The HELLSHITTER.

If I wrote everything is on my mind right now, I’d keep going to only re-emerge in a week. But since it’s utterly pointless, I’ll try to be done with quickly, enough so it can be off my mind.

Topic is that I’m starting to see why Scott Bakker left the scene. Not as an active author, but in the general, wider “discourse.”

It looks like there’s a (still, ongoing) legion of shitposters hellbent on this type of nonsensical propaganda:

(by the way, “Bakker is an ABD” is quite a telling sign someone happily loving the taxonomy of placing people into neat convenient boxes, and being complacent about knowing the world thus, it indeed “shows”)

Not the kind of shitposters writing casually and moving on. These are quite elaborate, requiring some effort. From an unbiased, third party point of view these read as quite reliable information. On point. Reading these without context I’d far more lean to accept and believe them, compared to a “defense” written by what would look mostly likely as a “fanboy.”

What I mean is that if I stumbled on these kind of posts, I personally would have leaned to believe them. They’d contribute meaningfully to paint the picture. Position the author, while considering what to read and what to skip, given that you have to decide what to give your attention to, before doing it.

This is interesting to me because not long ago I stumbled on a similar type of shitposting, but with Erikson as the target. And so I felt like I had to polish my own weapons and come to Erikson’s defense. You know, to preserve the “honor.” But what’s curious about this last example is that the shitposting came from someone who was disparaging Erikson’s work, while being deeply enamoured of Bakker. So he could see that worthwhile, engaging philosophical research in Bakker, but Erikson had none. Philosophy with the depth of a puddle. Childish pretense. Exaggerations and fireworks for the easily impressed.

Now we have a schematically third group where it just happen to be Bakker targeted as the undergraduate wannabe armchair philosopher edgelord. Stubbornly fretting to get attention for his naive, “fringe” ideas. (totally inexplicable to me, the second commenter shown there, taking an hardcore shit on Bakker, appears to be a fan of Malazan instead…. just HOW?!?)

So I’m here just as another partisan? What box I belong to? Is it just a game of factions? Are we just switching masks and taking turns?

Because I do THE EXACT SAME THING: (second one is me)

But then, I do have no idea how to get deeper, there. I’ve written endlessly about it on the blog, done tons of research, and spoken in various occasions, along the years with accomplished, actual philosophers and scientists. Pretty much at every occasion I had available. My own position is always in doubt, but it didn’t move because I only kept receiving conformations. To this day, I have not found a SINGLE, TINY idea or concept challenging my own initial stance.

And so, within the uncertainty of the point of view, I go claim a certain certainty in the comment I write. It’s backed off:

the criticism about Ted Chiang is ADAMANTINE, because of how deep to the core it is. That criticism DEMANDS to be as strong as possible. In a world where anti-vax propaganda becomes mainstream, where the government tells you to “not trust the experts, it’s not science.” Or worse, “trust your feelings.” Epistemology becomes the very core that is under active threat. So we get at what is philosophy, and what is science. And the story we tell ourselves about the very concepts of science and philosophy.

In Ted Chiang’s story the idea is a character receiving visions from the future, eventually “choosing” to make them true because life is worth living. Similar to the moral dilemma of deciding to have a baby, rather than abortion, knowing the baby has some birth defect. In the end the acceptance for the world as it is wants that love embraces it all. So, in the context of Arrival, it means acceptance of what’s to come, even in the possibility (or certainty in this case) of illness and death. In the end love embraces all, and pushes the hard sci-fi story to its more relatable and human level that people appreciated.

But that’s not science. We have this totally false and misleading idea that a scientist is a person who has one crazy intuition one day, then spends the rest of his life trying to prove it. So that he can finally be vindicated. Maybe after a whole life struggling against institutions who constantly tried stopping them. But that’s again not science, or how a real scientist behaves. Science is not some unerring belief to get eventually vindicated, it’s the very opposite. A scientist with a theory is someone who will try to fight that theory, test it. Stress it, break it. The real, fundamental quality of a good scientist, especially when facing claimed certainty, is to be contrarian, SKEPTICAL. Meaning that a scientist who receives a “vision from the future,” postulating that this vision predicts precisely what will happen, and nothing can contradict it. Well, this scientist newfound REASON OF LIFE will be to PROVE THIS VISION WRONG. The scientist earnest reaction to some vision of the future is to make his life’s purpose to contradict it in every way possible. TO CHALLENGE IT. Because in the end the true nature of a scientist is not embracing something received, to never question it. That’s faith.

Ted Chiang, then, writes a story where it seems there’s a theme of science, but in the end it’s just faith being disguised. It’s rhetorical, false, manipulative. Resorting to the very old trick of using emotions and “love” in order to persuade the audience of its lie. EMBRACE THE LIE. As Bakker would say:

“All things both sacred and vile speak to the hearts of Men, and they are bewildered. Holding out their hands to darkness, THEY NAME IT LIGHT.”

Last few days I picked up The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss, a book I bought at the dawn of the universe but only got to page 60, a couple different times. This time it’s part of a different “project” and I’m currently at page 130. I enjoyed the beginning more than I expected, I think it was quite flawless. It has some well written endearing prose, occasionally even showing some glimpses of genius. But the honeymoon only lasted some 20 pages, because then it settled for a more straightforward style. But I still enjoyed what I was reading. And then I got to this line:

“That’s how I like to remember them today.”

To me, that was a very explicit message, and so I thought, “okay, his parents are dead next chapter.” But instead the story continued exactly as it was. Until those parents indeed died, just a few chapters later. It could have been seen as some clever, ominous foreshadowing, throwing that line there, then let the reader immerse again in the story and forget about it. But nope, because before the end Rothfuss repeats the same another TWO TIMES. Just to make sure you didn’t miss or forget the cue.

There is a big problem with all this, and why I wrote in my commentary that there’s a problem when you polish something too much: it becomes straightforward and artificial. The problem with this story, specifically, is that everything is perfect. Kvothe is a perfect child, obedient, studious, naive at times in an endearing way, but always smart, his parents are perfect, supporting, full of love for each other, unsurpassed artists in their own craft. And when Kvothe is given a tutor, he’s also perfect, himself too supportive, insightful, utterly dedicated and so on and so on. This is fine because both story and context are quite richly written and described. But it all falls apart because as a reader I was perceiving a very glaring, deliberate skeleton: it was all made so bubbly and nicely colored in order to set up the following drama. It’s all artificially inflated “goodness” just to take it away abruptly. Just so to pull on the reader’s emotional strings, trigger that reaction, and so establish a stronger connection with the dear poor boy main character.

All this fails for me as a reader because it all feels so impossibly forced and artificial. It even loses the little nuance that was here and there in the pages. All blown away because in the end it’s all meant as a giant lever to pull you in a determined direction. It’s a mechanism. And it is quite pointless to me.

My reaction, having read all that, was: ok, this prologue ends at page 130, let’s read something else.

This type of story doesn’t really say anything of value to me. It’s just repetition of something I’ve seen. Even The Wheel of Time first book starts canonically in a corner of the world with a farmboy caught in his own daily wife, stuck in a small village, until suddenly a raid of evil creatures comes to upset the norm. Kvothe’s story is just the same, but with even LESS subtlety. It’s more interesting to read, page by page, because of different context, but it also ends up being framed even more bluntly to fit the intended purpose.

In the end, after 130 pages I’m left with absolutely nothing, outside of the enjoyment while reading and turning the pages. Robin Hobb is not dissimilar. Some excellent prose and resorting to cheap emotional tricks (bad things happening to innocent puppies, THREE TIMES within 100 pages). But the story does not end there. It’s not the point. Characters go somewhere, they leave you with something, whether you read 50 pages or the whole book. It’s not just an emotional GOTCHA, it’s not just set up. There is a substance that makes the reading engaging and entertaining, but without feeling completely pointless in the end.

But we started from Bakker here, and the point is you can’t misunderstand Rothfuss’ work: he already smashed your face to pieces with a bat.

There are some redeeming aspects to it. There is still a framing device, the story is told by Kvothe himself, unreliable narrator and all of that. It does make sense that he would give personally that angle to his story. So it is somewhat contextually justified, even if it does feel quite opportunistic as an excuse. The unreliable narrator is also blown out of proportion as we’ve seen already in the first few pages Kvothe being an extremely competent fighter. Actually, inhumanly so. That’s not the contained story, that’s authoritative omniscient. Unless the whole book is unreliable, and so you can as well toss it to the wall… (there would be more to discuss about unreliable narrators, including Gene Wolfe’s work, and how it became a silly excuse for everything)

There’s that, and then we return to Bakker. And to my own replies.

Spoiler-free, in what is a recommendation thread with someone asking reading suggestion about fantasy-philosophical book (I really don’t know how you can avoid mentioning Bakker or Erikson).

Here I can add:

1- That metaphysical certainty mentioned doesn’t appear until the last few pages of the very last book (inverted fire, never mentioned even once, afaik).
2- It’s an ALIEN artifact that almost no one knows exists, and those who have seen it are, like, less than an handful. Mostly off-screen characters. Its existence is almost completely external to the story, until the very few last pages.
3- It’s just about as saying: kings will enslave the population, to make their own bidding (referring to this particular class of gods and what they use to do).

Is that third point a certainty? Well, it goes without saying. In Bakker’s story it’s just another layer. It’s metaphysically true merely because no one has even attempted to challenge that layer. It BARELY appears in the books, which is why I strongly criticized the whole thing. It’s very incomplete. Especially if you want to question those “upper structures” that never really come into focus.

But how the hell can you take all that, which is some very advanced, extraneous discussion and use it to claim there’s no ambiguity to it when it is the one thing we can argue endlessly as it was left utterly incomplete? Not only itself is left ambiguous at the END of the series, when it surfaces. But through ALL SEVEN books is the very thing that fuels the ambiguity that rules everything. Otherwise why even read seven books?

Have you actually read the pages or just cobbled together comments from some shitposters? Because it all a clump of imprecise hearsay. None of it applies to the books at their surface level, to not even consider any deeper current.

Up to that point the concept of hell is literally equal to the religious concept in our own world. You do bad deeds = go to hell. And yeah, the people in the books BELIEVE that, go figure…

The other commenter being just an even more typical troll. To me the point was just nailing it to the point, without wasting more time.

And.

This guy was somehow caught up because I said that thinking Bakker endorses fascism is like taking an historical book about fascism and thinking it endorsement. But for this guy an accurate depiction of fascism would be impossible to mistake, because fascism has been clumsy and just the result of happenstance. Which is somewhat true. But for some reason he considered that aspect as some sort of “contradiction.” Because if Kellhus is incredibly competent, rather than clumsy, then he cannot impersonate any REAL fascism. Because, again, accurate fascism is clumsy.

And then, if you strengthen your villain (it’s a fantasy story, so you can) then, somehow, it becomes unambiguous ENDORSEMENT of fascism. Because it’s not anymore weak and faulty. Therefore “you’re contradicting yourself, can’t have it both ways.”

Huh? The line of distinction between fascism and everything else is not its clumsiness. Sure, there can be a certain correlation between being fucking stupid and being fascist, but it’s not how the concept itself is built and exists. There can be both very competent and ruthless fascism, as there can be clumsy, ridiculous fascism. They don’t overlap in a way they contradict each other as concepts.

The fact that Kellhus is “competent” doesn’t undermine the fact he can be a fascist. And the fact that he’s depicted as a very competent, effective fascist doesn’t undermine the fact he’s depicted AS A VILLAIN (or rather, an actual monster). Nope, for this guy the villains HAVE TO BE BUFFOONS. Tripping on each other feet, making themselves ugly and ridiculous. Because if you don’t do that, AH, you’re showing them as heroes. You are applauding fascism. It’s a celebration, right?

And we’re here in the greater discourse. Because all this appears as a very silly, forum-warrior kind of utterly pointless debate. But we’re here, in the greater world. The epistemology crisis that is shown by Bakker, now real. People will just flip any concept. Is Trump doing a fascist power grab and destroying humanity, or he’s the anti-establishment who’s giving power back to the people? Actual people will continue to flip. Factions. Boxes. Colors. Blue or Red. Democrats or Republicans. Flip. We are the rebels, you are the empire. Immigrants becoming invaders. Empathy becoming weakness. Strength becoming righteousness. This has no end.

