Review: Permutation City

Permutation City by Greg Egan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I see a lot of myself in this book.

(Light spoilers follow; I think you can read this review and still enjoy the book, but if you want to go in blind, don't read this review.)

I've never killed a person, but, if I had, I wonder if I would act in a similarly perverse way as one of the characters in this book.

A character ends up breaking their life apart by rigid dividing lines, considering each section to be independent.

Dust theory is horrifying to contemplate, and it seems to be contradicted in reality by the arrow of time, but it otherwise fits so well with many assumptions I have about consciousness.

The story grips me not just because it fascinates me but because it hits upon some of the themes in my own life that nag at me from time to time.

I've never killed a person (that I know of), but, like most people, I have regrets from past lives that still affect me today.

A character ends up breaking their life apart by rigid dividing lines, as though past moments were more like past lives than an earlier self.

Dust theory is fascinating to contemplate, with threads of thoughts merging and dividing in ways that seem to not be contradicted by anything we've observed in reality.

The story grips me.

(The light spoilers above shouldn't scare you away from reading the book, and this review might even make more sense after you read the text.)

I see that the author did a great job with this book. I give it five out of five stars.

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Review: The Erogamer

The Erogamer by Groon the Walker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way.

First, this is porn; if you aren't okay with reading porn, then you won't be able to enjoy this story. Yet I'm asexual, I don't generally read that much pornography, and while many of the porn scenes in The Erogamer did squick me out, I'm still giving the book 4 out of 5 stars overall.

Second, I tagged this book as both hard and soft fantasy. Yes, this seems to be impossible for me to honestly do on its face. But I would maintain that both tags are warranted, and I honestly like the combination. (You'll understand after you read it.)

Third, this is not really a traditionally written book. It's written as a series of posts on a forum, and in between each post you can see other real-world readers like you talking about the story. The author holds polls, including ones where readers can write-in their own options, and then the next part of the story will respect those votes. Apparently this is an actual genre that I don't have much experience with; regardless, I am convinced without even doing more than just skimming others in this genre that The Erogamer may very well be the best written story in its genre. I know it seems that I can't possibly be so sure of this without being more familiar with "questing" stories, and yet here I am, publicly maintaining just that, and feeling assured that if you read The Erogamer too, you may very well come to agree with my assertion.

The Erogamer is about a young protagonist girl who finds herself suddenly as a character in an erotic video game. She's still the same person, in the same house she grew up in, except now she can see a status screen at will, and her quests inevitably push her toward sex scenes where she gains experience and can level up. Being genre-savvy, she tries to munchkin her way through things, except she also has very human flaws that cause her to only stumble through at first. Without spoiling anything major, I will say that when she finally reaches the point where she can really start minmaxing, she suddenly finds that the eroge itself is also genre-savvy, and its goals aren't the same as hers.

I don't want to give away too much here, as the surprises you encounter when reading this story are all worth experiencing this on your own. Suffice it to say that if you have an interest in philosophy, or at least are into rationality (any story that includes a pun on the "ominous agreement theorem" gets bonus points from me), then so long as you're okay with reading porn, you may very well get as into this story as I have.

With that said, I have a couple of spoiler-lite things to say. If you want to go in blind, stop reading this review and just get started on The Erogamer yourself.

The first spoiler-lite thing I should mention is that it may be worthwhile for you to not only read the story posts that the author, Groon the Walker, posts on the thread, but also to read the thread posts written by others. None of them is an alt of the author; that would be against forum rules. Yet the story itself is dependent not just on the author writing the main story, but also the discussion generated by the readers as each new post goes up. At the time of writing this review, the story is not yet finished; ordinarily I would recommend that new readers wait until it is finished. But because this story revolves so much upon audience participation, I actually think it would be more worthwhile to start reading now.

The second spoiler-lite thing I want to mention is something that I'm a little uncomfortable about: trigger-warning-adjacent stuff. Obviously, explicit sex is in the story. As is heavily nonconsensual stuff, torture scenes, body negativity, etc. We all know that trigger warnings should occur first, before anyone reads the text, which the author does: certain sections of the story are actually only visible if you click after reading a trigger warning for the scene within. But I'm writing the following in a spoiler-lite section because I have something _meta_ to say about the trigger warnings.

