Conversation

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
i have a specific fun rec for anyone who's curious: olaf stapledon is an old-school SF writer who wrote in the 1930s and his work is really wild. try "last and first men" and then "star maker." nobody's heard of him but he's cited as an influence by some big names
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Visa ✈️ SF (Aug 2-14)
@visakanv
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I kinda wanna say, stop everything guys, stop everything and everybody go read a really old book from a different time, from a different place. You, over there. old russian novels. you. start reading dante. you. read some goethe. everybody share your notes and findings
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
when i read olaf’s stuff i feel like people writing modern SF are not even trying in comparison. it barely makes sense to me to label him as the same genre. he describes his writing here as an act of myth-making and that seems much more accurate than “science fiction”
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
that was so nice. inhabiting olaf’s thoughts is so expansive. literally galaxy braining a bit mostly finding it difficult to put into words what i got out of this. it’s interesting to notice what looms large in his ontology. he is very preoccupied with collective insanity
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
last and first men doesn’t have a protagonist in the usual sense. there’s a frame story and a narrator but the real protagonist is all of humanity, considered over the course of something like a billion years of imagined history. it is really a unique experience
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
science fiction exhibits this pattern i wish i had a clean name for, where the easiest-to-imitate features of a genre have very little to do with what ultimately actually makes it good, and bad imitators preserve that stuff while ignoring the real stuff
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
in SF the easy-to-imitate stuff is spaceships and rayguns or w/e, star wars stuff. that was never the point though. in older SF stuff like the exploration of human nature under extreme circumstances shines through a lot more clearly
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
in stapledon’s work spaceships (“ether ships”) and so forth do appear but only when the plot demands, and they’re not remotely the focus. olaf wants to ponder the fate of human spirituality on a cosmic timescale, which is infinitely more interesting (to me, anyway)
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
reading a plot that takes place over billions of years makes me want to zoom my attention out onto larger timescales. i used to keep a journal in workflowy where i summarized stuff that happened to me each month and i stopped doing that when i switched to roam
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
the workflowy journal goes back to 2013 and i’ve returned to it a couple times and appreciated the way the hierarchical bullets allowed me to easily switch between days, months, and years as timescales. idk how i can do that with roam daily notes. i think i want to switch back
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