Like they say ...the best laid plans of mice and men.  And while I was mostly confined to my couch, there was still quite a view.

At the onset, I wanted to push myself to read more diverse voices.  Step outside the fiction genre confines.  To read more women, more people of color, histories of the non-western world.  Given, there was still plenty of sci-fi to scratch that itch, but much of it was from an outside perspective.

I finished a total of 46 books.

I was interested in leadership at the outset - the qualities and attributes of true leaders in contrast with those currently in charge.  Goodwin's Leadership in Turbulent Times is a character study of four presidents (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and LBJ) during inflection points of American history.  She picks out bullet points gleaned in the trenches of the stories of these men, but to me, the biggest thing was an uncompromising vision and will to fight for an ideal bigger than self.  Grant is another long character study of a man thrown into the crucible of American history.  The white hot fires of the Civil War.  The treachery and tragedy of Reconstruction, leading into the greed of the Gilded Age.  This dovetailed with other things I was reading as the George Floyd protest begain in earnest (The Color of Compromise, How to be an Anti-Racist). The cry of "I can't breathe" is nothing new, but has been going on for hundreds of years.  For a moment there, in 1865, the mood and political will of the country was strong enough to make lasting change.  Perhaps Grant was too lenient on the traitorous Confederacy, many of whom took to the hills as the Klan, to burn and terrorize for decades to come.  Grant hunted down the Klan, but the deep seed of America's sin was never rooted out, it just festered and evolved.

There were other sobering reads: Uncanny Valley is a personal journey through the false promise of silicon valley startups. Imperial Twilight a fascinating exploration of the causes of the opium wars, the first trade war between the west and China.  At the Existentialist Cafe bounced around the lives of the thinkers, writers and philosophers who came out of the Paris salons of the 20s (Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger).  The strength of their convictions on the human spirit would be challenged as the world devolved into global war.  And perhaps most sobering of all was The Sixth Extinction: a globe trotting survey of all the biodiversity that has been and will be lost.  The scope of the book is breathtaking and puts into perspective the age of some of these ecosystems (millions of years in the case of Coral Reefs).  Even if the west curbs emissions and pulls back climate change, there are still poor farmers cutting into pristine rainforests every day.  At its core, humanity is expansive and destructive, and we have little hope of surviving in a closed ecosystem, as Homo Deus illustrates.

Female and diverse voices were also a highlight of the journey this year.  Outline by Rachel Cusk is a travelogue of a divorced woman in Greece.  Instead of Eat, Pray, Love hedonism, sampling food and sun and lovers, the narrator is deflated by the nature of approaching middle age, coming to grips with the disappointments of children, marriage and failed dreams.  The most fascinating difference with Dawn, by Octavia Butler, is the protagonist isn't a conquering hero who simply grows powerful enough to defeat all obstacles (Luke Skywalker), but instead someone who has to learn to live under subjugation, in quiet compromised defiance.  There's a lot of analogues here to slavery, "house slaves", cross-breeding, miscegenation.  On one end, there's "love stories'' of Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.  On the other, the horrors of the Face Huggers and Alien Xenomorphs, who enslave human bodies purely as flesh vessels.  The aliens in this tale are somewhere in between.  

1Q84 and Death's End are science fiction tales by Asian men (Japanese and Chinese, respectively).  1Q84 is nothing new for Murakami, and the book has been somewhat criticized for its meandering plot and interminable length.  But there's always something meditative about reading his soothing prose, especially in the beautifully bound hardback.  Death's End is the final novel in the Three Body Problem trilogy.  The hallmark of the series has been the absolute ruthlessness of the universe in contrast to human society.  There's even a scene where a low level alien worker, the equivalent of a security guard or street sweeper, nonchalantly destroys an entire solar system on a bored whim.  None of the characters have any sort of spiritual or emotional hope.  They reside in the cold world of physics and facts.  The books sometimes feel like an excuse to run thought experiments in theoretical physics. Contrasting these two novels, where a man and woman cross vast distances of spacetime to find some sort of peace and happiness, you can get a feel for the cultures in which they arose (consumer capitalism vs state-run authoritarianism), but the dreams of the people themselves are universal.

Florida and Orange World are standout short story collections by young female writers.  The sentence by sentence writing is solid enough to land them in the New Yorker, but the world building is what sets these books apart, particularly the sun-soaked mangrove mazes of Florida.  I drive down a few times a year to Florida, and while most of the time is spent in manicured golf course lawns and screened-in pools, there's always that overgrown gator pond just a few yards away.  It’s the contrast of America: sprawling pavement and swimming pools, yet the ferocity of nature mere yards away.

Big genre books were my palate cleanser.  For me, the fantastical follows certain familiar arcs.  The Silmarillion and Fire and Blood are collected tales of lore and pure world building.  Narnia and Hogwarts had their place as well (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Prisoner of Azkaban and Voyage of Dawn Treader), all British pluck and polite magic.  Red Mars has all the hard sci-fi engineering of the Martian with the sociology of 100 colonists on top.  There's some spectacular imagery here: a space elevator crashing to the surface of the red planet, burning hotter than a nuclear bomb, a vast flood filling the canyons for the first time in a billion years. And Dune, in anticipation of a film that never came, is the legendary space opera, all the thrill of Star Wars with R-Rated psychedelic dressing.

Camus' the Plague was the most prescient. So many of the passages ring true to me in these days: the reaction of government authorities debating lives vs economic well-being; the number crunching and the graphs; the depression and imprisoned mentality that coincides with lockdown; the overriding sense of hopelessness, the feeling that the future is erased; and how various types of people cope: either immersing themselves in work, or seeing suffering as a source of spiritual purpose.

At year's end, one book I keep thinking back on is one of the first I read, pre-pandemic. Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. I'd wanted to read it for over ten years, since I first saw it sitting foreboding on someone's shelf in a tiny East Village apartment. It’s the most wide-ranging Pynchon novel I've read, but still has all the same hallmarks - long sing-songy alliterative lists of stuff, dark humor, irreverence, labyrinthine plots and vague references to shadowy organizations. Dozens of creatively named characters. Like a Bond film, the characters bounce around all the iconic locales of the age: the "closing" of the wild west (when the adventure gives way to moneyed interests exploiting the natural resources), the bustle of New York and Chicago, jazzy nightclubs in New Orleans, the allure of the Himalaya and Shangri-La, even a Jules Verne-like journey to the center of the hollowed out earth in a dirigible.

