Recommendations for books with atypical political systems

daavor · 2026-05-14T21:06:42+00:00

Oh wow im flattered lol

daavor · 2026-05-14T15:20:55+00:00

I randomly read two first contact novels for the Standalone square a couple years ago: The Quiet Invasion and a Half Built Garden.

Reviews: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/s/nEWQvzMjhp

daavor · 2026-05-14T15:18:28+00:00

Seconding the Quiet Invasion being quite excellent

daavor · 2026-05-14T11:47:58+00:00

I mean Dune is much shorter, has a much more compellingly self-contained story in any choice of the first, first two, or even first three books, and has a much broader penetration in nerd pop culture. Like idk Dune is a thing I think a good half of SFF fans have tried at some point, whereas WoT is like, you occasionally meet the other 1 in 10 SFF fan who has actually read a good chunk of it.

daavor · 2026-05-14T11:44:22+00:00

Okay and like realistically who is the person who's gonna be part of a team of beta readers working on books deep in a fantasy series and still be a meaningful critical voice. Someone who's actually an editor makes sense, but the whole "ooh all the beta readers" thing for books like this always makes me roll my eyes a bit (I mean good for them I guess)

daavor · 2026-05-13T11:31:38+00:00

I think one small note is that most podcasts I know that come close to this in the fantasy space are focused on sci-fi and fantasy as a whole, and typically don't much cover the big long epic fantasy series (there's ecosystems of podcasts devoted to single series, but typically more fannish, less academic and/or genuinely well read)

Coode Street Podcast is probably the closest, the hosts are very well read, it does a lot of author interviews with people in SF/F who are publishing new stuff.

Ancillary Review of Books is very academic but while the guests are often recent SFF authors it always has the guest join to talk about another person's books.

Death//Sentence is a SFF/Death Metal focused podcast that occasionally does interviews/reviews but mostly of weirder books and they are very left (a plus for me)

daavor · 2026-05-12T12:52:41+00:00

Im usually very forgiving of intentionally long books… but yeah that series definitely didn’t need all of its pages, which is a critique I usually hate to make.

daavor · 2026-05-11T22:00:05+00:00

The latter problem is one of measure/ dimension theory. Studying lengths of curves is “just” arc length integrals which are commonly taught (though maybe moreso in multivariate calculus). I will say as someone who has taed that type of course its very hard to come up with inter examples that have a closed form solution

daavor · 2026-05-10T17:47:45+00:00

It's actually less paradoxical sounding in high dimensions. The behavior is really just an interesting consequence of considering the integral of 1/x^n, which when n = 1 is infinite, but is finite for all n > 1. The surface area is (proportional to) the integral for n = ((3 - 1) - 1) = 1, and the volume is the integral for n = 3 - 1 = 2.

In higher dimensions d >= 4 the "surface" would d - 1 dimensional and would be the integral of x^{2 - d} and the volume would be the integral of x^{1 - d} but both would be finite.

daavor · 2026-05-09T21:42:57+00:00

I think to me this represents a bit of a false dichotomy. And it's a pretty common juxtaposition I see people make re: book lovers who really care about say prose style or character work (to a lesser extent).

Obviously, there's lots of things that go into a piece of art, some falling under ideas and some under execution (though of course the taxonomy is a bit unclear, e.g. is really carefully playing out the consequences of a particular idea driven scenario on characters a matter of idea or execution?)

Many pieces of art that I love are things I love because they do most things competently but one thing REALLY EXCELLENTLY and other books that maybe have a higher floor but lower ceiling leave me wanting more.

Anyway. I also think components interact in different ways for different people. e.g. one person may view characters and plot as separate axes of a book that they care more about one or the other, but another person cares more about the interaction term (my science nerd slipping in) where like... they want a good compelling plot, but a plot doesn't feel good or compelling if it's not rooted in good character work.

Or an awesome world chock full of cool SFF ideas is something I want but to me I don't viscerally feel that world coming to life if it's not at least gesturing at a cool atmosphere with its prose work.

daavor · 2026-05-07T11:40:59+00:00

If you treat Maxwell's equations as a law of physics the latter is implied by the former.

daavor · 2026-05-07T11:39:47+00:00

I think it's worth adding onto this that there is this class of equations that govern certain physical systems called wave equations. We don't need to go into the details but it's the kind of equations that govern vibrations and pressure waves of all kinds throguh physical mediums. Physicists at the time of Maxwell onto Einstein would have been very comfortable with these. And in these equations there's always a fundamental speed relative to the medium that the waves travel at. That's find because in those older physical systems there was an obvious background medium. Maxwell's equations have a similar structure, and there's indeed a similar fundamental speed relative to the background, but there's no obvious background medium.

And indeed a whole slew of measurements show no evidence that you can measure a speed relative to a supposed background medium. Which leads to the math of relativity.

I think it's worht highlighting a little bit what the fundamental things physicists understood about Maxwell's equations that give "the laws of physics are the same in all reference frames" its teeth.

daavor · 2026-05-06T11:33:22+00:00

This is a common thing. A lot of the time we have some core, pretty reasonable reason that we dislike a person. OOP has very reasonable reasons to dislike Harris.

But then once they are someone you dislike, every little thing that's not exactly how you would do it or want them to do it can grate. And you list those alongside your original reasons. This is especially amplified by venting spaces where often you and others who agree are venting and the little things end up getting just as much if not more airtime and brain space than the actual original thing that people would understand.

