My newest short story "Twin Engines" is in Black Cat Weekly #217, out today.
Over the years I've posted many pictures of the House Opposite That Lights Up At Dawn to Presage the Coming of Spring (HOTLUAD). Recently, things weren't looking so good for HOTLUAD. It was vacant, subject to vandalism and showing a lot of erosion in the hillside below the house.
HOTLUAD glowed at the opposite end of the year as well, when the sun hit it at the same angle it did in March. So this week we had an opportunity to see how it was doing.
Verdict: All's well with HOTLUAD!
Someone has been doing a lot of work on it in the last few months. I'm not sure if it's owned by the same people, but two or three lots above it are also being renovated, and a lot of overgrown trees removed. HOTLUAD itself first swapped its brick-red roof (the San Juan Capistrano city-approved color) for slate grey, and then various windows disappeared and reappeared several times (presumably being boarded up and then replaced). Although the famous dumper truck did not come back, workmen's trucks were frequently in evidence along with ladders and suchlike "improvement" technology.
As more an more magazines are scanned and come online at archive.org, more of my early stories are available to "borrow" from them.
I've updated my bibliography today. Links in the first section sometimes go to the publishers sales page, but more often go to free-to-read sites like archive.org. I'm in two minds about their "service" - I certainly don't get paid when you borrow a magazine from them - but it is, as Americans say, what it is.
Short Stories
The Technophobe (1988) in Back Brain Recluse #10 ed. Chris Reed
Sensonomicon (1988) in Back Brain Recluse #11 ed. Chris Reed
The Fathers (1989) in Back Brain Recluse, #13 ed. Chris Reed
The Outside Door (1989) in Interzone, #28 ed. Simon Ounsley, David Pringle
Feminine Intuition (1990) in Dream Science Fiction #23 ed. George P. Townsend
Milk (1991) in Edge Detector #3 ed. Glenn Grant
David Cronenberg's "Alien" - Novelisation by J. G. Ballard (1993) in Interzone, #75 ed. Lee Montgomerie, David Pringle
Pace Car (2021) in Interzone #290/291 ed. Andy Cox
Jump Jiving (2022) in Eldritch Science #8 ed. George Phillies
Sundown (2022) in The Writing Disorder, Winter 2022 ed. C. E. Lukather
Blackpool Tower (2023) in BFS Horizons, #15 ed. Pete. W. Sutton
Autonomous (2023) in Aurealis, #157 ed. Dirk Strasser
Sunless (2023) in IZ Digital April 2023 ed. Gareth Jelley
When It Changed
There’s a tendency in Science Fiction studies—and in Prof. ----'s class they proved remarkably good at it, despite not being abject SF
writers—to try to establish the “earliest” science fiction. War of the
Worlds (1897)? Surely not! Remember Jules Verne? From Earth the Moon
was 1867. But Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) predated that. Then I must
nominate The Man in the Moone by the English cleric Francis Godwin,
published in 1638, where a man is flown to the moon by swans. But that opens up
Aristophanes’s The Birds (414 BC), does it not? Sure, and so I’m going
to nominate the space flight undertaken in the Epic of Gilgamesh (2100
BC)!
The question of the first woman-penned feminist science
fiction is not quite as thorny, but odds are someone will mention Frankenstein,
a book about how a male scientist built a living human, a creative act formerly
the province of women. I would point out that the daughter of Mary
Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with
Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), may have been a feminist
but she surely was not a feminist in the modern sense. In 1818, for one illustrative
example, women didn’t have the right to vote.
Frequently cited as a first flowering of feminism is C L
Moore, author of the Jirel of Joiry stories (and wife/co-writer of Henry
Kuttner). Writing in the US in the 1930s and 1940s, she was credited as an
early female fantasy writer. Jirel was a tough, beautiful fighter in Moore’s classic
Sword and Sorcery stories. US women were able to vote by this time: The
ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution took place on August 18,
1920. But even in 1950, women in the real US were often not able to open a bank
account without a male co-signer. Only the previous year, Simone de Beauvoir published
The Second Sex. The concepts of feminism had just begun to trickle in. Jirel
may have been a tough, redheaded babe, but neither she nor her author lived in
the modern world.
