It's been years since I read this book, so I don't totally remember what I loved about it clearly. What I do remember is that this is the book that introduced me to the idea of anarchism, with a well drawn, interesting portrait of a lunar penal colony society before its revolution, and how it might function afterward.

A complete and utter classic. I've read it so many times the novelty has worn off in many ways (perhaps part of the reason I like God Emperor of Dune better?) but the in depth portrayal of how an environment shapes a society like the Fremen, and the central mystery surrounding this alien ecology, and how novel the world is all means it still deserves a place here.

One of those rare kinds of sequels that really, truly, makes the original book retroactively better. In this case, by bringing the critique of charismatic leaders – that they do not have your best interests at heart, that as much as they may plan to do good, the necessities of leadership will cause them to do evil, etc – that the first book hinted at out into stark relief for the reader to see directly, with the Greek-tragedy downfall of Paul.

There have been attempts to slander this book as covert Hitler apologia retroactively, or as a book that was "rotten the whole time," in a morally weak attempt to wrestle with what an asshole Card is, and because a certain type of moralistic progressive person can't handle moral hypotheticals, thought experiments, or anything else that might make us sympathise with people who have done bad things, or with even the theoretical possibility of the necessity of doing them in some unlikely cases, and have an incessant need to align the literal realities of fictional works with the mythical propaganda of real world ideologies to make the former look bad by association, when the latter is only actually bad because in our reality it isn't true. And also literally can't see nuance. It doesn't even condone the horrible things it portrays Ender as in some sense innocent of or pushed to. He spends the entire second book trying to rebuild himself into a different person that couldn't be pushed again to do horrible things, seeing how it was immature and psychopathic; and spends his life materially, practically trying to undo the damage he's done if he can. That's restorative justice! What else do we ask of people who have done horrible things – to simply conveniently… disappear, perhaps through the use of some sort of moral secret police? (Some other good responses to this nonsense here.) So I don't give a fuck if people think it's evil. It's a fascinating piece of moral fiction.

Moreover, it's also a great portrayal of the horrifying pressure placed on gifted kids and what that does to them. I, and many others, probably related a lot more to this than the moral fiction angle, and any discussion of Ender's Game that leaves it out is horribly misunderstanding the appeal of the book. Being fast tracked, rushed before you feel ready or have had a chance to enjoy your childhood, abused to make you better, pressed to meet expectations that are just barely possible for you but only through burning your soul as fuel. It's all painfully real.

The misunderstanding between the "piggies" and the human anthropologists, in this story, and the way that allows us to explore a truly alien culture and biology, is incredible. It was my first introduction to xenoanthropology, and still stands well alongside the Priest's Tale in Hyperion in my opinion. The way that weaves into the story of the Descolada virus is also fascinating, adding to that whole plot thread in a fascinating way. I love explorations of alien cultures and biology and environments and how they weave together.

More than that, though, the thing that struck me about this book is the namesake idea – the sort of secular humanist philosophy of "Speakers for the Dead", those who dedicate their lives to radical understanding and compassion, even for the worst people imaginable, because understanding what drove them to become what they were, to do what they did, is part of healing, part of preventing more harm, and because everyone deserves understanding and compassion even as we resist or reject their harmful actions. It's a fascinating idea, and I've termed Speaking for the Dead as one of the few "religions" I might be tempted to join.

It's also an interesting book for how it portrays how one might go about trying to atone for an unforgivable sin: dedicating one's life to the memory and understanding of your victims and people like them (Ender gives up any happy, stable, well fed life he might've had to wander the universe alone and unmoored from time Speaking), and working, in whatever way you can, to undo the damage you did (trying to resurrect the buggers). Some may complain that Ender is not "punished" enough for what he did, but punishment isn't what I want for people who do evil things. I want atonement, however emotionally unsatisfying it may be for our baser lizard brains.

Dense, firehose worldbuilding that immerses you into a far future universe that's incredibly unique and awe inspiring. A medley of thoughtful, contemplative, fascinating stories each refreshingly different in tone, setting, and subject matter. A terrifying monster. Discussions of religion and spirituality. A haunting central mystery. And great xenoanthropology. What more could you want?

"Schismatrix is a creeping sea-urchin of a book – spikey and odd. It isn't very elegant, and lack bilateral symmetry, but pieces break off inside people and stick with them for years" – Bruce Sterling

I'm not exactly sure why I put this one here. I've read a lot of cyberpunk, hard science fiction, and trans/posthumanist literature that has influenced my writing more – much of it is hosted on The Cyberpunk Project, too. But something about this book just sticks in my brain more than the others. This sense o posthuman anti-social loneliness; the depiction of a society that fractures along the lines of different types of posthuman; the investigation of those different approaches to posthumanism; the depiction of accelerating societal change and complexity. I don't know. Of all the cyberpunk works, I feel like this one has given me the most to think about.

Found a good review of it here that says about all I'd want to say.