One image that sticks with me: the Chums of Chance (a sort of jolly band of proto-Boy Scouts), riding in on their gleaming zeppelin over Chicago towards the fabled "white city" of the World's Fair, watching vast herds of dark cattle routed through maze like barriers into the slaughterhouse. It's a perfect visual metaphor for that time period, and potentially the destiny of man.

Wolf Parade released a song titled Against the Day this year.  In a jaunty four minutes, they capture the core feel of the thousand page novel:

"Friend, isn't it so strange?

How the only things that change

Are the ones upon the surface

All is gone now

Seconds fade but our hearts will still remain

We are standing

Against the day"

Full List:

The Language of God
Against the Day
Silmarillion
Outline
Big Book of Science Fiction
New Testament - Paul's Letters
Elric Of Melnibone
Leadership: In Turbulent Times
Storm Tossed Family
Homo Deus
Electric Acid Koolaid Test
Dune
Uncanny Valley
Managing Humans
The Hope of Glory
Ride of a Lifetime
Fire and Blood
Strange in the Woods
Deathbird Stories
Armageddon's Children
Orange World
Elegant Defense
Dawn
The Sixth Extinction
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Grant
Red Mars
How to be an Anti-Racist
At the Existentialist Cafe
Imperial Twilight
Florida
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Full Throttle
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Plague
Measure What Matters
1Q84
The Color of Compromise
Death's End
Mountains of Madness
The Fifth Season
Notes from Underground
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Pastoralia
Forgotten Realms: Homeland
Trajectory

I tried to vary my selection, including non-fiction, contemporary literature and some classics, but my guilty pleasure is still Science Fiction.

Here are some highlights, with the full list below:

Man's Search for Meaning

A book in two parts - the first is a bleak tale of life in a concentration camp, told by a man with a thousand yard stare.  Cold, clinical descriptions of the cruelty and inhumanity.  if anything, he feels a bit stoic, with only a paragraph here and there expressing his misery, pain, terror and sadness over the loss of everything he's known.  Almost feels like a long-suffering Job, listing out the trials he's faced without ever putting his soul on the line.

The second part is a sort of psychological treatise and self-help manual, digging into his theory of "logotherapy", the search for meaning.  He talks about three forms: meaning in creating, meaning in experiencing love with another, meaning in enduring suffering.

It's an intriguing premise, and it has some potential, but I never feel like he bridges the gap why these three (which probably can play the trick of keeping human's from despair) actually catalyze meaning.  Is there's any existential "material" to meaning, or is it just an illusion that drives people in the moment? Does it have a metaphysical "currency"?

Even in this framework, we can look at the suffering millions of the holocaust (and other countless tragedies) and still ask, "what was it for?" A warning for the future?  A bleak reality for some souls to eke out minuscule demonstrations of hope, perseverance and grace in the face of an ocean of horror?

Her Body and Other Parties

Cutting, intimate stories that have a dark visceral feel.  Lots of themes about women's vulnerability, sexuality, weakness and power.  Some interesting slipstream and sci-fi nuances as well.  A strong voice who doesn't shy from hard themes or fall back on old short story literary tropes.

The Name of the Wind

Pretty standard coming of age story with the light trappings of the fantasy genre. perhaps its the harry potter effect - the appeal of the boarding school upbringing with a character who has magical powers.

The writing itself is functional enough, but lots of the flourish and fantasy world-building falls away to generic teenager tropes.  Kvothe isn't that interesting as a protag, and the character arcs aren't complete.  Perhaps Rothfuss is intending the entire thing to stretch into a trilogy, but there's not enough narrative urgency to make me care.

11/22/63

King certainly knows how to evoke the mes-en-scene of a place with a few simple, well-crafted sentences - whether its rural Maine, or Dallas in the 60s. This is a weird Frankenstein of a book, combining a mostly straightforward doomed romance in a 1960s American high school (like something out of Back to the Future), with throwbacks to his mythology of dark cursed towns (Derry, Dallas).

The insight into Lee Harvey Oswald's character is the strength of the book: a little man who feels self-important and wronged, and thus must take a momentous horrible act to change history. King's true gift is revealing the horror in men's souls.

Master and Margarita

Considered one of the best of Russian literature, but very different from the brooding moral tragedies of the 19th century (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy). This book is told with a lightness and sarcasm. I read this leading up to Easter (along with the gospel of Matthew) and it was a fascinating combination. The devil went down to Moscow and delighted in royally wrecking the best laid plans of men. And yet the tale within a tale of the devil as Pontious Pilate's right hand man at the trial and execution of Christ. The Rolling Stones classic (Sympathy for the Devil) is probably the closest evocation of the book's tone.

The Overstory

Lots of beautiful, third person narrative descriptive sections, revealing the wonder and glory of nature - specifically trees. the best sections were the "roots" where our assorted collection of characters are introduced with lots of allusions and references to various species of tree - the chestnut, the ginkgo, the maple, etc. These sections almost could stand alone, as literary short stories publishable in the likes of the New Yorker. They are clean, tight and bring to live a well rounded character possessing of both beauty and sorrow.

The rest of the book mostly just coasts on the strength of those early roots. The trajectories of the characters don't move very much - they coast on the momentum they were launched in those early pages. Mostly they join radical environmental groups in the late 90s, some even verging into eco-terrorism. The conclusions (the canopy) are pretty bleak - long prison sentences, suicide attempts, betrayal, strokes.

And yet there's so many pages of strong writing I never was bored or annoyed with the book. Even if the tale is lacking in rich dialog or character growth or pure plotting, the prose (which often flirts with purple verbosity) is a joy.

The message of the book: yes the world is doomed, but not from the perspective of nature. Nature has been evolving for millions of years, and wont stop now. It will outlast us. We're merely dooming ourselves, robbing our children of the beauty of the natural world.

Sapiens

The tale of humans rising out of the evolutionary darkness of the past - the Cognitive Leap forward 50k years ago, and our subsequent domination of the world. Some interesting points about how earlier versions in the homo genius didn't possess that gift (language, recursive thought, imagination, gossip?) to conquer, and were doomed to small tribes that were eventually subsumed. Fascinating to think about all the unwritten history - kingdoms, sagas, tragedies, etc - that persisted for tens of thousands of years before anything we know. The world was already old when those first babylonians and Egyptians started stacking stones into monuments. And so their gods, legends and beliefs were not invented wholesale, but simply inherited from long generations of ancestors before them.

