Tag: reading

Architecture of Encounter – Indexing with Claude AI

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5–7 minutes

Dear diary…

I’m not ashamed to say that AI is a significant part of my publishing workflow. In my latest project, The Architecture of Encounter, I’ve added indexing to the roles it serves. Other roles were prepping the index and footnotes, as I shared recently.

I expect the book to be available by next week. Time will tell.

I’ve included the full index below for reference. I’ve also included the title and copyright pages and other back matter.

Architecture of Encounter – v1.0 – IndexDownload

What will a visitor do with a bookless index? I don’t know, but sharing is caring in my book. For the interested, you can get a sense of the contents. I’ll be sharing more details over the coming weeks – and beyond, I’m sure.

Earlier, I shared that Claude had offered index candidates. I started executing on that list by indexing the first few terms. It took me about an hour to do these, searching for each term and documenting the page number and context – around 250 pages. The book itself is 292 – 6″ x 9″ pages, but more than 50 of these are appendices, and others are front matter. Still.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic. (Another one that misses some points but make others. Fair enough.)

Then it dawned on me to ask Claude to help me with the index. Claude interpreted ‘help’ by spitting out the entire index, formatted and organised. If the book were formatted in 8½” x 11″ Letter size, I could have appended it as-is, but I still had to pour the output into the InDesign template I was composing through and make it look like it was part of the same manuscript, but that took minutes, not days of hours. Appendix E.

Given that I also rely heavily on novel concepts and specifically-defined terms – language insufficiency notwithstanding – I felt that a glossary would be useful. I tasked Claude with this, too. Again, it output a fully-formed list.

I noticed that a couple of terms I wanted defined were absent, so I fed the list into ChatGPT and asked it to consider these and let me know, given the manuscript, what other terms might be absent. It agreed with the two I wanted and suggested three more. It also pointed out an error Claude had made in counting. It also provided the definitions for the glossary entries, so I poured Claude’s output into InDesign. Appendix D.

AI is also a helper. For example, I wanted my index to flow into 2 columns. I’ve done this before. In the old days, I’d have scanned the menus (Adobe products are infamous for convoluted, nested menus), read the manual, and/or Googled for the answer – perhaps queried YouTube, a great resource for such things. Now, I ask AI. In this case, I asked ChatGPT. To be honest, it’s a little verbose, where ‘it’s option X under Y menu’ would suffice, but I ignore the banter.

If you need to know…

If the index is already placed in a text frame

  1. Select the text frame containing the index.
  2. Go to Object → Text Frame Options.
  3. Set the Number of Columns you want, usually 2 for a 6×9 book, sometimes 3 if the type is small and the entries are short.
  4. Adjust the Gutter spacing between columns.
  5. Click OK.

Criticise AI all you want, but having access to in-built assistance 24/7 is a huge time-saving benefit.

Do I still use Google and YouTube? Yes, often.

Speaking of Google, I was searching for a cover image, and I discovered something I need for the fiction title I paused in September to focus on nonfiction. Sidenotes. Perhaps I’ll employ a similar mechanism.

The nonfiction book I am writing is somewhat epistolary, and I want to place internal dialogue as marginalia, employing a scripted font face. I am even considering a ‘deluxe’ version that renders this content in colour, but that’s an extra expense, first for the colour, then the full-page bleed, and perhaps thicker paper stock. Likely hardbound, reserving the paperback for a lower price point.

So, what’s next?

I finished both paperback and hardcover designs today.

I still need to review the index for hallucinated errors. This will still take less time than manually constructing it.

On the copyright page, there are a few classifiers. There are ISBNs for each format and a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN). These are done, as you can see, but the ISBN system in the United States is antiquated. It looks like it’s a museum piece from the mid-1990s. In fact, I believe I first accessed it around 2000 or 2001, when I published my first book – before AI, before print on demand (POD).

A bit of nostalgia. The WWW, the internet as most people know it, was made public around 1994. Google hit it in 1998. Web 1.0. Facebook blighted the world around 2004, though less invasively at the start. I digress. Technology is a mixed bag.