It’s actually true that “trust the experts” is not science, as RFKJ says, but as a statement it’s left incomplete: THEN WHAT?

THEN WHAT?

If you don’t trust the experts, THEN WHAT?

No, you can’t judge and decide by yourself, especially to use it as a recommendation given to everyone, because you can’t be a fucking expert of everything. You aren’t smart enough, you don’t have enough time. You can’t study everything at once. You’re not Kvothe.

THEN WHAT? Trust the most stupid humanity has produced? The most delusional? The most certain of their own bullshit?

Why it is that those who wouldn’t trust the experts are usually the MOST CERTAIN of the baseless bullshit they preach? Have you ever seen one of those conspiracy theorists against the establishment ever call for skepticism and doubt, or rather just use them as weapons against mainstream claims, only to resort to absolute faith when it comes to sell their own bullshit?

Just flip around the truth, any convenient way.

We can get rid of the Trump, Musk and Putin quite easily. People occasionally get ill and die, it just happens. But it would be just a delay because the system is rigged. We don’t have a problem with individuals happening to be especially greedy and soulless. It’s just humanity being broken. This system of democracy works on the very premise of rhetoric and simplification. The moment you add complexity and nuance, you’re out. The system is SEALED SHUT. You can’t change it because the means to do it filter out any possible transformative action. Same as in Bakker’s books the attempts to prevent the Apocalypse SET IT IN MOTION.

You can make a valid criticism of Bakker, that it’s just five ideas and he spends 1 million words just to repeat, over and over, hammering them down. The same five ideas, over and over. But there’s some actual complexity of the real world there, some nuance, and so people just as easily misunderstand the whole thing. So what you do? What you do if you SHOUTED RIGHT IN THEIR EARS, but they got absolutely NOTHING.

How do you fix this when there’s such a radical, deliberate misunderstanding?

And so.

YES, because the point is not FLATTERY. It’s not Kvothe. It’s not a Mary Sue. When I say that Achamian is Bakker it’s not because it’s a show off. Bakker deconstructs, mocks and destroys HIMSELF. It is why this work has a ring of truth. It’s not a glorious celebration. It’s a deconstruction of everything, a scarification. Bleeding out.

This commenter seems to believe that there’s an absolute rule so that evilness is always clumsy, and morality always comes out winning and beautiful. If it’s not, then it means the author sided with the bad guys. If you are a cynical pessimist, then it means you love negativity. You can’t criticize the world for what it is.

The book doesn’t have an happy end? Well, the author must be amoral then.

Bakker did not step up on a pedestal to dispense his lessons. That’s Kellhus, a false idol. If you haven’t understood this, what the fuck have you read?

In the same way we have anti-vaxxers thinking themselves cleverer than everyone else, here we have a reader with zero reading comprehension, therefore deducing the book and author are childishly stupid. It simply follows.

(there’s more complexity to Kellhus, but we’re light years from this level of discussion. And even if we were to have it, it’s all quite uncertain because that whole layer is left incomplete in the story, and I complained about this at length)

But, you know the pattern: we can just flip it. I’m not some self-declared insightful reader, from the unbiased outside I’m just a fanboy.

Thankfully a couple others ended up commenting.

This one is funny:

The rest, I wholly agree with:

(highlight mine)

(about that very last bit, since I didn’t get to comment as I intended to do… According to the most currently plausible fan theories, given all we know, Kellhus is very likely not dead. At least if he didn’t deliberately decide not to use one of countless, literal, aces in his sleeve. Or more precisely, attached to his belt…)

Everything written there is correct, but it’s still also a surface layer. If we really were to embed the level of Bakker’s blog here… Well, humanity itself would get questioned, rather than simply “endorsed.”

Also the fact, back to the book, that Kellhus is somewhat “right”, given the context, enables an unfathomable level of moral ambiguity, right at the center of the whole work. So it’s really quite “impressive” to claim there’s none of it.

Should I remind this was a recommendation thread? In my own personal experience, I’ve got far more useful information about a book I was going to read, more from the fanboys than the naysayers. You either connect or not with some work, but if you do, there is something. It just can not be not there. Maybe not for you. Just yesterday I was going through some videos of this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@SamHarrison2099
You could say he’s a Sanderson – Wheel of Time – Wandering Inn fanboy. The Wandering Inn, with its own 14 MILLION words. That’s correct, close to 15 now. To not even talk of the somewhat now popular subgenre of “progression fantasy”, or “cozy” fantasy. You have to draw the line somewhere. Something HAS TO BE SHIT, right?

If you can’t see any value in them, well, I’m sorry for you. We are all partial and incomplete, holding different pieces of the world. Rather than trying to deny what other people claim to have, worry about what you’re holding.

(Me? I’m anxiously waiting for Schattenfroh, that I had to preorder through a juggling of online sites to assure it comes as fast as possible. In October there’s latest Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket, and early next year comes out William Vollmann’s magnum opus. Give me $150 to buy it, thank you. When you look at me, I guess, you have to LOOK UP. And squint.)

Greg Egan – Axiomatic:
2. The Hundred-Light-Year Diary

I completely forgot that I wrote about the first story in this anthology.

I read a few pages of the third story, “Eugene,” before realizing I skipped the one in between. So here we are again. I wasn’t planning to write about this, but I feel I have to since this story is all about a recurring theme that I obsessed over for some time. The non-branching flavor of time travel that is the core common idea of Arrival, Tenet, Dark, Watchmen and so on.

I’ve exhausted the theme and I’m not even going to attempt a recap here, but I can offer a few more comments specifically on the story here. Again, the concept is exactly the same, just “dressed up” differently. What annoyed me the most in the stories like Arrival and Tenet, is that they implicitly embrace an ideology that makes science “magical,” going against the principle of what actually is good science (and good science-fiction, as an extension). Sure, science-fiction is not science, but I really dislike when it advocates openly for magical thinking. It feels like brainwashing propaganda. A complacent celebration of human stupidity.

My hope with Greg Egan, whose reputation I absorbed from the internet would be all about HARD sci-fi, is to find at least a clever perspective. Something I did not consider, and maybe something that could have broken down my certainties about this whole concept. Well, it didn’t happen in any way. But at least he goes a tiny step further. When the potential for this type of time travel is discovered within the story, it’s at least not automatically embraced as an unassailable truth, as it happens in both Arrival and Tenet. But IT IS actually getting tested. That’s what happens within science: you challenge the idea. You try to prove it false, so that the world shows it true.

To my disappointment, the story here doesn’t go further than that. It at least tries the scientific approach, but the result of those tests is just as magical and hand-waved away as in Arrival. The answer is once again a vague “feeling”:

“I couldn’t discipline my reflexes”

“And how did that make you feel?”

“At first, just …clumsy. Uncoordinated. […] I felt like opening it.”

In a similar way, and even more disappointing for me, Egan tries to at least address even the possibility of a purely mechanical experiment, so that human stupidity (of feeling) wouldn’t sully the results. But here’s all we get from that angle:

People have talked about automating the whole process […] but nobody’s ever done it, so perhaps it’s impossible.

Well, at least I appreciate this brutal defeat, rather than simply ignore these counter points. Where Ted Chiang FLEES the important questions, in order to sell his complete bullshit, Egan instead seems at least aware of implications, and he’s trying to tell a different story, despite the unsolvable imperfections at the core.

There are a couple of aspects that salvage this story into a decent one. The first is that he shapes the methodology so that it MAYBE could work. The idea behind this kind of mental manipulation comes from the concept of human consciousness as a secondary epiphenomenon to the activity of the brain. Basically means that your choices in life PRECEDE consciousness. What actually happens is that occluded processes in the brain make a choices, then that choice, already fully done, arrives into consciousness, and then consciousness works hard to “confabulate” a rational reason.

I could – almost always – find a good reason to write what I knew I’d write.

It’s as if consciousness is reverse-engineering a process it has no access to, and just guess an answer. Then fool itself into thinking that itself caused it, appropriating that process, its responsibility, even if in truth consciousness only arrived on the scene after the fact. For Bakker’s readers this is nothing new, and obviously more of an appealing idea to work with, here.

But again, my main criticism on this concept of time travel had nothing to do with consciousness. It has to do with simple physics. Information can’t be abstracted away, it has to be carried by some kind of medium. It needs existing in some kind of physical format. Ink on a page, impulses, binary data sent through light, electric signals. WHATEVER. It needs to be registered onto something. I’m not going all over this again, but when you deal with this type of recursive time travel, the SUBSTANCE that you bring back is substance that gets ADDED. I don’t grasp and pretend of even knowing the mathematical basis of all this, but I know enough to be able to wrap it up consistently.

Philosophy sucks compared to mathematics (and science in general) because it’s very imprecise. But mathematics often fails in front of philosophy because it’s very often PARTIAL (a good example is politics and economic theory, they are hard core mathematical models, but they all fail because they only slice and represent only a part of the world, they shine a spotlight that always loses the whole). The same happens here.

Same as what happens with representation of simple problems like the Liar’s Paradox (“this sentence is false”). Always assumed and analyzed as a PARADOX (contradiction), but only because you selectively removed something from the crime scene: time. The actual “solution” to the Liar’s Paradox, when you face it in its complete form, is that the sentence alternates infinitely between a true and false state. First run is true, second is false, third is true… And so on, as infinite recursion. This system, for obvious reasons, never closes. The recursion is infinite. But you can’t then stupidly COMPRESS it into a contradiction. Since you understand that it infinitely cycles through two incompatible states (true and false) you then hammer it down into a general incompatibility: true and false at the same time. A contradiction.

So again, it’s not that philosophy comes out superior to mathematics, but philosophy helps understanding that the mathematical model you applied to a certain scenario IS INCOMPLETE. Go get a better model.

At least Egan tries giving it a better shape. If in Arrival the signal was essentially visual (like a flash of memory, a richer experience), in this story the message is text. Therefore somewhat more plausible for avoiding contradiction. You would be told what you’re going to say that day, and you maybe would say it accurately, but there’s a lot of wiggle room between a textual description and the actual real image/video. You couldn’t PERFECTLY imitate something you’ve seen, even if you tried. But if it’s just text coming back, then the transition from signal to execution becomes SOMEWHAT more plausible.

The central “morally” problematic conundrum in Arrival is at least mentioned in one paragraph:

A residue of ‘seemingly avoidable’ tragedies remains, though, and the people who know that they’re going to be involved react in different ways: some swallow their fate cheerfully; some seek comfort (or anaesthesia) […]

There’s a note to this section I’ve scribbled that reads: filtering and grouping. I sometime wrote obscure stuff that is meaningful to me at that moment, only to later leave me in frustration when I can’t figure it out anymore. Thankfully this time I remember. It’s again fusing different layers together. If there’s future knowledge about some person dying in a car accident, then this knowledge, adhering to the initial concept, has to be precise. Down to the physical particles of the world. Physics. It’s all written down precisely. The ‘filtering and grouping’ in my note indicate that our recollection or description of an historical event, isn’t THE EVENT. But only a selective filtering and grouping of parts of reality that we deemed important. It’s a slice of time and events that have been CULLED of most of their details. “A person died”, sure, it happened. It was the sensible part of that event, but the circumstances are all written in, time and physics. The MENTAL STATE, atoms in the brain, the chemistry is ALSO part of this “picture.” Nailed down. So, the idea of “breaking a leg” and “breaking a leg while under anaesthesia” AREN’T the SAME event (“I broke a leg”). They can be in the vagueness and imprecision of human representation, or in the abstraction of human language (“that happened”), but they aren’t within the context of time travel that leaves no space for variations. In Arrival, and I assume in Tenet too, this is a giant unanswered and even unacknowledged problem. Here instead the idea is that reactions to future knowledge are already “embedded” in the fabric (the future HAS affected and modified the past, over and over again). Leading to the idea of a fully maximized and optimized world (same as the cycle of true/false in Liar’s Paradox, but we already know that this type of loop never reaches a “maximum”). An idea I already examined in the past and still doesn’t work, but that is at least less brittle compared to Arrival and Tenet.