Super Sad True Love Story

A mix of a Woody Allen romance and a cyberpunk dystopia. The primary narrator (Lenny Abramov) is very Jewish and neurotic. Has a manic pixie cute Korean girlfriend. Lots of interesting stuff about image, lack of literary values in the social media age, the Silicon Valley ethos of personal life extension, the decay of New York City, the rise of the surveillance state, modern romance. Some good stuff in here, told purely through "diary" entries - both sides of the equation are unreliable narrators, but thankfully both are honest with their intentions and so the general outlines of the story are well known.

the relationship follows a predictable arc - meet cute at a party, the first nervous interactions, the drunken lusts, second thoughts, deeper love and companionship falling into habit, a drifting away, and finally a breakup. The parabola is almost too mathematically perfect.

Fall; Dodge in Hell

This is a strange and lopsided book - but because the writer is Neal Stephenson the whole thing is pleasantly readable, and at times a page turner. The premise - in the near future a rich guy (dodge) suddenly dies and his will stipulates his brain should be uploaded to the cloud. Queue a hundred pages of his trust executors fighting legal battles and the various tech initiatives spawned to implement the thing. His niece finally turns the simulation on, but not before a number of fascinating side adventures.

First - some mysterious force spawns a mass hoax on the internet (complete with a DDOS, fake video, paid off eye-witnesses, etc ) that a nuclear bomb has destroyed Moab Utah. the initial DDOS cuts the small town off from civilization, then the coordinated disinformation campaign persuades the rest of the world. The truth comes out later, but the "truthers" can't be made to see reality - any alternate explanation is just an extension of the "deep state conspiracy".

Second - Dodge's niece and a few college friends drive around in Middle America that's devolved into Americastan. This is a natural (and extreme) progression of Trump Country, where the the divide between Red State and Blue State is a lethal slow-burning Cold War. One character - (Stephenson's Avatar - Enoch root) has to be rescued from an extreme splinter group that crucifies "unbelievers" on welded metal crosses. Nevermind that their religious doctrine is algorithmically cooked by AI "feeds" constantly streaming to VR goggles.

After "bitworld" is turned on, most the novel lives within those confines. Dodge awakens to an endless sea of static but manages to construct a "physical" world for his soul to reside. So begins a retelling of many of humanities core myths from the various religions - Greek and Norse mythology, Judeo-Christian tales of the fall, etc.

I was much more interested in how the tidbits of how bitworld affects the real world (people ceasing to travel due to the risk to their connectome and the failure to be uploaded). the creative and edge world building of Americastan is missing from bitworld, which just feels like generic fantasy MMO.

At Home

Mostly a collection of trivia related to the etymology and structure of the house, from an English perspective. Bryson delights in the weird idiosyncrasies (whether its an invention or an oddball person) that had an outsized effect on history. Thought his basic premise (take a tour of a modern home, explore the history of each specific room) isn't followed too strictly, its enough of a framework to lead us through lots of fun, macabre strange and weird turns of history (mostly Victorian England)

Native Son

Very intense intro. Reminds me of a Stephen King first person stream of conscious as he goes down the rabbit hole of fear, second degree murder, disposing a body.

Interesting perspective that portrays the experience of black people in mid 20th century as post-traumatic stress, leading to all sorts of strange behaviors (violence, fear, etc)

In a way, the book is a vehicle for a long monologue on social-politics (in this case communist thought). The anti-Atlas Shrugged. A growing liberal idea that capitalism is at odds with racial justice, that the free market is inherently racist because individual actions will always be biased and these will be magnified in the marketplace, and individuals aren't responsible for their own actions.

The crux of the argument to save Bigger's life (which fails, and is written as a tragedy in the book) is that it will serve a larger purpose to somewhat mend race relations. This removes the crux of justice away from individual actions and into larger socio-political aims. In this case, we see it as mercy, but what about the other direction? Punishing folks who have too much privilege? Going down that rabbit hole has some nasty snags.

I enjoyed the book for the initial sections (Bigger and his pals hanging on the streets, the thriller aspect of the crime + flight). The larger communist / monologue stuff felt a bit heavy-handed and preachy.

Steep Trails

Muir's enthusiasm and love of the wilderness comes through. Interesting how writers of the past would express themselves with scientific curiosity, even positing various theories of biology, geology, etc even if they weren't certified experts. Given the title "Naturalist" Simply required an enthusiasm and and passion to get out there.  The book can still act as a guide to the peaks, rivers and forests, even as the settlements surrounding them have dramatically changed (wild west to 21st century).

Oryx and Crake

Written back in 2003, this is a harrowing look at our horrible future: climate change, corporate gated communities, porn addictions, the fear of "terrorism" to cover all sorts of government abuses.  In a short novel, it basically wraps up all the fears of the 21st century into a compact package, along with a coming of age buddy dark-comedy (and sad pathetic romance).  Some real horrors here.

Full List:

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado
Alone on the Wall - Alex Honnold
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
11/22/63 - Stephen King
Swimmer Among the Stars - Kanishk Tharoor
Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Best American Essays 2014
The Overstory - Richard Powers
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart
Exhalation - Ted Chiang
Authority - Jeff VanderMeer
The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
Best American Travel Writing 2014
Damned - Chuck Palahniuk
Tribe - Sebastian Junger
Acceptance - Jeff VanderMeer
Largesse of the Sea Maiden - Denis Johnson
Utopia for Realists - Rutger Bregman
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
At Home: A Short History of Private Life - Bill Bryson
Native Son - Richard Wright
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
The Dark Forest - Liu Cixin
Binti - Nnedi Okorafor
What I Talk About when I Talk About Running: A Memoir - Haruki Murakami
Steep Trails - John Muir
When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition 1 - H.P Lovecraft
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

Previous Attempts

I used to try to write a novel every year during the month of November.  In the last few years, with my time vastly decreased, I've started doing NanoGenMo (generate a novel in 1 month).  The goal is to encourage experiments with all the interesting text generation technologies that have come about.