Returning to ISBNs… These are managed in a system built circa 1997. It seems it is still managed with a host of cron jobs, so not much is processed in real time unless it’s a trivial record entry.

Each ISBN references a title and a format, as well as other odds and ends. In my case, I also use an imprint to separate my fiction from nonfiction. I started Microglyphics – tiny writing– in the mid-90s. When I published other authors, I used this name. I also used it for some of my fiction writing. I decided to create a Philosophics Press imprint for my philosophy and adjacent work.

It turns out that the printer needs to ensure that a book’s title and ISBN match the imprint. The system default is the company name, but I changed it to my imprint. This causes a workflow event on their end. Until it propagates, it doesn’t match, and the printer won’t allow the print run.

I’m writing this blog entry as I wait. I’m not sure if it’s automated – I’d like to assume it is – or if a human has to do something. AI might help. Just saying.

EDIT: The imprint has now been updated to Philosophics Press, but it still doesn’t work at the printer. Evidently, it can take up to 5 days for the data to propagate. I’m not sure who owns the fail on this one? Is the printer waiting for a data push? Can’t they pull the data? They seem to be live from my perspective. Is there an API, or is it truly old-school?

Whilst I’m here wittering on, WordPress have deprecated the little widget below – the one with my (old) thumbnail picture and ‘written by’ tag. I adopted it last year, but it’s been killed off. I’ve been copying the object from old posts, but I’ll probably switch to whatever they’ve replaced it with. I wasn’t keen on the options I’ve seen so far. First-world problems, I suppose.

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Written by Bry Willis

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On Footnotes

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
1–2 minutes

Two consecutive posts on writing. What gives?

As a writer, I have a kind of workflow in mind. It differs for fiction and nonfiction, though there are similarities. The main differences are indexes, references, and footnotes. I thought I was nearly finished with my latest book.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I rendered the first couple of chapters in ElevenLabs so I could listen to the text. It helps me assess pacing, continuity, and the like. It also gives me one more thing to fix, since the digital voices occasionally pronounce things differently from the way I’d prefer. Usually, choosing a voice that sounds roughly like Standard Southern British English helps, though not always. In any case, I survive.

While listening and following along in the manuscript, I discovered that I still haven’t fully footnoted the book.

When I write, I tend to jot down sources and references as I go, but I leave the footnoting until the final revision. There is little point in spending time drafting footnotes for material that may not survive the cut. So here I am, drafting footnotes.

I am of two minds about footnotes and citations, especially in academic work. On the one hand, they can feel performative, a way of signalling that one has incorporated so-and-so, a kind of name-dropping appeal to authority. As a heterodox writer, this is risky anyway, because I am liable to cite one of the approved villains. God forbid a Nietzsche, a Heidegger, or a Foucault. Analytic philosophers, in my experience, can be remarkably thin-skinned.

On the other hand, I do want to acknowledge those whose ideas I have borrowed. Even that, of course, is also a signal. Perhaps it all comes down to intent. As I mean it, I want to leave breadcrumbs for anyone who feels inclined to follow them back to the source.

I’ll let you decide where I’ve landed.

I’ve procrastinated long enough. Time to get back into the word mine.

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Bry Willis

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Encounter with Carlo Rovelli

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2–3 minutes

I’m a philosopher of language, which sometimes veers off the reservation into philosophies of science and even metaphilosophy, but I am not a physicist. I don’t pretend to be. I do try to remain abreast of the goings-on in physics and science just because. Still, I view most affairs first through a philosophical lens.

I watch a decent amount of science videos on YouTube, and I’ve been following Rovelli for years, but I hadn’t engaged with his work directly until I was researching for my current book, The Architect of Encounter. First, I read The Order of Time, followed by Reality Is Not What It Seems.

Rovelli published these books around 2017, but I am only reading them now. We are travelling in the same neighbourhood, but we occupy different residences and have different orientations.

Surveying the marketplace, quite a few physicists and science educators make some of the same points I and Rovelli make. In fact, these things appear to occur as trends. When I wanted to write about agency and free will over five years ago, I noticed a slew of books on the topics, and I had nothing more to add, so I shelved the idea.