Even the idea of human brain as a magical black box is addressed a questioned properly:

Knowing the future doesn’t mean we’ve been subtracted out of the equations that shape it. […] If ‘choice’ wasn’t grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? […] Some mystical intervention called the soul… but then what, precisely, would govern its behavior.

There are no answers here (the concept is flawed), but at least there are QUESTIONS. Saying “the soul did it” isn’t an answer, it’s just a goalpost being moved. Just another screen hiding the answer.

Though there’s a passage that gave me the impression Egan didn’t quite “get it”:

The ignorance cults say that knowing the future robs us of our souls;

Correct: uncertainty. Knowledge of the future would erase uncertainty. And if the system is perfectly known, then human action is just another mechanisms embedded within. Fully mapped.

by losing the power to choose between right and wrong, we cease to be human. To them, ordinary people are literally the walking dead: meat puppets, zombies.

NO. This here is the same error I explained above about the Liar’s Paradox and how it gets wrongly abstracted (so losing detail, sliced) and then compressed and hammered down. From an alternation of true/false, into a superimposition of both, true/false AT THE SAME TIME. The same here because it’s a compression of implicit and explicit patterns. Tho I guess this needs a more eloquent explanation, of what I mean…

No one, absolutely NO ONE ever gets to decide between right or wrong. This is not a philosophical concept, only a practical one. Every single human being to ever exist has ONLY been able to choose right. “Wrong” is not an option. It’s not part of free will, and it’s been one giant, widespread silly misconception. If you are omniscient and were to navigate a system fully known to you, then you would automatically lose “free will,” because that omniscience compels you to always find the perfect optimized path matching whatever goal or desire you have. Like Bakker’s “Shortest Path.” As a good universal principle: omniscience precludes free will. This also causes very common dilemmas about omniscience and omnipotence. For example the typical “Could God create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it?” Again, the “pattern” at the core of this all, is once again recursion (as will be repeated here below).

Knowing everything means you know what you want, why you want it, and the shortest path, given a system. Even if you try some path of avoidance, then the avoidance IS WHAT YOU WANT. For reasons that need to exist, even if you just want to contradict yourself. The non optimized path you deliberately decide to take is the OPTIMIZED path of your desire for following a non optimized path. You can’t escape this labyrinth. Omniscience is always a trap you can’t escape from. In a very similar way, back to the quote above, “right or wrong” are contingencies of reality that YOU FIND OUT. The reason you HAVE CHOICE is because you don’t fucking know if what you’re about to do is “right or wrong.” You find out after the fact. Do you bring the umbrella? Is it going to rain? You have a choice BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW. If you knew (akin to omniscience), then you’d bring the umbrella. Because you’d know that it is going to rain. You can’t be “stupid” about it.

Even when you try fighting the system, you’re still being played. Because you’re only thinking it’s the right thing to do. So you TRY doing the WRONG thing, because you think doing the wrong thing is THE RIGHT THING TO DO. You just can’t escape this labyrinth.

So again, the core of the concept that ENABLES free will is not choice between right or wrong. You are always compelled to do what’s right, or what seems right in that moment, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED (including laziness). Free will is about choice due to outcomes being hidden away, by lack of information, and so drowned deep in UNCERTAINTY. You have free will because you don’t know shit, therefore you have to guess. And only later you find out what was the correct choice, and maybe regret a mistake. The MORE you know, the LESS choice you have.

All this of course radically destroys all concepts of merit and self determination. But it’s just how the world works, and what human beings are. No one chooses wrong. No one chooses evil. Everyone tries doing the right thing, at all times, set by circumstance and the narrow point of view that makes limited information. You can once again abstract this with misapplication of language. You can say “I would have done differently compared to him,” but your circumstances are not his. You information is not his information. You’ve culled the data. You’ve created yet another perspective. A slice, partial. All whole systems are wholesome, because there’s no correct conceptualization of “wrong.” Nothing is ever wrong, same as contradictions can’t actually happen in the real world. It’s a perceptival abstraction, a culling, that makes things appear as wrong. Language. Otherwise things are just things. There is no morality embedded in the fabric of the world.

The meaning of all this is that free will is not some precious additional power. But a loss. Free will appears as a loss of information. A loss of knowledge. You are free (from the strictures of the system) because you lose the ability to see the chains. Those chains cease to exist, so you become free. And the IMPOSITION of this blindness FORCES the freedom of moving through the world as if independent. Because again you are blind to the force that moves you. So, if you can’t see the force that moves you how can you move other than choosing how to move on your own? There’s nothing else in sight that can help you.

I guess in the end Greg Egan did nothing to address and solve the central dilemma, but at least didn’t completely ignore it. But more importantly, there’s a story to tell here. I’m not going to spoiler it here, it’s a story just 18 pages long, actually quite rich of ideas. As you approach its conclusion you expect that something is going to challenge the status quo, as the story seems to drive there, a sort of act of rebellion. But the twist is completely different. It stops being a story about time travel to become a story about what humanity truly is.

This type of time-travel doesn’t work, yet appears endlessly fascinating simply because it’s built akin one of Dennet’s “intuition pumps.” Whereas classic time travel is a loop that split into new branches every time it comes back, this other “solid” type of time travel is fully built on recursion. The reason why it TRIPS our brains is because, think about it… What is the very first device conceptually and fundamentally built on recursion? The brain. Consciousness. Your own brain tries to conceptualize and think itself. I wrote about this so many times: the thinking you (subject) observing yourself as an (object) of observation. Creating the split in two subject/object (a delusion, because the split doesn’t truly “exist”, but is only perceived). The recursion, the “strange loops” in Hofstadter works. The same loops that are then inappropriately generalized through language into paradoxes. Language that is imprecise and inaccurate, a map that is not the territory, but only a parallel of perception. Representation. In this case, events recollected, versus events as they actually happened in their physical form. The idea that you can cull reality (through perception) without consequences. (and so the idea you can cull information through language, and create a paradox, or abstract away information in a time travel story so that when time loops back that information is either “intangible”, or already pre-embedded, culling away the notion of the recursion…) In the end, all bad “translations” between different human languages. Philosophy and mathematics, not “wrong” in themselves, but when moving concepts back and forth, stacking translation errors.

If in Arrival it was the “power of love” that lead to the avoidance of contradictions (abstracting away the moments of happiness and sadness in life, then hammering them down into a single whole, declaring, “that’s my life, I accept it”, so why don’t you ask that same question to an immigrant who drowned young while trying to survive, as an example, and see if they answer you in the same guise), here instead it’s more of a general compulsion (as seen above), an inner desire that feels itself already perfectly aligned with the desire “of the world.” So… TEST IT ON ME. YOU CAN’T COMPEL ME. I AM DESTRUCTION. I LIVE VISCERALLY TO PROVE THIS WRONG. And… see… someone with a truthful scientific mind like me just couldn’t exist in that world. The world itself has to conspire against yet another “tabu.” Avoidance. Magic.

I guess science-fiction writers aren’t necessarily good philosophers.

P.S.
As written in the book, the story here was originally published in January 1992. Ted Chiang story, according to the wikipedia, first appeared in 1998. There’s a very good chance that Egan didn’t invent the concept (it appears in Watchmen, at least, but it’s not as much of a close call as it is between Egan and Chiang). The other relevant story from Ted Chiang is from 2005, you can read the summary from the wikipedia, I read the full form and it’s not much longer. If it sounds completely stupid it’s because it is. I’m still in awe of how he could write and publish it…

Actually, I’ve now read again that story from 2005 (What’s Expected of Us), and the device there is perfectly coherent with the story by Greg Egan. So we now have both the context and the test. It’s disguised as a problem related to free will, but it has nothing to do with free will. It’s about causality. And it’s again proven wrong because it perfectly reproduces the Liar’s Paradox, both its erroneous representation (contradiction) and its solution (endless recursion, alternation of two states). One one hand you have the classic interpretation of time travel, where each loop back creates a new timeline, so a new “branch”, and, if you keep the recursion going, infinite timelines. On the other hand the “culling” and misrepresentation of the problem (the translation error), where information going back is added to one single loop, that is always the same loop. Therefore a paradoxical overlap, a contradiction.

The Magic of Recluce –
Modesitt Jr.

She looked at the floor, and I looked at everything and saw nothing.

“You are rather bitter for someone so young.”
“That’s easy when you’re forced for a reason you don’t know by a group that enforces unspoken rules in unsaid ways.”

There are going to be some mild spoilers. I don’t know how to write about this book without describing how I felt through the trajectory of the story. This is a book where you find out what it is about, but the element of surprise doesn’t really play a meaningful role, therefore I don’t think mild spoilers can detract from the enjoyment.

I started reading over a year ago (but as you can see, as it often happens to me I read a hundred pages, then skipped a year). While I was familiar with the author’s name, it never surfaced enough for me to look into and decide to pick up and reading. This happened around the time, last year, where in January I was looking into Ruocchio’s stuff, only to decide not bothering about it, and then pick it up instead in February. But Ruocchio’s book took a while to be delivered, and in the meantime I got this odd interest in Modesitt that I can’t even remember how it started. I just remember I had this strong desire of getting the books NOW. An important priority that surfaced all at the sudden. But I couldn’t because I had to order an used and beaten copy and had to be shipped from the US to here.

It just works that way, from complete disinterest to white hot compulsion, apparently without a good reason. Or at least a reason that can be easily extricated. But as I step out of my usual “zone,” taking interest in Modesitt isn’t so surprising. I like finding and opening doors into new expansive landscapes. Modesitt is an author who wrote more than most, and while it’s the whole Recluce saga that takes the spotlight, all the other stuff really does seem interesting. From the other big series “The Imager Portfolio”, to the more recent “The Grand Illusion”, to the various sci-fi standalones. This wide range has its own appeal, it’s like Modesitt himself is a genre box where you can find all kind of stuff, and never run out. Like an author of authors. So it was the sight of a box like this one that made my interest flare brightly. I want THAT, more than anything else. Pick up and feel every book. Not new. Creased. Nice. Good. A treasure box.

So let’s count… 22 books. It’s not even up to date. Total is currently at 24, with two more already queued up to come out this year. Reaching to 4 millions and a half words total. Sitting right next to Malazan and Michelle West’s towers. But also a weird series, because it’s shaped as a collection of different stories, often self contained trilogies, and moving wildly back and forth across a wide timeline. More of a general background than a cohesive story with a direction.

Suggested reading order follows published order, and oddly enough “The Magic of Recluce”, first to come out in 1991, also happens to be set nearly to the end of the overall timeline, with only the fifth in the series set at a later point, to conclude the whole deal. But this first book was also written and planned as a standalone. I think I read in some interview that the agent of the author really enjoyed the setting, and so persuaded him to write a sequel, which came out the year after, but set a thousand years earlier in the timeline. And so it kept going, but I think never as a sort of coherent vision. I guess Modesitt just found himself at ease writing within this context, the series was popular enough, and so he kept adding stories to it. Rather than a mad push to 20+ books, it was a leisurely stroll. Then you look back and “oh shit, we’re far from home.”

Beside the overall monster of wordcount, “The Magic of Recluce” itself is not epic-sized. A fairly comfortable 160k. The same applying for most of the other books. If you read some comments online, both about the first book and the rest of the series, you’ll notice that its main trait is “no strong feelings.” No one hates it, it has its fans showing appreciation, but it doesn’t produce fanatics. Balanced in the middle of these metaphoric extremes. Which is a significant problem because… Why should you read it? You shouldn’t. That’s the whole point. You shouldn’t read this book. And the reason why you SHOULD (or could) read this book, is because you shouldn’t. It’s an act of rebellion against the compulsion of the world. The gravitational pull of being relevant and important. Of being now. Having an opinion about what everyone else is discussing. This is a book from 1991, that just kept floating in the background noise of attention. It doesn’t call out to you. It doesn’t shine a beacon.

