website/blog/other-stuff.md

title	description	created	updated	slug
Other things you may like	A nonexhaustive list of media which I like and which you may also be interested in.	11/06/2020	17/09/2024	otherstuff

I'm excluding music from this because music preferences seem to be even more varied between the people I interact with than other stuff. Obviously this is just stuff I like; you might not like it, which isn't really my concern - this list is primarily made to bring to people's attention stuff they might like but have not heard of. Enjoy the newly reformatted version of this list, with my slightly opaque organizational scheme and possibly incorrectly sorted lists.

Writing

12 Miles Below

12 Miles Below is an ongoing webserial (I am not fully caught up or close to it yet) with intelligent and well-written characters and a quirky setting. It has more grammar/spelling errors than I would like (I would like none) but most people care about this less than me.

A Hero's War

A Hero's War is an unfortunately unfinished-probably-forever webserial about bootstrapping industrial technology with vague knowledge of modern science and some simple magic available.

Accelerando

Accelerando is the best fictional depiction of the posthuman technocapital singularity I'm aware of. Humans are utterly consumed by increasingly sophisticated posthuman and alien intelligences, except a few plot-relevant ones.

Antimemetics Division

::: epigraph attribution=O5-8 Last time. The time before this one, the time none of us remember, the time for which there is no evidence of any kind, but which I now realise must exist. That time, when we told ourselves and each other, 'We must do better,' what did we do differently, from then on, and why didn't it work? :::

The Antimemetics Division stories are an excellently-realized comic horror series based on the notion of "antimemes", ideas which are hard to remember or transmit. The author, Sam Hughes/qntm has written many other things which I would also recommend, but this is my favourite moderately long-form work of theirs. The SCP universe provides great background detail for this, and Hughes makes the idea work very well.

Bastion

Bastion has a very creative setting, though somewhat annoying characters.

Chilli and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation

Chilli and the Chocolate Factory by gaizemaize is a now-completed web serial, though the experience of reading it now doesn't capture what it was like getting new chapters and wildly speculating about them. It is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fanfiction which manages to capture the bizarre surrealism of Roald Dahl in general, and may or may not exist entirely to provide a substrate for various puns.

The Combat Codes

The Combat Codes by Alexander Darwin manages to turn hand-to-hand combat (mostly grappling) into something of a magic system, and has a novel vaguely science-fantasy setting to it too. The author is a BJJ black belt, and thus actually competent at writing this correctly. There is a rerelease with edited versions soon now, so if you want to read it it may be best to wait until that's complete and all three new editions are available. The series ends with the secret software-engineer leaders of the world deciding to rebuild it in accordance with their new designs, which I appreciate.

CORDYCEPS: Too clever for their own good

CORDYCEPS: Too clever for their own good is a great short horror/mystery story. It is unfortunately not practical to describe it further without spoilers.

The Daily Grind

The Daily Grind is a webserial which accidentally grew out from a oneshot about deadly escapism into a dungeon incongruously within the real world to become about non-deadly, somewhat sanely organized escapism and then relentless exploitation of its magical properties. I got bored of it after book 2, though.

A Fire Upon the Deep

Unlike many science fiction authors, Vernor Vinge really "felt the AGI", as far back as the 1990s. A Fire Upon the Deep is impressive for managing to fit this into its worldbuilding without rendering humans completely irrelevant or handwaving AGI into impotence.

Discworld

Discworld by Terry Pratchett is a very long (41 books) fantasy series. As you would expect from the fact that its world is on the back of four elephants on a turtle, it is somewhat comedic, but Pratchett is very good at characterization and regularly brings in social and technological developments to make the world feel dynamic. It's roughly organized into sub-series which can be read mostly independently.

You may also like The Long Earth and Good Omens, which Pratchett helped write.

The Divine Cities

::: epigraph attribution="Anonymous Saypuri Testimonial" But if this is so, why did the gods make us at all? And if we were meant only to labor, why give us minds, why give us desires? Why can we not be as cattle in the field, or chickens in their coops?

[...]

The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope. :::

The Divine Cities - I like any¹ fiction about killing God, and this has great characterization and a creatively exotic setting too. I haven't actually finished City of Miracles (the third book) yet, though.

Doing God's Work

Doing God's Work, a web serial about a rapidly escalating plot to dethrone God (which is "based"). It seems like you can no longer publicly read most of it except on Amazon, sadly.