In this case, the trend appears to have been between 2017 and 2018. I’m sure this is where I absorbed some of my knowledge, opinions, and grammar, but my thesis goes further and comes from a different perspective, so I feel this manuscript is worth publishing.

Getting back to Rovelli, his books are very well written – very approachable and light on the academics. I hope mine lands somewhere in the middle. As I continue to write my book, I will lean on Rovelli for the perspective on quantum theory. If he’s wrong or it’s wrong, then we fall together. That’s what happens when you borrow a foundational commitment. It’s a risk I am willing to take.

As much as I want to share more of what I am working on, it turns out I still need to work on it if I want to complete it. I am aiming for April this year, if not sooner. At least I’ve got some of the administrative stuff out of the way. Here’s a quick glimpse, title and copyright pages.

Architecture of Encounter Title-CopyrightDownload
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Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis

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Bonus 2025 Post + Books

Posted in ontology, updateTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

2025 has been a good year for this blog. I’ve crossed the 1,000-post mark, and this year it has had over 30,000 page views – best year ever. This month was the best month ever, and 1st December was the most popular day ever. That’s a lot of ‘evers’.

I shared the remainder of this post on my Ridley Park fiction blog – same reader, same books, same opinion. Any new content added below is in red.

I genuinely loathe top X lists, so let us indulge in some self-loathing. I finished these books in 2026. As you can see, they cross genres, consist of fiction and non-fiction, and don’t even share temporal space. I admit that I’m a diverse reader and, ostensibly, writer. Instead of just the top 5. I’ll shoot for the top and bottom 5 to capture my anti-recommendations. Within categories are alphabetical.

Fiction

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – A slow reveal about identity, but worth the wait.

This was very philosophical and psychological. Nothing appeared to happen until chapter 7, as I recall. I felt like I was just eavesdropping on some school chums, which I was. Then came the big reveal.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Classic unreliable narrator.

Again, philosophical, psychological. I liked it.

There Is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM (AKA Sam Hughes) – Points for daring to be different and hitting the landing.

This, I read because I was attracted to the premise of memory as it might affect language. It touched on this a tad, but it was mostly about memory, anti-memory, and constructed selves. How can one experience a contiguous, diachronic self with memory gaps? It never quite got that deep, that on occasion it did, as far as I recall.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh – Scottish drugs culture and bonding mates narrative.

This is an age-old cult classic – much better than the already excellent films. Fills in what the film cut for its medium. I read several other Welsh books. Filth was an honourable mention, which I also made connexions to Antimemetics, above.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin – In the league of 1984 and Brave New World, but without the acclaim.

This flagged a tad at the end, but it was prescient and released in 1922, decades before 1984 and Brave New World. Worth the read.

Nonfiction

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher – Explains why most problems are social, not personal or psychological. Follows Erich Fromm’s Sane Society, which I also read in 2025 and liked, but it fell into the ‘lost the trail’ territory at some point, so it fell off the list.

Moral Politics by George Lakoff

Evidently, I forgot to explain myself in my prior post. I refer to this book and its trade counterpart, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which is more of a political polemic, but still worth the read. It’s also shorter. This is about Moral politics – duh! – but it’s about moral language. It was a precursor to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion or Kurt Gray’s Outraged! I found Haidt’s work interesting but reductive; I found Gray’s work merely reductive.

This said, Lakoff and Haidt were the vector through which I came upon my language ontology theory that further confounds language insufficiency. To be sure, Haidt was an unnecessary point, but it did emphasise it. Haidt’s frameworks also give me something to riff on.

Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis – Explains why Capitalism is already dead on arrival.

Nothing much to add here. Technofeudalism is economic fare, albeit with philosophical implications. I enjoyed it. Yanis is also an interesting speaker.

NB: Some of the other books had great pieces of content, but failed as books. They may have been better as essays or blog posts. They didn’t have enough material for a full book. The Second Sex had enough for a book, but then Beauvoir poured in enough for two books. She should have quit whilst she was ahead.

