thosearentcrimes

[thosearentcrimes]

note to all fuckers who enthusiastically went to vote for the liberal darling General-President Petr Pavel (get a last name loser) and celebrated his victory because Andrej Babiš bad:

do you think Babiš would have bothered to block the limited hangout in which those soldiers who tortured that Afghan soldier to death were supposed to face even the barest of consequences? because I really don't, I mean, Zeman ignored those letters for years

it would be better for one thousand kleptocrats and oligarchs to get pardons for naked corruption than for these bastards to get away with murder and establish that the Special Forces are de facto above the law, mark my words they'll be doing Fort Bragg level shit before the end of the decade

I wish I had actually shown up for the election, I thought both candidates were bad enough that denying the process legitimacy was justifiable, but I should have stuck around to vote for Babiš

[thosearentcrimes]

Read The Northern Caves by @nostalgebraist. You know, usually when I review books written by living authors, I try (operative word, try) to find a nice framing of my opinions, on the off chance that they are namesearching on tumblr. But in this case, I am outright confident that this review will be seen by the author, since I know he has read some of the other book reports I've posted. So, uh, thanks for nostalgebraist-autoresponder, I didn't follow it but some of the posts that got traction were very funny. Thanks also for talking about AI from a position of expertise while keeping the discussion in the realm of actual technology rather than apocalyptic science fiction, which I really feel should be a more common phenomenon than it actually is. And finally, thanks for the fact that when I went to search a very specific passage from Ulysses, I found your slashfic in which that line had been copied over, it didn't help with my essay but it was a nice diversion. I thought it was a good continuation from the point you left it off, though not really written in the actual style of Joyce. I will try to be honest but positive about your work. It will be fairly easy to, as I think The Northern Caves is a pretty good novel!

The Northern Caves is an epistolary novel about an infohazard. The author describes it as quasi-horror, which is correct I think, insofar as it takes a lot of narrative devices from various forms of horror (especially from the better parts of SCP fiction), even though it is not itself scary. Uh, maybe it is to people who believe in infohazards, but even then I imagine not. Though the specific allusions and referenced subcultures are pretty different, I would say the closest work to it in spirit that I'm familiar with is the very good webcomic What Happens Next, though obviously the form there is somewhat different. Also people compare it to Pale Fire and House of Leaves, neither of which I've actually read though I really should, so I can't really speak on that comparison.

The primary narrator of The Northern Caves is insane, and for the most part I find that insanity acceptably-rendered in the prose. Note that in this case, as opposed to Too Like the Lightning, it actually makes sense on a thematic level for the narrator to be insane. It aids rather than hinders what appears (to me at least) to be the authorial intent. Other than the main narrator we also get some snippets of forum threads, where I find the dialogue lags behind a little, especially for the classic forum asshole archetype. I've experienced a handful of these, and while it is very much true that the two major classes are hyper-formal hyper-correct smug bastard and punctuation ABUSING grammar IGNORING belligerent lunatic, I don't think either of them usually types that way exactly? But perhaps I have an overly narrow conception of the type. The time cube guy manifesto is good, the podcast episode transcript is well-executed, and the article excerpts seem a bit over-the-top at times but mostly accurate.

Generally speaking, unless I am seriously misreading something, The Northern Caves is about fandom, forum culture, Rationalism, infohazards, and lolcows, and I think it understands all of these phenomena pretty well. As far as the Salby oeuvre goes, of all the explicit references within the novel itself, the ones to the works of Lewis and Zelazny are the ones that seem most significant. The issue with that is I skipped both those authors. We had Chronicles of Narnia at home, but I didn't read it on principle after being taken to see the first movie and hating it, so instead I read Chronicles of Prydain. Given my hatred for all things isekai I think this was fortunate. Homestuck also seems kind of relevant, but is not mentioned, which makes sense given it would be an anachronism. I think in general I agree with nostalgebraist a lot on the nature of things, such as fandom, Rationalistm, and Homestuck, but have very different evaluations of them (specifically I think all of the above are not good). It's actually a similar situation with AI but that doesn't count because several of my material beliefs about AI were directly influenced by nostalgebraist.

In any case, I think the total inability of broader internet culture to understand the lolcows it uses for entertainment is one element that was particularly well described, and it seems to me like on some level the main point of the novel. If so, it is one that only seems to get more appropriate. Once they know a certain person or group of people is not to be taken seriously, to be mocked and reviled, people switch into the laziest and most formulaic ways of interpreting behavior that, while often not very reasonable or even sane, is a lot more explicable than people tell themselves it is. This seems to be especially the case where some form of psychosis is involved, like in The Northern Caves. I am curious if a version of the novel written today would include some reference to the true crime and real life spooky story genres. And also whether the new version might include the script for a Strange Aeons video (or one of the many significantly more exploitative variants) rather than a "web history" podcast.

I can recommend reading The Northern Caves, some background is likely necessary, but most tumblr users probably already have that background? Some of you are children probably and might not remember forums or know what they are like, even I remember them mostly as a bit of a dying breed. The novel will still make sense without that background but you'll miss out on a bit. I would also like to mention how nice it is that I had the opportunity to link the book I was talking about. Strictly speaking there are probably other books I could have done that with, but none of those were web-native. Thank you to Archive of our Own for hosting people's writing (soon including mine, hopefully) and to nostalgebraist for posting his novels there, of which I am looking forward to reading more.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Whenever I read a canonical work or classic of some sort, I try to come in with as few prejudices as possible. Fairly consistently, I am positively surprised, which is a good showing for conventional wisdom. The question is, does the relatively high quality of canonical works reflect the wisdom of crowds or the wisdom of elitists? In any case, those high school curricula weren't lying, To Kill a Mockingbird really is a very good novel. I recommend reading the novel, and doing so before you read this review. Unless you're not planning to read it at all I guess, do whatever.

So obviously the main thing about To Kill a Mockingbird is that it is trying to make a point. Over the course of the novel, against the background of a short section of coming-of-age narrative, a shithole county in Alabama in 1935 relitigates its socio-economic-racial-sexual order, with extremely predictable results reinforcing the status quo. It is somewhat impressive just how vividly the politics of Maycomb are described, with a lot of attention to elements that feel ahead of their time. You do need to keep in mind that the narrator is an intelligent but fairly naive 10 year old white girl who belongs to what passes for the elites of Maycomb though. Also, I don't know if the author is deliberately making the scraps of hope pathetic in order to make a point or whether the scraps were meant to be encouraging and have simply aged into absurdity, but either way the effect works.

