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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Paradise Lost. So far God isn't coming off well and Jesus sounds harebrained. On the other hand, Satan seems to have unfortunate ideas about what to do with humanity, which feels personal.
Paper I'm reading: Magnus' Science and Rationality for One and All.
Fellow Tetrapod by Dan Bensen, an absolutely delightful speculative-biology scifi novel. The premise: there are countless parallel versions of Earth, and in many of these sapient species have arisen, each from a different branch of life. There are sapient net-casting spiders that communicate by weaving puppets of their interlocutor, sapient hagfish that move about by extruding stilt-like rods of mucus, sapient crows that ride on the shoulders of domesticated hominids, sapient squirrels whose brain is mostly animated by strains of toxoplasma, and so on.
Two of these species (rotifers that form clonal colonies ruthlessly at war with each other and intelligent robots created by a long-extinct dinosaur race), have discovered how to cross between universes, and created a UN-like organization dedicated to building peaceful trade relations between sapient species. The protagonists are the representatives of humanity in this organization, about half a dozen of people rather neglected by their bosses on our Earth and looked down on by the members of senior, more affirmed species, trying to optimize humankind's position in the multiverse. The author has really done his readings on evolutionary biology, physiology, psychology, and so on; the novel comes with a proper bibliography.
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