A few years ago I mostly used a hand-crafted Markov chain to generate text, drawing from a number of sources (Shakespeare, The King James Bible, Moby Dick, Lord of the Rings and H.P. Lovecraft).  I also used some of the python text analysis libraries to analyze sentences and keep the good ones.  However, I mostly ended up using simple regex matching (reasonable length, starting with a Capital, ending with a period) to strip out the nonsense.

gtp-2

GPT-2 was one of the big announcements in the world of text generation this year.  It was released with a ton of fanfare, including ominous footnote that the most powerful model would not be released for the public's safety.  The argument was something like: the resultant text would be too realistic and the onslaught of fake news would be too much for folks to keep up with.When it was first released, quite a few interested tools were built to let you play around with it (https://talktotransformer.com/).  

One of the most unique features of gtp-2 is it can take a set of text as input and continue to generate text matching the theme and voice.I'd never run the full thing before, so the first step was setting up gpt-2 locally.  Also, I utilized this fork of the official gpt-2 library that contains some extra helpful scripts.

Here are some guides that were pretty useful:

https://minimaxir.com/2019/09/howto-gpt2/

https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92/beginners-guide-to-retrain-gpt-2-117m-to-generate-custom-text-content-8bb5363d8b7f

One of the box, gpt-2 comes with a model generated from raw internet text.  Most of this is what you'd expect - personal blogs, snippets of news, and quite a bit of political opinion.  Samples generated from these models sound about the same (an angry uncle on Facebook posting 9/11 conspiracies).

Training the Model

They key to generating an interesting narrative text with GPT-2 is training a new model.  I grabbed some useful text from Project Gutenberg: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Macbeth, The King James Bible (Genesis, Psalms, Revelation), Huck Finn, Lovecraft and a large collection of travel journals from the 19th century.

Training a model was simple enough, but took quite a bit of time.  Each iteration could take 30-60s, and a good model takes hundreds (or thousands) of iterations.  For my final model, I let my laptop churn away all day.

High Hopes

Originally I had some big ambitions for the structure of the model.  I generated a handful of unique models (poetry, travel journals, religious text, colloquial americana).  Then I put together a quick python script to recursively build a tree structure of branching themes.  The idea was to generate a core passage (the root), then use that to spin off branches using randomly selected models.  In turn, those nodes would use their core passage and spin off more branches.

The problem came about mostly from the limitations of the python scripts.  For one, most of the required libraries (tensorflow, etc) didn't match the version, so running the scripts spit out a ton of warnings.  The generate_with_input script was also pretty slow.  It would take 10+ minutes to spit out a page-length chunk of text.Building a framework to hold the tree in memory, run the gpt-2 scripts, ingest and parse the text wasn't a quick hack project.  Plus, if the thing had to run for hours, it was bound to freeze up or crash due to a bug.  The true solution would be to serialize the tree to disk and be able to resume where I picked up.  Not something I felt like coding.

I ended up simply writing a wrapper that would take in input and send the text to output.  I could then pipe this to disk.  Furthermore, I could bump up the number of samples created, so larger sections of text would be generated.  The input for a section was an interesting passage I found near the closing paragraphs of the preceding passage.  In the end, I ran the generator about 10 times, spitting out roughly 5-10k words each time, resulting in a novel of 74k words.

Cleanup

The raw output was half decent.  Large sections were filled with readable sentences, correct punctuation and even reasonable flow and transitions between paragraphs. Parts even felt like they were lifted verbatim from the source text, but doing a search of the inputs proved they were original.There were some sections where strange punctuation (headers, footers, indentations, missing parenthesis) had resulted in distorted text.  I ended up cleaning these up.I also broke the full text into logical sections (chapters and parts), doing a quick skim through.

There were only two sections I added to the text.  The first was due to one of the sources (Huck Finn).  There were some paragraphs where the N-word was heavily repeated.  Of course, the word fit with the sentences, being generated from the original dialogue.  But I felt it was a distraction, especially since it was repeated so heavily (18 times).  I ended up mostly replacing it with the word "man", and the feel of those sentences is mostly left intact.

The second was the title itself.  The Journey of the Book.

Probably the largest source of content were the set of 19th century travel journals, many of them to exotic places (The Himalayas, the Middle East, South America).  So much of the generated text is a journey.  Climbing over rocky mountains, drifting down mystical rivers, visiting the folk of strange tribal villages.  Near the end, there's talk of a fabled book, but the references are fleeting and strange.  The whole project has been a journey to generate a book, so the title fit.

Select Passages

I haven't read the whole thing, but here are a few sections that stood out:

Part 1, Chapter 4

We are now in this most remote mountain range, with the very rocks of wherever they may be; but where they shall remain is bound to be very hard. I shall have the satisfaction of being able to descend to it again, without having to face any difficulties whatsoever, unless my own mind and spirit become possessed by a terrible fear of things to come. There is no other path to be found; it may be an ever changing world.

Part 1, Chapter 5

For the gate at our door was full of broken bricks and fallen stones; there was no way out. The soldiers stood here and searched our feet. When the sun came out, and the moon came down, our path lay ahead. In our hearts our enemies cried aloud at the sight of the city, "What are these little stones and bricks, now falling to the ground?" "No, only the one that will go through us, the one that will die," cried out the soldiers, "at last, will we die together." Then they said in unison at our feet, "We will die together."

Part 1, Chapter 8

“I mean it ain't pretty quiet. It's pretty quiet in a lot of these places, too. But there was a lot of singing, a lot of swearing, and shouting, and a lot of the children were shooting at each other, too. And a lot of the folks that came to talk to the news were singing and shouting. They had the boys of the neighbourhood shooting at everybody, and they had the men of the neighbourhood screaming and throwing down in a frenzy. They seemed to take the best of everything that was said, and then turned it around so everybody could hear a few words and shout at them.”

Part 2, Chapter 1

I felt like I was going to land; that was not a chance to look in front of anything I might see, so I went to sitting on the stick, and turned on the other half of the stick and looked up at the stars; and then I rolled back on my blanket, which was the only thing I was looking at, and I said, with a little pause, to the stars, "Here's the next day's sunrise; don't you know your way to it till I tell you I'm going to. I'll be your guide when I go to night, and you shouldn't leave me. I want something for breakfast, and one-a-thousandth of it; and now I'll make up it. I want a book, and a book-case, and a book-case for the stars, and so on"

Part 2, Chapter 6

When my life was in danger of being destroyed by my own wickedness, the only way out was to go and get the head.  The way out was a terrible one, for it was a most terrible experience.