SF men were going great guns, literally and figuratively. After
Verne, men reacted to the rapidly developing conditions of the Enlightenment, Positivism,
the Industrial Revolution and the opening of new frontiers by writing science
fiction. Much early US SF was of the “pulp” variety. Still read today is E E “Doc”
Smith’s Lensmen stories of the 1930s and 1940s. Tough, square-jawed and
yet intellectual, the Lensmen brought peace to the galaxy/ies with the aid of
superior alien technology, a dash of faintly fascist eugenics, endless mighty
space battles and lots of blowing shit up. You won’t be surprised to hear that
the female bloodline of the Lensmen were tough redheads. Despite the fact that
many alien genders achieved Lensman status, somehow female humans were not
worthy. (There is one exception, to make the story work, but she eventually
eschews her lens. Probably not feminine enough for her.) “Doc” Smith’s Skylark
series was similar. His hero? Think Captain America crossed with buff Elon Musk
fighting giant space battles.
Endless space battles soon transferred to the Saturday
Morning Serials, comics and the big screen, and SF disentangled from the
pulpiest of pulps and attempted to explore the Condition of Man. The big three—Heinlein,
Asimov and Clarke—produced vast quantities of work that adequately explored
science (Asimov), innovation, society and law (Heinlein) and science tinged
with vague religious symbolism (Clarke). They rarely explored the interiority
of their male characters, who were mostly white male marionettes draped with opinions,
and the writers couldn’t explore the interiority of their female characters (at
least at first) as they didn’t seem to realize women had any thoughts of their
own, merely a few story-motivating emotions like love, greed and spite.
Critics have argued that this lack of interiority is not due
to “bad writing,” but arises from SF’s vastly different focus from the novel.
The bourgeois novel arose contemporaneously with the concept of individual
identity. It often set out to investigate the individual’s place in society. SF
sets out to investigate the impact on society of an idea or radical change. Critic
Darko Suvin introduced the concept of the “novum.” “SF is distinguished by the
narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” (novelty, innovation)
validated by cognitive logic.”
Noted critic Kingsley Amis, in New Maps of Hell, is
pro-cardboard character. “[Science fiction’s] most important use, I submit, is
a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which
cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged.”
Writer Joanna Russ (1975) stated, “… science fiction’s
emphasis is always on phenomena—to the point where reviewers and critics
can commonly use such phrases as “the idea as hero.”
Scott Sanders goes further and describes SF as refusing to
deal with individuals because the age of the individual has ended. ““Character”
was the focus of the bourgeois novel, at a time when the individual was the
kingpin of liberal ideology, and when the economic system was still primitive
enough to make such an ideology convincing. During the nineteenth century the
middle classes of Western Europe and America were still persuaded that the
individual was an autonomous creature, the true unit of value, capable of
determining his own destiny,” he wrote in 1977. “In this respect science
fiction parallels developments in the twentieth-century mainstream novel. While
such writers as Kafka, Musil and Beckett have recorded the dissolution of
character under the pressures of recent history, science fiction as a genre begins
by assuming that dissolution, and explores the causes. Science fiction deals,
in other words, with the same social and intellectual developments whose
intimate effects on personality have been explored in modernist fiction; the
two literary modes examine the outside and inside of the same phenomenon,”
Sanders continues.
Isaac Asimov split the difference. “Science fiction stories
are notoriously weak on characterization as compared with mainstream stories. [If
true] there happens to be a good reason for it. The characters are a smaller
portion of science fiction than of the mainstream. The double task of building
the background society and developing the foreground plot is extremely
difficult, and it requires an extraordinary amount of the writer’s attention.
There is that much less attention that is, or can be, paid to the characters.
There is, physically, less room in the story for character development.”
(Asimov, 1981 quoted in enotes.)
If men were reduced to cyphers in these multiverse-spanning
tales, what became of the women? Apart from the occasional Swordswoman and
Part-Time Lensman, they languished.
In the Seventies, things changed. In the US the Equal Credit
Opportunity Act (ECOA) was signed into effect on October 28, 1974, making it
illegal for financial institutions to discriminate on the basis of sex,
granting women for the first time the right to apply for and obtain credit in
their own names without needing a male co-signer. Birth control, including the
pill, was available. Comstock had recently been repealed. Roe vs. Wade was
decided in 1973.
