Book post: A Hero's Knack a.co/d/bUtqYoc This is neither a particularly good nor a particularly bad book series (4 shortish volumes). I'm reviewing it because I think it's an exemplar of what indie publishing and Kindle is doing to SF and fantasy genre fiction. In 2008 of a timeline that isn't ours, a mysterious virus alters the genetic makeup of humanity. People start getting super-powers at adolescence. Half the world's population dies in the ensuing near-collapse of civilization. I have to tell you, I nearly checked out right there. There is way, way too much modern fiction that starts with the author destroying the world in order to turn it into his favorite cartoon or melodrama or political screed. It's a cheap stunt, I'm tired of it, and there are several series I have dropped for this reason. And everybody gets superpowers. Seen that done before, more than once; it takes a lot to convince me that the author is going to do anything interesting or original with that premise at this point. And I can't say I think this series really manages it. So, there's nothing much to recommend these books. On the other hand, they aren't actively bad. The plotting and prose is competent, some of the characters are at least mildly interesting, and some of the obligatory wisecracking dialog is actually funny. There is much worse out there, and lots of it. Still, the prompt reaction I have to these books is: they wouldn't have passed trad-pub's gatekeepers. In the old days when distribution and print runs were limited resources, I don't think an SF manuscript this undistinguished would have made it to the public. (Certain other genres, which I will resist enumerating in order to avoid starting arguments I don't want to be in right now, have more slop tolerance. Some, alas, have much more.) But in today's indie scene, effectively anything can get published if somebody cares enough to write it. And one redeeming quality of these books is that I don't think they were ground out as a soulless cash grab by a hack. I think the author wanted to write them as a nostalgic salute to the stratum of pop culture that they mine so heavily. Mission accomplished on that score. Most of the modest charm this series does have is due to that retro atmosphere. Which refocuses me on the difference between two kinds of mediocre fiction: the expressive work by a not very capable writer, versus the cash grab by a competent hack. Trad-pub used to favor the cash grabs and filter out the expressive stuff, because hack-work was more aimed at pulling dollars out of pockets and more likely to succeed. This book reminds me that while there's plenty of cash-grabbing going on in indie, it at least makes more space than trad-pub did for mediocre fiction of the expressive kind. And that's a good thing, on net. Because, as slight as it is, for some small niche audience out there this series is going to be exactly the fun they wanted. I'd much rather see the reward for that go to an expressive work than to a mere cash grab.

Book post: The Blacktongue Thief a.co/d/5zYU9RF If you like the idea of a dark, atmospheric, very original fantasy with a trickster protagonist, this book is for you. Kinch Na Shannack was born to a despised people in a brutal and unforgiving world devastated by the Goblin Wars. He makes his way as an expert thief, until he robs the wrong person and is drawn into an unlikely quest. This book is a bit too harsh to qualify as fantasy escapism; there are definitely parts that make for uncomfortable reading. But the writing quality is head and shoulders above the usual fantasy slop. It's vivid and surprising and deftly avoids shopworn tropes. There's a sequel that I haven't read yet. This one stands alone quite well - there again, the author avoids the easy obvious dunk. I think of this book as the direct opposite of Larry Correia's recent "Academy of Outcasts", equally well written, but a tongue-in-cheek embrace of LitRPG cliches that wants nothing more than to be a fun ride and succeeds wildly at that. This one is recommended only if you want something chewier and more challenging than genre yard goods, which this certainly is not.

Gee, it would be great if "scientists" hadn't destroyed their credibility by failing to speak out against COVID bullshit and transgender bullshit and climate-catastrophism bullshit, wouldn't it? I'd love to be an advocate for funding basic research. I used to be a strong one.

