Starquest: Sinister Syndicate of Space, by John C. Wright

Wright used to be a more generous author. He’d have a character mention something in passing that a lesser author would have stretched into a five-book series. I can tell he’s stretching the Starquest books, though. This one is a single step in Athos’s career, and a single fun mission to a stolen planet. It’s heavily padded. Instead of focusing on the development of the character, Wright gives us a monologue from each crime lord before he’s killed. There’s a duel with a guy who seems interesting, but we’ve never met the man before, and we don’t know why we should care. He loses quickly and we never hear from him again. There’s a edge-of-the-cliff moment where Athos has to finally choose between loyalty to his comrades and loyalty to the law…and he sails through it without making any decision, because he accidentally puts his foot in his mouth. I wish the author would take more time with these. I’d prefer they come out half as often if they were twice as good.

The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger

This is a fun account of the Madan and what life was like for them in the marshes of southern Iraq in the 1950s. A lot of Arab culture - revenge, sex, hatred of pigs - makes sense to me after reading this book. It combines the best of personal memoir and anthropology.

A Zoo in my Luggage by Gerald Durrell

A beloved reread. Gerald Durrell goes back to the British Cameroons, this time to collect animals for his own zoo. Its descriptions of wildlife, people, and landscapes are unsurpassed in humor and compassion.

The Vintage Caper, by Peter Mayle

This cute little story follows an insurance investigator who sympathizes more with the thief than his client. It had a strange structural problem, though, as the author fought against the romance that kept trying to bloom between the male and female leads. “No, they didn’t kiss! They both were already in relationships.” Come on, dude, be brave. Show us what these two characters really would have done.

Decisively Engaged by C.J. Carella

I bought the whole Warp Marine Corps omnibus audiobook but stopped after finishing book one. Turns out humans are better than any other species at surviving warp space. We can do things like fling soldiers into enemy ships during space combat. Thus, the Warp Marines. Fun! But we don’t get much fun.

Rather than pick a story and stick with it, the author pulls us back and forth between the immediate aftermath of first contact and the next big test of the American Interstellar Empire a generation later. We should get either an “abused underdog rises to glory” story or a “complacent champion responds to challenge” story. Instead, we get neither.

Black Rainbow by Barbara Michaels

My wife sold this to me as “Bronte with teeth.” Okay, I see it. Two women in Victorian England orbit around an aristocratic young landlord. Megan is the governess of Lord Greyhaven’s bastard daughter, and Jane is his sister and manager of the woolens mill on his land. The point of view switches back and forth between them as their man’s behavior grows ever worse. There’s a good character study of the villain, but with no mystery element to the story or secrets the bad guy is hiding. He’s fairly up-front about selling out the villagers, prosecuting Jane’s lover, and locking his sister in the attic. The problem is the main characters, who wring their hands and fail to reveal important information to each other. I got sick of watching the women get progressively victimized before they finally decide to do something about it.

Every Living Thing by James Herriot

With this book, Herriot has mostly settled into his veterinary practice, so the spotlight moves to new vet, Calum Buchanan, who is a naturalist at heart and fills the clinic with badgers and herons. I wish I could read about his later adventures in New Guinea.

Light Up the Night, by

Another based book sale purchase, and it’s only okay. It gets off to a good start with the accidental discovery of cold fusion by a little boy and his grandpa. Now they can build an alternate power network and get out from under the wicked commissars of the state-owned power company, who turn off the juice to punish wrongthink. Meanwhile, the grandmas root spies out of the church group. These elements all sound good, but I got the impression that the author didn’t understand them and wasn’t interested in learning more. She doesn’t know how the college indenture system works, or what makes the villains tick, or why nobody else has discovered you can make a tokamak in your basement. Without digging into those elements, they’re just scenery. I don’t know what’s hard for the characters or what’s at stake, so I’m left feeling nothing when they win.

The Whispering Land by Gerald Durrell

I’d forgotten most of this one, because South America’s animals are less exciting than Africa’s. I have new appreciation for the people, though. The rural ornithologist, whom nobody understands. The rancher who collects Indian artifacts, and this perfect exchange:

It was Marie who scented danger.

‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked.

‘Si, si, señorita, the señor’s papers are all in order, but they have not been signed by a despachante.’

‘What on earth’s a despachante?’ I asked.

‘It is a sort of man.’

Everything on Black, by

This is a beautifully put together neo-noir about a cop who lets herself get seduced into murder. Halfway through the crime, she realizes she’s about to kill a totally innocent woman, and she goes through with it anyway. That’s just the first couple of chapters.

I give a whole review here with , who is wiser than I. You should listen to it.

Generations by William Strauss and

Published in 1991, Generations includes some entertaining pop-history and hilarious then-current political commentary, but its best feature is the predictions the authors make about the far-off future year of 2020. Were these guys right? Sometimes, yes, scarily, so.

This book needs a much more thorough treatment, but for now I’ll focus on Strauss and Howe’s description of the Salem witch trials, as an elder Prophet generation brought the hammer down on adult Nomads for their spiritual attacks on young Artists, while Heroes watched, congratulating themselves on their high morals. Now remember the 2010s, when we had stern elder Boomers, innocent Zoomers, their amoral X-ers abusers, and the Millenials, had so much fun during the #MeToo movement. History rhymes. It’s rhymes, man!

I still don’t know whether Strauss and Howe laid down the foundations of the predictive science of history, or whether they discovered astrology but for birth cohorts.

Fate of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

I would have been more disappointed in this book if I had cared about the Fleet of Worlds. Humans fight a revolutionary war against alien overlords. Humans discover new aliens, who can be super-smart. Even super-er-smart-er-er aliens show up! We discover the Ringworld, remember that one? Other humans find it too. All the aliens are fighting over the Ringworld. The Ringworld vanishes. So much of this series was just, And then what? And then what? With occasionally new aliens introduced to give me a reason to keep reading. This final book in the series didn’t even have any new aliens.

And here’s what else I’ve been up to:

I’m the Editor of Tortuga Media now, and you can see my fingerprints on its posts.

Tortuga Media

Munitions Made in Shenzhen

If you’ve watched a $500 drone turn a $5 million tank into a smoking hole and thought, somebody is getting rich on this, you’re right. It’s just nobody in the US…

Read more

2 months ago · 18 likes · 3 comments · Zarska and Professor Axelrod

, and I did a podcast about Krug’s novel Pornoland, in which I reconsidered some of the mean things I said about it. Do you think my review of your book was too harsh? All you have to do is record a podcast with me to change my mind. I’m a softy.

Tortuga Media

Pornoland, by Tyson James

This week we review Pornoland by Krug (AKA Tyson James), who joins us on the show…

Listen now

2 months ago · 10 likes · The 13th Grade and Daniel M. Bensen

I’ve discovered magazine, which is consistently excellent. The first thing you should read is The End of Weed Culture.

The Obelisk

Killing a Guy: 10/10 Would Recommend

DISCLAIMER: This was submitted to us over a year ago anonymously. The Bizarchives does not condone criminality or acts of violence and is publishing this under the assumption that it is a work of fiction…

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3 months ago · 82 likes · The Bizarchives

Possibly fiction? Nevertheless, real.

I can’t remember if I’ve recommended ’s Fallujiad before. I’m doing it again:

“Fuck. Big-ass haji crowd,” dry Pilter groaned

To his squad sergeant, laying on the horn.

“Fuck off, you fags! Come on! Don’t you have jobs?”

“Don’t aggravate them, Pilter.” “Sorry, Sarge.”

I’ve been enjoying this guy:

His illustrations are cute, he’s genuinely interested in the languages and the cultures of the bronze age, and he only rarely indulges in judging them by the standards of a 21st century American Blue-tribe suburbanite.

Now that’s how you aspirate a stop!

See you next month.

So there I was, huddled under the spreading beams in the attic of a Serbian cultural center, drawing. The old men around me did the same, but much, much better. There were airplanes and devils, stubbly tough men, video game characters, a full-sized portrait in acrylics of a knight on horseback. Watching them, I remembered high school, and how I’d wanted to be just like them.

I stuck close to my guide, Artyom, who introduced me as “my writer,” and created the top two-thirds of a brigand prince before my eyes. He began with the eyebrows. “Eh?” Then a Salvador Dalí mustache like the hands of a clock at 2:45. “How about this?” A pair of bells hung off the tips of the mustache, an homage to the bad guy from our comic Sharp Eye.

“Now what can I do with the mouth?” Some teeth were missing, some overlarge.

“A gold tooth,” I said, trying to hold up my end of our relationship. But of course in an ink drawing, you can’t see the color of a tooth.

While he drew, Artyom wanted to talk about his workload and income. “If I can do two big projects, I don’t need to be hustling for commissions. I have a video game, and half another video game, and Sharp Eye II will be my other big project.”

I didn’t really want to talk about money or scheduling. I wanted to talk about the characters and the trouble they’d gotten themselves into. And all right, what they would look like when they solved those problems. That’s why I do this. Those are the questions that interest me. But I didn’t want to distract Artyom. I wanted to watch while he worked.

Some football hooligan came in and shouted that Artyom was a pussy for penciling before inking. It turned out that he was one of the Bulgarian artists. Artyom ignored him.

“Now I just have to do something interesting for the important parts.” Artyom leaned in and made a few quick loops with his marker around the eyes. The brigand was a man beginning to go slack, his face pouched like a wineskin just a little more than half drunk.

He waved at the shoulders. “And I’ll just put some bullshit over here.”

“All right!” It was Marko, a tall, teacherly man with a ponytail, who managed to organize the whole Balkans Festival of Young Comic Creators without letting his manic energy tilt all the way into “crazed.”

He was standing at the head of the room and filling it with his voice. “Everybody, there is a documentary film in the theater. It’s very comfortable there, very cool. The film is only forty-five minutes long. So go!”

