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Farewell, Knight MementoMori...
May. 25th, 2026 09:47 amMori: I done reclaimed my hack103 honor! I beat the game as a knight!
( babbling about a forty-year-old compooter gaem )
( babbling about a forty-year-old compooter gaem )
May. 25th, 2026
Books of Great Alta and Singleton
May. 25th, 2026 10:21 amMori: I’m back on my ladybook business! And I just wanted to leave a quick note about the use of “singleton” in Jane Yolen’s the Books of Great Alta (itself an omnibus of the duology Sister Light, Sister Dark and White Jenna). It’s high fantasy from 1988/10 and 1989/09, respectively, and I’m not very far into the first book yet.
One of the conceits of the book is that the women of the all-female hame villages have a “dark sister” they summon from the mirror around the age of fourteen, who becomes their most trusted companion, only appears in shadow and moonlight, neither total darkness or full daylight, and dies when they do. This sentient shadow, though bound to her light sister, has independent movement, thought, speech, and substance, will disagree and argue with her light sister, and Uranian Worlds leads me to believe there be girlkissing in these here hills, so you see why I checked it out from the sci-fi library!
One of the women at the hame of the first book has no dark sister; she joined too late in life, and she is referred to as a Solitary. (This doesn’t seem to bother her.) Women without dark sisters are also referred to as “singleton” on page 75.
Sneak had already theorized that “singleton” (as a term for what Hocking so memorably called “someone with one or fewer personalities”) came from general use, since it means anything that came alone, rather than in a pair or group, and I could swear we encountered the term in other multish fiction before. This book adds a minor data point in that theory’s favor, since I doubt Yolen was intentionally building off MPD cultures at the time. (“Singlet” wasn’t in use yet, except POSSIBLY by its coiner, Astraea’s ex-husband, B.C.; our earliest record for that is 1992, years after these books’ publications, and no way Yolen was hanging out with them in the BBS Love Galaxy at the time!)
One of the conceits of the book is that the women of the all-female hame villages have a “dark sister” they summon from the mirror around the age of fourteen, who becomes their most trusted companion, only appears in shadow and moonlight, neither total darkness or full daylight, and dies when they do. This sentient shadow, though bound to her light sister, has independent movement, thought, speech, and substance, will disagree and argue with her light sister, and Uranian Worlds leads me to believe there be girlkissing in these here hills, so you see why I checked it out from the sci-fi library!
One of the women at the hame of the first book has no dark sister; she joined too late in life, and she is referred to as a Solitary. (This doesn’t seem to bother her.) Women without dark sisters are also referred to as “singleton” on page 75.
Sneak had already theorized that “singleton” (as a term for what Hocking so memorably called “someone with one or fewer personalities”) came from general use, since it means anything that came alone, rather than in a pair or group, and I could swear we encountered the term in other multish fiction before. This book adds a minor data point in that theory’s favor, since I doubt Yolen was intentionally building off MPD cultures at the time. (“Singlet” wasn’t in use yet, except POSSIBLY by its coiner, Astraea’s ex-husband, B.C.; our earliest record for that is 1992, years after these books’ publications, and no way Yolen was hanging out with them in the BBS Love Galaxy at the time!)
Sneak: *climbs out of a hole, holding records* o_o Guys... I got sucked into researching the various terms plurals have used over the years for singlets.
Okay, so there's like, a FLURRY of terms that all crop up in my records in 1992: single, single person (SP), singlet... the only terms that I could first find from other years were singleton (which I could prove appeared by 1991) and singletype (which seems to have come from a lost-to-the-sands-of-time argument on Dark Personalities in 2001 and never really broke containment).
I haven't dug super deeply into single and single person (just because they're such common words, you can't easily just search for them), but here are Mori’s and my quick and dirty notes on singleton and singletype!
( Singleton ) ( Singletype )
Okay, so there's like, a FLURRY of terms that all crop up in my records in 1992: single, single person (SP), singlet... the only terms that I could first find from other years were singleton (which I could prove appeared by 1991) and singletype (which seems to have come from a lost-to-the-sands-of-time argument on Dark Personalities in 2001 and never really broke containment).
I haven't dug super deeply into single and single person (just because they're such common words, you can't easily just search for them), but here are Mori’s and my quick and dirty notes on singleton and singletype!
( Singleton ) ( Singletype )
