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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1921 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 3, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I’m finally on ‘The Far Side of the World’ – perhaps the most famous novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series.

Captain Jack Aubrey, expert sloth debaucher, knowingly recruits enough lunatics and mutineers to fill out the complement of the ‘Joyful’ Surprise, before pursuing an American cough ‘French’ Man of War around Cape Horn and into the Pacific.

And after spending nine novels vociferously proselytizing his hatred of alcohol abuse to anyone who will listen, Dr Stephen Maturin has now chewed, injected, snorted, smoked, enema’d, or otherwise ingested most drugs found anywhere in, on, or adjacent to, the entire Seven Seas.

Aware of his addiction to the laudanum from his own medicine chest (that somehow didn’t make it into the screenplay), junkie Maturin decides that the only sane course of action is to wean himself off with the aid of a new wonder drug; Cocaine.

And that’s before he tries to cover up a fellow officer’s cuckoldry.

Unhappily, Peter Weir somehow felt the need to rewrite the film version to appeal to a broader audience.

For shame.

Decisive Battles of the Twentieth Century. It's written like an encyclopedia, with 23 different chapters/entries which are each about 30 pages deep. The book is pretty light on exposition, the chapter on Kursk for example has about 2 pages detailing the previous 6 months fighting, but to it's credit the book also goes fairly in depth with force composition and the planning/implementation of Zitadelle. Despite this the authors can't resist describing the armor and gun of the "fearsome Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger Ausf. H", which pleased me, but older and more serious historians might take issue with that bit of indulgence.

My other issue with the book is it's title, which seems to hint at setpiece battles resulting in the annihilation of the enemy, yet they include chapters on Verdun and The Marne, neither of which were conclusive. Also the book shoehorns in the Battle of Britain which I'm pretty ambivalent about. The greatest tragedy is that this book was published in 1976, so it doesn't have Desert Storm. Maybe it's because I recently read Robert M. Citino's Blitzkreig to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare but I would really like a re-release which focuses on maneuver warfare.

8/10

Finished The Moveable Feast. I enjoyed it, though I am not sure I could say why or what it was about. Maybe that was the point.

Ian M. Banks Surface Detail.

Any others here read the Culture books? It's interesting to me the way fans of the series read them as so overtly anti-capitalist and generally liberal/progressive works. This is the fourth or fifth I've read and I'm just getting a depiction of a post-scarcity society where market economies don't exist. Maybe I just haven't read the right book yet though or I'm missing it.

I think they're well-written. They're anti-capitalist in the Star Trek sense where they have a set understanding of what the author pretty clearly considers to be a good-if-not-perfect future, that future happens to be extremely left-liberal, and the works are really trying hard to imply that it's so obviously the correct and inevitable answer that Marx would be proud, but they're also not waving Ferengi in your face all the time, and The Culture is at least presented with some level of warts-and-all.

Player of Games is the most (early-TNG-) Ferengi-esque one. The villains are bad in more ways than just being fake meritocratic capitalists, and there's a bit of a twist about how they're bad, but they're the pretty standard grab-bag of sexism and racism and all the other isms that Ian Banks both didn't like and wanted to paint non-leftists as operating under.

Yeah the Culture is definitely a very small-l liberal society. The gender stuff jumps out the most in that sense, but to me it never comes off as making really political points - it just presents a post-scarcity society with super high levels of technology where doing whatever you want all the time is accepted.

To some extent I guess I'm just shoehorning my own beliefs into the books. It never struck me reading Player of Games that the market economy was the fundamentally bad thing about that society. The greed, hate, warlike nature, and as you point out, all the other - isms. But to read that as fundamentally leftist seems to need to to either connect these things to an anti-capitalist message (which I see the fans do a lot) or I guess just have knowledge of Banks intent - otherwise to me it just comes off as a crooked-timber-of-humanity sort of thing. That scene in Player of Games where they go through the slums of the city could just as easily have been some kind of failed socialist nightmare.

I'm guessing Banks was pretty vocal about his liberalism tho. I get annoyed by that stuff sometimes. People were talking about Watchmen here recently - to me Moore has such a silly take on his own character Rorschach!

Most of Azad's slums wouldn't be out of place in an Ayn Rand novel, but the treatment of medical care is one of the big tells, especially for when and where Player of Games was written, as is the drone informing Gurgeh that "it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having." That's not fundamentally leftist, but it's still also not how the red tribe equivalent would put things, or even universal among the left side of the branch (contrast, for example, Pratchett's "Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things").

Agreed that it's still pretty subtle and a fairly reasonable extrapolation of the technical assumptions Banks is making for the world he wants to build.

And oh, boy, do I have a take on Moore.

It's been a few years since I read Player of Games - that's a good point out, good quote, more overtly leftist than I remember it being.

Just read my first Pratchett last month. Look forward to reading more of his stuff totally blind to his political or philosophical views - Small Gods was... interesting, but also a really entertaining read, somewhat reminiscent of Culture novels to me.

Anyway thanks for the responses!

Patchett's an absolute blast. Hope you enjoy his books.

I was kinda put off by the villainy in Player of Games. It would be nicer if their "extreme meritocracy through McGuffin" concept have been addressed on merits, instead Banks just goes for "but akshually they are all liars and don't do what they profess at all, and instead just do evil things and hypocritically hide it". This is easy - of course people that use plausible sounding concepts to hide being bad are actually bad, especially if the author demonstrates to us that they are bad and then asks "aren't the people I just showed you being bad actually bad?!" Of course they are, you wrote them this way, what do you expect! This just feels lazy to me. I like my villains to be a bit more chewy, to require at least some work to figure out why their position - in which they see themselves as righteous - is untenable, or at least unacceptable to me. Even Ferengi have been given more fair treatment than that (remember, they reached pretty high level of developed society without any wars or atrocities like slavery. For an obvious caricature, it's pretty decent achievement).

