I can’t leave the topic of Sanderson, I’m afraid, without musing on one of the facts I’ve noticed about him, which is that his fans seem to run to type: almost all men, almost all straight. (I’m sure there’s a contingent of queer, female Sanderson fans, but I have yet to encounter any.) Reading big, chunky fantasy books just seems to be something that a certain kind of male in our society… inclines to? I don’t mean to disparage the fans, among whose ranks (I’ve discovered) many of my friends and relatives are numbered. What’s interesting is that many of these (increasingly middle aged) men seem to be… nice? Earnest? Thoughtful and conscientious, often?

There’s a certain kind of man who consistently reads the paper and is well informed about public events; and I’m pretty sure that almost all of the Sanderson fans fall into that category as well. (Though I know many male, earnest keepers up with the news who would never dream of picking up a Sanderson tome.)

What I can’t figure out is why. Who figured out this segment of the reading public? Was it a conscious market-driven move, or did the readers of large fantasy books self-organize, coalesced in some primordial broth? Who has modeled this reading behavior? Was the ur-text of this kind the Silmarillion? Those Thomas Covenant books? (Which, coincidentally, I was introduced to by a female friend.) Robert Jordan? Terry Goodkind?

I can describe the constellation of traits that often seem to characterize this kind of reader, but I’m still far less certain why this class of books would be irresistible to that particular kind of person.

So I just finished The Well of Ascension, and it cemented my opinion of Brandon Sanderson. (To be clear, I’ve read Mistborn, The Way of Kings, and Warbreaker, so I feel like I’ve done my due diligence.) The last 100 pages (of ~750) or so of Well is compelling: action-packed and memorable, with a bunch of evocative images and scenes that really work, and rank alongside other good bits of genre-era fantasy. But the first 650 pages? Woof. They’re often ponderous and excruciatingly paced, even when Vin is zipping around and we’re meeting rad new monsters like the koloss. How many scenes do we really need with Vin drawn to Zane but unsure about that attraction, or acting like some caricature of a flighty schoolgirl who can’t make up her mind about Elend? How often does Sanderson need to reexplain ferruchemy to the reader when Sazed does something? It’s a shame that Sanderson’s books are often such a slog, because when they get good they’re pretty good! I still think about some of the fight scenes at the end of Mistborn, and The Way of Kings has a few vivid images as well.

Why don’t Sanderson’s books work? In the last year or two, I’ve also been reading a lot of Robin Hobb, and Hobb’s books are superficially similar: they build very, very slowly, and also conclude with high drama. But Hobb’s books work for me, even as they’re also repetitive in parts, and even as some of the relationships grate. (How many scenes do we really need where Fitz unwisely bonds with Nighteyes, or where Fitz and Molly have some juvenile misunderstanding?) The difference, I think, is that Robin Hobb is a much more consistent and confident writer: her books often artfully elaborate and develop their characters, and are liberally sprinkled with vivid, memorable scenes throughout: Kettricken riding out to the hunt of the Forged in Royal Assassin, or Fitz’ encounter with the Old Blood in Assassin’s Quest.

What’s more, Hobb is singular in her ability to craft a conclusion that casts much of what has come before in a stark new light: for much of the Liveship Traders trilogy, I was vaguely annoyed each time Maulkin’s tangle took the stage; by the end of the books, however, you appreciate how these frankly interminable scenes fit into the broader arc of the books– and even, somewhat grandiosely, the sociology of the Bingtown traders. With Sanderson, the middle parts of his books consist of bowl after bowl of lumpy porridge, with gratuitous chunks of lore and vestigial, sometimes grating scenes, etc. Almost all of his books would be significantly better if they were half or even a third of their current size, because it would allow Sanderson to skip all of the things he’s not particularly good at and jump to the fun stuff.¹ By contrast, Hobb’s books might bear some editing, but they’re hardly in need of radical surgery.

To be honest, Sanderson and Hobb are more similar than all this may suggest. But there’s a reason that I’ll probably stop with Sanderson after Hero of Ages but am looking forward to more Hobb at some point.

I was thinking that I want my open table OSE game to have some sort of means of conveying information to the players that gives them a sense of what’s going on with factions in the settings, maybe also gives some sense of the history, but also provides an interface for learning about the local area.