(Slight digression: There’s a concept called the Long
Sixties which asserts that the societal changes of the Sixties stretch back
into the Fifties and into the mid-Seventies. I can’t argue for the Fifties
here, as any reader of Philip K Dick will quickly realize that societal changes
had not reached the lofty heights of SF yet. I’m prepared to backdate the
Change in Science Fiction to 1967, with Pamela Zoline’s boundary-smashing “Heat
Death of the Universe.” But that was published in the British Magazine New
Worlds, and the New Wave in SF washed up five years earlier on those
shores.)
Feminism developed rapidly in the 1970s. So rapidly that a
table may be easier on the reader’s attention span.
|
Author |
Title |
Year |
Type |
|
Laura Mulvey |
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” |
1975 |
Article |
|
Kate Millett |
Sexual Politics |
1970 |
Book |
|
Shulamith Firestone |
The Dialectic of Sex |
1970 |
Book |
|
Mary Daly |
Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s
Liberation |
1973 |
Book |
|
Adrienne Rich |
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution |
1976 |
Book |
|
Ann Oakley |
Sex, Gender and Society |
1972 |
Book |
|
Juliet Mitchell |
Psychoanalysis and Feminism |
1974 |
Book |
|
Luce Irigaray |
Speculum of the Other Woman |
1974 (French) |
Book |
|
Susan Brownmiller |
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape |
1975 |
Book |
|
Robin Morgan (ed.) |
Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from
the Women’s Liberation Movement |
1970 |
Anthology |
|
Germaine Greer |
The Female Eunuch |
1970 |
Book |
|
Ann Snitow,
Christine Stansell, Sharon Thompson (eds.) |
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality |
1983 |
Anthology of 1970s work |
Though male science fiction writers may have remained more
interested in Moon landings and Voyager missions, women were “doing the work”
as the kids say these days.
In 1975 the zine Khatru devoted two issues to a “round-robin”
of snail-mail letters exchanged between a number of women writers unhappy with
the genre (Suzy McKee Charnas, Virginia Kidd, Ursula K LeGuin, Vonda McIntyre,
Raylyn Moore, Joanna Russ, Luise White, Kate Wilhelm and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro),
one man (Samuel R Delany), and one woman everyone believed was a man (James
Tiptree, Jr.) (Long story.)
In the early part of the Khatru document, writers
take time to state that the genre has not done justice to either sex. Ursula K
LeGuin wrote, “‘Golden Age’ writers were not writing a fiction of character or
of passion; they were writing in an impersonalized genre of
ideas-technology-adventure; and so all their characters were necessarily
two-dimensional. Male characters were more frequent than female, but just as
wooden, vapid, and stereotyped. SF now has vastly enlarged its artistic range,
and so has room for people in it. Both sexes.”
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro wrote, “Many of the fans I know who
read sf read it entirely for the ideas, and they don’t like characterization to
get in the way. I find this incomprehensible, but I have seen enough of it to
know that a significant number of our readers would prefer cardboard cutouts
for people so that they don’t have to deal with anything more than the idea.
This might be immature (I think it is, but that’s my opinion), it might be all
kinds of unrealistic, but face it, my dears, a good number of those readers
give out the Hugos [then as now the pre-eminent awards for the genre].”
As the round-robin progresses, the writers delve more and
more deeply into the reasons why women rarely wrote, and even less rarely
starred in, SF until the 1970s.
The Khatru
conversation is worth reading in its entirety as it illustrates the extent
of the writers’ dissatisfaction. The contributors and their fellow SF writers also,
of course, attended symposia, and produced articles and books of theory of
their own.
|
Author |
Title |
Year |
Type |
|
Joanna Russ |
“The Image of Women in SF” |
1970 |
Essay |
|
Joanna Russ |
“What Can a Heroine Do? Or, Why Women Can’t Write” |
1972 |
Essay |
|
Joanna Russ |
“Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction” |
1975 |
Essay |
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
“American SF and the Other” |
1975 |
Essay |
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
“Is Gender Necessary?” |
1976 |
Essay |
|
Suzy McKee Charnas |
Non-fiction essays on feminist SF (various articles) |
1970s |
Essay Collection |
|
Marge Piercy |
Review essays on feminist SF (various) |
1970s |
Essays |
And of course, the contributors and their cohort continued
to write SF books and short stories incorporating these modern theories.