Which is why, to read and appreciate this book, you need to lower the sound on the front, in order to listen to that muted background. I learned that to ENJOY reading slow books, you need to slow down even more. Perfectly counter-intuitive. Where the slowness compels acceleration, to catch up, the trick is going contrarian. Become contrarian. And it transforms into a whole new world, like a negative copy. Going against the flow so that you can perceive a different context. The same I think happens when reading Robin Hobb (likely where I’m going next/resume, even if imo she’s again surpassed by Michelle West, who will be (maybe) where I’m going then). When it feels like it slows down, you slow down further, in order to seize it.

I don’t think there’s any other way. Either you ignore this book, or accept the deal it offers and slow yourself down to its pace. But I’m exaggerating because the writing style is quite terse and to the point. Descriptive but not overly so. It’s not an indulgent book, not very long as I already said, and even has a couple of time skips. It can be easily a quick effortless read. The risk is that you can fly through it without, again, any strong feelings. Plot, characters and environments as well, are fairly muted. It’s just a quiet story, that you listen by tuning to it properly. Even then, “no strong feelings.” If your time is short, you can’t afford patience. You can’t afford wasting your time. You need to be selective. And that’s why it becomes an act of rebellion, to work against the force of the world and time running out, at the very brink of the apocalypse. Fuck that, you sit down and read a book.

I was reading Ruocchio at that time and kind of worried I developed a type of hyper-sensibility to the prose, but picking up this one immediately solved it. From the very first page it felt familiar, as if being right at home. It’s written almost completely in first person, the story of this youth and his perspective on the world. It’s almost a typical farmboy beginning, but there’s no imminent danger, or sudden raid of evil forces to disrupt daily life. In fact, it almost seem like a complete absence of friction. It’s all too quiet, to the point that, page by page, it start feeling… creepy. A number of small things feel off, and relationships between characters not entirely normal. It’s all fine, but also “askew.” It gave me an idea similar to when I was reading Donaldson (Thomas Covenant), and the fantasy world was like “matrix,” a code underneath. Here too it seems like the familiar order of things is only a layer draped over everything, returning a feeling of falseness. Characters that seem slightly hypnotized, like one of the early Herzog movies. But it’s never quite explicit.

The main character is this youth called Lerris, whose main trait seems to be boredom. Yet this boredom is never really motivated, it’s not boredom pointed at something, but more of a general bitterness or cynicism. A dissatisfaction about circumstances. The main problem, and what becomes the direction of the book, is that Lerris has no goal. He doesn’t know what he wants from his life, and is bothered by what other people seem to expect from him. If it’s a coming of age story, it’s a weird one. It’s the world to be strange. To determine those circumstance that then would cause one to have a goal. An inspiration. But to his eyes, the world doesn’t make any sense, and no one is willingly to explain him how it works. Without any connection from point A to B, he is aimless, driven by pure inertia.

A shift of responsibility, as it seems everything points to Lerris being the problem, when it’s the world itself being a problem. As I wrote in my early notes: “Too quiet and pastoral world, with ominous presence just beyond the surface. Nothing bad happens. No one dies. But if someone causes some discomfort… They get deported somewhere else.” The tone is very muted, as I said frictionless. But it almost appears as a dystopia. Lerris’ parents are all good, diligent workers. It seems all normal and justified with the tone of the book, but to the external reader it’s obvious that there’s an obsession over perfection. Even the most mundane task needs to be optimal, or not at all. As if anything less than a masterwork could be the origin of a maelstrom that could swallow the world. You can’t just do an honest job, either you become the greatest ever, or you have to give up and try something else. This perfect realm of peace, being fully intolerant.

I had better things to do with my life than worry about whether the grain patterns on two sides of a table or panel matched perfectly. Or whether a corner miter was precisely forty-five degrees.

Since Lerris isn’t able to develop an honest (and unnatural) passion for anything, he’s eventually sent away by his family. First to a sort of magic school, even if in this book anything resembling something else would be misleading. He gets some companions, he has teachers, but do not expect Harry Potter. The same general inertia drives the main character on, teachers never quite explain what they are supposed to teach. From the outside it’s as if Lerris is looked at with a fatalistic resignation. It is what it is. He is what he is. But he doesn’t know what he is, so what?

A small amount of warmth comes from his companions, and even start what is an harem-like side plot (all the girls are after him, who will he choose?). Thankfully this is also very subdued and even if it surfaces again at different points through the book, it’s never really annoying and easily digestible within the context. There is some romance, but it’s light, understated. Totally fine.

After the first hundred of pages the context shifts because Lerris is sent out to the “main world”, his companions also exit the scene all at once. From this point he’s mostly alone and there’s lots of travel by horse (or pony). This section of the book feels like the central part of the first book in the Wheel of Time, but even more lonely. A frightful journey, moving through unwelcoming, desolate places. Where the threat is always at the margins. Always incumbent but never quite manifesting. Or, when it does, you only realize the danger after it’s already over. Again, the main theme is the aimlessness. Lerris is trying to figure out his place in the greater world, but the greater would isn’t especially friendly or forthcoming.

Toward the middle of the book the story warms up again. From lonely, confusing journeys (and it would have been much better if there was a map), the main character settles down in a random small town for some humble work as a woodworker, the job he had to quit early on for the reason of being not good enough. Here he finds new friends, or at least acquaintances, as no one is usually quite friendly and welcoming to him. Despite all his efforts, he never quite belongs. But again, the description of quiet, mundane life is the best part of the book. Despite of the understated style, characters come through. Then from one page to the next, things get emotional again, and it works because of how down to earth the book has always been. Honest simple.

So we move to the last hundred of pages, where the main character is driven away once again, in a sort of fatalistic way, but this time with a final goal. I was less than 25 pages from the end, and no idea how the story could wrap up with so little space left. It was meant as a standalone, after all. And wrap up it did, with a tiny bit of exposition, and linearly so. Probably the weakest part of the book is these last 50 or 100 pages. Nothing especially bad, but it seemed to me a little simplistic. Rather than solve its core theme that was dragged along the whole book, it simply restates it in its original form. It does work, there’s nothing truly inconsistent about it. The story finds its end, and Lerris definitely figures out his place. The final resolution is even too effortless. Only the implications and consequences do matter, but even those seem still very remote.

After I closed the book there was some confusion left. It seems like the possibility of order, Lerris starting point at the beginning of the book, could only be achieved and maintained through denial. But as it is then seen through Lerris perspective, order also compels truth. He finds himself unable to lie again and again. And I guess that’s why at the start no one is willingly to answer his questions exhaustively. Given the impossibility to lie, it seems that the only alternative left is… avoidance.

This book is about being, and then staying earnest. Even when the world tries putting a label or you, or even when you ask for it, at least to find some purpose or direction.

Reading Modesitt in 2025 is probably no one’s priority. So you should. Go read and join the aimless rebellion. It’s the perfect a-political book from a political author.

P.S.
As it often happens I have a number of notes left out that I’m not able to incorporate in what I’ve written without making a worse mess. So I’ll append them here. One says “Twin Peaks” but it’s merely a reference to the eerie place hinting at something hidden underneath. The false sense of normalcy. Apparent calm, sense of staticity. Almost like an horror movie. Then, some scenes here and there are a bit “gratuitous,” in the sense that they feel not entirely justified and a bit too convenient. There’s also a frequent use of noises (onomatopoeia) on the page, it’s quite jarring and sometimes even confusing, but I think it gives the text its sense of staying “analogical.” It seems to be quite reduced in the following book, and it’s then completely gone in the third. And one reason why I picked this up, is because from other opinions I read, it gets better. When you look at an huge saga like this one, the idea of an upward trend is a major encouragement, because you know that if you’re able to adjust to a rougher start, then the rest has good chances of paying off…

Fall of Light – Part 1 (and only?)

What you find below has been written, partially, back in June 2021. I had the idea of doing some kind of “live” commentary of Erikson’s “Fall of Light”. The idea was to break down a bulkier review into a leaner ongoing, hopefully more regular commentary, but it ended up adding too much overhead rather than less as it was intended. Reading, thinking, writing notes, then later picking it up again, reading and then arranging the notes… My constant reading delays are mostly due to pacing in a way I can then write about the books. I feel this sort of commitment that I don’t quite enjoy. So the idea of breaking up a whole “review” into smaller pieces had some merits, but it doesn’t work all that well. I have a backlog of things I should write about, Bakker’s chapter is not over, but even in that case I was exhausted writing the lengthy commentary about my dismay to the last book, I needed a break, and after a break it’s almost impossible to get back into that type of mental space and focus. So who knows when/if it will happen.

As things kept getting stacked I felt the need to get back to Erikson, sooner rather than later. So the idea of resuming this one blog post that was left as an old draft. Pick up Fall of Light again, see what I get out of it… Only to realize that it’s been way too long and this time not only I don’t remember much of the plot, but it’s the tangle of characters that appears as inextricable. And so I take another step back and pick up “Forge of Darkness” from page 1. At this time being already some 130 pages into it, hardcover version.

Let’s see how it goes. I can try doing something monthly, but I really have no idea how it will turn out in practice. Also, the more I write here, the more I get disappointed about how I write.

—
This blog-site being in limbo isn’t surprising, and I don’t expect anything to change, at least for a few more months. I guess this can serve as a quick recap.

I’m still quite active, about things, but feel a lot more dulled. Virus-stuff takes a big chunk of my attention and also made me more jaded about everything. Writing on a blog demands effort and time, it was always important for me because it was a way to put down thoughts and move on. But right now I just don’t care about anything anymore, including my own thoughts. Everything feels fleeting. Writing a blog feels redundant.

This book came out in 2016. Back then, I had the idea of writing a commentary page by page, here. Something fast but regular. It didn’t happen, but I read the first 60 pages of the book at least three times, along the years, and have scribbled some notes at the margins. Today Werthead posted on his site the review of the new one. A few weeks ago I updated the wordcount page and found out the book is quite short, even shorter than Gardens of the Moon, and less than half of one of the big Malazan latter ones. I felt a little disappointed. But then I also immediately realized I don’t have any reason to. I have my stuff. I still have so much more of Erikson, probably more than I’ll ever end up reading. And I have this book especially. This is my stuff.

“Length” isn’t meaningless. Thinking so is oversimplification. I like Malazan also because of its “range”, and a smaller book implies smaller scope. Maybe a shrinking of ambition? I have tons of doubts about where Erikson and Malazan could go. I had my doubts about Kharkanas too, even if that ended up my personal favorite. A commercial disappointment that made Erikson switch to the Malazan sequel. Will it work? CAN it work? As Werthead writes in the comments of that review, this book cannot be realistically be sold to a new audience. Whoever decides to start, is going to start from the beginning. But it’s not my job or concern how to sell a thing. What else? How do you continue Malazan? That’s the problem of ambition. Can you even rise the stakes past that point? Or write some smaller scale epilogue, give it time to breath out, tie loose ends. I have no right to say anything about this, I haven’t got to the end.

(Note from the future: many, most, writers have maybe one great book in themselves. There isn’t anything fair about this angle of discussion. Unless the angle is the market and product. Why should we, I, even expect MORE from Erikson? Because he hasn’t died and is a WRITER? A job? As the future closes its doors, I realize even more clearly that the meaningful journey is to the past. If I want to find something that has value, then I walk back.)

The virus stuff caused a certain shake-up. I drifted away from certain communities, I feel a little lost. I lost my themes. As I said, I also stopped caring. I don’t give a shit, about anything. So I’m constantly drifting, between the meaningful and the meaningless. A couple of weeks ago I finished “V.”, by Thomas Pynchon. It was an immense book, full of inexplicable, impossible talent. It’s not even “talent”, because it shows a writer being just complete, and beyond. But also immensely frustrating, because I don’t know enough, I’m not smart enough. Most of the book went right over my head, and the day I finished it I started again from the first page. It’s a new book. I could just keep reading V.

And then I’m reading the first stories of The Savage Dragon, and I’m almost done with Rising Stars by Straczynski. I recently watched the entirety of Line of Duty (bent coppers!), that’s a masterpiece that goes close to The Shield, and whose ending is quite fitting in its imperfection. And whose intention is probably thematically linked to Forge of Darkness here (note from 2025, funny reading this part because I remember almost nothing about it, and I certainly have NO IDEA how Line of Duty could be linked to Forge of Darkness…).