Book post: How to Lie With Maps a.co/d/c83IuYT This is my first ever review of a nonfiction title, because it's so good. The map is not the territory. This book is a systematic exploration of how maps can deceive - inadvertently, or worse, deliberately. It's made more useful because, in order to explain how maps can deceive, the author has to explain how they can be used to tell the truth. Along the way, we get an excellent first course in technical cartography, with excursions into adjacent areas including color theory, the limitations of various different kinds of map renderings including computer displays and print, and how multispectral satellite mapping actually works. Attention is even paid to the special hazards of degrading maps by putting them through duplicating machines. This book was good at teaching me some completely new things. Lake planimetric distortion, a problem that can subtly mess with realistic-looking aerial photographs. It was also very good at latching on to lots of disparate bits of knowledge about mapmaking. I had already picked up, sharpening them, and organizing them into a pattern that's more than the sum of its parts. The most important thing this book will do for you is teach you how to read maps critically. You'll be more likely to spot distortions or propaganda being fed to you with techniques like cunning interval choices in heat maps (not a term the author uses - apparently the cartographer jargon is "choropleth map", which was new to me). There's also entertaining historical stuff like an explanation of how the Soviets falsified maps of Russia - and perhaps more interestingly, why they stopped doing it. There is only one major omission in this book. I feel there should have been a chapter on using maps to lie by confounding effects with causes. The case that often comes up on X is "the map", where maps of various socioeconomic indicators in the U.S. are misleading to readers who don't realize that they're adding basically zero information beyond population density. Still, even with that caveat, this is a spectacularly good and fun book for anybody who cares about truthfulness, or maps, or both.

Public service announcement: if you think the slop-level science fiction and fantasy on KindleUnlimited is intolerably bad? Do not...I repeat...do not...sample any of the Westerns.

Learn to prompt, losers. Because you're too fucking stupid to learn to code.

A few LOTR geeks will find this hilarious.

Attagirl! This could have been predicted from the video of Sweeney shooting tactical pistol. That wouldn't have got out if she gave a flying fuck about political correctness. I love the death glare she gives the interviewer.

Book post: Destiny's Crucible a.co/d/9HIqmGK Joseph Colsco is a chemist flying to a professional conference when the airline he's on has some kind of explosive failure. But...instead of suffering a fiery death, he wakes on an alien shore, surrounded by people speaking no language he can recognize. It doesn't take him long to realize he's not on Earth. He has a new language to learn, a society to find a place in. His only real asset is that the technology level is about 1700-equivalent on Earth. And Joe remembers a lot. Maybe more than he should? The "Destiny's Crucible" sequence, currently at book 9, is what I've previously referred to as a civ-builder story. Unlike the others I've reviewed recently, it's played as absolutely straight science fiction with a lot of emphasis on the nuts and bolts. We even get a peek (as of book 9, still just a peek) at the alien machinery that smacked him all up the isekai. Sadly for Joe (but interestingly for the reader) he's not going to settle down as an eccentric inventor peacefully improving the tech level of Caedillion. Because a rather nasty slave empire has just turned its eyes on his new country. There will be war, and he'll need to become a general and a statesman to survive. This one is way over towards the hard end of the civ-builder spectrum. Which is good, that's how I like them! And there are hints that we might get a whole 'nother level of reveal involving two different sets of enigmatic aliens. These books have maybe sprawled some, and the pace sometimes drags a little. The author isn't trying to deliver an instant thrill ride, but a long build-up with meticulously detailed and plausible world-building. A lot of thought went into these books, and with a little patience you'll get a lot out of them.

Mine too, except for the notable absence of any thousand-foot drop-offs for Wile E. to plummet off of.

The people who continue to insist that Antifa doesn't exist or is "just an idea" are running cover for terrorists who are now running paramilitary operations against ICE. Plate carriers, rifles and squad tactics are a significant step up from just shooting and beating people at street demonstrations. But this is always where a Marxist organization running the Maoist/Castroite playbook was headed.

