The “coherent water” scam is back

On May 7, I received a press release touting a product called “coherent water” made by a company named Analemma Water India. According to the document, “coherent water” is based on more than “15 years of rigorous research and development” and confers “a myriad … health benefits”.This “rigorous research” is flawed research. There’s definitely such a thing as “coherent water” and it’s indistinguishable from regular water at all scales. The “coherent water” scam has reared its serpentine head before with the names “hexagonal water”, “structured water”, “polywater”, “exclusion zone water”, and water with one additional hydrogen and oxygen atom each, i.e. “H3O2”. Analemma’s “Mother Water”, which is its brand name for “coherent water”, itself is a rebranding of a product called “Somarka” that hit the Indian market in 2021.

The scam here is that the constituent molecules of “coherent water” get together to form hexagonal structures that persist indefinitely. And these structures distinguish “coherent water”, giving it wonderful abilities like possessing a greater energy content than regular water, boosting one’s “life force”, and — this one I love — being able to “encourage” other water molecules around it to form similar hexagonal assemblages.

I hope people won’t fall for this hoax but I know some will. But thanks to the lowest price of what Analemma is offering — a vial of “Mother Water” that it claims is worth $180 (Rs 15,000) — it’ll be some rich buggers and I think that’s okay. Fools, their wealth, and all that. Then again, it’s somewhat saddening that while (some) people are fighting to keep junk foods and bad medicines out of the market, we have “coherent water” companies and their PR outfits bravely broadcasting their press releases to news publications (and at least one publishing it) at around the same time.

If you’re curious about the issue with “coherent water”: At room temperature and pressure, the hydrogen atoms of water keep forming and breaking weak bonds with other hydrogen atoms. These bonds last for a very small duration and give water its high boiling point and ice crystals their characteristic hexagonal structure.

Sometimes water molecules organise themselves using these bonds into a hexagonal structure as well. But these formations are very short-lived because the hydrogen bonds last only around 200 quadrillionths of a second at a time, if not lower. According to the hoax, however, in “coherent water”, the hydrogen bonds continue to hold such that its water molecules persist in long-lived hexagonal clusters. But this conclusion is not supported by research — nor is the  claim that, “When swirled in normal water, the [magic water] encourages chaotic and irregular H2O molecules to rearrange into the same liquid crystalline structure as the [magic water]. What’s more, the coherent structure is retained over time – this stability is unique to Analemma.”

I don’t think this ability is unique to the “Mother Water”. In 1963, a scientist named Felix Hoenikker invented a variant of ice that, when it came in contact with water cooler than 45.8º C, quickly converted it to ice-nine as well. Sadly Hoenikker had to abandon the project after he realised the continued use of ice-nine would simply destroy all life on Earth.

Anyway, water that’s neither acidic nor basic also has a few rare hydronium (H3O+) and hydroxide (OH-) ions floating around as well. The additional hydrogen ion — basically a proton — from the hydronium ion is engaged in a game of musical chairs with the protons in the same volume of water, each one jumping to a molecule, dislodging a proton there, which jumps to another molecule, and so on. This is happening so rapidly that the hydrogen atoms in every water molecule are practically being changed several thousand times every minute.

In this milieu, it’s impossible for a fixed group of water molecules to be hanging around. In addition, the ultra-short lifetime of the hydrogen bonds are what makes water a liquid: a thing that flows, fills containers, squeezes between gaps, collects into droplets, etc. Take this ability and the fast-switching hydrogen bonds away, as “coherent water” claims to do by imposing a fixed structure, and it’s no longer water — any kind of water.

Analemma has links to some reports on its website; if you’re up to it, I suggest going through them with a simple checklist of the signs of bad research side by side. You should be able to spot most of the gunk.

Infinity in 15 kilograms

While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage and thus increase the rocket’s payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!

The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system’s performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle’s capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.

Granted, the PSLV’s cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument’s launch to a future mission.

But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO’s scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn’t to say I’m surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.

A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.

The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It’s a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.

Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV’s new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.

Justice delayed but a ton of bricks await

From ‘SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’’, The Hindu, April 10, 2024:

The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. … Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.

… The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.

A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government’s hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.

But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali’s charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.

I think the Supreme Court’s inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that’s more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn’t new. In that May, he’d called evidence-based medicine “stupid” and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.

But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India’s response to the virus’s spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading “vaccine hesitancy” and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India’s deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.

For this alone, Vardhan deserves the “ton of bricks” the Supreme Court is waiting with.

Feel the pain

Emotional decision making is in many contexts undesirable – but sometimes it definitely needs to be part of the picture, insofar as our emotions hold a mirror to our morals. When machines make decisions, the opportunity to consider the emotional input goes away. This is a recurring concern I’m hearing about from people working with or responding to AI in some way. Here are two recent examples I came across that set this concern out in two different contexts: loneliness and war.

This is Anna Mae Duane, director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, in The Conversation:

There is little danger that AI companions will courageously tell us truths that we would rather not hear. That is precisely the problem. My concern is not that people will harm sentient robots. I fear how humans will be damaged by the moral vacuum created when their primary social contacts are designed solely to serve the emotional needs of the “user”.

And this is from Yuval Abraham’s investigation for +972 Magazine on Israel’s chilling use of AI to populate its “kill lists”:

“It has proven itself,” said B., the senior source. “There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. There has been an illogical amount of [bombings] in this operation. This is unparalleled, in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”

Cheers for everyone but the bustard

Behold, the legerdemain of spinning bad news into good:

Setting aside the meaningless headline, we have a lede (and the rest of the article, for that matter) that claims the Supreme Court of India “struck” a fine balancing act between the transition to renewable energy and protecting the great Indian bustard by rolling back a complete ban on overhead cables in the birds’ habitat.

Accepting sustained arguments from attorney general R Venkataramani, solicitor general Tushar Mehta and additional SG Aishwarya Bhati, the bench said, “India’s commitment to promoting renewable energy sources, particularly in regions like Gujarat and Rajasthan, aligns with its broader sustainable development objectives.”

Pats on the back for everyone.

Except while the Supreme Court is switching between imposing and revoking a ban on overhead cables and the newspaper declaring this a pro-climate triumph, there is no indication in the report that the petition before the Supreme Court is to move the power cables underground, protecting both the endangered bustards and the region’s power-generation potential.

The apex court has now asked an expert committee to examine the feasibility of underground cables and their costs, which the promoters of solar- and wind-power projects in the region have contended are too high. As such, the court’s order has created a false balance between the birds and the profit margins of these promoters, as if to say they’re equally legitimate and equally valuable.

Such are the perils of government by Supreme Court.

It’s the little things

‘What Muslim Women Face Every Day at Work’, The Wire, April 4, 2024:

[Nisha] Shah, who prays five times a day, says such Islamophobia at the workplace – amongst highly educated Indian youth – has become more audacious. She says her two-three prayer breaks are shorter than the frequent smoke and tea breaks her colleagues take. But she was asked to leave her religion out of the office. There was no holiday for Eid and no concessions to her schedule during the month of Ramzan. But when the Hindu festival of Diwali came around, the company organised pujas at work.

It’s the little stuff like this – unearthed expertly, laboriously by Mahima Jain – that really drives the pseudo-secularist point home on the ground. In my limited experience, I’ve noticed this kind of discrimination, motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment and sustained by kettle logic, in some research institutes, journalism establishments, and apartment complexes. Social anthropologist Renny Thomas’s book Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment is in this regard an eye-opener.

Some people exchange polite wishes for Islamic festivals even if they’re not Muslim themselves but by and large what on-premise celebrations the powers that be consider appropriate are very different for Eid and Mawlid versus Dussehra and Janmashtami. And when these powers don’t see value in or actively ignore the value of affirmative action in the cultural sphere of the space they administer, the differences hang like a reminder that, even if physical violence isn’t in the offing, “the seeds of hatred” are there, as Shah says.

End of the line

The folks at The Wire have laid The Wire Science to rest, I’ve learnt. The site hasn’t published any (original) articles since February 2 and its last tweet was on February 16, 2024.

At the time I left, in October 2022, the prospect of it continuing to run on its own steam was very much in the picture. But I’ve also been out of the loop since and learnt a short while ago that The Wire Science stopped being a functional outlet sometime earlier this year, and that its website and its articles will, in the coming months, be folded into The Wire, where they will continue to live. The Wire must do what’s best for its future and I don’t begrudge the decision to stop publishing The Wire Science separately – although I do wonder if, even if they didn’t see sense in finding a like-for-like replacement, they could have attempted something less intensive with another science journalist. I’m nonetheless sad because some things will still be lost.

Foremost on my mind are The Wire Science‘s distinct sensibilities. As is the case at The Hindu as well as at all publications whose primary journalistic product is ‘news’, the science coverage doesn’t have the room or license to examine a giant swath of the science landscape, which – while in many ways being science news in the sense that it presents new information derived from scientific work – can only manifest in the pages of a news product as ‘analysis’, ‘commentary’, ‘opinion’, etc. The Wire has the latter, or had when I left and I don’t know how they’ll be thinking about that going ahead, but there is still the risk of science coverage there not being able to spread its wings nearly as widely as it could on The Wire Science.

I still think such freedom is required because we haven’t figured out how best to cover science, at least not without also getting entangled in questions about science’s increasingly high-strung relationship with society and whether science journalists, as practitioners of a science journalism coming of age anew in the era of transdisciplinary technologies (AI, One Health, open access, etc.), can expect to be truly objective, forget covering science by the same rules and expectations that guide the traditional journalisms of business, politics, sports, etc. If however The Wire‘s journalists are still thinking about these things, kudos and best wishes to them.

Of course, one thing was definitely lost: the room to experiment with forms of storytelling that better interrogate many of these alternative possibilities I think science journalism needs to embrace. Such things rarely, if ever, survive the demands of the everyday newsroom. Again, The Wire must do what it deems best for its future; doing otherwise would be insensible. But loss is also loss. RIP. I’m sad, but also proud The Wire Science was what it was when it lived.

The foundation of shit

I’ve been a commissioning editor in Indian science, health, and environment journalism for a little under a decade. I’ve learnt many lessons in this time but one in particular still surprises me. Whenever I receive an email, I’m quick to at least shoot off a holding reply: “I’m caught up with other stuff today, I’ll get back to you on this <whenever>”. Having a horizon makes time management much easier. What surprises me is that many commissioning editors don’t do this. I’ve heard the same story from scores of freelancing writers and reporters: “I email them but they just don’t reply for a long time.” Newsrooms are short-staffed everywhere and I readily empathise with any editor who says there’s just no time or mental bandwidth. But that’s also why the holding email exists and can even be automated to ask the sender to wait for <insert number here> hours. A few people have even said they prefer working with me because, among other things, I’m prompt. This really isn’t a brag. It’s a fruit hanging so low it’s touching the ground. Sure, it’s nice to have an advantage just by being someone who replies to emails and sets expectations – but if you think about it, especially from a freelancer’s point of view, it has a foundation of shit. It shouldn’t exist.

There’s a problem on the other side of this coin here. I picked up the habit of the holding email when I was with The Wire (before The Wire Science) – a very useful piece of advice SV gave me. When I first started to deploy it, it worked wonders when engaging with reporters and writers. Because I wrote back, almost always within less than half a day of their emails, they submitted more of their work. Bear in mind at this point that freelancers are juggling payments for past work (from this or other publications), negotiations for payment for the current submission, and work on other stories in the pipeline. In the midst of all this – and I’m narrating second-hand experiences here – to have an editor come along who replies possibly seems very alluring. Perhaps it’s one less variable to solve for. I certainly wanted to take advantage of it. Over time, however, a problem arose. Being prompt with emails means checking the inbox every <insert number here> minutes. I quickly lost my mind over having to check for new emails as often as I could, but I kept at it because the payoff stayed high. This behaviour also changed some writers’ expectations of me: if I didn’t reply within six hours, say, I’d receive an email or two checking in or, in one case, accusing me of being like “the others”.

I want my job to be about doing good science journalism as much as giving back to the community of science journalists. In fact, I believe doing the latter will automatically achieve the former. We tried this in one way when building out The Wire Science and I think we’ve taken the first steps in a new direction at The Hindu Science – yet these are also drops in the ocean. For a community that requires so, so much still, giving can be so easy that one loses oneself in the process, including on the deceptively trivial matter of replying to emails. Reply quickly and meaningfully and it’s likely to offer a value of its own to the person on the other side of the email server. Suddenly you have a virtue, and because it’s a virtue, you want to hold on to it. But it’s a pseudo-virtue, a false god, created by the expectations of those who deserve better and the aspirations of those who want to meet those expectations. Like it or not, it comes from a bad place. The community needs so, so much still, but that doesn’t mean everything I or anyone else has to give is valuable.

I won’t stop being prompt but I will have to find a middle-ground where I’m prompt enough and at the same time the sender of the email doesn’t think I or any other editor for that matter has dropped the ball. This is as much about managing individual expectations as the culture of thinking about time a certain way, which includes stakeholders’ expectations of the editor-writer relationship in all Indian newsrooms publishing science-related material. (The fact of India being the sort of country where the place you’re at – and increasingly the government there – being one of the first things getting in the way of life also matters.) This culture should also serve the interests of science journalism in the country, including managing the tension between the well-being of its practitioners and sustainability on one hand and the effort and the proverbial extra push required for its growth on the other.

A new tradition

Source: ESPN Cricinfo

This screenshot is from ESPN Cricinfo’s live commentary for the Chennai Super Kings versus Gujarat Titans IPL match on March 26, 2024. Super Kings captain Ruturaj Gaikwad got out caught behind off the bowling of Spencer Johnson. I’m not sure why Cricinfo’s commentary says Gaikwad walked off because he didn’t. He swung his bat at the ball, got a nick, and the ball flew through to wicketkeeper Wriddhiman Saha. Saha and Johnson both started to celebrate – until Johnson noticed Gaikwad hadn’t left the crease. He turned around to appeal to the umpire, who signalled out, and it was then that Gaikwad started to walk.

A new captain at the helm of Super Kings has been due. MS Dhoni is in his early 40s. Though he still plays good cricket, it’s also time for him to make way, and Gaikwad is a good choice: he’s only 27 years old and can serve in the new role for a long time, assuming he also does well. It’s just that… if Dhoni had been the one to nick that ball, he would’ve walked the moment Saha caught it instead of waiting for the umpire’s signal. We’ve seen it in so many games both in the IPL and those for the national team, and we’ve also seen other Super Kings players follow suit. I assumed it was team culture, bolstered by the fact that Super Kings has also frequently been among the top five teams in the (meta-)race for the IPL’s ‘Fair Play Award’.

To each their own, of course, but considering Gaikwad is now the captain, I hope how he responded is just the sign of a new captain and doesn’t also signal a change in the team culture.

Happy Lord of the Rings Day

War is on all our minds these days. There is a war happening in Ukraine and something barely resembling a war (because it’s a genocide) in Gaza. Governments have been fond of casting our collective responses – such as they are – to climate change, antimicrobial resistance, and water crises as wars. In every nationalist country, and there are more of them every year, the states have claimed they’re at war against “anti-national” forces within and without. War is everywhere. At this time, where does fantasy fiction stand, what can it do?

First, the genre itself is often centred around military action as a means to challenge protagonists and resolve conflicts. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the skirmish on Weathertop showcases Aragorn’s leadership; the Battle of Helm’s Deep is where Théoden truly returns as the king of Rohan; the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is the stage on which Denethor fails, Faramir rises in his stead, Rohan’s crown effectively passes to Éowyn, and Aragorn does something only Gondor’s ruler can; the Battle of the Morannon is a test of every protagonist’s mettle as they distract Sauron and his armies in a doomed stand long enough for Sam, Frodo, and Gollum to destroy the ring; and the Battles of Isengard and Bywater are where the ents and hobbits, respectively, retake their lands from Saruman’s rule, unto the powerful wizard’s political and then mortal demise. Even outside the trilogy, war is never short of a great contest between good and evil.

There have been many flights of fancy that bear little resemblance to JRR Tolkien’s epic and its style, yet it’s just as true that every English attempt at epic fantasy since the trilogy has either basked in its shadow or tried to escape from it. Another way in which Tolkien foreshadowed the genre is in terms of its authors: predominantly cis-male and white. Despite the variety of factors at play that could influence who becomes an author of epic fantasy fiction, this is no coincidence, at least insofar as it determines who becomes a ‘successful’ author – and just as well, it’s not a coincidence that so much of modern fantasy is concerned with similar depictions of war.

Bret Devereaux wrote in his popular blog that Amazon Primevideo’s Rings of Power fell so flat even though it had borrowed heavily as well as branched off from Lord of the Rings because, among other things, it failed to “maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings, books and films, did very well)”, rendering it “impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules”. Yet even with the ‘rules’, Tolkien’s narrative arcs within his books were modeled perceptibly on the Arthurian legends. A similar complaint can be foisted on other (esp. white male) works of epic fantasy fiction, which have been concerned on a metaphysical level at least with recasting the past in a different light, unto different ends.

I admit I haven’t read enough of epic fantasy – all of Tolkien, a smattering of Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), Peter David (Sir Apropos of Nothing), some of M. John Harrison’s short stories, Brandon Sanderson, Marlon James (BLRW), and George R.R. Martin – to be able to write with any kind of authority about the genre, but for this I blame partly myself and the rest Steven Erikson, whose Malazan Book of the Fallen series spoiled me for anything else. My own tendency to read the work of the cis-white men of fantasy is also to blame.

However, Erikson, unlike any of the other writers I’d read until then, both within and beyond the genre, is also a white man yet his Malazan series treats war differently: its tragic toll is always in view thanks to Erikson’s decision to train the narrator’s focus on its smallest players, the soldiers, rather than on its kings and queens. This is how, for its well-earned reputation as a military epic bar none, the series itself recounts a tale of compassion.

And having read and re-read the Malazan series for more than a decade (to the uninitiated: it’s possible to do this without getting bored because of its rich detailing and layered story-telling), war – including ones of annihilation, which can apparently be fought these days without the use of terrible weapons – is if nothing else the ultimate examination of purpose. It is brutal on people, the land, the cultures, and the planet for much longer after it ends, and it magnifies through these effects and the methods by which they are achieved the moral character of those conducting this violence.

Like others I’m sure, I feel completely powerless against and often dispirited by Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza, Russia’s wanton destruction in Ukraine, and the systemic violence the Indian state continues to inflict on its poorest and most marginalised sections. The best tools of opposition available at my disposal are my words, my ideas, my morality, and, if a situation demands it, some spine – and all four good fantasy fiction can inspire in abundance.

I remember reading a Roger Ebert review of a film sometime back (can’t remember its name now) in which he said good story-telling can inspire us to become our best versions of ourselves, that even should the film flop on other counts, it will have succeeded if it can do this. These words are applied easily to any form and mode of story-telling, including epic fantasy. Lord of the Rings is a tale of good versus evil but it’s also a tale of friendships and their survival through untold hardships, and while some may disagree it was good story-telling. In the end, whether or not it succeeded and also setting aside the moralities of the time in which it was written, it strove to inspire goodness.

The Malazan series strives similarly (present-tense because Erikson is still building out its lore) and, to be fair, does it much better, directing its empathy at almost everyone who appears in the books (excluding – spoiler alert – the truly vile). In our present time of seemingly incessant conflict, it helps me look beyond the propaganda both noisy and subtle at the people who are suffering, and with its stories refill senses constantly on the verge of depletion. If we just let it, fantasy can step up where reality has failed us, alerting us to the infinite possibility of worlds within worlds, new and necessary forms of justice, and of course how and where we can begin to cope together.

A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. 🙂

Previous editions: 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

Note: I chose to ignore sci-fi in this post. I suspect “sci-fi” and “fantasy” are at the end of the day labels invented to make marketing these books easier, but I also stuck to fantasy per se so I could finish writing this post in a finite amount of time.