Publishing Industry Blinders

This is just an unplanned extra, not very relevant.

Today I received a not especially important book order. I wouldn’t be writing about it. It contains the latter three books by Ruocchio, Kingdoms of Death, Ashes of Men, Disquiet Gods, just to have them all before the last one comes out in November (but I’ll then wait a year for that once, since I think I have some cheaper trade paperbacks, I think?), then The Will of the Many, by James Islington, and the last is Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young, which is the “stick out like a sore thumb” in this group.

When I opened the package I realized that something didn’t look quite right. All the books are actually okay, only Miss MacIntosh is a bit battered, but nothing very serious. The first visible was Disquiet Gods… and it was much larger than expected.

I’m the one who gathers lots of information before picking up books, one of the factual elements is wordcount, and I always look at wordcount for long series. They tell a lot of the “shape” of the story. So when I pick up Disquiet Gods, I know already pretty much everything about this series, outside of details of the plot (tho I ended up picking a couple of bad spoilers). This book, the 6th, is indeed close to the largest, up to this point, at 282k, but not so comically large compared to the rest. The third is 285k. Yet this 6th is almost TWICE as thick!

The other two, 4th and 5th, were instead very thin, compared. This is in line with expectations, as they are shorter books, both at slightly less than 200k, and because they were originally one volume that was split because of shitty publisher impositions. These two books (4&5) exactly match the format of book 2 and 3 that I already have. They are the European/UK editions, with the much more uglier and anonymous covers, by Head of Zeus (not the illustrations, the paperback editions). In that weird paperback mid format that is quite larger than mass market, but smaller than the default hardcover/trade paperback. I get these merely because they cost much, MUCH less to the insanely overpriced US “cheap” paperbacks.

EDIT: I’ve now realized why the latter 3 Ruocchio’s books are much shittier in quality compared to the first 3, despite all of them being UK editions. The first three were published by Gollancz, the other three by Head of Zeus. While Islington’s book is not published by Head of Zeus, but Saga Press, it shares the same actual printer (and rather awful binding and stiff paper), so the bad actor is in common and is “CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY”, whereas Gollancz printed through “Clays LTD, Elcograf S.p.A”. As we know, the bad ones always prevail.

Because, you know, DAW (the US publisher) got bought by some Chinese company, that then proceeded to cancel all mass market versions, gut all the warehouses so that no previous books could be purchased, and then proceeded to almost double the prices for everything produced from that point onward. Capitalism!

By the way, that’s the reason why I had to find the whole series by Michelle West exclusively as used copies. That was DAW too, all books were removed from the market.

Anyway, when I ordered book 3-6 by Ruocchio I was simply expecting of receiving the same edition. All these books were released in a very short time span, that’s one significant feature of this series: seven relatively big books for an ambitious space opera, but fully delivered in a very tight interval of time. Whatever you think about the writing, Ruocchio delivered a complete series without years of delays that typically happen.

So I expect a consistent edition. Whereas, book 4 & 5 indeed respect the format of the previous volumes, but holding them in my hands they don’t feel quite the same. In this case it’s the quality of paper, being more stiffer. The kind of paper that doesn’t really want to bend and prefers keeping its straight planar shape. I mean, it’s not a big deal, but suddenly book 4 & 5 have worse paper.

Then we come to Disquiet Gods. If possible, this one got even more stiffer paper, but it’s when you open it up that it’s ridiculous. All the previous paperbacks have a rather small font than usual, that I still quite enjoyed. I like it more when text on the page has space to breathe, rather than obsessively having eyes constantly move to a new line, and turning pages too quickly because text is very light on the page. So having small text usually meets my preference, and I was completely okay for the format used from book 1, all the way to book 5. And then of course book 6 changes everything. Why not? Book 6 is comically larger in size, because for some completely ABSURD reason they decided to enlarge the font. Not only, if the previous volumes had a page made by 39 lines, this much larger one has only 37 lines on a page.

