New moon shine

The new moon doesn't shine, at least not perceptibly. I suppose in theory it provides a bit of double-reflected Earthshine, but in practice a new moon is invisible, indistinguishable from no moon at all. Therefore, references to the light of the new moon tend to be few and far between.

Last night, I was reading Koté Adler's Timelock. The main character, Alik, is on board an enormous spaceship, all alone until he discovers, of all things, a small yellow bird flying through it. (This was a minor sync in itself. A few nights ago I watched the 2016 film Arrival, in which humans repeatedly board an enormous alien spaceship to learn to communicate with the aliens and always bring with them a small caged bird. The yellowness of the bird also hints at my tiny yellow pterodactylus; I used to have dreams of following it, like Alik, into the unknown.)

Alik follows the bird:

Eventually the corridor widened wider and wider until the oriented ceiling vanished altogether explosing a vast, unexplored, weightless, void-like space. The bird sailed into the dimly lit abyss, leaving Alik at the mouth of the corridor wondering and staring into the darkness. There was light emanating, somewhere within the blackness, but it was barely perceptible. . . . its soft halide glow washed through the room like the shallow fingers of a pool. It was the light of a new moon, present but just barely (p. 185-186).

This evening I checked William Wright's blog and found a new post, "The Water Is Wide," about the James Taylor song of that name. He mentions the album it is from:

The name of the album is "New Moon Shine".  In terms of links to my topics here, and even about being able to cross this sea, this title could refer to both a stone (The Moon or Ithil Stone shining) as well as a drink (Moonshine is traditionally used in the US to describe liquor that is made and sold illegally).

Also, in the upper left is a symbol like an eclipse that I think has come up before on WJT's blog, and others he has cited, though I can't remember right now in what context or why important; so just pointing it out.

I like James Taylor -- "Sweet Baby James" was my lullaby in infancy -- but I've only posted his music here once. It was "Down in a Hole," from New Moon Shine, with the album cover visible in the post. This was in the November 2020 post "Coming up for air." This same post also featured a page from Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks, saying, "Mr. Fox! I hate this game, sir." I reposted this image almost exactly three years later, in "'Tim' and The Key," and it was then referenced by William Wright in "A battle of wits."

"The Water Is Wide" is well done, but my own personal favorite version of that song will always be the one sung by Cedric Smith and Loreena McKennitt:

In fact, William's references to stones and moonshine actually fit this version's lyrics better:

Now in Kilkenny, it is reported

They've marble stones there as black as ink

With gold and silver I would transport her

But I'll sing no more now, till I get a drink

I'm drunk today, but then I'm seldom sober . . .

Another novel with Tyco and mushroom people

A few months ago, on a whim, I picked up a secondhand copy of Timelock by Koté Adler, an apparently self-published novel by an author on whom I have no information other than that he obviously didn't have a copyeditor. I go back and forth on whether or not he's a native speaker of English. The summary in the back cover is as follows:

On board a vast and lonely starship hurdling through space at relativistic speeds, Alik Likiaksa pushes the limits of his consciousness to unlock the secrets of an alien messenger.

Through the lens of the hallucinogenic mushroom, this psychedelic journey into the future carves out a new footprint for a fresh and exciting sub-genre of psychedelic science fiction.

Timelock is the first installment of an epic science fiction adventure that seeks to define man's ultimate place within the Cosmos and unravel the mystery's of mind.

I bought it because it was cheap, because it looked like something I wouldn't be able to find anywhere else, and because I read a fair bit about psychedelics and about fringe theories of time.

At the time I bought Timelock, I had no knowledge of the existence of Eleanor Cameron or her Mushroom Planet novels. I discovered these after Kevin McCall mentioned them in a comment on one of my Little Skinny Planet posts, the connection being that the Mushroom Planet is very small and orbits the Earth. I've since read the whole series and posted quite a lot about it. Regular readers will be aware that one of the main characters is a Mushroom Person called Tyco Mycetes Bass. Mushroom People appear human-like but are actually fungus-based organisms.

Since Timelock features space travel and mushrooms, it seemed natural to read it after finishing Cameron's series. I was expecting mushrooms to appear only as a hallucinogen, but in fact this novel, too, features extraterrestrials who appear humanoid but are actually fungi. The main "mushroom person" character is called Myco, suggesting both the first and middle names of Mr. Bass. Of course it's not all that surprising for two different fictional mushroom people to have names suggesting the scientific prefix myco-, meaning "mushroom." More striking is the fact that the human characters in Timelock use a currency called the tyco. I'm not sure if that's a coincidence or an homage -- perhaps Adler had read Cameron's books -- but it certainly is a coincidence that I bought Timelock and then, shortly later and for unrelated reasons, had the Mushroom Planet novels brought to my attention.