Book post: The FitzDuncan series a.co/d/50IKFQu Casimir FitzDuncan grew up as the bastard son of an earl in the Kingdom of Aquileia, shunned by the nobles around him. He began to find his feet as a junior officer in the Rangers guarding the Kingdom's western border. But with any career dead-ended by noble hostility he mustered out, and must somehow find a living on the streets of the capital city. All he has is a trickle of money from his grandfather, a good sword, and his wits. And, fortunately, a knack for finding things. It's refreshing these days to read a fantasy that neither fails at the epic ambition to do Tolkien better nor falls back on the easy, obvious tropes of "urban" fantasy. Well, except for one of them: early in the series Caz is, effectively, a private detective. He doesn't stay that way for long, though. His work makes him some friends, and he starts to become more entangled in the affairs of the powerful. He spends much of this 10-book series as a confidential agent for the Crown, getting into and out of various dangerous scrapes all over the known world. Eventually, he finds success beyond his wildest dreams. Caz is an attractive character. You'll like him, and the friends he makes along the way, and Lucy his love interest who awakens him to the fact that he has a minor but useful magical talent. He works hard for his gains, but thankfully the author never descends to melodramatic character torture. There's a little more going on in the setting than appears at first sight, too. It's roughly like England or France in the mid-Renaissance except there's no gunpowder. Magic exists but is fading from the world outside of the temples of the Twelve Gods...or so it seems at first, anyway. The milieu reminds me a bit of Lois Bujold's excellent Chalion fantasies. I'm not going to say these books quite reach the quality of writing or worldbuilding Bujold delivers, but they are good clean solidly-constructed fun that never insults your intelligence. Recommended.

Not *just* human reason. The basic idea is that moral systems are sets of rules and procedures... do this, don't do this. "Good" ones help societies, and the people in them, thrive. "Bad" ones don't. This is how we call moralities "good" or "bad"... not *morally* good or bad, but good or bad for purpose. How we arrive at those moralities isn't just pure reason, it's a variety of discovery techniques. The first is biological evolution. This is why, for example, bees have a sense of property rights (anyone who disagrees is invited to test this by hitting a beehive with a stick). This gives a set of basic behaviors that are built into us, instinctive. Because we are a pack animal, it govern not just us, but how we relate to the tribe. And these are why we feel, very strongly, that we have an innate sense of right and wrong. Because we do. Theists believe it is built into the universe, by god. Atheists think it is built into us, by evolutionary processes, discarding what doesn't work and keeping what does. The second way we arrive at moral precepts, which further refines what we get from biology, is cultural evolution. Parents pass moral teachings to children. Societies with good ones thrive. Societies with bad ones don't. Hundreds of thousands of Aztecs were conquered by a few hundred Spaniards for a reason. The third way is the deliberate investigation you speak of, which isn't just reason, its also empiricism. That's what we are doing now. These stages don't occur in a vacuum. They build on previous ones. All of our thoughts and investigations about morality are informed by our cultural traditions and our instinctive pack behavior. To an atheist, Christians appear to see their moral laws as bypassing this whole process, a direct line to an alleged architect of the universe who gives you a definitive answer. A sort of "Christian exceptionalism", if you will. We don't agree. We see Christian morality simply as parts of the second and third stages... traditions that worked + deliberate moral reasoning. Why don't we agree with Christian exceptionalism? It's not just because we don't believe in the alleged source. It's also because we have seen Christian morality undergo the process of cultural evolution (stage 2), and changes in its moral reasoning (stage 3) based upon those changes. What a modern Christian, of any stripe, considers the morally imperative will of god only has the barest of overlap with what a medieval European Christian would believe. And neither would overlap much with an early Roman Christian. Also, modern Christians don't completely overlap even with each other. So, we don't buy that Christianity is the One True Word that ends the discussion. Because it isn't One. And it certainly hasn't ended the discussion. Now, you can argue that Christianity has arrived at a point where it is a positive influence. A case can certainly be made for that. But if you argue that, then you are viewing Christianity through my lens, not yours... viewing is a step in moral evolution, not a process-ending divine revelation. Which would kind of undercut your point. The dichotomy isn't "Christianity bad" vs "Christianity good", or even "Christianity wrong" vs "Christianity correct". It's "Christianity final answer from god" vs "Christianity part of ongoing moral debate". As a side note, "Christianity part of ongoing moral debate" doesn't necessarily imply atheism. It seems to be that one could be a Christian, believe in a creator god, believe that god has given us some rules, but also that god has declined to give us all the answers and end the debate. This would probably imply the belief that he wants the debate to happen.