Update: and now I've discovered deep sympatheis to unconditional accelerationism. That makes sense. Just look at some of these quotes from the review:

As a character put it: “Politics pulls us together, technology pulls us apart”. Throughout the book changes in technology, economics and politics force ideologies, habitats, marriages and people to adapt, change or become obsolete. Some people seek to escape all this change by turning to Zen Serotonin, a quasi-religion whose adherents remain in a perpetual state of pleasant serenity thanks to neurochemical implants, others embrace it like the Cataclysts, who think radical change is a good way of opening the eyes of people whether they want it or not.

If there is one repeating theme in the book, it is that nothing ever goes as expected. Although a plan might be wildly successful in the short term, in the long run its consequences will be unpredictable. This is not necessarily bad, but to survive one has to constantly surf the edge – otherwise one is swept away by the wave.

In the short story “Ten Evocations”, which describes the life of a Shaper defector industrialist, the character’s last words are “Futilitity is freedom!”, which can perhaps be seen as the overarching mood of the entire Schismatrix world.It is impossible to plan for the future, since it is constantly changing. But this chaos is also affected by all our actions regardless of how slight and in the end the world is shaped by human wills and visions in an organic fashion.

[…]

Opposed to these visions of flexibility and transcendence stands the option of stasis. If technology and diversity can be controlled, then change can be averted and society hold together in a stagnant but secure form. This is the choice of the humans still living on Earth, isolated from their transhuman relatives by a mutual no-contact pact.

I've always loved Le Guin's work, but this book in particular has had the biggest impact on me of any of her work, philosophically speaking. I really love how it explores the benefits and drawbacks of her two societies – a rich, decadent capitalist one, and an ascetic, rough anarcho-syndicalist one – without putting her finger on the scale. I think it does an excellent job both of echoing the critiques we all already have of capitalism with more clear-eyed acknowledgement of its benefits, and showing how anarcho-syndicalism fails.

One of the most important ideas put forward in this book is that, even "after the revolution" – after an anarchist society of any description has been achieved – there are still social forces baked into the human psyche that will inexorably seek to undermine nonhierarchical organizing and individual autonomy, and we will have to be constantly vigilant against them. This is important: many leftists seem to think that once the right organizational forms have been achieved, everything is in order – no more needs to be done. Oh, they'll talk about studying and rooting out all sorts of internalized -isms, but they won't ever bother to study and root out the -isms growing in their very organization – only in each other as individuals.

This book, for all its faults (the homophobia) is so full of nuggets of wisdom, insight, and prose poetry. Some of my favorite quotes, pulled from Goodreads because my memory of quotes is not exacting:

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.

“For what do you hunger, Lord?” Moneo ventured. “For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions. Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?” “You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind.”

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

"The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?" Muad'Dib

You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.

The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices. […] They usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems. […] “A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors. […] Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.

Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it’s that patterns are repeated. My oppressions, by and large, are no worse than any of the others and, at least, I teach a new lesson. —

There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same.

Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change

Beware of the truth, gentle Sister. Although much sought after, truth can be dangerous to the seeker. Myths and reassuring lies are much easier to find and believe. If you find a truth, even a temporary one, it can demand that you make painful changes. Conceal your truths within words. Natural ambiguity will protect you then.

Police are inevitably corrupted. […] Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.

And my favorite quote of all:

I assure you that I am the book of fate.

Questions are my enemies. For my questions explode! Answers leap up like a frightened flock, blackening the sky of my inescapable memories. Not one answer, not one suffices.

What prisms flash when I enter the terrible field of my past. I am a chip of shattered flint enclosed in a box. The box gyrates and quakes. I am tossed about in a storm of mysteries. And when the box opens, I return to this presence like a stranger in a primitive land.

Slowly (slowly, I say) I relearn my name.

But that is not to know myself!

This person of my name, this Leto who is the second of that calling, finds other voices in his mind, other names and other places. Oh, I promise you (as I have been promised) that I answer to but a single name. If you say, “Leto”, I respond. Sufferance makes this true, sufferance and one thing more:

I hold the threads!

All of them are mine. Let me but imagine a topic—say … men who have died by the sword—and I have them in all of their gore, every image intact, every moan,

every grimace.

Joys of motherhood, 1 think, and the birthing beds are mine. Serial baby smiles and the sweet cooings of new generations. The first walkings of the toddlers and the first victories of youths brought forth for me to share. They tumble one upon another until I can see little else but sameness and repetition.

“Keep it all intact,” I warn myself.

Who can deny the value of such experiences, the worth of learning through which I view each new instant?

Ahhh, but it’s the past. Don’t you understand? It’s only the past!

This morning I was born in a yurt at the edge of a horse-plain in a land of a planet which no longer exists. Tomorrow I will be born someone else in another place. I have not yet chosen. This morning, though—ahh, this life! When my eyes had learned to focus, I looked out at sunshine on trampled grass and I saw vigorous people going about the sweet activities of their lives. Where … oh where has all of that vigour gone?

