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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2084 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

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So what are you reading? I just finished The Children of Men by P.D. James, review below. Also working on Way of Kings, Capital, and some Kant.

Didn't realize that the author of this was THE P.D. James, of thriller writing fame. I guess there is something about British authors who abbreviate there first and middle names and pulling surprisingly deep science fiction commentary that has stood the test of time (thinking of you E.M. Forster).

The Children of Men is a book about a world with ultra-low fertility, in other words, an extreme version of a world that we already live in. I had a friend's birthday party at the park a couple weeks ago (I'm getting close to 30 unfortunately), and I noticed that out of the 20 or so couples there, only one had a child. And I think this is becoming increasingly true over the whole entire world. Many of the downstream aspects of this fact also seem to be shared between James' novel and reality: the prevalence of pet parents, the lack of interest in the future of society (but a fixation on the past), and an obsession with health and safety at all costs.

Beyond the social commentary, the actual plot of the novel is a little lackluster. It centers on an Oxford Professor of History, Theo, who happens to be the cousin of the dictator of England. Theo lives a pretty unremarkable and utterly selfish life (even before the "Omega" where most men suddenly become infertile), until he becomes involved with a rebel group that wants to enact some minor changes in the governmental system, but more importantly, is sheltering a woman who happens to be pregnant. Theo's time with this group changes his inner and outer lives almost completely: it's amazing what hope for the future does to an individual, although I was left wondering at the end how much would really change in England after the birth of this child.

Having children is no basis for a moral system in of itself (this was Chesterton's critique of H.G. Wells), but it sure as hell makes constructing a society a hell of a lot easier. Unfortunately I think our world is headed to a future more similar to what James envisioned in the 1990s. People simply aren't having children: I'm guilty of this too: it's not like I'm close to being married even. And that, I think, means that this society isn't very long for this world.

Didn't realize that the author of this was THE P.D. James, of thriller writing fame. I guess there is something about British authors who abbreviate there first and middle names and pulling surprisingly deep science fiction commentary that has stood the test of time (thinking of you E.M. Forster).

Iain Banks (literary fiction)/Iain M Banks (SF) surely fits into the same bucket, despite spelling out his first name?

Yes he is another one that fits this mold.

Moving this from the friday fun thread:

I'm hooked on this Russian blog of (mostly funny) stories of a nuclear submarine officer. Y'all should put it through Grok or Deepseek or whatever, it might still be funny in machine translation.

You should like Pokrovsky as well, I think he's the OG darkly funny submarine officer.

Pokrovsky is one of the authors directly endorsed by Ovechkin of the above blog, so I probably should, yes.

Sounds like my kind of humor.

Two recommendations in response:

Thunder Below, a WWII memoir of an America sub captain. Known for sinking a number of Japanese ships and one train. Alternating hilarious and awesome.

A Country Doctor’s Notebook, collected serials by Mikhaio Bulgakov. English translation here; no idea where to read the original.

Ah... This is so good. I didn't know I needed to read this, thank you. The Missile Officer is a character.

This is amazing, thank you! Already dying on the Men’s Day cake.

In just a year since my last time with Fyodor Mikhailovich, I read Gambler last week.

As with Notes from Underground, it holds up amazingly well 150+ years later (give or take all the gentry out and about), with the outchitel MC being a likewise colorful fellow who is entirely ruled by, and unashamed of, his addiction to gambling and pathological simpery. It is morbidly funny to me that gacha games, the scourge of modern vidya, combine the worst of these exact two vices; I offhandedly wondered what Fyodor Mikhailovich would've made of such superstimuli, Alexey (who seemed a rather unsubtle author stand-in) sure seems like the ideal target audience.

Reading about it online after the fact, people seemed to be confused by the abrupt ending with a very rushed resolution of character arcs via a "where are they now" loredump from an in-universe character. I agree that the pacing is weird in places, but to me it seems partly deliberate - there is a certain point ~midway where the book's focus seems to overtly switch from Alexey's simping struggles and general drama around la baboulinka's inheritance to the titular gambling and its consequences for the human race, with all the errant nobility in Roulettenburg (is it still nominative determinism if it's this obvious?) and especially la baboulinka's own downward spiral providing no shortage of demonstrations. The gambling-related segments are IMO the highlight of the book, written in a florid, visceral, almost compulsively rambling way that leaves little doubt that Dostoevsky is writing from extensive first-hand experience.

With this in mind the abrupt ending reads less like a rushed job, and more like a narrative device - the book is explicitly presented as "notes" Alexey is writing during his misadventures in Roulettenburg, which he sometimes abandons for weeks at a time, and has to recount everything for the reader once he takes the pen back up; Mr. Astley (who provides the aforementioned loredump) gives the down-on-his-luck protagonist some money out of pity, but at this point has very little faith that he will use it for anything other than gambling; Alexey in turn is stirred enough by the memories and recollections Astley's words evoke to have a lucid break, feeling genuinely hopeful to try and restart his life, IIRC even mentioning he's excited to put things to paper again... and the book ends, right then and there. YMMV but I felt like the implied, unspoken final relapse was a pretty fitting conclusion.

