Sixty-Seventh Grandfather

"Dad, my guy is a dragon rider, because his sixty-seventh grandfather was a dragon rider."
"Sixty-seventh! That's quite a long way back."
"Yes"
"Let's figure out how long ago that would have been!" (Parents of school-age kids mysteriously think everything is a math problem).We do some figuring ... "Hmm, probably about 1600-1800 years ago."
"Yes, that is a very long time."
"And I wonder HOW MANY sixty-seventh grandfathers a person has. You know how you have 2 grandfathers, and four great-grandfathers? How many sixty-seventh grandfathers do you think you have?"
"I don't know. A hundred?"
(More figuring).
"Nope. Over a billion." (Actually the answer seems to be in the quintillions).

So that got me thinking. Clearly a person can't have that many ancestors. I don't know much about population, but it got me to thinking. Take a smaller number of generations -- say 14. This would take us back to the late 16th century, Elizabethan era. A person still has about 32,000 ancestors at that generation. Well, that's believable. And any individual one of those, assuming each generation doubles, has about 32,000 descendants in the modern day.

That's all believable. But clearly, if you go back far enough, the number of a person's ancestors at some point is about equal to the size of the entire human race. And from there of course, assuming each generation is smaller than the one after it, the pool of ancestors shrinks and shrinks. That point seems, from my superficial reading (Wikipedia of course, I mean, what ELSE, it's 2008 and ... well yeah) seems to be called the identical ancestors point, and be located some where between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago. This seems to be different from the most recent common ancestor, a single ancestor shared by all living humans, who may have lived as little as 2,00o to 5,000 years ago.

Of course, the blindingly simpler lesson from all this, but something one still tends to forget, is that all people alive do share a common ancestor, and hence are all related. The smaller the subgroup, the more recent the common ancestor. Whichever subgroup you look at it, the CA falls within approximately historical times. Who knows, for my background, the CA might be lurking no more than a millennium back.

So it's obvious, as I say, but still forgotten, that the person I argued with yesterday, the blogger whose photo I clicked past because I didn't like his color scheme, the President, the cable guy and I, are probably all descended from some Basque shepherd around 811 A.D. Or, if any of those folks are, say, of African or Chinese descent, then some Egyptian boater, or the mayor of Mohenjo-Daro.

Tower of Babel, indeed ...

I put this proposition to my kids. E was pleased at the idea that all the kids in the world were his cousins. R thought it about in bed, and asked in alarm "Even people I don't LIKE?"

***

The original statement from E about "my guy" (a frequent phrase, meaning one of his characters in one of the various imaginary universes, all generally referred to as "D&Ds"), had to do with his guy's propensity for dragon-riding. This in turn comes from our having seen the movie Eragon, and subsequently to explore the book. I wish I could say this has been a thrilling exploration of a gem of young adult fantasy. I'd really like that to be so. But so far, it hasn't been.

I'm on delicate ground here. The Eragon series are written by Christopher Paolini, who was fifteen when he began writing the first one, and is about twenty-five as he finishes the third, all best-sellers I believe. Some of you know that I've worked at writing for a long time, and have a raggedy novel and lots of odd short stories scattered back over the years, none of them published. I've often been dismissive of authors, especially genre authors in areas like fantasy who succumb to the conventions of their "area" rather than rising above it. It's particularly tempting, and easy-seeming, to snipe jealously at someone who published his first book in his teens, and has continued from success to success. Anyone's writing will be youthful at sixteen or seventeen, and those determined to find fault could easily do so.

I've tried not to approach the books in that spirit. I got over my jealousy of published authors a long time ago. Finishing a book and getting it published is not primarily a matter of talent. Talent is essential if the book is to be a GOOD book, but as Molly Hunter has put it, talent is not enough. Her point was about the personal qualities of the author, but as much as the various traits she explores in her book on the subject, finishing and publishing a book requires sheer, raw tenacity. Christopher Paolini, and the others whose books fill the shelves at Barnes & Noble, clearly had that tenacity -- so my hat, with all sincerity, is off to him. Well done, man! Lots of people want to write books. Fewer succeed, and fewer still in a way that hits thousands of people. My book publishing has all been in the technical space, and I know a little of what it's like to have people you've never met tell you that they have your book and that it made a difference for them.

So when I approach these books now, it's not with the vague bitterness of the disappointed author, but as a concerned parent. Eragon is one example of something I'm seeing, but I'll point to another, that I've mentioned before: Emily Rodda's Deltora series. E brought one of these books home in first grade. Now, a couple years later, we're going through a whole Deltora renaissance.

I find the Deltora books honestly very hard to take. They're the exact opposite of the Droon series, that I've mentioned here before. Droon is very self-consciously goofy, extremely light-hearted bubble-gum fare that is at worst inoffensive, and has some pretty clever bits in it from time to time. Reading Droon to the kids can be boring, but it doesn't make me hurt. Deltora is different.

What's striking in Deltora is the humorless, ugly nature of everything in the stories. Everything is flat and sharp-edged. The names are short and unlovely, many of them one-syllable: the capital city is Del , for example, while much of the country is drained by the filthy River Tor. Monsters have names like Ols, and The Glus. Pirates are named Nak and Milne. The only smiles for anything, in seven books, are "grim" or "tight" ones. Combat and violence, when they occur, are pointlessly graphic, occasionally gruesome:

"Envy, Greed, Hate and Pride turned on him in a frenzy, their jaws frothing, their terrible teeth ripping and tearing at him, shredding his robe to ribbons, slicing into the shriveled gray flesh beneath."

That probably would have been fine up through "tearing at him." What follows adds needless specificity. I could add examples.

Eragon suffers from this as well. In one of the more strained-feeling plot devices, Eragon's dragon, upon hearing of the dark servants in the vicinity, goes half-mad and carries Eragon away into the mountains, where she insists on remaining for a day despite his pleas, long enough for the bad guys to come kill his uncle. He is so unused to riding her that the insides of his legs are rubbed raw. We are made to participate in this injury with Passion-of-the-Christ-like detail: the insides of his pants are "dark with blood", his legs are scabbed over, the wounds are "opening up again." -- none of which advance plot or character at all.

I don't know what to make of this. In the case of Eragon, perhaps just a beginning author learning what to include and what to leave out. With Deltora, the ugliness and infelicity are so pervasive and consistent that they seem deliberate.

Surely people who are writing for our children ought to be able to do better.

Then there's this.

"Out of the wreck rose the Black Rider, tall and threatening, towering above her. With a cry of hatred that stung the very ears like venom he let fall his mace. Her shield was shivered in many pieces, and her arm was broken; she stumbled to her knees. He bent over her like a cloud, and his eyes glittered; he raised his mace to kill."

Too much to ask? Perhaps, I don't know. Sometimes an unfair test is still the right one.