intertext

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/09/15/the-big-idea-marissa-lingen/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=62441

Does a weapon want to hurt people? What if it had opinions on the type of people it was used to slay? Author Marissa Lingen had these sorts of questions rattling around in her brain long enough that a story formed from them. Take up your (opinionated) sword and follow along in the Big Idea for A Dubious Clamor.

MARISSA LINGEN:

Some big ideas form in an instant, an explosion of brilliance, totally ready to write down and go–the Big Bang of idea formation, if you will. Others are more like planetary accretion. There’s a whole massive whirling disc of random crap, and over time it runs into each other and eventually you have an entire planet with rings and moons. A Dubious Clamor was definitely in the second group.

Twenty-five years ago I read the Francis Peabody Magoun translation of the Kalevala. This is my recommended translation. Rather than trying to preserve rhyme or structure, it preserves weirdness, which for my money is the exact right thing to preserve. Catch me at a con sometime and I’ll tell you about the milk from hell or the insults from your in-laws, as rendered in the Magoun translation of the Kalevala. But the one bit that kept poking at me over the years was when one of the magical swords made by the smith Ilmarinen said, “Probably I was not made for the slaying of young maidens.”

Probably. The sword was willing to leave room for discussion on this point. Huh.

That one word kept popping up in my head: probably. Probably. Maybe not, though! Who knows! Probably. I started to wonder: are there other swords with both opinions and a refreshing unwillingness to lay down immovable dictates? I mean, probably! Why wouldn’t there be? Who would make those swords? Was it all Ilmarinen? Probably not! There are lots of other magical smiths in mythology. Was I a little too obsessed with one word in a translation? Yeah, probably!

But I liked where it was going. I was trained as a physicist (can you tell from my go-to metaphors above?). I was a lab TA for three years. One of the most important things I taught in those lab sections was the section of lab reports devoted to error analysis. I tried to walk lab students through assessing where things might not be perfect, where their own error had a chance to slip in. Several students wanted to write, “There were no sources of error in this lab,” and I had to walk them through why that was in fact not true. But in the outside world I kept watching malicious actors treat uncertainty and error as if they were a sign that you were on the wrong track. As if they had perfect answers that would work every time. As though science acknowledging that it didn’t was a sign of dishonesty. And I kept returning to that sword and the way that it went with. Y’know. Probably.

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Oliver Cromwell in general, but my favorite thing he ever said was, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you might be mistaken.” He should have listened to himself a lot more on that, but–yeah. At least consider. Think it possible. I can come up with a few contemporary figures who could do some more thinking it possible that they might be mistaken. I bet you can too.

The harpies came later. Jenny Lind and operetta and the alternate history aftermath of a Chartist rebellion and all the little cakes–all of it came later. The first and biggest idea, the one I couldn’t leave alone, was a sword that was not fond of people being all too certain they had all the right boxes to put each other in. That seemed worth raising a dubious clamor about.

A Dubious Clamor: Amazon|B&N|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky 

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/09/15/the-big-idea-marissa-lingen/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=62441