There's some pretty bad ethical ideas presented in this story. The body negativity is especially bad. And it's not just written so that a character has bad ideas on body positivity, but also the narrator's voice and ways of describing scenes is really bad about body positivity. You might think that this means the author thus has bad views on it, and that the story is promoting something bad. But (and I really don't want to spoil too much here, so I do recommend you read the story before reading this full review) I believe that this is actually a story beat. There are some weird meta-things going on in this story that go pretty deep into metaphysics and other philosophy, and some of those things happen due to the frisson occuring when what the reader (aka YOU) experiences a dissonance with what you're reading (aka the TEXT). This gets deeper when you start to consider that what the author writes depends on what the readers vote on in polls, including write-in options. So YOU affect the TEXT which sometimes disagrees with you in a way that produces frisson.

For example, a character at one point describes a person as getting "more beautiful" and does gives as evidence that her breasts are bigger. At first you may think this is just that character's view, but it doesn't get challenged and then the story itself then completely legitimizes it by having the BOD stat of the video game positively correspond with breast size. Which kind of means that the author himself is legitimizing this point of view, by making the main system of the story they are writing have this be actualized. Yet at the same time, it becomes clear that this is _not_ what the author actually thinks is true, when you later see scenes outside the view of the main protagonist playing the erogame. The body negative view of equating larger breast sizes with having a better body is then shown to not being played straight, even though from the text itself at the time it looks quite a bit like the author is holding these views either explicitly or implicitly.

The same kind of thing happens when you see a character thinking that fat is bad. Followed by other characters thinking fat is bad. Followed by the world of the story itself thinking fat is bad. After reading all this, you the reader might then rush into a conclusion that the author himself is thinking fat is bad, and is actively pushing that view onto his readers. But I suspect that this is more of a modest-proposal-type situation than the author actually espousing those views. The point of the story is that you are being pushed further and further into situations that you get less and less comfortable with until you realize that the earlier things you just went along with in chapter one were also things that you should have felt uncomfortable about, too.

Now I realize that not everyone can handle this kind of fiction. Maybe you can't handle reading about rape. But even if you can, can you handle characters arguing intelligently (and perhaps somewhat convincingly) that some forms of rape are actually good? Maybe you're okay with that, too, but then do you continue to be okay with it when the description turns especially graphic? Maybe you're okay with even that, but then what about when you reach the end of one of the author's posts and see the next post by a reader who apparently viciously enjoyed reading that description? You _will_ reach a point where you feel uncomfortable in this story, especially when you truly realize that the story itself is propelled by the readers voting on what happens next in the story. It is the desires of those reading that cause the story itself to be written as it is. You cannot just scapegoat the author, because YOU are also the author. Even if you don't post in the forum thread, you _could_. Your non-participation makes the votes of those you disagree with even stronger. YOU are a part of this story in a way that you probably won't realize until _after_ you read the story yourself.

This is not to say that the author is blameless; Groon the Walker has cleverly taken a page from how John Marshall dealt with Marbury vs. Madison, granting himself power by negating votes in ways that follow from the rules of the 'questing' genre itself, acting like an evil genie monkey's-paw-style.

And there do seem to be some legitimate blind spots in the ethics of the author that bother me, though they aren't dealbreakers. He uses the word "harem" positively; I'm polyamorous, and I realize that this is legitimately the name of a specific eroge genre, but that word has too many negative connotations in today's non-eroge world to be acceptable to an outside audience (like the non-protagonists' world in The Erogamer). (This is unacceptable in the same way that the n-word isn't acceptable in a story about non-blacks participating in black culture by appropriating that word, but to a much lesser degree.) And while there is a difference between rape-with-physical-force and rape-where-the-rapist-was-using-deceit, that difference might not include a local human-scope-comparable moral difference in the same way that destroying just the Milky Way isn’t locally human-scope-comparably good compared to destroying the Virgo Supercluster. (This will make more sense after having read the text.) These are not modest-proposal-style disconnects. They seem to genuinely be a difference between how I and how Groon view the world.

Finally, the biggest issue I have is one of shame. This is a major negative trait of the protagonist that MUST be resolved by the end of this story or else it will feel unsatisfying to me. In a pretend world where a character can jump higher than physics might otherwise dictate, you can have characters be fat and/or old and yet have no drawbacks. If you can erase the health drawbacks, the speed drawbacks, the endurance drawbacks, etc., then the only reason left to look down on them is to say that they aren't desirable aesthetically. But if an erogame wants variety among hair color, freckles, race, etc., shouldn't it also include variety among body sizes and ages? This is a lesson that the protagonist should be made to learn, and so far I see only the smallest steps toward learning that type of lesson in-story.

However, even if these small flaws don't get resolved, I'll still maintain that this is among the best books I've ever read and it is very likely to be near the best in its own 'questing' genre. If I can enjoy The Fountainhead and Ender's Game despite objectivism and gay-bashing being present within them, then I can enjoy The Erogamer despite it taking a few ethical positions that I'm not okay with in real life.

