Category Archives: Blog


Is Gene Wolfe a good writer?

Yes, of course he is. The title is intended to be rhetorical, in this case. But it’s the result of what I’ve asked myself: would I think this as good writing if I didn’t have a giant bias and prejudice, knowing how highly regarded Gene Wolfe is? He is one of those great writers who aren’t simply considered great fantasy writers, but great writers without any other specifics. One of the giants.

Yet, if I do a little shift and try to approach the book without any precondition, as a blank state, the result I get can be quite unexpected.

My problem is mostly with how other readers speak about these books. But then I only read the first two a while ago, then re-read pieces of them here and there, but didn’t finish the series yet (meaning the Book of the New Sun, specifically). I know there should be a type of “Fight Club effect” where something happens at the end so that if you were to start a re-read from the beginning, it would like going through enlightenment, and have a whole new experience. Again, I haven’t read the other two books, so I cannot know, but I’m here feeling at least somewhat skeptical, because what I’m observing, and have observed, doesn’t seem to have that much potential of getting upended. But skepticism obviously isn’t a proof.

Reading is still its own experience. No matter a possible, later revelation, the book is read right here, right now, page by page. For me reading this book, rereading it now, is ALL about reputation. The last few chapters, if I try observing them without bias, have been a total mess. The book is so episodic to be simply “random.” Scenes seems to work more like dreams, being one thing one moment, then warping into a whole different context, with a very tenuous link keeping things coherent. Severian is off to see the world, walks through a city, enters a shop and falls in love with a woman who happens to be there. Spends a few pages explaining how this falling in love has absolutely no explanation, the description of the woman not even flattering. It’s some kind of mystical love, unyielding but completely abstract. Characters are so apathetic to be fascinating like the hypnotized actors in the early Herzog movies. They are moved, rather than moving themselves, as if following some radio instructions that are transmitted right into their brains, but completely unseen and unknown from the outside. Then Severian walks off with this newfound party group, boards a carriage but the driver is mad so they end up in a race and they crash and destroy some kind of church. Where some nuns walk in, completely unphazed, speaking in riddles, stripping naked the woman next to Severian only to walk off again, declaiming some random foreshadowing. After having destroyed the church, with no other consequence, Severian and the woman exit and look around.

It’s literally a dreamworld. Every scene is meaningful in some opaque symbolic way, but makes zero sense at a basic rational level. It’s all coated in religious mysticism, but since everything is so warped, it’s like trying to decode some alien dream, where you have no means to connect symbol and meaning. And Wolfe gets a pass because it’s “weird” fiction. The dying earth genre where meaning itself, like the essence of culture, has been lost and forgotten. And so you only have pieces left, that maybe have great meaning, but whoever was able to extract that meaning has died ages ago.

This is a tiny excerpt, nothing meaningful in any way, but while reading it I simply though: this is poorly written (and of course it cannot be true). And so decided to write this that you’re reading.

The sunlight was blinding; it seemed as if we had stepped from twilight into full day. Golden particles of straw swam in the crisp air about us.

“That’s better,” Agia said. “Wait a moment now and let me get my bearings. I think the Adamnian Steps will be to our right. Our driver wouldn’t have gone down them – or perhaps he would, the fellow was mad – but they should take us to the landing by the shortest route. Give me your arm again, Severian. My leg’s not quite recovered.”

We were walking on grass now, and I saw that the tentcathedral had been pitched on a champian surrounded by semi-fortified houses; its insubstantial belfries looked down upon their parapets. A wide, paved street bordered the open lawn, and when we reached it I asked again who the Pelerines were.