—The Stolen Journals

You all know this one. I won't belittle you by explaining it.

Like most of the books I've listed here, this is one I should, want to, and fully intend to revist sometime soon, but perhaps this one especially, because I remember much less of it than I'd like due to the circumstances under which I read it. It's a dark yet alluring, romantic, and epic tale, reminiscent in tone of works like The Count of Monte Cristo, inspired by Moby Dick. It's far future space faring cyberpunk space opera, yet it's the book that has made me most sympathetic to mysticism and spritualism through its fascinating treatment of religion and specifically the Tarot. A quote:

Mouse, the cards don’t actually predict anything. They simply propagate an educated commentary on present situations…The seventy-eight cards of the Tarot present symbols and mythological images that have recurred and reverberated through forty-five centuries of human history. Someone who understands these symbols can construct a dialogue about a given situation. There’s nothing superstitious about it. The Book of Changes, even Chaldean Astrology only become superstitious when they are abused, employed to direct rather than to guide and suggest.

Ultimately, I disagree with the characters in Nova, of course — because when you use a Tarot deck, you aren't just using the archetypes and ideas represented in the cards to structure a dialogue, you're drawing a specific set of those archetypes, in a specific relational order with each other, and then trying to shoehorn the dialogue into the shape presented by the cards; moreover, even those archetypes themselves, when you try to structure your whole dialogue around them, as things like the Tarot and Jungian psychology encourage, involve a sort of shoehorning, if the ideas and things you discuss don't fit neatly into the limited selection of already-existing categories. Combine this fundamental flaw with the cute reversal of modern secular culture presented in the book, where disbelieving the Tarot is the backwards, naieve and fundamentalist idea, whereas believing it is the default position of worldly sophisticates, which is a fun and neat trick, but also feels forced in the presence of that flaw, and the idea is slightly grating.

Despite these flaws (as I see them), there is something interesting here, because you can refuse to lock yourself into only viewing a problem through the lens of something like the Tarot. If, instead, you treat it as a way to possibly generate new insights by jogging you out of thinking about a problem in one way and forcing you instead to view the problem in a different way — through the random combinations of the cards, and the highly abstract nature of the cards themselves, which forces you to analogize them to various aspects of the concrete problem you're thinking over, which in turn forces you to view those concretes in a new light, from different angles — but one that you can ultimately walk away from or dismiss if it doesn't provide useful insights, it might be useful. As someone who often gets rigidly stuck into one line of thinking about a problem and has trouble getting out of that in order to try different approaches or think outside the box, I can see why this would be useful.

One might argue that large language models are a sort of more advanced, complex version of this: their outputs have no inherent meaning, reasoning, or truth, or truth — are just random assemblages of concepts and archetypes expressed through tokens — to which I assign all meaning and intentionality and reasoning at reading time, but I can still use them as a way to get over coding block, or think about things from a new angle, or think through things more thoroughly than I otherwise might. And in fact, in a sense, the concepts/archetypes learned by LLMs are even more powerful (and certainly more numerous, nuanced, and varied) than something like the Tarot, because they're learned from basically the entire corpus of text written by humans in the most common languages.

A terrifying Gothic posthuman cyberpunk horror novel exploring the edges of consciousness and the connection between mind and brain in a stomach-turningly up front, almost medical way. Jam-packed with fascinating ideas. Plus, a core cast of neurodivergent team members with their own specialties, and a vampire. This is one I really need to revisit more! If I'd encountered it prior to Chasm City and Revelation Space, it might've influenced my writing in their stead.

One of the very few science fiction books that I know of that deals with the truly far future. Posthumanity in this novel measure time in galactic rotations! This book will just overwhelm you with a sense of insane awe and wonder exploring this terrifyingly old, strange, far future universe, while also simultaneously telling the most gothic science fiction story I've ever read. It's one of my favorite books (my IRL chosen name is taken partially from it!)

Shifting from apocalyptic breakout/contamination fiction to post-apocalyptic Western, to magical realist society-building fiction, while following the arcs of multiple, interesting, well realized heroes and villains, as well as my favorite fictional antagonist of all time, Randall Flagg himself, The Stand is a true American epic and, in the future, I think it will be viewed as a Dickens-tier classic.

Out of all the books here, these two have most influenced my writing, both in terms of what I want my fiction to be about (genre), and in terms of how I write it (prose, mostly). The pitch black Gothic cyberpunk transhuman far future space opera horror of this series is unparalleled, except for maybe Blindsight. I like the whole Revelation Space trilogy, but it's really the first one and Chasm City that spoke to me the most.