Some of the math systems aren't that great, and if I were an editor, I'd suggest several changes before recommending its publication, but overall I've found The Erogamer to be an excellent example of philosophical fiction that anyone into philosophy or rationality should at least consider reading. It's the best sex-oriented fiction I've read. It’s the best choose-your-own-adventure style story I’ve ever read. It’s among the best meta-meta-stories I’ve ever read. It’s among the best weird metaphysics stories I’ve ever read. And while I disagree with the philosophies of many of the characters, the author, and even the reader-voters, I truly enjoyed the various philosophies described within. I also appreciated the unexpected ace-representation in an eroge story.

Very well done.

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Review: Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility

Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility by Alicorn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You might at first expect that a rational retelling of Norton Justen's The Phantom Tollbooth would require at least that the reader be familiar with the source material. But just such an unwarranted assumption is exactly the kind of thing that this fantasy tale may cause you to reconsider.

Nyssa is a young girl who doesn't quite grasp what knowledge truly is, but who is already at the level of being able to guess her teachers' passwords. By walking through a portal into the Realm of Possibility, she goes on an adventure Wonderland-style that takes her on a journey full of references and lessons common in the rationality community. Whether it's the robin who blocks her hansom to lecture on why she's really doing what she's doing, or her half-hour friend Pomodoro who yells with a voice like an alarm bell whenever she wastes too much time, there's always something around the corner that will hearken back to the kinds of things that rationalists might find generally amusing.

Yet this is not just a case of the author making a reference-laden story that doesn't actually speak to the plot. You won't find Cory Doctorow-style references that serve just to make the reader feel good if they get the hidden reference. Yet you also won't find deep conceptually important references in the style of James Joyce that are the actual story behind the surface level text. Instead, the references that Alicorn uses in Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility are the story itself. Nyssa learns to like real learning through seeing the examples of each reference used in the story themselves. It's not just a reference to Flow; the Flow literally propels her forward. It's not just a reference to akrasia; the demon Akrasia literally shows her power by making Nyssa overcome her in the story. This is a story full of references, yes, but the references are a part of the story itself, and thus integral to the plot.

I was enamored by Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility, even though I had never read nor even heard of The Phantom Tollbooth before reading. Alicorn has done an exemplary job of bringing the reader into the world she created without needing any foreknowledge of the source text nor even (I think) the rationality concepts that she puts on display throughout the story.

I would heartily recommend this relatively short story to both children and adults, so long as they are receptive to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-style lessons on how (and why) we might think better. This is not the best "go learning!" book I've read (that title still remains with Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity), but it is definitely within the top few. Thank you, Alicorn, for writing such an entertaining and enlightening short story.

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Perspective

It's been nearly two months since I checked into the hospital, and though I've thankfully been able to spend recuperation time at home for the last four weeks, it's been a constant struggle, with home health nurses and nurse practitioners coming thrice each week, having to infuse antibiotics for over an hour every eight hours (and having to prepare 45 minutes in advance for each infusion, meaning I could only get five hours of uninterrupted sleep each night), and the constant reminder of tubes coming out of my body, with staples and stitches in various places.

So it was with great pleasure when I learned that my peripherally inserted central catheter would be removed. I dreamed of finally being able to take showers again (though, as it turns out, continuing to have a nephrostomy tube means that dream hasn't quite matured yet), and the thought of being able to roll over onto my right side at night made me downright giddy. And, if that were not enough to celebrate, I'd finally be able to remove those sutures!

Ah, but the plague that comes in the form of these mysterious sutures has driven me mad for over a month. Supposedly, you only have to cut under a knot and then pull, and they'll come right out. But first one nurse, then two, then a nurse practitioner all claimed to be unable to get it out. They didn't want to pull too hard. They couldn't see the suture properly. They were afraid that my skin had grown over it. The excuses seemed to have no end. So, for the first time since I left the hospital, I traveled to a doctor's office for the sole purpose of removing a single stitch.

This was the surgeon who put in my chest tube in the first place. It was another who stitched me up afterward. I felt so bad for wasting his time when supposedly a nurse was intended to do it. He asked: "They didn't want to pull too hard? Does it hurt?" I said no, so he pulled out a pair of tweezers, grasped the end of the string, and before a single second had passed, my suture was out. "What was wrong with those nurses," he sighed idly.

But it was what happened before this that really caught my attention.