“The sunlight was blinding; it seemed as if we had stepped from twilight into full day.” This line is just that, repetition. It’s not especially bad, it’s just plain and maybe you’d expect something, as the beginning of a chapter. Wolfe loving his semicolons (parentheses too). It makes sense, they were inside some kind of church, so you expect some diffused, low lights, and since I think it’s still morning you expect them coming out would indeed look like they transitioned between twilight and day. But then: “Golden particles of straw swam in the crisp air about us.” Particles of straw, so you mean them being similar to dust motes, more visible maybe, but they crashed and where inside a little while, whatever “debris” wouldn’t simply stay in the air, and instead what can possibly stay in the air would be really small, really light. So… when you come from a gloomy place into “blinding sunlight” it would mean that brightness is greatly enhanced. That you have to strain to keep your eyes open, until they get used to that brightness. How would you notice some floating straw particles suspended in the air? Usually dust motes are completely invisible unless there’s a very specific contrast, but you aren’t going to see them in a bright place, even worse when the scene is so bright to have blinded you.

“That’s better,” Agia said. “Wait a moment now and let me get my bearings. I think the Adamnian Steps will be to our right. Our driver wouldn’t have gone down them – or perhaps he would, the fellow was mad – but they should take us to the landing by the shortest route. Give me your arm again, Severian. My leg’s not quite recovered.” So they walk out as if this “Agia” hadn’t been just stripped naked by some creepy cultists, turn the page, new chapter, everything already forgotten, and you get the character in all its precise characterization: a robotic voice, starting a whole monologue. “The fellow was mad”, oh yes, sure, just mention it casually, it’s completely pointless anyway, lost in the past. Severian, help me walking, my leg isn’t operating correctly, must be some crossed wires. This is some 100 pages into the book and dialogue has never shown any emotion. Just prompts of automatons barely aware of each other. They could as well be speaking at walls.

“We were walking on grass now, and I saw that the tent-cathedral had been pitched on a champian surrounded by semi-fortified houses;” This is obviously Wolfe again. What the fuck is a “tent-cathedral”, what a “champian”, but especially, what would even “semi-fortified houses” look like? Because “house” here is meaningless as a word. Houses can have any shape and styles, across the world what is considered a normal “house” never looks quite alike. In a description I’m meant to somewhat visualize the scene, and here Wolfe has a world that is “weird” by definition, it has no style because it’s like a collapse of culture, in the future where everything is an amalgam, a blob, in language as well. I’m probably even lucky because being of a latin language origin, these weird words he uses should be likely more familiar to me than they can be to a random english reader. So at least for me they can carry some borrowed meaning. Yet, if you can’t find any root to these words, they can be evocative in their eerie way, but they are also completely meaningless. They don’t carry anything. It’s as if you’re reading a sequences of this is “weird”, then there’s that “weird” and over there more “weird”. If you cannot attach any nuance to every different world, then every of those words becomes a placeholder for nothing. Maybe imagination-filled holes, but still holes without meaning.

“A wide, paved street bordered the open lawn, and when we reached it I asked again who the Pelerines were.” What’s wrong with this, you certainly are asking. Yeah, it’s all perfectly fine. They came out of the church, Agia asked Severian to help her walk since she’s limping and he didn’t notice, so deeply in love with her he was. Have you seen any concern dawning on his face? Didn’t they quite get both killed just five minutes ago? So they walk, until Severian inexplicably wakes up from his slumber…

“Who the fuck are the Pele(g)rines?” Yes, indeed.

Gene Wolfe had a time-traveling machine in his possession and The Book of the New Sun was written by ChatGPT.

On Malazan reading orders

I wanted to comment on a blog post by Werthead and reading orders in general. Following the general premise that a reading order should simply maximize reader enjoyment as a first read. You could then rearrange orders, following plotlines or chronology, but at that point an experienced reader is able to make their own choice. So I think it makes only sense to discuss reading orders as a suggestion to a new reader.

In general, Malazan reading orders aren’t very controversial, or especially important, there are discrepancies between different lists, but they aren’t a big deal.

For that reason, I don’t really disagree with Werthead, but there are things in his statements that aren’t wrong, but certainly aren’t as final as he says. A different analysis is possible.