As always, The Worm Ourobouros.

Also, The Sea-Wolf.

And I notice some parallels between the two. An effortpost - as effortful as I can make it, anyways - is in the works.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I really enjoyed Demon Copperhead and I'm quiet enjoying Poisonwood as well.

Recently finished Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte after seeing it mentioned here. Good fun, entertaining.

Now reading Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. So far it's stuck to interesting reportage and avoided the Road To Wigan Pier trap of segueing into lengthy political rhetoric.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi.

Unapologetic Palestinian perspective. Khalidi is highly educated and Westernized, so occasionally makes some obligatory noises about how terrorism is bad and it's unfortunate that Israeli civilians have been killed, but this is pretty clearly performative throat-clearing before getting into how everything is always Israel's fault (or the US's). That said, makes a good case for where Israel has gone wrong (and admits some of the areas where the Palestinians have). It won't change any minds but if you want the best-articulated Palestinian perspective you can get without academic faffing about "subaltern identities" and "Zionist colonial-settler projects" (e.g., Nur Masalha and Edward Said) this is probably it.

makes a good case for where Israel has gone wrong

Could you quickly summarize that part? There's no way I am going to read this book, but I am curious enough to hear the summary.

They have frequently not engaged in good faith any more than the Palestinians, especially under PMs who really didn't want to make any kind of a deal and made noises about it only under US pressure. They have manipulated Palestinian leadership for political convenience and not to actually effect change in Palestine. And the West Bank settlers are particularly egregious. A lot of it boils down to fairly predictable radicalization (or at least lack of sympathy) after years of conflict. The Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon, for example, were preventable had the Israelis given a fuck, but the Israeli military basically cheered it on because they were past giving a fuck.

Pretty predictable overall, but it's fascinating how things like Palestinians having shitty leadership and Lebanese killing Palestinians is still Israel's fault because what isn't? It looks like Israel is by default expected to have such sky-high moral standards that it would feel obligated to protect the very organization that declared itself their mortal enemy and is conducting the active warfare against them, or to conduct a policy beneficial for the leadership of the enemy. It's a bit like somebody would declare Hitler's suicide a war crime from the Allied side because they didn't work hard enough to prevent it.

I’m finally on ‘The Far Side of the World’

Give you joy on reaching the antipodal point on your circumnavigation of the series. I think The Far Side of the World is where O'Brian was at the height of his powers. The five novel sequence from The Thirteen-Gun Salute through the The Commodore is where I most like to get lost in though. One just flows into the the next.

junkie Maturin

To be fair to Maturin its clear he deals with chronic pain from his physical torture in HMS Surprise and the physiological torture by Diana.

It's quite clear his physical recovery was very slow from the bowling-green scene in The Commodore.

Even though the film could never live up to the novels, I have mixed feelings about a sequel. I think they still did a beautiful job, especially with the sound stage. I wish we could have had more of at least the same quality, but I'm afraid that any sequel moves would be a shameless cash grab at far lower quality.

The five novel sequence from The Thirteen-Gun Salute through the The Commodore is where I most like to get lost in though. One just flows into the the next.

The sequences are one off my favourite thing about the series. I really enjoyed The Mauritius Command > Desolation Island > Fortune of War > The Surgeon's Mate where it takes 4 novels for the protagonists to finally return to England for a debrief. I also like how where the novels begin and end is fairly inconsequential as the series covers most of a career over the Napoleonic wars and the War of 1812.

Even though the film could never live up to the novels, I have mixed feelings about a sequel. I think they still did a beautiful job, especially with the sound stage. I wish we could have had more of at least the same quality, but I'm afraid that any sequel moves would be a shameless cash grab at far lower quality.

I'd hope instead that as AI improves, film production costs will drop and it would become viable to make a film or tv series that can adequately portray naval life in the Age of Sail. It's historically been notoriously expensive to film things like this and I think it led to the end of the Hornblower TV Film series. (Which btw is up on YouTube)

My dream is to either have an updated streaming TV/Film series with a new cast, or complete AI generation with digital likenesses of Crowe and Bettany (which someone else wished for on The Motte a few weeks ago). There's so much material to mine in a 20 novel series, but I can see how it might not have mass appeal.

Edit:

To be fair to Maturin its clear he deals with chronic pain

I know. Others have said that Maturin has the most character development in the series and is perhaps the real lead character. His fallibility is why I like him. He is a leading physician and naturalist, invited to lecture at the Royal Society and salons in France. Perhaps the greatest intelligence agent of his Age.

And he is a simp for a very very particular type of woman, physically uncoordinated to the point where he would be drowned (or worse) many times over if he wasn't beloved by the crew and a drug addict. An idealist and despairing cynic with a deep deep hatred of authoritarianism. He is naive and ruthless all at once. Great character, and I have to sadly say that Paul Bettany didn't do him justice (probably for screenplay reasons).

The Skin by Malaparte. Not as good as Kaputt so far, but it has been worth it if only for the chapter about how the young male survivors of WW2 became communists because they were homosexuals and wanted political justification for their pederasty.

Black Magic Sanction (The Hollows Book 8) by Kim Harrison.

The other day I started reading Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Only about twenty pages in but I'm liking it so far.

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