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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3146 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 31, 2023

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Monte Cristo, which has grabbed me this time, perhaps because I'm reading it in smaller portions as if it were serialized.

Some scattered themes are forming but I get the feeling that I've missed a lot already. It's implied that Dantes' basic problem was that he acted as if he was already in heaven. In material life it was deemed improper to speak as if one was already married before the ceremony, but Dantes treated life as if the marriage between Christ and the innocent was already done. It's setting him up for the role of the serpent in the phrase "as wise as serpents, as harmless as doves."

Also, what have you read for the year that interested you? I have to say that the most impactful thing I've read all year is Danganronpa 2.

Happy new year, everyone.

I have to say that the most impactful thing I've read all year is Danganronpa 2.

Was it the only game in the series you played all year, or have you experienced the other titles as well?

I played 1 a few years ago. It was smart, consistent and focused, if too easy, and Byakuya was unforgettable. Definitely the better of the first two games by all objective measures.

However 2 was an insane rollercoaster of sublime highs and painful lows, and it managed to make me genuinely upset and exhausted at their suffering. It's main problems were that many things were too abrupt, the surviving cast wasn't nearly as compelling as in 1, and the ending needed much more fleshing out. But while it was all over the place, it was also a lot more articulate than 1, and Nagito...I'll have to play it again sometime. He was profound in a lot of ways.

3 looks a lot more gritty than usual, may not finish it for a while.

Still on Monte Cristo, which has grabbed me this time, perhaps because I'm reading it in smaller portions as if it were serialized.

If you're interested, this appears to list the serialization dates?

I've been reading Hanania's The Origins of Woke (it's good, and a little horrifying), started Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and have been skimming a little of Johann (not Martin) Heidegger's Tumulus Concilii Tridentini.

Just finished The Glory of The Empire. Very interesting book - it's an entirely fabricated alternate history of a Rome-like empire, set in our history (e.g. it's full of citations to people like Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, TS Eliot, etc. writing about the Empire). It's got a real feeling of plausibility, like you're reading the kind of mythicized histories people used to actually write about the cultures, loves, battles, and deaths of great men and cities. It gets more into spirituality and religion as the book goes on, but never fully woo. Would recommend to fellow history autists.

That sounds rad. I've requested it from my local library.

Trust by Hernan Diaz

I finished Dreamland, I found it quite good though I wish it would have gone into more detail on the pharmaceutical companies and their internal machinations. I suppose a lot of that didn’t come out until a few years after the book was published.

Started Beloved. It’s not as slow as I originally thought and the writing is quite beautiful. Morrison crafts similes and analogies that are so striking and descriptive, it creates wonderful imagery in the minds eye. Looking forward to finishing it.

Dune in preparation for the 2nd part of the film release.

I read Dune right after Stranger in a Strange Land, and found the shared religious reverence for water, outsider upbringing, and quasi-religious warfare to be an interesting point of comparison for two novels that I've never heard described as similar.

I read the first Dune book around a year ago (after watching the movie) and thought it was excellent. Looking forward to the second movie. Still undecided on whether to carry on reading any more of the books. I've heard that the books work well as either just the first one, or all of them. Reading the first two books wouldn't be satisfying.

Personally, I would read Dune Messiah (which imo isn't that good, but you have to read it if you want to keep going) and Children of Dune (which is excellent), then decide if you want to keep going. After those books there's a very long time skip, so that's the most natural stopping point.

That said, you could certainly stop at any point in the first four and it would work fine. Herbert isn't a writer who leaves a lot hanging unresolved from book to book, so it's not like it would be unsatisfying to stop even on the second book.

Will start on book two now and see if I can bear with it to reach book three (and book four which was praised by chooky). :)

Dune 1 is considered a true SF classic. If you liked 1, Book 2 is okay, tbough I'm not sure it adds a great deal that isn't implied by Book 1. Book 3 is not great and worth reading mostly as setup for Book 4 (God Emperor), which is a wild book that is worth getting to. Book 5 is pretty skippable and comes after a huge timeskip, so it is completely unnecessary to hitting the genre peaks of 1 and 4.

I thought Dune was grossly overrated. Somewhere between boring, nonsensical, and up its own ass.

It's not even that thing where a book that established foundational tropes that are explored by subsequent works seems staid and boring in comparison, I can name plenty of older books that still hold up with the best available today, and feel just as fresh as when they were written, such as anything by Mark Twain.

And don't get me started on the fucking Fremen, at least ACOUP has me covered:

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/

On the other hand, the movies? At least they're a spectacle.