Starting from the most important:
The Tor list suggests starting with the Kharkanas Trilogy novels Forge of Darkness and Fall of Light. This is really not a good idea. The Kharkanas Trilogy is a prequel in the purest form, working better when you have knowledge of the characters from chronologically later on. In addition, Fall of Light may be the most divisive Erikson novel published to date. Having it as the second book in the series I think would be a major mistake, as I’ve seen that novel drive off twenty-plus-year veterans of the series (some have returned, now that The God is Not Willing and No Life Forsaken have been more warmly received).

I don’t know what Tor list he refers to, and I would be worried at some list that simply suggest reading the prequel first, but I also think that the rest of what he says is partial. I am one of those who would suggest reading the FIRST prequel book, only, as the very first book to read. But only in very specific cases. There are motivations to consider.

Yes, the prequel books are “divisive”, but there’s a significant selection bias at work, here. He says that veteran readers didn’t receive well the prequels, but then returned for the sequels. What he doesn’t consider in this context is that there ALSO are tons, and tons of readers who picked up Gardens of the Moon, and dropped it, either midway or at the end, and never read anything else by the author. NONE of these readers will ever read the prequel, whereas none of the readers who read the prequels HAVE NOT not-read all the main series.

Can you see the giant problem with that?

The first book is already a significant selection gate. The real problem is that it’s a REALLY BAD selection gate. All long series select their own readers from the very beginning, same as it happens with TV serials. You start from the first, and depending on how you like it, you keep going or stop. For major fantasy series, from Martin to Robin Hobb, to most others I can consider, including Bakker (despite some different claims from other readers), I think they all make “good” gates. You read the first book, you get a decent idea of the nature of the experience. Malazan is an exception.

For a new reader, to “get” Malazan, you need to go quite far and deep. You get significant pieces at the second and third book, but the nature of the work is likely still elusive. It takes the end of the 4th book, or even the 5th, to have a more complete picture. So that you know what the deal is.

The first book is not a “bad” one, but you can only appreciate it when seen in retrospective. It’s not about being a more or less perceptive reader, you simply don’t have ways to see it properly.

It really depends on the reader, on different terms. Someone who’s curious and is going to read the whole series in a year or so, because they have enough focus and commitment, then sure, follow the standard reading order. But telling a reader to go through several THOUSAND pages in order to get a proper idea doesn’t make for a sensible suggestion. You are asking too much. Most readers will “give it a chance,” they’ll pick up the first book and, in the best case, get to the end of it.

If you have read the books you can go back to GotM and see how it draws a straight, clear line to what Malazan is, but as a new reader reading the book will feel like being inside a giant nebula, hard to pinpoint. Again, not because you’re lost within the plot, not a problem of complexity, but the thing itself as a literary object, the sheer experience of reading. GotM will always feel weird and offputting, unless you happen to be already aligned with it.

There are two types of readers that make the suggestion to read Forge of Darkness (the first prequel) a good one:
– the skeptical reader
– someone who read GotM and decided to stop there

For the type of reader who wants to understand “what Malazan is about” but certainly doesn’t want to commit to thousand of pages just to be able to form a good opinion, then reading Forge of Darkness is a good suggestion. I still consider the book as effectively an independent standalone. I’m still stuck reading a re-reading the first 200 pages of the second book, so I cannot give a reliable opinion, but from what I’ve read the second book is already its own thing, to consider separately. The suggestion wouldn’t be reading the prequels first, but just that one book. It’s not overly long, and it has the best prose. It’s the distilled essence of what Malazan is at the core, and it is accessible to every type of reader.