Image: Books I read in 2025 on Goodreads.
Full disclosure: I don’t always record my reading on Goodreads, but I try.

Bottom of the Barrel

Crash by J.G. Ballard – Hard no. I also didn’t like High-rise, but it was marginally better, and I didn’t want to count an author twice.

Nah. I felt he was trying to hard for shock value. It didn’t shock, but it put me off. At least High-rise represented an absurd cultural microcosm. I just wanted the story to be over. Luckily, I read both of these sequentially whilst on holiday, so I wasn’t looking to ingest anything serious.

Neuromancer by William Gibson – I don’t tend to like SciFi. This is a classic. Maybe it read differently back in the day. Didn’t age well.

Nexus by Yuval Harari – Drivel. My mates goaded me into reading this. I liked Sapiens. He’s gone downhill since then. He’s a historian, not a futurist.

Outraged! by Kurt Gray – Very reductionist view of moral harm, following the footsteps of George Lakoff and Jonathan Haidt.

See comments above. ☝️

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord – A cautionary tale on why writing a book on LSD may not be a recipe for success.

Honourable Mention

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer was also good, but my cutoff was at 5. Sorry, Jeff.

I did like this, and it was much better than the Natalie Portman film adaptation. This is the first book in a trilogy. I absolutely hated the second instalment. The third was not as good as the first, but it tried to get back on track from the derailment of the second. As I wrote in public reviews, the second book could have been a prologue chapter to the third book with all of the relevant information I cared about. You could skip the second story with almost no material effect on the story or character arcs.

The Burnout Society – Byung-Chul Han

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1–2 minutes

🤔 If liberation now feels indistinguishable from exhaustion, what exactly have we been freed from?

A digital MTG trading card titled “Achievement Token – Condition.” The image shows a human figure shaped like an hourglass, sand flowing through its body as if time and self are draining away. The design echoes the colours of oxidised red and muted graphite, symbolising burnout and the illusion of productivity within modern capitalist culture.
Image: Exhaustion means you’re working hard, and working hard means you’re good.

Han’s slender essay reads like a diagnosis of our psychic economy. The disciplinary society of ‘thou shalt’ has dissolved into the achievement society of ‘yes, I can’. We no longer rebel against authority; we internalise it, polishing our exhaustion until it gleams like ambition. Productivity replaces purpose. Rest becomes guilt. The subject, stripped of exterior constraint, now self-flagellates in the name of freedom.

We exploit ourselves and think we are free.

What Han captures is not mere fatigue but a civilisational pathology: the compulsion to optimise the self as though it were capital. Burnout is not the collapse of will but the logical conclusion of unlimited permission.

If liberation now feels indistinguishable from exhaustion, what exactly have we been freed from?

From the series Readings in Late Exhaustion – a Philosophics reflection on the maladies of modernity.

About the Series — Readings in Late Exhaustion

These cards belong to Readings in Late Exhaustion, a Philosophics project tracing the psychic and cultural costs of late capitalism.

Each card interprets a contemporary work of critical theory through the language of collectable gameplay, where identity, labour, and value become quantified acts.

The format itself is the critique: a system of self-expenditure disguised as achievement, reflection rendered as performance.

Edition: RLE / LCAP — Philosophics Press

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Meditations On Nothing: Notes Before Existence

Posted in identity, nature, perception, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Meditations on Nothing has finally been published after an administrative glitch.

The core of this book consists of six “books” of aphorisms, each book comprising a single page, totalling 24 in all.

Why only 24 pages?

Couldn’t this have been a blog post? An email?

Fair enough, and yes, of course it could have. It could have been six – three sheets, front and back – but I wanted to share in the tradition of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. The content is not similar, but the format is shared.

Honestly, I printed a draft copy for myself on A4 paper, folded it to A5, and stapled it at the spine with a long stapler – sans a fancy cover. Perhaps, I’ll share the source PDF in future.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I was inspired by the aphorisms of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Pascale, Debord, and others. To be fair, I disliked Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, but I was still inspired by it for the two or three things I got from it – each of which slips my mind as I write this.