The Edge Chronicles

The Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddel is a "high fantasy" (in the sense that it has large-scale plots and is set in a very non-real-world-like world) children's series which is nevertheless somewhat bizarrely dark. The illustrations are nice, and the worldbuilding is unique if somewhat superficial, though the plots are somewhat simplistic.

Endeavour

Endeavour (and its sequel, though it seems like there is a low probability of a third book) are decent if not especially compelling science fiction about the Fermi Paradox.

Ender's Game

I don't know exactly what about Ender's Game I like, but I read it long ago in my youth and it still holds up well. It has the weird quirk that basically all the characters are 12 or so - you forget this when they are taking over the world and such.

The Expanse

The Expanse by James S. A. Corey is another (see Theft of Fire below for my general thoughts on this, though The Expanse was first and much more widely known, so) modern (mostly) hard science fiction series. It's also a TV series now, though that got truncated by internal meddling.

As the Godking Wills

As the Godking Wills is a short(ish) somewhat Discworld like political/theological black comedy.

Good Omens

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett is a very funny... religious comedy... in which the apocalypse is averted by vaguely dissatisfied angels.

The Machineries of Empire

The Machineries of Empire has a unique setting, although I do feel like it has some issues with pacing, the vaguely mathematical nature of setting annoys me because the few pieces of specific maths are wrong² (and, related to this, the setting is also not really congruent: there's not enough information there to model what might happen next yourself, or why anything might happen), and the fact that somehow nobody in several hundred years has thought of a particular externally-obvious thing until the protagonist did.

Mage Errant

::: epigraph attribution=Avah Dragons keep their money in banks like everyone else. Hoards don’t accrue interest. :::

Mage Errant is a moderately-long-by-now fantasy series with a very vibrant world, and which actually considers the geopolitical implications of there being beings around ("Great Powers") able to act as one-man armies and the consequences of its setting in general. Now complete (I haven't read the last two books though) though I do not like the last book as much in some ways (unnecessarily large amounts of time spent on fight scenes, primarily).

Firefall

Firefall (technically Blindsight and Echopraxia in an omnibus edition) is one of those rare books which is actually decent at portraying very alien intelligences. I preferred Blindsight to Echopraxia but both are worth reading. Some people seem to have thought that it is "cosmic horror" (particularly Blindsight) and/or had their psyche shattered by the implications of what they read within, but this didn't happen to me for whatever reason. It is certainly bleak. Also, Peter Watts somehow makes vampires work well scientifically.

I also read and enjoyed The Freeze-Frame Revolution by the same author; it's annoyingly short, being a novella, but it's dense, weirdly cognizant of AI safety concerns for its time, and packed with some clever ideas.

Friendship is Optimal

Friendship is Optimal is a great cautionary tale about unfriendly AI. It does a good job being horrifying while not describing the worst possible outcome, or one of the bad but boring ones.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy

::: epigraph attribution="Frankie (mouse)" Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise. :::

The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams (a series). It is pretty popular but quite a few people aren't aware of it, which is a shame. It is regarded as some of the best science-fiction comedy ever, and manages impressive surreal humour.

House of Suns

House of Suns is one of Alastair Reynolds' standalone works (I have not actually read much else from him); it explores "deep time" sublight colonization and the difficulty of stabilizing institutions over those timescales, among other things. I liked the prose.

"house of suns is really very good, you should read" - baidicoot/Aidan, creator of the world-renowned Emu War game.

Message in a Bottle

Message in a Bottle has a human von Neumman probe make first contract with... Equestria. This may sound like a strange choice, but it works very well.

Mistborn

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson initially seems like a standard "chosen one defeats the Dark Lord" story, but quickly turns out to be more complicated than that. It's part of Sanderson's Cosmere extended universe, which is being assembled very quickly, though Mistborn is the only part I've read much of.

Mother of Learning

Mother of Learning by nobody103. A long and now-completed progression-fantasy webserial. Quite twisty.

Nice Dragons Finish Last

Nice Dragons Finish Last is some reasonably enjoyable and nonstandard urban fantasy.

A Practical Guide to Sorcery

A Practical Guide to Sorcery was read on the recommendation of this comment. It has a smart and competent (they make silly mistakes sometimes but in reasonable ways they notice later) protagonist, flexible but sufficiently-constrained magic system, and a well-realized setting with some mysteries to explore.