I've read some non-Dune Herbert (like the human ants book and the evil Indian guy on a water planet trilogy), and they were even worse. Herbert was just not a very good writer that had a momentary stroke of worldbuilding genius.

I really don't understand the praise for Dune's worldbuilding. The Fremen are ridiculous/retarded:

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/

And as for the rest of it, Warhammer 40k rips it off and does it all better. I will not apologize for the sheer spice in that take.

It's, for the lack of a better word, romantic worldbuilding. Fremen might be ridiculous, but they follow in the footsteps of many noble savages created before them.

I can see that, but I'm sure it won't surprise you in the least that I have a jaundiced opinion of the "noble savage" trope as a whole, in whatever incarnation I encounter it.

Nobody cares (well, apparently except you) if the Fremen are realistic. They're cool. And for the rest, even if 40k does it more to your liking, the fact remains that Dune did it first and deserves credit for that.

Nobody cares (well, apparently except you) if the Fremen are realistic

Sorry dawg, Brett Devereaux apparently does, and I've seen this particular piece of work crop up both on the Motte, as a definitive rebuttal to the "Weak times, weak men" hypothesis that so many are fond of, and in the wild elsewhere, that I can be confident there's a significant number of people who find the Fremen-wank grating.

And they're far from the worst elements in the novel, credit for being first only goes so far. So sure, I "give credit" to Dune, if you so desire, which doesn't negate my stance that I think it's a mediocre book with questionable worldbuilding, queer plotting, 1D characters, and enough fetish material to make an accurate adaptation to the big screen something you should book your popcorn for well in advance.

Hey, we did have a "Good times, weak men" moment just recently in Afghanistan. It turns out that wealth and industry (at least in our hands) can't beat small arms and religious fervor so intense they were prepared to blow themselves up just to defeat us. Perhaps things would've been different if the PLA had gone in and shown the world what real human rights abuses look like, who knows.

There's some truth in "Good times, weak men". Take Rome. Their tenacity was absolutely legendary until it wasn't. They lost to Hannibal at Trebia, Lake Trasimene and then Cannae - 20% of male citizens dead in under two years. Rome totally rejected the possibility of defeat and fought on to ultimate victory! Later on they're surrendering and paying tribute to the Goths, the Huns, everyone and their dog. There's no Cannae spirit of victory at any costs, a single defeat is enough for them to make concessions.

That's not a particularly convincing statement, one of the benefits of "good times, hard men" is how vaguely it can be interpreted. The Japanese and Germans during WW2 suffered far harder times than the US did, what with their soldiers getting ships full of ice cream while the former were eating their shoes. The Soviets suffered plenty of "hard times", and even they gave up on fighting a mountain insurgency. The Chechens prided themselves on being "hard men" and even they got their cheeks clapped later when the Russians swallowed losses.

It is a largely useless and outright misleading frame to view the world in, even if there are examples of moral "weakness" (or at least a lack of appetite for brutality) causing defeat. And that's not even the definition of weak being used in every context, another benefit of how vague the term is in the English language is that it lets people accidentally or intentionally conflate two very separate things, cowardice and military weakness. The US managed to clap ISIS despite the latter being even more rabid than the Taliban.

The Romans famously gave up on Germania after disastrous losses at Teutoburg and well before anyone could plausibly call them weak/decadent.

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I read that link you provided, and I definitely wouldn't say Devereaux cares that the Fremen are unrealistic. He cares that people think it's a realistic premise and is arguing against that, not saying that they are bad because they aren't realistic.

https://acoup.blog/2020/02/21/collections-the-fremen-mirage-interlude-ways-of-the-fremen/

There's an additional interlude which delves further into his opinions on how much Dune it's succumbs to the "Fremen Mirage".

Note that I never claimed that Devereaux considered the Fremen "bad", merely unrealistic, and a propagator of bad tropes into even relatively sophisticated audiences. I'm using his arguments to justify my dislike of them, and my primary rebuttal is to your claim that nobody other than me happens to care about the matter. Like I said, I have seen people bring it up as a criticism of Dune organically, hell I could pull up screenshots of a discussion a few days ago on the ACX discord.

Suffice to say that n>1 people care, and at least I have plenty of reason to find Dune not particularly worthy of its current high regard as a work of classic science fiction.

I mean the counterpoint is that the worldbuilding is something which makes the fremen make sense in context, and otherwise makes you understand in the pages, without needing to be specifically told, that there's 20,000 years of history betwixt here and there, without glaring contradictions.