|
Title |
Author |
Year |
Main Theme/Significance |
|
The Female Man |
Joanna Russ |
1975 |
Multiple realities; gender and identity |
|
Woman on the Edge of Time |
Marge Piercy |
1976 |
Utopian futures; mental health |
|
Walk to the End of the World |
Suzy McKee Charnas |
1974 |
Misogyny, oppression, survival |
|
Motherlines |
Suzy McKee Charnas |
1978 |
Matriarchal society, independence |
|
Dreamsnake |
Vonda N. McIntyre |
1978 |
Healing, nontraditional heroism |
|
The Dispossessed |
Ursula K. Le Guin |
1974 |
Utopia, anarchism, society |
|
Kindred |
Octavia E. Butler |
1979 |
Race, gender, time travel |
|
We Who Are About To... |
Joanna Russ |
1977 |
Bodily autonomy, anti-colonization |
|
Title |
Author |
Year |
Notes/Significance |
|
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” |
James Tiptree, Jr. |
1976 |
All-female society; male violence |
|
“When It Changed” |
Joanna Russ |
1972 |
Gender & society on an isolated planet |
|
“The Women Men Don’t See” |
James Tiptree, Jr. |
1973 |
Women’s alienation, survival |
|
“The Girl Who Was Plugged In” |
James Tiptree, Jr. |
1973 |
Media, bodies, gender agency |
|
“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” |
Vonda N. McIntyre |
1973 |
Healing, female protagonist |
|
“The Funeral” |
Kate Wilhelm |
1972 |
Family, mourning, women’s experience |
The change in SF demographics (both of readers and writers)
that began in the seventies gathered momentum like an asteroid entering Earth’s
atmosphere. The SF landscape in 2015 barely resembles the landscape of
1955—which many would say is a good thing.
Why 2015? I would
argue that the gyroscope began to wobble with the advent of the Sad Puppies in
2013, but that’s a story for another day.
OK, fine. Here’s a short list of feminist, woman-written
stories that I found compelling.
|
Writer |
Type |
Story Name |
Date |
Subject |
|
Octavia
Butler |
Short Story |
1984 |
Male
pregnancy |
|
|
Joanna Russ |
Short Story |
1972 |
Gender &
society on an isolated planet |
|
|
Pamela Zoline |
Short Story |
1967 |
Entropy and
womanhood |
|
|
Joanna Russ |
Novel |
1977 |
Bodily
autonomy |
Joanna Russ (1975) Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/6/russ6art.htm
retrieved 07/23/25
Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction,
1960
Jirel of Joiry basic background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jirel_of_Joiry
Darko Suvin1978 https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/14/suvin14art.htm
retrieved 07/23/25
Khatru Issues #3 and #4 https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Khatru/Khatru03.pdf
retrieved 07/30/25
Scott Sanders 1977 https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/11/sanders11.htm
Retrieved 07/23/25
Isaac Asimov: Asimov on Science Fiction. Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, 1981
enotes: https://www.enotes.com/topics/golden-age-short-science-fiction/criticism/criticism-major-golden-age-short-science-fiction/patricia-ferrara-essay-date-summer-1987
retrieved July 23 2025
**
The above was written for a class in Fiction writing. Given it isn't fiction, did it get a good grade? It was an ungraded class but the prof did say I "did a lot of work" and he "always enjoyed" having me "in the class," a masterwork of not actually grading it. I did also submit some fiction. Those pieces did well.
Angel City
Eastern American legends tell of a tribe
who founded a golden city in the far west, led by their divine foremother Eve
Angelica. The Royal Treasurer asked us to determine if her city existed, and if
so, to locate the gold these ancient people amassed and sequester it for our
Queen.
For our trek, I assembled a team of
five women; a geologist, a botanist, two ethnologists who had lived with a remaining
eastern tribe, and an interpreter, Skilar, who was brought up in an east coast
village. She could read several hundred written word-glyphs as well as speak latter-day
Inglish fluently.