The Quantum Thief

The Quantum Thief was moved out of my infinitely long queue to actually be read on recommendation from Gwern. I really liked it (and the sequels); Hannu Rajaniemi throws in every absurd idea I can imagine being discussed on transhumanist mailing lists in the 1990s/2000s, never explaining them yet (as far as I can tell) remaining consistent with the known laws of physics, and it actually works.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K. J. Parker is a funny book about an irreverent engineer running a city, slightly reminiscent of Discworld.

Schild's Ladder

Schild's Ladder may just be Greg Egan showing off cool physics ideas without much in the way of plot beyond this, but they are very cool. Egan also manages to pull off an actually-futuristic future society and world. I also enjoyed Greg Egan's many short story collections, Luminous/Oceanic/Instantiation - I think he does better at these.

Sufficiently Advanced Magic

Sufficiently Advanced Magic by Andrew Rowe is a progression fantasy series which I've enjoyed somewhat due to its interesting magic system, though the books are somewhat longer than I would like.

Snow Crash

Snow Crash is a fun action story which somehow fits swordfighting into a slightly retrofuturistic scifi world. Neal Stephenson seems to have expected more progress in the physical world and sort of slower progress in software, like many people. I don't know how seriously he meant the tangents into Sumerian mythology, but they seem silly.

Since this list was written, I think it became notorious for introducing the "metaverse" as pushed by Facebook now. This is very silly. Everyone who is paying attention knows that the real metaverse is Roblox.

Stories Of Your Life And Others

::: epigraph attribution="Ted Chiang" We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound. :::

Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation are short story collections by Ted Chiang spanning a wide range of ideas and generally very well-executed. One of the stories got adapted into the Arrival movie, though the scriptwriters clearly did not understand what was going on.

Street Cultivation

Street Cultivation has a setting I don't particularly like (mostly for aesthetic reasons) but has characters who are actually sane and make vaguely reasonable decisions, so I like it overall.

Systema Delenda Est

Systema Delenda Est is a hard-SF deconstruction of LitRPG (suddenly switching the world over to magic and "only the strong survive" is actually bad) which appreciates the power of exponential growth. Chasing Sunlight is another work I've read by the same author - it has a fascinatingly ominous setting and amoral-but-cleverly-written main character. I am still trying to puzzle out the metaphysics.

Theft of Fire

::: epigraph attribution="Marcus Warnoc" Yeah, so, like you said, everyone has heard this story before. Including all the other frogs, see, they've all heard it, too. So the next time a scorpion needs to cross a river, it can't persuade any of the frogs to carry it. So it waits until one of the frogs is asleep, then climbs on its back, and says 'Take me across the river, or I'll sting you.'

Well, frog has no choice, so it starts to carry the scorpion across the river. But when it gets to the middle, the frog starts to dive under the water. The scorpion can't swim, and it doesn't have anything else it can do, so it stings the frog.

And as they're both going down, the scorpion says 'Why the hell did you do that? Now we're both gonna die.'

And so the frog says... 'Because you're a scorpion.' :::

Theft of Fire: I am very conflicted on this, but I did like it enough to fast-track it and read it in two days, so I am including it. Expanding on this might deserve an entire blog post, but it would be a short blog post, and this would create odd incentives unless I expand all other entries to blog posts, which I won't.

It is "hard scifi" in the sense of The Expanse (moderately recently) and lots of older fiction (it's been compared to Heinlein, who I haven't actually read much) - spacefaring technology and a few peripheral areas advance substantially, and most other technologies are unchanged, as opposed to e.g. The Quantum Thief where everything is radically overhauled to the limits of known physical laws. I can generally accept this as a setting conceit like I accept fantasy worlds, but it feels strange to be 200 years in the future and have neural interfaces but only used for primitive AR, computers nominally thousands of times more powerful but with capabilities slightly worse than 2024's state of the art³, and spaceships maintained with modern-era manually-operated machine tools. This does, at least, make the problem-solving more relatable to us modern people. It portrays spaceflight under the constraints of astrodynamics and having to not pulp your human crew very well. The governance of the (off-Earth parts of the) setting is apparently anarchocapitalist, which is a minor detail I bring up because it caused me to discover that there's a Libertarian Futurist Society with a very 90s-but-in-a-good-way website.

It is very character-driven, in the sense that the main characters being silly drives most of the plot. Some of the characterization is odd, though it has its moments of brilliance. The author clearly wants to distinguish the "space roughneck" main character Marcus from "space princess" Miranda, but this is done oddly. I cannot believe that he simultaneously knows what Dirac monopoles are, has read enough Lewis Carroll to say "typical Lewis Carroll" in first-person internal monologue, and was apparently a childhood scifi fan, but doesn't know what "Fibonacci" and "anthropomorphizing" mean. Miranda is described as very intelligent; the author does not entirely ignore this as some might have, but the fact that she should be able to resolve most of their situation with about ten minutes of internet access (which she has) is not noticed.