The film showed the history of The Leskovac School of Comics, beginning in 1995 and ending with Marko calling to a playground full of children: “Draw three panels, beginning, middle, and end. It can be about anything. A flower and a bug. Two clouds that made friends with each other.”

Marko found me back in the attic and asked if I had everything I needed. I said I’d already gotten my hamburger, and I thanked him for inviting me. He strode off, head on a swivel, putting out more fires and distributing more burgers.

The air conditioners blasted into the attic, battling the heat that baked down from the underside of the roof. All of the speakers went overtime. There was a box full of hamburgers. Comic artists from all over Europe drew and drew and drew.

I started my own drawing, trying to mimic the top two-thirds of Artyom’s smiling, dangerous man. But I was always more interested in non-humans. I drew some of the species from Fellow Tetrapod: a Quotidian, a Monumental, a Tensor, like a soccer ball with dinosaur arms. Maybe someone would pass behind me and discover me. Artyom clapped me on the back, and I straightened. Looked up at him. “Now draw two clouds making friends,” he said.

It was time for our panel discussion. Marko himself joined another comic writer and me to talk about our side of the work, and someone in the audience asked about ethical dilemmas. What if readers were offended by what we wrote? Marko related the story of a comic where he had a tank driver talking about his grandfather who fought for the Nazis in World War Two.

His commander asked the driver how he could be proud of such a man. The driver said that his grandfather had fought and died for his country; how could you not be proud of such an ancestor? The commander answered, “In that case, your family will be proud of you. We’re not going to survive the upcoming battle.” That was the most real story I heard during the festival, and it got cut. It was censored out by the publisher.

“Thank you.” The audience member pointed at me. “But what do you think?” This is why the youngest member of the panel answers first, people, so they don’t have to follow an act delivered by a master. I could’ve spend my time listening appreciatively, instead of figuring out how the hell I was going to answer.

First I said, “I wish I was famous enough that I had this problem. Ha ha.” That was my fear speaking. What if I was discovered? But I did recover: Fear is your compass. If you are afraid of something you’ve written, that means it’s good. And if you’re afraid to write something, that means you write it.1 I think that goes for deeds as well as stories.

“Have you met Dimo?” It was our final night in Leskovac, and Marko steered a crop-haired, energetic young man toward me. “He’s from Sofia, too. He’s written a historical comic.”

“Well,” said Dimo, “alternate history. In the real world, we lost that battle.”

I bought a copy and asked him to sign it for my daughter. He did so, wielding a brush pen taped to a felt-tip marker, which he twirled as he wrote, outlined, and shaded a signature and a cavalry officer with out-thrust saber.

“Let’s have coffee,” I told him.

I’ll sound him out. See what he'd be like to work with.

“I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d get mad,” said my thirteen-year-old.

I stared at her, already tucked into her bed. Then I stepped back into the bathroom and stared at the sink, which was hanging halfway out of the wall.

That rumble I’d felt after dinner hadn’t been a minor earthquake. Maggie had gotten out of the shower, grabbed the lip of the sink, and put her weight on it. The long, rusty bolts had slid from the wall, and there the heavy porcelain fixture hung, at a thirty-degree angle.

It was 10:30pm on a school night. I pushed the sink back into the wall and propped it up on a wooden chair. The weight of the porcelain probably wouldn’t break the pipes under it and flood the house. At least, not tonight. The next day, I’d find the valve and shut off water for this floor, to stop anything leaking.

There wasn’t a valve. My family lives on the third and fourth floors of a townhouse in Sofia, and the sink in question is on the fourth floor. There did indeed use to be a separate valve for only that floor, but it had been removed. That wasn’t my decision. Then again, I’m in no position to critique anyone else’s plumbing.

My plan was to (A) shut off the water to our whole apartment, (B) disconnect the sink from the pipe in the wall, and (C) screw in some kind of cap that would keep the water where it belonged. Then, (D-?) I could repair the sink?

I made it up to (A). Once I was sure that all of the taps in the apartment were dry, I tightened my wrench around the nut between the water-supply line and the pipe that stuck out of the wall. I pushed. Nothing happened. The nut was stuck. I slid my hand down the handle of the wrench and tried again, thoughts full of high-school physics and the length of lever arms. The pipe snapped like old chocolate.

Now, I felt fairly bad about this. If I turned the apartment’s water back on, now, we’d have a fountain. My whole family had to do without water until I somehow fixed it. I told Maggie she couldn’t take a shower that night, but she didn’t get mad.

There was still hope: the broken-off pipe was screwed into the main water line in the wall. If I could unscrew the whole thing, I could cap the main water line, replace the pipe, replace the tap whose water supply line was still screwed into a shard of pipe, and then figure out how to get the sink stuck back in the wall.

I went to the hardware store, I bought my supplies. I asked people for advice. I asked Claude for advice. I sprayed WD-40 into the pipe and heated it with a blow-dryer. I tightened the wrench around its neck and carefully applied pressure. The pipe snapped.

Oh, yes, Claude told me, this was a common problem in Sofia. The hard water leaches the zinc from cheap alloy fittings, leaving behind porous copper. “Multiple Bulgarian plumbing services flag this exact failure mode.”

Thank you, Claude. So now I have this shattered stump sticking out of the wall, and I don’t know what to do with it? Should I plug it? Tape it closed? Claude said the water pressure would blow apart whatever I put in there. Maybe I could use a “1/2” брass плъг (тапа 1/2” мъжка) — 2–4 BGN.” Yeah, thanks, clanker. I’ll just screw that брass плъг into the corroded stub, shall I? And I still couldn’t turn the water back on. I had no choice but to turn to Pavlina, who called her dad.

“Just turn off the valve to the second floor.”

“There is no valve to the second floor.”

“I know there is one. I installed it.”

“But there’ve been renovations since then.”

“Well, that’s foolish.”

My father-in-law arrived late on the second evening with his toolbox and knelt by the broken pipe with a pair of pliers.

“The first thing we do is we pull out these broken pieces.”

He seized the pipe. A piece snapped off. I felt a little better about myself.

“What is this Chinese nonsense? Did your cousin install this?” He used a conical extractor tool to break away all the pieces of de-zincked alloy.

After that, it was the relatively simple matter of screwing in the new pipe. He wrapped furry plumber’s hemp around the male end, which would swell when wet to seal the connection. And this new pipe had its own valve. He closed it and sent me downstairs to turn the apartment’s water back on.

“Do we have water?” I asked him through the phone.

“Yes,” he said. “But we don’t have water all over the floor.” In other words “good job.”

We removed the sink from the wall and I watched in enormous relief and gratitude as he drilled a pair of fresh holes for bigger anchor bolts. Then he went downstairs, refused to be fed, and gave Pavlina advice about how to refurbish the kitchen. This took a toll on her. She’d rather not have to spend the evening arguing why we shouldn’t put plastic parquet over our real parquet, but that was the price of having water in our apartment again.

I installed the new tap the next day, and Pavlina and I mounted the sink on the wall. The new brass fittings threaded together easily. The only remaining problem was the hose that led to the washing machine, which wasn’t getting any water. Claude told me there must be a clog somewhere, and I searched it up the pipe and down. I sucked water through the hose. I berated myself every time I caught that washing machine out of the corner of my eye. Then I realized that each hose attachment to the pipe had its own individual knob, like the knobs that controlled the taps but hanging down. Of course, all of these are shut by default. All I had to do was twist the knob to let water flow into the washing machine.

It should be obvious that I never learned anything about home repairs. As a kid, I always had something better to do than learn how to fix a sink. As an adult in my forties, I couldn’t tell a valve from a waste water trap.

The next time I did laundry in that machine, I had Ellie help me. Maggie’s next. This is stuff a kid needs to learn. And this summer, I’ll follow my father-in-law on his home-repair projects, so I’m ready the next time something breaks. You only get mad about problems you can’t fix.

“Let battles bloom”

Andrei Trifonovich has become the avatar of Hades, which means that now he has to rescue a whole nation of worshipers. Between Kori’s dream of a republic and Nikolai’s nightmare of empire, the Good are tearing themselves apart.

To save the thousands caught between two warring factions of death-cultists, Andrei must forge assassins into soldiers and root a nest of zealots out of a mountain they’ve defended for fifteen centuries.

And it is not enough for him to only be a god. As Nikolai lashes out in paranoia and Kori sinks into despair, Andrei must prove that he is still a doctor, as well as a man.

Start the Wealthgiver trilogy.

kṓtheis ándedon.

Bḗsseis mánedon.

ainḗn spíndedo.

skyssékan pī́nedo.

saggeiméniân kábedo,

nárakon ge zígnedo.

Let battles bloom.

Let rave the Good.

Let wine be spilled and drunk as blood.

Let prophetess be captive kept.

And pit be made of Sacred Depths.

Pornoland by Tyson James

A month ago, I quoted this book to my wife: “I don’t mean to be condescending, but your life is a shriveled, distorted caricature of what it should be.” Now this is my kind of literary fiction!

Brock Stolitt is a man tragically unable to achieve orgasm, ironically working as the writer of advertising copy for porn. But when his company takes on an adaptation of a medieval erotic novel and he’s the only employee who understands the source material? All right! But little does Brock know that the eccentric billionaire behind the project is also a member of a secret society dedicated to the renunciation of worldly attachment and the attainment of Apatheosis!

Pornoland has bites and, yes, throbs, and it makes you laugh. I do have a serious critique of the book, the ending, but no spoilers. You should read it so we can talk about it.

Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy

Like Make Time, Eat That Frog advises us to start the day by doing the most difficult thing on our to-do list. It’s not bad advice, although Make Time’s “highlight” concept can also be something you want to do, which I appreciate. Focusing only on what I didn’t want to do made my mornings harder to wake up to, so I don’t recommend it.