I’ve restarted Dickens’ Black House from the beginning. I read about half the book, what, 10 years ago? In the last few months I started or restarted at least 50 books. I stop at some point, then repeat the process a few years later. I could go on forever, just reading again. Leaving everything in a constant flux of incompleteness (note from 2025: yeah, didn’t go well. Restarted AGAIN in 2022 and stopped at page 350). I’ve picked up the second book in Janny Wurts series, at least three, four times? I want to read more Tad Williams, now that I’ve completed both first books in their respective series, “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn” and “Otherlands”. Scott Bakker should always be my priority, even when it isn’t. I’m reading light novels, but only if they are as long as Malazan, because in Japan it’s a thing. I started Re:Zero because I was searching through Google for the number zero short story of Shingeki no Kyojin, and instead Google returned me a ludicrous question answered unironically. I’m reading Faulkner (“Mosquitoes”, and I suspect this is Faulkner’s best book), I’m reading Stephenson (both Anthem and Reamde) and I’m reading JR by Gaddis (this type of schizoid reading is especially alive right now in 2025, as right this moment I’m reading Dostoevsky and Gadda). A while ago I finished “The Long Way Down” by Craig Schaefer, another large interlinked series project, urban fantasy and self published. I planned to write a sort of review, but this is how things go. I’ve started Bubblegum, by Adam Levin, and it felt like David F. Wallace in a really good way, but then I felt bad, because I’ve not finished the previous one, The Instructions. I really want to read The Instructions. And I really want to read “XX”. I started “Six of Crows” by Leigh Bardugo, but then it got popular, so I went to “And I Darken”. I’m reading books about old games, to build real time machines. I even picked up the Monster, Bottom’s Dream, a month ago? I’ve made through a few pages. I felt both smart and stupid, and then pathetic.

I’m putting together a new PC to play Factorio.

(some incomprehensible notes here written in 2021, about some other stuff, one mentioning Warhammer… But I really don’t know)

Today I’ve picked up, once again, Forge of Darkness with mixed feelings. I’m still perfectly tuned for this, but as I said I feel dull. The worst part is that these pages are scribbled with notes. Not only I don’t feel as receptive as I was, but I don’t even understand what these notes are supposed to mean. I read the same pages that I’ve now read a few times, and they seem new pages. I said I still feel tuned to this writing, but I cannot quite sink, and grasp. But I don’t care, so this is what it is. It is…

PART 1 (my notes on the pages are in italics, pages numbers from original Bantam UK hardcover edition)

I remember at the time I was looking through forums to read what others thought about the book, trying to take a measure of it before I started myself. Staying out of spoilers isn’t so easy, though, so I read that some readers were disappointed. There was going to be a big battle at the end, but it wasn’t described directly. As if Erikson decided to not give the payoff that readers demanded.

“I just slogged through Fall of Light, way too much philosophizing, not enough convergence. I was looking forward to a badass battle”

Then I read the first two pages, and wondered how you could be disappointed when it was written so plainly.

At the end of page 4, I don’t know if Erikson wrote this at the beginning.

My suspicion here is that this introduction-declaration was written after the book was completed. A way to tie the beginning and the end with a clear intention. Instead of a sort of “this is what I’m going to do”, it would be “this is what I found.” A writing trick.

In any case, it doesn’t matter. This part is a bit ornate in the writing, as most of this prequel series, but far from rhetorical and, especially, far from being opaque. Or subtle. “Stand at a distance, then, and make violence into a dance.” My note: make it entertaining.

Lower on the page: motivation VS truth. The idea is the split between stories and reality. Usually, this is romanticized. Not in the way Erikson means here, but in the universal way. Human beings cannot survive reality, so they fashion convenient stories. These stories form a cocoon of (for) life. An artificial space that is survivable. Erikson is more specific here, because he goes against the war and the art of war. About the morality of the intention behind this process. And so the “rhetorical swagger” is what’s necessary to make the killing possible. A little necessary push to refashion it. A concept that is then encoded, a few lines later, “deftly ritualized”, and so, I’d add, it disappears from perception.

This is my own interpretation and extension, because Erikson here is precise, only talking about the shapes of war. But the concept itself encapsulates modernity, how we feel we can observe and judge, without understanding that we are so deeply embedded within this fictional world that none of us can truly “see.” You can be more careful, more aware of the blindness, but you can’t overcome it. As Bakker would say, it’s darkness that comes before. We come after. We have neither awareness nor control of that context that builds us. The codification happens before conscious thought even surfaces. We are fused with this world, and our consciousness makes no sense separated from it. So how can we possibly judge what we do not see? If then this is true, “necessity” comes fused with the rest, it cannot be critically separated as Erikson does here. Leading to the concept of fatalism, that will return later.

Fall of Light: exhortation to himself. Cannot teach any lesson if you don’t follow it. writing is a monologue, so it’s self-reflection, introspection. The audience is not there. Passive.

(Note from 2025, what I wrote back then stops right here. Not even a true start, not even getting to the end of the FIRST page, quite ironic. So from this point onward it’s all written in the “now”, but based on a mix of notes taken years ago, a month ago, or the day before…)

The introductory page ends with an exhortation, obviously to himself as a writer: “Oh, have done with it, then.”

“The poet who glories in war is a spinner of lies. The poet who delights in visceral detail, for the sole purpose of feeding that lust for blood, has all the depth of a puddle of piss on the ground.”

One of my notes reads: necessity is the system of no-responsibility / a life is fashioned, and so we dance. It’s as if Erikson is rejecting what he’s just trying to begin, as much of the story will have to be a motivation for the war. The high level perspective and moral judgment will have to be seized and collapsed. Brought back to the blood-sodden ground. I think in general this page can be somewhat off-putting to read, because it does take a moral high ground and immediately “preaches” about the spectacle of a “fantasy” book. Fantasies of epic wars. Wars being bad, yeah. Do we need to repeat this? Well, maybe.

“What, in the name of all the gods above and below, are you doing here?”

This is more effective, and again can go all the different ways. You, the reader. You, the writer. You, the character of this story. But to me (and my notes) it speaks to a theme that, hopefully, will return through this commentary I’m writing: stratification. The stratification of the world and the constant switch of perspectives. That single life that is trapped and moved by circumstances. So, in order to understand, we need to move from the god-like fly-by, the judging-eye high level, down, to “incarnate” in a character. Get dirty, get tangled in. To feel that hate and rage, give them names. To feel the world made human, made real. Made broken.

And so… “Choose a cool dusk” in this introduction, becomes the first line of the first chapter: “Stepping out from the tent, Renarr faced the bright morning light, and DID NOT BLINK.” The beginning of a new book is the morning of a new world, we get incarnated into this Renarr, who does not blink. Not averting eyes, not shielding from bright light, not protecting. We take all in. Erikson moved from the abstract intent, to the concrete and incarnate. A voice found, now shaped.

But because we are now incarnate, we are also vulnerable. This world can and will hurt and then kill us. This point of observation has its expensive cost.

Knowing a bit more I wondered if maybe the blinking thing was a reference to Renarr being moved to a position of “daughter dark,” not blinking to the light, and connected to her skin tone proclaiming and revealing more her internal landscape, that in this case could be dissent. But at this point I still don’t know about the metaphysics of these aspects. I merely appreciate that they are subtle, taken for granted by the characters, and left there to simmer. I guess I could complain about this if we get to the end of the whole story and nothing more meaningful comes out of it. But for me things are also more confusing because a few weeks passed since this new re-read, and I know how the chapter ends: “Renarr studied her, and did not blink.”

I wasn’t able to extricate anything quite meaningful from that. Obviously it references back to the beginning of the chapter, but who she’s looking at doesn’t seem representing light, and I just don’t have a working interpretation for it.

Back to the chapter, Renarr is our point of observation to this war camp. The war being a fastidious possibility in the imminent future.

Section in italics from Renarr PoV, “we are awash in lies.” Echoing back the introduction. But this time we are already within the embroidery of characters. The tangle of relationships.

Page 6, my note reads: other realms, the world is layered thus, referring to this part: “By mid-afternoon, when the sun warmed the air enough, mosquitoes would arrive in thick, spinning clouds, thirsty for blood. If soldiers stood arrayed in ranks, facing the enemy, there would be little comfort preceding the clash of weapons.”

The mosquitoes here represent another layer of the world, which is quite typical of Malazan and something I especially like. Those annoying creatures don’t know anything of the world of men, and in this case, of their wars. But still, they are necessarily connected, depending on it. The world is both made whole and fragmented constantly, Erikson often shifts the attention so that you see these layers, rather than cutting them and brushing them off as irrelevant. The world speaks, you only need listen. Listen. Be one with those mosquitoes. Breathe them in, until your lungs are full, and then you die into the world.

It is indeed how Erikson, and many other writers, write. You kill yourself, shut up, die. So that you can be borne into the world, and listen. (which is one reason why I was deeply annoyed at the Nobel given to Han Kang, she was trying to do specifically this, and completely botched it)

Erikson writes as if possessing a character, like a ghost. He’s both a writer, and this character walking through the camp. Superimposed. At the same time the camp exists, and is made. But it is not seen as a blurred, uncertain dreamscape. It is solid, tangible. One page in, and there is a sense of familiarity. You wake up after being unconscious through a whole night, and the world continues uniformly and familiar, as if it never stopped. You’ve always been Renarr.

As she continues walking through the camp, veterans “had known that realm” (of war). My note says: microcosm in the camp, personal experience becomes a realm. Like a warren. Again a stratification, and communication between these parts, whether possible or not.

Then another section in italics, my note saying: VOICE. These are the sections that, I think, feel quite jarring to some readers. The “introspective” sections that are often criticized in Erikson’s writing. It’s not quite the same as standard Malazan, because in this prologue series the style is a lot different again, but these sections specifically I think evoke similar reactions. They feel maybe too articulated to be plausible, but I have a completely different interpretation. As I said, this is Erikson testing. Searching for the internal voice of the character. It’s not a form of internal dialogue, but an actual internal landscape that is translated into a literary one. It’s not plausible in the sense that this is what the character is thinking, word for word, right at that moment. It’s, again, like its own warren. It’s own space that here in the book takes a literary form. Its expression is different from what it is, because it’s meant to be interpreted rather than being simply “read.” I’ll return on this (maybe) when writing some comments about Forge of Darkness, but I think the style here is heavily “Shakespearean.” It’s an internal declamation that is faithful to the internal landscape, but not as plausible, “plain” voice. It’s not an accurate internal thought written down. Instead it is OVERwritten, another superposition. A sublimation of one territory into another. Same as symbolic representation, the symbol you use doesn’t have any direct resemblance to the object represented. The word “apple” does not resemble an apple. It’s a symbol, they are connected, but they are not alike. Here the same happens, but it’s language over language. A symbol representing a symbol. A mold over a landscape.

“The questions seemed banal, like things covered in dust, the dust shaken free, blown into the air by a heavy but meaningless sigh.” Next to this line I wrote: “SANDERSON.” But this is from years ago, and I have no idea what clever thought I thought.

“in the bright light, which rose like another world, a world unlike the night before,” this represents the start of a new, eventful day, but, specifically, a new book. A new world. But also plot-wise the people transformed, as they divide between followers of Light, and followers of Dark.

The whole next section has a line going down, I wrote: observer. More meaningfully, “too solid to be a ghost, but shunned all the same.” This is all contextualized, but I interpreted in a more general and abstracted way. It sometimes (often?) happens that the characters that Erikson “possesses” are then affected by that touch. The writer eye doesn’t just comes in and then leave unnoticed. It’s like these characters feel that abstracted touch, and the connection changes everything. These characters get permanently “dislodged” from their reality. They belong, but not quite. The characters themselves aware of this otherworldly touch.

That’s why, a moment later: “She saw herself observing.” That’s quite delicious, I love second order observations, reminds me of Heinz von Foerster. But this is again another superposition, a ghost-like double Erikson. It’s exquisitely “Malazan”, not just observing directly, but observing the observation. It’s an active, ongoing reflection, an awareness of the story that comments itself. This type of meta-narrative is quite explicit since the first page of the first prequel book, not only in all the winks thrown to the veteran reader, but also as a way to have a heightened attention. It’s as if at some point Erikson embedded the concept of Ormologun and its critic into himself. The story and its critical commentary bundled together as one.