As a consequence I feel like the novel has aged very well, even though the length between the time it is set and the time it was published is less than half of the time between when it was published and now. Perhaps it has aged so well precisely because it has been so long, even. It functions as a bit of a set of two linked period pieces in a very nice way. Certainly there are elements that are very controversial from a modern point of view, but I think there are none that seriously indict the book, make it inapplicable or even just worse really. Especially since they have a tendency to crop up in sections most strongly affected by the (very clearly fallible) narrator's presence in the novel.

In terms of style it does an ok job, I obviously have a hard time judging the regionalisms and ruralisms and just generally the accent, but it didn't make reading the book too annoying, which is sufficient. The dialogue is plausible, generally speaking, but suspiciously convenient at times, which interferes with verisimilitude. Nothing devastating, though, for the most part it's just dramatic irony. The plotting, while very obvious and predictable, is predictable because it is the most plausible resolution of a very plausible situation, very much ripped from the headlines. Sometimes the thing that you would expect to happen happens, if your expectations are well calibrated especially.

Having a child protagonist is always a tricky proposition, and Harper Lee does a good job of it, there is nothing particularly jarring about the way Scout expresses herself, and her psychology is pretty plausible to me. Though I have to admit, I have very poor recall, especially about my childhood, so I'm kind of talking out my ass here. Still, the misunderstandings feel like they're handled pretty well and aren't really mined for cheap laughs I feel like. Her execution also manages to avoid being excessively cloying or idealizing, which is a frequent issue for child political mouthpieces.

There has been a second Harper Lee novel published since, Go Set a Watchman. I haven't read it yet, and I'm not sure if I will. Most people seem to agree it is just not all that good on the merits. Though if their objection is, as seems to be the case at least some of the time, to the fact that Atticus, for all his nobility of spirit (in large part because of that nobility and its class and racial character), is portrayed as a racist, then perhaps they should have read To Kill a Mockingbird a bit more attentively! But we should expect readers of assigned scholastic literature to come away with a formulaic and simplistic reading of the text, and it is not a reason to stop assigning it. The novel is good, it is educational, it makes sense to teach it. At least, I hope that is what they are doing, because it does feel like it requires a bit of context and interpretation that might not come naturally to all students.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick. I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't what I got. It was a pleasant surprise, though.

The novel is shockingly straightforward. There is no trickery, no twist (well, there's one, I guess, but it's quite insignificant), everything is at all times exactly what it appears to be. Dick doesn't see a need for subtlety or subtext, not in this novel at least. Even the title is a bit of a joke on that account. There is stuff in there to think about, and there are several themes being explored throughout, but the novel does not compel engagement with any of it the way some others do. I think this is a good thing, a good sort of book to exist in the world. It is a book which gives you more or less exactly what you put in, a book to which you can choose to pay any amount of attention you like without worrying too much.

I did feel like it lost the plot a bit around half-way through, though. I mean, at one point it transitions into doing a lot of character development and character work. But it just doesn't come off as very plausible, really. I mean, cops being capable of actual introspection, it's a bit of a stretch! Generally, there's something to be said for characters being explicit and all, but I do think characterization is one of the points where at least a tiny bit of subtlety might be in order. But I suppose within the novel it has its own place in giving a picture of a truly fucked society in which everyone is constantly psychologizing themselves and each other. Or in other words, contemporary America.

I suppose on some level it is the perfect length. Any shorter, and you couldn't fit the plot in. Any longer, and the characters would grate. But it does feel a bit insubstantial. The worldbuilding is pretty solid, aside from a little bit of numbers disease, but the fact that it's not going anywhere is perhaps a bit of an issue. But then, if it were going somewhere, that might cause thematic problems, so I suppose it's just how it needs to be.

It's one of the classics. Do I really need to recommend it? I suppose it should be read by pretty much anyone, so long as they're not actively looking for anything particularly challenging, intellectually, in which case maybe leave it for when you're a bit tired or distracted. I'm curious about Blade Runner (and the sequel), which I have not watched yet but should some day.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Read it in English, in the translation by Deborah Smith. My understanding is that the translation job on it was quite a controversial matter, but I haven't read the original and cannot judge. But do keep in mind, the things I say about The Vegetarian may or may not also be true of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, as opposed to that translated by Deborah Smith.

In any case, I was fairly impressed by it. In fact, impressed to the extent of having to take long breaks to read other stuff in between sessions reading it. I am very squeamish and the imagery, especially towards the beginning, was a bit too much for me. That is, I suppose, a testament to its effectiveness! But it made the experience difficult and outright unpleasant at times. The rest of the imagery tends to be similarly effective and did not pose problems of that sort, fortunately.

I did get the impression that I was missing something, that I hadn't fully gotten 'it', whatever that was. This is, at least in my opinion, very much distinct from a feeling I've had in certain other cases, where it feels like a novel is desperately trying to convince me there is something I am missing when in fact I have not, and have possibly already found whatever it was and dismissed it as trivial. It is, in principle, a matter of judgement, of whether you trust appearances or not in a particular case. But I trust my judgement (to a degree others sometimes find arrogant, probably correctly) so I think I am right that The Vegetarian has an underlying logic that I have only experienced and not observed, rather than an imitation of such.

There's a simple and matter-of-fact quality to the novel that I think really works with the theme. From what I understand, the style of the original might also have been more in line with that approach? But again, I cannot judge that for myself.

It's a tricky book to recommend, really. It's barely at all literary, I think, in terms of what that term feels to me like it should mean, preoccupied with its own nature as a text and with other texts and with Literature and maybe with some Modernist or Postmodernist flourishes. But I do think it is literary fiction in the sense that the term often seems to be understood, contemporary or recent historical narrative fiction with a thin plot and substantial psychological exploration. So I guess people who disdain literary fiction would probably not like it? I thought it was pretty good. But it's not going to join my list of books to recommend to everyone who asks and also most people who don't. I should really write that list up sometime so I have a record of it.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read the remainder of the Hainish Cycle by Ursula LeGuin. Look, obviously The Left Hand of Darkness is the most famous one for a reason. None of the others really match up to it, though they're (almost) all pretty good. For more on TLHoD see my dedicated book report, it's really great.

Rocannon's World and City of Illusions are fairly straightforward adventure stories. There are some themes at play, they're not vapid or anything, but they're ultimately relatively straightforward narratives, nothing particularly special going on. The worldbuilding of Rocannon's World is extremely unoriginal. Some of the handling of sensitive subjects is also clumsy at best. City of Illusions is better but low-key transphobic, oddly enough.