But we could not lose the Head either.  Every night he would go down there and kill me. This was it, the only way out.  Then we would go back up to the river. And after that I knew all about the heads. And every night I would stay up there and watch them, and they would shoot.  One morning I was standing on the bridge, and one one of the little men would say to me:

My head's dead!

And I cried and cried, and I cried and cried, and there was no sound but the water and the river, and the dogs shooting.

Part 3, Chapter 5

We have got to make a choice; the choice will be ours, and we can have our way.

There are two sides to the whole thing.

I can go to heaven by going to hell.  I can have my way by going to hell. But the devil will always be with me--if I can go to the last place, it will be my chance to go to the first place which is my home."

Part 3, Chapter 6

"It all got to be so hot it was too much; we didn't get to sleep that well. But I said, as soon as I got to it, it didn't matter if we slept; it was always a fine night, and we did sleep, and sleep. But I couldn't stand the cold; I couldn't stand the hot. And when I got up to bed, it was too late to get by, so I was lying, and I said: "When can I see the sky again?"

And she said: "When I see the sky again."

I said: "It is all fine now."

Some Larger Observations

GPT-2 is very impressive at constructing individual sentences and matching the tone and voice of a passage.  It has a few quirks.  

Often it will latch onto repetition in the source text and produce strange loops.  You can see the "scope" at which the algorithm breaks down.  On a word by word basis, the sentence structure is correct, but the repetition is out of control.

You wake up, old boy, let's have a good time! I'm awake! I'm awake!

What a riddle I had the last time!--a riddle! A riddle was a riddle like--a riddle--a riddle a riddle.

Go! let's have a good time, now, and try to be right, you won't get left, you won't; just try to be right; you`n't a good riddle, is it? It was like a--a riddle a riddle before it got the right place; and yet, as good it gets, so is the right way, right?There it is again--a riddle a riddle; a riddle where it gets the right place first. You'd never know that as soon as that riddle got where it couldn't go again.

When you wake up, I know you. I know you, all right, and I know we got you at the right place, but how? I know how you got there; I know how you got there. I know how you got here, and I know you.

This alludes to the larger issue: the algorithm has no knowledge or real intelligence. It's simply spitting out text that statistically matches the source text (at a word by word and syntax level).  It has no knowledge of what words mean.  Large sections of text contradict themselves and gpt-2 would be none the wiser. This can lead to a whimsical, Suessian quality to the output, but for writing something rigorous or logically intact, it's no better than a Markov Chain.

Ultimately, experimenting with gpt-2 can be fun, and you can certainly utilize it to generate a novel in a few hours.  The novel may even have some decent passages.  The entire thing will be nonsense.

As many others have said, the true horizon of artificial intelligence is building a framework that can support logical thought, that can digest all the pattern matching produced by the machine learning algorithms.

Here's to next year.

I’ve had a raspberry pi gathering dust for a few years, but I had an inkling to do something cool with it. Over the holidays, I was gifted a PiStorms kit. PiStorms is a “shield” for the raspberry pi that fits directly onto a set of pins and interfaces with Lego Mindstorms motors and sensors.

Mindstorms is a pretty cool concept, but the entire set runs $350 and doesn’t actually allow full programmatic control over the resulting creation. It’s more of a drag and drop visual programming language.

I was able to download the OS image and flash it to my raspberry pi SD card. However, the PiStorms shield requires direct power, instead of utilizing the DC Power from the raspberry pi. This required a 6 AA battery pack and a set of brand new batteries.

Once the brain was operational, I still needed to build the vehicle. Mindstorms is supposedly compatible with all of the Lego Technic sets and parts, so I bought a basic four-wheeled mechanical car for 50 bucks from the lego store. I chose this model since it appeared to have a surplus of parts and lots of exposed anchor points for modification.

After following the directions for an evening, the car was assembled (aside from the cosmetic touches like stickers, etc). There were gears and axles propelling the rear wheel, and turning the front two. I was able to modify the frame to mount two medium mindstorms motors.

Lastly, I configured a mount for the entire PiStorms / raspberry pi assembly, which is relatively heavy. Once the OS boots up and the wireless connects, PiStorms has a php frontend website to display info allow control of the motors. You can connect to the site over wireless and remotely control the motors, driving and turning the car.

Some of the challenges:

Power

Once the Pi is wired up to batteries, it absolutely drains them. 6 AA batteries in series have about 9v. When PiStorms is turned on, you can see the voltage visibly decrease – 8.8…8.7…8.6. The motors and pi will cease to function once it drops to ~ 6.5V, so there’s very limited juice in the thing. I’m considering upgrading to use a rechargeable RC battery kit, which should extend the lifetime. But for remote robots, battery power is a real issue.

Mechanical Engineering

Perhaps one of the most fascinating challenges was engineering the mount points for the motors and the PiStorms brain. The axles themselves jutted from the frame at certain angles, forcing the orientation of the motors. The motors needed enough anchors in order by maintain torque and accessibility. The PiStorms assembly had to be elevated enough from the frame to ensure smooth turning. Problem solving the mechanical and structural issues was fascinating because it was so constrained. I only had limited parts and spatial real-estate, and the solution space was three dimensions. Choosing Lego as the base tech for building the robot was absolutely essential here. It would be much more difficult to experiment with models and configurations if the parts were permanently affixed metal.

Software Control

The robot as it stands now is hardly better than a cheap RC car. It’s able to drive forward and backward and turn the wheels remotely. The feedback loop is somewhat sluggish (manipulating a javascript-based joystick, sending http posts of the web), and the tuning of the motors is rough (often it will oversteer, over-torquing the steering column). So, there’s much room for improvement needed in the software.

One crux is that robotic motors and sensors are continuous, but the simplistic software API is discrete: The PiStorms unit works by sending a signal to the motors (run for 1 second, spin at 25 rpm, slow down to a stop in .1 seconds, etc). Driving requires iterative polling of the input (every x seconds, check the throttle, translate that to a motor command, send to the motor). Of course, motors in real cars don’t work this way – there’s a smooth continuous feedback between the throttle and the power given to the drive train. The question – how can this be represented in software?

I’d like to add in visual sensors and have the PiBot drive itself using some rudimentary computer vision algorithms. A similar issue arises – how often do you poll the sensor? 100 times a second? 500? Is it possible to act (ex: turn to avoid an obstacle) upon a single view, or is a continuous model of required? What kind of data structures and overall program architecture allow this orchestration between input sensors and output motors? These are some of the interesting questions that arise in robotics.

