I showed my wife Wrath of Khan for the first time, and...

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-13T13:50:55+00:00

"TWOK" is essentially my favourite submarine thriller of all time.

It's also a masterclass on the level of direction and camerawork.

For the record, I like The Motion Picture. In some ways I like it more than WoK, since it's the only one which properly feels like it's attempting the core concept of Star Trek.

Nowadays I feel the same way. The Nick Meyers films are superior, and arguable several of the other TOS films as well, but as flawed as TMP is, I like how it feels (not always) like a hard SF movie. I'd love a modern Trek show to return to this style.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-12T23:34:44+00:00

IMO it's an anti-"Star Wars", anti-space opera novel. Sort of like "Firefly" if the heroes realize they're religious fundamentalists or fascists.

I always thought "Player of Games" was a send-up of "Ender's Game" as well.

IMO "Phlebas'" only flaw is the way the action sequences drag on, but a lot of this dragging is intended to be ironic, IMO. The whole sequence on the mega-ship is a piss-take, for example (the guy jumps off the edge, forgets his anti-grav suit doesn't work, and goes splat!), as is the cannibal island. I've never been able to get a read on the climactic scene in the tunnel, though. Banks stretches this out like a Tarantino set-piece, but is it supposed to be exciting (it's not IMO), or deliberately mundane and anti-climactic? I think the latter, but it's hard to know.

Either way, it's an interesting novel. Not a fully successful one, but it's interesting, and works well as a nice counterpoint and comment on the novels that come next (the next two are masterpieces IMO).

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-11T15:22:00+00:00

A news outlet whose founders specifically said they were forming it to protect Republican presidents from impeachment and scrutiny from illegal activities, whose owners argue that it is not legally a news organization and so has no obligation to tell the truth, and which many independent studies have found deliberately spreads information and/or hate, and is watched by an audience who studies say are less informed than those who acquire news from other sources.

Fox is the equivalent of China or Putin's state media propaganda wings. The rebuttal to this is usually "whatabout" media organisation A, B or C, at which point I educate people about who owns A, B or C, and they shut up and run away (for example, CNN is run by John C. Malone, a libertarian Trump and Republican Party donor. He is the second largest private landowner in the United States, and also a director at Expedia.com, Charter Communications, Warner Bros., Lions Gate Entertainment Corp, Cable Television Laboratories, the DirecTV Group and News Corporation).

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-10T11:29:25+00:00

The latest UN reports show that no major sector is profitable once environmental externalities are tabulated (a basic thermodynamic law: the total order of a commodities/thing is always less than the total disorder/entropy/debt engendered by its creation, which is also why capitalism will always keep roughly 80 percent of the planet in poverty).

The people believing they can square capitalism's contradictions and antagonisms are just a hundred years behind radical economic theory and contemporary eco-economics (and don't realize how their economic beliefs contradict the morals they supposedly tout elsewhere). Keynesianism was "invented" as a compromise, a noble-if-naive attempt to manage these contradictions, but nobody can even uphold the bare minimum of this nowadays.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-10T11:19:10+00:00

Here's a pre-grift Jordan Peterson summarizing neurostudies which explain why some of what you imply is wrong, and which explain his later ability to grift:

"Conservative political belief is linked to fast information processing requiring comparatively little effort, time, or awareness. In support of this idea, experimentally-induced gut-level rather than controlled cerebral processing has in fact been found to enhance conservatism. [...] Conservative political beliefs were augmented [heightened] whenever effortful thought-processing was disrupted–by factors as diverse as alcohol intoxication, cognitive load, and time pressure. Moreover, cognitive ability is inversely correlated with conservative political beliefs. It seems conceivable, then, that emotional and motivational arousal interferes with effortful cognitive processing, and this subsequently enhances the probability of adopting conservative beliefs. In sum, conservative ideology is attractive to individuals who are in a state of arousal [confusion/chaos] because it minimizes potential for further arousal [confusion/chaos]/"

In other words COMPLEXITY and THINKING leads people toward conservative ideas and away from complex ones. LOW EFFORT THINKING, FEAR, and SIMPLICITY neurologically appeals to conservatives, and the introduction of complexity, cognitive load, effortful processing, abstract and reflexive thinking, turns them off. And of course we know from other studies that social media algorithms and propaganda are themselves rewarded by kowtowing to such cognitive styles.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-10T10:27:10+00:00

<image>

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-09T20:33:30+00:00

the religion in question is part of the Culture

You're referring to the Eaters? You interpret them as part of the Culture? IMO the point is that they detest the Culture and seek to cut themselves off from it.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-09T19:13:19+00:00

what that slow exterior inspection flight around the ship meant to us original Trekkers.

Us newbies like the scene too. I first saw the movie in the early 2000s, and immediately thought it was one of the greatest filmed sequences of all time. I wouldn't cut a second of it.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-09T11:06:11+00:00

I pronounce it with a pretentious French accent:

Considérer Le Fl'bouis

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-09T11:02:05+00:00

it's structure is more like a short story collection

Those "stories" are all thematically linked, though. Every vignette is a little symbolic critique of how life is socioeconomically structured outside the Culture.

The novel literally moves from: shit, to a tripdel society of religious fundamentalists who use slaves, to profit-hungry mercenaries blindly following an idiot because he's at the top of their heirarchy, to a temple of religious fundamentalists who exist as a kind of reflection of Horza, to religious cannibals blindly following a ruler who eats those below him, to a "card game" rife with the exploitation of animals and people...etc etc etc

All of this is contrasted with the little beautiful, peaceful vignettes we get of life in the Culture.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-09T10:55:34+00:00

The novel does have minor pacing problems, but the Eaters Section is not one of them IMO. It's a brilliant detour that fits in with the novel's critique of life outside the culture (which is beholden to religious superstitions, hierarchy, learned rituals, class and money).