The first westerners we met, living
outside the ruins of Angel City, call themselves the Lost Feelies. They do not
know of Eve. They say their founders were white men and women from the east who
all arrived together on iron horses. They call these ancients the “Rubber
Barons,” and say they built Angel City in one hundred years. The Lost Feelies
told us that the tribe now dwelling in the inner city are not related to them,
arriving long after the city was built.
When asked why their people
abandoned the city, the Lost Feelies say supernatural enemies from the Land of
the Setting Sun sent two plagues: “Bee Die Off” killed all the flowers and “wheat
rust” (a fungus) ruined their grain fields. The city dwellers starved or
dispersed. From the size of trees now growing in the ruins our botanist agreed
that a major disaster occurred around four hundred years ago.
We followed the course of the
river, which is a mere trickle in a vast channel some thirty paces wide, now
much overgrown. On once-paved streets near the remaining great buildings, which
they call “Those-Who-Scratch-The-Sky,” there are numerous dwellings made of
ephemeral materials. They include cartonnage boxes and blankets of animal and
plant fibers. There exists a great stock of paper in the abandoned buildings,
which the people scavenge for cartonnage-making. A popular coating for the papier-mâché
homes is a variety of green paper cut into hand-length rectangles. Each bears a
portrait of a man in the center and a selection of lucky numbers. The tribe living
in the streets call themselves “Skidro.” They too claim to be descendants of
those who built the Sky Scratchers. They say they have an “American Dream” that
material wealth will “trickle down” from the Sky Scratcher, and so they live in
its shadow, waiting.
 |
| A Sky Scratcher |
We asked the Skidro where they kept
this treasure. They pointed to the largest Sky Scratcher and said it is concealed
“inside the block-chain.” Skilar elicited from them that the ultimate source of
wealth is the “bite coin.” Our ethnologists believe this must be gold, since gold
will readily take teeth marks, but I feel the concept of “trickle down”
strongly suggests that wealth was spiritual, distributed by a sky god.
We soon reached an impasse, despite
Skilar’s fluency. I quickly learned that the highest Skidro moral value is
“Freedom of Speech.” They permit and even encourage untruths. They call lies
“Alternative Facts.” They recite a mantra, “Do your own research!” When we asked
for verification of statements, they cry “I plead the fifth,” and “We refuse
compelled speech!”
Our geologist told us that this
area suffers frequent quakes. Eight Sky Scratchers still stand, but ten or a
dozen have fallen. These cluster, with lower-height wooden buildings (and some
stone) surrounding them as far as the eye can see. Some still have metal glyphs
attached to the upper façade. Skilar told us they were single words without a
common meaning, denoting the name of the god to whom the edifice was
dedicated.
We explored the tallest intact
tower. It is rectilinear at the bottom,
quickly becoming circular, and built in a series of reducing steps, or setbacks,
which eventually shrink away to leave a round tower above, surmounted with a
crown. According to Skilar, the building is composed of 73 “floors” (as each
layer is called, though they are not on the ground). Each “floor” is about the
height of two women and each has many window bays inset into the outer surface.
The core and cladding are made of white “concrete” which Skilar described as a
stone the ancients liquified, then poured from spinning machines, after which
it resolidified. Concrete is usually white but sometimes beige, like a cheap
sandstone but with far more strength (as I found when I tried to chip a piece
off as a souvenir).
From the remains of the roadway,
broad concrete stairs ascend to the “ground floor.” The step height is designed
for women, but they measure a dozen paces in width, suggesting ceremonial
processions ascended the steps. Skidro
told Skilar that workers, both women and men, walked up the steps to spend time
sitting in chambers at the top of the building. We were unable to verify this.
The structure is so austere that it seems likely to me that only priests would
be allowed to enter it.
At the top of the stairs are two
flat, rectangular areas filled with small rocks. Skilar learned these were
fountains that propelled water through hidden pipes into the air, after which
it would sink out of sight. I assume this water was used for ritual ablutions
before ceremonies. The river is a mile away but our geologist pointed out that,
judging by the size of its concrete channel, it must have been a veritable
torrent in the Classic Period. Perhaps the depletion of this resource provides
another reason for the city’s abandonment.
