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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3580 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 24, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Sayers' Whose Body? Also reading Abelson's The Seven Liberal Arts after rereading Sayers' essay The Lost Tools of Learning.

Currently reading:

  • Desolation Island Patrick O'Brian
  • The Monastery of the Damned Nicholas Tobias
  • Interwar Articles Ernst Junger
  • The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 Mark Peterson
  • High Output Management Andrew S. Grove

I’m trying my hand again at A Fire Upon The Deep. I made an attempt at it some years back, but it’d always been one that remained in the back of my mind and I’ve since had a commitment to myself to eventually return to it. I think what may be key to it is to go slower than my usual reading speed.

I found the tomato surprise about the pack aliens clever, but annoying.

Wait, what’s the surprise? The echolocation thing was introduced organically, as was the genetic/value drift from avoiding inbreeding. At least, I don’t remember the plot hinging on anything else that should have been common knowledge to a bunch of stranded humans…

The very first chapter set on the planet is written from the viewpoint of one of the alien packs, so you keep encountering weird turns of phrase that make no sense and have to slowly guess what the hell is going on: "Okay, does each dude have a pack of doglike animals with them that they have a tight bond with like in Starship Troopers? No, do they control them like riggers in Shadowrun? Wait, there's no one else, does their conscience simply hop between the dog bodies? Oh, o-oh, I get it now, it's like a hivemind, but with a small number of animals, an oligomind!"

Which is, as I've said, a clever trick, but I still don't like it.

I read it not that long ago, and enjoyed it. I want to claim I finished every novel set in that particular universe, and that's probably true.

I thought it was fantastic the first time, but have never been able to re-read it and I have no idea why. But I've read A Deepness In the Sky twice and loved it both times.

The galactic Usenet feels hilariously dated nowadays.

It ranks up there with the sock puppet subplot in Ender’s Game, yeah.

I go back and forth on the viability of that in the modern era: there are certainly solo discussion influencers on social media that shape ongoing politics, if not as directly. This site has loose associations with several such folks.

But it certainly would take a Wiggin-caliber poster to make it viable, and to have that much sway. But I also don't see any of the current crop parlaying it into global political office.

I don’t know why that is either… Because I’m not a usual fiction reader, but I love stories like that. For some reason it just never clicked with me previously. One thing I will say though is audio productions of all the old classics have offered me a great deal of renewed enjoyment to re-experience. I’d recently listened to the Dorsai series a couple years ago after I’d read the books even years prior to that, and it was a great experience.

I really need to read some Junger. Never heard of him before the SSC reviews of Marble Cliffs but his work sounds so cool.

There are basically three Jungers - the man lived to be a hundred and two. The early Junger, roughly Storm of Steel to The Worker, is a warrior-poet writing on his war experiences and how the War (and particularly the emergence of technology's power over man) changed the world. He rejects the Nazis when they come to power and his techno-nationalist thought takes a mystical turn, this is where we get Marble Cliffs and some of his real hidden gems. After WWII, he's able to write more freely, and his thought becomes explicitly centered on individual inner freedom under the rule of technology, with The Forest Passage and Eumeswil his best-known works, as well as his writings on psychedelics (he was a friend of Albert Hoffmann and coined the term "psychonaut"). All his books except for his diaries and correspondences are very short, so you can start anywhere that takes your fancy.

Try reading On Pain by Junger. That’s one of my favorite short-reads of all time. Storm of Steel was the first work of his I’d ever read and I was hooked after that.

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