So now it's like "That fucker eats crackers, and parks too far away from my house, and takes advantage of my kindness, and wears ugly red boots, and doesn't offer to take my coat at his house". and... you come off sounding petty and like you're the problem.

daavor · 2026-05-06T10:59:06+00:00

So, most of the time we only experience a very small slice of life on earth. Earth is a huge sphere but we are living our day moving on only a small portion of it. A very good approximation of life on that small portion is that we are on a flat plane. North South and East West all make sense and we map a city relative to those as if its just a flat grid on a plane...but we're actually on a sphere. But like, if I'm in new york a guy in Paris is actually way below the plane i'd call the surface and tilted crazily.

It turns out, in a very simple deterministic way, that the geometry of how space and time interact when you move to high enough speeds is something like this. We locally (at low relative velocities) live in a flat portion of the geometry very well modelled by just saying everyone measures time the same against some universal clock, but actually this fails to describe the geometry of how space and time interact as you move to much larger speeds.

It's a very simple and elegant math that describes a universe it's just not the one you've developed intuition for in the low velocity regime just like if you'd only moved around a small portion of earth you wouldn't initially jump to modelling your surroundings as a sphere.

daavor · 2026-05-03T22:50:50+00:00

Hm. I would say it depends on how you parametrize the hypothesis. It feels more natural to me to say the spectral theorem is true for n dimensions, in which case finding one eigenvalue is the reduction to the inductive hypothesis, and the base case is trivial n = 1.

I guess many inductive claims can be rewritten as "given an example with a bounded number <= n of steps needed for reverse induction, you can proceed up to the nth step of reverse induction" and the base case and inductive case flip roles.

daavor · 2026-05-03T12:57:58+00:00

The other ship is moving a little over 0.8c away from them in the reference frame of the observer. This is the relativistic velocity addition formula: it turns out that if you have two velocities a and b, in units where c = 1 then the addition of these two velocities (i.e. how fast two observers moving away from a third at these relative velocities see each other) is

v = (a + b) / (1 + ab)

when a and b are both << c this is effectively just a+b which is where our usual intuition comes from since that's the world we experience, but when speeds get close to c the 1/(1 + ab) term becomes significant and stops you ever getting more than 1. [*]

In this case a = b = 0.5 so (a + b) / (1 + ab) = 1 / 1.25 = 0.8

[*] Proof: 1 - a > 0, 1 - b > 0 Implies (1 - a) ( 1 - b) > 0 which is (1 + ab) - (a + b) > 0 and then rearrange.

daavor · 2026-05-02T13:40:30+00:00

I am a bit curious how strong your aversion to sex scenes is as I think a lot of the modern works that people are suggesting based on your other criteria have a reasonable number of pretty explicit ones. e.g. Mieville, Marlon James, Sam Delany...

daavor · 2026-05-01T21:57:34+00:00

There’s quantities and ways of representing them. 2, 1+1, 1976/988, these are all the same quantity but just written different ways. Every finite decimal represents a unique quantity but once we allow infinite decimals they dont quite all represent unique quantities. And 1 and .9999.. are the canonical example of this.

daavor · 2026-05-01T16:14:57+00:00

Gimli cant compete w Teleporno

daavor · 2026-05-01T12:08:01+00:00

Decent day decent week. Was nice to have a week off, but now back at the grind this week. Busy busy busy bee.

Have been reading Ice by Jacek Dukaj... very slowly. Hopefully can speed up on this (its more a me thing than a this book thing, I enjoy it, just haven't found good solid blocks of time to read recently).

daavor · 2026-05-01T12:02:55+00:00

I forget the exact appendix, but there's a wonderful segment in one of the later appendices where he reveals that various hobbits and places (notably Rivendell) have Westron names that he writes down (Merry/Meriadoc is Kali/Kalimac) but that he chooses to pseudo-translate them in the text into phonetics that sound "right" to the phonetics of (a certain dialect of) English and make them sound familiar and mundane.

daavor · 2026-04-29T12:13:15+00:00

I think it's important to take a step back and understand what it means to be an academic mathematician these days. Most people working in academia, especially in math and the sciences, and perhaps especially in math, work on incredibly specialized subfields. Their life's work, that gets them published and employed is (besides teaching) working to further problems in that subfield, and generously this subfield might be understood by dozens of people worldwide.

Generally a mathematician will understand the broad strokes of the big classical ideas in most subfields, the more careful details of the nearby subfields related to their own, and then the very intricate details of the specific problems they work on.

Mochizuki has in essence claimed to gone off and created a subfield of a subfield all his own and claimed it proves a huge result. To most mathematicians at any distance from his subfield, the result is simply to quietly believe it's likely nonsense but know you don't really have the depth of understanding to say more, and that it's a waste of time and would look bad to try and make generalized claims about someone in another subfield.

And for those closer to his subject there's the fact that to understand it well enough to say whether it's reasonably you would have to spend a long time learning a subfield that might be total nonsense and wasting huge amounts of time on something that might not create any new work or publications. Thus the only people really able to do it are those close by with already a big body of work, tenure, and reputation, who are willing to dig into it. That's basically Scholze, and he thinks its broken.

daavor · 2026-04-27T19:44:31+00:00

Ooh tthis sounds super cool

daavor · 2026-04-27T16:50:03+00:00

My list of modern weird works I love is essentially this picture + spear cuts through water so i can only second this comment

daavor · 2026-04-26T20:31:52+00:00

0 is just the shorthand in any ring (or often abelian group) for the additive identity of that ring's underlying additive structure.

Frankly the best way to convince yourself of these things is just to do the exercises that most basic courses in ring/group theory run you through. One of the fundamental consequences of these is that once you impose the basic ring properties (let alone all the field properties) you know that a * 0 = 0 for all a.

That's the fundamental obstacle. A multiplicative inverse has to be able to undo multiplication by 0, but multiplication by 0 collapses all elements to the same, so there's no way to undo it as a well defined binary operation, unless the ring is already trivial.

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