Politblogo

STEYN ATTACKS!

My first foray into the dangerous world of political mockery by image editing.

Johann Hari has an excellent takedown of Mark Steyn's book on the impending European Islamopocalypse. 

Johann Hari - Archive: But this cannot hide the gaping holes of logic and fact in his argument. To fulfil his headline predictions, Steyn needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 200 million European Muslims - in just 13 years. Only Fallacci's rats could reproduce so rapidly. Steyn even admits that the history of demographic predictions is hysterically inept, noting that "most twenty-year projections... are laughably speculative, and thus most doomsday scenarios are too" - before offering his own.

Europe's real demographics are described in a similar book by a slightly more scupulous author. Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the Washington Times and DC grande dame, last year wrote 'The West's Last Chance' predicting an enfeebled Europe would collapse before the Muslim hoardes. But after studying the figures, he admitted: “For almost every Western European country, their populations do not even begin to decline until at least 2025... In fact, for the next few decades, they continue to go up, even without any new immigration… The numbers only begin to move decidedly down about fifty years from now.” So for Steyn's predictions to hold true, the current Muslim birthrate needs to hold steady through five decades of life in the West, all Muslims have to become communitarian Islamists bent on sharia law, and there must be no natalist policies from European governments in the meanwhile.

Perhaps sensing this groaning crack in the foundation of his argument, Steyn adds hastily: "It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the eighth century, the 'Islamic world' stretched from Spain to India yet its population was only minority Muslim." But they were - a fairly obvious difference - not electoral democracies, where any group has to command a majority to rule.

And it goes on thusly to deconstruct Steyn's panicked racist natalism.  The main flaw of the article is that he resurrects the common multiculturalism strawman (and I am told he is an otherwise odious libertarian conservative of some kind?  Many people I like seem to hate him, and this is the first time I've ever heard of him), but for shooting the pirhana in the barrel so well, I'll forgive him.

Nations: three vignettes

Some of you will remember "Prussian Blue", the twin girls who are, together, apparently the Spice Girls of the neo-Nazi world.  In a bout of idle Internet-surfery, I occured again upon their web site.  One of the things I discovered is that they have a little sister named Dresden.  I also took a look at their lyrics.  Let's just say that after reading them, you'd become a little more suspicious when someone invokes Norse mythology, and you'd feel more confident in a Wagner-Nazi ideological link!  But: this is a little less fair to Norse mythology than it is to Wagner.

These young ladies get letters of support every time the media gives them a justifiably horrified glance.  Some of these people claim that they'd never say such things in public.  They have jobs like bank tellars and the like.   So, if you're a darkie like me or a visible/seeming Joo, and you're at the bank, and you're being served by a white seeming-non-Jewish person, there's a chance that this person may be a closet neo-Nazi and believe that he'll have to shoot you in the coming race war.  Feel free to profile them as desired.

One interesting one:

I am a Black woman and I have a lot of pride in my race but I don't wish any ill will toward any other race. I think you girls are talented and you should keep your race pride alive. Be proud of your accomplishments and always thank GOD for giving you the gift of musical ability and having the support from your parents to persue your dreams. Your website is really cool and if I were your demographic I would pick up your CD. I read the lyrics and they are really good. Keep up the good work, and don't get discouraged and never forget where you came from. (A fan)

If this person really is black, one really wonders what was going through her head as she wrote this.  Is this some form of rhetorical judo based on fear?  It's normal for beleaguered groups to engage in that sort of thing.  Still, it's odd when the lamb goads the lion's self-pity.

---

Way back when the Web (as opposed to the Internet) was young, I had a slightly diffferent set of obsessions than I do now.  One of the things about which I was obsessed was the Helleno-Turkish conflect, particularly the intractable Cyprus problem.   So I used to follow, in that time, a (now defunct, deleted) Cypriot discussion board that was mostly populated by expats of the region in America.  It was run by Greek Cypriot in the California tech industry (or something), who wanted Ordinary People to discuss solutions to the conflict given the failures of the leaders.