It’s been a fun project to complete the base model, but the truly fascinating road is the one that lies ahead.

I usually grab a selection of the best indie games each year, during the Steam Winter sale. Last year, the certified standout was Stardew Valley, an 8bit farming throwback to Super Nintendo RPGs of yore. The amazing and endearing thing about the game, beside the fact that all the programming, writing, pixel art and music was done by one guy, was the good natured charm of the game. There weren’t any dark world-ending villains forcing along a ham-fisted plot. Sure, there’s a little bit of sword slashing, but for the most part, you clear out a patch of land to plant crops, tend to animals, and wile away the hours fishing.

I’m by no means a completionist, but I spent a full year (four seasons) of gametime, growing my meager crops, renovating the cultural center in the middle of town, and catching some record-setting fish. It’s an addictive game, but not purely due the mining/crafting/exploring mechanics, like Minecraft or Terarria. Stardew borrows heavily from the elements of those games, but it’s an evolution of the genre. The biggest change is the clock. Your player grows weary in the evening, and must return to bed at midnight or soon after. If not, you’ll pass out from exhaustion, lose some of your hard-earned cash, and start the next day tired. Instead, if you follow the wise motto “early to bed, early to rise”, you’ll be bursting with energy and productivity. On top of the hourly clock is the march of days on the calendar. Each season is only thirty days. With a change of the seasons comes new weather, new town festivities, new crops to plant and harvest.

Instead of a simple day/night cycle, which passes unceasingly on in the other *craft games, the hard delineation of days and seasons gives a narrative arc to all the crafting and building. There’s only so much you can accomplish in a day. I started thinking of my days being dedicated to certain tasks. A day to clear the dense brush on the back 40, or till the soil, or forage for rare mushrooms in the woods, or spelunk deep into the slime-infested mines. If it was raining, I didn’t have to spend the half hour watering my crops and could rush directly to the mines, unless I was after the rare early-morning catch down on the shore. The townspeople also abide by regular schedules (includes store hours, and happy-hours in the bar). Most stores are closed on Saturday, so you’ll need to do your shopping before the weekend.

In the mid game, once you’ve hewn out your farm and are establishing a routine, there’s a joy to the game. You’ll see your crops blossom, and can bring your prize harvest to the various fairs. Townspeople will send you letters, and you can do errands for them and bring them gifts. You’ll learn their quirks and traits. There’s the jock and the goth and the skater and the science nerd. The cranky old couple, the perky school teacher. The uniqueness and charm of these characters is amazing, crafted with only a few lines of dialog and minimal pixel art.

The thing about all video games is that eventually the “game” part rears its head. Stardew Valley is absolutely lovely, but to truly complete the game you have to mine, farm and fish dozens of rare items. A sprawling farm entails an endless retinue of chores, from milking the cows, repairing the fence, to replanting seeds. I found myself starting up a play session only to race around, mass clicking a screenful of charming devices, watching them whirl and spit out yet more items.

It made me ponder the nature of work, and entertainment, and fun. I was spending my leisure time to play a game that was simulating work. Given, there were lots of charming touches, and all the messy unknowables and chaos of reality were ironed over. But it was still a nested tier of systems to master. All the charming NPCs were just state machines that had predilections for certain consumables. It made me wonder about why I played games. Was the game truly about escaping the daily grind, as illustrated in the opening cinematic, to revel in the freedom of the simple farming life? Or was it just a daily grind of another color?

Don’t get me wrong, Stardew Valley is an instant classic, a game that will stand the test of time. I was enthralled with the pixel-perfect little town, the planting and fishing and mining. Sometimes that life is better when its abstract memory, the wind gently rustling the leaves, birdsong in the air, and there’s not a grid of 64 yams to harvest click.

If you’ve been to New York, there’s a resonating sound that perpetuates across the island. All the cars and movement reverberate against the orthogonal architecture, a low echo, like the inside of a sea shell. And when you’re there, despite all the movement, energy and money, the sound penetrates, and with it a sort of existential fear. If you’ve watched 9/11 videos, you can hear the sound, between the screams and the crumbling of the towers.

The opening of The Goldfinch is probably the best approximation of that yawning maw I’ve read. It’s a blockbuster start, and no doubt what propelled the book forward into reader’s hands. The premise is top notch: thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a terror attack in a museum that kills his mother, and in the chaos, smuggles out a priceless work of art – The Goldfinch.

But where do you go from there? Donna Tartt follows through with a prosaic bildungsroman, at least for 500 pages or so. First New York city and the workings of teenage angst, apprenticing with a lumbering antique furniture dealer named Hobie. Young friendships and loss, occasionally taking peeks at exquisite brushstrokes of the legendary painting. Later, in scalding Las Vegas, he lives with his drunk, gambling father, and a Ukrainian artful dodger named Boris.

The narrative world Tartt builds is exquisite. Her prose is populated with uncanny verisimilitude, from the songs playing on character’s iPods to the specific make of early Americana armoirs. The sentence by sentence structure flows easily, and the pages swiftly turn. Theo – only occasionally distorted by drugs or drink – is for the most part a thoughtful observer. There’s a dose of timidity and shyness in his interactions. He’s rarely vulnerable with his feelings. These are all acceptable, accurate character traits of one who was orphaned in a violent explosion in his youth.

And yet Theo’s passivity is the book’s weakness. In a way, its a core flaw in any first person tale. The dramatic irony that comes from a limited perspective is mostly wiped away in the direct telling. Since Theo spends hundreds of pages simply observing and describing his interactions with Boris, Hobie and Kitsey, instead of acting, his inner voice can become grating. Its the reason many readers find Catcher in the Rye irritating: hell is other people, and what worse to be stuck in the mind of another (even one as sympathetic as Theo Decker) for a thousand pages.

And while the journey Theo makes is fascinating – there’s a certain hygge to the passages in the old furniture shop, slanting afternoon sun cutting through the wafting dust – it’s cut deep by slightly off-kilter passages of Russian criminals, shootouts with gangsters, cliched high society snobs.

The novel itself is basically cut in half at 500 pages – Theo’s maturation. He returns to New York from Vegas, is accepted into school, then … fade to black. Eight years later, he’s a junkie and a conman. A number of characters are simply cut. Of course, Tartt isn’t so gauche and unsophisticated to drop these bombs in clumsily, and we receive them through the eyes of Theo, who’s properly animated enough so they fit into the world’s scaffolding. But underlying it all is the feeling that Tartt wrote herself into a corner and had to shake things up (a figurative explosion) in order to propel the book along.

