Brad deLong on AI and H.P. Lovecraft

I am very impressed by Brad DeLong's essay Shoggoths among us. I've been going through my inbox, and except for all the great astrophysics material, this discussion of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and the Singularity was by far the best. When I was in university (ca 1970), I like my fannish friends read H.P. Lovecraft. We all read as much SF and fantasy as we could get our hands on. Young readers today probably can't imagine how little of such material there was. I was not impressed by Lovecraft (except for At the Mountains of Madness .) Too creepy.

But Brad got more out of it. One result is this sensible (!) essay on AI, modernity, democracy, autocracy, and industrial revolutions.,

/p And monsters.

Highly recommended.

Good books

Brad deLong loves Peter S. Beagle's Folk of the AirFolk, which he called, back in 2021, "a fantasy novel of Berkeley and of the Society for Creative Anachronism."

Jack Vance, fantasist extraordinaire, is dead.

 Will McLean sends me sad but not unexpected news: One of my favorite writers, Jack Vance, is dead. He was nearly 100 years old. Here's an article that talks about his work.

My own take on Vance: when I was a kid and read his stuff, I thought it was intriguing exotic. And indeed many people will say even today that he was great at creating exotic situations and characters. But as I got older and more well-read in history, I came to the conclusion that Vance's characters in particular were much more realistic than I supposed.

 Vance's characters often had seemingly irrational beliefs and practices; these were generally observed by commonsensical characters, sometimes from Earth, and one could easily identify with the observer and feel superior to the others, the exotics. I remember well the day when my own exoticism rose up and took control of me and I realized I could never feel superior to a Jack Vance character again. In other words, Vance's work was reportage more than it was invention. He just had a keen eye and a talent for recording what he saw.

Update: a much more substantial appreciation of Jack Vance.