Planet of Exile and The Dispossessed are, in my opinion, relatively well-handled political stories. They portray abstracted, idealized versions of ideologies and social phenomena, with enough competent worldbuilding to patch up the bits that would otherwise lack verisimilitude. While in some cases it causes serious issues, the relativist anthropological perspective LeGuin brings to the books really works well here.

The Word for World is Forest and Four Ways to Forgiveness are similar, but with more questionable handling of sensitive subjects at times. I still liked them quite a bit, but it's a lot easier to see why someone might not. Still, though, I think both are basically good and worth reading.

The Telling is kinda just bad to be honest, just not a very good novel in my opinion. I dunno, maybe people more positively inclined towards mysticism and such than me would like it. Generally speaking I do not think it is wise for science fiction to involve Earth much, unless there is a specific reason for it. Don't get me wrong, there is a specific reason for it in The Telling, I just think the reason is not good and not sufficient. The abstraction and idealization is a lot clumsier when it involves actual Earth.

On the whole, I think most of the cycle is worth reading, with the exception of The Telling. But if you're going to go with just one or two, I'd say the conventional wisdom of TLHoD holds, and of the others, well, there it depends a bit on your preferences.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read Too Like the Lightning, part of the Terra Ignota series, by Ada Palmer. I generally try to be a lot nicer about books written by living authors, on the off chance that they read what I'm saying. For example, I tried not to be very mean about the Baru Cormorant series, which I thought was pretty bad but had some strong points I could highlight, but I was perfectly willing to go in on Madame Bovary. All I can say is, I tried. You see, Too Like the Lightning is straight up terrible, and it is basically impossible to find anything nice to say about it at all.

Too Like the Lightning is an unbelievably stupid book. Now, I don't require total scientific fidelity from my science fiction, not unless the author signals I should. But I do think authors should be at least broadly aware of what laws they are breaking to get what they want, and Palmer very clearly isn't. Basically everyone has the predictive/prescient powers of Dune characters through mathematical oracles, despite this being provably impossible. Everyone travels in cheap supersonic private jets that probably also have VTOL capability, which are powered by Fucking Magic presumably, the author sure as hell doesn't seem to care. This wouldn't be as annoying if the book didn't spend so much time musing on the deep sociological effects of the FM-powered aircars, while entirely forgetting that evidently both Fucking Magic and oracles apparently exist and should probably affect society in some way also. There's also more minor points. At one point, the first of the aircars is analogized to the Nina and Pinta and Apollo XI, all of which were notable exploration vessels, not technical breakthroughs. The appropriate comparisons would be to something like the Kitty Hawk Flyer or Stephenson's Rocket or some of the Trevithick machines. Sure, it's a minor error, but for a novel this pretentious, all errors are serious. There is no appreciable narrative reason for this error either. If the book were edited, perhaps someone would have noticed.

The ideological and historiographical (more on this later) background is also just kind of dumb. The book is trying to make some tedious liberal points and also say that we need to have very serious discussions about like sexism and racism or whatever. What the content of these discussions is supposed to be is extremely unclear, and as far as I can tell simply the existence of them will basically fix things on its own because discussion is magic and leads to Truth and such, except, of course, when the narrative needs for it not to. Also destroying a book is kind of like killing a person, and other trite garbage. Anyway, where the book actually ends up is in my opinion quite far from the apparent intent, but unfortunately not in a very interesting way. Suffice to say, if I wanted to read kinda racist gender-normative rapey fiction with clockwork twists scattered around, where all the characters are secretly serial killers (notably Mycroft and the Saneer-Weeksbooths) because that makes them edgier or something I guess, I suspect I could still do a whole lot better than Too Like the Lightning, for example by reading self-insert Wattpad romance novels about pop stars, or werewolf erotica, or self-insert Wattpad erotica about werewolf pop stars. The incest is boring as hell and cowardly, too. It's a book that's trying to shock you, but the author doesn't know how to actually do that because, again, just not very good at writing at all. It doesn't help that the pacing is so horrible that none of the shocking twists actually land, especially since absolutely nothing keeps actually happening. Sure, Too Like the Lightning is the way it is for a reason, but so is the werewolf erotica, and helping other people jack off is a far more noble pursuit than jacking yourself off.

If the book is so stupid, why do a lot of fairly intelligent people seem to like it so much? Well, a lot of those people are Rationalists it seems (or close enough to it), and Rationalists have insanely bad taste in fiction for some reason. Actually Rationalists have insanely bad taste generally speaking but it's especially marked in fiction. And it's obvious why Rationalists would like the book, it treats intelligence as a comic book superpower the way they do, there's group homes and libertarianism and all sorts of other stuff they like. But there's a more fundamental feature that I think a certain kind of nerd loves about Too Like the Lightning. It's the omnipresent didactic tone, just like with Baru Cormorant, though here it's somehow even more obtrusive. Some people evidently like it when the author has a character read an encyclopedia entry for a paragraph or two for no particular reason, or pointedly make and then exhaustively explain a reference. I suspect it's because if they knew the reference, they feel like very clever students who read ahead, and if they didn't know the reference they feel like they are learning. I think it might be a form of high school nostalgia, the nerd version of student athletes unable to move on. Which is normal I suppose, I still think about doing amateur theater after all, but it does seem kind of embarrassing. To me, at least, the didactic tone always feels insulting regardless of if I knew the reference or not.

This insistence on transforming most of the characters into condescending lecture or encyclopedia entry delivery mechanisms understandably has serious consequences for the readability of the novel itself. It is impossible to believe that any of the supposed 10 billion people in the Hives that we barely ever see any actual traces of are actually persons in the eyes of the author or the narrative. Nor are most of the several dozen very important characters we do meet, to be fair. There is a single character, Eureka, who reaches the dizzying heights of "is an actual character" and she barely shows up. Thisbe is the only other one under consideration, but, eh, nah. Everyone else is functionally just a rhetorical device, because outside of the exposition most of the novel is poorly stylized as philosophical dialogue in Enlightenment style.

According to the Author's Note, Palmer sincerely wants to be participating in the Great Conversation. Now, this is a lost cause from the start. You cannot engage in a conversation by just parroting the words of others, and if you don't have any ideas of your own (and it is quite reasonable not to, there are so many people and so few ideas to be had), then a bare minimum would be the ability to rephrase or synthesize them. Now, maybe Palmer can do this, in lectures to students. Or maybe not, I have known instructors like that too (especially in history, lately). All I know is that Too Like the Lightning is no thoughts, all cliches. But if there were original ideas, the framing device would interfere anyway. You fundamentally cannot participate in a conversation while maintaining plausible deniability for everything by hiding behind your fictional characters, as Palmer does with Mycroft. Whenever I object to, well, more or less any feature of the novel, its fans can always say that actually I just haven't been paying enough attention to the unreliability of the narrator. This objection tends to be either false or irrelevant, but it's a pain in the ass to prove, and the only reason it is possible in the first place is that the author is actively refusing to stake out a position to be held to.