Werthead writes: “The Kharkanas Trilogy is a prequel in the purest form, working better when you have knowledge of the characters from chronologically later on.” I don’t quite understand what he means with “prequel in the purest form” because I’d expect that a prequel would perfectly work as a starting point, but I disagree with the second part. It’s true that there are characters in Forge of Darkness that appear in the main series, but I consider the added knowledge DETRIMENTAL. Knowing those characters from the main series, set so many years later to be a different world, establishes expectations that are meant to be subverted, if anything it’s even more confusing as you try to merge together pieces that seem to contradict each other. Coming in with a blank state helps experiencing story, characters and settings as they are meant to be.

There is a counter point to this, though. Because the book is also not immediately accessible, and it seems to give the reader the idea there’s “something more.” But it is mere illusion. You get a feel that maybe this isn’t a “correct” starting point, that concepts seems to be taken for granted. But it is solely a matter of setting the approach: it’s the nature of what you’re reading. The same difficulties you have as brand new reader are in the same range to those of the veteran reader. The only difference is that the veteran reader has to “shed” a number of preconceptions and re-learn the world and its inhabitants. The difficulty is internal to the work, it never depends on pre-requisites. You have to trust what you’re reading, pay attention and keep your mind on the page, in the sense that any confusion is not meant to frustrate but it’s only natural. Give it time, keep reading.

Pretty much the same for the other group of readers who gave it a fair shot and read all of the first book, and yet found nothing in it especially appealing. It may be a good idea to give Forge of Darkness a chance before giving up entirely. You’ll get a sample of what’s inside Malazan, whether you stop there or decide to continue, at least you will be able to fully grasp the nature of the work. Something that DOES NOT HAPPEN if you read a lot more pages, but still don’t get past book 4 or 5. Without getting there, even if you read tons and tons of pages, you will still form an opinion that will be significantly incomplete. And again, this is something that applies to Malazan as an exception. You can read 50 pages of Sanderson’s The Way of Kings and you’ll have a perfectly good idea about what it is (as long you make past the prologue). The rest isn’t fundamentally different. Same after reading 100 pages of Hobb’ Assassin’s Apprentice. Or 100-200 pages of A Game of Thrones (take some more pages because the story is more fragmented into PoVs).

Malazan is an exception, believe it or not, but it’s also an exception that can be entirely solved within the 800 or so pages of Forge of Darkness. Nothing else.

On the other hand, Forge of Darkness itself wasn’t as widely appreciated by fans simply because it’s like there’s two sides of Erkison and Malazan. There’s the emphatic, bonkers and spectacular plot, and there’s the more introspective side. For the main series the emphatic and spectacular are front-loaded (and not always well set-up, to earn it) and the introspective will start claiming space in later books. As a “literary object,” the experience of reading and the uniqueness that Malazan represents, is only fully delivered within Forge of Darkness. With no distractions. It’s the only book by Erikson with an hyper-focus, despite the sprawling nature and ambition of it. It’s a book that tries MORE, despite everything, but with less emphasis and less spectacle.

The real, important recommendation is this one: if you will only read ONE Malazan book, then you HAVE to read Forge of Darkness.

Forge of Darkness is not the perfect starting point, it’s the only necessary read. For every reader out there. Whether it may be your thing or not, Forge of Darkness has to be read. At least if you care about literature for more than just entertainment. Which would be still fine.

For everyone else, who’s committed for the long haul, then you can read Forge of Darkness at the end, or whenever you feel like. Start from the first book as everyone recommends, because you’ll eventually “get” what Malazan is, and you’ll eventually get to Forge of Darkness and, whether or not, at that point, you feel it being better or worse than the main series.

Because, to return to the initial point, whereas currently 100% readers arrive at the end of the series, and then maybe to Forge of Darkness, 0% of those who start with GotM, and found it lacking, will EVER get to Forge of Darkness. GotM will filtered out tons of potential readers that want more than that surface-level chaos that GotM throws into your eyes and obscures the rest. And yet, to have a clear view, either stick to 4-5 more books, or you’re out. Which for most readers means going too far / asking too much.