You can as well take everything I wrote up to this point as bullshit, since these pages have a proper, obvious context that doesn’t need any fancy reinterpretation. But there are points of contact and I give myself more freedom to wander around, as I feel more familiar. The double observation, here, happens because Renarr is imagining a scene, same as Erikson is himself doing the same while blending with Renarr. So it becomes a series of thresholds, a dreamworld nested inside another. But then this little brief glimpse Renarr is having is shaken awake. Hunn Raal comes onto the scene, and the presence of others suppresses the internal voice. Attention moves to the outside and you are pressed forward against the transparent glass that is the point of view (the window that is your PoV to the world, focus shifts from the internal loudness, to the external). There are some dry lines of dialogue, some quips and jabs. There is familiarity between these characters, but also some guarded hostility. Again, in all forms of modern entertainment everything is loud and redundant, but I especially like this type of writing where you understand, but something always slips through. You know these characters but they aren’t fully revealed either. There is always something more that leaves you wandering, that draws the attention but without rewarding and satisfying it immediately… Sometimes it can be illusion of complexity, but often it’s meaningful depth. Either way, it always feels great, a pleasure for reading.

The actual encounter with Urusander, following the imagined one, isn’t quite unlike it. He is indeed more busy listening to his own internal voices than to who’s around him. He’s not completely addled in the sense he only raves about what he’s thinking, he does reply in a somewhat coherent way, but his line of thought is “elsewhere.” Which I guess is fitting since he then flees the scene, literally and meaningfully, considering the battle that is ahead. His own is presented again as a Shakespearean monologue than something that makes sense voicing. Something about the veil of representation, surface.

A dialogue continues between Renarr and Serap, more meaningful for what comes later. My note reads: those who see have no power. But this is more my own personal theme than Erikson. I have a whole system built around this: if you want to understand something, then you can’t be part of it. Choice, action imply participation. Understanding instead implies a point of view from the outside. The desire, the tug toward the will to affect something, to change its course, to affect it, even if only positively, is a process that in itself makes understanding impossible. So you surrender one or the other. You can understand something, but you’ll never be able to touch it. Just watch passively. Or you move to be part of it. Enjoy the love and hurt, and whatever else. But you’ll never fully know, then. You’ll never understand. You have accepted being permanently blind, so that you can be part of the world. Contextualized here, with a war ahead, those who sees it for what it is have no power to prevent it, or even change its course. And those who have that power because they are embroiled in it, who have the actual choice, don’t have it at all, because they are trapped within the tangle of circumstances. They are sacrificial victims. Unaware of their own doom (though it’s Sevegg, not Serap, who dies here).

Follows the point of view from the other side, that seems to have a similar function to Renarr, since they are both quite lucid about what is going to happen, neither having real leverage to avert it. Havaral here has a more of an active role, but is still trapped by duty. That part of him that is active is trapped by circumstances just the same. As he moves to meet Hunn Raal, he sees the approach as fatalism itself: “They rode with arrogance, with the air of believing themselves privy to dangerous secrets.”

Reading this in 2025 has a weird effect, because it does feel like the beginning of civil war. The world has gone mad, yet none of us has any power. The more lucidly we are aware, the less power to change it we have.

I guess I’ll stop here. This was supposed to be a quick, brief and to the point commentary, specifically to be the opposite of a more involved review. So I have to find a way, because otherwise this will be the first and last attempt.

As I said, while I’m 35-40 pages into this re-read, with the commentary here stalled at 14, I restarted Forge of Darkness and already 130 pages deep. Forge of Darkness is, by far, my favorite Malazan book. This reread is reconfirming it without any doubt. I know most readers consider it one of the weakest, and that it was not popular in sales, but the much denser prose style is what I adore. That’s the main reason why I like it so much. The prose. That kind of unrelenting Shakespearean heft. It is sometimes quite ridiculous to read, certain dialogues, certain internal monologues. They have too much emphasis, as I already commented above. But it is what I enjoy. This is not a movie. Language is precious. For example I do not like, in the main series, when especially in battle scenes Erikson uses a more cinematographic terse style where this and that “blurs.” This is not a movie. It feels to me out of place. A book is not analogical reality. It shouldn’t represent it “as it is.” That’s why I emphasized the symbolic weight above. Language needs to be precise, honest. But it is a different realm. Separate. Or, if it were the same, two good writers would write the same scene in the same way. And so dialogues need being authentic, but don’t need be the same. The same scene represented in a movie or as theater, won’t use the same language.

From the very first page Forge of Darkness is deliciously dense prose that has meaningful depth. So much more consistent compared to all other Malazan pages that I read (that up to this point means from first book to the prologue of book 7, still haven’t moved past that). I always though Malazan is rougher and more inconsistent, even if it progressively gets better on this. And it’s very, very wasteful. Too many interesting ideas that are crammed in and wasted for what they can be. Malazan moves too fast, is a “blur” sometimes without the necessary weight. Ridiculously, it has no space to breathe properly. Something that instead is completely absent as a problem in Forge of Darkness. Every character that comes on the scene, and every idea, is given space and depth. It forces the reader to pay attention. I guess sometimes it can be too obvious and melodramatic. But I love this dense style. Even Fall of Light feels slightly “off” in comparison, but probably it’s more my own impression as consequence of going back and forth without giving the book enough space. Every character in Forge of Darkness is weird and interesting. There hasn’t been a single page among those 130 that I haven’t relished. A more gothic, bleak (and even more cynical), moody, muted type of book that I did not expect at the time, and I find now even better.

I know these books didn’t sell so well, and it’s the main reason why Erikson prioritized the sequel series. I wish I could be along all those other readers pulling in that direction. But instead I can’t help finding myself pulling in the opposite direction instead. The more “opaque” and unrelenting the prose becomes, the better it feels for me. There is no limit.

William the Blind

Just linking to a worth-reading article, on William T. Vollmann.

William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA called A Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even that part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me.”

His publisher of thirty years.

It’s more complicated than that.

For starters, when he first turned it in, A Table for Fortune was 3,000 pages.

The way Vollmann tells the story about delivering A Table for Fortune to Viking suggests it wasn’t too different from other books, which tend to be long and complex and to pose new challenges about form and content: some heckling about length, cost, headaches and all the rest. “After seven hundred pages,” Vollmann reflects in the Harper’s piece, “[the novel’s] protagonist remained unborn, and my editor found that tedious; on the phone he got sharp about it.”

He nodded along with their points. Heard them out.

Took the feedback home with him and considered it. One thing they suggested was that he remove a long storyline about the CIA’s activity in Angola during the 1970s where they tried unseating a Marxist-Leninist government that would’ve made a good Soviet asset. They sold weapons, propagandized, and recruited mercenaries in an effort to create civil unrest and install a Western-aligned nationalist party.

It’s a blight on the history of the CIA. Not only for its colonialist jockeying but the fact that it failed. Angola aligned with the Soviets. Still, at the behest of President Gerald Ford, then President Jimmy Carter, the Agency showed data to prove that it was hopeless — same way, Vollmann says, that “president after president” had fed young Americans into the Vietnam War just a few years prior despite conclusive certainty, from the start, that there was nothing to gain.

They didn’t care, he says. All they wanted to do was “bloody the Soviets.”

Which might all be true, was Viking’s point, and it’s certainly very interesting — but what’s it got to do with our characters?

And so Vollmann read the whole book again. In earnest. Looking for places he could take stuff out. Storylines that served no larger purpose.

When he finished up and sent the new draft back to Viking, it was 400 pages longer.

Enjoy.

Who’s Jonathan Maberry..?

A little interlude. Sometimes I’m a victim of my whims. In this case I’m well out of my usual area of interest, but I’m also drawn to large, interconnected projects, even when that interconnectedness is just a thin excuse. Where typically most people would recoil, because time is precious, I react in the opposite way and I’m drawn in. The discovery of yet another giant “hobby” that makes a world by itself.

So here I causally stumble onto another writer I’ve never heard about before, that would not generally be very interesting to me, as a writer of mostly thrillers blended with some horror vibes. Thrillers in general aren’t my thing, and horror was more meaningful when I was a kid, even then always the more conceptual side, like Lovecraft, or the artsy-gritty, like Tobe Hooper. Or Hellraiser, or Society, by Brian Yuzna. For me horror was always either aesthetic or concept. The reason I stumble on this other writer is because the concept of one of his series is actually cool: a fantasy setting with Lovecraft’s horror blended in. Not even some monsters in that style, but actual Cthulhu Mythos explicitly referenced. I guess not having copyright helps with that type of adoption.

Looking up the author I found a largish amount of other publications, split in different series. Stuff like action-thrillers, and YA series with zombies. Nothing especially noteworthy. But in one of the comments on the already mentioned fantasy trilogy I read that, as you move between the first and second volume, you realize, if you are familiar with the author, that there are a number of semi-hidden references to the other main series he wrote: “Joe Ledger”. Until those references become rather explicit. But, you see, Joe Ledger is a detective in the modern world, dealing with espionage, conspiracies… those sort of things. How do you link THAT with a fantasy series, especially one where Cthulhu casually walks around? The answer, directly from an interview with the author, is that the fantasy setting FOLLOWS the Joe Ledger modern-time series. It happens some 40k years later, after the world “ended” because of a “successful” zombie apocalypse, followed by a long ice age that reset the life on the planet, until humans appear again and then jumpstart the premise for this “upcoming” fantasy world.

But then the writer wasn’t satisfied, so started writing AT THE SAME TIME also a sci-fi trilogy with spaceships. Fighting once again against Cthulhu. Sadly, at this time only the first (relatively short) novel is out, and in this case there do not seem to be any actual references to THIS one book being in any way connected to the rest. I wonder… because it would be quite an exception.

The more I looked into this, the more I found out how EVERYTHING is connected. I thought at first it was just that silly 40k years connection between Joe Ledger and the fantasy trilogy. Looking at the wikipedia, “Kagen the Damned” is the fantasy trilogy (already completed, the wiki is outdated), the Joe Ledger series has 10 main books, then got an official spin-off “Joe Ledger – Rogue Team International”, as you can see the wiki lists three of them but a fourth comes out in a few days (early March), while the writer is instead writing the fifth… (by the way, remember the already mentioned sci-fi trilogy whose 1st book only is available? The writer is also currently writing… the third. Because the second comes out in May.)

I’m writing all this out of happenstance. I was casually watching this video, until it got to the part where another of Maberry’s book is mentioned, Glimpse. I was watching and thinking… wait, isn’t that name one of those writers I looked up recently? Maybe not, but instead it was. I had done this type of “research” on Maberry weeks ago, to figure out all of this, but this book specifically was left out of the picture because it’s clearly labeled as stand-alone. This time I type in google “maberry glimpse connected” and find a link to this interview: “My other doorway into writing this is the character of Monk Addison. He is a kind of private investigator who carries strange tattoos on his skin. I wrote four short stories about him, and then used him as a supporting character in my novel, Glimpse.” This referring to another standalone, Ink. But if THAT is related to everything else, then it means this one is TOO…

This book, Glimpse (that I continue to mistype as Glister), also has a very interesting first chapter, that I paste here in its entirety:

It’s like that sometimes.
It starts weird and in the wrong place.
This did.
Rain Thomas went to bed on Thursday and woke up on Saturday. She had no idea at all that someone had stolen a whole day from her until she arrived twenty-three hours and forty-eight minutes late for a job interview.
The interview did not go well.

Here we are. What follows is an unedited section of my notes about wordcounts of all the main novels part of this giant tapestry. Again, the connections here don’t really matter, but I like that type of flavor. It’s what gets my attention. Wordcounts here are quick and rough. I usually edit the files because, just as an example, some writers love using “. . .” and using those a lot can actually bloat the wordcount, along with other artifacts, excerpts of other novels at the end of the book, introductions, notes, appendices and so on. The numbers here are instead more roughly eyeballed, but generally still accurate enough. I approximated to -2k words as an estimation. The whole thing comes at over four million words. Not bad.