This is not going to be a post about race or Black people. Please have a little patience while I get to its actual point. For several decades there was a taboo in the major media against showing mugshots of Black criminals or even mentioning the race of a non-white offender in text. Recently - quite recently, like since about 2022 - I've noticed that this taboo seems to have disintegrated. I think I've figured out why. Cheap surveillance cameras are what did it, I think. There's been such a flood of video evidence of Black street crime that it has broken containment. I understand the impulse behind that containment. Media gatekeepers thought of it as virtuous anti-racism. But yesterday it occurred to me that the long-term effects of having this taboo collapse may go beyond what we normally think of as racial issues. The laws and customs of modern liberal democracies are built on the assumption that everybody in them is basically peaceful and has low time preference. Of course we all know that some people aren't, but we're accustomed to thinking of violent and impulsive behavior as something we have pushed to the margins of society and can relatively easily suppress. Ubiquitous video challenges this assumption. It's just too easy now to find documentary evidence of lots of stupidity and violence, not as dry text but as visual immediacy in motion. We've all seen the video of Iryna Zarutska being stabbed to death. I'm not claiming this video is what broke the containment, because I think it happened a few years sooner. But it is an index of the new reality. There's no going back from this. One immediate result is that "anti-racist" gatekeeping now looks pointless. So incentives have flipped, and media now shrugs and uses Black mugshots as clickbait. Downstream, I think the classical-liberal assumption that human beings other than children and obvious mental defectives are universally competent to be equals in a free society is now under an unprecedented kind of pressure. As a libertarian, I'm unhappy about this. It's not good for my normative political desires. It's more difficult to argue for liberty when there are not simply individuals but identifiable large classes of people that are morally incompetent. Ubiquitous video is giving us that identifiable large class. I think this is a more corrosive problem than a simple resurgence of racism would be. How do you argue against aristocracy when there's a lower class that really is violent and stupid, and we're immersed in moving evidence of this? This is my real point. Congratulations to anybody who persisted long enough to get here. I don't have a facile answer to this question. I do think it's important for everybody who loves liberty to start thinking about it.

This is how to reveal that you know less than nothing about how morality and ethics work outside of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic context, because what you think you know ain't so. Note: the remainder of this post will assert nothing about what you ought to believe about religion and morality. It will simply report facts about what humans do and have believed. Most societies both historical and present do not depend on any idea of divine enforcement or supernatural foundation to enforce morality. At least half the population of the Earth today lives inside religious traditions in which morality is a kind of natural law that is as binding on the gods themselves as it is on humans. They didn't create it, and don't get to change it at will. I'm referring specifically to Brahminic Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist tradition here. In another large range of cultures, morality is essentially a set of inherited purity taboos that may be decorated and mythologized by folk religion but are neither produced nor enforced by religion. Hinduism sort of falls in this category too; it's complicated and depends on whether you're paying more attention to folk religion or Brahminic theology. The notion that if God is dead everything is permissible is an extremely parochial, culture-bound claim that is not separable from the assumptions of one relatively small group of related religions. If you are Christian, or a Christian atheist, you may have a lot of trouble wrapping your head around this reality. Because you've grown up in a religious tradition that takes it absolutely for granted that any religion has to fuse practice, cosmology, and morality into one big totalizing story. What I'm here to tell you, as a matter of fact about human behavior, is that most religions do not work this way. It is not historically normal for religion and morality to be tightly coupled in the way you have grown up assuming they have to be. It's not even a majority belief of humans living on this planet right now. If your reaction to this is "How could that possibly work?", you are just suffering from ignorance and a failure of imagination and need to fucking get out more.

I wonder how many Britons understand that they're now paying the price of allowing their government to disarm them, and that price is denominated in the screams of the raped and murdered.

