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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act.
It seems strange that a Rabbi would proclaim himself agnostic and have his first sermon be about how Adam ought to have eaten the whole fruit of knowledge and not just part of it, but I have to agree with the introduction that there is an authenticity to it. Beerman, if he is to be believed, was inspired by the Spinozan God-as-nature idea, and argued that authentic doubt can be a religious stance.
The tropes fit perfectly into today's leftism: social justice, activism, inequality, racism, oppression, but these things must have made a different impression before Current Year. Various dubious aspects pepper the narrative, like support for the Rosenbergs. If there's one thing I've taken away from it, it is the reminder that I'm not exactly a church-goer myself, and that perhaps a renewed study of my relation to God is in order.
My recent reading queue has been a tour through various subgenres of speculative fiction, with predictably mixed results.
First, John C. Wright’s Golden Oecumene trilogy. Post-singularity fiction is a high-difficulty endeavor, usually collapsing into either utopian hand-waving or prose so baroque you cannot parse what the god-minds are even doing. Wright’s work mostly sticks the landing. It presents a surprisingly coherent model of a far-future society without shying away from its deep strangeness. I have a much longer post on this simmering in my drafts, but the short version is that it’s one of the few genuinely solid attempts I’ve seen.
Next was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history with a compelling hook: what if the Black Death was 99.9% fatal in Europe? I found it interesting, but with two confusing caveats. The author makes a strange ontological commitment from the outset: Buddhist reincarnation is literally true, and we follow a small cluster of souls through the ages. I’m still not entirely sure what work this does for the narrative that couldn’t have been achieved by other means. A more confusing structural choice is the novel’s reluctance to explore its own primary conceit. A vast, effectively empty Western continent is sitting there, yet we spend surprisingly little time with the civilizations that eventually investigate it. It feels like a missed opportunity.
Then I tried Virtuous Sons, a highly-rated web serial. A Greco-Roman take on Xianxia cultivation tropes is, on its face, a brilliant idea. And to its credit, the story executes the core translation of concepts like qi and cultivation into a classical framework with reasonable competence. The problem is that everything else is aggressively mediocre. The characters lack interiority, the prose feels unrefined, and the worldbuilding seems to operate on dream logic. This seems less an indictment of one specific author and more a reflection of the incentive structures of platforms like Royal Road. It is optimized for high-volume, low-friction content, and the market rewards this optimization with high ratings. A classic case of revealed preferences in action, and the revealed preference seems to be for slop. I could not continue.
Finally, I am now reading Through Struggle, the Stars. It’s military science fiction, and the most accurate description is that it’s aiming for the same niche as The Expanse. This story, however, operates under stricter constraints: no alien magic, and a much more rigorous adherence to the laws of physics. So far, it’s just solid, competent storytelling. No major complaints.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link