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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2635 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026

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 finally finished Al-Ghazali's The Book of Knowledge. I thought it would be a quasi-religious manual about logic and argument, but it turns out to be a remarkably interesting attempt to consolidate and support the basic opinions of Islam's Prophet and the Companions on the topic of knowledge in comparison to what was deemed knowledge in his time.

...the most satisfied state of mind for the sagacious is to deem yourself alone in the universe with God, in front of you is death, the day of judgment, reckoning, heaven, and the fire; ponder deeply on what will serve you best in that which is before you and abandon all else.

Otherwise I'm attempting Said's The Question of Palestine, for reasons unrelated to my reading on Islam or contemporary events, being more interested in the idea of Othering. I'm still on Bly's Iron John, and some day soon, I hope, I will make progress in The Dawn of Everything.

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I've been wanting to read this one for a long time but there's a shaggy dog story that boils down to buying this one in paperback ages ago but said paperback turned out to be a misprinted copy, so when it went on sale in the Kindle bookstore, I was all too happy to pick it up.

I read this one recently: I liked it overall. Without spoilers, I thought it interesting that the plot twist, to the extent there is one, struck me as very "of it's time" in how it reflects on the human condition, but in a way that I don't think could be written today because waves at culture war, nor would the conclusion be deemed quite as satisfactory in that light. At the time, it was pretty well received by critics, too: an interesting display of shifting political winds.

I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts, though.

All right, it's been a few days since I finished the book and I gotta agree that Mote wouldn't have ever made it past the editors in modern publishing. That said, I have to say that the book is quite well-written and I can easily see why it's such a classic. Yes, there's zeerust, as there is with all aged works, but the CoDominium being the obvious big one is actually pretty impressive to me. Gotta give Niven and Pournelle props for not getting too into the weeds with the science part of their science fiction there. And the first contact angle of the story is exceptionally well done, with mediator caste of the Moties in particular being a clever way to facilitate communication between species. It pays proper care to the incredibly difficult nature of the task without feeling too hand-wavey to me. I also appreciated the true alien-ness of the Motie world and culture compared to the recognizably human culture of the second empire. All in all, I think it holds up well on the whole, and I'll be keeping my eye out for The Gripping Hand.

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