Next by Michael Crichton

There’s the sketch of an interesting technothriller, where Big Pharma hires bounty hunters to “repossess” the patented cell-line of an innocent family, but its plagued by a terrible, deal-breaking plausibility gap. Just because some guy’s cells produce anti-cancer cytokines doesn’t mean his daughter’s will, not to mention his grandson’s. Crichton could explaining that problem away, but instead he throws flak in our eyes in the form of endless unrelated stories about apes and parrots and progeria gas. You might say it’s “Love, Actually” but with genetic engineering, and less charming characters. Reall, though, it’s Michael Crichton telling you that people shouldn’t be able to patent genes. Sure.

Current Affairs by

Easily the best book I’ve read this year. The best new book since Erik Hoel’s Revelations five years ago. But while Revelations took us into a young man’s crisis of adulthood, Current Affairs takes us through.

We meet Calvin in Honolulu, where he’s all het up about a meeting with a woman, not his wife, who he’s been obsessed with since they spoke, once, in high school. They separated, him into New York and the Blue art world, her into Memphis and the Red music world. Which, in the nicest way possible, chewed them both up.

How do you grow in a city that rewards you for staying a child? Where each job is faker than the last, and every effort is made to lubricate your life down the path assigned to you? Eventually you look up and realize that you’re a ruin, and you’ve done this to yourself.

Please go read Current Affairs, then come back and talk about it with me. My friends and family can’t take it any more.

The Great Degeneration by

I had trouble remembering the thesis of this one because it’s so obviously true: Anglosphere countries are in a period of decline. I guess that was harder to see in 2013 than it is now. I have hope, however, that the trends Ferguson points out are cyclical, rather than linear. Things that cannot go on will not go on.

Flybot by Dennis E. Taylor

I don’t blame , whose review made this book sound interesting. It’s entirely my fault that I read it. In theory, the book is about superhuman AI, what happens if it gets into the wrong hands, and what it decides to do by itself. Those are questions that interest many people, but Taylor has no answers, nothing to say on the subject at all, really. Terrorists might use AI to make bioweapons. The AI might develop consciousness and wonder if humans are worth keeping around. Okay. So what? He fumbles around for something to care about, and fails to find it.

Red State Mars by

I already wrote a longform review of this book, which will be available on May 26th. Go buy it. It’s a fantastic scifi adventure, and, I hope the first of very many.

Castle of Days by Gene Wolfe

This one was on my kindle for months as I slowly worked through it. It’s a huge book - an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink collection of Wolfe’s short stories, essays, diary entries, and personal correspondence. I’ll focus on two of those. In “An Idea That…,” Wolfe tells a correspondent what’s not working in her story. He says she has an idea, but that’s like having a tiger. You can’t just show it to people; you have to make it do something. Give it flaming hoops to jump through. “Now let’s see you put your head in the idea’s mouth.”

Now, see how he does it: in “Labor Day,” a man awakens in a house with no memories. With him is a woman, apparently his wife. She has no memories either, but they both find thick manuals on their bedside tables that tell them how to be functional grownups: “if your husband does not go to work, you and your children will starve.” What follows is an anxiety-dream about being late for meetings and unclear about what you’re supposed to be saying or writing down in them, while the machine you’re part of grinds the beauty and romance of the world into dog food. Awesome.

The Barsoom Project by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes

This was my second reading. I love the Game Park books, each of which is a layer cake of industrial espionage (the workings of a virtual-reality theme park), psychological drama (the professional and amateur gamers who patronize it), and fantasy adventure (the game, itself.) In reverse order, an evil cabal of Inuit shamans use the magical potential of a crashed Soviet satellite to begin a new Ice Age. This story is packaged into a “fat buster,” designed to exercise and treat people with eating disorders. But one of them is a spy for a cruel Arab petro-prince, who is trying to sabotage the park and their parent company’s bid to terraform Mars. Our heroes have to solve the mystery, find love, deal with their issues, and save the Arctic. A ton of fun.

Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves by Fenton Wood

Like all of Wood’s books, this one veers between hard-nosed technical detail and bizarre, even fairy-tale fantasy. Also characteristic of the author, it has boys doing things they’re not supposed to do. The stakes in this one were actually rather low, but the atmosphere was good enough to pull me through, anyway. There’s a point when our heroes are walking along the utility platform under bridge, and the mist clears to show them how very far they are above the river. I was in bed, and I had vertigo.

And some videos:

I love The Book of the New Sun, and it’s got so much to theorize about. Wolfe introduced me to some interpretations I didn’t know about, like that Severian went back in time to help make his younger self less cruel. How could he possibly have been crueler?? Fascinating.

Phreonotopia has a new series of videos out about new discoveries with a bearing on speculative biology. Very rewarding.

Nothing particularly special about this episdoe. I just like this show. Yes, especially the zeitgeist segment.

Youtube is full of “talking animal” videos that are actually nonsense, but this one has something to it. There does seem to be good evidence that prairie dogs have nouns and can modify them, although not with adjectives. It’s a believably non-human system.

A dark meditation on sexual selection. Nothing is too expensive for reproduction.

So there we were, smuggling art across the Serbian border. Our line of cars drew closer to the waving border guards, and Pavlina and I grew silent.

Do you want to sell the Serbs’ cultural heritage out from under them? Nejde, brate. The state requires a certificate from the Ministry of Culture to accompany any priceless, antique masterworks overseas. Apparently, this law also applies to pen-and-ink drawings of superheroes on posterboard, drawn by a comic artist who’s just trying to make a buck.

Artyom strode into the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, two meters tall, waving and grinning, the world’s least-secretive art thief.

“Yo, Dan, I got the stuff,” he whispered after we’d hugged in the middle of the lobby, and hoisted his enormous portfolio-filled shopping bag. We opened it right there on a table in the lobby bar, under the shafts of sunlit cigarette smoke. The staff didn’t mind.

“These are the Sharp Eye inks, and these are the sketch cards. These are commissions from this year. If our fulfillment center won’t take them.” (They did. Thank you, CRWN.)

“And this is for you.” Artyom folded back the portfolio’s flaps to reveal a full 30-by-40 board with the inks for the full-page splash panel when Honza and his bodyguards paddle poor Chal toward the island of the Friendship Temple near the end of issue one.

It’s all columns and vertical lines. The canoe and the shadows’ reflections in the canal water point up to tall, rounded cliffs, their forms mimicking and overpowered by the massive, dome-topped tower of the Temple.

The dwellings and walkways carved into the cliffs give them a hunched appearance. You can imagine those windows as skull holes, the stairs as teeth. The dome of the Tower is cracked like an eggshell, like a mouth opened to snap at the gibbous moon. Marginalia read: “Добавь блики?”1 and “Градиент идёт сквозь области тени?”2 The affixed sticky note, fluorescent orange, reads: “And this one is 4 u, Dan ❤️”

“It can be a conversation piece,” said Artyom. “It’s based on Hitler’s favorite painting.”

Artyom explained how all the German intellectuals of the 1930s put up prints of Die Toteninsel, but of course the conversations I’ll start with his artwork won’t be about Nazis. I’ll point at the Friendship Temple and say, “I smuggled that across the Serbian border.”

Value is hard, but hardship is also value. Any idiot can download a PDF, you don’t need much genius to print out a high-res PDF and hang it on your wall, but getting your hands on the original ink that flowed from the artist’s actual pen. It’s hard to get that ink shipped across the Atlantic.

Harder than we’d thought, which is why I have to thank the four governments who acted together with resolve and multilateral coordination to put us in this absurd situation. Picture an American stopped at the Bulgarian border with his suitcase full of stolen Serbian art made by a Russian draft-dodger. Opa.

“It used to be you could send out art by national post, but it got harder and harder,” Artyom made palms-down gestures as if shuffling papers on a desk. “I put them in tubes and labeled them ‘gifts’ and ‘documents.’ I sent each one out individually. Then there were these Trump tariffs, and they sent every single one back.”

I told him that Bulgaria’s national post just gave up on America for a few months. They refused to send anything at all to the United States, package, postcard, or pigeon. Now they’ve relented and do allow letters through, but if your envelope is too thick, you’d better have a damn good reason. (I did, and my tax return got through.) But we still have courier services.

“I almost got them out with DHL,” Artyom said. “I classified them as ‘miscellaneous documents,’ but in the description field I wrote something about art, and the lady was like, ‘now that we know it’s art, we can’t ship it.’ I asked her, ‘can you forget that it’s art?’ But no, she was one of those officials you can’t bribe.” He shivered. “So, when you get to the border…”

“I have a plan,” said Pavlina. “Don’t worry.” This was to pack his art at the bottom of our suitcase under a layer of my sketchbooks and art supplies.

“They’re your drawings,” she told me in the parking lot the next day.

“And I just love them so much, I take them everywhere I go?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I slid into the passenger’s seat. “But my art style isn’t anything like Artyom’s.”

She rolled her eyes and pressed the starter. “Dan, these guys didn’t become border officials because they were highly educated art critics.”

As it happened, they waved us right through.

I’ll skip lightly over that point in my retelling, and focus my guests’ attention on my dodgy moment at the DHL office in Sofia, when the guy at the table asked me for dokumenti.

“But this is my art,” I recited. “It’s a gift.”

“Can you open it?” He looked the art over with an eye I worried might be critical and educated. “What medium is this? Fullmaster? Marker?”

“Pen,” I said.

Maybe he was impressed by my artistic nous, or it might have been the impatient lady behind me in line, audibly sneering at both of us.

“Okay,” he said, and turned to the question of packaging. He had other stuff to do. So, I’m sure, do the hard-working staff at CRWN, and the mail carriers, and that impatient old woman behind me in line. The border guard wants to go home and finish working his way through Camus.

