Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2026

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on history or poetry.

Madeleine Robins, The Doxies Penalty

Mind candy: continuing Robins's series of historical mysteries set in a very-slightly-alternate Regency London. (I re-read the last one, Sleeping Partner, before turning to this.) Robins continues to be great and I hope that many more of these will flow from her pen. (She has a fine eye for how to offer her protagonists poisoned gifts.) §

Dan Abnett, Eisenhorn

Mind candy, calling for some comment.

I vaguely remember Warhammer 40,000 as a role-playing game from around 1990, i.e., when I was in high school. (This would have been the first edition.) I can't remember if my group ever actually got around to playing it *. I am also aware that it has become something of a nerd-cultural phenomenon, but have genuinely not kept up with it. Now, I am the kind of nerd who has a certain disdain for novels written in licensed intellectual properties, but I readily acknowledge that it can, in fact, be great. (John M. Ford's Star Trek books, for instance.)

When this collection fell across my path cheap, I picked it up out of curiosity. It's pretty decently adequate, as mind candy. There are places where Abnett shows flashes of real talent. (To avoid spoilers, I'll just say: The first alien planet; the opening scenes with the cranky biologist.) There are other aspects of the novels which are pretty unsatisfying. (I don't feel mean enough, today, to elaborate.) It'd be incomprehensible without some background familiarity with the setting. But I don't see anything special. My curiosity being satisfied, I am pretty unlikely to peruse any other fiction from this brand, unless someone reliable points to a particular instance as something extraordinary. (This is not an invitation to send me pointers.)

--- The question arises of why this particular brand/game/setting has become so popular; as this will let me take some hobby-horses out for a spin, I will pursue it. Why are there endless licensed books, to say nothing of fan-produced material and casual allusions, for Warhammer rather than any other role-playing game from around 1990? One possibility: if you are going to actually play a game, you need to coordinate with other players on which game. (Also, more notoriously, on a time and place...) This creates a role for focal points, and focal points are subject to increasing returns. Therefore, we should expect some games to be vastly more popular than others, even if all games were equally good, spoke equally to our moment in history, etc. This argument is somewhat undercut by the fact that some people are perverse enough to buy and read rule-books for RPGs they don't actually play. (I am one of them.) It also doesn't explain the tie-in material. But even when there are no focal points, we know that cultural trends can be self-reinforcing (Salganik, Dodds and Watts 2006; Salganik and Watts 2008). The important ingredient for such phenomena is that your odds of encountering artifacts from the trend must go up, the more of your peers are participating in the trend. Social media, and before that search engines and recommendation systems, deliver this in spades, but even a best-seller list will do (that's essentially what Salganik et al. used). I decline to seek an adaptive explanation for Warhammer's success, or to interpret it as meaningful symptom that Really Says Something About Our Society, unless someone shows that it's a lot more successful, or differently successful, than we'd expect from the nigh-inevitable tendency of cultural interaction to amplify, and so lock in, random accidents. (In other words: there are very high-amplitude branches of the wave-function where all the memes are about Traveller, or Vampire the Masquerade.) This concludes today's edition of A Series of Footnotes to Herbert A. Simon. §

*: We mostly did D&D and Call of Cthulhu, but I definitely remember Stormbringer, Beyond the Supernatural, Traveller and Gamma World. ^

Marie Boas, The Scientific Renaissance, 1450--1630

An old (1962) but still interesting history of the earlier part of the scientific revolution. In every field, Boas traces a basically-humanist impulse to discard medieval ideas and accomplishments, in favor of reviving antiquity, the more antique the better, which only gradually turned towards striving to go beyond Greco-Roman science to something actually new and unprecedented. She offers sympathetic (but unvarnished) portraits of the greats (Harvey, Gilbert, Vesalius, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, etc., etc.), along with attentive readings of their major works, interspersed with sketches of the broader environment and trends in learning and its application. It's not as deep, conceptually, as something like Wootton, but it's readable and humane, and covers most of what's important. §

Joseph Brodsky, Selected Poems, 1968--1996

I am a Philistine, because I thought this was just OK. There were some good poems, quite a few which I found boring, and absolutely nothing that has stuck in my memory even a few weeks later. I realize that the contemporary poets I enjoy have, in fact, a very different judgment of Brodsky, but I did warn you that I have no taste. §

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; The Commonwealth of Letters; Writing for Antiquity; The Great Transformation; Tales of Our Ancestors; Portraits of Detection, Pleasures of Crime