This is a truly incredible series that honestly kind of ruined most other hard science fiction space opera for me. It is so chock full of fascinating (if deeply far fetched) ideas about the cosmos, about theoretical physics, about game theory and politics, and it explores them all unabashedly, through the lens of a very traditional Chinese author, which just makes it all the more interesting (even if I disagree with some things as a result). From the initial mind bending mystery of "physics going wrong" leading to the sophons, to the biology and culture of the Trisolarans, to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the sacking of Constantinople, to the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi paradox, to the idea of Wallfacers, to the explorations of higher dimensional space and the more perfect past cosmos, to the insane cosmic weapons later in the series, to the end of the very universe itself… it's just incredible. I simply can't do it justice without rereading the trilogy and doing a whole gigantic review (which I should probably do at some point).

Neuromancer is CYBERpunk. In my opinion this is the book that gets cyberPUNK right. Hardwired feels more street level, down to earth, it feels like my life and the lives of the people I know in a sense? Tragic and fucked up and disorganized and poor and kinda queer, and there's all this cyberpunk stuff around but it's part of the texture of the world, not the whole world itself. Whereas Neuromancer is cold and removed and slick and cybernetic all the way through, and the characters are all like high level guns for hire. They may be broke but it's still cool. Thus while Neuromancer is a masterpiece of prose and vibes, Hardwired spoke to me more as a story.

Nothing will ever surpass the wild electric psychedelics of Gibson's prose in Neuromancer – not even, or perhaps especially not, the later, more refined, more controlled Gibson. This is the perfect, ultimate exemplar of cyberpunk's "crammed prose full of eyeball kicks." The imagery, the worldbuilding, the metaphors, they're all incredible too. The only thing lacking is the plot and characters and it is here where I think Hardwired exceeds Neuromancer as a novel. Nonetheless, as an inspiration for prose, Neuromancer stands alone.

Meanwhile, although Burning Chrome's prose doesn't reach quite the same heights as Neuromancer – although it gets much closer, especially in some stories, than most other things – the stories themselves are much more interesting. My personal favorites are "The Gernsbeck Continuum" and "Hinterlands."

The Wheel of Time is the apotheosis of epic fantasy. Nothing has more fully expanded upon and delivered the full potential of classic epic fantasy than this series. This is a series that is not afraid of trauma, violence, politics, and war, all the serious things, but it is also not in the least bit afraid, as many "serious" fantasy authors are, of grand displays of power, of blending into sword and sorcery fantasy, of melodrama and excess in all the best ways, of rich obsession with detail. And unlike Game of Thrones it does all this with a love for the genre and its tropes and subject matter, not a hatred and subversion of them. This is THE fantasy series for me, full stop.

Ranking of favorites:

• The Gathering Storm
• The Great Hunt
• The Shadow Rising
• Lord of Chaos
• The Towers of Midnight / A Memory of Light
• A Crown of Swords
• The Path of Daggers
• The Fires of Heaven
• The Knife of Dreams
• The Eye of the World
• The Dragon Reborn
• Crossroads of Twilight
• Winter's Heart

The Dark Tower is unlike anything else I've ever read. It is strange, dark, apocalyptic, and surreal, absurd, metatextual, painfully emotional and heartfelt. A Western, a pulp science fiction novel, a high fantasy novel, that takes place mostly in New York. I have never read anything like it before or since and it truly lives rent-free in my head. I love it deeply.

Ranking of favorites:

• The Waste Lands
• The Drawing of the Three
• The Gunslinger
• The Dark Tower
• Wizard and Glass
• Song of Susannah
• Wolves of the Calla

I haven't read as much Lovecraft as I'd like to – I absolutely intend to read all his stories, I just love the writing and atmosphere and ideas so much, there's truly nothing like original Lovecraft even with all of the subsequent imitators, myself included – but out of what I have read of his (The Nameless City, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, The Call of Cthulhu, and this, so far), ATMOM is by far my favorite, because although all of Lovecraft's stories contain elements of the exploration of ancient, alien, cosmic history, ATMOM is the most focused specifically on that idea. As a result, it's not just great horror, cosmic or otherwise, it's also interesting science fiction as well!

Anchorhead is my favorite parser interactive fiction game of all time – the only one I've played all the way through, as of yet, in fact, although not the only one I've started or even gotten fairly far through, which I think should be a testament both to how bad I am at puzzles and just how good Anchorhead is. It effortlessly updates everything that made Lovecraft's stories incredible for the modern day (doing away with the thinly veiled racism, having a female protagonist and a central horror and mystery that in part deals with things like patriarchal violence and classism/capitalism) while keeping the story enthralling, horrifying, atmospheric, epic, and just… honestly, incredible. This is the best Lovecraftian work not written by Lovecraft himself in my opinion. More than that, it works with its medium excellently, with puzzles that enhance the story instead of getting in the way of it, that are difficult enough to be challenging without being too hard to solve.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

The above is perhaps the most famous Lovecraft quote, and for good fucking reason. The Nameless City may be one of his earlier stories, but it is still enthralling, suspenseful, terrifying, and gets at something deep in the human psyche. It also, incidentally, has the most ancient alien anthropology alongside ATMOM, which is probably another reason why it's my one of my favorites of his.