After spending 900 pages in someones head, you’d think Theo would come to some sort of closure about his mother’s death, or the meaning of the painting. He doesn’t. There’s an info dump of existentialist purple prose, leaning nihilistic, pretty much every end left untied.

By the end, any passionate reader is a bit stunned. Is that it? What did it all mean? What was the significance of the painting, the drug addictions?

The closest analog, which many critics have pointed out, is Charles Dickens, who wrote coming of age tales in Victorian England, often populated with colorful characters (both rich and poor) from the bowels of industrial London. His writing were serialized, riveting as page turners. Yet who remembers intricacies or the catharsis of Great Expectations or Oliver Twist? The overall narrative arc and ultimate meaning of his stories was secondary to the thrill of living alongside fully-fleshed characters, through both the exhilarating and the drab.

It’s a fitting approach, mirroring the Goldfinch painting itself. Hyperreal, yet mundane. Perhaps even minimalist in its scope. Touches of darkness, absurdism. Maybe nihilism. A bird, chained to a perch, staring forth. Was the bird ever real? Is the painting capturing that reality, from some time in the 17th century? Or was it merely a notion in the mind’s eye of Carel Fabritius? Who knows what was his mind? All we have are his finite brush stroke, pigment and oil caught on canvas. It’s not art that stuns us, or changes our worldview. There’s no catharsis. We continue on with life. Yet there’s an enigma behind it, some shadow smudged on the wall. Did we miss something?

Lots of great art makes us feel like we’ve gained something, that we now possess a new experience. The Goldfinch (the painting, and the book), plays tricks on us, hinting at something grand. Yet when we open up the hidden cache, it’s empty. All that remains is a fading echo.

This past December was the sophomore year of the Disney Star Wars resurgence, and fans and critics were generally pleased. Rogue One was an entertaining return to the time of the original trilogy, complete with Stormtroopers, Star Destroyers and Vader’s signature black helm. The key differentiator was the tone of the film, closer to a gritty war movie than the jolly camp adventure of the Lucas originals. Also missing were the opening crawl, John William’s score and signature fade wipes. So we’re left with a solid action movie, dressed up in all the mise en scène of Star Wars (the tech, jargon, lore) missing the feel of the core trilogy. From a business and marketing perspective, this is a brilliant move, broadening Disney’s Star Wars IP beyond the narrow artistic confines of the original films. Prior to Rogue One, this was all but impossible. See: the uproar over the blasphemous prequels; the Force Awakens honing tightly to the prescribed formula.

Yet there’s something lacking in the new broadened and reawakened reality. Something cynical in the ultra efficient filmmaking of the Disney-Lucasfilm industrial complex.

Thinking back to the 77 Star Wars, there was a crew of dreamers and engineers, shaggy and bespectacled. They lacked the funds of the big studios, so they improvised spaceships with model airplane parts and glue. I watched the original 77 film recently, and I was struck by those moments in-between. Not only the iconic scenes that are oft repeated (Vader stomping around, Luke’s wide eyed naivete), but the naturalistic shots of a krayt dragon skeleton in the sand, the denizens of Mos Eisley drinking and smoking exotic vices, Aunt Beru pouring blue milk, Han’s improvised frustrations, Leah’s feisty snark. It’s these non-serious in-between shots that make the universe feel lived in, that it will stick around beyond the battle between the Empire and the Rebellion. That feeling is lost from the later films, and most of the newer entries, where every moment is a life or death struggle, high intensity, and even the humor is that of soldiers, not idiosyncratic galactic weirdness.

The similarities to another California success story are striking: Apple. Jobs and Woz, hacking away in a garage with borrowed parts, their first computer cobbled together with a hand soldered board and wooden frame. Accolades, fame and fortune came later, but that first strike defined the core of what Apple would be: beautifully designed personal computers for individuals, not gray number-crunching machines. Just as Star Wars redefined the feel of space sci-fi in cinema (away from the cold techno optimism of Star Trek or 2001 to a warm, worn galaxy of adventure, populated with familiar archetypes, not unknowable aliens or pressing philosophical conundrums), Apple made nerdy gadgets the ultimate status symbol.

And of course, both Apple and Star Wars were massive hits, redefining their respective industries, entering the cultural canon, earning billions. Here we are, 40 years later, both have become institutions. Both are riding on their past glories, minor adjustments being marketed as courageous moves, but mostly just polishing and remixing the rich material of the past.

The question remains: is the magic still there? The spark that brought these two behemoths to life? Of course, Jobs and Lucas are gone. But there were others in the early days, down in the death star trenches. Disney has proven to be a responsible steward of cultural heritage (Star Wars, Marvel superheros and fairy-tales the world over). And Apple continues to bevel aluminum edges and perfect their minimalist helvetica marketing. But now they are the establishment.

The time’s ripe for another set of shaggy underdogs with zero budget and a dream.

I first discovered Dark Souls huddled down in a dingy basement, like one of the lost and despaired corridors so common in the game’s setting.  Since then the series has been one of my favorites.  The second installment made some dramatic shifts to core gameplay elements (backstabs, poise) and felt off, but I still powered through and slaughtered Nashandra.  But it was 2015’s Bloodborne and last year’s Dark souls III that the series hit its high point, mastering the formula.

After what felt like months of battling frustration, I finally beat both Dark souls III and Bloodborne last month (at least the vanilla game), so I feel like I can finally comment on the series as a whole.  What makes these games so appealing?

The fascinating thing about the game design of the series is they take the opposite approach to many of their peers.  other RPGs go heavy on dialog and exposition, Souls is sparse.  Other games rely on randomized enemies and events, everything in Souls is scripted.  Other games polish a user interface util its intuitive and clean, Souls sticks with a barebones tables and text.  It eschews difficulty modes or learning curves.  It simply presents a direct challenge to the player and gives them tools to work with.

All the praise of the original still stand: uncompromising difficulty, cryptic lore, unhelpful statistics, pixel-perfect collision and response.  But III and Borne honed the formula to a fine tip.