I could hear, through the door, as he took a phone call. It was another doctor, asking for a consult. He was already familiar with the patient: positive for COVID-19, older, currently intubated, but stable. There's a good chance that they could recover -- except when they took an x-ray before removing the intubation tube, the metal object that they had seen previously had moved. "We assumed it was shrapnel embedded in tissue; but now it seems to be loose. If we remove the intubation tube, it could cause severe damage." A slight pause allowed me to hear my heartbeat ever so much more loudly.

"You'll need to inflate the tube slightly, then take it out. We have to just hope for the best."

"But that's too dangerous; couldn't we --"

"We could, but it would be --"

"I know, I know; that would be heroic --"

"No, suicidal. There's not enough capacity with COVID-19. You're thinking he could get better, and yes, he could, but he is DNI/DNR. It would be different if he had long healthy years ahead of him, but he's coming off the intubation so that he can talk to family."

"I can't…"

"Get them to do it. … I'm sorry. I really am very sorry."

"I know."

There's another pause after the phone is hung up. In a few moments, he will enter the patient room I am sitting in, and we will both pretend he didn't just have this conversation. But just then, in that moment, I recognize just how lucky I am.

What Star Trek Means to Me

Some of my favorite memories of my mother are of when we'd sit on the couch together watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I don't generally have a good relationship with my mother. The last time I saw her, she called the police to kick me out of the house, even though we had already previously planned for me to leave the next day. The officer drew a gun on me, nearly shooting me because I didn't know enough not to reach for my shoes before walking outside. (Had my skin been a bit darker, I wonder if I might have died that night.) I ended up having to leave half of my possessions there because I had yet to pack them. Today, when I watch TNG, I remember the better moments; mother and I curled up in blankets, patient with the commercials and engrossed in the story.

Star Trek: Voyager aired just as my life collapsed for the first time. I had been young, thinking my life was destined for great things, when everything stopped as my girlfriend became pregnant. I didn't know how to proceed. We tried to get an abortion; but I lived in Alabama, and the nearest place to do so was in Atlanta, which wouldn't help us. She thought to leave the state, give birth, and then put the child up for adoption, but I felt this was too burdensome for her. We were out of options. I knew nothing to get us out of this. That's when my family suggested that I marry her. I took the suggestion seriously, bought a ring, and asked her to marry me soon after. I dropped out of school, married soon after my 15th birthday, enrolled in college, and tried to make the best of it. I failed. I was too immature for college, dropping out less than a semester later. I was too immature for parenthood, failing to properly care for the infant, doing little better than the motions required to keep her alive. I was too immature for matrimony, putting the majority of the responsibility on my then wife, and relegating my own time to mostly feeling sorry for myself. I remember thinking: This cannot go on. Something must happen that will change this situation. But I was too "honorable" to end the relationship, and too stupid to change my behavior to make it work better. Thankfully, my partner at the time was extremely intelligent and insightful; she was able to see that nothing was working and that life would be better for all three of us if she left. So, in the middle of the night, she did. I was distraught at the time, not realizing the gift she had given all three of us. The narrative of our lives had changed so drastically, but all I could do was wallow. This took the form of watching VHS videos of the first few seasons of Voyager at a friend's house. They left the door open for me. I'd walk inside, put on VOY, and veg out through entire seasons as numerous cats surrounded me. It was all that I could do to get a semblance of reality back into my life.

I had watched DS9 and ENT on my own, without any significant life events occurring at the time. They helped me to enjoy the time. But it wasn't until decades later that I first properly watched the series as a whole. Star Trek: Discovery had been announced, though we didn't know the title yet at te time, and I decided to watch all of Star Trek. It took months. I started with TOS, moved to TAS, then all the original movies, followed by a rewatch of all of TNG. To say that this made me emotional is an understatement. I watched DS9, VOY, and ENT, and then all the TNG movies. By the end, I felt ready for whatever came next. I was working 20 hour weeks throughout this time, allowing me a great deal of time to really consume so much Trek.

DIS was watched with my partner, Katherine, as it aired. It reminded me of curling up on the couch with my mother back when I was a child. DIS was filled with a sense of wonder, but also of familial love for me. I felt loved. I felt secure. I felt happy.

PIC aired as I was sick in the hospital. I would have surgery, then lay helpless in bed for days, only to later realize that the latest episode had aired. I'd wait until 3 am so that the internet wouldn't be as spotty, and then attempt to stream PIC as I lay somewhat in pain. It was a transformative experience.

Other sci-fi series are better, in terms of writing, suspense, etc. Babylon 5 back in the day; the Expanse more recently. But Star Trek still occupies an important space in my heart, giving optimism when it is needed most, and connecting back to a history of my life that I never want to forget.

Thank you, Star Trek, for being such an integral part of my life over the decades.