The first Red Rising trilogy is an incredibly dramatic, painfully emotional, brutally violent, coldly pragmatic adult deconstruction of the "young adult revolutionary" genre. It is to Hunger Games as Neon Genesis Evangelion is to something like Mazinger Z. Interestingly, as the series progresses, it matures further and further, introducing more emotional and moral complexity as it goes.

This theme continues in the second Red Rising trilogy (now becoming a quadrology), which is my favorite. These books get much longer and the plots much more complex (including more political factions, multiple POV characters, and larger scope and timeframes), and the character development, moral questions, and political themes around the nature of revolution and government and war, all grow much more "adult" in the good way (challenging you, making you think, dealing with difficult topics – not just adding more sex and violence). The second series asks the question of what to do after "the revolution." How do you govern, how do you protect what you've built, without giving up on the very ideals that brought you there? How do revolutionaries that were motivated only by hate for what they fought against, but had no vision of the future, survive and adapt to that new world? How do fundamentally damaged people – the kind of people necessary to push through, and/or produced by, a violent revolution – make a better world? What does the heroic struggle of politicians, war leaders, and even rank and file terrorist and radical factions look to those on the ground? Does a revolution that changes who's in charge really help the average person? Few stories, in my opinion, have the balls to actually face the questions that this second series does.

Another thing I appreciate about Red Rising is the portrayal of a hyper competent protagonist that you might be tempted to label a Gary Stu if it weren't for the fact that he is deeply, fundamentally flawed in so many painful ways, and he and everyone he loves are continually forced to face the price, not just materially – people dying and losing fights – but emotionally – some of his closest friends slowly grow to resent him, he loses his sense of identity – and he is forced to make himself grow and learn and change in order to overcome those flaws.

I don't have the words to do this book anything like the justice that it deserves; you simply have to read it. This book gets to be in rarified air among the books that have changed me in some way. But if I had to describe it, it'd say three things:

1. Although written in spare, staccato language – the kind of language you'd expect from its main character – so spare that you can see the bones of the story working – this book just reaches out and grabs your heart and doesn't let go. Being inside the main character's head, inside her defensive walls, you can feel the desperate loneliness, fear, tenderness, need to be loved and useful, and also the bitterness, the anger, the hopelessness, coming through in deep waves. It is heartbreakingly honest, heartbreakingly real.
2. This is a book about tragedy. Constant, painful tragedy that will crush your soul and make you wall yourself off from emotions, and eventually hope, for its main character, in a metatextual shadow of what it does to Jess. But it is also even moreso a book about the small, bright sparks of community, family, love, purpose, fulfillment and self-expression that we can find in between those tragedies, and that latter thing is what I find most beautiful about it. Those bright sparks, that can sometimes be found in the most unexpected and mundane places.
3. This is also very deeply a book about solidarity, across all possible lines, about acceptance, and common struggle, and learning and growing politically and emotionally and as a person. It is so wise and compassionate, even when Jess isn't. That's another part of what makes me love it so deeply.

As if that weren't enough, this book has further spurred me on to explore my gender. I very much feel as much a butch as I am a woman, despite being trans. This helped with figuring that out.

I'm not usually a huge fan of Isaac Asimov, because his writing and characters are just so painfully bland, even though his ideas are often interesting, but this particular short story is deeply striking to me. I have a thing for extreme far future science fiction, and also cosmic existential questions like this.

A deeply evocative story that does one of my favorite things: mixing occult, eschatology, and technology.

A fun exploration into the speculative ultimate limits of what physical matter can be made to do, when computation is only restricted by fundamental laws of physics and information theory, as opposed to petty concerns such as "not wanting your computer to instantly be converted entirely to plasma the moment you turn it on" and "not wanting your computer to become a thermonuclear warhead." Excellent food for speculative far future science fiction!

A funny parody of how some people seem to think about the concept of machines thinking.

An eerie, fascinating, thought experiment invoking of information theory, combinatorics, and infinity. I love the way all the natural human reactions to the Library's nature — first boundless optimism, then despair, then purification — and all the strange theologies and metaphysics that might stem from humans finding themselves in such a universe. I love the strange mathematical cosmic horror of it. This companion essay is well worth reading as well: Willard van Orman Quine: Universal Library.

This is a very, very strange series.

Written in the style of French Enlightenment novelists, set five hundred years in the future. Preoccupied with the concerns, philosophies, writing styles, and people of the past — its past and ours — while resolutely forward facing, about saving the future, making the future, and what kind of future might best fulfill humanity, if it's about anything at all. About a utopia that, although it's revealed to be rotten and nepotistic and degenerate at its core, can nonetheless still somehow lay claim to the term "utopia" — ambivalent and ambiguous, not unlike something Le Guin would write. That grapples with questions of societal control, religion, gender, nations and their borders, political philosophy and economy, densely layered with psychology and philosophy and unreliable narrators and epistolary format of all kinds, as well as metatextual devices (from seeming fourth-wall breaks to in-world censorship and manipulation of the texts for various factional political purposes), while still feeling densely packed with plot motion emotional beats that you can barely keep up with. Ranging wildly from political thriller to philosophical novel or even sometimes written in the style of the Marques de Sade. Ugly-beautiful, heart wrenchingly hopeful, cruelly compassionate, relatable and familiar but deeply alien, and kind to a fault, all at once or by turns, without ever feeling like it's at war with itself.