For what it's worth, I don't think it's out of cowardice. Palmer seems to have noticed that the tradition of the conte philosophique and the genres that take off of it includes a lot of different styles and narrative devices, and has ultimately decided to use most of them, invariably quite poorly. I've read conte philosophique, and it does not read like conte philosophique, sorry, the writing is all so painfully 21st century. Ironically, the one major device for philosophical stories I can think of that was not used, the travelogue, is the one I think is clearly most appropriate to the sort of worldbuilding-based speculative fiction Palmer is engaging in here, both from a practical and a historical perspective. The eclectic stylistic muddle makes the novel much longer without giving it any additional depth, the styles do not complement each other, and also the author very obviously does not have the skill required to pull any of it off. Authors, unless exceptionally competent, should pick at most one gimmick per work. Might not have helped here, but it's good practice either way.

One of the techniques that gets talked about with regards to the book is the unreliable narrator, probably because the device is referenced in the book right at the start. In fact, contrary to what people insist, it is not really present in the sense I would understand it, of a narrator styled as deliberately deceiving the audience in order to promote his own agenda. Since the narrator of Too Like the Lightning, like basically every other character in the novel, evidently only actually has an agenda or motive as an informed attribute, there is no way for the reader to reason their way to the implied meta-narrative of what "actually happened", because I'm pretty sure that meta-narrative doesn't actually exist. As far as I can tell, the only actual function of the extremely tedious and obtrusive in-universe narrator is to justify telling the exposition in a particular twist-preserving order, which, again, is not what the unreliable narrator is.

The novel really does consist almost exclusively of dry narration and loredumps. Nothing ever happens in this miserable 460 page slog. I really mean this, nothing actually happens and nobody really does anything except flit around irrelevantly at supersonic speeds. A bunch of characters talk to each other, or talk at each other, or read the encyclopedia at each other. But it turns out none of that actually matters, because enough of the characters are basically omniscient (except for all the stuff they can't know otherwise the story falls apart, even though there's no conceivable way they wouldn't know) that there is no appreciable difference between characters talking at each other and thinking at each other, which they also spend way too much time doing. None of the dialogue serves to develop the characters, because, as discussed earlier, there aren't any. None of the dialogue serves to establish the plot or stakes, because the plot gets retconned every other chapter with yet another tedious twist so there's no real point in following the intrigue, which I'm pretty sure consists mostly of plot holes by the end anyway. Worst of all, a consistent pattern in these retcons is that it becomes clearer and clearer that an alarming number of the conversations in this book are actually functionally just a guy talking to himself.

It kind of makes sense that the novel is more or less entirely people talking to each other (well that and poorly done metatextual horseshit) because it turns out the novel endirses a fundamental theory of historical change consisting entirely of people talking to each other, specifically, a variation on Great Man Theory that says change happens because the most important members of the very real and existing natural aristocracy get into a room together in order to figure out what's going to happen next by finding the smartest bestest boy from among them all and all just doing what he says, and then maybe some other stuff that doesn't matter happens after who cares, all of the actual persons have made their decisions. History of ideas people are basically all wacky, but this seems extreme even for them, so I sure hope Palmer isn't actually teaching anything like this. In addition to being based on a variant of it, Too Like the Lightning references and then explains its own reference to Great Man Theory, and naturally has its own Great Man in the narrative itself, the guy talking to himself from the last paragraph, and boy is he unbearable.

The guy in question, Y.U.D.D. MASON, is genuinely in the running for the most insufferable character ever written. I wouldn't mind him being written like a particularly annoying teenager with delusions of grandeur who has evidently somehow read both far too much and far too little philosophy so much if the novel did not take every single opportunity to make it absolutely unquestionable that this horrid little git is in fact an unparalleled superhuman intellect omniscient oracle capable of outright mind control through speech alone. And no, that's not a unreliable narrator thing. My understanding is that somehow this gets much worse over the course of the rest of the books, which I will not read because frankly 460 pages was an unreasonable test of my patience and commitment to reviewing everything I read and finishing everything I review. Apparently at the end he starts a civil war and becomes God-Emperor of Humanity or whatever, who even cares.

Look, a persistent obsession with Mars, nonsensical car-based revolutionizing of transportation, references to De Sade, excessive confidence in mathematical oracles, these are not the preoccupations of a serious thinker, these are the preoccupations of Elon Musk. Musk really is a convenient example of the sort of Great Man that actually exists by contrast to the ones you get in fiction and in Carlyle. Richest man on the planet, widely acknowledged power behind the throne of the most powerful state out there, owner of what was once (you know, before he bought it) regarded as the online public square, AI magnate, rocketman, surely here we have the Great Man of our time? Except, wait, we know him. We know him from his irrepressible habit of Posting, his now decades of pathetic self-promotion, his desperate need to turn himself into a living meme to get the attention he never got from his father, and which he in turn will not give to his two dozen kids. He is a massive loser whose aesthetic interests consist of the most accessible symbols of coolness and futurism that he can find, up to and including the glyph 'X' and memes that got old over a decade ago. What does it say about Too Like the Lightning that half of its aesthetic language is not only shared with this fucking loser, but is even projected out to the 26th century? Nothing good, that's for sure.

It is my opinion that novels should be edited. Unfortunately publishers do not seem to agree. Editing could never have made this book good, but it might at least have informed the publishers of the scale of mistake they were in the course of making. This novel was a lost cause the moment it was accepted for publication, which happened by a mechanism I am still quite unable to explain. The Author's Note does contain a very helpful list of the extraordinarily many collaborators allegedly responsible, of whom I would pick out for particular discredit the editorial decision-makers and the peers who apparently encouraged the creation of the work. That this book was written was a mistake, that it was published was a travesty, that it got sequels is an absurdity. The existence of Too Like the Lightning is an enormous embarrassment to the entire genre of Science Fiction, whose reputation was frankly already quite bad for very good reasons. Anyway, I'm never going to read Worm that's for damn sure.

