3 posts published by nathangoldwag during September 2025| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
Last year, around Thanksgiving, my friend Cooper drove up from Washington D.C. to visit me in Lancaster, PA, where I was visiting family. Among other things, we went to pay our respects at Thaddeus…| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
For a long time now, one of my perennial interests has been the way that science fiction interacts with concepts of scale and scope. It’s one of those things that is usually invisible, to the mechanics of the actual story, but is absolutely load-bearing in terms of what kind of story you can tell, and … Continue reading The Eternal Empire| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
TITLE: The Raven Tower AUTHOR: Ann Leckie PUBLISHER: Orbit DATE: 2019 Fantasy, as a genre, is no stranger to Gods. It is by now an almost pro forma part of the traditional formula, for any author to populate the background of their psuedo-Medieval world with the requisite pantheon of Olympian or Norse knockoffs, usually provided … Continue reading BOOK REVIEW: The Raven Tower| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
I am profoundly bigoted against frogs. This isn’t a joke. When I was like, five years old, in Zoo Camp, they showed us a documentary about frogs or something and it had a thirty-second clip f…| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
TITLE: The Last Unicorn AUTHOR: Peter S. Beagle PUBLISHER: Viking Press DATE: 1968 It’s hard to talk about The Last Unicorn. There’s a beauty to it, a haunting sense of splendor that li…| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
Today I want to talk about how magic works in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and associated legendarium, as well as how systems of morality and values function in his world–as the two are fundamentally linked in a way that cannot really be discussed separately. This isn’t an original topic to myself, and … Continue reading Intention Matters: The Magic of Middle-earth| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
Professor Golon WagGalactic University of CoruscantCoruscantNew RepublicComparative Politics of Modern Galactic History: Chapter IV297 ABY In 19 BBY, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine of the Galactic Re…| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Source) Here is a story that is probably not true: In c. 520 BCE, the Persian King of Kings Darius I led his armies into the Hindu Kush, and subjugated the Indus Riv…| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
It will likely be no surprise for you to hear that I think Andor is probably the best Star Wars content ever made, certainly since the original movies. This has become conventional wisdom among fans of a certain nature (elderly millennial nerds with left-wing politics), and it’s true; Andor is an extraordinarily complex and nuanced … Continue reading Stars Wars and the Difference Between Reverence and Respect| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
Zhang Xueliang and Chiang Kai-shek, 1930 In 2001, a man named Zhang Xueliang passed away of pneumonia in a Honolulu hospital at the age of one hundred. He was a man most famously known as “th…| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
I feel like I tend to encounter every cultural phenomenon at least a few years late? Which is my way of saying that I only now got around to watching the 2013-2019 Cartoon Network show Steven Unive…| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…| Goldwag's Journal on Civilization