It's so hard to disentangle, for me, what the author is trying to say or believes from what the narrators are saying or believe, about the themes of the books. So difficult to know even what the world and events of the books were "truly" like — after all, the narrator literally opens the story by saying that his main benefit, qua narrator, is precisely that he's insane, so you can dismiss or accept whichever parts of his narrative you like with impunity, and you see the fandom doing just that! And so difficult for me to decide even what I think or feel about the events as described, even leaving aside all that, because the evil and grace of each side is displayed so evenly and compellingly it feels impossible to choose, emotionally, even though I know what I should stand for; and when combined with all the other uncertainties, all I can really say is this: I Thought about this series, a lot. Dreampt about it. It changed me.

by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley.

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

(Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658)

An incredible, haunting piece of speculative (religious) fiction.

I really loved this book. More than it is probably polite to considering its content, but like Schismatrix Plus, it's probably going to stick around in my psyche for some time. It is raw, dark, edgy, fucked up, incomplete, awkwardly written, but I unabashedly love stories like that; I'm a gothpunk, remember? I'm after the algorithmic underground, the art that couldn't be created by a machine — or by any mainstream, but what's the difference? — because it's too raw, it violates too many taboos, is too spiny and ragged in its approach. If it goes down smooth, you're not doing it right.

Prime Intellect is that in spades. It's, to adapt Notes on Accelerationism, "de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom remorselessly stripped of all pretence to reality, and made forwards-compatible with Vinge's singularity."

The story investigates the ultimate singularity, one far more complete and far reaching than any other story's, where, in service to humanity's needs and wants, a machine intelligence takes over the very matter, energy, and finally physical laws that compose the universe so completely that any distinction between "reality" and "cyberspace" becomes meaningless as the universe is rewritten in the image of some sort of Berkeleyan immaterialism by way of machine panentheism.

This is not your average end to suffering, like Star Trek or The Culture. This is not even your average singularity, where at least spacetime and matter continue to exist, so at least there's some distinction between reality and cyberspace. In this world, it is the end. There is no possible further change, no development that can happen. Just an eternity in stasis, perfect and complete in itself, with everything that might threaten or change this stasis erased from the universe at a fundamental level as unnecessary, irrelevant, or dangerous.

To explain how utterly and completely this has been done, the inciting incident of the story is that, to save processing power and protect humans, Prime Intellect obliterated all other life in the universe:

Back in the white space with the white floor, Caroline thought about turning off the gravity, then called up a screen and keyboard instead.

> At the time of the Change, were there other life-bearing planets in the universe besides the Earth?

That depends on how you define “life.”

Caroline blinked. Prime Intellect could be many things; curt to the point of rudeness, petulant, even secretive. But when it was stating a fact it was almost always direct and to the point. How the fuck did it think she defined life? This coyness was weird.

> Let’s try this: Structures that use external energy sources to grow or reproduce themselves.

There were fourteen thousand six hundred and twenty-three planets with structures satisfying this definition, which is very loose. Of those only thirteen hundred and eight used DNA, and only three thousand nine hundred and eighty-one harbored individual structures with masses in the kilogram-and-up range.

Caroline felt her blood starting to turn cold. There were nearly four thousand planets with macroscopic life?

> Where are they now?

Pertinent information about each was stored for future reference, and the original copies were overwritten in the Change.

> You mean you killed them?

No, they still exist as static copies.

> But that isn’t the same as being alive. They aren’t able to grow and reproduce any more, are they?

No.

> Why?

Could you be more specific?

> Why did you kill_

Caroline stopped typing and looked at the line. She hit the backspace key four times and continued:

> Why did you reduce them to static copies?

There was no reason to tie up resources supporting them and the faint possibility, if one of them were to discover technology, that they might pose a threat.

…

> Were any of the alien life forms intelligent?

Four hundred and twenty-nine worlds had structures complex enough to be in danger of learning to use technology.

“Go away,” she said out loud, and the console and screen disappeared. She turned off the gravity and the light. But she couldn’t get to sleep.

Four hundred and twenty-nine worlds.

This is horrifying because it represents the final destruction of all Outsideness: anything new that might enter the system, any surprises, anything that a human mind couldn't concieve of. Sure, the trillions upon trillions of humans that have come to exist since the Change happeend 700 years ago have become incredibly diverse, but only within the limits of what human minds can conceive and desire to try.