I’m writing about these pointless details merely because of the LOGICAL ABSURDITY. I just got book 4-5, that in pure wordcount are the shortest books in the series. And they go with the “smaller than average” font. Then you get book 6, which is significantly LARGER in wordcount, and they go with the logically OPPOSITE solution of making the font MUCH LARGER on top of that. So that now you hold a brick of a book in your hand. You put them side by side, and you have the first 5 all relatively matching, then this ogre of a book as volume 6, when in wordcount is actually shorter than the third. It makes no sense, and it also makes one ugly book. If the first 5 have, maybe, slightly smaller than ideal font (but perfect for me), the 6 suddenly goes for bigger than ideal. Right to the other extreme.

Why? It’s all about that. Why? Why you print 5 books in a series with the exact format, then switch to its EXTREME OPPOSITE for the 6th?

Is there a human being, in there, who consciously made that choice? Why?

It’s not an important question. No one really cares. But it’s a question that cannot possibly have a logical answer. But that’s the reason I’m writing this, and why I’m not yet done here.

Let’s pick up The Will of the Many, shall we? This is an immensely popular book that I picked up mostly because of significant peer pressure, as tons of people were and are talking about it. Not so much unlike Ruocchio actually. In both cases there were also a few specific elements I was curious about. So without any rush they end up in a list, and now I ordered a copy since it was rather cheap.

This edition of the Islington book matches, physically, almost perfectly the editions of Ruocchio’s books. The same mid-sized paperback. This one published by Saga Press, with the stylized orange cover. I like the design a lot, really neat, quite elegant, good colors.

And then you open it. I think, for the very first time IN MY LIFE, I don’t think I can actually read this book. I think I’ll have to order a new copy, for fuck sake.

I always complain that the trend in recent years is making text on the page larger and larger. Most books now look like children books, for so comically large they are printed. And I’ve also said that this choice is for me not just aesthetically wrong, but it also affects my reading in practice, because my brain gets distracted by having too short lines constantly interrupting the flow, and turning pages in a way that actively disrupts the moment of the story. Too heavy pages are also equally problematic, because they take the oxygen out, you feel like not moving at all and this makes the read more tiring. But books aren’t new technology, and modernity is ALWAYS A LIE. Meaning that there are really no new solutions you have to find out, only lessons to unlearn, and the well known enshittification.

If I can’t find a logical motivation for the way Ruocchio’s 6th book suddenly disrupts its own format, then, even less, I can fathom how it’s possible to publish this The Will of the Many, with a well designed outside shape… and then you open the pages…

Now… I live in a rather alien dimension where up to this point I still never owned a smartphone. So I’m sorry, I don’t actually have means of taking and posting photos. It’s simply true. This is something that would need to be shown in images.

Description will have to do. Imagine footnotes to a text. Not just average footnotes, but the tiniest footnotes you’ve experienced. The kind of text you need to make effort to parse, to squint.

I did mention this isn’t just another book. It’s one of the most popular and most discussed out there. It’s a big, commercial deal. I’ve also said how the recent trend is to make the font constantly larger. Since it’s the commercial target and trend, whenever you match popularity with the epic genre, you have guaranteed that some 200k, 500-pages standard books get published at over 800 pages bloat-bricks. The trend is making everything much larger than it needs to be.

Imagine the tiniest footnotes, and that becoming the main text on the page for this edition. The absurdity doesn’t end. Imagine the white rectangle of the page, then imagine a much smaller rectangle within, and take all the text in this unreadably tiny footnote-sized font and CRAM IT DOWN to the second tiny rectangle. You obtain a page with MASSIVE EMPTY MARGINS that almost take half of the space on the page, and the actual text, in it’s unreadable miniaturistic font, pasted in the middle as if someone took a picture of the page and then shrunk it down and glued it to the page.

While I’m not a fast reader who read thousands of books in my life, I’ve held in my hands a rather huge number of them. This is I think the smallest text I’ve seen in a commercial book.

It makes NO SENSE. It’s UGLY AS SIN in its aesthetic form, because of so much empty space wasted, and because of way too small to be read in practice.

And the real question is, once again, HOW. Why?

How is this possible in practice? How is this the result of conscious choice? Not only it disrupts ALL marketing trends, but it produces something universally unreadable, for the edition that, being the cheapest, you expect being more widely read. Then, how could this come to be? I hold in my hands the equivalent of an impossible object. A metaphysical piece that is in contradiction with all the laws of reality. Impressive.