Book post: From Chef to Crafter to Conqueror a.co/d/cMtX4xW A science-fiction subgenre I particularly enjoy is what one might call civ-builder stories, like "The Doctor From Nowhere" that I recently reviewed. Protagonist is hurled backwards or backwards and sideways in time and takes it as a mission to upgrade the civilization he's in. Gabriel Rathweig's "From Chef to Crafter to Conqueror" is a particularly entertaining example of the type. But instead of a scientist or engineer or some steely-eyed military veteran, our protagonist is...a gourmet cook? A naval cook from the 25th century, to be precise, dropped into an alternate Japan on the eve of the Mongol invasion in 1280. "Alternate" because various other species of the genus homo did not go extinct the way they did in our timeline and have become the monsters of Japanese legend. Ryo has a few advantages - nanites in his blood that make him difficult to kill, an on-board AI that's a library of future knowledge and...a really bitching set of chef's knives. But there are a million angry Mongols coming in his direction. Uh oh. How is he going to get the tiny island of Tsushima ready in time? Every book like this has a slightly different answer to the question of how you get from a pre-industrial tech base to steamships and repeating rifles. The fun is in the details. These books aren't the best example of the genre I've seen from an engineering-detail point of view but they are vivid and fun. And unusually, Ryo is a bit of a comic figure who occasionally slips on a metaphorical banana peel. Oh, and his onboard AI is an asshole. Hilarity ensues. Also a lot of descriptions of mouth-watering meals and how to cook them. The sixth volume of these just came out; it's unclear how many there will be in the future. Fun light reading, recommended.

Book post: Patriarch Reliance a.co/d/1n0xmrk Following my review of Tao Wong's excellent "Thousand Li" books (xianxia fantasy written in English), Er Gen's "I Shall Seal The Heavens" was recommended to me as one of the better Chinese-language xianxia fantasies. A little research with an LLM seemed to confirm this, so I dove into this first volume. I'm a bit puzzled by what I've found. Givien the way the flow of literary derivation went, one might have expected one of the Chinese originals of the modern xianxia form to be distinctly better than a take on it in English, and for the Thousand Li books in particular to come off retrospectively as inferior invitations. Instead, I have questions. So many questions. Why are the characters in "Patriarch Reliance" mainly cartoonish? Why is the plotting primitive and obvious? Why do I feel like I got more historical-period feel and erudition from a Chinese fantasy written in English then from a Chinese fantasy written in Chinese? It's pretty clear that the source of these problems is not translation quality. The translation is somewhat clumsy - whoever did it doesn't have much sense for the appropriate register of English to use in fantasy novels, so you get powerful ancient wizards using street idioms like "Beat it!". But while they are unintentionally humorous, these infelicities of language don't do much to explain why this novel underneath them feels like a pot-boiler. I hasten to add that the "Patriarch Reliance" is not without virtues. If elaborate magical battle scenes are your thing, Er Gen delivers those at high volume. And if the whole novel sometimes feels like a series of thin excuses to knit those scenes together, well, nobody who still occasionally reads space opera because "spaceships go kaboom is fun!" has much warrant to complain, and I'm not going to start. But it does make me wonder what I'm looking at. Is Er Gen an individually primitive writer, or is Chinese xianxia generally written at the level of pre-Campbellian space opera or equally ancient pulp adventure fiction? More research is clearly required. My tentative guess, based on reading "Journey to the West" longer ago than I care to think about, is that Er Gen is either deliberately or unconsciously imitating the style of classical Chinese mythological novels. Which, while gorgeous reads, are similarly crude compared to modern Western fantasy. This gives rise to larger thoughts about fusion literature. I mean an analogy to fusion cooking here, which is often more exciting and innovative than its parent cuisines because it can cherry-pick and combine the best parts. Should I have actually expected Tao Wong's books to be an improvement on Chinese-language xianxia? Maybe. I will say these books are head and shoulders above Will Wight's "Cradle" sequence, an English-language xianxia derivative that I'm told is extremely popular. I found it unreadable and quit before finishing the first volume; evidently xianxia with the Chinese cultural flavor and Taoist/Zen mysticism omitted isn't for me. I'm not sure who to recommend this book to. If you like magical-battle scenes a lot, check. If you have a forensic interest in understanding xianxia and its cultural roots, check. I fit both criteria myself, but for those of you who don't there are probably better uses of your reading time.