I enjoyed this novel, its magic system, its overarching physicality as well as its respect of the world outside of sapience. The world-building relies on a soft magic system, it is built upon the idea of evoking true names of things, singing to the world in a language understood by it, convincing the will of the world (by song) to better align to ours. The magic system is really well done, the rules and limits are only implied and despite that feel somewhat firm, it has an aura of being consequential and rooted in tradition. It was a treat.
It reminded me of Kalevala, a Finnish epic poem, stitched together in the 19th century by a folklorist Elias Lönnrot, sourcing various Finnish ballads and other parts of oral tradition and making them into one story. In it Väinämöinen a powerful demigod bard also warps the world to his will by magical song, a representation of his deep worldly knowledge. It's notable how much those ballads from the cold northern Europe laid the groundwork for the classics of fantasy, both Le Guin and Tolkien were inspired by Finnish mythology.
The setting of the book (an archipelago, everyone has to sail around it) itself is overflowing with a really fun theme only intensified by the story, of relationships the man enters with powers greater than himself (wind and ocean but equally so the magical balance of the world).
I hadn't read a lot of fiction yet, but this book stimulated my imagination, world written about was almost tangible and I think it helped me have some cool dreams.
⚠️Source for this piece of art, will replace with a crude drawing of a dragon⚠️
This book also had the best kind of dragons, the type for which knowledge about the world is like smell to a dog, flight to a swift or water to a fish, animalistic and awe inspiring, showing greater ability in what they were born to do than any human.
Learning about the true nature of the world as means to wielding almost magical power over it, resonates with how I see natural sciences knowledge in real life.
As I read this book I kept thinking about parallels between the idea of magical singing and how people remembered things when illiteracy was the norm, how people constructed complex mnemonics, but also how the knowledge of things impossible to immediately prove was carried over between people, as far as I know it was transmitted by a fun to remember song, a rhyming proverb or an exciting story.
In biology, most quantitative analysis are a means to an end, the end being a story, usually of how proteins interact with each other, but those stories end up being very dry, there is a deafening lack of songs, rhymes, epics or limericks. Mnemonics are common but they usually function as an inelegant clutch for botched naming conventions that were given to a system before it was adequately understood, knowledge in biology is built somewhat vertically, language used for biology makes it harder to remember, and by proxy harder to discuss complex ideas.
Maybe having a constructed language which would fit our sensibilities regarding language but would contain more information in a more captivating and more flexible way would make it more natural to come to interesting conclusions regarding our understanding of the world. Then using it to write poems that would be then used to explain complex interactions within those biological systems would be better than any mnemonic techniques.
Another solid idea is retrofitting the names around to line up with already established stories, be it from history, literature or philosophy, aligning hundreds of years of those human stories to the reality of biological systems, the end goal would be enabling reliably guessing the function of the protein and broad relationships to other proteins by knowing the concept assigned to its name. Only people who spent entire life studying human sciences could manage to make such a thing happen, it's a really difficult project.
I was quite frustrated when I found out that the protein called Argonaute has absolutely nothing in common with the quest for golden fleece, and the protein is called as such because of a series of unfortunate misunderstanding and wrong theories.
The protein is called Argonaute because the model plant Arabidopsis T. having that specific gene broken somewhat resembles an Argonaute Argos squid if you squint very hard, its two peculiarly shaped tentacles lead 17th century scientists to believe it must use them for sailing, the person who gave it a Latin name believed it lived in the Mediterranean and was a sailor, that lead him to picking the name Argonaute to honor the Sailors of Argo, but in fact its range is much wider than the Mediterranean and the weird tentacles are used for building and fixing its shell
Lately with my reading choices I tend to go with the flow, I was looking at Polish Ebay (Allegro) for deals on the book I mentioned in the In search of aliens blog, looking through other books the specific online used bookshop held I saw a specific (different) "A wizard of Earthsea" edition, my neurons spiked, I wasn't quite sure why, I remembered not only the name of the author (I knew it from a silly post-soy-jak meme video from which I found out about the book telling the story of Posadas, there as a part of a technofeminist canon Le Guin's sci-fi novel was mentioned (I hadn't yet read it)).
Bothered by this curiosity I googled the title and was very surprised with the joy I felt recognizing one of the editions of the book, in deep crevices of my mind I pulled out a memory of having seen that book before (the edition is the one used).
Source of the screencap - The nu-wojak video
It's a really silly video I quite enjoy it trying to match lines of thought of (somewhat downtrodden) modern left with various online aesthetics.
I remembered that I have read this book on a few day long school trip in primary school, I randomly stumbled upon it after the previous occupant of the room I was issued left it there, I distinctly remembered the book's cover art as somewhat impressionistic and mysterious. I remembered how I quite liked it and compared to other things I was reading at the time (young adult slop) it surprised me with really good writing. I don't remember if I wanted to take it or maybe even if I am misremembering the whole ordeal and I just borrowed it from a roommate on that trip, but I remember it was really enthralling for the 13 year old version of my brain and that I hadn't read it from front to cover.
So I was quite motivated to read this book, figure out what did I like, how much have I read, what was it about. I dusted off my library card (used back in the far gone times of reading YA novels), and went to borrow this book, the only edition was the one in a 1000 page long anthology but nevertheless I borrowed it and enjoyed it, I hadn't read the entire anthology as after the summer break ended I slowed down my pace of reading and returned the book.