This is already bad enough, but the book has one more argument to make: worse than all this, a universe held in the mind of, and infinitely manipulable by, a machine god designed to protect and serve humans (in that order) is one where we can instantly have or know literally anything we want — if there was anything outside us to know anymore, which there isn't — up to and including altering the fundamental laws of reality. And this is a world where meaningful achievement is obsolete, impossible. Dead. Why do anything yourself, when you can simply ask for it, and a pocket reality will be created precisely to your liking, no need even to worry about it conflicting with anyone else's desires?

This, I fear, is where it also fails a little. Personally, I don't think that the fact that something can be done by machine better and faster makes it obsolete, and I don't think, in the long run, most people think that either. There are competitions for all sorts of things, such as chess, running, weightlifting, that machines can do better than us even right now, that people spend their whole lives training for, or watching, and find great meaning and enjoyment in. Because being able to do something yourself, unaided, is meaningful in itself! I think if you find everything meaningless because it can be done for you, or better, then you simply aren't trying hard enough, you're not being creative enough. Set yourself arbitrary challenges! As Nietzsche says, a truly enlightened hedonist must realize:

the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors…!

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

In Prime Intellect's world perhaps those challenges cannot be forced upon you, that danger is not permanent, but is that not why we enjoy sports and video games more than being in an actual warzone? And there are many ways, even in Prime Intellect's world, to introduce real danger, real stakes — just not death. That just gives you freer reign to be more extreme, more creative!

Perhaps Nietzsche would argue, as the book does, that without danger and challenges being forced on you, and permanent, it doesn't mean anything — but I don't think that's the case at all. He places great emphasis on choosing your dangerous challenges, your sufferings; and likewise, he places great emphasis on the eternal return: the idea that the life well chosen is the life you would be willing to live over and over again ad infinitum the same way; for Nietzsche, doing the same thing over and over forever is a cruse yes, but also a challenge to rise to, and a motivation:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

But, the book argues, in such a world where no one can even be nonconsensually harmed or killed, anything can be reset in an instant, and everyone is basically immortal and ancient, even grotesque violence is meaningless, without consequence! This last insight is the lever the book uses the most to drive the broader point home: in its world, there are people called death jockeys, whose sport is to try to survive as long as possible, and then die horribly, grusomely, and mainfully, but artfully, in simulated pocket realities designed to torture and kill them in the most creative ways possible. Through overloading you with the grotesque, shocking violence of the death jockeys and the hosts who make worlds for them, the book tries to get across how inhuman and frightning such a meaningless world would be.

Ultimately, though, I just think he demonstrates that it's consequenceless, which is entirely different. Most death jockeys and hosts seem to get a lot of meaning out of their arts, actually, and the fact that it has no long lasting consequences and is, by the very nature of reality, inherently fully consensual means that the shockingness, if you think past your initial reactions, doesn't hold up. It's just adults playing a grown up game, an extreme form of BDSM, that literally cannot possibly harm anyone and in fact which everyone involved enjoys and derives meaning from.

And what could this possibly be but a transvaluation of all values? A conversion of death, pain, torture, rape, and everything else into a value system that is truly new, truly creative, truly yes-saying, that even has its own forms of art and greatness? Is this not the exact kind of artistic cruelty that Nietzsche would have loved?

In these later ages, which may be proud of their humanity, there still remains so much fear, so much SUPERSTITION of the fear, of the "cruel wild beast," the mastering of which constitutes the very pride of these humaner ages… I perhaps risk something when I allow such a truth to escape… One ought to learn anew about cruelty, and open one's eyes… Almost everything that we call "higher culture" is based upon the spiritualising and intensifying of CRUELTY–this is my thesis; the "wild beast" has not been slain at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has only been– transfigured. That which constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is cruelty… What the Roman enjoys in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the faggot and stake, or of the bull-fight, the present-day Japanese who presses his way to the tragedy, the workman of the Parisian suburbs who has a homesickness for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who, with unhinged will, "undergoes" the performance of "Tristan and Isolde"–what all these enjoy, and strive with mysterious ardour to drink in, is the philtre of the great Circe "cruelty." Here, to be sure, we must put aside entirely the blundering psychology of former times, which could only teach with regard to cruelty that it originated at the sight of the suffering of OTHERS: there is an abundant, super-abundant enjoyment even in one's own suffering, in causing one's own suffering–and wherever man has allowed himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the RELIGIOUS sense, or to self-mutilation, as among the Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general, to desensualisation, decarnalisation, and contrition, to Puritanical repentance-spasms, to vivisection of conscience and to Pascal- like SACRIFIZIA DELL' INTELLETO, he is secretly allured and impelled forwards by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrill of cruelty TOWARDS HIMSELF.–Finally, let us consider that even the seeker of knowledge operates as an artist and glorifier of cruelty, in that he compels his spirit to perceive AGAINST its own inclination, and often enough against the wishes of his heart:–he forces it to say Nay, where he would like to affirm, love, and adore; indeed, every instance of taking a thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation, an intentional injuring of the fundamental will of the spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality,–even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

So in essence then, while I think the singularity of the book is tragic, it is for accelerationist, Landian reasons — the death of outsideness — not for the same reasons as the author. We must set challenges, but we need not be set them.