Now, I don’t know what kinds of jobs our backers have, but at the end of the shift, they have a new comic book to read. Sharp Eye issue 1 has finally been shipped out. Thanks to some skara and coffee in Niš, Artyom and I have a script for issue 2, too. But that’s a story for another conversation.

See you next month.

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung

Jung once interviewed a schizophrenic who claimed the sun had a penis that waved and made the wind. Years later, Jung found an old Greek text describing a tube in the sun disk, “the origin of the ministering wind.” If that sounds meaningful to you, you’d love this book. I found it mostly crazy. In and amidst his motif-lists and mandala-counting, I did find a couple of real creative gems. Buried in this bug collection, there’s a raven that’s been nailed to a wall. I keep feeling like it ought to mean something.

Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold

Komarr is the perfect synthesis of techno-mystery and social drama, with extra ironic commentary on Miles’s emotional and familial baggage. I've heard it said that Bujold wrote like Mozart, but I'd say it's more like Mandelbrot. You're talking down a grade-schooler who’s locked himself in the bathroom, now terrorists who’ve locked themselves in with their hostages, now the hostage has locked herself in with you!

Coming Apart by Charles Murray

If you think the US is going through some things, but think The Fourth Turning is a bit much, this is the model for you. After World War II, money married brains. The country creamed off its smartest teenagers and sent them all to live together in college dorms. The result was a new “subculture of cognitive elite,” self-reproducing and geographically concentrated, which grew to hate the non-credentialed cousins it had left back in the corn-fields. Maybe this is the cause of the collapse of standardized testing. Somebody read this book back in 2012 and it scared them.

War by Other Means by Karl Gallagher

The War with the Censor has settled into a rhythm: one book we spend with husband Marcus fighting to protect his family from space-villains, and the next we're with wife Wynny back on solid ground, building that family. I like it. Wynny’s now a diplomat, trying to coordinate the liberated worlds who, in fact, can’t stand each other. I appreciate how Gallagher doesn’t lecture us about why the slavers are bad and the matriarchs are good. Wynny has opinions on the matter, but those are plausibly hers. And anyway, the real threats are the liberal democrats, who have run out of money.

The Sundering by Walter Jon Williams

These Praxis books are more fun to remember than to read. You’ve got an interstellar empire ripping itself to pieces after it lost the last of its alien god-kings. You’ve got a navy that suddenly has to win battles instead of pad resumes. There’s space tactics and spy games and the demolition of this whole orbital ring, and I was bored by all of it. The most interesting event in the book happens off-stage as the result of a brief conversation between the two main characters. Without an interior to connect to, it’s all just words on a page.

Tortuga Media

Just Leave The Publishing Industry

Behold My Screed…

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4 months ago · 17 likes · Daniel M. Bensen

This one is mine. At the request of Tortuga Media, I’ve written the whole sorry story of the traditional publishing industry as it collapsed around me. It’s worth reading if you’re concerned about what comes next.

Always The Horizon

What if Dystopia is Just a Matter of Perspective: Flybot

I could describe this book maybe as “Dystopian Fiction with a Happy Ending…

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5 months ago · 24 likes · 12 comments · Copernican

Copernican takes the universal surveillance of Dennis Taylor's Flybot more seriously than Taylor did. Another review that’s much better than the story.

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Monologue: Out-of-Africa is not dead but hybridization lives

On this episode Razib talks about where we are when it comes to “Out-of-Africa,” Neanderthal origins and the broader state of understanding the dynamics of Homo evolution…

Listen now

5 months ago · 33 likes · 7 comments · Razib Khan

If you don’t listen to every Khan lecture (why not?), this is a good summing-up of the current picture of human evolution. There were several waves of migration out of Africa, and while most of our ancestry comes from one particular wave, there was quite a lot of “introgression” along the way.

Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf

REVIEW: Boyd, by Robert Coram

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War, Robert Coram (Back Bay Books, 2002…

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5 months ago · 194 likes · 64 comments · John Psmith

You know an essay is good when I read it to my wife. She disagrees with Mr. Psmith about beating engineers at their own game, but that’s what makes the discussions interesting. I love these “history of engineering” stories, and I never want to work with anyone like John Boyd.

Chris Arnade Walks the World

America and Public Disorder

Two weeks ago, on the blue line to O’Hare, my car had two men smoking joints, a broken woman, her eyes dilated and blank, sitting in a nest of filthy bags smelling of sewage, and a man barking into the void, shirtless, who was washing himself with flour tortillas, which would disintegrate, littering the subway floor, before he took out another and began…

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6 months ago · 1948 likes · 646 comments · Chris Arnade

Chris Arnade usually writes autobiographical essays about his walks in various cities around the world. Here, he brings his humility, compassion, and moral fortitude to a higher level of abstraction: Americans allow each other to face far too much chaos and insanity.

I don’t care so much about RFID or how they pretend to steal money from some famous dude, but this video is worth it for the hilarious Cold War spy story.

I spent March watching Map Men with my daughters and wife. We all found it hilarious.

What I love about Dan Davis is how he cuts through the political blather that acretes around famous archaeological sites. What was life in one of the first cities actually like? What does the evidence actually tell us? No, Çatalhöyük wasn’t a glorious matriarchy or a verminous hive. It was a real place, where people lived very strange lives.

See you next month.

I remember my first scifi convention. I was a little awed, a little Dorothy-opening-the-grayscale-door. I’d married the only girl in college who read Terry Pratchett and Lois McMaster Bujold, and here I was in a convention center filled with fans of scifi. Some might even know more about force fields than I did.

Some did, but then came the dreary twenty-teens. One friend called LonCon 2014 the “last safe WorldCon.” Another, when I asked her in 2024, said “why would I pay so much money to spend four days with people who hate me?” As the dreary decade slumped on, I found myself bored, snubbed, and egregiously robbed of my time.

And yet here I was again, twelve years later, at Prague Comic Con with my Bujold-loving wife, under the auspices of Anna and her husband, who I’ll call Jakub. Back at their wedding, I’d shaken hands with Anna over a deal to split the cash with her from any publishing projects she could arrange in the Czech Republic, and she’d held up her end of the bargain. She’d invited me to this con and spent the weeks before cold-emailing Czech publishers about my work. On the first day, she marched up to a pair of comic localizers and introduced herself as my agent.

At first, I was more of a good sport than a participant in Anna’s machinations. Pavlina found wearable kitty-cat ears for our daughters, but there was nothing I wanted to buy for myself, and my backpack was quite heavy. But then we passed the booth set up by the Czech armed forces, with all these little plastic doodads arranged on a table. One of them looked like a pineapple.

“What’s that?” I asked the soldier behind the table.

“A proximity mine!” he said, absolutely delighted to speak with me. “From Italy. It has magnetic coils inside. If something made of metal passes close enough, it detonates.”

“How do you bury it?”

“You don’t need to.”

“So, you hide it in the bushes…”

“You don’t even need to do that! If you’re entrenched somewhere in Ukraine, and you want to deny an area to the Russians, you put these things in a field. They can’t roll their tanks through before they clear out the mines. It’s called ‘area denial.’”

“Wow,” I said, “you don’t even bury the mines. You could paint bright colors to —,” I was going to say ‘to warn away predators,’ but the soldier evaded my dumb joke by hopping over to another display.

“This is a butterfly mine.” It was the size of my hand, with two lobe-shaped fuel tanks connected by a thumb-sized detonator. “It detonates when you step on it or squeeze it. The Serbs,” he said, “painted these things in bright colors, so that children would pick them up.”

What is the frame of mind of a person who makes mines in tempting colors? It was a cold thought in that noisy, dazzling event space. Clarifying. We all have goals, especially if we don’t admit them to ourselves. The Czech government wanted to recruit the sort of young man who thinks Warhammer 40K is cool. The publishing houses wanted to sell books, and the fans in T-shirts, cloaks or space-armor, wanted to become something larger than themselves, to have fun and find meaning at the same time.

Anna, for her part, was determined to find paid work. She set me up for coffee with a Czech author, who had a village house he wanted to fix up. Thinking about it now, I realize that conversation would have gone better if I’d connected him with my father-in-law, who knows how to design a brown-water recycling system. Instead, I talked about what I wanted, which was for hundreds of thousands of people to read my books. We made no particular connection.

But Anna and Jakub weren’t done. He translated a whole marketing panel to me in real time, and she parlayed a series of short conversations into a meeting in the event center’s cafeteria with Jan Kotouč.

Jan Kotouč is another of Jakub’s favorite authors, a prolific writer of scifi and alternate history, and one of the few in the Czech market who supports himself entirely with his fiction. I’d had enough of talking shop, though, so I asked him about his next book.

Kotouč wanted to explore space warfare at close range. Using their zero-acceleration drives, ships would instantly gain velocity, flashing past each other dogfight style, while deflecting each other’s missiles and lasers with shields. What an image!

“Okay!” I said. “So, these shields. When they turn on, do they do this?” I pushed a pepper shaker away from a salt shaker. “Or this? I chopped the edge of my hand onto the pepper shaker. “If the first, one ship can get in close to another, turn on its shields, and bash the other one. Bam! Like bumper cars. If the second, you can have a small ship or a drone that gets in real close, flicks on its shields, and slices a spherical chunk out of the side of the enemy ship. You know what this guy in the army just told me about area denial?”

“Probably not possible in space,” said Jakub, who designs the guidance and control systems of satellites. “Too much volume to defend.”

“So, you’re American?” Kotouč asked Anna. “What do you do?”

“She’s an editor,” said Jakub, and Kotouč refocused. If he’d had kitty-cat ears, they would have perked up.

“Really?” he said. “I have students who write in English and they need an editor.”

Anna was overjoyed. Here was some real work.

It was the last day of the con and people circulated tiredly through the cafeteria. Furries in body-suits, fathers pushing strollers, high school sweethearts who’d just spent four thousand koruna on books, and writers trying to look professional when really they were desperate to get their stories out. They seemed to work well together.