I asked ChatGPT for a few suggestions given my setting, and they were mostly lame and predictable. I had the idea, somehow, that maybe it’s like ARDNEH in Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East novels, where (spoilers) there’s a massive, old, possibly vacuum tube-style computer underground somewhere. In Outposts of the Undying, there’s a large, underground computer that’s maintained and operated by some monk-technologist (Adept Lyserius?) up in the hills who might possibly have done this for too long. The computer was originally used to promulgate imperial rescripts to the people, but was also used to spread information about agricultural practices and tips, information about the weather, etc., etc.

What I didn’t have was a good name for this large computer, but I wanted it to be something like ARDNEH or ENIAC or MISTIC or whatever. So I asked ChatGPT, and ChatGPT gave me some awesome options. (I’m going to paste them all, because I think they’re all pretty great.)

1. AURINEX (Automated Universal Relay and Information Nexus)
2. OMNIRIS (Omnipotent Networked Relay and Information System)
3. VORTEN (Vacuum Operated Relay and Transmission Engine)
4. ELDRIN (Elder Data Relay and Information Node)
5. ZANTHOS (Zero-Point Automated Network Transmission Hub and Operational System)
6. MYTHOS (Magical Yoked Transmission and Heuristic Oracle System)
7. TITANEX (Total Information Transmission and Analysis Nexus)
8. QUINTEX (Quantum Universal Information Network and Transmission Engine)
9. ARGENTH (Automated Relay and Grand Information Node of the Empire)
10. SYLVARIS (Systematic Yoked Luminous Vacuum Automated Relay and Information System)

I could have gone with almost any of these, but AURINEX sounds perfect to me– ChatGPT got it in one.

And in each of the imperially sanctioned towns, the Empire built functionally indestructible screens in the town squares to display the most recent rescripts, remind the people of the impossible power of the Empire, etc. etc. (I can’t decide if the demihuman settlements have AURINEX boards.) Very strict pronouncements were made about the severity with which defacements of AURINEX boards would be punished, but as time has gone on, people post all sorts of flyers and things around the edges of the AURINEX board, so it also serves as a public notice board for issues of more local concern.

I like the idea that there are certain things our monk is obliged to send out with each post (and that may be enforced by the programming of the computer itself), but that there are also little parts of the message where he can add his own commentary (or even code comments that he’s been able to print?). I’ve been messing around with building static sites with Hugo, and I like the idea that you could easily build a website in Hugo that has a cleverly styled archive of AURINEX pronouncements.

Behold the AURINEX!

I’ve been mucking about on blogs since the mid-2000s, egads, but I’ve never been terribly reflective about it. At least since that time, I’ve had other forms of writing that seemed more serious to me: verse, initially, then academic writing, and now some mix of nonfiction and academic writing and maybe a little verse on the side, too. Blogging has, at times, seemed to be a place for my trifles: a place to make a few notes about my current idle preoccupations, whether that might be pop music, or music videos, or random little thoughts about technology and programming, or book reviews (thanks, O’Reilly, for all reviewer ebooks!), or whatever.

As I get older, and belatedly realize the necessity of being a bit more focused and disciplined about my various disparate projects, I wonder whether a blog might not be a good place to put all of the really good ideas that I don’t have time to follow up on in the moment. When my life was more single-minded, it was easy (or easier, despite my perennial scatteredness) to have a couple of places where I kept track of the projects that were the most important. I never managed to get through all of the reading, or all of the other various notes to myself, but even getting through some appreciable fraction was often enough to count for something. As my life has become more varied, a single location where I can set down some reasonably coherent thoughts about various projects seems like a good idea. The membra disiecta of my various notes will probably always be a bit of a wilderness, but I can live with that.

Because the reality is that I do reread my own blog posts, as self-indulgent as it feels to admit. I give most of my posts a read through before they go live, and so the prose is often less execrable than some of my other writings; and so a blog might be one of the few places I have that I will almost certainly return to: old notebooks and note files often get filed away and forgotten, but I do reread old blog posts.

We just finished up our holiday watch of the Hogfather TV series, and I found the whole thing pretty charming. The effects can be janky, the acting can be a little hit or miss, somehow I always find the Unseen University deadly unfunny, but I liked it all quite a lot. It’s hard not to like any Pratchett with Death, and Susan is always a nice addition as well (and Michelle Dockery seems the empirically correct for the part).

I do love the warped Christmas aspect of it, too– perhaps even more so than Futurama’s Xmas, which is usually my go-to for that sort of thing.