The Fremen don't make sense even in context. That is the objection that both I and Devereaux happen to have. The blog has shed enough ink on the topic that I don't feel the need to recapitulate any of it again.

While I disagree about Dune (this is a reread), I share your enjoyment of Twain, do you have a favorite of his?

It's a tossup between Connecticut Yankee and Huckleberry Finn, both are S-tier as far as I'm concerned.

"innocents abroad" is a classic, especially entertaining if you yourself have visited any of those places.

I read Dune maybe 6 years ago. You know, I'm always surprised that I didn't see more progressives trying to cancel Dune immediately before or since the film release, for the books clearly stating that Baron Harkonnen is a gay pedophile who wants to have sex with Paul. That seems like the sort of thing that they'd be against, because it's "punching down" or something. Even I think it's a little annoying in the book, since it's like a "puppy kicking" trope, to get you to clearly see Baron Harkonnen as a bad guy.

Baron Harkonnen is a gay pedophile who wants to have sex with Paul.

I remember him being into Feyd-Rautha.

Maybe, but I don't happen to remember that. In the David Lynch movie, he looks at Feyd suggestively, but who the hell knows what's going on in that movie. In the book, Feyd is always trying to kill the Baron so he can take over, so the Baron is annoyed at him consistently. But what I remember is that the Baron keeps thinking of Paul and saying things like "such a handsome young boy", etc.

Yeah there's some quotes of the Baron's thoughts:

Towards Paul:

"I'll be in my sleeping chambers," the Baron said. "Bring me that young fellow we bought on Gamont, the one with the lovely eyes. Drug him well. I don't feel like wrestling."

"Yes, m'Lord."

The Baron turned away, began moving with his bouncing, suspensor-buoyed pace toward his chambers. Yes, he thought. The one with the lovely eyes, the one who looks so much like the young Paul Atreides.

Towards his Nephew Feyd:

A tank-brain, the Baron thought. Muscle-minded tank-brain. They will be bloody pulp here when he’s through with them. Then, when I send in Feyd-Rautha to take the load off them, they’ll cheer their rescuer. Beloved Feyd-Rautha. Benign Feyd-Rautha, the compassionate one who saves them from a beast. Feyd-Rautha, a man to follow and die for. The boy will know by that time how to oppress with impunity. I’m sure he’s the one we need. He’ll learn. And such a lovely body. Really a lovely boy.

Yeah perhaps it gets a pass because of it's length, or because the ecology is so central to the themes?

Also reading Dune, for the first time. My impression is I like it, but the things I like are islands of intrigue in the middle of a sea desert of boring periods of people talking about water. Hoping it’ll pick back up again.

I grew up in a very arid climate not too far from the Oregon dunes that inspired Arrakis, so I enjoy both the intrigue as well and the boring discussions of water.

This was my impression of the entire series. Herbert left all the most interesting aspects of his world tantalizingly out of reach, as though he pointed a camera at a beautiful landscape and it focused on a fly buzzing in the foreground instead of the natural wonder behind.

Yeah, I would say that in general the Dune books excel at worldbuilding and theme, but don't do so well with the actual plot. It's a shame because as much as I do like the books, they can suffer from that at times.

I finished Termination Shock, a few weeks ago actually.

The part about the Queen of Denmark's sex life was a little weird, but I didn't find it too off-putting. It feels like a case of, all such action/adventure novels are obligated to stuff some sex and love into them somewhere, regardless of whether it really makes sense. The whole concept of livestreamed hand-to-hand combat by volunteers at the China-India Line Of Actual Control is pretty bizarre too.

It also felt like there's some obligatory wokeness jammed in. This character is gay, this other one is native american, or black/african, or something else, even though it doesn't really add anything to the plot. But it's more of a mention than a focus. Almost like somebody convinced him to add some of that stuff into his next novel and he did it kind of half-heartedly.

I did find interesting the concept that some random rich guy and/or small nation could just start doing some geoengineering on their own that technically doesn't violate any laws. What would anyone do about it? Surely some nation would feel, justifiably or not, that some bad weather issue was caused by it.

The eagles fighting drones concept was pretty cool too.

Also, I'm fairly sure that EMPs cannot actually do what they were portrayed as doing. From what I've read, EMPs are hardest on very long conductors, like power transmission lines and copper communication cables, and anything connected to them without the right protection. They most likely won't have any effect on handheld electronics or vehicles, including drones. But hey, plot device I guess?

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