There was a sense of, if not community, at least health - readers, writers, and publishers all going home satisfied. Anna got a very warm lead on an editing gig, Jakub bought books, my daughters got fuzzy new ears, and I now know what a green shoot looks like, poking up through the ash.

Red State Mars is the best new science fiction book I’ve read since Project Hail Mary, and not for lack of trying. I’ve searched desperately for years for an alternative from the industrial slurry extruded by Tor, Daw, and Ace. Yes, I have found a few indie gems, such as Corcoran’s Aristillus books, which describe how a single breakthrough technology can threaten even the most entrenched of powers. They were good books, but now Corcoran has an editor. This, Ark Press’s first book, is beautifully polished.

Red State Mars follows the formation of the first Martian state, founded by a coalition of five Texan clans, which themselves coalesced in the anarchic aftermath of World War III. Now, after three generations of peace, they find themselves in another violent Turning, as foretold by Strauss and Howe. In response to the ever-escalating demands of the technocratic eugenicists of the Unitary Sovereign State of China, the Martian clans must put their differences aside and fight together.

Corcoran shows us the war through the eyes of three men: Will, a teenage boy with a dog who goes on Heinleinian adventures as he becomes a soldier; his nerdy uncle Brian, who wins the love of a good woman through feats of engineering; and his father, Jim, who is so used to leadership he’s gone soft, and is forced to admit that even he is not done growing up. Corcoran has been paying attention to many Thanksgiving-table arguments.

In the afterword, the author says he planned Red State Mars as a family saga, but that isn’t how it turned out. Under the guidance of editor Tony Daniel, the older generation’s stories were moved to a separate novella, resulting in a tighter, quicker-launching book. I actually think they could have gone further in this direction and brought more out of Will, Brian, and Jim, but that’s a quibble.

Here’s another: there were some dropped threads. What happened to the young Mormon guy with the wire-rimmed glasses? Why did they use the tainted feedstock? Maybe I missed his answers, but I got the impression that Corcoran had too many balls in the air, and dropped some.

Anyway, the battle scenes were exciting, suspenseful, and technical in the best tradition of Clive Cussler. Satellites, molten salt cooling systems, and missiles all get their chance in the point-of-view spotlight. LLMs are ubiquitous in the 22nd century, where every armored fighting vehicle quotes doctrine and every valve has a opinion. It makes sense for the machines’ voice to be close third person.

As in the Aristillus books, Corcoran is conscientious with his future technology. There’ve been incremental advances in AI, 3D printing, and genetic engineering, but there’s just one black swan: the force field generator. There were chapters of Red State Mars where I alternated between reading about space-explosions and furiously imagining force field tactics. Can you batter through a force field? Yes. Can you reshape it at will? Yes. Can you thrust or see through it? No. But you can flick it on and off rapidly in sync with your cameras or engines. Of course, if you do that, weapons can sneak in. Beautiful stuff. And don’t get me started on what impermeable, immaterial walls mean for nuclear fusion. Leave that up to Corcoran.

There’s quite a lot of town-hall politicking, which was gripping even compared to the coming-of-age-through-microgravity-combat scenes. I was never more emotional a reader than during those debates. Stop interrupting each other!

This is a book about people’s love and loyalty to a place and each other. It gives us what a good story should: a perspective on ourselves, and a view of where we might go from here.

I am delighted, inspired, and even hopeful having read this book. It seized me, it pushed me, it scintillates with the possibilities of the future. It’s exactly the sort of story I couldn’t find for a bleak, censorious decade. And it’s only Ark Press’s first. May there be many, many more.

This book doesn’t really have anything to say that you didn’t already know, and its smirking, self-conscious informality gets stale fast. It does, however, feature some amusing anecdotes. One explains this book’s popularity in Bulgaria: a doctor from Sofia and an old village woman focus so completely on the status difference between them that they forget that he should treat her and she should be treated. People do often forget the purpose of whatever they’re doing, so this book does contain some truth.

Pirate King of Star Patrol - by John C. Wright

Athos Lone is a pirate hunter pretending to be a pirate captain — whoops, now an admiral — torn between loyalty to his crew and the law that would see them hanged. It’s an interesting bind, and Wright has gotten Athos in and out of such before. This time, though, he doesn’t. Here’s the author banging his spaceships together in all sorts of interesting ways, but the main character just watches, reporting the action and feeling things about the combatants. It gets dull. And doesn’t anyone notice that Athos isn’t participating in this battle? Galaxy Quest is a fun series and I’ll continue with it, but this episode doesn’t do its job.

The Thousandfold Thought - R. Scott Bakker

When I recommend The Second Apocalypse series, I tell people to stop with this book. The later ones get increasingly bloated and sloppy, but the first three are tense, forceful, even lovely. Unfortunately, without an ending to build toward, the story is pointless. The author starts with some interesting deconstruction, but once you’ve finished tearing down the old system, you need something to build in its place. Bakker can’t bring himself to make positive suggestions about the way people should live, so he just leaves the characters and their world in a shambles, with nobody picking up the pieces. It’s a purer example of Gen X nihilism than George R. R. Martin’s, and so worth studying.

Futurist Letters

The Censor and His Writer

This piece is free to read without a subscription. It originally ran in Hyun Woo Kim’s personal publication Requests of Literary Exile. We are honored to run it here…

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6 months ago · 14 likes · Hyun Woo Kim

It’s a heartwarming relationship. Much healthier than the one between the Writer and His Mistress.

Man I love military technology. Politics, money, engineering, and the merciless laws of physics and game theory all come together, and prove to you that you did something dumb.

I really want to try that toasted flour idea.

Now I know how Vantablack works.

See you next month.

There is a pair of dragons on the crest of the iconostasis of the village church. Posed like cats clawing an armchair, they flank the skull of Adam and look away from crucified Jesus above.

It was more than a little cold in the church. There usually isn’t anyone there, the village isn’t big enough for a dedicated priest. My wife’s mother and grandmother had engaged one for the morning, and he came with a sort of manager, a firm, efficient woman who directed the church to be opened and chairs brought inside.

“No,” she told the grandmas, “This money isn’t for us. Everyone takes a candle and leaves some money, and you keep the money at the end. That’s the tradition.” I think her pushback made Baba Vese feel better.

By the time I met Dyado Kolyu, dementia had already begun to affect him. Every few minutes, he would have to look around and figure out what was going on. He’d go out into the woods. Why was he there? To find mushrooms. He was at home with a mushroom. Why? It must be for cooking. “Gaba gaba gaba,” he sang, “Mushroom, mushroom, mushroom.”

He fried it in butter, but Baba Vese would not let him serve me any of that mushroom. “She says she doesn’t want to create an international incident,” said Pavlina on my first visit to her village. “She’s making him sign a document that says he’s eating that mushroom of his own free will.” He lived for another twenty years.

Dyado Kolyu, the son of a forest ranger, escaped the envy of his neighbors in the first decade under the Regime to  become a mining engineer. He moved from his little village in western Bulgaria to Sofia, then, at the height of his career, to Algeria. “If you marry while I’m gone,” he told his college-age daughters, “I will never speak to you again.” They were both married by the time he came back to Bulgaria. He replaced both his parents’ house in his village and his in-laws’ house in Sofia. “Look at this wonderful place I’ve made,” he said when we moved him into his new handicap-accessible apartment two years ago, and I realized that for the past fifty years at least, he never lived in any structure he hadn’t made himself.

His decline was slow and linear, just a gradual dimming of the light shining through him. I’ve written about how he was in his last months and how Pavlina recognized a best case when she saw it. Better, far better to die in the apartment her children and grandchildren bought for you, surrounded by family, cared for, mourned.

Bulgarian funeral arrangements are quick. We found out on Saturday, and by the time we got to the apartment, the undertakers had already come and gone. Pavlina cried and hugged Baba Vese, who kept vigil all that night while the hearse driver got the necessary permission to transport human remains.

The funeral was Monday, and Pavlina and I brought our daughters, somewhat in defiance of tradition. They roamed the graveyard until it was time for the service. They had done their mourning on the day their great-grandfather died, and now they were mostly bored or cold or interested in the candles they were holding.

I tried to focus on the service, but Bulgarian Orthodox priests chant in Old Church Slavic, and I could pick out one word in ten. I did wonder about the pronunciation of “niebe”, heaven, and when the grandmas corrected his pronunciation of Dyado Kolyu’s name (“ni-KO-la, not ni-ko-LAI”), I finally caught up and realized the priest spoke Russian. He was a refugee from Ukraine, I overheard his manager say. Some villages didn’t want him doing their services.

I think the grandmas enjoyed correcting the priest. They indulged several times, including when he invoked the blessings of Saint Nicholas.

“Nikola.”

“No, no, not this Nikola. That one.” The priest pointed to the icon, then upward. “Svieti Nikolai,” he pronounced.

The grandmas also told us not to let Maggie and Ellie walk up the hill to the grave, and told the gravediggers not to shovel rocks on the casket. They didn’t get their way either time, and I think that made them feel safe. They did piss off Pavlina, though. “Dyado Kolyu loves us,” she said. “He wants to see his great-great-granddaughters playing.”

Nobody asked my opinion, but I do prefer Pavlina’s metaphysics. My own experience with death has taught me that ‘because you live in a universe of uncaring atoms’ is so totally useless it insults me, like being given sand to eat. You cannot confront death without faith.

From there, in that yawning absence of evidence, you can fear the ghosts of your loved ones, or you can remember that they love you still. The dragons look away from Christ because he’s beaten them.

See you next month.

Most important things first: I’m doing an Ask Me Anything for paid subscribers and patrons tomorrow, Saturday the 28th, at 7 PM Bulgaria time. I’ve been thinking about an alternate-mythology-history where Achilles is the son of Zeus and the Bronze Age Collapse was even worse…or we can talk what you’re working on. Paid subscribers and patrons will get a notification when it’s time.

Subscribe now

Prague Comic Con: I just bought tickets. My goal is to show up with physical copies of Wealthgiver Volume III — cover's done, interior formatting is all that’s left. If you're going, let me know. If you weren't planning to, consider this your invitation.

And here’s the rest of what I’m working on.

Wealthgiver: the triptych alternate history story of a reluctant avatar of Hades. Volume I is out. Volume II is out. Volume III, I’m almost there.

The Eccentrics: My wife told me to stop posting rough draft chapters on Patreon. Not because anyone was in danger of reading them, but because I was thinking about those hypothetical readers when I should have been feeling my way through the story. "It makes you rigid when you should be loose," she said, and she was right, as always. No more draft chapters this year — but the novel will be better for it. In the meantime, paid subscribers and patrons get worldbuilding notes, book reviews, newsletters, and, starting in March, a new podcast.

Proof of Concept is that podcast. I’ve recorded four episodes so far. In each, I brainstorm with another writer about their current project. Now, I’m sitting on the conversation, waiting until my guests are ready to release their projects. When I post our conversation, you hear the first spark alongside the finished story. Paid subscribers and patrons get each episode a week before it goes public on YouTube and Spotify. The first one comes out in March.

If you’re a writer and you want to brainstorm with me about your next story, send me a message. Two conditions: it has to be a story, not worldbuilding for its own sake, and you have to plan to publish or release it.

Sharp Eye: The Kickstarter campaign for my new comic is still running. Back it now and you'll get the electronic version of Sharp Eye immediately. Physical copies ship in March.

One more thing: I’ve merged my Patreon and Substack feeds. Everything now goes to both places: worldbuilding, book reviews, and newsletters. Daily updates on Discord will continue until morale improves.

And tomorrow — Saturday the 28th, 7 PM Bulgaria time — the AMA. Achilles, Zeus, stealth spaceships, your creative projects, whatever you want to ask. Paid subscribers and patrons get access.

Subscribe now

Thank you all. More soon.

If you already pay for your subscription, save the date and click the link at the bottom of this post at 7:00 p.m. Sofia time on February 28. If you’re not, upgrade, my friend.

Five Million Watts1 by

We begin with a young man arriving in a city (not quite New York), talking to a coin-operated head made in the likeness of a beautiful woman. The original woman is, it turns out, the daughter of an inventor…but that story line doesn’t go anywhere. Boy, do we go somewhere else!

I usually like my fiction to be “tight” and “workmanlike,” where every scene works toward the goal the author had in mind for the novel. Five Million Watts does not do that. It dashes like an excited beagle from ancient DNA to folk music, classical music, mythology, and, most importantly, electrical engineering. How could you make an AM radio station broadcast at 5 million watts? Just imagine how big that antenna must be. Imagine cleaning ice off it.

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

I need to track down C. S. Lewis’s other lecture series. As the best teachers do, he doesn’t just impel you to read the source material, he points out things in it that you were too inattentive to catch.

My standout is the demons, newly fallen into hell, who rationalize “like a man who has cheated on his wife.” They can fight to get home! No, they can’t, but they can hide until they feel better. No, but they can make hell just as good as heaven. No, but what they can do is go and ruin Earth.

Hacking Galileo by

I picked this up at a (keep an eye out, there’s one every six months or so), but I sat on it for a while because the cover looks boring and the book description has too many layers to send a clear signal. So let this be the signal: read this book. It’s a blast.

A gang of teenage boys pull pranks with electronics and get in trouble. That produces a couple of fun little anecdotes, but then they try to bounce a radio signal off Mars and we really start cooking. Because it’s not Mars that returns their signal. It’s something older, and worse.

Return to the Whorl by Gene Wolfe

There were parts of The Book of the Long Sun that didn’t make sense until The Book of the Short Sun, and some of The Book of the Short Sun didn’t become clear until this, the last book in the series. For example, the narrator is a different person from the main character. Or rather, he was different in the first two books, before Horn woke up in Silk’s body, with Silk’s soul. That was my favorite part, maybe, in the whole series. That groping in the heated dark between friends, enemies, giants, and Wolfe’s ever-present hyena.

Always The Horizon

A World is Unfinished Without God : Half Made World

The Half Made World is a book written by Felix Gilman, as a sort of post-modern analysis of classic Western tropes reimagined as a not-quite fantasy, not-quite steampunk, and not-quite modernist weird-western. The story carries the reader all the way from the heartland of the Old World, across the World’s End Mountains (in this case, the stand-in for th…

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8 months ago · 43 likes · 10 comments · Copernican

Here’s my review of ’s review of The Half-Made World: they’re both worth reading. The sequel to The Half-Made World is not worth reading, however, and Copernican can tell us why: A World is Unfinished Without God. The Half-Made World gives us our Gun-man and our Bug-man, but where is our Preacher-man? That would have made the story work because it would have given us a good, third choice.

Astral Codex Ten

Best Of Moltbook

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7 months ago · 843 likes · 609 comments · Scott Alexander

You’re probably sick of reading about Moltbook, but this was written the day after the social media site’s debut, and it’s funny.

I’ve ordered my copy. Have you?

Nothing Earth-shattering here, but it’s a good introduction to an interesting aspect of language change: fortition or “strengthening.”

Another space-battle animation!

So that’s how they got those “you can see the light waves propagating” ultra-slowmo videos. Cheating!

Plump, chilly turtles. It’s everything spec-bio should be.

I love the idea of kinetotrophy, and I love even more to see it developed so beautifully.

I’ve been listening to this song on repeat.

This one makes me tear up. Those grandchildren.

All right, here’s the expensive part. $3. Oooh.

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The last month of the morning schedule is always the hardest. Every weekday since September you’ve had to wake up at six, but it’s only now, with February and the new schedule approaching, that you really begin to feel it.

I raced out of the Christmas vacation like a whippet past the starting gate: classes, writing, my Kickstarter campaign, train my AI! Six hours of sleep before Tuesday, six more before Wednesday, and at 3 p.m. on Thursday, my brain stopped working. I rose from my chair in Starbucks, my coffee gone as if it had never been, and lurched off to my next class. Seven hours to go before bedtime.

So I was at about 15% brain power (warning: plug in your device or initiate Power Save) when I read this text message: “You have a shipment [long string of numbers] traveling with UPS, which is subject to customs clearance before delivery. The necessary information regarding the steps you should take can be found here [link to email address].”

The shipment was ten copies of “Sharp Eye,” the comic I’d written and Kickstarted with Artyom Trakhanov, Simon Roy, and Jason Wordie, shipped to me by Tiger Press in Hong Kong. I’d been working on this project for five years, and now all that stood between me and my precious, glossy comics was this Customs official.

Reading their message now, I judge it to be wordy but straightforward enough. At the time, though, I was seized by a kind of hysterical blindness. What was this? Clear my what? Necessary why? I was totally at a loss, so I opened trusty old ChatGPT and began this fable of triumph and error.

Now, for some context, let me take you back to my Christmas vacation, that soft, glowing lull between Christmas and New Year’s, when you have no gifts to buy or geese to roast, and the prospect of entertaining guests until 1 a.m. is still several days away.1

We were in Belchin, a spa-hotel where the kids swam, Pavlina got massages, and I worked out and played with AI Projects. I had this idea I could ask ChatGPT how to use ChatGPT more effectively, in a loop of recursive self-optimization that would birth a digital god and conquer the galaxy, just like you read about in millennial sci-fi novels and on Twitter.

Well, the galaxy is still safe. ChatGPT certainly told me something. I got these documents saying things like “You are Dan’s Financial Advisor. Identify the root bottleneck, avoid novelty hacks,” which, when uploaded and queried, gave excessively mediocre advice. The “Chef” Project suggested meals like “Asian stir-fry with beef and bell peppers” and the “Teaching Assistant” told me to assign “writing: short paragraph ‘My Most Impressive Travel Experience.’”

But then: a glimmer of utility. When I fed a scene from my novel-in-progress into the “Editor” Project, it told me, “exposition overload at peak emotional moment” and “Mess is not sharp.”

It makes sense that this Project would actually be helpful, because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about writing. When I was building the Editor Project and the AI asked me for my opinions, it got them. I told it about sharpness of character, and it brought my own advice back to me when I needed it.

Over the course of January, I learned to treat the AI as a mental battery, which I did need. I had about nine hours every day before I turned into a zombie, but if I put some good ideas into the AI in the morning, I could get them back out at night. It would walk me toward a goal when I was too tired to think, even though ChatGPT was still fairly useless at deciding what to do in the first place. Maybe I should have told it to remind me of that last part.

A friend of mine learned this maxim from his flying instructor: “You fly the plane, the plane doesn’t fly you.” It’s a warning against instrument fixation—pilots staring at readouts instead of maintaining a clear intention.

When I got that text message, I should have drafted an email to Customs, then asked the AI if I’d forgotten anything. At the very least, I should have said, “My goal is to get these comic books delivered at minimum cost.” Instead, I just shoved the text into its chat window and asked, “what should I do?”

“Proceed methodically,” the instrumentation said. “What to do first (correct order): Step 1 - identify the order. Step 2 - decide clearance method. Recommended: let IN TIME/UPS handle it. Step 3 - send documents (do this next)” followed by which documents, exactly.

It was almost good advice. As handholding went, top-notch. But when the AI analyzed the invoice from the printers, it extracted an incorrect, much higher number than the value of the comics. A number that I unthinkingly pasted into the email I sent to the Customs officials.