Why a Companion Guide?

Twenty-four pages – really, only six that matter; why would someone want that?

You got me there, too. No, so Notes Before Existence is not a casual read. It’s logical and coherent, but it’s not standard exposition. It’s meant as a thinking tool. Also, the ideas are supported by those who came before me – Newton’s ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ quip pertains.

The main body of the book comprises the same six books as Notes Before Existence, each printed on its own verso, opposite a recto page for personal annotation.

Whilst Meditations on Nothing: A Critical Companion does provide supporting context for Notes Before Existence, it doesn’t fully break it down. I expect to provide this context in a more comprehensive volume, both online and offline, primarily on this platform and on YouTube.

I Wonder what’s Next?

I’m putting the final touches on my next project. The Illusion of Light: Thinking after the Enlightenment is a sort of capstone to my Anti-Enlightenment Project. It provides context around this project as well as details about the underlying essays available on Zenodo at no cost.

And so it goes…

What I really came here for is to share the reason this book was hung up in queue. On the surface, everything checked. I uploaded the source files, entered the required metadata, and chose appropriate price points – which, for the record, is $4.99 USD for Notes*.

Other Prices as of 16/10/25

  • UK: £3.99
  • EU: €4.99 (except Belgium, €4.39)
  • Canada: $6.99 (CAD)
  • Australia: $10.99
  • Japan: ¥1000

As it turns out, this publishing business is data-driven, and some of the systems and validation rules, let’s say, are remnants of the 1970s. Some companies are better than others, but in the US, Bowker controls the ISBN numbers. The US is one – if not the only – of the countries to charge for these identifiers, because: Capitalism. Unfortunately, the printers need to access Bowker’s antiquated system to validate the pairing of the ISBN and the publishing organisation.

I publish under Microglyphics, an entity through which I published my first book in 2001. In 2025, I started using Philosophics Press as an imprint for philosophy materials. This created a snag. I had entered Philosophics Press, but it was expecting Microglyphics – even though I’d used Philosophics Press previously. Unfortunately, the error was not thrown on the page where this information had been entered and validated – that was passed – but on the last page, I was informed that something was wrong on that page.

In any case, after a couple of days of trying, I updated the Bowker record (just to be sure) and eventually entered Microglyphics. Voilà. It worked.

Since then, I’ve also secured a second printer and distributor, IngramSpark, so I’m interested to discover what they’re like.

#PSA

Temporal Ghosts and Rational Spectres: An Anti-Enlightenment Collection

Posted in economics, equality, modernism, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, property, psychology, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 11 Comments

The Enlightenment still walks among us. Or rather, it lingers like a spectre – insisting it is alive, rational, and universal, while we, its inheritors, know full well it is a ghost. The project I’ve begun – call it my anti-Enlightenment collection – is about tracing these hauntings. Not the friendly ghosts of warm memory, but the structural ones: rationality unmoored, democracy designed to fail, presentism enthroned as law.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the essay underlying this post.

This collection began with Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail, which anatomised the Enlightenment’s misplaced faith in rational self-governance. The rational individual, Enlightenment’s poster child, turned out to be less a citizen than a figment – a ghost conjured to make democracy look inevitable.

It continues now with Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present, which dissects the structural bias of presentism – our systemic privileging of the living over the unborn. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bacon, Smith, Bentham, Montesquieu: each laid bricks in an architecture that secured sovereignty for now while exiling the future into silence. Debts accumulate, climate collapses, nuclear waste seeps forward through time. The unborn never consented, yet institutions treat their silence as assent.

Why a Collection?

Because ghosts travel in packs. One essay exposes Enlightenment’s hollow promises of reason; another its structural bias toward immediacy. The next will follow a different haunting, but always the same theme: Enlightenment’s bright lantern casts a shadow it refuses to see. The collection is less about reconstruction than exorcism – or at least acknowledgment that we live in a haunted house.