(as a note, one of the writers in a similar area I tracked was Greg Iles. This is also generally “thriller” but without supernatural or fantasy elements. Just bad men doing bad things. Ends up at seven volumes, the last three more interconnected than the previous, forming an internal trilogy. The last one being a massive 380k words and getting political…)

maberry
ledger
140
158
148
145
145
158
152
165
165
148
= 1.524
152
164
162
dead of
125
120
rot&ruin
110
115
100
112
–
110
95
= 1.365
pine
142
162
175
118 glimpse
122 ink
= 719
kagen
172
210
175
= 557
= 2800
= 4165

Empire of Silence –
Christopher Ruocchio

I became aware of Christopher Ruocchio around January 2024, about a year ago. I was starting to watch youtube videos that were suggested, rather than sticking to my own feed, and as it happens, once you watch one type of video the whole page fills with lookalikes. So I got also introduced to lots of the popular “booktubes”, or whatever they are called. Both the internal and external effects are like an avalanche: you get hit by constantly repeating patterns. For example in the last couple of months everyone seems to be reading and talking about Robin Hobb, which is both nice and weird, since so many readers are now jumping on a fairly older series. But why now? Yet the result of this type of avalanche is actually nice, because even in my case it stimulates interest in reading and sharing the same thing. Keep the ball rolling and enjoy the process.

(no matter what you/I read, the moment the process of reading is confined to itself, it dries up and feels like time wasted. Instead when the process of reading is preceded by other times when I spend time reading about the book, or other books, about other people reading and sharing, so that the moment of actual reading is better connected to the rest, then the process flourishes, I do enjoy reading, more)

So it was the case of Ruocchio that suddenly seemed to appear in lots of favorite book lists. Maybe being the very beginning of (last) year triggered all sort of recaps, and those books ended up being mentioned a lot as favorites, stringed with superlatives. Somewhat weird for me because I had never heard of Ruocchio before, not even a single time. I haven’t been very much in touch, but in certain circles Ruocchio seemed to be completely absent, only to be a main topic in certain others. This triggered curiosity for me and so I kept delving. A similar process led me to discover Jenn Lyons, a while ago, that I still remember quite positively (I already got all five books, just need to decide when to read them), so I’m always happy to find spaces to explore that are completely new to me, despite still having tons to read in those spaces I already mapped. A certain leap of faith.

Problem is, delving more, reading reviews, hearing Ruocchio himself through lengthy interviews that were quite informative both about the nature of what he was writing, but also of the decaying state of the publishing industry…

While my appreciation of Ruocchio himself grew, my interest in the books waned. In the end I decided I could do without. Problem is, again, that the youtube-driven avalanche continued. The seed of that curiosity didn’t go completely away and so about a month later I decided that, yes, I was going to read Ruocchio. In fact I went from “I do not really care about this”, to “please, can we speed up shipping? I want the book right now.” These books are actually quite expensive despite being simple paperbacks, so that part added to the initial hesitation. They weren’t impulsive purchases (for book 2 & 3 I switched to the cheaper and smaller UK edition, I do not regret this at all). Funnily enough, at the same time I got curious about Modesitt‘s Recluce, and this new interest completely robbed the hype out of Ruocchio while the book itself was in transit. But! In Modesitt’s case getting my hands on a copy of “The Magic of Recluce” meant ordering an used copy from the US, and so WEEKS of wait for the delivery… Meaning that while my hype got sidetracked, it left the space for Ruocchio to land on my lap just in time (this doesn’t sound right, I’m sorry). And so I started to read, almost exactly a year ago.

One of the reasons why I decided to read is about the structure of this whole thing. As with Jenn Lyons, I appreciate that these writers set out for an ambitious plan and then deliver. Ruocchio is a relatively young writer, he set out with an ambitious, multi-volumes space opera, and right about now he’s writing the last 50k words of the very final volume. The seventh. Some 1 million 800k words when complete. The original plan was to have two different blocks, two trilogies for a total of six books. But then DAW happened, or rather Astra’s hostile takeover (we won’t linger on that, as I’m trying to write a review and not an encyclopedia). After the third book was published, and even if the sales were improving (hello youtube), the publisher imposed Ruocchio that the fourth book wouldn’t exceed 200k words (the third was already 285k), and that the series would conclude with the fifth. Problem is Ruocchio already wrote 300k, as part of the fourth. The following wasn’t going to be any shorter, and then he had a SIXTH planned… This put him in an impossible to solve situation, because there wasn’t any amount of editing and cutting that could plausibly work. Right at this point he started to realize that the whole project could as well completely fail and end there. He didn’t have much to bargain with the corporate overlords (now I’m starting to sound melodramatic same as the meta-commentary of Hadrian in the book… Oh well.) So he decided for a temporary solution: he published the first 200k of what he wrote, as a fourth volume, then had left those spurious 100k at the end, and rather than trash them, he set out to write another 100k half-of-a-book, to glue in as an unplanned transition toward the second part already written. Go figure, this frankenstein procedure wasn’t fully successful and now the general consensus of reviews is to consider the fifth volume as the weakest in the series. This is an example of how we generally consider publishers and editors necessary to improve and polish the art, when in many cases they are obstacles (Michelle West is another of these cases, DAW strikes again). What happened next is that Ruocchio gave his publisher what the publisher asked, volumes 4 and 5 as close to perfect 200k words cuts, but certainly not the end of the series. He instead switched publisher, only to have DAW came back to him with their tail between their legs, because Ruocchio got popular and they really wanted to publish that last book, even if it exceeds 300k words. How things change when you show the money rather than the art…

Despite the incident with books 4 & 5, Ruocchio found a way through and now the series is set to achieve whatever goals were initially planned. There’s a well established consensus that book 1 to 3 are on a upward trend, with the third book being considered exceptionally good. That book 4 is bleak, that book 5 is weaker because of what already explained, and when Ruocchio started to write book 6 he decided that he would at least try doing his best to surpass the third book. He mentions this in interviews, of how he didn’t want to simply leave that third book as the apex of the series, giving a sense that everything following it could be omitted. The success of this goal was debatable (not by me, I’m merely here to write a review of the first, if I’ll ever get to the point and not get drown in this ever-growing premise), but I respect the lucidity of the goal. I respect the writer, the plan, I’m onboard. And at the time I was looking for space opera that was ambitiously “large.” Which is not something easy to find in sci-fi, outside of Peter Hamilton. Fast forward to the summer, I then moved to three completely different authors: Greg Egan, Peter Watts, and Alastair Reynolds. But this is a story for a different time.

I am a reader (and writer, apparently) of infinite prologues. I enjoy dwelling in the sidetracks. I enjoy the slow burns. As a premise, Ruocchio was doing the right things: he had an ambitious plan, he DELIVERED it with a wordcount to show, no matter if good or bad, there was a definite upward trend to look forward to. And it was the wide-ranging space opera I wanted to read about. These were the main movers for me, but I started reading as a VERY skeptical and jaded reader.

What is this book truly about, then? Well, it is all in the first page. Nope, not that first page of chapter 1 with that pompous beginning “Light. The light of that murdered sun” bla bla… I mean the page before (actually two). The “acknowledgments.” It’s that page that becomes a pompous introduction that indeed sets the tone for everything that would follow. Now that I’m done with the book I know that the initial intuition was correct. I read that whole, lengthy and rhetorical page, only to then turn to the first page of chapter one to read THE SAME THING AGAIN, but now… fictional.

If I were to list every family member to whom I owe some depth of gratitude, I would have to publish a genealogy, so here’s a short list: to Uncle John, for his help understanding contracts; to Brian, for reading the book before anyone else in the family; to Uncle Pete, for indulging my requests for artwork when I was little and for showing me it was possible to be an artist and a success in life; and to my mother’s mother, Deslan, who bought me my copy of The Lord of the Rings, which along with Star Wars made me want to tell these stories. And to everyone else, for being truly the best family—and a better family than I truly deserve.

I had all the education you might expect the son of a prefectural archon to have. My father’s castellan, Sir Felix Martyn, taught me to fight with sword, shield-belt, and handgun. He taught me to fire a lance and trained my body away from indolence. From Helene, the castle’s chamberlain, I learned decorum: the intricacies of the bow and the handshake and of formal address. I learned to dance, to ride a horse and a skiff, and to fly a shuttle. From Abiatha, the old chanter who tended the belfry and the altar in the Chantry sanctum, I learned not only prayer but skepticism and that even priests have doubts. From his masters, the priors of the Holy Terran Chantry, I learned to guard those doubts for the heresy they were. And of course there was my mother, who told me stories: tales of Simeon the Red, Cid Arthur, and Kasia Soulier. Tales of Kharn Sagara. You laugh, but there is a magic in stories that cannot be ignored.

Those first few pages, the framing structure established by the fictional author in a later stage of life, read too much like rhetorical hogwash, so I moved onward to the actual beginning of the story. My original skepticism was a problem here, because I still wasn’t sure of the nature of what I was going to read, and whether or not I’d embrace it. I was looking for Dune, because that’s the kind of expectation set up by countless other reviews, but it was only some very vague, very superficial imitation. This book and Dune both start with a training duel and the presentation of some characters in the role of mentors, but whereas Dune is already, from the very beginning, thick with meaning and depth, here I could only find a similar shape but stripped entirely of that depth. The main character’s family deals with the production of an important resource, in Dune it’s the spice and all it implies, here it’s uranium. And, while fundamental in the scope of this economy, it’s just that. Fuel. There’s obviously nothing wrong about this whole set up, but the book itself explicitly evokes Dune in its initial motions, only to then trigger an upset because it only take what’s pointless and superficial, and none of its depth.

I was mentioning that training duel session because it exemplifies some issues I had directly with the prose and especially with the descriptive parts. The writer attention seems to wander aimlessly without order or logical sense. At some point during that duel it is mentioned that the walls or some window (here I’m quoting by memory, it’s not important to be accurate) started to vibrate, because some ship was landing outside. Since this detail was completely out of context, I immediately deduced this was some clever foreshadowing intended to signal the arrival of someone important whom we’d be going to meet in the next scene… But nope. It was just an anonymous ship landing without consequence.

Later in the book, but not by much, the main character is assaulted, in a scene that would have been quite dramatic but only in retrospective. The mind-focus constantly wanders off:

The next street I found wound up and to the right, its limestone-and-glass facades curving around and artfully grown over with grape vines, though it was the wrong time of year for them to bear fruit.

Then he gets mugged:

My breath was knocked from my body, and I struck the paving stones with a grunt, my long knife under me. My back ached, and it was all I could do to get my arms under me and rise to my knees.

And the mind goes:

Too-black hair fell into my face, and suddenly I understood the utility of Crispin’s shorter style.

He got attacked by some biker, so this description follows:

the primitive petroleum engine belching poison into the air.

And when you get assaulted with an imminent risk of death, where goes the mind?

Where he had gotten the thing – from some guild motor pool or back-alley deal – I never knew.

How is it relevant the provenience of a bike, and its owner, that we will never see again? And then:

The pipe also must have been what had struck me down. But it was the man’s face that caught my attention. The left nostril had been clipped, sliced up to the bone so that the thing gaped awfully in the light of the burning streetlamps. And on his forehead, text proclaimed the man’s crime in angry black letters: ASSAULT.

Call it subtle, will you? Again some pages later, but still in this first section of the book (chapter 12) the chapter starts with a paragraph dealing with a number of considerations about possible avenues to leave the planet. This paragraph ends and without any sort of transition it completely switches theme, resuming considerations about what happened in the last page of the previous chapter. It’s just a very jarring, complete shift from the previous paragraph. You’d expect to follow the train of thoughts, but instead you find yourself on completely different tracks. Along with some silly, convoluted lines that read like parodies:

I had hoped Kyra might share whatever childish hopes I had

I thought I was different. I had not thought that I could be no different.