Overall, I guess I can call it good at what it is but not groundbreaking.

Three Parts Dead

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone is part of the Craft Sequence, which I've now read three books from. I enjoy it for managing to have a modern-feeling and yet clearly distinctive world with "Craftsperson" battle-lawyers and gods as corporations.

Thresholder

Thresholder is a jumpchain story but with some degree of actual plot arc and character development (though it does still have its worldbuilding infodumps, although I appreciate those personally).

Alexander Wales has also written Branches on the Tree of Time, a Terminator fanfiction which manages to make Terminator make sense (somewhat).

UNSONG

::: epigraph attribution=Uriel ATTENTION. DUE TO A SCALE BACK IN COVERAGE, THE MORAL ARC OF THE UNIVERSE NO LONGER BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. :::

UNSONG (now published as a book, but the web version is what I read and is probably fine) is one of approximately two books here based on wild free association based on (very sophisticated) puns. I recall there being some weirdness with pacing, but I like it overall, and it is fearsome how well Scott is able to connect everything to everything else.

Void Star

::: epigraph attribution=Cloudbreaker You are that which copies your genes into the future. I am that which dissolves the order in certain kinds of complex system. That’s the deep structure of things. :::

Void Star - somewhat strange for a "mainstream" scifi book (it was reviewed by the Guardian) but in good ways. The prose is very... poetic is probably the best word (it contains phrases like "isoclines of commitment and dread", "concentric and innumerable" and "high empyrean")... which I enjoyed, but it is polarizing. The setting seems like a broadly reasonable extrapolation of ongoing trends into the future, although it's unclear exactly when it is (some of the book implies 2150 or so, but this seems implausible). The author is a software engineer, so, unlike many other books with computers in them, the computers are not totally wrong.

Its most unusual characteristic is that it absolutely does not tell you what's going on ever: an interview I read said it was written out of order, and that makes sense (another fun quirk of it is that the chapters are generally very short). I think I know most of what happens now, but it has taken a while. It has about one big idea in it, but it's written well.

The author, Zachary Mason, also wrote The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which has a very similar style. It's a novel take on the mythology and sort of works as a nice short story collection.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor is a fun and decent, though not particularly deep or smart⁴, space-colonization science fiction story.

Short stories

• IO.SYS provides a surprisingly good justification for destroying the Earth.
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Super-Rationality will probably not make sense to you unless you've read HPMOR, but it's very funny.
• "You think that's air you're breathing?" describes how the Matrix is actually wrong.
• Hronar the Barbarian.
• Voices of the Gods.
• A boring test in a room.
• For God-like power, all I need is one bit.
• The Cambist and Lord Iron.
• One Compile Man.
• Immortem.
• Compressibility.
• The State Pension.
• The Long Chase,
• The Things.
• The Study of Anglophysics.
• an important lesson in cryptography.
• Stargate Physics 101.
• Programmer at Large does futuristic and strange software and society worldbuilding.
• Economies of Force.
• The Titanomachy.
• Wizard, Cabalist, Ascendant.
• [Sekhmet Hunts The Dying: A Computation]9http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/sekhmet-hunts-the-dying-gnosis-a-computation/.
• More to be added when I feel like it.

Games

Factorio

A factory building game containing many of the best parts of modded Minecraft but in a form which actually has good performance and nice UI design. Really good performance and UI design - giant factories will run smoothly on any remotely capable hardware, unlike Minecraft, and attention is paid to every facet of the UI. A notable feature is the blueprint and construction robotics system, which lets you horizontally scale a factory much more cleanly than anything Minecraft can manage. The factory must grow. Refer to the website for more.

FTL: Faster than Light

Nicely constructed roguelike (roguelite, arguably, since while there is permanent death there are permanent bonuses in the form of new ships) with a very high skill ceiling and mechanics with a large amount of emergent complexity. As a small example, defense drones work by shooting at incoming projectiles, which works because two projectiles colliding destroys both - which you can exploit yourself with very good timing in some scenarios, and which means defense drones can be beaten in various ways. Has a great soundtrack. The website is here. I have a page with (spoilery) tips here.