Ghost by Ghost

  • Rational Ghosts – Enlightenment democracy promised rational citizens and self-correcting systems. What it delivered instead was structural irrationality: Condorcet’s paradox, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and a politics rigged to stumble over its own claims of reason.
  • Temporal Ghosts – The unborn are disenfranchised by design. The Enlightenment’s “living contract” fossilised presentism as law, leaving future generations to inherit debts, ecological ruin, and technological lock-in.

There may be more hauntings to come – economic ghosts, epistemic ghosts, technological ghosts. But like all spectres, they may fade when the season changes. The calendar suggests they’ll linger through Día de Muertos and Hallowe’en; after that, who knows whether they’ll still materialise on the page.

Sustenance Novella free on Kindle

Posted in fiction, identity, language, philosophy, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

On 7–8 September 2025, the Kindle version of my Ridley Park novella Sustenance will be available free to everyone on Amazon. (It’s always free if you’re a KindleUnlimited member, but these two days open it up to all readers.)

👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9PTK9N2

So what is Sustenance?

It’s a novella that begins with the dust and grit of rural Iowa – soybean fields, rusted trucks, a small town where everyone knows your name (and your secrets). At first glance, it reads like plainspoken realism, narrated by a local mechanic who insists he’s just a “regular guy.” But then the ground literally shifts. A crash. Figures glimpsed by firelight in the woods. Naked, violet-skinned beings who don’t laugh, don’t sleep, don’t even breathe.

What follows is not your usual alien-invasion story. It’s quieter, stranger, and more unsettling. The encounters with the visitors aren’t about lasers or spaceships – they’re about language, culture, and the limits of human understanding. What happens when concepts like property, law, or even woman and man don’t translate? What does it mean when intimacy itself becomes a site of misunderstanding?

Sustenance is for readers who:

  • Gravitate toward literary fiction with a speculative edge rather than straight genre beats
  • Appreciate the mix of the banal and the uncanny – the smell of corn dust giving way to the shock of alien otherness
  • Are interested in themes of language, power, misunderstanding, and human self-deception
  • Enjoy writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, or Denis Johnson – voices that blur realism, philosophy, and estrangement

This isn’t a story that offers tidy answers. It lingers, provokes, and resists easy moral closure. Think of it less as a sci-fi romp and more as a philosophical fable wrapped in small-town dust and cicada-song.

This version of the book is available in these Kindle storefronts:
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India

For more details, visit the Sustenance page.

📚 Grab your free Kindle copy on 7–8 September 2025

Why a Free Copy of Sustenance?

I made this Kindle version available for free to get some reviews. This promotion is all or nothing, so take advantage of the opportunity. If you want to leave a review, please do.

On Ishiguro, Cioran, and Whatever I Think I’m Doing

Posted in fiction, identity, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Sora-generated image of Emil Cioran and Kazuo Ishiguro reading a generic book together

Having just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, I’ve now cracked open my first taste of Cioran—History and Utopia. You might reasonably ask why. Why these two? And what, if anything, do they have in common? Better yet—what do the three of us have in common?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Recently, I finished writing a novella titled Propensity (currently gathering metaphorical dust on the release runway). Out of curiosity—or narcissism—I fed it to AI and asked whose style it resembled. Among the usual suspects were two names I hadn’t yet read: Ishiguro and Cioran. I’d read the others and understood the links. These two, though, were unknown quantities. So I gave them a go.

Ishiguro is perhaps best known for The Remains of the Day, which, like Never Let Me Go, got the Hollywood treatment. I chose the latter, arbitrarily. I even asked ChatGPT to compare both books with their cinematic counterparts. The AI was less than charitable, describing Hollywood’s adaptations as bastardised and bowdlerised—flattened into tidy narratives for American palates too dim to digest ambiguity. On this, we agree.

What struck me about Never Let Me Go was its richly textured mundanity. That’s apparently where AI saw the resemblance to Propensity. I’m not here to write a book report—partly because I detest spoilers, and partly because summaries miss the point. It took about seven chapters before anything ‘happened’, and then it kept happening. What had at first seemed like a neurotic, wandering narrative from the maddeningly passive Kathy H. suddenly hooked me. The reveals began to unfold. It’s a book that resists retelling. It demands firsthand experience. A vibe. A tone. A slow, aching dread.