Now that the web is older, it generally knows better.  Or, at least, many people on it do. 

The most striking figure on this forum was this Greek-from-Greece, an ultra-ultra-nationalist, who had only vicious things to say about the innate barbarity of Turks and whose (unwittingly ironic) desire for Cyprus was that the Turkish Cypriot inhabitants be swept from the island or otherwise dissipated (even by "peaceful" means such as obligate assimilation, I assume).  Of course, he desired this regardless of what Greek Cypriots themselves wanted, which, to their credit, involved at its strongest some form of compensation for lost property and an apology.

The presence of interfering irredentists and ultra-nationalists from the motherland is not in itself very remarkable.  What is remarkable are as follows:

• A more reasonable Greek or Greek Cypriot once pointed out the fluidity of identity and the futility of establishing a firm definition of "Greek" by pointing out the existence of a Muslim Greek friend of his living in Greece.  Mr. Ultra-Nationalist responded by saying that if he ever met this person, he would kill him.  Because it's a worse crime to blur the definitions than it is to be a Turk.  And this Muslim Greek blurred the definitions---since proper Greeks, no matter whether they actually believe and behave as such, identify as Greek Orthodox Christians.
• Mr. Ultra-Nationalist, like most of the discussion board, was actually living in America.  He had a Chinese-American friend who had converted to Greek Orthodoxy and was learning Greek.  Mr. Ultra-Nationalist believed that this individual was acceptably Hellenic, despite the inconvenient Chinese origin.  A Muslim Greek is a vile concept, but a Chinese Greek is not.  (Actually, he usually used the word "Hellenic" and objected to the term "Greek", because---and this is true---the word "Greek" is what the imperialistic Romans called them.)

---

Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a big fan of science fiction novels.  One notable author that I usually like is Mike Resnick.  But Resnick is quite a troublesome writer in some ways.  He's a man who went to Africa or something on a lot of safaris or worked there or...well, I have no idea.  But he---a white dude---writes a lot about Africa, including very good allegories for African politics, such as Purgatory.

Now I say that he is troublesome, because sometimes he is a subtle defender of colonialism in a Kiplingesque way.  Not always---sometimes he's a clear critic of colonialism---but frequently one is left with the impression that he occasionally mourns the end of colonialism in Africa.  That is actually what makes him a good writer.  (Or maybe he is not mourning it, but trying to tell us that the end of colonialism has consequences too.)

One of his best works, however, is an anthology of a series short stories he published in magazines.  It's called Kirinyaga, and its background is a futuristic, advanced Kenya centuries hence.  In this rich, futuristic Kenya, very little traditional African lifestyles are left.  Most of the tribes have urbanized and modernized and live wealthy, capitalistic lives.  Except one.

And that one remnant of traditional life, kept on a reserve of their own making (one of the troubling theme that Resnick rides) is led by a witch doctor with a modern education.  This man persuades an international council to give him a whole terraformed planet in another solar system (remember, this is far-future SF) to which he can take his tribe and re-establish the cultural life of his tribe in an environment similar to ancient Kenya.

Each of the short stories is thus an episode in the life of this colony as told by the witch doctor.  In each episode, a "leak" in his cultural utopia starts to form, and he must patch it up.  For instance, an old woman, his closest ally, decides that she wants to retain her independence in her old age---and he, in order to prevent the corruption of the traditions he is trying to save, must stop her.  And he uses every power he has, including contact with the terraforming maintence services, to break her spirit.

A young woman wants to learn to read.  But he cannot allow anyone to become literate but the witch doctor. (If they want an education, they can freely leave---forever.)  Otherwise the ideas would poison his paradise.  So she devises more and more devious ways to get what she wants.  And he must thwart her at every turn.  Eventually he wins, with tragic consequences.

And what is most striking about the way that Resnick paints his reaction (and Resnick writes it very well)?  The witch doctor does not feel that any of the consequences are his responsibility.  Instead, he crucifies himself on the gentle cross of martyred self-pity.  The witch doctor communicates with his people through the use of parables---these pervade each story---and the responsibility for the consequences is entirely subsumed by the truth he creates with his parables.  Every episode raises the stakes by raising the potency of the parables he invents---and the potential damage caused by a leak in the cultural dam grows every larger.