So we come to “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling”, this one being not quite a brick of a book as a gravestone, being larger in format. It’s a big, wider, blunt (and heavy!) rectangle. Feels quite cheap, actually. Like the “printed by Amazon” books, that have quite decent paper, but still feel like, I don’t know, just very plain. Turn the page, after an introduction, you get to Chapter 1 and page numbers starting from page 3, then you flip it to the end, go back to the actual last page written, and it’s page 1320. Nice. Then you can just open the book randomly, any page will do…

Because this is the literal wall of unbroken text. On every page. For 1300 of them. There is no spacing of any kind (there is occasionally one broken line). Believe me, it’s quite a visual experience.

Wordcount is 672k. Outside of Bottom’s Dream, which is its own class of alien object, this is the biggest single volume I own (and that I’ve seen). But it’s actually nice because it’s not a tiny font. Comfortably readable. Yes, you can print books that almost reach 700k. No you don’t need to split them. No you don’t need any special, extremely rare and expensive “printing technology” (I swear, this has been truly claimed by publishers as an excuse). No, in order to publish such books you don’t need to use unreadably tiny fonts. This one uses a font that is much larger than all the books I’ve just received. Islington’s book’s the REAL problem here, 650 pages leaving all wasted space at the margins to cram all text in the center while using footnote-sized font.

I ordered Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, despite being one interest and curiosity of mine but not exactly a current priority, merely out of frustration because Schattenfroh, while out already in the US, is unavailable in the EU. My preorder is morosely stuck sitting there.

Ruocchio can wait, I only wanted to have all the remaining volumes. Islington, I was curious to read at least a few pages, but I’ll have to order a different edition. I guess I’ll start with Miss MacIntosh, then. Main current read is “Sons of Darkness” by Gourav Mohanty, it was another leap of (not) faith, we’ll see. I already own the second volume. If I get to it, it’s possible I’ll write about it here with both volumes taken as one, because even if I’m just 100 pages into the first, it feels too fleeting even to form an opinion. Polar opposite of Hobb, where within 100 pages you already know perfectly what you’re reading.

(how did I get to write over 2k words on this?)

P.S.
Oh fuck, I forgot. I meant to write about another absurdity of the Islington book: the prologue is at the end.

No, not a printing error. There’s a short comment by the author as a partial explanation. It looks like the prologue was cut by the publisher “for pacing reasons” and then the author got to include it as an “APPENDIX A” (there’s no appendix B) because he thought it too important to be left out and “of everything we took out, it was by far the part I was the saddest to see go”. He mentions this cut was done “correctly” though this note is written in February 2024, so I deduce it was not part of the first edition. Being 10 pages long, no, I don’t think “pacing” can be a logic reason for the cut.

It’s just the usual publishing industry. Doing things that make no sense. Just because. Cutting 10 pages to then paste them at the end of a second edition, great choice. Yet couldn’t even do basic layout that could be read. We just don’t have the technology to print books anymore. Thumbs up.

I was saying, elsewhere, the KPOP DEMON HUNTER, “Golden” song. What does it tell us about “autism announcement”. You wonder: come on, how can these be possibly related, now?

They are because I’m asking myself questions. How is it possible that a fucking POP SONG has so much technical expertise and quality crammed into it. Experts who know what they are doing. Who worked all their life to study and perfect those skills. For a fucking pop song. And then we have selected the MOST INCOMPETENT AND DROOLING FUCKWITS for our actual governments. Who decide on the literal life of entire populations. How is this possible. The skill pumped into a pop song, and the incompetence pumped into the government. How is it possible. How can this make sense. How can this be anything other than just the laughter of a deranged god.

Assassin’s Apprentice –
Robin Hobb

People are intimidated by a man who acts with no apparent regard for consequences.

I was some 60 pages from the end of the book in June, but then it meant I had to write something about it here, so I put it on hold while starting to read tons of other books through the summer in a very scattershot way, and here we are in September. (I also write this while having the “Golden” Kpop Demon Hunter song stuck in my head, somehow, creating a rather unprecedented cognitive dissonance)

This book cover shown is the edition I’ve read, and owned for roughly… 18 years. When I picked it back up, this year, I found that there were some of my notes scribbled in the first pages. As I usually do, I buy books and read 50-60 pages, then shelve them for a later point when I actually decide to commit for a full read. I’m mentioning this because it’s part of the “review” of this book. The reason why it took so long is because it never became a priority. Robin Hobb was and continues to be among the first tier of big names, but for me it lacks a stronger hook. As long my curiosity was quenched, at the time, to read a bit of sample and so being able to fit neatly in its mental space, well, there wasn’t any reason to go back to it, same as there wasn’t any real reason to put it aside as something I’m not interested about. It just waited quietly.

