A sea-looking alternate history. (Or any, any fantasy set in South and Southeast Asia, with a focus on maritime travel, please... I will write it myself eventually if no one else does.)
That will be all right, too. The Carthaginian trade-routes can shift eastward and meet the great sea-empires of those waters on their home waves.
The sea erases the past, the sea is the eternal present.
The sea is past, too. It's just not the kind of past that shows itself—or shows us in it—as readily. We like to leave records of ourselves: if not marks of passage, then the things we left by the way. If we can't see the old Roman road (or the ruined walls of Carthage) in anything other than the turn of the hill, we know some digging will bring the older strata of time to light, coins, potsherds, curse tablets, children's bones. There are few things you can drop into the sea that it will not take and make its own. It's what makes the Black Sea shipwrecks are as amazing and uncanny as Pompeii: it's one thing to imagine an amphora lying undisturbed in the earth, it's another to have it come up trailing wet ropes, with only a sticky web of sediments between you and wood that in other waters would have rotted millennia.
On the other topic, will that small-world connection result in a place for you to live, maybe?
At the moment, I think it is more likely it will result in someone else for me to e-mail and/or hang out with, but I am still considering.
no subject
That will be all right, too. The Carthaginian trade-routes can shift eastward and meet the great sea-empires of those waters on their home waves.
The sea erases the past, the sea is the eternal present.
The sea is past, too. It's just not the kind of past that shows itself—or shows us in it—as readily. We like to leave records of ourselves: if not marks of passage, then the things we left by the way. If we can't see the old Roman road (or the ruined walls of Carthage) in anything other than the turn of the hill, we know some digging will bring the older strata of time to light, coins, potsherds, curse tablets, children's bones. There are few things you can drop into the sea that it will not take and make its own. It's what makes the Black Sea shipwrecks are as amazing and uncanny as Pompeii: it's one thing to imagine an amphora lying undisturbed in the earth, it's another to have it come up trailing wet ropes, with only a sticky web of sediments between you and wood that in other waters would have rotted millennia.
On the other topic, will that small-world connection result in a place for you to live, maybe?
At the moment, I think it is more likely it will result in someone else for me to e-mail and/or hang out with, but I am still considering.