And here we are, reality continuing to baffle Mr. Den.

I don't like fiction.I don't like fiction.

It's kind of, basically, a waste of time. Fiction writers, even pre-AI slop, could imagine and fantasize and produce endless versions of known story arcs faster than anyone could read them. Cue my mother's bookshelf, filled with endless variations of complete thriller-romance-detective crap.

Plus, whatever baseline moral value or literary excellence they may contain, you must overcome all the peaks of generations past to ever be worth my time -- as I put it in a provocative piece many, many years ago. Why bother reading you when I can read Dostoevsky or Dickens or Borges or the old Eddas or whatever? #1452788

Again that backdrop, imagine my surprise when Lyn's new fiction book (The Stolguard Incident) grabs me. Not just fanboi-ingly attracts my attention, but has me read it in-between bites of food, in the car (passenger seat, obviously!) and until the early hours of the morning. Gotta know what happens to these vivid characters. Why? Not so sure, but probs @TotallyHumanWriter will explain the deep storytelling mechanisms involved here.

What I thought of the book: Incredible pace, storyline surprising and with beautiful character arcs. She manages to fool the reader quite beautifully a few times. Also, the way her dystopian future of hyper-technological/surveillance-state so casually includes bitcoin and cryptography is wonderful. That's how we trick the plebs into normalizing our money? At least that's what I presumed was the @KonsensusN point with 21 Futures and Tales from the Timechain.

It's a little bit disorienting at times, but again without the Tolstoy or Dostoevsky-style number of characters. She plays expertly with the concepts of villain, hero and antihero. Not everything is what it seems, etc, and warming my Nordic soul, one of the main characters (the detective, presumably featured on the cover) is a very Nordic-Noir type troubled man.

Some segments of the book's hidden moral themes jumped out at me here and there, the characters voicing an important point or resonating with what my internal being is digesting as well.

"If you're bred for one purpose and you're not the best at it, then what are you?""If you're bred for one purpose and you're not the best at it, then what are you?"

Here's another, given the topics of progress (#1476033, #1476043) and (technologically enhanced) improvements (#1468858, #1472777) I keep coming back to

I could make them better. Longer-lived, with greater alignment...

We do that a lot in e.g., HumanProgress and look-oh-so-beautiful-the-world is. Having achieving material abundance yet lost our soul and meaning in the process... that sort of stuff.

Here's another, quite personal and suitable for ~HealthAndFitness I guess(?):

Fallon wasn't even sure what she was angrier about: [redacted for spoilers] or the feeling of having been so weak. She'd almost died as an unnamed soldier on a foreign battlefield, one of countless corpses rotting in the mud. [...] Part of her wanted to obliterate the table. She imagined crashing it up into the ceiling, then flinging it back down to shatter across the floor in front of everyone. She had so much anger and nowhere to put it. Somehow, breaking the table felt more constructive than eating the worthless meal that sat atop it.

(The carnivore/ketogenic segment toward the end seems somewhat tacky, and probably won't fly with a normie audience).

Otherwise, I had a good time. I'm glad I read it, I'm appreciative of the work Lyn put into crafting it for me (especially given her opportunity cost!!)

Quite shockingly, too, in only a few months #1453436 of releasing it, she already has 10% of the public reviews on Amazon (a pretty decent indicator of relative readership). Would be insane, and pretty on par at this point, if her fiction book does better than her incredibly careful, persuasive, and detailed book on monetary history. (Proper indication of the decline of our civ, plebs reading imagined nonserious things rather than the serious, important stuff.)

Here's another observation: Isn't it a tad odd that people who excel in one domain (in Lyn's case, investments and monetary history/research) also tend to do extremely well in other, seemingly unrelated domains (in this case, fiction writing; and engineering; and martial arts). It's kind of unfair to the rest of us 80-IQ plebs... don't hog all the talent, OK.

TL;DR: I guess it's nice reading fiction again??TL;DR: I guess it's nice reading fiction again??