (to speak broadly) educated, cosmopolitan urbanites and less educated, more nativist rural voters. Neither side is entirely justified (for instance, the Koch Brothers aren’t in favor of more immigration because they’re in favor of workers’ rights), but if we don’t figure out some way to live together, I fear the twenty-third century may bring some of the same horrors as the sixth. So the next time your community is confronted with a problem, I hope it pulls together to fix it rather than splitting apart and allowing the well-off to fix it on an ad hoc and incomplete basis.