But on top of that there was also some active discouragement, because I’ve kept reading about the books, other readers talking about it. I know the general structure of the whole series. The first trilogy about Fitz, then the second trilogy that works as a separate section of the story, out to the sea on some weird sentient ships, to then return to a second trilogy on Fitz. To then find what’s considered its weakest point in a following duology/trilogy that got split in four books, only to then return to Fitz for a final trilogy that once again binds the whole series among the greatest. But accordingly to the readers, the first trilogy isn’t exactly smooth. Everyone agrees that the first book is a strong one, but then it moves on a downward trend, with the third book considered the worst. But also the size of the books. This first one is tiny if compared to standards of epic fantasy, but the second is already almost double the size of the first, and the third adds another 250 or so pages on top of that. The “weight” of the story is massively unbalanced toward the latter volumes. This is not atypical, as stories grow in the making, but here it seems readers didn’t enjoy the journey. Outside of the four books later in the series, the second and third are considered the lowest point in the whole thing. From the outsider perspective of a new reader, this means that you get to the good parts of the story only with the second trilogy, and only to the real core with the THIRD, because this is still mainly Fitz deal, and you don’t get to its strongest part until you get to the 7-9 books… It’s one giant delay of expectations. At that point you’d be at more than 1.5 million words into the series, to finally get the “real deal.”

If I picked this up this year it was mainly because it started surfacing again and again on random youtube videos (no it’s not the algorithm, I was already following these channels, for some reason there was some sort of resurgence of Robin Hobb in 2025). And then because of this review of the third book:

There were parts of the book that I felt it dragged a lot or that I did not find them very important plot wise but being used to Hobb’s prose and slow building I hoped that things would get more interesting as the story progressed. Some new characters helped to keep me interested at the tedious parts. Kettle or Starling for example. I am in love with Starling. And yes I was right. The final third of the book was a testament to Hobb’s beautiful melancholic writing. Eerie and mysterious to the very end with so many interesting characters conjoining to the heavily emotional aftermath.

Standing at end of the whole story I feel like Fitz was indeed the narrator and not the main character. This could be Verity’s story. Maybe it is. There is little significance to that. There is a certain magic in Hobb’s style that captivates you along its slow burning and mysterious rhythms and you get seriously attached without even noticing. I hope the Liveship Traders series that follows will keep me interested because I do not feel like waiting for so many books to read again about Fitz, The Fool and all those people.

P.S: Emotionally speaking its a 5 stars

I was coming from Modesitt, where I’ve experimented how the trick to enjoy a slow book is to slow down with it, despite your brain seems to pull in the opposite direction. It worked for Modesitt, and worked equally well for Robin Hobb. Despite it’s not a long book and there’s actually plenty of plot, the pacing is still very slow. But as the quote above states, the slow pacing here isn’t a weak point to overcome, it’s where the whole value is. You don’t look ahead to anticipate where the story will go, you stay in the present. The characters are vivid in the present time, with only a tiny dissonance, because the book is written from a melancholic perspective of future Fitz, introducing each chapter with a short section in italics. But that outside voice is very delicate and never directly interferes with the main story.

The idea coming from the above quote opened for me a new possibility, like a key to unlock a gate. Those second and third books (in perspective, it’s all about perception here, because I don’t know if I’ll ever read them, in practice) weren’t anymore a wearing mountain to overcome, to eventually get to something better later, but an hidden destination. A treasure inside that mountain. To slow down, to be in the present, within the page you’re reading, rather than looking ahead to see how many pages before the chapter ends. The following books, getting bigger, would be about forgetting the imminence of the backcover, of the book ending to start another. But to lose yourself instead within its limitless space.