I will say that III feels like a remake of the original.  Certain zones are identical, from the architecture to the trash mobs.  Some zones are literally the same (Anor Londo), but experienced hundreds of years later, so the stones have experienced considerable weathering.  At times this is a bit of a letdown, that we can’t experience more of From Software’s brilliant originality, but it’s good that those motifs can be experienced on the current HD modern console generation.  III goes beyond the original for a number of zones and bosses (Abyss Watchers, Pontiff) and closes with a nice throwback (Soul of Cinder as Gywn).  

Bloodborne is a different beast.  Probably the darkest video game I’ve played, the setting is an unholy melding of victorian architecture and lovecraftian horror.  One of Dark Souls core mechanic – blocking with shields – has been abandoned (even mocked), in favor of guns, parrying and lifeleech rallies.

Beyond the fights, Bloodborne tells its story in fascinating ways.  Players gain “insight” from encountering and defeating bosses, or consuming Madmen’s Knowledge during the playthrough.  As insight increases, new details are revealed about the world.  Monsters grow dozens of eyes, like spiders.  And instead of merely a bloodred sunset, a huge spindle-legged monstrosity is revealed, climbing the steeple of the central cathedral.   Numerous characters have also blindfolded themselves, removing their vision of the mundane world in exchange for a glimpse of the eldritch truth.

The player’s journey moves through creepy plazas and grand cathedrals, along with dingy villages of wooden huts.  But it also warps in and out of nightmares and dreamscapes, trapped in some recursive figment of cursed and dying adherents of the blood church.

All that being said, Bloodborne’s dark palette and and motifs can be overwhelmingly dreary, and DS III is a nice change of pace to fight on glowing lava fields or sparkling snowscapes.

Even as the Soulsborne games are objectively solid, but it’s is the organic community that’s turned them into legendary hits.  The lore, secrets, and the labyrinthine level design requires multiple playthroughs and hours of erudite study, plenty of fodder for wiki communities to digest.  Beyond that, freakishly talented players have adopted the game as a prime candidate for speedrunning.  The various combinations of achievement possible in the games is astounding.  Some run through and slaughter all the bosses as quickly as possible.  Other’s find glitches and exploits to simply reach the end credits in twenty minutes.  Some even do it all naked, without getting hit once.  Others stick the online PVP gameplay, using exotic weapons, or trolling opponents.

I’ll never be that good, or have that much time and dedication.  I’m content to master the game to the level where I can defeat the bosses, maybe come around again in NG+ and defeat them a second time.  There’s nothing more satisfying than finally executing all the perfectly timed rolls and counter attacks to victory, hands sweaty, heart pounding.  In a way, that rush is behind me, which is a bit bittersweet.

From Software says they’re done with the Soulsborne series, but the formula has been such a wild success, I’m sure spiritual successors will abound.  I’ll be there, dodge rolling and backstabbing with the rest of them.  Praise the sun.

On a dusty bookshelf tucked away in the corner of a nondescript brick building, it sat, yellowed paper and bent spine. Printed in the early 80s, jacket art and overblown font signifiers of the time, newly translated from the Italian. Before the Sean Connery Hollywood adaptation. The Name of the Rose.

On the first handful of pages, an unnamed narrator discovering a lost text in a dusty european enclave, the written testimony of a monk from the 1300s. It’s a theme Umberto Ecco has embraced and highlighted in most of his work – discovered texts, reinterpretation, what of the thing itself is lost and gained in transition.

The tale itself a Sherlock Holmes mystery set in a medieval monastery. Adso of Melk, the young protag, accompanies his mentor William of Baskerville across the Italian countryside to an ancient monastery nestled in the mountains. It’s the time of two Popes, split between Rome and Avignon, and church politics play heavily on the workings of the plot. Soon after their arrival, monks start showing up dead of mysterious circumstances.

William fits the Sherlockian mold (Adso the Watson) as close as possible, and there are great scenes where the former bends over a murder scene in his handcrafted spectacles, sniffing out clues. Much of the book, however, is dedicated to obscure theological debates among the monks over minutia, references to the titles of long forgotten books, chants and songs never translated from Latin. It makes the reading a bit of a fractured experience, incredibly dry and long passages leavened with vivid accounts of murders or vicious tactics of the inquisition.

Heresy figures predominantly. Entire sects of monks are labeled heretics due to minor emphasis on the original Biblical text, in this case – Christ’s poverty. What were Christ’s true thoughts on possessions? “Render to Caesar”, of course, but what if the church is Caesar? Of course, the rich pope and priests in Avignon would want to legitimize property, if only to maintain lavish lifestyles in gold laden cathedrals. One character even speaks at length of the holy properties of various gemstones. Following all this, the poor monks, who wish little more than to live a life of service and transcribing tomes, are labeled holy or heretic, depending on the political alliances of their order (and are thus burned at the stake).

All this political infighting and background noise brings a hint of conspiracy to the murders in the monastery. Is it a vengeful assassin, enacting the killings to send a message (which appear to mirror God’s judgement from John’s Revelation)? William and Adso are forced to consider both physical and logical facts of the deaths (who was in the vicinity, what time of day), and the tertiary details (a dead monk was transcribing a certain book, was this heresy for a certain sect)?

As is Ecco’s forte, the rabbit hole goes ever deeper, all the way to madness. William and Adso explore the forbidden library, constructed as a labyrinth, tricked out with psychedelic incense and false passageways. Near the conclusion, Adso has a breakdown from exhaustion, envisioning a hellish feast where the entire cast of characters, along with Christ, the apostles, infamous bandits, even the popes commit any and all permutations of heresy. Everything sacred is violated, from communion and baptism on.

The final act of the book wraps everything up nicely (from a plot standpoint), but the open questions persist. If ideology becomes enforced with the rule of law (and punished by the sword and the stake), then everything can become heresy, punished at the whims of a capricious tyrant. If information is incomplete, is deductive reasoning useful, or does it lead to faulty conclusions? Should certain knowledge be taboo, locked away in hidden libraries, accessible only to the select few?

Ecco himself saw many of these nightmares come to pass in Italy during the 30s. Mussolini and the cult of fascism swept through the country. The intellectual elites elevated an ideology and in turn designated what (and who) was heretical. Mob rule, societal peer pressure, government backed thugs forced the common man to march in line. After Ecco died earlier last year, a phenomenal essay was republished on his experiences as a boy and thoughts on fascism’s roots.

The monks, castles and inquisitors of 700 years ago are but dust and fragments of text in lost books. But the root of that nightmare – inflexible ideologies, heretical pronouncements – are as fresh as newly transcribed parchment, the ink yet to dry.