(I still wouldn’t recommend reading Fall of Light, the following prequel, right after. The suggestion I make here is to consider Forge of Darkness as a standalone. It works perfectly well because it can be seen as fully contained, with absolutely nothing required both before or after. You can start and stop right there.)

For the rest of the reading order there’s not much to say (or much that you can do wrong). I’d suggest reading the first three Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas in between book 2 and 3. Because they introduce the characters at the right point and because they offer a sample of the more satirical and playful writing that will come more to the surface with book 5. It will liven up the read and mix things making some space before book 3. I also prefer placing Night of Knives after book 4 rather than 5. The book itself is not connected to book 5 at all, but I think it makes the most sense to “shore” it with the early phase than the latter starting with book 6. It’s more in theme, it feels flowing more naturally. And again, whenever it will be, I’d probably place Return of the Crimson Guard & Stonewielder after Reaper’s Gale, and then go through the rest of the series and pick up Esslemont after the end (Orb, Sceptre, Throne and so on). Merely because it all probably works better when bundled up rather than alternate between Erikson and Esslemont each book, trying to wind around plot lines that don’t quite perfectly align. I remember I read a number of specific motivations from other readers about this choice, but I forgot the details.

That’s all I have to say about reading orders. In the meantime my own current Malazan read got disrupted during the summer and stays now frozen once again. Right now I’m focusing on “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling,” that giant (at 670k words) and challenging book. I’m at some 20%, which is not too bad, and it’s certainly an unique reading experience. At the current pace it will take me roughly another 6 months to get to the end. But even with this current, rare focus, I still read stuff in parallel. I’m some 150k words scattered across four different “things.” These things being fully “internet” projects. Amateur self-publish territory. VERY amateur in this case. The common link being that, all four, are around 5 MILLION words projects each. And these aren’t the well known, popular ones like the Wandering Inn, or “Wildbow” ones. I’m curious about things even more at the margins. Besides that, I’m also, again, some halfway through the first book of Shadow of the Torturer. I don’t even know why. Or, I know, but it would take too much space to explain. The next few days I’ll get another four “big books”, King Sorrow by Joe Hill, I haven’t read anything else by the author, but I’ve read great things about this book since months ago. Then I’ve ordered Empire of the Vampire, considering the trilogy ended with the last book published a few days ago, but it’s not a priority so I’ll probably read as usual some 60-80 pages as I receive it, then shelve it for later. Then comes Ice, by Jacek Dukaj. I’ve chased after this book for more than 10 years. It finally got translated and published. Last one is Tom’s Crossing by Danielewski. I still need to decide whether I like Danielewski or not, but I always admire the ambition and publishing a no-trick novel of this size (545k), in the present year, is already a close to impossible event. “No-trick” because Danielewski is known for the “funny layouts”, that while quite pretty and charming, also waste lots of space on the page. The Familiar 28-books series, canceled at 5th, and where each book was around 800 pages was more like 200k words or less in total. Tom’s Crossing is a fancy western that uses no funny layouts. Only dense pages of text. Reviews I’ve read were somewhat… all over the place. I’ll link the nastier one because it’s the more off beat. You can find the rest on your own if you care.

In September I was waiting for Schattenfroh, that I had on preorder. It was never shipped and I canceled my order at the end of October. Maybe at some point Dalkey Archive will care sending some copies over to Europe… (even Miss MacIntosh took a while to be available, over here)

(I guess I should order Erikson latest as well, but since I’ll only be able to shelve it until who knows when, I don’t feel any strong priority. The book came out in a complete silence, which is somewhat worrying as marketing sadly is everything these days. I just hope it doesn’t do too poorly. It already got split into smaller chunks and it doesn’t project a positive scenario for a fitting completion of the prequel trilogy. But… “whatever.” As I already said so many times, Forge of Darkness fully delivered what I personally wanted and I would take anything else as a pure extra)

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.

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.

William the Blind

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

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

His publisher of thirty years.

It’s more complicated than that.

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

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

He nodded along with their points. Heard them out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy.