Input: [Description] I'm not a housewife, I'm just in training for the apocalypse. Self-sufficiency and a return of domestic skills as a survival strategy for climage change, social collapse. [Name]

Output: Survival in changing times

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Input: [Description] A general introduction to his work. Charles Stross is known as a leading post-cyberpunk and exponent of singularity fiction, but who also writes far future social commentary, space opera, fantasy and Lovecraft/espionage cross-over with a side order of bureaucratic satire. Learn more about this varied and complex author. [Name]

Output: The different faces of Charles Stross

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Input: [Description] Just as you think, and just as silly as it sounds. [Name]

Output: Sing along to cartoon themes

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Input: [Description] It may have come from fiction, but cyberpunk fashion is real enough. Learn who wears it, where they get it, and what inspires it. [Name]

Output: Cyberfashion

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Input: [Description] How is a story constructed? Where do the ideas come from, what is the structure of a story? Come and see a story take form in front of your eyes, as writers guide us through the process. [Name]

Output: Story-building workshop

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Input: [Description] Workshop for a Swancon survival kit [Name]

Output: Con Survival Kit

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Input: [Description] The soap opera is one of the most popular - and most regularly misunderstood - forms of television drama, and with one or two exceptions (Jupiter Moon, Passions, Chances) has never embraced speculative fiction as the basis for its stories. Is a science fiction soap opera possible? What would be the challenges? The benefits? [Name]

Output: Science Fiction and Soap Opera

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Input: [Description] Once Space Opera was denigrated, but now its become one of the most popular, original, thriving and dynamic of genres. Why is it so successful now, what is new about it, where is going and where did it come from? [Name]

Output: The New Space Opera

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Input: [Description] Are we reaching a point where science is accelerating faster than we can speculate about it? How much does redundant science invalidate a science fiction story, novel or film? Can becoming scientifically redundant actually help a text? Does fiction actually improve when it becomes a document of the time it was written rather than a real prediction of the future as cyberpunk is now associated with the 80s, and nuclear influenced disaster fiction with the 1950s and 1960s? [Name]

Output: Staying Ahead Of The Curve

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Input: [Description] The seventh and final book has been published, and the back cover closed on one of the biggest fiction phenomenons of all time. So what, in the final analysis, does Harry Potter represent? A look at its effect and influence on children's fiction, fantasy fiction, Internet fandom and the book publishing industry. [Name]

Output: Harry Potter: The Final Analysis

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Input: [Description] Why do fans sometimes feel they own a show or series, and feel they have rights that the author should respect? Is it just a sense of entitlement, or do fans sometimes have a point? Do fans sometimes bring more insight than the authors? What happens when fans are given real control over something, and then what happens when its taken away, as has happened with Doctor Who? [Name]

Output: Fan Ownership

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Input: [Description] To what extent is fandom a primarily white, middle class, activity? Is this where fandoms tendency to talk about the future while obsessing about the past, resistance to change, general trend to "corrall the wagons" and resist newcomers, comes from? Do we use fan jargon to keep the mainstream at bay - and what happens when science fiction goes mainstream? [Name]

Output: Fan Demographics: Who Are We?

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Input: [Description] A lot of science fiction we read now is post-cyberpunk , and its a very important part of modern SF. Only, no one can agree on what that actually means -- come, watch the panellists violently disagree. [Name]

Output: Post-Cyberpunk

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Input: [Description] Sometimes, science fiction sneaks up on us unaware, and is reality before we know it. Hear about the technologies on the horizon that could be reality by next Swancon. [Name]

Output: The Futures So Bright

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Input: [Description] Imagine being an ordinary cop in a world of superheroes and villains. Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker's award winning take on the DC Comics universe will surprise and confront you. [Name]

Output: Gotham Central

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Input: [Description] Produced by the BBC from 1965 to 1971 Out of the Unknown was the premier British science fiction/ fantasy anthology series. A brief history of the series will be given and clips from the surviving episodes will be shown. [Name]

Output: Out of the Unknown

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Input: [Description] When does it work? Why does it so often fail? Why is it so popular? Why do people have such strong feelings about it? Should it have its own awards? Is it a dumping ground for ideas that fail to develop? Or is it simply the perfect form of fiction for an era of multi-tasking and shot attention spans? [Name]

Output: Flash Fiction

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Input: [Description] The differences between UK, USA and Australian fandom from the perspectives of natives and visitors. What do fans do differently in other places? What things are the same everywhere? Are fans elsewhere just like us? [Name]

Output: Fandom cultural exchange

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Input: [Description] Why should people love and obsess over that obscure corner of the fannish world that YOU love and obsess over? Be prepared to stand up and share the love. [Name]

Output: Pimp your fandom

And Ye Shall Know Us By Our Trail of Web -


Input: [Description] What has come out lately that you really should read. [Name]

Output: SF Reading list

And Ye Shall Know Us By Our Trail of Web -


Input: [Description] A show and tell for craft and hardware projects [Name]

Output: Geek Craft show and tell

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Input: [Description] Laughing can make you happy. Come and laugh with us. [Name]

Output: Laughter Yoga

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Input: [Description] A discussion of what the upcoming movies to be excited about were 20 years ago. What was big? What was hyped? What were the sleeper films, not promoted at the time but remembered now? [Name]

Output: What you should have been watching - 1988

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Input: [Description] There are webcomics, ebooks, webzines, and online story repositories full of SF and fantasy. A treasure trove of online SF for your reading pleasure is there, if you only knew were to find. Let our guides show you where. [Name]

Output: Online SF

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Input: [Description] A few brave souls signed up to read every single SF/F short story published in 2007. Hear some of these veterans report on the state of the field, and see their battle scars. And find out what made the effort worthwhile. [Name]

Output: Not if you were the last short story on earth

And Ye Shall Know Us By Our Trail of Web -


Input: [Description] Fantasy races have been used as a metaphor for ordinary human race relations many times, from Angel to Harry Potter and Babylon V. Does it work? When does it fail? [Name]

Output: Fantasy race as a metaphor for race

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Input: [Description] Fandom has an image of itself as a geek social utopia, but it has more than enough unpleasant social realities of its own. Is fandom crippled by the Geek Social Fallacies? Is it really as tolerant as it likes to think? Can we make it better? [Name]

Output: Fandom as our perfect society: the dream and the reality

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Input: [Description] This Christmas, Paramount Pictures release their 11th Star Trek motion picture, relaunching the adventures of Kirk, Spock and McCoy with all-new actors. Is there still a place in SF film and television for Star Trek? Is a complete relaunch the best idea? An examination of the potential future of America's most famous science fiction franchise, and its potential place in the future of the genre. [Name]

Output: To Boldly Go: The Future Of Star Trek

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Input: [Description] In the past decade, American television drama has become more creatively and commercially successful than ever. Television shows with unprecedented levels of quality in script, direction, acting and production have raised the bar higher than ever before. But among shows like Deadwood, Rome, Six Feet Under, 24, Damages, The Shield and The West Wing, what place is there for science fiction? An examination of the realities of television broadcasting, the difficulties in launching new science fiction TV drama - and the possibilities and niches in which to do so. [Name]

Output: Science Fiction And The Future Of American Television

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Input: [Description] A world where the Nazis won World War II? It's been done. What are the possible historical changes that haven't yet been explored in science fiction? What historical events, with the requisite changes, make for the best alternative histories? [Name]

Output: Alternative Alternative Historiea

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Input: [Description] Films like Pi, Cube and Primer have proved that you don't need a big budget to make a science fiction film - in fact, you may not need a budget at all! A look at the world of low and no-budget science fiction film: what works, what doesn't, and the resources available in Western Australia to help you make your SF opus. [Name]

Output: How To Make A Science Fiction Film

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Input: [Description] A look at the upcoming genre films for 2008: the films we're looking forward to, and the ones we're fearing. Predictions will be made. Theatrical trailers will be shown. [Name]

Output: Trailer Park

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Input: [Description] 2007 was a great year for quality film, and we look back at the science fiction, fantasy and horror films to hit the big screen over the past 12 months. What were the successes? The disappointments? What were the hits, the flops and the unexpected surprises? [Name]

Output: 2007: The Films In Review

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Input: [Description] More than 30 years later, and even without any upcoming movies, there is plenty of life in the Star Wars universe yet. There are upcoming cartoons, games, books, a live-action TV show, and more. [Name]

Output: The Future Of Star Wars

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Input: [Description] In the world of American comic books the "big two" - Marvel and DC - are undergoing something of a creative crisis. Fans are responding to current storylines more and more negatively, and it's beginning to look as if neither publisher can put a foot right. What has led to the current situation in the American superhero comic industry? What's currently working, what isn't, and why? What is the potential future for the genre? A critical appraisal of two fictional universes in crisis. [Name]

Output: Crisis On Infinite Publishers!

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Input: [Description] Getting into some real nitty-gritty stuff about plotting TV scripts, writing series bibles, the reality of what you should and shouldn't bother writing in Australia, and so on. [Name]

Output: Writing For Television: A Guide For New Writers

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Input: [Description] The idea that human consciousness is just software for a powerful computer, and so can be copied, freely duplicated, moved around, and edited, as such, is well established in modern SF, and used by authors from Frederick Pohl to Charles Stross. But is it likely to happen, or are the practical and philosophical issues raised more serious than some might think? How would you feel about dying so a copy of you might live? Would the process really capture you, or just a superficial version of you? [Name]

Output: A Case of Consciousness

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Input: [Description] Join Steph and Matt for 5 whole minutes of laughs, spills, thrills, interrogation and entertainment, and if that doesn't work, a quiz show of some sort. Almost entirely cat-free. Really. Promise. An S&M BGs Production,with special guests John Parker, Gina Goddard and Dr Sophie Ambrose. [Name]

Output: The Anxious Penguin Hour

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Input: [Description] The return of the totally unofficial rip off of the BBC quiz show. [Name]

Output: Swancon QI

And Ye Shall Know Us By Our Trail of Web -


Input: [Description] As the dream of truly transforming human culture and environment through what is referred to as the Spike, or the Singularity, twinkles on the horizon, at the same time we face approaching crises in climate change and pollution, mass extinctions, overpopulation and other disasters that seem to be spiking in their own way. What are the relationships between the two trends, is the very existence of the positive dependent on the negative, in the perhaps delicate balance between the two, which way will the future fall? [Name]

Output: The Spike Versus The Precipice: Can Our Evolving Technical Mastery Actually Save Us From Itself?

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Input: [Description] When weird science meets haute cuisine, you get the trend that s been attracting huge attention in the ranks of the worlds most influential restaurants. The end result often comes across as very science fictional. Come see explanations of food science and live demonstrations. [Name]

Output: Molecular Gastronomy hour

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Input: [Description] A book launch for books by Sean Williams and Karen Miller [Name]

Output: Harper Collins Launch

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Input: [Description] Discover what next year s con committee have in store for us! [Name]

Output: Swancon 2009 launch

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Input: [Description] Other SF conventions and expo style events are attracting larger numbers. Supanova will soon be offering its own, very successful and different, style of event to Perth. Swancon is failing to grow its numbers. Fandom overall is graying, and fracturing. Big areas of fandom don t see Swancon as the event for them. Is the way we run conventions becoming inappropriate for fandom? Are we doing some things wrong, could we change without losing what makes Swancon the event we like? [Name]

Output: Convention Running: Are We Doing It Wrong?

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Input: [Description] The evolving and current play formats for the first of the great fantasy collectible card games. [Name]

Output: The evolution of Magic: The Gathering

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Input: [Description] Jasper Ffordes popular books features JurisFiction, who police crimes committed by the characters inside the world of literature. What literary crimes should we crack down on? What are the crime threats to the world of literature? What sort of character behaviour, dubious plotting, or abuse of literature should face legal sanction? [Name]

Output: CSI: Literature

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Input: [Description] Once the core of the Japanese videogaming scene, the role-playing game (RPG) now seems outdated and irrelevant. While genre leader Final Fantasy goes from strength to strength, other titles seem few and far between - and those that do see release face underwhelming sales and customer response. Is it all over for the Japanese RPG? What trends in gaming are drawing players away, and is there anything that can be learned from those trend to re-invigorate this once-massively popular genre? [Name]

Output: A Very Final Fantasy: The Future Of Japanese Rpgs

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Input: [Description] With bookstore shelves now overflowing with thick, popular fantasy novels, and with new titles arriving every month, how difficult is it to make an impact in the genre? Looking at matters of content, mythology, style and form, a panel of fantasy fiction professionals explain what it is that they do to stand out from the crowd and get noticed. [Name]

Output: A Point Of Difference: Standing Out In Fantasy Fiction

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Input: [Description] From concept to comic, produce a short comic entirely within our convention workshop. [Name]

Output: The Three Hour Comic

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Input: [Description] A characteristic of the Space Opera genre is its love of settings on a huge scale, from the planetary to the intergalactic. How do you choose a setting, how does a sense of time and space change the nature of the story? What about the truly innovative settings, from ringworlds up to far more esoteric settings? [Name]

Output: The Big Stage: Space Opera and setting

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Input: [Description] The traditional auction. Pick up a bargain or grab that obscure fannish special item. Sell your old stuff, and help raise money for fannish causes like the fan funds. [Name]

Output: Auction

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Input: [Description] Big Finish are a notable producer of Doctor Who audio plays and other media. What is like working with them? How have things changed with the new series? How does fandom feel about their take on Doctor Who? What about their work based on other cult SF properties? [Name]

Output: Doctor Who and the Big Finish

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Input: [Description] Concerns about energy efficiency, carbon emissions, and sustainability are changing the direction of technological development. When we think about the aesthetics of future technology, how will the green trend affect SF and our visions of the future? [Name]

Output: Painting the Future Green

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Input: [Description] All the action and adventure of the Wizarding Worlds greatest sport! Come prepared to participate in an physical sporting event. [Name]

Output: Live Action Quidditch

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Input: [Description] British fiction, and particularly film and TV, have often represented the end of the world, and often in an understated British fashion. The cozy catastrophe genre and its offshoots. [Name]

Output: A Rather Polite Apocalypse: British Representations of the End of the World

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Input: [Description] Cloverfield is about the fall of the World Trade Centre, the Forever War is about Vietnam, Godzilla is about atomic testing. Responding to historical disaster and loss in a fictional form is a rich source of powerful SF work. Why do we respond is such a metaphorical fashion, does this create more powerful fiction, are their inherent dangers of trivialising in responding to the world in such a way? [Name]

Output: Armageddon as Allegory: SF Responses to the Trauma of History

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Input: [Description] The Organisation for Transformative Work is a new organisation dedicated to defending the value and legal validity of fan works and fan culture. Hear about its founding, its mission, its organisation, and its many projects and campaigns on behalf of fan culture, and learn just what is a transformative work. [Name]

Output: Transformative Work

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Input: [Description] Real world technological advancement rolls along so steadily that some technology leaps from fiction to reality with surprising speed, and some ideas leap from concept to reality without touching fiction in between. Is traditional Hard SF becoming overwhelmed by the pace of technological change? [Name]

Output: Can We Keep Up?

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Input: [Description] A workshop for prospective authors, discussing all the things happen in between that creative urge and holding a book in your hand, including the ones that no one might have told you about before. [Name]

Output: From an Idea to a Publishable Book: Avoiding Beginner's Mistakes

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Input: [Description] Fan fund delegates past and current recount their adventures, muse on the role of fan funds, and attempt to interest the audience in free or subsidised holidays. GUFF, NAFF, DUFF and FFANZ delegates speak about what happens when you win a fan fund race, and what happens after. [Name]

Output: Fan fund travellers tales

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Input: [Description] Come with an idea for a comic, and produce something within 3 hours. [Name]

Output: 3 Hour Comic

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Input: [Description] Ticonderoga Press launches a new Sean Williams collection. [Name]

Output: Ticonderoga Launch

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Input: [Description] Professional marketer and editor of the independent publishing house Ticonderoga Publications, Russell B. Farr, presents the basics of marketing and promotion for individuals and small groups. The difference between professional and amateur doesn't have to be large. [Name]

Output: Marketing 10101

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Input: [Description] Why do readers still crave romance of fantasy? What lifts a love story above the trite, mushy and predictable? [Name]

Output: Girl Meets Boy: Romance In Fantasy

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Input: [Description] Writers groups (face to face and online), manuscript assessment services, mentoring will they help you write better? Or will they hurt your confidence, or waste your time? [Name]

Output: Critiquing: how much feedback is too much?

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Input: [Description] Science fiction abounds with images of planets from space, however it is only in the last few years that media such as Battlestar Galactica and feature films have gotten planetary observation right as the technology of earth and planetary observation improves. Where do these satellite images come from and how did they actually work? Why are the remote satellite images of earth and the solar system our eyes into other worlds including our own? This presentation is an introduction to the science behind satellite remote sensing, with real-life examples from archeology to mars and the NASA photograph archive that allowed the artistic jump from Blake-7's colour filters to realistic-looking imaginary planets. [Name]

Output: Introduction to Satellite Remote Sensing

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Input: [Description] Caffeine, exhaustion, stand- up comedy and a magical hat. Last year, two men decided to pull audience suggestions out of a hat and improvise some random ranting. This year, they'll do it again, but joined by the mighty power and scrumptious beard of Mr Danny Oz. Come on down, pop a topic in the hat and watch as three men use all their energy to produce well... something. It'll be like a Dr Who episode, but nobody's a doctor, or a time lord, or Billie Piper. God, I love her. [Name]

Output: Magical Hat of Mystery 2: The Time Wasters

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Input: [Line] Two little dickie birds sitting on a hill [Action]

Output: Both fists are closed

With a Grateful Prayer and a Thankful Heart: 6/12/11 - 6/19/11


Input: [Line] One named Jack [Action]

Output: With a quick motion, Daddy would flip one of his fists over his shoulder and return it with the index finger extended to show, Jack.

With a Grateful Prayer and a Thankful Heart: 6/12/11 - 6/19/11


Input: [Line] One named Jill [Action]

Output: He would repeat with the other hand.

With a Grateful Prayer and a Thankful Heart: 6/12/11 - 6/19/11


Input: [Line] Fly away Jack [Action]

Output: The Jack hand is quickly drawn back alongside the adult’s head. As part of the movement the adult folds the marked finger and sticks out the second finger of the same hand and drops the hand back down to the original position. The child sees that the marking, Jack, is no longer there – it has flown away

With a Grateful Prayer and a Thankful Heart: 6/12/11 - 6/19/11


Input: [Line] Fly away Jill [Action]

Output: The action is repeated with the other hand

With a Grateful Prayer and a Thankful Heart: 6/12/11 - 6/19/11


Input: [Line] Come Back Jack [Action]

Output: The action is reversed to make Jack reappear

With a Grateful Prayer and a Thankful Heart: 6/12/11 - 6/19/11


Input: [Line] Come Back Jill [Action]

Output: The action is reversed to make Jill reappear

With a Grateful Prayer and a Thankful Heart: 6/12/11 - 6/19/11


Input: [Author] EBounding [Title] The Coming of a New Power [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: In order to save the future Ness must come to realize a new power form.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] EBounding [Title] A New Peace [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: A kid from a different moves into Foursides and manages to befriend Ness. He finds himself tied up in an adventure with Ness and his friends.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] EBounding [Title] Ness is Lost! [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Ness is missing and it's up to his friends to find him.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] EBounding [Title] The Mad Quest For Power [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Ness and Paula are being hurt by their own PSI powers and are noticing strange happenings where they live.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] EBounding [Title] The Beginning Perspective [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: The start of EarthBound from Paula's perspective.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] EBounding [Title] The Denied Vengeance [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Jeff developes a PSI machine and a new student is having an unusual influence on Snow Wood.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] Ninten1 [Title] The Series Ends Here, Chapter 6 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Life in Onett had become a dull bore over the several years since the War Against Giygas. An unexpected phone call from Nintendo about an upcoming sequel inspires Ness to move to Fourside with his friends and party it up in the big city and on the beach. But one morning, months later, time stops. Could this be the definitive end of our heroes' adventure?

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] Ninten1 [Title] The Series Ends Here, Chapter 5 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Life in Onett had become a dull bore over the several years since the War Against Giygas. An unexpected phone call from Nintendo about an upcoming sequel inspires Ness to move to Fourside with his friends and party it up in the big city and on the beach. But one morning, months later, time stops. Could this be the definitive end of our heroes' adventure?

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] Ninten1 [Title] The Series Ends Here, Chapter 4 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Life in Onett had become a dull bore over the several years since the War Against Giygas. An unexpected phone call from Nintendo about an upcoming sequel inspires Ness to move to Fourside with his friends and party it up in the big city and on the beach. But one morning, months later, time stops. Could this be the definitive end of our heroes' adventure?

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] Fabricati Diem [Title] EarthBound: ReBound [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: A self-described "oddly epic retelling" of the story of EarthBound, as Ness starts out his adventure under his much more preffered moniker "Elliot".

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] Ninten1 [Title] The Series Ends Here, Chapter 3 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Life in Onett had become a dull bore over the several years since the War Against Giygas. An unexpected phone call from Nintendo about an upcoming sequel inspires Ness to move to Fourside with his friends and party it up in the big city and on the beach. But one morning, months later, time stops. Could this be the definitive end of our heroes' adventure?

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] Ninten1 [Title] The Series Ends Here, Chapter 2 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Life in Onett had become a dull bore over the several years since the War Against Giygas. An unexpected phone call from Nintendo about an upcoming sequel inspires Ness to move to Fourside with his friends and party it up in the big city and on the beach. But one morning, months later, time stops. Could this be the definitive end of our heroes' adventure?

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] Ninten1 [Title] The Series Ends Here, Chapter 1 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Life in Onett had become a dull bore over the several years since the War Against Giygas. An unexpected phone call from Nintendo about an upcoming sequel inspires Ness to move to Fourside with his friends and party it up in the big city and on the beach. But one morning, months later, time stops. Could this be the definitive end of our heroes' adventure?

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] Ninten1 [Title] EarthBound: A Novel Idea [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: This is the story of EarthBound, from Ness' perspective, with a little spin on it. Ninten1 took some liberties with the plot, but it's still EarthBound.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] Ninten1 [Title] To Dream in Two Worlds [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Do you ever get that feeling after you

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] EBBoy [Title] Revenge of Giygas Ch. 1 - 4 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: Pokey brings Giygas back for a second rampage.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] INouveaux18 [Title] The Chosen Eight, Part 27 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: 30 years after EarthBound, a new threat rises, and only Zain and the rest of the new Chosen Eight can destroy it.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] INouveaux18 [Title] The Chosen Eight, Part 26 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: 30 years after EarthBound, a new threat rises, and only Zain and the rest of the new Chosen Eight can destroy it.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] INouveaux18 [Title] The Chosen Eight, Part 25 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: 30 years after EarthBound, a new threat rises, and only Zain and the rest of the new Chosen Eight can destroy it.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [Author] INouveaux18 [Title] The Chosen Eight, Part 24 [Date] 3/26/05 [Rank] 0.00 [Description]

Output: 30 years after EarthBound, a new threat rises, and only Zain and the rest of the new Chosen Eight can destroy it.

STARMEN.NET - Fanfiction - MOTHER 2 Archives


Input: [as] = [As Meditation"] imagination ["The World]

Output: reality


Input: [as] = [As Meditation"] what we create ["The World]

Output: what is


Input: [as] = [As Meditation"] future ["The World]

Output: past & present


Input: [as] = [As Meditation"] the other ["The World]

Output: the self


Input: [as] = [As Meditation"] "dear friend" ["The World]

Output: "friend"


Input: [as] = [As Meditation"] Ulysses ["The World]

Output: Penelope


Input: [as] = [As Meditation"] creating new poetry ["The World]

Output: old traditions in poetry


Input: [as] = [As Meditation"] Stevens ["The World]

Output: Homer


Input: [Title] Radiance: A Novel [Author] Carter Scholz [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2003 [Read] 2014/02/20 [Review]

Output: (Quotes are extracted from my annotated ebook edition of Radiance; see also my list of other review & excerpts from them.) Publisher summary: Somewhere in California, in the 1990s, a nuclear weapons lab develops advanced technologies for its post-Cold War mission. Advanced as in not working yet. Mission as in continued funding. A scandal-plagued missile defense program presses forward, dragging physicist Philip Quine deep into the machinations of those who would use the lab for their own gain. The Soviet Union has collapsed. But new enemies are sought, and new reasons found to continue the work that has legitimized the power of the Lab, its managers, and the politicians who fund them. Quine is thrust into the center of programs born at the intersection of paranoia, greed, and ambition, and torn by incommensurable demands. Deadlines slip and cost overruns mount. He is drawn into a maelstrom of policy meetings, classified documents, petty betrayals, interrupted conversations, missed meanings, unanswered voicemail, stolen data, and pornographic files. Amid all the noise and static of the late twentieth century made manifest in weapons and anti-weapons, human beings have set in motion a malign and inhuman reality, which now is beyond their control. More than a critique of corrupt science and a permanent wartime economy, Radiance is a novel of lost ideals, broken aspirations, and human costs. In this vivid satire, relationships are just a question of who’s using whom. Failure is just another word for opportunity. “Spin” is a property not of atomic particles but of the news cycle. Nature is a blur beyond the windshield, where lives are spent on the road, on the phone, on the make, in fierce competition for financial, political, and intellectual resources. It is a world which language is used to evade, manipulate, and expedite. It is a world where everyone’s story is always open to revision and language is used for justifying everything from defense programs to divorce. Years ago, I ran into a book review titled “‘Its awful and enticing radiance’: The Beauty and Terror of Carter Scholz’s Radiance” by L. Timmel Duchamp; about a 2001 novel I had never heard of by an author I had never heard of, but it sounded interesting and I read the review until towards the end, it quote a key passage in Radiance: A murmur of rain had started again. He lay there in the abyss of his thoughts as her breathing beside him steadied and deepened. Almost a voice stirred in him. It starts before Hanford, it almost said. It starts with Röntgen, with the piece of barium glowing in the path of invisible rays, striking out the fire that God had put there. It starts with his wife’s hand on the photographic plate, its transparence there, the ashen bones visible within the milky flesh. Who could imagine that this radiance at the heart of matter could be malign? That with its light came fire? (Yet from the first the ashen bones were there to see within the flesh.) It starts with Becquerel carrying the radium in his pocket that burned his skin, and darkened the unexposed film. It starts with Marie Curie poisoning herself in that pale uncanny glow. With Rutherford guessing at this new alchemy, guessing that matter, giving up its glow, transformed itself one element into another. With the miners at Joachimsthal, deep under the Erzgebirge, inhaling the dust of uranium and dying of “mountain sickness”. With women who by the thousands in watch factories tipped their brushes with that glow, touched it to their tongues before painting the dial face, women who only much later, when the watches’ glow had faded, sickened and died from that radiance taken into their bones. It begins with Ernest Lawrence rushing across the Berkeley campus, the idea of a proton accelerator uncontainable in his mind, calling out, I’m going to be famous! With Oppenheimer at Jornada del Muerte that morning of Trinity. With the scientists who had prised open the gates to that blazing realm past heaven or hell. What were they now at the Lab in all their thousands, but the colonial bureaucrats of that realm, the followers and functionaries, the clerks and commissars? Mere gatekeepers of that power. Or in its keeping. It goes of its own momentum beyond Hanford, to Trinity, to Hiroshima, to the prisoners, the cancer patients, the retarded children, the pregnant women injected or fed this goblin matter to see would it bring health or sickness, the soldiers huddled in trenches against the flash, bones visible in their arms through closed eyes, staring up at the roiling cloudrise, the sheepherders, the farms, the homes, the gardens downwind. And in his sleep the voice long stilled spoke once more. It starts with Sforza; in case of need I will make bombards, mortars, and firethrowing engines of beautiful and practical design. It starts with Archimedes focusing the sun’s rays upon the fleet at Syracuse, it starts with the first rock hurled by the first grasping hand. It starts where we start. It is mind, it is hunger, it is greed, it is defense, it is mischief, it is the devil, it is the god; it is life. The force of the incantation struck me and a few years later, a copy finally appeared in my local library system. I requested it and devoured it in one or two sittings; Scholz’s favored punctuation-less style, using hyphens for voice transitions, annoyed me (but did not challenge me - I’d already read Stand On Zanzibar & Dos Passos’s U.S.A.). The swirl of references drenched the work in reality - Scholz seems to know everything about everything, from philosophy of science to the L5 Society to Wagner’s Parsifal, but the themes were grand and ones ‘modern literature’ so often fails to address and cedes to science fiction: the role of science in society, the tension between future gains and present losses, what is corruption, whether we live up to our own standards, the worth of truth… You could only call it a satire if you didn’t realize how closely it all tracks to real events: it is a roman à clef of the Star Wars program, down to the nuclear tests which intrude onto 5 pages in the final section. (Scholz seems to have drawn heavily on Gregory Benford’s autobiographical essay “Old Legends”, included in the anthology the “Radiance” novella was first published in.) The novel begins in media res, depicting a failed exorcism of the government labs, quickly turning to its protagonist, a good-natured but despairing and baffled Quine’s attempts to understand his predicament: in charge of designing a nuclear weapon where the data simply disagrees with the theory which is supposed to be right. The story unravels into one of deception and funding pressure, and Quine triumphs, unseating the culprit in it all, and realizing he doesn’t belong at the labs - “I belong inside!” he says, even as he is forced out in the turmoil of anti-nuclear protesters. A hallmark of Radiance is the Gibsonian sense of alien entities and organisms clashing for life, at a level above individuals: the Labs has generated its own culture, with its own imperatives and loyalties and goals, fed by government money, but in this respect, we can say little better of the continual antagonist of the labs, the protesters, as it is its own alien entity, seeking funding for its protests (funding, Réti reminds us, comes from the enemy), subverting Lab members for information, pressuring characters like Lynn to serve it. And it doesn’t end there: the Pentagon lurks in the background, represented by Reese, quietly pushing along research into ever better nuclear weapons, and hinted at twice are foreign governments like North Korea, and beyond that? Here I borrow a term from Kevin Kelly and refer to the Technium: science and technology regarded as its own entity with its own drives and selection effects, including the proliferation of all forms of technology. Section two turns to the unseated Highet: his ouster, and the epilogue of his story as he looks over the ruins of his life and seeks out a final resting place in a think-tank. The Biblical and Wagnerian overtones are strong in this section. Thinking of Parsifal‘s Grail quest, it’s hard not to remember that only one knight finds the Holy Grail in the end: the others all go astray or have sinned in various ways. Section three completes the work. Just like Dune Messiah thoroughly subverted and undermined the simplistic narratives presented for the reader to swallow in Dune, part three shows the reader how Quine in his own turn is fully subverted by the environment, his sense of duty, and yes, his own belief in the desirability of progress. (“He goes right to the point and carries the reader / Into the midst of things, as if known already; / And if there’s material that he despairs of presenting / So as to shine for us, he leaves it out; / And he makes his whole poem one. What’s true, what’s invented, / Beginning, middle, and end, all fit together.”) The imagery and parallelism at times is not even subtle: for both Quine and Highet, Scholz arranges for them to at some point limp (just like Edward Teller) and have inflamed reddish faces - the implication could hardly be clearer if one of the characters had been named ’Faust’ and Lynn Hamlin renamed Margaret Hamlin. And finally, having been ‘corrupted’ (but having succeeded in securing the future of the National Ignition Facility which runs to this day), Quine is dealt the final blow: the revelation of the leak of nuclear test data. The Technium strives toward openness and proliferation. Technology may be amoral but it has imperatives of its own. The book ends in Quine in despair and granted a moment of lucidity: seeing his entire life as a mixture of success and failure, as but a pawn of vast forces beyond his comprehension, beholding the presence of the ghostly Technium, far from exorcised. …he stabbed the radio to silence as the dash blinked JAM and he accelerated into the next lane with the needle climbing past 80 past 90 when the CD player blinked PLAY and a falsetto whined, –gonna be just dirt in the ground –Damn it! Shut up…! banging the dash as his wheels trilled on the raised lane dividers and a horn snapped his head around to the panicked face of another drive too close as he yanked the wheel and the road slid on despite his foot wedged on the brake and the yank of the wheel back against a fishtailing swerve into a chorus of horns and gaping faces traveling sideways past him until the car came up hard against a curb and stopped. He was on the shoulder turned sideways. Through the passenger window he saw traffic rush toward him and pass behind him. Ahead of him, smoke rose from fields of stubble, and a flight of bird, scattered by some disturbance, wheeled, now black, now white, against the empty burning sky. In the heart of that light, lucid and inevitable, all that was scattered cohered. Superbright and all its progeny stood plain before him in conception and in detail and in its component part and its deepest strategies and in its awful and enticing radiance. He saw the design and the making of that device complete, and of further devices without end, and he stood apart from them as if it mattered not at all whether the deviser was himself or whether they came into being sooner or later. Trembling he stared across the burning fields and whispered, –Stop. Stop. But the traffic rushed on. The 3 sections form closed circle: a tight ball of historical forces, corruption, science, despair, progress, failure, and personal tragedies. The reader expecting further satire will not be pleased by this section. They’ve missed the point: this isn’t a comedy, it’s a tragedy. And what would a tragedy be without there being a great gap between what we hoped a character might accomplish and what actually happens? The higher they can fly, the sadder a crash. Coyote, First Angry, enemy of all law, wanderer, desert mind, outlaw, spoiler, loser, clown, glutton, lecher, thief, cheat, pragmatist, survivor, bricoleur, silver-tongued Taliesin, latterday Leonardo, usurper Sforza, adulterer Lancelot, tell, wily one, by any means, of the man with two hearts, of knowledge and desire safely hidden from each other. Did not Paracelsus command us to falsify and dissimulate so that ignorant men might not look upon our mysteries? Did not the noble da Vinci hide the meaning of his thought by the manner of his script? What man has not two masters, two minds, two hearts? Tell of the man so wounded in himself that he tore his second heart from him and cast it out, naming it the world, and swore to wound it as it had wounded him. It’s not as simple as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. It’s not even as simple as ‘corruption’ vs ‘honesty’: look around. Progress is not inevitable. Athens declined. Florence declined. Countries fall. Knowledge can be lost (look at scurvy). Science is not a formalized process, but a spirit of honesty and inquiry, which can be aped and the wordless teaching lost (how can Japanese or Chinese researchers run hundred of experiments, apparently complying with all known standards, every single one of which concludes acupuncture works, when results elsewhere show dramatically lower success rates?). After WWII, many Americans saw the ruins of Germany and Japan, and took to heart a lesson: the darkness waits. Anti-vaxxers to our left, Creationists to our right. And that’s in America, still preeminent in science, still one of the wealthiest countries in the world - based on just that science & technology. Highet is not wrong - just one-sided. (“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”) Throughout the book, we know “the work goes on”. Another of Scholz’s references, this time to alchemy’s magnum opus, the philosopher’s stone, which grants moral purification, eternal life, and the transmutation of base elements into nobler ones. (Transmutation has been realized as radioactive decay, while modern medicine would astound Bacon, and it does not seem absurd that in the next few centuries mankind will cure aging.) The double aspect pops up again, of fraud and greatness: research as practical work but also as spiritual quest. Another double aspect: alchemists were notorious scam artists & mountebanks, tricking others (particularly secular lords and governments) into funding their researches based on tricks with gold - but Isaac Newton was an alchemist, Robert Boyle based modern chemistry in part on the knowledge painfully gleaned by centuries of alchemists, and the formation of modern states was due in part to gunpowder (Chinese alchemists), and Roger Bacon, who I cannot resist supplying an apt quote about: “Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea. Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever. The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc. etc. etc. The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right.” It starts with Bacon… But the traffic rushes on. And the work goes on.


Input: [Title] Worm [Author] Wildbow [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2014/08/13 [Review]

Output: Worm (Table of Contents/official summary/TvTropes/Reddit/post-interview) is addictive superhero SF posing as fantasy; it is long, of consistently high quality, and features a huge amount of imaginative powers with equally imaginative applications & combos (the protagonist usage of bugs, as impressive as it is, is only one of many possible examples, although I particularly like the Regent & Shadow Stalker incident as an example of social-engineering/hacking); the setting excellently rationalizes the standard superheroes vs supervillains setup (which as often observed, makes little sense prima facie). The series opens in the smallest possible setting, the geeky introverted protagonist Taylor being bullied in school, steps logically towards a life of crime as a supervillain while trying to do the right thing (and being manipulated by multiple parties, some prescient) and slowly expands to multiversal scope with an appropriately epic & bittersweet ending. (Reminds me of Watchmen.) Or to borrow from the official summary: An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one, thrusting her into the midst of the local ‘cape’ scene’s politics, unwritten rules, and ambiguous morals. As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons…Readers should be cautioned that Worm is fairly dark as fiction goes, and it gets far darker as the story progresses. Morality isn’t black and white, Taylor and her acquaintances aren’t invincible, the heroes aren’t winning the war between right and wrong, and superpowers haven’t necessarily affected society for the better. Just the opposite on every count, really. Even on a more fundamental level, Taylor’s day to day life is unhappy, with her clinging to the end of her rope from the story’s outset. The denizens of the Wormverse (as readers have termed it) don’t pull punches, and I try to avoid doing so myself, as a writer. There’s graphic language, descriptions of violence and sex does happen (albeit offscreen). I recommend reading single arcs at a time: calling the whole thing ‘Worm’ is a bit of a misnomer, it’d make much more sense to group a few arcs and call them individual novels in the ‘Worm Saga’ or something. Length-wise, it’s upwards of a million words, and according to my arbtt logs (using the rule ‘current window $title =~ [/.* Worm - Iceweasel/] ==> tag Worm’), took me 37 hours & 42 minutes over 5 days to read. The work is not perfect. The opening is perhaps too slow: the first fight with Lung, which hooked me, took a while to happen as it only really starts in ch4. In the middle, I suspect there was perhaps too much material devoted to the Slaughterhouse Nine arc and not enough to later plot arcs like Taylor joining the heroes or dealing with later Endbringers. Further, there’s so many characters that a binge read is a good idea, but during a binge, the fights can blur together and become exhausting, suggesting Worm may spend too much time on that. Some good parts, like characters having reasons to be bad, are taken to an extreme where it seems like every character, no matter how mundane, must have a backstory explaining how their environment/society made them evil (even for characters like Emma where such a cause is unnecessary). But the flaws are relatively small and hopefully will be addressed in the editing process. I look forward to reading Wildbow’s Pact when it finished, and I think I’ll check out some of the fanfics like Cenotaph. I read Worm after it was finished and I continued to see positive reviews of it, such as Eliezer Yudkowsky: …I commend to you…the just-completed story Worm, which is roughly 1.75 million words in 30 volumes. The characters in Worm use their powers so intelligently I didn’t even notice until something like the 10th volume that the alleged geniuses were behaving like actual geniuses and that the flying bricks who would be the primary protagonists and villains of lesser tales were properly playing second fiddle to characters with cognitive, informational, or probability-based powers…Doing this so smoothly that I don’t even notice because my brain considers the resulting world to be ‘normal’ really ought to deserve some kind of epic bonus points….There are stories which are better than Worm, and stories which were written faster than Worm, but I don’t know of any epic which was ever written faster and better than Worm. Other reviews include Joshua Blaine: …a self consistent and expansive Super-hero universe, and with a ton of unique and powerful abilities, I’ve really been enjoying it. The story is Worm, and It’s easily one of my favorite web stories in awhile, and very dark (especially as the story progresses further). iDante: I’ve been reading this awesome web serial called Worm. Highly recommend if you want some action and suspense. There’s a bit of rationality business in there as well, but it’s spaced out and the story is long. I see it’s been recommended previously on here as well. Vaniver: Caveat: Worm is really dark. The characters are clever, the protagonist makes the most out of a superpower that seems mediocre at first glance, and there are enough twists and turns that I would look at the clock and realize that I’d been reading for six hours. (Worm is really long, so if you’re the sort of person who has to keep reading fiction be warned that it will eat a week or two.) But, despite those positives, terrible things happen to everyone always. I found it similar to Game of Thrones in that it was engaging but depressing, and unlike GoT where new characters are introduced, dance about, and then die, in Worm there’s a clear protagonist who, as far as I can tell, always wins eventually. I also found the superhero fight sequences less engaging as time went on - but they can be skimmed with little loss. and Ritalin: Indeed. Although, frankly, what I’ve seen of Worm so far seems to designate it as very similar to my idea of Hell; every accomplishment is either made moot or cost something irreplaceable and possibly of superior value, every victory is short-lived, every mistake is paid for dearly. Every situation is desperate, every problem urgent. By the time a conflict reaches its resolution, another is at its peak, and two more are right around the corner. Perhaps it’s even worse; hardship, instead of building character, corrupts it. For the characters, it must be like a nightmare they can’t wake up from.


Input: [Title] Urne Burial [Author] Thomas Browne [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2005 [Read] 2012/07/14 [Review]

Output: I first heard of Browne in Borges - as so often - in the ending of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” where the narrator is attempting to translate it into Spanish. Borges is always interested in translation (see for example his fantastic essay on translating the 1001 Nights) and I made a note to look up this work which presented such challenges for rendering into Spanish. (The actual edition I used was James Eason’s online edition.) Urn Burial is hugely archaic, but also amazing. I am not sure where I have last seen any literary pyrotechnics to match Browne in English. David Foster Wallace sometimes approaches him, but beyond that I draw blanks. The book defies any simple summary as many passages are cryptic tangles and Browne says many things. So I will not try, and simply present some passages that struck me: “He that lay in a golden Urne eminently above the Earth, was not likely to finde the quiet of these bones. Many of these Urnes were broke by a vulgar discoverer in hope of inclosed treasure. The ashes of Marcellus were lost above ground, upon the like account. Where profit hath prompted, no age hath wanted such miners. For which the most barbarous Expilators found the most civill Rhetorick. Gold once out of the earth is no more due unto it; What was unreasonably committed to the ground is reasonably resumed from it: Let Monuments and rich Fabricks, not Riches adorn mens ashes. The commerce of the living is not to be transferred unto the dead: It is not injustice to take that which none complains to lose, and no man is wronged where no man is possessor.” “If the nearnesse of our last necessity, brought a nearer conformity unto it, there were a happinesse in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying; When Avarice makes us the sport of death; When even David grew politickly cruell; and Solomon could hardly be said to be the wisest of men. But many are too early old, and before the date of age. Adversity stretcheth our dayes, misery makes Alcmenas nights, and time hath no wings unto it. But the most tedious being is that which can unwish it self, content to be nothing, or never to have been, which was beyond the male-content of Job, who cursed not the day of his life, but his Nativity; Content to have so farre been, as to have a title to future being; Although he had lived here but in an hidden state of life, and as it were an abortion.” “Nature hath furnished one part of the Earth, and man another. The treasures of time lie high, in Urnes, Coynes, and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables. Time hath endlesse rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth it self a discovery. That great Antiquity America lay buried for a thousand years; and a large part of the earth is still in the Urne unto us.” “Some bones make best Skeletons, some bodies quick and speediest ashes: Who would expect a quick flame from Hydropicall Heraclitus? The poysoned Souldier when his Belly brake, put out two pyres in Plutarch. But in the plague of Athens, one private pyre served two or three Intruders; and the Saracens burnt in large heaps, by the King of Castile, shewed how little Fuell sufficeth. Though the Funerall pyre of Patroclus took up an hundred foot, a peece of an old boat burnt Pompey; And if the burthen of Isaac were sufficient for an holocaust, a man may carry his owne pyre.” “The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.” “To be content that times to come should only know there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in Cardan: disparaging his horoscopal inclination and judgement of himself, who cares to subsist like Hippocrates Patients, or Achilles horses in Homer, under naked nominations, without deserts and noble acts, which are the balsame of our memories, the Entelecchia and soul of our subsistences. To be namelesse in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives more happily without a name, then Herodias with one. And who had not rather have been the good theef, then Pilate? But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it; Time hath spared the Epitaph of Adrians horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equall durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamenon, [without the favour of the everlasting Register:] Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, then any that stand remembred in the known account of time? without the favour of the everlasting Register the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselahs long life had been his only Chronicle.” “What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entred the famous Nations of the dead, and slept with Princes and Counsellours, might admit a wide resolution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above Antiquarism. Not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the Provinciall Guardians, or tutellary Observators. Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their Reliques, they had not so grosly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a fruitlesse continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as Emblemes of mortall vanities; Antidotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their Names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempts of their vain-glories, who acting early, and before the probable Meridian of time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their designes, whereby the ancient Heroes have already out-lasted their Monuments, and Mechanicall preservations. But in this latter Scene of time we cannot expect such Mummies unto our memories, when ambition may fear the Prophecy of Elias, and Charles the fifth can never hope to live within two Methusela’s of Hector.”


Input: [Title] The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War [Author] Graham Robb [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2007 [Read] 2013/10/24 [Review]

Output: Discovery of France charts the transition of the region covered by modern France into the unified cultural/political/geographic entity of today. This is incredibly interesting because from our perspective, we have forgotten (if we ever knew) what went into the process of taking the thousands of villages and regions differing in all sorts of ways, and crushing them into the relatively homogeneous high-tech culture of today - unifying languages, political systems, forms of transportation, religion, and so on. A theme throughout is Scott’s legibility (Seeing Like A State); Robb gives all sorts of examples demonstrating local knowledge, specialized information, and resistance to outsiders. Often people dramatically underestimate this. It’s easy to assume that the vast nation-states like China or America just sort of came into existence naturally, but this overlooks the amount of effort Chinese/American governments/organizations have put into unification, in aspects ranging from stamping out as many languages and other cultures as possible to simplifying existing languages (particularly striking in China) to enforcing standardized units & measures (encouraging cash crops is a good way) to standardized national educational curriculum inculcating patriotism and common beliefs. You may not think that they are ‘unified’, but they are far more unified than they used to be - contrast the original 13 American colonies to how large America is now, or look at historical maps of Han China with the current boundaries, and think about all the cultural, linguistic, political, and economic differences that used to exist, and how many of, say, the languages are now extinct. (To say nothing of the peoples… Tibet and the American Indians come to mind as examples unique only for the documentation and notice taken of their particular instance.) The process of homogenization and simplification happens in many large countries, for easily-understood reasons such as the convenience of the state. Besides Robb & Scott, some views of this process can be found in Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order for China. (You could also get a bit of the American process out of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States by looking at various incidents in the right way, but that’s too polemical & focused on other topics for me to really recommend.) This may sound like a very grand theme, but Robb is able to give so many fascinating examples that one forgets the underlying demonstration and just basks in the knowledge of how the past is a very foreign country. (As I mention in my review of The Dark Enlightenment, a sense of distance and alienation is one of the things I prize most in historical works - while there is continuity, continuity is easy to find and it is beyond easy to portray the past as proceeding Whiggishly and comprehensibly into the present, obscuring all the ways in which we are profoundly alien from the past.) Where do I start… The extraordinary fact that until the 20th century, French was only a plurality language in France? The stiltwalking shepherds? The horrifying bits about drunken dying babies being carted to Paris by the ‘angel-makers’? The packs of smuggler dogs who smuggled goods in and out of France for their human masters? (Or the dog-powered factories?) The forgotten persecution of the cagot caste? The Parisian who sold maggots to fisherman, which he raised in his closet on a pile of cat & dog roadkill collected from the streets? The wars between rival villages? The commuting peasants who thought nothing of a 50 mile walk? The strange twists of fate that lead regions to specialize in particular wares? The villages of cretins or families who regard a cretinous child as a gift from god? The mapping of the hidden communication networks that spread rumor at the speed of a horse? The corvée system of road-building, so inefficient at points that transporting the materials to build 1 more meter of a road could destroy more than 1 meter of that same road? All of this and much more is to be found in Robb’s dizzying tour of France, past and present, a tour I found as entertaining as educational. I made per-chapter excerpts of parts I liked: prologue, ch1 ch2 ch3 ch4 ch5 ch6 ch7 ch8 Interlude ch9-10 ch11-12 ch13 ch14 ch15 ch16 ch17 & epilogue


Input: [Title] Stories of Your Life and Others [Author] Ted Chiang [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2012/12/12 [Review]

Output: What’s there to say about Chiang that all the others don’t say? He is the closest thing to a modern Jorge Luis Borges in melding high concepts with literature to create something better than either; in some respects, I’d rank his best short stories as better than Gene Wolfe’s. His writing is deceptively excellent: I would call him a writer’s writer, because the flat evenness of his prose may strike a reader as boring unless they have tried to write as clearly themselves and failed abysmally, at which point they begin to appreciate Chiang’s infallible choice of words and lucid prose which sinks into the mind without friction. Stories of Your Life and Others is much superior to his novella Life Cycle of Software Objects, and contains pretty much all of his greatest short stories which I have read, except for his excellent “Exhalation”. I read most of them online, so when I had the chance to read a hardcopy of the full collection, I seized it. 1. “The Tower of Babylon”; amusing, and in describing the lives of the people living on the tower, moving in some respects. The final ending feels like an appropriate conclusion. If one had to criticize it, it would be that the Tower itself is completely unrealistic even in the Biblical cosmology of the story: as I said, the best Chiang stories unite literature and good ideas. I would rank this #5 of the 8 stories. 2. “Division by Zero”; not terribly impressive - over-wrought, and I feel I have read this story before and better. #7. 3. “Understand”; a classic in the niche genre of superintelligence, and IMO better than Vinge’s “Bookworm, Run!” and at least as good as Flowers for Algernon. Chiang, like every other author, confronts the limits of his writing ability in trying to write convincingly of a superintelligence who is by definition vastly smarter than he is (the same challenge laid down by Campbell to Vinge: “you can’t write this story, and neither can anyone else”), and so the start of the story is much stronger than the later passages. But the whole is still memorable. #4. 4. “Story of Your Life”; I had actually read this one before, and dismissed it as sentimental tripe with some weak physics or linguistic layering that I didn’t really understand. Fortunately, just a few weeks ago I happened to read some material on the Lagrangian interpretations of physics and combined with knowing in advance the ending, I was able to appreciate the story much better this time. I would rank this #3 of the 8 stories. #3. 5. “The Evolution of Human Science”; short, dubious. Not Chiang’s best work, on either dimension. #8. 6. “Seventy-Two Letters”; simply fantastic. The setting is wonderful, the problem great, the ideas even better, and the solution & meaning better still. #2. 7. “Hell Is the Absence of God”; as an atheist who keeps coming back to the Book of Job, this story came as a gut punch. The writing is Chiang at his most Chiang-y, the world interesting and provocative, and the ending simply unspeakable. But don’t take my word for it, ‘decide for yourself’, as the fallen angels say. #1. 8. “Liking What You See: A Documentary”; interesting ideas, but something about the dialogues and characters seem off. It just jars me. #6.


Input: [Title] The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy [Author] Adam Tooze [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2007 [Read] 2014/05/07 [Review]

Output: A fascinating account of the economic transformation of Germany under the Nazis, the repression & distortion of the German economy, the strategic confusion & ignorance of their best options revealed by shifting armament priorities (such as the underemphasis on tanks & overemphasis on surface ships), the difficulties imposed by exchange rates, how often Germany teetered on the brink of disaster, and how Hitler’s constant focus on the danger of the American juggernaut guided his grand strategy; Nazi Germany’s militarization based on debt induced competing arms races / instability an the country quickly (and only temporarily) became the deadliest shark in the European waters, which had to desperately keep swimming forward & taking insane gambles if it was not to choke to death on its own accumulated wastes & bad decisions, in the hopes that it could eat all its enemies before they woke up & ate it, and while the shark got a reprieve in Austria and then the freak victory in France, it eventually hit a wall in Russia and died after thrashing around for a while. Tooze’s account of WWII explains many otherwise baffling points for me, such as the focus on futuristic weapons or why Nazi Germany sought an alliance with Japan even at the cost of declaring war on the USA & striking FDR’s shackles, why it invaded the USSR with less than an ultimate effort, and the economic consequences of its conquests (predictable to anyone who’s read Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies). Particularly surprising is Tooze’s description of how impoverished Germany was in comparison to rival countries (despite the gleaming technology and Blitzkrieg we associate with Nazi Germany, and the industrial conglomerates like IG Farben with Imperial Germany, most of Germany was still rural & unproductive, and the country abjectly dependent on imports to maintain its agriculture; Tooze includes a very telling anecdote: Ford Motors, when considering a plant in Germany, found that to give its blue-collar American workers their accustomed lifestyle would require expenses 4x that of normal blue-collar German workers; and horses will feature repeatedly throughout). Tooze also does a good job delineating how the Holocaust both exacerbated and helped with the severe labor & resource problems Nazi Germany began facing, and covers how it was a logical outcome of earlier policies: emigration failed because the German balance of payments did not allow for the Jews to leave with anything like their actual wealth, and unsurprisingly many Jews were not so fearful as to emigrate penniless, and starvation in camps was not far from the earlier Wehrmacht plan to make the conquest of the Ukraine pay by simply starving to death 30 million Slavs to free up food harvests. Indeed, given all the constraints and necessary imports in the 1930s and 1940s, one really has to wonder how contemporary Germany can be so wealthy and whether it really is due to labor reforms or thanks to the Euro… One flaw is that Tooze freely goes from macro to micro, from the overall economy to very small subindustries or benchmarks, and it’s easy to get lost. And while the book covers the international finance in enough detail to understand it (and things like why Schacht was the ‘dark wizard of international finance’), I don’t think he does as good a job as Lords of Finance, which should probably be read before Wages of Destruction so one understands the international gold standard, and the French and British actions in the inter-war period.


Input: [Title] Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World [Author] Liaquat Ahamed [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2009 [Read] 2012/09/16 [Review]

Output: I enjoyed this tremendously for revealing a new world to me where I thought I already knew the lay of the land. Throughout were revelations to me - just how ruinous WWI was, how reparations kept echoing and damaging Germany, how exactly the hyperinflation started (it was only partly the Versailles payments but more the social programs?), how America aggravated the issue (the Coolidge quote and the American tourists certainly never appeared in my history textbooks…), how late the stock bubble was and the details of the endless succession of crises that rocked Europe. It’s also interesting to understand why Keynes had such a grip on economics until recently: he predicted repeatedly what would happen, and it’s hard not to sympathize a great deal with him. As far as criticism goes, I can agree with some of the other reviewers: Ahamed sometimes goes overboard with the narration, and skimps on the details one might want. He provides no convenient graphical network of how factors affect each other in a gold economy, so one is left constantly being surprised by connections, and the rare graph is not very helpful - for example, he provides a time graph of the big economies’ rises and falls in growths, and remarks that their recoveries in the Great Depression… and nowhere on the graph marks for each country the year in which they left gold! Well, that graph wasn’t very informative or helpful - Tufte would not be pleased. Applying it to modern times is a little harder, although the ironies are many (particularly the Germans being hardasses on debt now, when they seemed to understand not all debts could be paid after WWI… -_-). One thing that struck me was how the nationalist demonstrations & protests in Germany reminded me of what I hear in China these days - which has a somewhat similar per capita GDP as those nations and is in a similar period of industrial growth, and indeed, is the young turk of Germany to the old tired island-nation England of Japan, with South Korea as a nervous smaller neighbor (France?). And China is quite aggressive lately. Before WWI, it was rightly pointed out that such a war between such networked nations as France/Germany/England would lead to ruin; and right now, one could point out a similar thing with China/SK/Japan/USA. But nevertheless, before WWI, they thought they could have a short victorious war against an encircling enemy; does China think it can have a short victorious war against their encircling enemy, the USA-coordinate nations? I don’t think it does, but I do think people underestimate the risk of war in East Asia. (Of course it could never happen; just like WWI could never happen.)


Input: [Title] The Notenki Memoirs: Studio Gainax and the Men Who Created Evangelion [Author] Yasuhiro Takeda [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2005 [Read] 2009/01/01 [Review]

Output: For people interested in the history of the anime industry, Takeda fills in many gaps related to Gainax - it’s hard to think of any source which covers nearly so well DAICON III, DAICON IV, General Products, or throws in so many tidbits about surrounding people & Japanese SF fandom. It is an invaluable resource for any researcher, and I felt compelled to create an annotated e-book edition in order to elucidate various points and be able to link its claims with versions of stories by other people (for example, Okada’s extensive Animerica interview) Those reading it solely for Evangelion material will probably be relatively disappointed: Takeda clearly finds NGE not very interesting, may have bad associations due to being targeted in the tax raids, and he was writing this in 2000 or so - too close to the events and still working at Gainax to really give a tell-all, and it’s not a terribly long or dense book in the first place. Nevertheless, NGE fans will still find many revelations here, like the origin of NGE production in the failure of the Aoki Uru film project (an origin simply not present in any Western sources before Notenki Memoirs was translated). In general, Takeda is not interested in a ‘tell-all’; perhaps it’s due to fear, perhaps too many people involved are still alive and kicking, but he only covers the embarrassing things which are too well-known to omit, like the aforementioned tax raid or Okada’s ouster from Gainax. I read it several times, and that was how I wound up transcribing my copy into a webpage which I could annotate with cross-references and interviews with other figures like Okada or Anno - I realized I could keep rereading it, or just do the job right the first time. It’s been a valuable resource for me ever since.


Input: [Title] The Remains of the Day [Author] Kazuo Ishiguro [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2005 [Read] 2012/07/21 [Review]

Output: Of Ishiguro’s novels, this is the most elegant, most restrained, and most English. The prose is so smooth that like Gene Wolfe’s, it becomes invisible, and you pass through it to the slow silent sorrow of the protagonist. Ishiguro makes the tragedy clear enough, shows us the heart of the story, but without ever being gauche. In July 2012, I re-read it and for good measure, I watched the movie too. (The movie, IMO, was pretty good with excellent casting, if unfortunately often blunter than the novel and the ending especially so.) What struck me this time through was the ending of the novel: the butler has come to realize that his life has been suboptimal and less joyful than it could have been because he shunned Miss Kenton and denied his emotions out of a misguided sense of professionalism. But instead of the typical Hollywood ending where he woos Miss Kenton or quits his job etc, he realizes that it really is too late: his and Miss Kenton’s day is almost over, and the important thing to do is make the most of ‘the remains of the day’, which for him is returning to his butlering job but being less rigid and more human. It is, in other words, a beautiful tale of not honoring sunk costs or pursuing lost opportunities.


Input: [Title] The Book of Lord Shang. a Classic of the Chinese School of Law. [Author] Shang Yang [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2008/01/01 [Review]

Output: The Book of Lord Shang was very hard for me to read: there is something sublime about it, in the old sense of “terrifying” - the policies and reasoning laid out are a systematic crushing of anything that might oppose the State and its goals. It feels inhuman, mechanical, and all the more so when you know that these sort of policies were how the Qin crushed all their opposition - including those states espousing the other Hundred Schools of Thought like Mohism & Confucianism - and that the 20th century affords further examples of how these policies proved themselves in practice (unlike the former Schools). It’s no wonder that there are so many negative reviews on the other copies here at Goodreads: you might as well ask your normal liberal Western to drink rat poison as read The Book of Lord Shang & try to fairly evaluate it. Even if they’ve read their share of Chinese classics & philosophy, they wouldn’t want to understand it, just like modern readers don’t want to understand the Unabomber’s philosophy. (The version I read was an ebook version of Duyvlord.)


Input: [Title] The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution [Author] Francis Fukuyama [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2012/01/01 [Review]

Output: It is, overall, an excellent book and one of the better ones on grand history I’ve read†… but Fukuyama does not have a very transparent prose style, and makes no concessions to those who don’t have a good grasp on global history and especially those who don’t know their Chinese history well (eg. if you can’t put the Qing, Han, Qin, and Shang dynasty in order, you aren’t going to enjoy at all the large amounts of material he rightfully devotes to Chinese politics). And it’s seriously big, no kidding. This is no fluffy Guns, Germs, and Steel walk through the park! † for example, I found some sections very useful for structuring my thinking on the evolution of ethics and regard for ancestors.


Input: [Title] The Histories [Author] Herodotus [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2003 [Review]

Output: Decided to finally read Herodotus after I read Gene Wolfe’s historical fantasy novel Solder of Arete which draws heavily on him, and then when I had to track down a quote on LessWrong.com to the exact Herodotus passage. Overall, far more interesting than I had expected. Surprisingly funny or interesting anecdotes. There is a superfusion of gods and oracles, which was curious - the oracles truly were treacherous! The Persian kings come off as remarkably capricious and destructive, even the good ones. And Herodotus has a strange capacity to skeptically reason well & sensibly and then be completely superstitious in the next passage. Having read about these ancient events many times, I found half the value was just seeing a thorough account from a single Greek’s perspective.


Input: [Title] The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined [Author] Steven Pinker [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Review]

Output: This was really really good, as in, maybe the best book I’ve read that year. Time and again, I was shocked to find subjects treated of keen interest to me, or which read like Pinker had taken some of my essays but done them way better (on terrorism, on the expanding circle, etc.); even so, I was surprised to learn new things (resource problems don’t correlate well with violence?). I initially thought I might excerpt some parts of it for an essay or article, but as the quotes kept piling up, I realized that it was hopeless. Reading reviews or discussions of it is not enough; Pinker just covers too much and rebuts too many possible criticisms. It’s very long, as a result, but absorbing.


Input: [Title] The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet [Author] David Mitchell [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Review]

Output: Finally got around to reading it. It was surprisingly unliterary and unpostmodern for Mitchell, but in exchange, he nailed the historical details and gave us an adventure which subverted many of the usual tropes - the raid on the nunnery was just a trap, the hero doesn’t get the girl, his chief heroism was standing there to be shot at, and the man who takes down the big baddie is someone we thought to be entirely in the baddie’s pocket. The supernatural aspects are implied to be genuine, but it’s never resolved, which I am grateful for. It would ruin the feel.


Input: [Title] Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman [Author] James Gleick [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 1993 [Read] 2014/04/08 [Review]

Output: A solid biography, though I don’t have anything in particular to say about it. It throws in all the classic anecdotes and quotes you expect (which are more than worth their weight in gold - certainly, the price of admission) doesn’t try to whitewash Feynman despite the temptation to hero-worship, and includes some critical examination, does at least try to explain all the physics which earned Feynman his prestige, etc. It’s a well-regarded widely-read biography on an excellent subject which I have nothing to say against.


Input: [Title] The Collapse of Complex Societies [Author] Joseph A. Tainter [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 1990 [Review]

Output: Very good: much better than Jared Diamond’s Collapse, and much more convincing than Spengler or Toynbee. It was also deeply disturbing - the Ik amazed me in chapter 1, and the statistics in chapter 4 were extremely dismal and tie in far too well to Cowen’s The Great Stagnation and Murray’s Human Accomplishment. There are a great many datapoints suggesting that diminishing marginal returns to modern tech/science began sometime in the late 1800s/early 1900s…


Input: [Title] Star Maker [Author] Olaf Stapledon [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 1999 [Review]

Output: Star Maker is one of the very few SF books that I’d place up there with Blindsight and a few others in depicting truly alien aliens; and he doesn’t do it once but repeatedly throughout the book. It’s really impressive how Stapledon just casually scatters around handfuls of jewels that lesser authors might belabor singly throughout an entire book.


Input: [Title] Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea [Author] Barbara Demick [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2009 [Review]

Output: Highly recommended. Probably the second best book I’ve read about North Korea, after B.R. Myer’s The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.