This was the romantic view, but it carried me spectacularly well through this first book. It did work in practice. And it works because the primary quality of this book for me is not the characters, nor directly the emotional involvement that seems to win most readers. For me it was purely the prose. A quality of writing that sets itself from the first page follows an impossible straight line to the last page. This is a book to enjoy because of how well it is written. And it is prose first and foremost, with direct dialogue taking a backseat. It’s not what most people prefer, but it matches perfectly my own instead. The prose is DENSE. I love it. Same as I mentioned recently loving just the same Forge of Darkness by Erikson, compared to his other books, also because his prose gets a lot more dense.

On the other hand, I find myself mostly confirming my own expectations, in the sense that having read the book didn’t really offer me that much. Outside of the enjoyment in the moment, already mentioned, it’s not a transformative read. I think this book is more a companion than something that shines a beam of light onward, to offer some inspiration. The plot itself is actually, surprisingly, excellent, but from an external perspective not so interesting. If I can praise the prose, I still do think I enjoy more reading Tad Willams. Hobb is probably a slightly better writer, but I’m more interested in what Tad Williams writes. And if I want to get there, I think maybe Michelle West writes characters better than Hobb (but I haven’t read enough, it’s just an initial impression). Like Modesitt, then, there isn’t some external compulsion to read Robin Hobb for me. I just have to make that choice.

It is a slow paced book, but the first 100 or so pages are short scenes separated by significant time jumps. Considering the close perspective of the main character, to carry the story, one may expect that these jumps would be quite jarring, especially when taking place so early, before you have time to sink in. But in practice everything feels smooth and no jump or disconnection is felt. Maybe it’s Fitz own peculiar voice, because I think has a strength by not being especially defined. I’d have expected a very strong personality, very strong characterization. But I think Fitz voice is actually understated. And it works because when something dramatic happens, it’s like there’s no screen. You don’t see melodrama, you don’t see the character screaming in pain, or being in shock. Everything happens in a sort of fatalistic way, it happens so quickly that there’s no time to contain it. These are all traits that you’d expect would work against an effective emotional impact and strong characterization, but that somehow work very well here. Fitz, by being just a kid, gets pushed along by circumstance. He doesn’t really make choices because from the very first moment he’s rejected from his family to be shoved into a new situation he doesn’t control. And he will continue being shoved on by other people having control, this way and that, trying his best to adapt and survive. But certainly not a strong character in the sense of strong personality, or making choices to determine his own future. He’s more like water flowing, and if he survives it’s mostly because some characters around him decide to take care. I think this kind of muted internal voice helps to instead bring up the other characters and places. Making the surrounding pieces more lively. What Fitz isn’t is arrogant. A personality that centralizes and demands attention. In the castle he’s just another boy, who blends in the crowd. Other characters populate plots and events.

Burrich is a character that stays relevant and carries most of the weight, but my favorites were Lady Patience first, and the Fool second, obviously. The Fool is the highest point because he stays a mystery. A mystery that crosses over to the metaphysical. He almost steps out of the story, and I guess it’s one thread that will link the future books. But Lady Patience instead doesn’t have any special feature, she’s indeed just another person within the setting. She relieves tension so effortlessly and she keeps trying to help people make sense. She really tries hard, but sometimes people just can’t be helped. She’s suspended there, fretting constantly to get things right. She’s just the best one out of the bunch.

I mentioned that I took a break of two months before reading the last 60 pages, and it made for quite a surprise because up to that point there had been some understated drama, but it was overall a rather muted experience. A quiet, enjoyable journey where bad things happened, but blended with the rest of the plot. Then everything unravels in just 40 pages. It doesn’t feel rushed, in the sense that the writing gets worse and the plot needed more time, but it really happens all at once, unexpectedly, and there are a series of revelations, one after the other, that you are in a constant state of “wait, what?!”, then again and again. Things move so quickly that if up to this point you were always constantly in sync with Fitz, now Fitz understands things and only has time to confirm something on the page, with me as the reader left completely behind, “wait, how did you figure that out?” Despite the two months delay I was still able to catch most things, but I’m sure a few still escaped me. I thought I was doing well when Fitz reused some words that Lady Patience told him some 60 pages earlier, but then those last 40 pages are a barrage of things coalescing all at once, and tons of hints and seeds scattered casually through the whole book now taking their precise place in the overall puzzle.