I don't know to what extent Resnick's whiteness and mentality afflicts his writing in this story, but he is trying to tell us that there is no single national moment.  The witch doctor's attempts to stop time will always be futile and probably never reflected the ancient reality of the tribe.  His parables were like the ancient parables---but they were all designed not to educate, but to justify.  To screw down the lid of the pressure cooker of human creativity and independent desire. Eventually the parables must rupture.

A send-up of the world is flat

Via a rather complicated path---Chris Clarke's comment on Dr. Socks's site---we receive word of this wonderfully snarky review by Matt Taibbi of Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat.

New York Press: Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.

"Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.

To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman "had Lufthansa business class." When he reaches India—Bangalore to be specific—he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: "Gigabites of Taste." Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: "No, this definitely wasn't Kansas."

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

I have never greatly believed the free trade boosterism, myself.  It's not clear to me that pitting first world workers against third world ones is a great idea in the long run for either.  In the short run, you might produce some small enrichment to certain almost-middle-classes in India, etc.  But the processes that are being used to do this greatly increase the bargaining power of the already powerful. 

Of course, economists will tell you that the relative impoverishment of rich-country workers is to be remedied by social supports.  When such are forthcoming, we'll talk.  But the nature of the process itself as it has unfolded in the US and Canada suggests that the compensation will never be forth coming, because it requires the already-rich to give up some of their bargaining power.

Socialist steampunk fantasy

Eugene Plawiuk asked what "socialist steampunk fantasy" was in the comments to my post on the philosophy of Miéville's garuda. This would take a bit of text, so I thought I'd devote a post to it.

The whole thing really starts off with the "cyberpunk" subgenre of science fiction.  The general form of a cyberpunk story consists of marginalized individuals in a futuristic dystopia hacking information-distribution technology to achieve what is, in their view, a positive social aim, usually some form of emancipation.  Cyberpunk has become very familiar to most people in North America and Europe even if you don't notice it.  Much of the terminology and thinking people use when they interact with the Internet comes from William Gibson's prophetic novel Neuromancer (which I admit I haven't read).  Apparently we are living today the cyberpunk fiction that was written yesterday.  And, of couse lots of people have watched The Matrix, which is another example of cyberpunk fiction.  Some writers are very outré and futuristic, such as Neal Stephenson and his excellent The Diamond Age; or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (which I have, in fact, read)---works like this attempt to explore the social effects of very different technology on a far-future world, such as, in the case of The Diamond Age, ubiquitous nanotech. 

Far from being dry descriptions of technology, though, these works are often political polemics---more often then not, although they are also frequently enjoyable futuristic romps.

Steampunk is an offshoot of cyberpunk where the writer attempts to make use of the same form minus electronics or any futuristic technology.  It is usually set in an industrializing society, hence the "steam" in "steampunk".  A novel that is an interesting transition between steampunk and cyberpunk is Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a long but very popular novel about WWII and its aftereffects in present-day life regarding discoveries in computer science, with cameos of great thinkers like Alan Turing.  (I found the book too long for the subject matter and never finished it, but others I know really really liked it.)

Steampunk fantasy takes the steampunk genre and adds magic to it.  In the case of China Miéville's New Crobuzon universe (the subject of the previous post that this is based on), the city of New Crobuzon is highly reliant on trains and factories...that are powered both by steam and magic.  New Crobuzon is like the worst aspects of London during industrialization, plus it has massive racial tensions between various human and nonhuman subcultures, whereby Mièville explores questions of identity: some races manage to accomodate themselves to the dominant human culture better than others, who become ghettoized for a variety of reasons.  And other races, like the garuda, are immigrants/strangers to New Crobuzon society whose prior cultures and philosophies contrast deeply with the Crobuzoner way of life.

