#unsong — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #unsong, aggregated by home.social.
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So, "Unsong" by Scott Alexander. In this alternate history, Apollo 8 never reaches the moon, because it hits and cracks the celestial sphere surrounding Earth.
Turns out the torah and kabbalah are literally correct in this universe.
The crack in the sphere is how lights gets in to Earth: divine light, Names of God giving the speakers power, but also magic, suddenly working. Of course, this being the US, this gets exploited for money-making.
(1/n)
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The only thing missing for a true tumblr thing is the horniness. There is pleasantly little of that; one character is asexual, and the sexy robot girlfriend trope is subverted: young dude Aaron gets his, but she isn't his type.
There was much I liked (Uriel!), even though I still dislike the assumption that the world gets less infused by divine light when it runs on a mathematical framework. Thanks again @lizzard for the recommendation!
(4/n, n=4)
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The worldbuilding is neat and thorough; the book takes its premise seriously and finds best ways to emphasize it by little details. It also is an absolutely WILD ride, full of ideas and puns and kabbalistic connections between anything and everything; a bit like a novel-length tumblr shitpost with a bit of storytelling and not much character development. If you like the "Illuminatus!" trilogy or Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", this might be for you.
(3/n)
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Names are copyrighted, and our protagonist Aaron works for an outfit that tries to find new Names by permutation.
He finds one, and things turn sideways fast, sweeping him and his friends up in an all-encompassing struggle against evil.
Because it also turns out that if divine light gets in through a crack, so can evil forces; the devil is at work on Earth, and so are fallen angels and demon armies.
(2/n)
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CW: Spoiler "Unsong"
I like Ana's encounter with the Metatron. She stays true to herself, asking the question that's bugged her all her life, and it seems like a fuck-up: she doesn't get the Name.
Only she *does*. In the end, it's a win-win, and I think that's quite beautiful.
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"Father, Origen wrote that even the devils will be saved, in the end. Is this true?” Father Ellis stopped, thought for a second. “People mostly think St. Jerome made that up to make Origen seem more heretical."
I think my headcanon is on Origen's side 😬
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"I don’t want you to hate evil. I want you to love good. And good is hard to see sometimes. Except for love. The sky produces so many kinds of radiation, but our eyes are so limited, only made to see a few specific wavelengths, and we call those wavelengths light. And goodness is the same way. It’s so vast, but God lets us feel a tiny bit of it viscerally, and we call that part love."
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"Rabbi Tarfon said: it not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it"
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Gah, these speeches Ana makes at Simeon and how he's portrayed as sympathetic *shudders*
I just hate this dynamic, young, idealistic woman in a "discussion" with an older, more cynical man. It almost always turns out she's just naive and learns her lesson soon.
Gah. Cringe. Don't want.
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Of course, fond of filthy Latin poetry as I am, sparrows make me think of Catullus. Not sure how his dead... "bird"... might be connected to the Other King though.
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“If God wanted the sick to be cured, why would He make them sick? If He wanted the righteous to be saved, why would He put them in danger? God lets people perform miracles to make a statement.”
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"Atheistic science should be thought of not as a literal attempt to say things like “Space is infinite and full of stars” or “Humankind evolved from apes” that were now known to be untrue, but as an attempt to record, in the form of stories, our ancestors’ answers to those great questions."
Funny reversal. Like "the Lambertians have no need of this hypothesis" in Greg Egan's "Permutation City", which is an interesting comparison by the way.
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"Tried to tell you that the equations and correspondences held more of God than all of your songs and swords and shields combined."
Look, I know this book is about clever wordplay and absurd ideas and totally not serious, but.
YES THIS
🥹
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"Still other texts say the Messiah will come in a generation that is both the most righteous and the most wicked. I don’t even know what to think of that one."
I don't know either but the 20th century must have been very high on both the "most wicked" and "most righteous" list. I am still surprised we survived it, to be honest. So there's that.
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This degradation of technology is interesting: it stops working because the physical laws themselves are buggy.
Reminds me a bit of Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought", where automation and thought work differently in different regions of space. But it's scarier: space is just space, but to rely on an overworked angel using Sapphires on a Path and Ruby on Rails feels pretty daring.
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You have to imagine me looking at the fractal, everything-is-connected, numbers-have-significance kabbalistic parts of this book wearing safety goggles.
My brain loves patterns. And it loves systems. This stuff is VERY attractive.
It also is REALLY unhealthy for me.
I certainly can't walk in there alone again, without safety gear.
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"No? You can’t imagine the story ending that way? Neither can Reality. That was Dylan Alvarez’s secret. He always tried to be the protagonist of whatever story he was in, and the protagonist never dies."
Sounds like a classic dudebro fallacy to me.
(The protagonist also usually has a lot of shit to work through. I'd rather be the nerdy sidekick.)
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"The overt meaning of singer is “someone who sings.” The kabbalistic meaning is “someone who tries to be good.” This reading we derive from Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher who explored the depths of moral obligation."
Oo-kay. I know Singer's a famous moral philosopher. But I know him primarily for his views on disability, which I disagree with. So this feels ironic.
(I am no Utilitarian; I don't think this weighting of interests is possible IRL)
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Obviously, this can be compared to R.F. Kuang's "Babel" and "Katabasis": language as technology. It doesn't have the colonialism lens and focus, though, and focuses more on what this tech does to the lower classes.
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“I want to give my laptop a soul,” I said. “Llull only works on Macs, remember?”
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG
(Obviously, this was written before the mass usage of LLMs...)
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"Fifty years ago, Apollo 8 cracked the sky open and people started discovering the Names of God. A decade later, corporations started patenting them, demanding license fees for anyone who wanted to work miracles with them. A few years after that, they codified the whole system into international law and created UNSONG—the United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God—to enforce it."
Late-stage capitalism 😑
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"Experimental theologian", ha. I like the sound of that. Like "excellent heretic". Or "liturgical special operations".
(The last one was used by @Frau_Sanders to refer to things like not TECHNICALLY preaching as a woman because now THAT wouldn't be allowed, would it)
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I remember the "find true divine names by permutation" idea from Umberto Eco's "Foucault's pendulum" (which also gives source code for the program, and does similar things with conspiracy theories).
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"On December 24, 1968, one billion people—more than for any television program before or after in the history of mankind—tuned in for Apollo 8’s short broadcast. [...] Then, mid-sentence, they crashed into the crystal sphere surrounding the world, because it turned out there were far fewer things in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of in almost anyone’s philosophy."
I accept it as a *premise*, but I intensely *dislike* it. It's like the opposite of my kind of spirituality.
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New book: "Unsong" by Scott Alexander. Recommended by @lizzard, I think?
Angels and dark lords and puns and true names of God and the end of the world, I gather, in a "what if it all were literally true?!" way.
(Jewish-, not Christian-themed, as far as I know.)
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A few months ago, a friend told me about a meetup he had run across for people involved with a blog called "Astral Codex Ten," centered around a writer named Scott Alexander, who had written a serialized novel called #UNSONG. (cont'd)
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"It took all the way until the turn of the Millennium before America listened to a Bush, and then got stuck wandering in a desert without an exit strategy."
#ScottAlexander, UNSONG
https://unsongbook.com/Audio book version read by Matt Arnold is available as a podcast here;