Minecraft

It is unlikely that you have not heard of Minecraft. I am listing it for completeness. Java Edition, the only correct version, has rich community modding support, despite the developers randomly worsening things every update, and you can get anything from programmable computers, machines and stuff, new "dimensions"⁵ to complex magic systems. Some people have even made quest-driven modpacks like GregTech: New Horizons in which you have to bootstrap your own (very significantly simplified) industrial revolution. I have not actually gotten beyond LV, but apparently finishing it can take several months.

You can also play Minetest, a free and open source game in the style of Minecraft, which I mention for completeness - it's much better from a technical perspective, and free, but also significantly less polished and, for whatever reason, not very fun.

Universe Sandbox

Universe Sandbox is more of a simulator, but it is fun to rewrite the universe in accordance with your every whim. I can arbitrarily redesign the (virtualized) solar system if I'm unhappy with it, which I am.

Video

Dirk Gently('s Holistic Detective Agency)

This is actually two separate series (the British version and the American but also British version) based on Douglas Adams' excellent humour. Both have a detective who uses "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" - the American version is somewhat flashier and weirder, whereas the British version is in some loose sense more realistic and significantly more cynical.

Limitless

Limitless (the movie is also decent) is among the somewhat less bad fictional depictions of superhuman intelligence, but mostly a good comedy. Unfortunately, like many of the series I like, it was killed unreasonably early. Perhaps future AI technology will simply predict the next season.

Pantheon

Pantheon was saved from cancellation and unwatchability (which was apparently done for nonsense tax reasons) by Amazon, though I believe it's still nontrivial to watch.

It is of about three TV series I've seen on the subject of brain uploads, and I think the smartest, mostly because this is a very low bar since most people don't care about this. It frequently talks about how uploads are just data which can be copied, and then forget this every time it would be useful, and it has nigh-meaningless upload fight scenes. There are cool parts though - some day I want my own ominous giant cube of servers in Norway.

Person of Interest

::: epigraph attribution="John Greer" Men have gazed at the stars for millennia, and wondered whether there was a deity up there silently directing their fates. Today, for the first time, they'll be right, and the world will be... an undeniably better place. :::

Person of Interest starts as a mediocre police procedural with the fun conceit that they only get social security numbers and no further details. If you do not feel like sitting through a lot of this for the good parts, you shouldn't watch it. What are the good parts? They actually have some idea of what superintelligence means, cool scenes with this sometimes, and, unlike AI labs in our world (where the machine god will probably be visualized with a few loss curves and ugly CLI output) they have great graphic design.

styropyro

styropyro is the top search result for "crazy laser guy" and does impressive work in what I think is best described as the modern "entertainment engineering" genre. The Discord server contains many smart people

Travelers

Travelers contains a novel (to me, at least) take on time travel. Some of it is somewhat dumb, and the ending is clearly very rushed, but the idea is quite new and it's otherwise well-executed.

Other

Schlock Mercenary

Schlock Mercenary is a very long-running (~20 years, now finished) space opera webcomic which has impressively long-running and increasingly sophisticated plot arcs. The art is somewhat rough at first, but it gets better.

Freefall

Freefall, a hard-science-fiction webcomic. Long-running enough that it has also gone through a wide range of themes. I find it to be consistently surprisingly thoughtful.

Special mentions (i.e. "I haven't gotten around to reading these but they are well-reviewed and sound interesting") to:

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
• Codex Alera by Jim Butcher.
• The Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft.
• Singularity Sky by Charlie Stross.

If you want EPUB versions of the free web serials here for your e-reader, there are tools to generate those, or you can contact me for a copy.

You can suggest other possibly-good stuff in the comments and I may add it to an extra section, and pointlessly complain there or by email if you don't like some of this. Please tell me if any links are dead.

---

1. Not really. ↩︎

2. Think of normal spacetime, said the author/illustrator, as a hypersurface. Each point on that surface had a tangent space associated with it. The tangent space could be considered a linearization of the area around the point, with extraneous information knifed away. Anyone stuck in the region of a threshold winnower’s effect was painfully affected by the linearization.

   That is not at all how that works. Also some parts on cryptography. I can only assume reviewers generally ignored this because they studied English.
   ↩︎

3. I think DeepMind's agents work is more than sufficient to build massively superhuman space pilot/combat automation without further fundamental advances or faster computers. ↩︎

4. I believe the reviewers saying it's novel and exciting have just never read anything vaguely transhumanist ever. ↩︎

5. Using the word "dimension" this way is terrible but we are stuck with it. I might have to retroactively eliminate whoever came up with it. ↩︎