Which brings me neatly to Cioran.

History and Utopia is a collection of essays penned in French (not his mother tongue, but you’d never guess it) while Cioran was holed up in postwar Paris. I opted for the English translation—unapologetically—and was instantly drawn in. His prose? Electric. His wit? Acidic. If Ishiguro was a comparison of style, then Cioran was one of spirit. Snark, pessimism, fatalistic shrugs toward civilisation—finally, someone speaking my language.

Unlike the cardboard cut-outs of Cold War polemics we get from most Western writers of the era, Cioran’s take is layered, uncomfortably self-aware, and written by someone who actually fled political chaos. There’s no naïve idealism here, no facile hero-villain binaries. Just a deeply weary intellect peering into the abyss and refusing to blink. It’s not just what he says, but the tone—the curled-lip sneer at utopian pretensions and historical self-delusions. If I earned even a drop of that comparison, I’ll take it.

Both Ishiguro and Cioran delivered what I didn’t know I needed: the reminder that some writers aren’t there to tell you a story. They’re there to infect you with an atmosphere. An idea. A quiet existential panic you can’t shake.

I’ve gotten what I came for from these two, though I suspect I’ll be returning, especially to Cioran. Philosophically, he’s my kind of bastard. I doubt this’ll be my last post on his work.

Reading Science Fiction

Posted in fiction, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve got a confession to make: Science Fiction as a genre doesn’t resonate with me. Neither does Fantasy. I enjoy some fiction, but it seems that it’s primarily Literary Fiction – old-school classics like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Kafka, Barthelme, and the like. Mostly, I prefer non-fiction.

I’ve just finished reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, having read The Peripheral at the end of last year. To be fair, someone recommended Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which is in the same genre – cyberpunk. I’d been advised that Snow Crash is better written, but I thought it might be best to start at the start of that genre.

[EDIT: After writing this post, I read the first two chapters of Snow Crash. The opening scenes of samurai swords had me thinking I needed to give up on this genre once and for all. But no, this was simple character building—fingers crossed. It quickly—and I do mean quickly—changed into a rapid montage dripping with ironic satire. I was in my element. I’ll take sci-fi wrapped in irony. It’s like stuffing a pill in cheese to trick your pet into taking medicine. I don’t want to jinx it, and I don’t know how Stephenson can control the pacing. I’ll let it unfold, and I hope it lands in a happy place. Now, I feel obliged to end with a motivational message on not giving up.]

These writers have good ideas. It often sounds appealing when someone tells me the plot summary, but the details bore me to tears. When I read reviews of these books, I frequently hear how immersive they are, but to me, they are cluttered and chockablock with minutiae. I find myself prodding, “Just get to the point.” But there has to be more than this. Short stories may fare better. I liked Ursula K LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, but that was more related to its philosophical, anti-utilitarian perspective rather than the story.

It’s not as if Dostoyevsky doesn’t circumlocute and pontificate, but it’s somehow different. I want to like it. I want to read it – first-hand, not just a summary, so I can feel that I’ve engaged with the material.

Over the years, I’ve been consoled by fans of the genre, who say, “I understand. What you need to read is” [fill in the blank]. I read Ender’s Game on this advice.

To be fair, Sci-Fi movies and television don’t resonate with me either. Star Wars? Nope. Star Trek? Nope. Firefly. No, again.

What people find amazing, I find trite. Often, there is some embedded Modernist morality that some view as profound. I roll my eyes. I cringe thinking of old Star Trek episodes about what makes humans so special.

I don’t tend to find movies or television very interesting in general. I’ve never owned a television. My partners always do. “But you watch streaming content,” you say, and you’d be correct. But I watch it on my own time and take a chance, if only to remain connected to contemporary trends.

My last engagement was Arcane on Netflix. I found Season One well done and entertaining, but I’m not sure Anime qualifies as Sci-Fi. I caught The Peripheral on Amazon a couple of months ago, which led me to the book, but they turned out to be different stories, though they were set in the same universe with (generally) the same characters.