This novel made me afraid to write my own intended stories, for fear that they will end up like this. Ordinarily, this is where I mention what kinds of person might enjoy the novel, recommend it to someone even if I did not like it myself. Frankly, I think I have provided enough information for people to figure out whether or not they would like it, but I have to confess that I do not think anyone should read this book, including the ones who would enjoy it. It's not for moral reasons or anything, I just think the book is that bad.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I have strongly ambivalent feelings about it, actually. As a relatively frequent point of reference for its subject, I imagine people are mostly familiar with its topic, but I'm sure there are people like me before very recently who hadn't read it before and might not be entirely familiar with the execution. As such I will try not to spoil too much, but any discussion of themes inevitably will contain some spoilers.

Flowers for Algernon is a science fiction novel framed as a series of autobiographical lab reports (well, really more of a diary) written by Charlie Gordon, the first human subject of an experimental surgery. The objective of the surgery is an element of the novel that I think is perhaps a bit of a cop-out. The procedure is billed as one which would cure mental disabilities like Charlie's, and generally when characters discuss it that is what they claim it is. But in the story, it actually turns him into a super-genius, who reads incredibly quickly, learns languages almost instantly, and can become a super-expert at any discipline in weeks. I think this weakens the book for two major reasons.

Firstly, depicting a super-intelligent character is obviously very difficult to pull off. All of fiction is ultimately reliant on illusionism, but some illusions are easier to maintain than others, and ones involving characters substantially more intelligent than their writers are particularly difficult. There are some tricks you can use, but they only do so much. Keyes does a decent job I would say, notably in basically just taking a handful of traits generally regarded as indicative of high intelligence and then making Charlie good at doing them very proficiently, typically meaning fast. This is obviously preferable to treating it as a comic book superpower, the way comic books used to do and damn near everything seems to now, but it strains credibility nonetheless, and is entirely an unforced error.

Largely because, secondly, the exaggerated contrast is not necessary in the first place, and is way over-blown. Charlie has an IQ of 68 at the start of the novel. I think the novel would have been better if it had chosen to either give post-surgery Charlie an IQ level and intelligence-associated capacities of either about 100 or about 132, that is, either the removal of his disability or a 'reversal' of it. IQ on the upper end of the scale is a particularly finicky measure and it is far more consistently effective at measuring/predicting outcomes at the lower end of the scale, which makes sense given that's what it was designed for, which would cause problems of its own for the narrative. But I think such an implementation of the central plot would still have been thematically a lot clearer. A more grounded, realistic approach would have lent the story more relevance and emotional depth, I think.

Anyway, inevitably the book adopts a perspective and vocabulary on mental disability that is seriously outdated, both in terms of language and in terms of attitude, but on the whole it is at least trying to be a humanizing portrayal. I think what bothered me the most on this point was actually the analogizing of mental disability to childhood. I'm not familiar with the research on the mechanisms and causes of mental disability, so I may be missing critical points validating such an analogy at least as far as some causes for mental disability go, but to me it often seems like a mechanism for the blanket application of permanent denial of various forms of personal autonomy to disabled adults without having to actually justify those interventions, which is obviously bad. I also think it's probably bad, in reverse, to effectively treat childhood as a (usually temporary) mental disability. That's a bit of a tangent though.

The book is well-executed as far as craftsmanship goes. The story strains against the framing device at times, but there is an extremely clear justification for its use and maintenance, since it allows for variation in the character of the narrator over time, obviously a useful attribute for a book about a large change in the life of that narrator. When I discussed Great Expectations, I believe I mentioned that it kind of felt like the novel was doing the same thing, except there it actually contradicted the framing device.

Generally speaking, aside from the impossibility of plausibly depicting super-intelligence leading to an entirely evitable failure on that point, I felt like the book was fairly well written and plotted. But I find I disagree with a lot of what it is saying because of differences in worldview, and even if most of these are an artefact of a different time, they affect my perception of the book. To me, Flowers for Algernon is interesting to read in terms of its function as a relic of its time and place and as a common point of reference, but it is an appreciation that is due to its cultural importance, and not because I enjoyed reading it, which really I mostly didn't. To touch on just one of the works it influenced because I like it a lot, the webcomic Narbonic by Shaenon K. Garrity is heavily influenced by Flowers for Algernon, which it name-checks repeatedly, and I like having more supplemental context for it now. But Narbonic is a comedy webcomic, it doesn't take itself very seriously and the wacky elements help a lot to cover up the super-intelligence problem. On the whole, I'm glad I read Flowers for Algernon, I can recommend reading it, but I didn't actually like it very much, though I can see why others might.

[thosearentcrimes]

Haven't Posted in a while. Actually still need to finish up my review of Journey to the West. I've been busy with schoolwork, generally longer pieces of dubious quality, all responding to assigned topics that are frankly not immediately relevant to my usual interests. This one comes somewhat close to being interesting and relevant, and is also an analysis of a written text, and was written in the format of what my professors are calling an "online discussion" so it comes reasonably close to the kind of stuff I put here. I've decided to put up a lightly edited and expanded version of one of the parts of my assignment. I would obviously write it differently if it were for tumblr originally, so parts of it might seem a little out of place.

Note that this is not a review. I have picked out pieces of the book that matter to what I was trying to demonstrate, which is the ideology behind American Cold War aggression. There are other parts of the book which do not relate as cleanly to these themes, ones which modify and even complicate the quotes and arguments I've picked out. What follows is not really a good faith interpretation of the text, insofar as I am broadly uninterested in any form of dialogue with the text, and am instead focusing on what the writing can tell us about the society that produced it. You will certainly not come away from this with an accurate picture of the opinions of Hans Morgenthau.

From the beginning of the Cold War, American strategists developed and followed an ideology now known as classical realism. I will examine realism as expressed in one of the earlier and more influential texts of classical realism, the 1948 book Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace by Hans Morgenthau (unrelated to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau), who later became an advisor to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. All quotes are from this book, with page numbers according to the 1949 second printing, because it's on the Internet Archive (glory to the Internet Archive). Morgenthau asserts that all persons by nature act to maximize their own relative social power, a claim justified by reference to the "typical conflict between the mother-in-law and her child's spouse" (18), which with the benefit of hindsight seems to me to expose rather than disprove the contingent nature of power conflicts. He then further asserts an analogy to international politics, in which all nations or states are said to likewise necessarily seek to maximize their own relative power. On page 74 there is a more direct theorized connection between domestic and international politics than merely analogy, which is that by the mechanism of identification, the frustrated domestic social power aspirations of members of nations are said to find a substitute in the international power politics of their nation. This is in fact a fairly straightforward and obvious neutral reframing of the Marxist observation that international power politics and jingoism in particular are an instrument of class warfare, insofar as they serve to distract workers from their struggle with their rulers.