But the most dominant issue in Miéville's work is that of class, which is what makes it "socialist" fantasy.  (Miéville is a Trotskyist and the head of some fringe British political party.)  Miéville uses this industrializing society to illustrate class oppression---but that's been done before.  What makes Miéville's work so innovative is that he uses the magic of his universe to make metaphorical descriptions of capitalist/worker relations into literal ones, often in a quite luridly grotesque way.  For instance, workers and the poor who commit minor crimes are sent to be magically "Remade", a process that often involves grafting alien appendages or industrial machinery to the bodies of the convicted, often in sadistic ways---poetic ways, relating to the crime.  The treatment of the Remade after their ordeal is often frightening---and the rate of Remaking suspiciously increases when Capital demands more cheap labour.

That is "socialist steampunk fantasy."

Concrete vs. abstract individualism

A few of you may know that I have lately been reading China Miéville's New Crobuzon series of socialist steampunk fantasy.  I have, however been reading them in the wrong order, reading THE SCAR and Iron Council before the original book, Perdido Street Station, which I have just started.  Either way, I highly recommend these rather Dickensian fantasies to anyone who likes both to read fantasy and to read about social change.  They are, however, very grim stories, and Miéville has a taste for the grotesque, like his mosquito-women in THE SCAR.  *shudder*

However, in Perdido Street Station, there is an interesting idea that I thought I'd turn into a Politblogo post: that of concrete vs. abstract individualism.  Early in PSS, Miéville presents us the character Yagharek, a "garuda", which is a half-human, half-bird combo.  In garuda culture (they are a desert people), the individual is paramount.  However, only certain kinds of individualism are permitted.  Yagharek has been severely punished and exiled from his people, ending up in the dirty streets of New Crobuzon.  His crime?  "Choice-theft" and being "too too abstract."  Miéville's garuda believe that one must be "concrete" about one's individualism.  That is, one must recognize that one's choice emerge partly from the efforts of others to give you these choices and to avoid denying them to you.   That leads to the crime of "choice-theft": among the garuda, to knowingly deprive someone else of choice is to commit a heinous crime of abstraction.  Becoming "too too abstract", therefore, is the condition under which one performs the crime of "choice-theft".  The abstract are those individualists who believe that their individuality emerges from some inner right to be liberated from the community---and that their individuality gives them the right to make choices that affect others willy-nilly.   This system of concreteness vs. abstractness enables the highly solitary garuda to maintain coherent communities.

I don't know yet where Miéville is going with this: we don't know what exactly Yagharek did to be punished painfully and severely for "choice-theft".   As described so far, I find the "concrete individualism" quite congenial to myself. I do tend to think that the proper purpose of all these political peregrinations and machinations should be, in the best case, maximizing the well-being of the maximum number of individuals, rather than defending abstract collectivities.  But that requires recognizing the connections and dependencies between people and the world.

"Abstract" individualism seems to resemble nothing so much as the form of libertarianism that is favoured in some quarters, particularly in the USA.  They have their own science fiction/fantasy writers, some of them very good.  Verner Vinge is almost as good if not better than Miéville at writing, particularly his A Fire Across the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, both brilliant books deserving of the accolades they received.  Nevertheless they are firm polemics in favour of an "abstract" individualism, which is nonetheless ironically considered to be optimal for the maximum number of individuals.  But Vinge's Qeng Ho very clearly consider the most fundamental ethical principle to be an abstract right to live unmolested, no matter the consequences of that position, and that there are no positive actions to be taken to maximize human freedom except to maximize profit.

Areas of Study

I recently hijacked this thread at The Valve.  Someone had asked for suggestions for reading lists on what high school students ought to read before entering university.  Almost certainly they were intending were intending what literature and literary-criticism scholars would consider adequate preparation for their students.  Just on a whim, I sort of hijacked the thread for a random series of rambles on what I'd want high school students to read/do before entering computer science or linguistics programmes in university. 

The response was interesting.  One or two of them already had some technical education and struck up a conversation.  Eventually, however, the discussion was brought back on track to what they would probably have considered more "on topic" book suggestions.

One fairly interesting set of responses comes from a Tony Christini.  Not responses to me, but perhaps responses to the fact that there wasn't that much response on the thread by literary-critic types:

What I am surprised at is that at a prompt for important basic college level reading material at a scholarly literary website, there have been virtually no suggestions of basic critical and/or theoretical books that might represent, indicate, or introduce the professional field(s). Is the field that dead to everyone at a basic level? Or is everyone that dead to introducing students and/or lay readers to the field?

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine why I might consider this interesting.

Science fiction roundup

rabble.ca is preparing a feature consisting of reviews of SF books of interest to progressives. I'm including fantasy in SF here although I sometimes believe that they are different: it is arguable.  Anyway, they are asking for readers to contribute blurbs on their babble forum. I've contributed a few and will contribute more, as I'm a big SF aficionado.

Fantasy, SF, and feminism

Twisty Faster comments on a fantasy novel she tried to read, but couldn't.  I simply had to comment because I think she totally missed the point.

I Blame The Patriarchy: Twisty, Book Killer: What I can’t live with is the dependency of the fantasy narrative on unapologetically misogynist pseudo-feudal agrarian European settings that glorify patriarchal principles of war, caste systems, omnipotent deities, primogeniture, and women-as-virgin-damsels. The Curse of Chalion is about pseudo-medieval Spaniardesque nobles with names like antifungal ointments, the males brandishing swords all over the place to protect the females, who sit around the castle embroidering. The hero, Benadryl, is a 35-year-old warrior-nobleman who lusts after Rogaine, the beautiful, strong-willed 15-year-old princess.

Huh.  LMB is usually considered to be *feminist* writer.  Most of her career was spent writing about the ironies of patriarchy in her light-hearted Vorkosigan science fiction series.  The premise of this series was a highly feudal, primitive, patriarchal society suddenly exposed to a galaxy where in many/most places men and women are more or less equal.  It's told through the eyes of a man who, by accident, is deprived of many of the privileges of being a man in his (high) stratum of feudal society.  In the second-last book, one of the crises is that a woman, knowing she could run her late father's estate better than her incompetent and inimical younger brother, has a sex change done on another planet (a total sex change including the ability to reproduce as a male) but *still* has to fight to inherit.  One of the male characters, having "played the field" for most of the series, decides to "settle down", but discovers to his dismay that most of the women have passed him by and now tend to be more like those uppity galactic women, going to graduate school and piloting aircraft and expecting men to be more than overgrown children, etc.  And so on.  It's for the Vorkosigan books that she won her Hugos and Nebulas, mostly.  Twisty Faster did notice LMB's talent when she said LMB had "flair."

I think Twisty missed the point of The Curse of Chalion, though it's not entirely her fault.  "Benadryl" does not lust after "Rogaine" at all, though he is loyal to her.  But more importantly, Chalion is a lead-up novel to a series.  The next book, Paladin of Souls, is focused completely around what is a side-character in Chalion, Queen Ista.  It's the only medieval fantasy novel I know of that is focused around a bitter middle-aged widow, recovering from playing a role she hated.  The book is not "unapologetic" about its patriarchal setting, it is simply leaving aside the question.  The theology includes an argument over the nature of the god known as "The Bastard," which is precisely intended to be a feminist comment (Quintarians vs Quadrenes: can "The Mother" goddess have a willing affair with the demon king, or is any such thing by definition rape?).  But Twisty dismissed the book too quickly to notice it.

Genre fantasy is series-based, and it requires patience particularly with the first world-building novel, so I guess it's an acquired taste, so to speak.  I think SF does a little better.  It's true that medieval fantasy focuses, well, around patriarchal societies, but that's not because everyone thinks that it is a good thing.  Certainly, LMB doesn't think so from the mountain of her other work that critiques it, but she was willing to put that aside to actually experiment with the genre.  Most fantasies that ostensibly start with equal female or matriarchal societies tend to degenerate into other kinds of stereotypes, if you know what I mean.  And a bigger problem is that the fantasy genre's attraction is precisely the "inserting magic into a violent and chaotic history" pattern: that's why the medieval template is so common in the genre.  It has historical grandeur, graced with Magical Objects.   The best feminist fantasies use the same pattern to subtly and ironically point out the flaws---as LMB does.

I suspect, then, that even the "Gold Standards" of feminist fantasy wouldn't be enough to satisfy Twisty.  The first book in Le Guin's Earthsea series also, if I recall correctly, paints a patriarchal world without questioning it too obviously, but it is only in the later books where she starts to twist the knife, and she focuses completely on gender in the last book (so far), Tehanu. And I am the biggest Cherryh fan (she writes rarely directly on gender, proving that female writers don't also always have to be pigeonholed into writing gender-comment fiction---but most of her worlds are rougly egalitarian), but I suggest she steers clear of the Fortress novels.

Oh no! A book meme!

In revenge for the thorough trashing I have been giving them, The Monarchist has decided to burden me with one of the book memes that have been floating around the Internet here and there.

Number of books I own: Well, this is a tricky question.  I am of limited means, and I just moved and left most of my books in the care of others.  My current ownership is probably not much more than 30.  Previously, I lived with probably several hundred books, most of them technical, and some of them rather dated.  I now live in the vicinity of libraries of various sizes (some of them very large and comprehensive), so I haven't felt too much pressure to actually buy books.

Last book I bought: Keyboard Musicianship: piano for adults, book one.  By James Lyke et al. I am taking a few weeks worth of piano classes to give myself a hobby and brush up on my musical skills (used to be a bassoonist), alas now rusty.  This book is fairly comprehensive and includes an instructional CD, which should hopefully last me beyond this 3-4 weeks.

Last book I read: I'm a sci-fi addict (for more recent work, never got too attracted to Heinlein and company): Changing Vision by Julie E. Czernda.  It wasn't very good, I'm afraid to say; I've seen similar themes done better.  It's in my favorite category of SF---interspecies/intercultural contact fiction---which is why I got it.  But it left something to be desired.  If you must, the last serious (as though fiction were unimportant) book was Statistical Natural Language Processing by Chris Manning and Hinrich Schütze.  I didn't read all of it, though.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

This is an interesting question.  I've read a lot of books, but I'm supposed to pick the ones that "mean a lot to me."  What does that mean?  I guess it should be books that had some influence on my development as a person in some way.  Whatever that means.  Now, there are actually many of these, but I'm going to try and pick a representative sample.

Foreigner by C. J. Cherryh.  Really, almost all of the contact fiction written by her, she's really the queen of this subgenre.

Rhyme and Reason: an Introduction to the Minimalist Syntax by Juan Uriagereka.  A Socratic-style explanation and defence of the 90s version of Chomsky's Minimalist Programme in syntax.  It starts from very elementary principles, and is intended for a general audience, except for segments of the book that are marked off as too technical.   The first chapter is especially fun for non-linguists, as it relates this form of syntactic analysis to observations from a number of other scientists.

Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Canadian Myths.  Linda McQuaig.  A very enjoyable send-up of some of the hysterias that surrounded the early 90s.  The Cult of Impotence forms an excellent sequel.  I haven't had time to read the two or three books she's written that followed it.

The Silmarillion.  J. R. R. Tolkien's breathtaking epic history of a universe.  After all, I am Mandos, how could I not cite this?

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper.  I read this when I was much younger, and I believe it is a necessity for everyone to read in the 8-16 group.  It's superficially in the Harry Potter vein, but I think it far outstrips the Rowlings franchise in terms of subtlety.  Rather than separate the world into a mundane world and a fun (if dangerous) world of magical wishes, Cooper totally intertwines the magical world and the real, modern world using often-grim British rural folklore.  The whole series is good; for instance, one sequel, The Grey King, embeds a cosmic battle within an emotional family feud among Welsh farmers.

New victims:

I understand one is supposed to pass this on as though it were the flu or something.  So here are my victims:

Tilting at Windmills
Derivative
Miss Vicky's Offhand Remarks
Polunatic
Rempelia Prime (my concession to extremely morbid curiosity)

Enjoy!