Fortunately, I sometimes talk to human beings as well as machines. Artyom and Pavlina were both shocked when I told them that the VAT and handling fees for ten comic books came out to 250% of their value. To their credit, UPS was willing to be talked down from this insane number, but their handling fees still raised the total to 100% of the value of the comics, which is still remarkably eccentric.

So, as I often ask ChatGPT: what lessons can I extract from this experience? Suggested language to paste into Operating Protocols.md: if I’m asking it “what should I do?” I’m using the AI as a security blanket. Yes, sometimes I need to shut my eyes and pretend it isn’t me doing some scary, money-adjacent thing, but when it really isn’t me flying the plane, that’s a problem. I need a clear idea of where I’m going. Otherwise, the bottom of my empty wallet is very cold this time of year.

By the way, the comics are beautiful. You can still order them.

See you next month

If you already pay for your subscription, save the date and click the link at the bottom of this post at 7:00 p.m. Sofia time on February 28. If you’re not, upgrade, my friend.

Subscribe now

Next, I read some things in December.

Kingdom of Verse by

I bought this book aspirationally. My younger daughter is ten, and I wondered if she was too old to care about rhymes (she’s definitely too young to care about the re-enchantment of Western civilization). She is, however, very into Cyclops’s bright, somewhat deranged art. It took a couple of days to read through the whole book, and we found ourselves looking forward to bedtime. One of the poems, after I read it for the first time, popped up the next day in a C.S. Lewis essay. “Whatever Miss T. eats turns into Miss T,” indeed.

33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene

Greene’s structure is uninspired but serviceable: give an inspiring quote from an interesting source, a condensed little story about the circumstances, and a little moral at the end. I found it refreshingly straightforward, and much of the advice is good. I find myself remembering The Anabasis. “Doing is better than suffering.”

Theft of Fire by

I read this book a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed it more than the audio version. Yes, it was as well-produced as the author said it was. The actors were well cast, especially Miranda, and the sound effects did add something. I think the story itself worked better as text, though. (You can read my long-form review of the book here)

Scourge of the Spaceways by John C. Wright.

Oh no, how will our hero survive after a fall into a radioactive frozen river in Antarctic temperatures (previously Plutonian, but it got warmer)? While Imperial troops shoot at him?!

I could wish for more heft in the scene that finally brings together the characters, who’ve all been searching for each other for the past five novels. But all right, this book was a blast. Boys-own-adventure interspersed with moments of real tenderness. There is an especially touching interlude in a tiny urban church, where a former Imperial bureaucrat attends service in his uniform because it’s the only nice suit he owns.

You got me again, Wright.

“Sort by Controversial” by

I got set on this one by , who mentioned “scissor statements” in his and Mrs. Psmith’s cute year in review post. Remember that thing with the white-gold/blue-black? What if you could do that, but with morality? Oh wait. This story was so good that I read the first two-thirds of it to my wife, who is a tech CEO and laughed several times. The ending, though, leaves something to be desired. Scott Alexander, unfortunately, doesn’t take his Xenophon seriously. He writes as if things happen to us, as we don’t do things. In the face of the unstoppable force that he creates in his story, we are all helpless. I disagree. I think these questions have right answers, and that right can win.

Trantor Publishing

The End and Death of the Old Ways

Jacob Savage’s “The Lost Generation,” from Compact is still simmering down across the internet. It seems every Christmas now has a big blowout regarding, “What kind of American are you?” Last year it was Elon and Vivek crashing out over H-1B, this year it was a surge of anger from Millennials realizing just how thoroughly they were screwed. I think ther…

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8 months ago · 109 likes · 13 comments · Isaac Young

Speaking of which? I didn’t write anything about The Lost Generation because, as soon as the elation of reading the forbidden words wore off, I realized I hadn’t learned anything from them. Young White Man Denied Access to Creative Career and Dog Bites Man. Creative Industry Hollowed-Out Scam and Politician Tells Lies. None of this is news. The real question is “what now?” and Young answers it: “make original, creative work profitable again.”

Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf

REVIEW: An Amish Paradox, by Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell

An Amish Paradox: Diversity and Change in the World’s Largest Amish Community, Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010…

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9 months ago · 165 likes · 31 comments · Jane Psmith

…Or we all become Amish? Mrs. Psmith, who writes the best book reviews I’ve read since C.S. Lewis, helped me convince my wife of something I didn’t want to understand, either: you can’t resist True Believers unless you’re a True Believer too.

Karl K. Gallagher's Stories

Neighbor

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9 months ago · 16 likes · 16 comments · Karl Gallagher

…or at least have kids. Gallagher deftly captures the gentle rotting of the atomized aged. What we’re seeing now with our parents’ generation is sad enough. What about when our generation is ninety? I don’t know if and are reading each other, but they should.

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Monologue: year-end review of Proto-Indo-European origins and humanity's deep evolution and diversity

On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning Razib reviews two big stories he has followed and written about on this Substack in 2025, Indo-European origins and how genomics has illuminated human evolution…

Listen now

8 months ago · 38 likes · 3 comments · Razib Khan

’s guests come in varying degrees of worthiness, but his monologues are always a good listen. This one is a good place to start if you want to get a grip on the discoveries that overturned our understanding of our species’ origins this year. Got to be ready to be overturned again in 2026!

Ellis Elms

Flagged as 97% AI

Brandon Choi’s thesis was rejected twice. One of those times, it was for being AI-generated…

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9 months ago · 1259 likes · 229 comments · Ellis Elms

A good short story about the hypocrisy of most of the conversation about AI in writing.

And some music. , purveyor of Japanese lessons with a culture-crush on Bulgaria, seemed to enjoy this robust little song about coffee.

Доста съм фенси.

All right, here’s the expensive part. $3. Oooh.

So come and talk with me next month! Below is the link to my Ask Me Anything on the 28th of February

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Our kids’ school, icy in its cruelty, continued its program right up to the day before Christmas Eve. “We’re letting them out of school early, but you still have to wake up at six to get them here on time.” So it was in a bleary fog of holiday obligation that I paced the streets of Sofia that morning, shopping for presents.

As my legs worked and my brain warmed up, I tried to pay attention to the stores on Yanko Sakuzov: dairy store, sapphires, pearls. Would Pavlina like some cheese for Christmas? No, because we were fasting, or trying to. And she’s told me she thinks pearls are for old ladies, which means they’ll have to wait until it’s time to celebrate grandchildren.

Robert A. Heinlein taught me two important things in Stranger in a Strange Land: “A present should show that you considered that person’s tastes. Something he would enjoy but probably would not buy.” People don’t trek to the gas station thinking, “you know what Dan would really appreciate? Axe body spray.” No, they’re just buying something. I have to get rid of so much aftershave on Boxing Day. Would I do that to my wife?1

Slanchogled, the artist’s supply store, was packed today with face-tattooed art students and middle-aged people buying presents for young relatives. Remembering gifts I’d gotten from my own parents, I bought Maggie a block of 100% cotton paper and a set of serious watercolors, the ones in tubes. Ellie got smaller versions of the same things, because her big present was a stack of books. I had to go pick those up at the post office, from which I managed escape after only twenty minutes, my most difficult gift still ahead.

Pavlina always tells me to buy her something she can wear. When my energy is low, that often defaults to the goldsmith who made our wedding rings. I did walk from the post office to his shop, and I looked at the heavy gold earrings displayed in his window. He even caught my eye and nodded at me, which made things very awkward when I turned around and left. I couldn’t see Pavlina in any of his work this year. And anyway, I can’t go to the same twinkle-eyed Armenian for every Christmas and birthday. I’ll make up for it by recommending him to you: the shop’s name is Karen.

When I’d ridden the metro into town, I’d thought I was so clever. I’d uploaded a photo of Pavlina and told Claude AI, “give me advice for presents for this woman in the voice of Anna Wintour.” Claude sounded very much like the Devil wearing Prada (“a woman who would wear red dress and green army boots has the strong aesthetic sense”), but it suggested stores that don’t exist. ChatGPT gave me real stores, but they sold tacky mall-wear and boring tchotchkes. I imagined them on her, and the gold, and the sapphires, so I headed back to Yanko Sakuzov. I got upsold there, but Pavlina enjoys an expensive present.

“You know,” she said two days later, bedecked in her new jewels, “you have very specific taste.”

I took that as a compliment, and got up to take the Christmas stratta out of the oven. I’d found a use for that cheese, after all.

See you next month.

Energized1 by Edward M. Lerner

There’s a very promising premise — the radioactive contamination of all Middle Eastern petroleum and a couple of interesting ideas about power satellites — and the techno-thriller plot is solid. The twist (which I won’t spoil) hit just the right point of expected surprise. However, none of the dialogue worked, and only one character interested me, the twist one. The bad guys should have been fun to watch but weren’t. I just wish this book had passed through the hands of a real editor.

The current state of the art in powersats, and a character (the skinny LA dude) who should absolutely have been in the book.

Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

My first thought was, this isn’t OCEAN, and I was right. The four-humor system, rebranded here as the colors red, yellow, green, blue, does not identify psychological dimensions by empirical factor analysis, but it does do something else. The first hint comes with an anecdote of a party the author attended, where people got drunk and changed “color.” Normally aggressive “Reds” sought approval from submissive “Greens,” who delivered punishment. A cheerful “Yellow” turned out to be a melancholy drunk, and the nerds (“Blue”) were dancing on the tables. These colors aren’t fundamental personality dimensions but strategies people adapt at work. That’s why so many people are Green.

Trouble In My Day by Karl K. Gallagher

This one dragged. Gallagher spent the first half of the book figuring out what his hero should be doing, and the only thing that pulled me forward was the villain and his quest to find a friend. Eventually, the plot does get moving, and there’s even some emergence of theme. “Can we at least wait until the war is over before executing everyone with initiative?” Versus “Sir, what does this button do? Never mind.” It could have used a good tightening revision.