Despite the themes, the book is surprisingly light reading and has plenty of funny moments - the cringe drama, petty fights and callous mask-off moments between assorted loosely-related people as they wait with bated breath for beloved babushka to finally croak and part with her inheritance show plenty of opportunities for morbid humor, the babushka herself is a riot, and watching the entire trainwreck in slow motion from Alexey's relatively detached POV is very entertaining.

Moving on to Impro sometime next year, as once shilled by Zvi. As an unfettered cringelord amateur actor back in high school who now heavily struggles with creative pursuits like writing, roleplaying and DMing, my expectations are high.

Less than a hundred pages from the end of Speaker for the Dead. Still can't really say I'm loving it, and certainly I'm not enjoying it half as much as I did its predecessor.

I have a copy of The Children of Men which I've never read, but I've seen the film adaptation several times and (one major plot hole aside) loved it. Well worth checking out. I believe the author gave it her seal of approval.

I finished Stranger In A Strange Land earlier this week, as I mentioned at one point in last week's SSQS thread. So now I'm on to the other book I picked up at the same time, an anthology of short stories by Harlan Ellison. Overall I have found it to be quite good, though I strongly recommend against getting the specific volume I got (a Barnes and Noble edition called "Greatest Hits"). First, B&N put a sticker on the cover that I didn't notice until after I got it home and ditched the receipt, and it left glue residue when I peeled it off. Second, it is tainted in places by the Current Year - there's a content warning saying that the stories have offensive thinking about women and minorities, and some editor thought it would be acceptable to change Ellison's text to say "Black" instead of "black" when referring to a character's ethnicity. Honestly, I would return it if I hadn't immediately thrown out the receipt, because editing an author's work after the fact like that is downright offensive. But c'est la vie.

For the actual content of the stories themselves, they are good (which is no surprise considering the author). I bought the book because it contained I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream (which I had never read), and I thought it deserved all the praise it gets. But surprisingly, I found "Repent, Harlequin" Said The Ticktockman (which I had not heard of) to steal the show thus far. The story is a classic sci-fi story type, the cautionary tale. It shows a version of humanity where society is so far in service to keeping a schedule that the tool of a clock has become a tyrant over humanity. I don't want to talk too much about it because it is a short story (only perhaps 30 pages), so it would be pretty easy to give the whole thing away. But I thought that Ellison does a great job of introducing the world, setting up a story that the reader cares about, and resolving said story in an effective way, all within a very short format. It is a really great bit of writing and I'm glad I got exposed to it even though it's not what I originally purchased the book for.

Reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the third time.

My first time was in high school in the 90’s, where mostly it was Newspeak that impacted me. I’d just finished Rush Limbaugh’s two current affairs books, and the trickery of politicians changing words to “politically correct” variants was my takeaway.

My second read was during the first Trump administration, where the shock of the totalitarian state of IngSoc/Airstrip One/Oceania and the geopolitics of Goldstein’s book made me look at current affairs in a new light, especially during the Biden/Covid years.

This third time through, the small details of Winston’s life are hitting me hard. He’s 44 or 45, a few years younger than me, and his constant mentions of physical problems punctuate the existential misery of his life in the lower rungs of the Party.

He’s married but separated, a fact I’d forgotten. I haven’t yet reached the parts detailing his love affair. I also hadn’t remembered his furtive writing of a diary where he introduced the idea that freedom is the ability to say that two plus two equals four, giving [spoiler] the perfect tool to break him in the end.

Contrasted with the other big dystopias I’ve read (The Hunger Games’ Panem, Brave New World’s ultracivilization, Atlas Shrugged’s crippled Communist America, and Harry Potter’s Voldemort’s Magical Britain), the world system in 1984 feels the most hopeless, the most capable of keeping heroes from arising, the most terrible to live under — and yet somehow, the most realistic and likely, with certain aspects already showing up in America’s coastal capitals.

Orwell was a communist. He wrote about what he knew and observed directly. This lends him the ability to describe the bleakness more realistically. Though he was a Western communist, so he hadn't experienced the full measure of what totalitarianism could do to a person and a society.

It’s incredible how Orwell wrote something which, no matter one’s political affiliation, candidly describes one’s outgroup.

I dunno. There's stuff you can pin on any authoritarian regime, but it clearly resembles some ideologies more than others. I think it had a pretty specific inspiration as well.

More than one, certainly.

I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily arrive, but I believe (allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive...[it is] a show...[of the] perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realisable in communism and fascism.

Dude hated the Soviet Union; he was also pretty unhappy with getting bombed for years.

I think I recall reading something about how the "we have always beem at war with Eastasia" bit was inspired by his experience of the infighting between the Republican factions in the Spanish Civil War.