Even here it’s not all “perfect.” I’ll mention that it felt quite forced that, early in the book, in the span of just a hundred pages three times bad things happen to fluffy, cute puppies. This is contextual to the story and Fitz, so it has a sort of motivation, but it really does feel like the book didn’t mind taking some shortcuts, to win that emotional effect. It did feel a bit artificially manipulative. Then, as I said all plot that didn’t happen through most of the book, happens all at once at the end. And even there it becomes a giant tangle of references that too neatly match. A god-like alignment of relationships. It’s impressive because it’s perfectly realized, of how much fits together and solves things that seemed to have been abandoned, but there are also some solutions that are quite convenient. And it’s completely baffling that some actions don’t seem to have any other consequence, without spoiling the plot. The aftermath just appears to be absurd. As if the characters shrugged off what happened, and move on just as usual.

This is what it is, for me. There wasn’t a strong compulsion for me to read Hobb, and there still isn’t now. The prose is excellent and there’s just pure enjoyment in reading the book. Can’t do any better. But it does lack a purpose, a main drive that makes the reading something more. For my own fun I could move right to the second book effortlessly, but my reading habits are moved in many different ways by many different things. I don’t really know if I’ll ever get to the second book, considering that it took me eighteen YEARS to read the first…

P.S.
I want to mention that the book is written in first person, but it’s not as much a close perspective as I expected. This early passage at page 21:

I leaned my forehead against his back and felt ill in the brackish iodine smell of the immense water. And that was how I came to Buckkeep.

I wrote a note there, because at that early point Fitz had no exposure to the world, and so wouldn’t have any notion of what a “iodine smell” would be. I was expecting a much more closed perspective there.

These present circumstances

This is a direct follow up to the previous.

I let some time pass because I didn’t want to get stuck writing, even if knowing this severely weakens intent and efficacy (and always consider this here isn’t a dialogue, but just a kind of soapbox where I mostly talk to myself to clarify things for my own use. That’s all. Whoever stumbles on here, they are on their own.). That previous post was written across several hours, and I edited a section later in a way that doesn’t make that much sense. I already intended to return to it.

I mentioned how a month earlier I had randomly stumbled onto another conversation where a Bakker fan couldn’t see anything of value within Erikson’s work. In that case it wasn’t someone arguing in bad faith, and turns out it was one of the old guard on ASOIAF forums. That opinion isn’t especially surprising for me. GRRM’s forum had at the time an ongoing thread dedicated to Bakker, and it made sense for the way Bakker’s series is written and the attention to detail of its worldbuilding to be somewhat closer to GRRM work. In the style of prose, point of view, and structure. It’s somewhat more canonical. And I can understand that Erikson’s work, instead, can be seen as more juvenile and shallow. That’s why I suggest “Forge of Darkness” as an inverse point of view on Erikson’s work. It’s not that “Gardens of the Moon” starts in a way, and then the series takes a sharp turn toward the introspective. The books aren’t at odds with each other. But I understand it’s very easy to miss what in the first book is merely a hidden undercurrent and that later becomes a lot more prominent. You can find the same flavor in that first book, but you need to know where to look. As a first read you’ll most likely miss it entirely. That’s why it takes SEVERAL books to “get” Malazan. It’s something that has always been there, but only slowly comes into focus. You want a book that has that core in focus from page 1 and is unrelenting in its quality? Then Forge of Darkness is precisely that. Then you go back to the main series and you can see how that newfound perspective continues to be valid for all the books in the main series. But you need that sort of “backward” perspective to find value in Malazan. Something that Bakker’s work doesn’t suffer in any way. If anything, it’s a forward perspective, since a lot of what is in the first book informs meaningfully what comes after.

(btw, Werthead, who’s one of the old guard supporters of GRRM, also says this: “His worldbuilding is solid, better than most, but also is full of holes that even people who like the series will poke at out of amusement.” Along with the fact that a lot of the worldbuilding choices were made merely because they seemed “cool.” Only later, as the series developed and the fans started to show a dedication to the tiniest detail, Martin also started to look more closely and take care, so that the world felt more and more like a real place. Even in this case, it was a process. Partially driven by the readers’ expectations and demands more than a pure and uncompromising vision from the very beginning. These projects grow into their own maturity. Bakker being the exception because he’s fully committed from the first page you can read, and never yields.)