Scenebux by

As far as scifi ideas go, there’s one pretty interesting one right at the end, but despite its cyberpunk window-dressing, this is really contemporary fiction. Ultra-contemporary. I can’t get over how fixed in time the story is. Did Smith just sit down and write the whole novel over the course of July 2025? What’s most important is the writing style, which I’ll describe as Father-To-Be-Joke:

“I finish my tea and try to turn a new leaf, cultivating zen as the tension brews. It would be all too easy for this whole thing to boil over. It’s going to be a steep climb to convince bitter Findholm I’m relatively innocent. I start to spill my guts to sweeten him up, really milking it.”

Oh, and a lot more will make sense when you understand what Thielbux are.

It’s edutainmarific!

Hossenfelder doesn’t give me all the science news I want, but at least in the realm of physics, she’s good.

I love the pig’s tail casting. This is the sort of engineering I want.

All that’s missing is a rallying cry at the end.

Look at the funny little clay dollies the old Europeans made.

My wife binged these. She wants to be like the rocket guy.

Trantor Publishing

Conservatives as Counter-Culture, or Why the Right Won't Get the Art Scene It Wants

Conservatives have been predicting the implosion of subversion culture since forever. The obvious prediction was the collapse in box office numbers as the Left burned every franchise Hollywood had to offer, the cultural equivalent of setting fire to the Library of Alexandria. But the more important observation was that Leftwing culture is hollow. Once t…

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9 months ago · 99 likes · 20 comments · Isaac Young

“Real art brings up...uncomfortable realities”

It’s good Isaac summed up this argument, and better that he takes it forward. Let’s do it. Let’s make art.

The Library of Celaeno

Schrödinger's White Boy

Professor Juan Cole is apparently on Substack, and in a tour-de-force essay- “Sorry White Nationalists: Europeans Were Black Until the Rise of Rome, and Rome Was Multiracial”- he departs from his general comfort zone of pro-Palestinian propaganda and…

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9 months ago · 155 likes · 74 comments · Librarian of Celaeno

As often in political commentary, I agree with Librarian’s diagnosis, but not his cure. He disassembles the utopian dreams of postmodern academics and white nationalists (”sludgeworthy” and “fragile,” respectively). But then, monarchy? I just don’t see that happening.

A good self-contained sci-fi story. The narrator is just so convinced he’s doing the right thing, the scamp.

All right! Got any reccs of your own? Tell me.

Every year, Pavlina and I take a break the day after Thanksgiving and drive away to a secluded mountain retreat. The first year we did it, I was on chemotherapy. Another year, Pavlina was in such a state, I had to feed her chocolates every time she went through a tunnel or passed a truck. This year it was me again, playing angry music on the car speakers.

Sidle up with a big grin

Caught the scent of my skin

From across the room.

But I can see your bloody teeth

Peering out from underneath

I know it’s coming soon.

Such was my state of mind, but Pavlina couldn’t feed me chocolates. I’m low-carb. Instead, we looped through Tsigov Chark and pulled up at the Shkembedzhiynitsa. Don’t worry, I’ll help you. Shkembe is the Bulgarian (from Turkish) word for tripe. -dzhiya (also from Turkish) is a person who does something, a triper. -nitsa forms nouns of place. The Tripery.

I don’t like tripe. It’s sold in soup (shkembe chorba) in every roadside truck stop, and it’s never any good. Watery, rubbery, and no matter how much pickled garlic and chili flakes you pile onto it, always smelling just a bit like farts.

I ordered the vegetarian chorba, with mushrooms, but Pavlina ordered chorba three-in-one, including not only shredded stomach lining, but tongue and liver as well. this plus another serving of those same organs, chopped, without the broth. She had more faith than me that day, and she was hungrier.

There’s a wrong way to make shkembe chorba, but there’s also a right way. Even though I wasn’t in the mood, even though I’d ordered a pale, wimpish imitation of the real thing, my soup seized me.

Roux, salt, meat, and a deep well of savory warmth. The pickled garlic and chili flakes became, not an escape hatch, but a ritual. Pavlina’s soup was even better. The tripe was satiny, cooked down to almost the same consistency as the broth. Substantial. I forgot why I was angry.

The Shkembedzhiynitsa is a small place, full of stuffed weasels and wooden tchotchkes, surrounded by aimless construction. Its Shkembedzhiya is an old bald man who watches political YouTube videos and won’t talk to diners. A master. The place didn’t have a card reader, but I dug up enough coins to pay for our meal.

“So that’s what the truck stops are imitating,” I said as we got into the car. Across the street was a lot full of abandoned campers and a grossly overbuilt vacation house. We drove toward the severely dry Lake Batak, past poorly-planned developments of bungalows trying to look rustic. I was reminded of Montana.

“What must someone think, staying in one of these?” I asked. “You bought a block of Dragolevtsi suburbia in a sheep field. Your house is two meters from someone else’s, and your windows look out onto a construction site, but deep inside you is your desire for the real thing: a cabin in the woods. It’s like the truckstop shkembe chorba. It’s an insultingly bad imitation, but what it’s imitating is so good, you’re glad to have it.”

Once we were at the hotel, I went on to Google Maps to give the place a review. “Should be the center of a national revival of Bulgarian cuisine,” I wrote, before reading the other reviews. The master shkembedzhiya had responded only to the negative reviews. He told his dissatisfied customers not to be idiots.

See you next month

The Things We Make1 by Bill Hammack

Few books could deliver so little on such big promises. “How to build a cathedral without…a yardstick” and “From Mesopotamia…to space.” We get one (1) truly interesting historical engineering practice, such as using a rope to determine the proportions of an arch, followed by waffly space-filler until the next chapter and the next ungenerous drop of actual information. Somewhere buried inside him, the author has an engineer who loves solving physical problems. For every cool and inspiring solution, though, he has to tell us about a woman or a minority who did something too. It’s patronizing and tedious.

The Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

The chaos and gigadeath visited on Earth spill out into the wider galaxy, alien civilization starts to fall apart, and I’m left cold. There are some standout moments — Carl’s horror at discovering what the Bedlam bride is trying to do, the raid on the Naga royalty — but most of the rest of the book feels like boxes being checked off of Dinniman’s list. Slow down, man. Have fun with this. Get back in touch with the game you were playing in book one, before the stakes got so high. And do a round of structural edits.

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio

I found Principles to be both useful and heartfelt. For this book, on the other hand… Calibrate your expectations with the following statement by the author on Marx: “I didn’t appreciate that Marx was a brilliant man who came up with some good theories and some seemingly bad ones that he would probably agree were not adequately tested and refined by the evolutionary system he espoused.” Okay, Grandpa.

Dalio is best when he talks about his expertise, which is finance. Going to him for political-philosophical — or worse, economic — insight is like going to a mechanic for lessons in particle physics.

Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold

This one is so good it’s almost painful. Bujold was at the top of her career here, pulling off a complex plot that is both beautiful and symbolic. Imagine a car engine that teaches you about the nature of trust, is perfectly symmetrical, and wins Formula One races.

As for the story itself, it’s best if you start with one of the earlier books: The Warrior’s Apprentice or of course Shards of Honor. You need to know Miles, Mark, Bell, Ellie, and Aral Vorkosigan before Bujold smashes them.

Karl K. Gallagher's Stories

Zombie

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10 months ago · 25 likes · 6 comments · Karl Gallagher

A fun, interesting short story about corpse disposal and orbital mechanics. It promises, it delivers.

Submission by Marilyn Simon

Courage and Honour: Against Timidity

In mid-October, just a few weeks ago, I delivered a talk to a group of students, high school and university, scholars, and interested community members at Bard College in upstate New York. It was a talk on love, on the joy of shifting inequalities in a loving marriage, on how the asymmetry of the sexes increases our mutual delight in each other. The stu…

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10 months ago · 138 likes · 3 comments · Marilyn Simon

Read this to see health speaking to sickness. Sickness does not respond well, but the lesson is good: we have abandoned the distinction between authority and tyranny. We need to find it again, and not just for the sake of our sex-lives.

I include this one for the very Australian joke about tasting toxic plants.

Chaotic Neutral

Getting Jacked is Simple

It’s actually really simple to get jacked. That’s not to say it’s easy- just that the complexity of the challenge is trivial, requiring only time and energy to succeed…

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a year ago · 3764 likes · 153 comments · Dylan

I’ve been applying the advice here for a month and I can say it works. Quote, “it’s the final rep.”

No Serials

First thing: I stopped serializing Tyrannosaur Queen. After a lot of soul-searching and back-and-forth, I came to the conclusion that people like to read serializations when the book is still unfinished, and they can affect the writer’s choices through their comments. Since Tyrannosaur Queen is already finished, there’s no reason for people to read the serialization. They can just buy it. (or listen to it on Audible!)

Sketches

What I’m doing instead is sharing my process. On Substack, you’ve seen the map I made for my current project, The Eccentrics. Over on Patreon, you can find my “sketches,” including notes, literal drawings, and occasionally complete scenes. They’re all very rough, but you do have the opportunity to stick your oar in and tell me what you think.

Ask Me Anything

Speaking of which, come talk to me on Zoom on the 22nd. I’m doing an Ask Me Anything for paid subscribers and $3 plus patrons. Details here.

If you haven’t read about my adventure last month lifting an old man, you can do that here on Substack, or here on This is Bulgaria which will now feature my newsletters as a monthly column.

Typos

In other news, I spent a couple of days this month grinding over the Sharp Eye script one more time. The comic book is with the printers now, but it’s not too late to order a copy.

And wouldn’t you know it, I publish Wealthgiver I on Amazon, and I immediately see formatting mistakes and a typo on the cover. I’ve fixed those, and I’ve put Volume 2 up. It’s available for pre-order.

Pre-Order Wealthgiver II

That’s it for this month. Tell me: what do you want to see more of from me?