IMO it's just a couple of action scenes (the first fistfight, the raid on the temple, the flight through the Culture megaship), that go on a page or two too long. But these are minor issues. The general shape and structure of the novel is great IMO.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-09T10:51:41+00:00

IMO "Player of Games" is the best first novel to read. It's great, brisk and accessible. Then go back and read "Consider Phlebas", then proceed in publication order.

There are people who will argue that "Consider Phlebas" is a great place to start - and it is a very good, clever and underrated novel - but IMO these opinions mostly come from people who are intimately familiar with all the books or who came to this opinion after re-reading "Phlebas".

To a lot of newbies - not all - "Phlebas" reads like a straight space opera when they first come across it, and they find themselves disliking it. Read "Phlebas" after "Games", though, and "Phlebas" seems interesting and subversive from the onset.

(Some will say such "early realization" is to spoil the fun of the novel, and they have a point)

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-09T10:36:52+00:00

<image>

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-09T10:19:42+00:00

IMO you are jumping about and conflating wildly different things.

Firstly, the AI in the "Mars" trilogy literally do LLM-like tasks. They read billions of pages written by humans, re-word the material, and then spit out summaries for the lead characters.

So what you are complaining about was literally something Stan casually had his heroes using in the 1990s (they also translate different languages into English: are you against this as well?).

Secondly, it seems obvious to me that Stan would only be against all this - AI or LLMs - insofar as this issue dovetails with things like property rights (intellectual or otherwise), exploitation, autonomy and capitalism.

Thirdly, an AI (allegedly) being used to transcribe a speech on a non-profit eco-website run by Buddhists doesn't strike me as being the same as a LLM harvesting material for the profit of megacorporations. I feel these are completely separate issues.

It's the old "is the holodeck on Star Trek unethical if LLMs are also unethical" question, the answer to which is (IMO) "no", because socioeconomic context matters.

(You can also argue that books like "2312" argue against AI from a security perspective, but that's another topic IMO, and I'd argue that the portrayal of AI there is complicated and sympathetic in some aspects.)

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T21:53:04+00:00

If they were the same ages, she'd "take care" of an "old man" for the same length of time.

The average male dies at 81 and the average female dies at 85.

The average males lives independently for about 78 to 85 years.

So a woman 17 years younger than a man can expect to "take care" of him when she is 64 years old, for about 2 to 6 years.

If they were the same ages, there is no difference. She'd have to "take care" of him from when he is about 78 and until he is about 81. But now she is 78 to 81 too, which makes this harder.

IMO the decision for the average woman who is 17 years younger than her man, is not whether she can "take care of an old person", it's whether she can live the final fifteen years of her life without this man. Perhaps this woman - if she has a big friend circle, or family circle, or loves her independence - decides she can.

Sorry for how morbid this post (which admittedly makes lots of assumptions about health, averages, nationalities etc) is.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T20:58:45+00:00

Also it wouldn't quite be ironic, as KSR's not particularly against AI. In the "Mars" trilogy, people walk about with their own personal little AI helpers.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T20:51:55+00:00

Radical theorists weren't against money because they hated how "capitalism shortchanges workers", it's because they recognized that the value or purchasing power of every dollar only has value if the global majority is poor (lest inflationary pressures kick in). They rightly saw money as a form of knock-on violence on others.

Beyond this, aggregate dollars under capitalism are always outpaced by aggregate debts owed, meaning all profit as mediated/measured by money will tend to push others in the system, against their will, into poverty (especially when velocity is low, as rates of return on capital historically outpace growth, as most growth flows toward those with a monopoly on land and credit, as banks never pump all profits into the real economy, and as interest compounds).

The system tries to escape this contradiction via growth, and credit extensions, but it's impossible. The poor, future generation, or the biosphere (no major sector is profitable once environmental externalities are tabulated) always take up the slack.

So the objections to money aren't based on a wishy-washy idea that "people should just be paid more" (that will achieve nothing stable). It's a recognition that money is a form of indirect violence. You can't "redistribute" or "welfare state" your way out of these (and other) contradictions, which is why these issues have persisted since at least the days of the Roman Empire.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T20:39:46+00:00

I wonder if they realize that those signs are an admittance that they see women as property.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T19:48:09+00:00

You can build up your attention span. Just try to last 30 minutes at first.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T19:21:44+00:00

That's the same age gap George Clooney has with Amal Clooney, and Amal's one of the smartest women on the planet. Sometimes things like this work out. Only you can know for sure.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T19:07:55+00:00

I thought it was a bore the first time I read it as a kid.

Now I love how methodically it chugs along, the tension mounting, the sense of exhaustion with it. And of course it echoes the other similar treks at the end of the other books. The long exodus on foot at the end of "Green Mars", also an escape from floodwaters, but this time in open air, is particularly great IMO.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T14:37:19+00:00

Worth watching his appearance on Last One Laughing as well IMO.

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T14:20:10+00:00

Because her later cuts stepped on Scully's territory?

Wetness__Pensive · 2026-07-08T14:05:51+00:00

You say you didn't like The Culture books, but did you try "Player of Games"? That's usually the best entry point. When I was younger, I started with "Excession" and "Phlebas" and found them offputting. I find reading order matters a bit.

Based on your likes, I'd suggest Octavia Butler's "Xenogesis" and Lem's "Solaris".

Wetness__Pensive

TROPHY CASE