Beyond this ritual cistern, against
the concrete wall, stand four metal sculptures. These resemble serpents adorned with
red, serrated crowns. Each has a glyph affixed which Skilar read as “Fire
Riser.” She did not know what relationship snakes have to fire. I asked her if the glyphs could be an example
of “Freedom of Speech,” but she said that both here and in the east, glyphs
sanctified by the “Fire General” were always true, as the gods required the
General to be literally truthful in all her dealings with the populus.
 |
| Serpent sculpture at the top of the broad stair. Traces of red paint remain visible. |
The main entrance on the “ground
floor” (many steps above the ground) was originally composed of large sheets of
curved blue glass, some fitted with hinges to form doors. We saw no evidence of fortifications or guard
quarters. The doors lead into an expansive open chamber. Large concrete pillars
inside the space reveal the method by which the immense weight of the building
is distributed to the ground, but the size of the open space is remarkable. It
is some six “floors” high. The space—Skilar read the glyph as “atrium”—retains
traces of wood flooring and there is a long, chest-height counter with remnants
of red-stained wood. Skilar said that easterners believe the ancients stationed
four “recessionists” in military garb behind these counters to repel invaders
and escort invited guests.
Light pours in through the upper
windows, lower windows and doors. It seemed a barren glare to us, but while the
blue glass remained intact on the now open side of “atrium,” daylight must have
been calming and tranquil.
Skilar and I climbed the ribbed
metal staircase at the far side of “atrium.” It leads only to a balcony (or half-floor with
a short wall) overlooking the entrance and “atrium.” Further ascent, Skilar
said, was undertaken in a box winched on cables. We explored, finding two
arrays of the winched boxes and many rooms of unknown use. We saw several
blocks and chains, but I did not find any bite-coins.
We saw several other glyphs Skilar believes
the “Fire General” must have written.
Signs include “Occupancy” followed by a numeral, which must be the
number of celebrants in a religious ceremony, and “Emergency Exit,” a
reference, I believe, to the doorways which are thrown open during an
“Occupancy” and through which Disaster Demons are expelled. From the balcony,
we saw that the principal contents of the vast “atrium” comprises many ceramic containers,
the size of coffins, each one filled with soil. Around them, the Classic Period
tribe placed stools with backs, for comfortable viewing of the vessels’
contents.
I asked our botanist to examine the
plant material remaining in the soil-containers. She found desiccated leaves
and stalks from Swiss Cheese plants, remnants of Bromeliads, dried leaves of
Velvet Philodendron, and stalks of Dumbcane. All of these, she told me, originate
in rainforests far to the south of Angel City. They are all inedible and some are noxious, so
were not grown for food.
We left the city precipitously, as
an earth tremor shook the ground. The Skidro told us it presaged another “big
one” strong enough to collapse a sky-scratcher.
From our brief visit, I conclude
that the ceremonial cisterns before the entrance, the dim, filtered blue light,
the serpent sculptures and the large ceramic pots filled with rainforest trees
and shrubs surrounded by observation platforms and resting areas—even the belief
that beneficence ‘trickles down’ like drips from trees—suggest an attempt to
recreate the tropical home of their gods. I further believe, contrary to their
own origin myth, that the city-builders came from the south, bringing their
gods with them. The Sky-Scratchers were their temples.
Accordingly, we feel that any
subsequent expedition in search of bite-coin should contact the more indigenous
tribes, beginning with the Lost Feelies (since we have already made contact)
and their neighbors, the Hollyweird.
***
This piece is a travelogue in the
style of Fr. Diego de Landa. It is a fictional account of an expedition to the
ruins of Los Angeles.
The Classic Maya civilization collapsed
five centuries before Father Diego de Landa arrived in Yucatán, Mexico. He set
to learning Mayan history, relying on contemporary villagers’ stories and his own
primitive ethnography. In 1562, de Landa burned the 27 bark-paper books he had
found, believing them to be the work of demons. In doing so, he wiped out
almost all written Mayan historical records. Because of his vandalism, his
account of explorations in Yucatán paradoxically provides much of what we know
about Maya life.
***
07/17/25 - edited the image of ruined LA