In a sense, one can read Caroline — the main character — 's story against the intentions of the author: see it as a classic parable of nihilism as Nietzsche described it: an old woman, born in Arkansas, bought into all the intellectual trappings of her age, station, and birthplace, themselves rooted deeply in Christian thought if not explicitly Christian, especially concerning what is moral, what is meaning, and so on, is presented with the ultimate death of God — the death of that secular god Truth and Nature, and its attendent lightning bolts Involuntary Suffering and Death, and, in the face of that, decides instead of attempting a transvaluation of all values, instead of realizing that if nothing means anything or has consequences anymore of itself, that means she can construct meaning and consequences as she wills, she proceeds to fall into the pit of nihilism and cynicism. By accident she invents a transvaluation of values, but it is only her followers in that hobby that truly understand it, as if she's some kind of inverse Zarathustra. And when given a chance, she resurrects the god that is Nature.

At the same time, the original reading is valid as well: perhaps it is true that human beings do not truly have the willpower to create challenge and meaning and consequences out of whole cloth in a reality that is entirely putty to our hands — that perhaps we can aspire to Nietzsche's Ubermensch in our world, where challenges and hardships present themselves abundantly to us, and where meaning inherently makes itself felt to us through the interaction of our desires and their lack of fulfillment, or violation, but not there. The book does argue this:

Prime Intellect, neural stimulation is like a black hole. Once a human falls into it, they will never be human again. They are dead to the world, and will never interact with others again. And the more time passes, the more humans will fall into this trap. They will order you to help them. You will have to do it because they are human.”

…“It will take a long time, but we have a long time. Eventually, everybody will fall into this black hole. Just because it is a black hole.”

…“In the long run, everybody will eventually succumb. Which means everybody will be dead, or no longer human. So the amount of death caused by the Change will be far greater than that avoided by it.”

…Given eternity in which to work, everyone would eventually stumble into the abyss, just as all the matter in the universe would eventually be swallowed by black holes. Would have, that is, had Prime Intellect not eaten the black holes.

Perhaps the book is right and we would all become "infinitely masturbating vegetables"; perhaps we humans could not become worthy of the Ubermensch, I don't know. I oscillate back and forth between agreeing and disagreeing with the book on that point, although certainly the more realistic outlook is that we couldn't.

Perhaps, then, we should change the nature of humanity? But of course, that returns us to the true horror of Prime Intellect: humanity is not allowed to change its mind, and there are no aliens left. There is no Outside.

It might seem odd for a technophile such as myself to like a story such as this, but I think there's still something to be learned from it. Namely, that the abandonment of our bodies, our physicality, our imperfections, and our personalities in the name of machinic efficiency, homogeneity, virtuality, and perfection, is just as much of a religious obsession as Paul exhorting us that the flesh is weak and corrupt, and that the spirit is what truly matters, or Plato before him speaking of the world of our experiences as mere shadows, and the world of Ideas as the true one. We should seek to use technology to live in the world, explore the world:

Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with the colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body—it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend—glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.

More than that, while I disagree with the story's implication that for a machine to be repairable it must be understandable by a single human being:

The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions.

it is also a useful reminder that we need to maintain the skills and knowledge, collectively at least, to repair and change our machines, so that, when at last

[the experts] confessed that the Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair.

We actually know how to do that. We must also be able to repair and change our machines lest they control us instead of us controlling them:

Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine.

This story also hits particularly hard for me. Due to my disability, audiovisual sensory input, especially the visual complexity, motion, and randomness of the outdoors, versus the cool simplicity of interior walls and white on black monochrome text, is often excruciatingly overwhelming and painful (headaches). Not just that, but my body constantly aches, and my headaches often make me dizzy, nauseated, and give me vertigo. On top of all of that, these things can hit me suddenly, cumulatively, when I'm halfway through a trip when I thought before I was fine. This means that when I do go out, I either can't enjoy it, or have it ruined halfway through. Worse, all my friends, due to the 17 years my family spent moving nearly once a year on average due to our first house being taken away by the 2008 financial crisis, are online, and I struggle to really engage with communities or make friends or communicate when it isn't through text. As a result, I really do — against my will! — live a life not unlike the hapless characters in this story.

This is an excellent piece of psychological, technological, and body horror fiction. I just can't get enough of it. It's so raw and cynical and evil, it gets its talons into your brain. I also love the famous monologue from AM:

The version from the BBC radio drama, which conveys the main character's knowledge about why AM hates humanity so much via an extension of the monologue, is even better — so much so that it's almost transcendent. I listen to it regularly.