A different contrast with Marxist theory is in Morgenthau’s creative redefinition of imperialism. Counter to not only Marxist theories of imperialism but as he admits also the colloquial usage of the term by self-described imperialists, Morgenthau defined imperialism as “a policy which aims at the overthrow of the status quo, at a reversal of the power relations between two or more nations” (34), with neither "preservation of an empire" (27) nor "exploitation and consolidation" (28) of an existing empire being considered necessarily imperialist policies. The most obvious motive for the use of such a counter-intuitive definition of imperialism is the fact that it renders imperialism a policy that can by definition only ever be pursued by subordinate nations or states. The US, being “at the moment of this writing the most powerful nation on earth” (8), categorically cannot be imperialist according to this definition. If we note further that, according to Morgenthau himself, "The most widely practiced disguise and justification of imperalism has, however, always been the ideology of anti-imperialism." (66), we can see that dubiously justified redefinitions of terms in classical realism are specifically adapted to narrow early Cold War era US foreign policy interests.

I don't mean to entirely dismiss realist theory, if its Cold War ideological baggage were somehow removed (which as far as I can tell has yet to happen), as a tool for academic interpretation of international relations. I especially do not mean to denounce Hans Morgenthau personally. Rather, the purpose is to show that influential American scholars and officials, including Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, developed an ideology under whose own terms US policy was outright bound not to be substantially different from the foreign policy of previous powers.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read Ulysses by James Joyce. Read it a very long time ago now. It's even been quite a bit since I turned in my assignment for it. I've still been thinking about it, but that will presumably never not be the case again. So that's one point in its favor, I suppose!

It really is an undeniable masterpiece. I mean, people who get offended at the very concept of Modernism probably will try, but it'll be pretty obvious nonsense I think. On the level of effort, of talent, of execution, and ultimately of cultural impact, it's very obviously one of the greatest books of all time. Is it good, though? Well, I think so. But I think a lot of people will disagree with me. Even people who respect the artistry but dislike Modernist approaches to fiction will, uh, probably not have a great time with this book. And I rather suspect that those people are ultimately very numerous, almost certainly a majority of potential readers (and, given the shape of the literature market from what I can see, also of actual readers). But the thing is, I'm an aesthetic elitist. I simply have better taste than nearly everyone else, it is honestly a burden.

Reading Ulysses feels like watching a hyperspecialized piece of industrial equipment. Every piece of the machine is there for a reason and you can kind of figure out what it does when you look at it working, and it's often kind of visually threatening or grimy but so beautiful and so effective. Also no matter how much I stare at explanations of how they work I know I'm missing some kind of detail that ties all the mechanisms together. The broad strokes are pretty easy, three characters are characterized by their various forms of internal monologue, and just when you get used to what the novel is doing, it swerves into some random other clever bullshit. But it's clever bullshit that really works. Every moment I think about Ulysses I feel like it's making me smarter. Is it actually? Almost certainly not, but hey, a lot more probable than if I read blogs all day.

Obviously there are bits of Ulysses that haven't aged well. Much of it feels easy to put down to the passage of time, to be treated like part of a period piece. For some reason this is a lot more difficult to do with the antisemitism. Now, to be clear, the antisemitism is weird enough that some people won't even notice it, so it's not like it has particularly strong negative associations, hell, it denounces the more familiar and dangerous kinds of antisemitism pretty thoroughly. Really, the impression I get from Ulysses is basically that Joyce sees a very strong and important affinity between the Jewish and the Irish people, which informs his characterizations in Ulysses. Unfortunately, Joyce seems to have been something of a self-hating Irishman, and he runs the parallel both ways. Makes for a very strange read occasionally. There's an extremely unpleasant amount of very much identifiable antisemitic German philosophy in the intellectual background for this thing, which isn't easy to notice but is hard to stop noticing.

Should you read Ulysses? I dunno. Do you like fancy literary bullshit? It really doesn't get much more fancy literary bullshit than Joyce (though apparently he takes it much further in Finnegan's Wake, which I have not read), everything else seems to take bits of Joyce they like and support it with mostly conventional narrative devices. Sometimes I think about whether it was good to read The God of Small Things before Ulysses. Obviously the former is informed by the latter. But I think it did help ease me into the style. I dunno. I think probably more people should read Ulysses than will actually like it. Should that be you? If you have a spare. Uh. It'll depend how fast you read, how fast you process (Ulysses has the fascinating and rather frustrating distinction of being a book that I understood far slower than I read it, which is otherwise fairly unusual and forced me to reread sentences and pages constantly) and how much time you can give to it per day. But it will almost certainly take quite a while.

[thosearentcrimes]

so is anyone else's first reaction to seeing people use the word 'invert' to think "oh so we're reclaiming that one now? ok cool but with what meaning though" rather than "ah, yes, bugs"

for me the response is so instinctive that it applies even on occasions where it is accompanying an image of an invertebrate, though I think that's just because I'm stupid

[thosearentcrimes]

as far as the czechoslovak picture goes, the main things worth mentioning imo are the involuntary sterilization of roma women (continued after the revolution), pro-eugenics articles in the reformist press during prague spring (jiri drnovsky remained a universally beloved pediatrician after the revolution and until his death, nobody else seems to have even ever noticed the pro-eugenics article), penile plethysmography (whose architect emigrated to canada in 1968 and trained ray fucking blanchard), and whatever bizarre shit the disciples of education minister and psychic magician frantisek kahuda were doing (which was carefully observed by the cia and probably prompted their own deranged magic experiments, insert dr strangelove scene, and laid the groundwork for havana syndrome shit)

the only connections with child abuse in particular are that drnovsky was a pediatrician and freund studied pedophilia, though obviously there were a lot of systems for organized child abuse like pionyr or the vykrmny that were less wacky and so didn't make it in here, it's also not clear to me what if anything the stb were doing in terms of mad science because none of this really involves them but they must have been doing something

anyway imo this gives a very different picture of what you would want to be highlighting in a fictionalization of czechoslovak cold war mad science, a missed opportunity you might say, and making it an anti-communist screed is silly ofc

the plot of monster revolves around (spoilers!) state-sponsored child torture and dangerous long term psychological experimentation/engineering conducted during the cold war in communist central europe (in particular, east germany and czechoslovakia), at its most scandalous in concert with far right nazi sympathisers. the narrative presents this as a natural fit with the "totalitarian" ideology of soviet bloc communism, and western bourgeois democrats as its natural unmaskers and enemies

in reality, bourgeois democracies in central europe were perfectly capable of systematic child abuse in the service of psychological experimentation and social engineering. denmark was the site of confirmed cia-backed experimentation on orphans as part of mkultra, and theres been argument that they were also involved in the infamous "kentler project" in west germany. west germany for decades also ran childrens "health resorts" responsible for serious abuse, often staffed by ex-nazis (unsurprisingly, given the much less intensive denazification undertaken in the west). now itd be pretty facile to use these to make the same poetic argument as monster makes with its fictitious child experimentation except flipping the sides so its clumsily anticapitalist instead of anticommunist, but it at least would have the merit of appealing to projects that actually took place