I get what it means. These examples aren’t especially meaningful or especially bad, but I’m using them here to give some examples of the way I felt reading every single page. A sense of “wrongness” that permeates the prose. On goodreads I was documenting my reading progress and wrote “there are descriptions distracted by trivialities, at the wrong time. Dialogues have all wrong timing and content…” It was as if fighting with obsessive, intrusive thoughts the whole time. The density of the prose, the overwrought style didn’t give it a sense of depth and meaning, but of enhanced superficiality. Something constantly offbeat. But at the same time I also realized that a big problem wasn’t the writing, it was me. Because I was constantly dividing myself, and so distracting myself. I wasn’t simply reading, but I was “judging.” I was trying to read and at the same time observing myself in the act of reading. Constantly wondering and second-guessing if there was something wrong in the writing, or just me trying to pick up a fight with the book itself. I was caught in this overthinking and I couldn’t get away, I couldn’t ease into the book because of this constant internal split. Observing the act of observation, to catch what was wrong in it.

I certainty couldn’t go on like that for 600 pages, and I didn’t. I don’t know if the writing improved, or if I simply adapted and eased in. But the situation got better, very slowly but steady as if going through a regular sloped trajectory. But I still wasn’t in good terms with the book, at all. I knew from reviews to expect a “slow start”, and that it would get better around 200/250 pages, but when I got there, the book got actually worse for me. I started to get the idea that this wasn’t going to be a good experience in the end. But now I’m writing from the perspective of someone who read the whole book, and I know I have a rather positive opinion of it.

I’m trying to avoid spoilers, but in this case what’s written in the back cover still has to take place when you have read HALF the book. I mentioned that, around page 250, I got to the point where most other readers say the story “picks up”, but since this part corresponds to when the main character enters the gladiator arenas, I expected that this is where the story settled. And I couldn’t care less of reading about some pointless battles written in the style completely devoid of tension. Thankfully none of that happens, even these scenes come and go in a few pages, and once again the scene shifts. At around this middle point of the book I got on peaceful terms with the prose, and I was alright with the nature of the story as well. The main character, while never quite endearing, became “readable”, as in making sense, including the constant sidetracks of thoughts. But more on this later.

The point is to wrap up this first part of the book and figure out what happened. In many cases I read people complaining about a “slow start” but I think the problem is the opposite: it’s way, way too fast. This apparent contradiction is obviously not one. The first part of the book, stretching over 200 pages, is constantly switching scenes. Not only the “circumstance” around the main character change, but also the surrounding cast of companion characters constantly shifts. Every time it’s a change of scenery and faces. Every time, characters that seemed important, richly described, get moved off the page never to reappear, and a brand new cast shows up to get a similar treatment. This creates a reading fatigue because why do I need to absorb all these names and details when these dudes are going to fall off the edge of fiction in the next ten or twenty pages? Why do I need to put effort absorbing a whole new set up, with the promise it won’t even last two chapters? What is truly important in this story? Where is it even going? It’s almost picaresque, but where the single episodes simply aren’t strong enough, interesting enough to hold up on their own. Too fast, too inconsequential, too random happenstances.

The problem of “nothing happens” is precisely that everything happens so fast that it’s emptied of any consequence. It’s all a blur (despite I was reading very slowly and attentively). This whole first chunk of the book is like a series of completely different short stories that are glued together, whose only common feature is of sharing the narrator. Each one of them could have been, potentially, its whole book. But there’s no time, it’s an ever changing of scenes. Now, I’m quite wary of deducing things that are impossible to deduce, but my best guess is that my own problem with the prose, and of the whole first section for both its structure and plot, could be caused by excessive editing. I get the feel that maybe Ruocchio tinkered with the beginning of this book for a very long time. That entire sections, and then line by line, the text has been cut and pasted, moved around, reassembled. And the final result of that process has been one that gives it that fragmented feel overall. Of things that have been compressed, robbing them of the natural flow of the prose and writer intention. Of a thought that moves in harmony with its environment, rather than being pulled in every direction at once. It’s as if an original draft was filtered over and over and over, until only nonsensical fragments remained.

Thankfully, the structure eases, along with the writing, plot, characters and everything else. Not with the gladiator arena, but at some slightly later point, 300 pages in, almost perfectly the halfway point in the book. Once again most characters are brushed off, and they continue to churn until the very end of the book, to be honest, but this process overall settles progressively. Characters linger, more and more. The story finds some vague unifying theme. It all starts to breathe a little more. And have space to do so rather than constantly pulling the rug under one’s feet.

The good parts of this book, in this second half, are probably ones that don’t sound that good when explained. The Dune-like introduction to the setting is “what if Paul Atreides was born into House Harkonnes, and was more like Anakin Skywalker instead?” That part doesn’t last long, as already mentioned with the constant context shift. So, again, the problem wasn’t in the potential of the idea, but that not much is done with it. Same for all the following fragments. But at the same time what surfaces is this quirky main character that you cannot quite pinpoint. I wasn’t sure while reading, and am still not sure whether this effect is deliberate or not, as a writer intent. Hadrian is not “likeable.” He’s stuck up, kind of annoying. His narrating voice is slightly pedantic. Is Ruocchio trying to write a nuanced, off-putting character that doesn’t want to be an immediate fan favorite, or he’s trying but failing? The strong morality at the base of the character is meant as a wide arc that span the whole series, but is certainly intended to ground the character in a positive way. At the beginning is like the character comes out good and likeable because of the contrast of how despicable everyone around him is. But in the end it’s quirkiness of the narrating voice that holds the interest.

When his “love interest” arrives on the scene, Ruocchio casts such an immense spotlight that I couldn’t avoid thinking “oh please, can you try LESS?” So corny and cliche to become immediately cringe.

Valka’s laugh was a deep, musical sound that escaped her chest from somewhere near her heart. It was not the laugh of some churlish courtier, trained to demure and girlish precision. No, she laughed like a storm cloud, like the sea. And she had broken on my grim demeanor like a wave against the sea wall at Devil’s Rest.

Enough to break the book right at that point. But the thing is that this character (Valka) gets written immediately as typical and cliche, but she’s not a typical love interest. The description is, but not the character. It’s as if Valka too is slightly askew, colliding with what you would expect, so creating a contrast that stays interesting through the rest of the book.

The main character, Hadrian, Valka, but also more of the cast around them, being oddballs makes them interesting enough to follow and sustain the story. As the book moves into more of its second half, as the plot settles and finds a common theme, it starts signaling its own identity. There is a wide ranging mystery to solve, but it’s faint, more like an intellectual puzzle than immediate necessity. All this, on the whole, gives the shape of the story an even more introvert angle. A personal intellectual obsession rather than action driven or plot driven. The story slows down but improves. I’m trying to avoid spoilers but as I describe the latter part of the book even the mention of the tone, of what is or isn’t there is a GIANT SPOILER, so beware. In the last 100 pages the plot and overall mystery picks up and gets more into focus. This is what then defines the whole book in retrospective, because to be honest there’s very little “space opera” here. We are in space only for an handful of pages, entirely irrelevant, and the whole of the story takes place in a series of different environments, but amount to a limited series of rooms, in the end. It’s very much “boots on the ground”, but also gives it its “bottom up” perspective. From the personal to the wider ranging. What truly defines the whole book and the characters is an anthropological perspective. An human perspective, rather than a worldly one. For all the attempts by Ruocchio at claiming aliens as truly alien, they are just as alien as actors wearing suits and elaborate make-up in Star Trek, and not entirely unintended. And so the theme becomes an insight into human nature, and does this fairly well the more it engages with this core and leaves behind its inconsequential conflict of other interests.

I saw a fragment of a video where Ruocchio was criticizing something about Herbert, as if claiming that his story would be a reaction of something that Herbert didn’t execute quite correctly. I didn’t watch further because I didn’t want to abstract the themes out of the book, before reading first. But this helped to set all the wrong expectations. Important writers are there TO BE challenged. That’s fine. Herbert deals with philosophy and even metaphysics, competently and upfront. This book doesn’t even reach 5%, or even 2% of the profundity of Dune, but it doesn’t even try. The challenger didn’t even show up to the fight. As with Bakker, you can complain about something you wanted to be in the book, that isn’t there, or you can simply comment on what the book tries to be. In this case Ruocchio hasn’t failed at all, simply because he didn’t try going there. This one has none of the metaphysical depth of Dune, nor it tries to. We’ll see what comes after.

But the philosophy that is there feels more like quotations you give at parties to look smart, rather than real philosophy. More evocative poetry and courtesies than philosophy. Including some magical thinking that probably shows too much of Ruocchio’s own magical beliefs:

We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom – these are as much parts of our universe as light and gravity. The ancients called them gods, for we are their creatures, shaped by their winds. Sift the sands of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred.

Just… no. Not the textbook dualism again. There are two languages, but one world.

This sets the tone. As long the philosophy stays anthropological, then it’s fine. The human angle is well done, without going too far. The interest Hadrian takes in the other forms of life and their expression is endearing and sounds true compared to the rest. And so that part of the book becomes more interesting and stronger. On one hand I knew the book being so incredibly popular that I expected somehow it would become just heroic action scenes in the arena. Something to gain that type of hype. And instead it grew… quiet (forgive the pun if you are in the know.) At page 354, we are well past the halfway point, chapter 52 is titled “little talks”, and it’s not even euphemism. The story slows down while it gains more of an introspective, searching angle. A scientific inquiry matched with more nuanced characters and interaction.

The last 100 pages, as I said, bring more the theme into focus, but always matching this intellectual angle of careful examination. I didn’t know if to expect surprises and plot twists from the end (spoilers again), but there were none. The plot languidly follows the already projected course, almost effortlessly. I got soured by the torture scenes, but that’s more my own sensibility (I can go through Bakker’s horrors without worry, this part annoyed me, instead, because of its more clinical execution). I didn’t quite like the final part, because the writer wants the tension high even if there’s no reason for it. Reading through it was a bit eye rolling because it felt quite forced. But the ending itself is executed very well. It does its job: it closes the whole chapter represented by this book, even giving substance to what would be otherwise an inconsequential sequence of unrelated stories, and sets the course for something entirely new, as the context for the following. A significant shift of context that creates the curiosity to go immediately read about it. (though the immediate mention of an unnecessary, upcoming adversary felt out of place and again too cliche)

If for most of the book we have fragments of scenes, and characters that come on the stage only to disappear again, creating a constant renegotiation of premises and so a growing distrust at putting the effort to learn about all of that, it’s Hadrian himself that strings these otherwise unrelated episodes into something that feels cohesive. His internal landscape is the link. The “magic” (see above) of the story. It’s never necessary to the plot or the story, but Hadrian constantly keeps bringing up those characters and events that would be otherwise forgotten. They don’t become relevant again, but Hadrian clings to those memories so stubbornly that he manages to cement their importance even for the reader. Hadrian’s own focus gives importance to what isn’t, FORCES that attention from the reader, going even against the flow of the story. This kind of BACKWARDS momentum is what I consider the main quality of the whole book. That it doesn’t give up about what came before. That it never fully moves on.

One of the most interesting character is Anais. Like Valka she’s painted as a complete cliche. A naive, airhead princess. And she’s never given a chance. Yet, like Valka, she doesn’t quite fit her mold, and her COMPLETE absence from the last part of the book gives her substance. Because it would take immense courage and maturity to simply step back. Her absence grants her the upper path. Hadrian flight from her is the flight of a coward.

While reading this book I had to course-correct a lot of my expectations, both negative and positive. In the end my response to the book is very positive, and going back I’d have far less scruples about whether engaging or not, whether it would be worthwhile or not. The whole point was to read something outside of my perimeter, so it wouldn’t make sense to use my usual yardstick. This is also very easy to recommend to other readers, in a similar way of Sanderson for fantasy, but better than Sanderson as a more grounded and thoughtful read. For me, a lot depends on where this story goes. Already for this book, the whole trajectory is able to lift all that came before, not incredibly so, but in a noticeable way. It cast a better light even on the first half that I criticized up here. Hadrian held it up as a whole. But I’m not sure Ruocchio could go and write effortlessly something entirely different. In this I join the majority of other reviewers, the strength of this writing seems directly bound to a very specific style of character, rather than the result of a writer and his skills, seems more the result of Ruocchio himself. It’s a sort of narrowing cage, that is up to Ruocchio to defy. But I’m also sure he’s already well aware of all this. And he doesn’t need to prove anything, same as all of us.

(This “review” really didn’t need to be this long… I’m exhausted once again.)