Tag: Georgian England

Mary Ambree and Female Warriors

gordsellar0 Comments

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of writers of fantasy talk about historical female warriors—the historicity of women marching into battle alongside men—and there’s obviously value in looking at history, because there are plenty of dumbasses out there who will be quick to say something stupid like, “But women didn’t march into battle! That’s dumb!” There will be nitwits who will say it’s feminist claptrap, or unbelievable, or implausible, or whatever. (I mean, I suppose we should spend time correcting such ignorance and stupidity when we encounter it, at least occasionally, right? So: yes, it is plausible. There definitely were societies where women …

Continue Reading

July/August Books

gordsellar0 Comments

My last stretch of comments on books was really, really long. 5,400-odd words long, if I recall right. So I’m going to try for shorter and pithier this time. Should be easier, since I read less than I’d hoped I would, but even so… shorter. Pithier. Also: I have been feeling like I have been reading too few books by women, so I did something about it. At least on the fiction side I achieved parity—three female authors and three male ones—but I’m not so concerned about the nonfiction/research books, since you don’t get to choose who writes research books pertinent …

Continue Reading

Recent Books

gordsellar2 Comments

I’ve been reading a fair bit this year, as far as my standards go. More than usual, anyway. This is everything so far, though, of course, a few of those I gave up on and didn’t finish: I’ve been feeling a little disappointed lately in how so much of the SFF world online is so busy talking about scandals and outrages that we never seem to talk about the books anymore. Short stories, too, but, well, that’s for another post. So I figured: do my bit. Post about what I’ve read lately. Part of why I stopped was because–on some very bad …

Continue Reading

The Georgian Postal System(s), and Cross-Writing

gordsellar4 Comments

As I’ve been harping for a while now, modernity didn’t just spring out of nowhere… it got built out of chaos, and it got built, primarily, in the form of systems, since people realized that systematization was an effective way of converting chaos into order. Modernity thrives on order, for better or worse, but as is clear to anyone living in a big city where modernity is a recent import (and not yet completely metabolized), you cannot have a modern metropolis without highly functional, highly integrated systems. As I’ve mentioned lately, it seems to me that it was in the Georgian era that a lot of …

Continue Reading

The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830 by Peter Mathias

gordsellar0 Comments

Well, I’ve finally finished studying Peter Mathias’ masterpiece of brewing history, The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830. It is regrettable in the extreme that this book is both out of print, and as difficult to obtain as it seems to be. (I was lucky, as I’ve mentioned in the past, to get help from a friend in Germany who aided me in dealing with online bookseller there; apparently the demand of Mathias’ book in Deutschland is less than in the English-speaking world, and I got it for a relative song.) I’ve mentioned the book in many a recent post, so I’m just going …

Continue Reading