[thosearentcrimes]

Read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Now, it does not take as long to read Mrs. Dalloway as it has been since I posted last. In fact that whole time I have been reading Ulysses, which I just finished, and I moved onto Mrs. Dalloway yesterday. I simply haven't posted about Ulysses yet because I still need to think a long while about it. I do not feel the need to think overmuch about Mrs. Dalloway. It would be wrong to take this alone as a reflection on the relative quality or interest of the novels. There is far more in Ulysses, it is denser, and it is formally adventurous, it demands reflection, it takes longer to understand, none of which is in itself a mark of quality. I need more time to judge.

What I can already say is that Mrs. Dalloway is a very good novel. It is fairly short, but does not particularly feel incomplete. It handles a number of quite difficult topics, most of them competently. There's a really sweet plot thread weaving its way mostly through the first half of the novel about comphet. The anti-psych stuff is mostly tastefully done. Class is often enough mishandled in my opinion, but we should not expect anything else.

The novel is often described as stream of consciousness, which doesn't feel right to me? There is something reminiscent of a stream of consciousness to it, the narrative is preoccupied with the thoughts of the characters and the descriptions are often recognizably subject to the perceptions of the characters, but at most what we are following is a series of inner monologues, and I'm not even sure it's quite that even. Not every stream of consciousness needs to be a series of flashes of perception and ungrammatical trains of thought, per Ulysses, but it doesn't seem like the right classification for Mrs. Dalloway, which is far more straightforwardly narrative, even though some of its formal experiments, such as unannounced point of view shifts and narrative identification with the point of view character, do point in that direction. In any case, the formal devices are used well and excuse the relative lack of plot, and they are sufficiently unobtrusive to keep the book very readable. I stopped to think every now and then, but never felt like I was reading faster than I was understanding.

There is something very much unsettled in Woolf's writing. It manifests in Orlando where it blends into the premise, and in A Room of One's Own where it is painfully obvious, and in Mrs. Dalloway. There is a spectre haunting Virginia Woolf. It is not (and yet it is close to) Communism, which has been exorcised by depicting it as the hideous virgin Miss Kilman, a spectre still (simile used repeatedly in the book, hardly by accident) but now one that haunts Mrs. Dalloway and seemingly not Woolf. There is a hole, an absence of thought, something unseen and unsaid, the heart of the British ruling class, a hideous relic. Joyce can see it and name it, and Woolf comes ever so close, but doesn't get there, because she would need to indict herself and everyone she knows.

A century later and Communism is dead and the Empire just about gone and still the rough beast Britain slouches on, despite everything changed as little as possible, a wilful anachronism in the third millennium, raking all below with lion claws. Something has gone horribly wrong.

I can definitely recommend reading Mrs. Dalloway to people who haven't already, if such end up reading this. It's fairly boring to start with, but stick with it, Woolf needs to present the character before explaining why she is Like That, and the character is very intentionally dull. I promise everyone gets more entertaining with time.

[thosearentcrimes]

Apologies for the late reply, had to go vote against him. His opponent, Marek Hilšer, is a hapless liberal conscience vote perennial candidate and the incumbent in a district which is about as much of a liberal stronghold as it gets. He's ok. Marek Hilšer collected the near-universal support of the more or less authentic intelligentsia because Miroslav Bárta is such a massive asshole. Specifically, he has annoyed them by having been openly in the pocket of every significant oligarch we've had in the past decade, including the dead one, and also by being part of the Zima faction within Charles University, a faction which is insanely corrupt and is also viewed as being pro-Chinese (to be clear, I think it's probably not appropriate to turn a university into a lobby organization for foreign influence, but I think it's also not exactly new and most other countries get away with it), along with one of his best friends, a notorious plagiarist who now positively reviews his books. Marek Hilšer has, at the time of writing, just lost the election (turnout: 15%, as usual), because the liberal intelligentsia turns out to have no influence whatsoever and the voting public has amnesia.

I do not believe Miroslav Bárta is insane, and in fact at no point did I say he was insane. I said that the kind of person usually delivering the apocalyptic rhetoric in person that he delivers in print is a lunatic. I also said that his rhetoric, for related reasons, probably appeals to people who are lunatics. I wouldn't hate him like I do if he were crazy. He's just a conniving piece of shit.

Without further ado, the 7 laws (paraphrased, translated):

all societies and civilizations are limited in time and space and begin and end with conflict

changes in the development of societies and civilization are sudden jumps, not linear

that which leads a society and civilization to the top will typically cause its crisis

each society and civilization is based on shared values, visions, and implicit law

each civilization and society relies for its stable existence on a functional social contract based on mutual cooperation [look, I'm just translating, I'm not the one who paraphrased this, and this redundancy is not my fault ok] of the individual parts of society

the development of each society and civilization is determined by technologies and power sources

the success of each society and civilization is chosen by its level of its ability [look I'm translating honestly, people just write like this, I dunno] to adapt to changes in their natural environment

The first law is mostly tautological. If you define societies and civilizations by time and place they will be limited by those things. That's what delimitation is. Like, assuming that the society or civilization in question has any form of organization, it will tend to resist non-existence, therefore conflict. Also I don't think it's actually true.

The second law is literally tautological. A change, especially in historical terms, is definitionally a discontinuity. The discontinuity looks non-continuous. Next you will be telling me that continuities tend to occur linearly.

The third law is a nonsense platitude, a cold read. Doesn't actually mean anything to speak of, though it looks kinda like it does.

The fourth law is obvious and also false. I dunno, have you seen societies, civilizations? Do the people in them look like they broadly agree about these three things?

The fifth law is just the fourth law again, see previous paragraph, but with bonus corporatism. Look. It's not an *inherently* fascist concept. Well, it is, more or less. Nevermind.

The sixth law is a bizarre nod to materialism. It's only mildly consistent with most of the other laws. It's also very silly, right? I mean, even if we're taking a broader view of what development is, it's probably either productivity or dependent on it, right? Like, yeah the things you do depend on your ability to do things. Ok man whatever.

The seventh law just seems blatantly wrong? I dunno, I guess everything that exists is 'natural' and everything outside yourself so it's the 'environment' and everything is constantly changing and words don't really mean anything do they. I no longer know what a "society" or a "civilization" is, but apparently none have managed to arise and then end without any significant changes in their natural environment.