Wikipedia says it was inspired by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but I’d believe that too.

I really need to read Homage to Catalonia.

What a lot of people never learn is how much the modern imperial states (Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, FDR’s USA, the Soviet Union and Communist China) resembled each other, differing mostly in how their philosophers describe them and how much (and how often) their governments are perceived to be allowed to violate their citizens’ and enemies’ human rights.

The opposite of libertarian isn’t communism, it’s totalitarianism.

Much like Moldbug’s “demotism,” that model sounds dramatic, but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The bits which resemble each other are not the ones with explanatory power.

If nothing else, the U.S. comes out way ahead on body count. We have a distinct lack of Holocaust or Holodomor or Great Leap Forward. Surely that reflects a difference in methodology.

FDR’s USA

Interesting how the wiki entry for the National Industrial Recovery Act makes no reference to fascism despite it being part of FDR and the brain trust's inspiration for the act.

Man, fascism used to be hip and happening.

Where can I read more about this? None of the related articles have anything to say on the subject.

Where can I read more about this? None of the related articles have anything to say on the subject.

Various critics were deriding FDR as fascist within his first year in office, yet that NIRA article mentions none of it. Herbert Hoover was a prominent critic and wrote 2 anti-New Deal books in 1934 and 1936 specifically pointing out the parallels.

In the part about critics from the left:

Richard Hofstadter noted that critics from the left believed "that the NRA was a clear imitation of Mussolini's corporate state".[35]

There is this line in the criticism of FDR article:

John P. Diggins found only superficial similarities between the New Deal and Italian fascism. However, Diggins produced some quotations indicating that Roosevelt was interested in fascist economic programs and admired Mussolini.[49]

Footnote 49:

Early in 1933, Roosevelt told a White House correspondent: "I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman". In June 1933, Roosevelt wrote to Ambassador Breckinridge Long in Italy about Mussolini: "There seems no question that he is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and to prevent general European trouble". John P. Diggins. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1972). Princeton University Press. pp. 279–281.

I haven't read the book by Diggins, but it sounds interesting.

This article by Codevilla talks about it some, but he doesn't cite sources.

I'd have to say that The Children of Men feels both more realistic and hopeless to me (and also The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster). Although I suppose both end on a somewhat hopeful note: I have seen the hills of Wessex, as Ælfred saw them when he overthrew the Dane.

Having finished Reverend Insanity for the second time, I'm left with the same void in my soul.

Of course, the easiest solution was to seek out something by the same author, Gu Zhen Ren. He wrote two other novels since RI was banned, Infinite Bloodcore (points for the name, negative points for being left unfinished) and Mysteries of the Immortal Puppet Master.

I opted for the latter, initially, I felt lukewarm on it, but I know that in Xianxia, you don't judge books by their covers, or their first 50 chapters. Yup, sure enough, it became very clear that it's a Gu Zhen Ren novel after all. The protagonist is... callous, if not as ruthless as Fang Yuan. Maybe his little nephew. There are plots within plots, excellent attention to detail, and heart wrenching stories about seemingly insignificant characters. It has the majority of my attention, even if the edges are sanded down a tad bit to reduce the risk of another ban. GZR himself stated that it's a more "mass-market" novel, with a more standard Cultivation setting. It's still pretty solid so far.

Others on my reading shelf:

  • The Simoqin Prophecy by Amit Basu. The first of a trilogy. It's my second go at them, I heartily enjoyed the first. The easiest way to describe it is Indian Discworld, with clear inspiration from Pratchett. It is often ridiculously funny, while being poignant, but I'm afraid that a significant amount of the charm is lost on Western audiences. I could swear that 70% of the character and place names are references outsiders won't get, be they incredibly dumb puns or allusions to wider Hindu mythology. You'd probably need ChatGPT to let you in on the joke.
  • Kim Stanley Robinson's The Year of Rice and Salt. I fucking hated Aurora, and I'm the process of writing a full review, but while this novel is supposedly mid, it has an interesting premise with an AU setting where the Black Death absolutely rekt Europe (even more than it did in actual history, of course).
  • I was supposed to read Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Model of Communication for an ACX book club meeting. I was too lazy to do so, went in, claimed I knew a little bit about Game Theory, was embarrassed to find out that an actual PhD in the topic was present, and then unembarrased myself by actually making (IMO) good points. I do actually know a reasonable amount, especially when it comes to practical applications such as in military history. I might have another essay in the oven on that particular topic.

I haven't read Years of Rice and Salt since I was about 16, but I remember absolutely loving it. It is an interesting exploration of reincarnation and of how "locked in" a lot of history seems to have been. It also inspired me to do an Iroquois mega-campaign in Eu4/vic2, which you will understand when you've read the book.

I also have this on my bookshelf (it's been checked out of the library for ages), so perhaps we can agree to read it September and discuss?

Sounds good! Your endorsement makes me inclined to give it a proper shot.

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