But this was a moment of surprises, so I’ll mention this other video I randomly stumbled on. That again defied my own expectations of what I consider plausible. It’s an harmless book tier video from someone who read the whole Malazan series. He ranks most of the later books at the bottom of his tier list. This is not really weird, everyone comments how the books do become slower and heavily introspective in a way that for a lot of readers is too cumbersome. But he also ranks the first book close to the very top. The interesting part is his motivations, and as you can listen in the video, this is a reader who loves the plot. I could say the more shallow layer, that is indeed more prominent in book one and three. Again, nothing surprising because book 3 has always been considered a fan favorite in general. But I just didn’t think it possible that a reader could simply appreciate that one layer in almost total isolation and still feel the whole series worthwhile. I guess these books are so crammed with ideas that even when you embrace a small portion of the whole, for some readers it’s still plenty enough.

For me it still feels unlikely that you can digest Malazan without being “in there.” It’s almost political. I think the books will eventually reject the reader, if the reader denies those forms of empathy and sensibility that the books force. You have to be there, tuned to that type of vision, of the world, of humanity. You can’t glaze over, that’s what the books actively oppose. You can’t brush it off. It makes sense that you see none of it in the first book, and then the second or the third you still get distracted by the more spectacular and louder parts. But eventually the voice demands something of you. You’re either in or out.

It’s not possible to mistake what you’re reading. It’s a filter.

And yet it fails. Spectacularly so.

That first post I pasted as an image, “dissing” Bakker, came from a fan of Erikson. Not just one random fan, but someone who cared enough to run a podcast. And I just can’t understand HOW. How can a work that so explicitly demands for empathy, then completely denies it. How is this not an impossible, implausible contradiction?

Again, I can see someone appreciating Bakker not getting Erikson, because of how it’s written, because of its many “distractions”. But the reverse is downright absurd.

Then we get to the third case, again in the previous post, but I don’t see any worthwhile pattern there and I simply won’t believe it wasn’t arguing in bad faith. What’s curious is that it came from an hardcore GRRM fan. And so our table is set up. We have GRRM fans who hate Bakker, whose fans hate Erikson, whose fans hate Bakker. And whatever other combination you come up with.

Look outside and see a world on fire, filled with hate. And then even our curated “fantasy landscape” is just a mirror. How is this possible? What happened to that filter? What happened to the “power” of fiction? I only see failures here. Writers who spend their life trying to communicate something. And it fails, again and again. Bakker’s searing eloquence, reduced to nothing. Erikson’s pleas, crumbling as rhetoric.

How can you make sense of all of this?

Bakker’s books then become pro-fascism.

Mistaking description for prescription.

Apparently, no, literature won’t save us.

I don’t even usually browse reddit, only randomly stumbled on those two single threads for completely different reasons. I guess it was bad luck.

I’ll archive here one of my own replies, since I give more of my perspective on how I read Bakker:

For ease of clicking, this is the link in that post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjjnZvtwtqA

This one more rambly post is not to be taken as a sort of objective read of Bakker. It’s my own, more subjective interpretation. But even considering that, all I wrote comes directly from what’s written in the book and I always tried to stay away from more speculative thoughts.

One last point I wanted to clarify, and I think I already wrote about in the past. This is a quote from the other guy that was “defending” Bakker:

I still don’t quite agree with what Bakker was doing here. It is indeed what the books seem to say, but it’s not coherent.

“Madness, those parts of him without provenance”

This seem to imply some sort of magical nowhere. But again, it’s not coherent. Madness is merely an artifact of point of view. It’s a layer of interpretation, it’s not “the world.”

I can observe a man going mad, in the sense that his actions appear not being rational, they “don’t make sense.” But not knowing a cause doesn’t equal the fact that a cause does not exist. If some mental illness causes madness, then madness has a rational cause. On this level “madness” is precisely the layer of interpretation, assuming behaviors being always rational.

So actions and choices are interpreted as madness because they APPEAR not having cause. Yet they don’t escape the causal system. They merely escape knowledge of who’s observing: the causes are not evident, explicit. But they still exist within the system.

I still don’t quite understand what Bakker was intending to do, because it really looked like he tried to ascribe madness some kind of metaphysical efficacy. Rather than just another, plain, blind spot.

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.