In the metro on the way to work, for weeks now, there has been a guy urgently telling everyone about how he has studied The Ancient Civilizations and has come up with the 7 Laws Of Civilization and that according to him we are all on the way to Civilizational Collapse and that we are all going to die soon and Only He Can Fix It. An ordinary public transport lunatic, you might think.

In fact he is a candidate for Senate with a massive ad campaign. He is a professional academic Egyptologist, which is where he gets his apocalypticism it seems. He is probably going to win, I think, he advanced to the second round and he seems like he should appeal naturally to insane people, who are markedly overrepresented among the maybe 15% of eligible voters liable to actually bother showing up for second round Senate elections (godspeed to them).

Under the circumstances I am quite glad that the Senate mostly does fuck all.

[thosearentcrimes]

In the metro on the way to work, for weeks now, there has been a guy urgently telling everyone about how he has studied The Ancient Civilizations and has come up with the 7 Laws Of Civilization and that according to him we are all on the way to Civilizational Collapse and that we are all going to die soon and Only He Can Fix It. An ordinary public transport lunatic, you might think.

In fact he is a candidate for Senate with a massive ad campaign. He is a professional academic Egyptologist, which is where he gets his apocalypticism it seems. He is probably going to win, I think, he advanced to the second round and he seems like he should appeal naturally to insane people, who are markedly overrepresented among the maybe 15% of eligible voters liable to actually bother showing up for second round Senate elections (godspeed to them).

Under the circumstances I am quite glad that the Senate mostly does fuck all.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. Both are very good novels, Empire is a well-executed spy story with a sci-fi setting and some interesting themes and plot devices, while Peace is a more thorough exploration of some themes hinted at in Empire. This is the third ongoing sci-fi series out of three sci-fi series that I've read recently in which the protagonist has neurological trauma and a dead person speaking to them from inside their brain. But it's very different this time, you see. Her girlfriend isn't the dead person speaking to her from inside her brain, that's some other guy, and her girlfriend isn't dead. Yet.

The Teixcalaan series is a great object lesson in the application of real-world knowledge to enhance a fictional work. The main thing to learn from it is that creativity is essential. You can use things you know to lend a degree of verisimilitude to your narrative, to ground your allegories and metaphors, but it will not replace worldbuilding for you, if anything it imposes further constraints on it. If you are writing fiction, you will need to make some things up. Additionally, it is essential to know substantially more than you actually put in the book. I dunno, maybe other people feel differently about this, but whenever I notice a clear boundary in an author's understanding of a topic (and it is so very easy to notice, something about the use of vocabulary) it shocks me out of suspension of disbelief for a moment. Teixcalaan has the occasional lapse on this point, but fortunately it's rarely anything particularly thematic. What other writers can learn from this is that it is very good to write what they know, but they should actually know it.

Reading the first novel was an interesting experience because there was one plot point where I was having a hard time figuring out if it was a clever setup with minimal foreshadowing or whether it was a writing mistake. Whichever one it was, the sequel does explore it a lot deeper. In fact the sequel is mostly about exploring it.

It's a very interesting structure, and I'm not being sarcastic here, for a novel to be very little happening for a very long time, followed by a couple dozen pages of everything happening incredibly fast, followed by a couple dozen pages of epilogue. In both cases it fits with the central plot, and despite the relative absence of plot happening the novels build tension effectively, in part because of how transparent the setting up of the dominoes (and of the red herrings) is. The first novel in particular has a devastatingly effective ramp into the climax.

I disagree, or perhaps it would be better to say that I dislike what Martine has to say about minds. I don't think it's right, not really. Not false per se but lacking something to make it meaningful. I think the exploration of individuality compromised by cybernetics, propaganda, force, cybernetics again, education, parasitism/symbiosis, still cybernetics, empire, and love holds up really well despite my disagreement, but I felt like mentioning it. Oh also on that front I felt like making the compromise of individuality by love explicit and discussed in-character rather than keeping it subtle and thematic was unnecessary and weakened the book, not the only unfortunate lapse of subtlety either. But readers are morons, and it's quite likely more people got something out of the reminder than I lost by it.

It is a great pleasure to read a book written by someone with an idea of what themes they want to explore and how their plot and genre contributes to and complicates those themes. They're clearly very thoughtfully constructed novels, which doesn't prevent them from having a very strong emotional core. I certainly hope people who don't normally read science fiction read the series, it really does represent the best of the genre. I suppose that's why it won all those awards.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong (probably?) in the translation by Moss Roberts. It's very very very long. Sometimes, it's entertaining. I wish it had spent more time being entertaining.

The basic problem of the book is that the sections of it that are historical fiction are mostly bad. There is only one character who is particularly fun as part of the historical fiction sections, and it is Cao Cao, with his classic catchphrase "My thoughts exactly" (other characters say it too sometimes, but Cao Cao responds to every situation by asking someone what they think and then going "My thoughts exactly", though Roberts never translates it quite with that wording and I'm not sure why). What can I say, I love an evil schemer. I love a good schemer too, but Zhuge Liang is more often than not boring in the historical sections.

Where Zhuge Liang is really fun, and undeniably the best character in the book, is in his Mysterious Taoist Priest Troll guise. Nearly every character who gets to have a fictional interlude is fun while it is taking place, and Zhuge Liang has more of them than anyone else, and they are generally longer. The best extended passage in the book, which is a Zhuge Liang special, is the expedition against the Southern Man people. Unfortunate that it's also the most racist, can't win them all.

The translation notes by Moss Roberts are essential, of course. I don't think the book would mean very much to me without them. Even in such basic elements as noting when a use of the word "nine" indicates there are nine of something, or whether it is used to mean "all". I probably would have noticed the suspicious frequency of the numbers 9 and 81 even without the notes, but they are very helpful. The notes are also essential in untangling the various commentaries and versions from the text.

Where the novel is strongest is when it engages in repetitions on a theme. The seven captures of Meng Huo, Guan Yu slaughtering his way to the border, even the three trips to see Zhuge Liang, all of it is very fun. Unfortunately the novel is also weakest when it engages in repetitions on a theme, trying to stuff historical contingency into a moralizing narrative.

I can't say I think Romance of the Three Kingdoms is particularly worth reading on balance, unless you are interested in it as a text to study in a literary manner. I can see why people like abridging it so much because it has some really strong sections. I'll be reading Journey to the West soon enough probably, and I'm cautiously optimistic about it, since it seems like it will have more of what I do like and less of what I do not.