(2023-03-08) Sloan How The Ring Got Good

Robin Sloan: How the ring got good. I’ve been tearing through a series of books I never expected to read, and they have revealed something breath­taking about where The Good Stuff comes from.

You have to understand: J.R.R. Tolkien, among writers of this kind, is revered as THE grand designer. The story goes: he’d worked it all out in advance

This is tech­ni­cally true — he HAD worked out the languages and legen­darium years before — but (I have now learned) that story doesn’t capture or explain, in any way at all really, the process of composing these books. It doesn’t tell us how Tolkien came up with the things that actually made them good.

Aragorn, son of Arathorn, was missing entirely from early drafts. In his place was a ranger hobbit with wooden feet named Trotter

And a character as indelible as Galadriel — think of her powerful presiding role — was the product not of some grand architecture, but an errant note:

Tolkien discov­ered her on the page, just as we did.

if Tolkien can find his way to the One Ring in the middle of the fifth draft, so can I, and so can you.

Not even the MAP was mapped out in advance!

The long-running BBC show In Our Time is a treasure; I love the way Melvyn Bragg allows his scholarly guests to range and roam

Matt Webb has built a Braggoscope that allows you to explore the show’s archive in new and exciting ways.

Matt has not only constructed this cool thing, but winningly docu­mented the process. He used OpenAI’s GPT-3 for the “heavy lift” of cate­go­rizing the episodes, which conforms to a pattern I’ve noticed more broadly: while the buzzy appli­ca­tion of these GPT-alike language models is chat, the real workhorse seems to be something we might call “text under­standing and transformation”.

I loved Tomihiko Morimi’s novel The Tatami Galaxy, trans­lated into English by Emily Balistrieri

vibrates with a voice that is sharp and funny, wacky and winning. It’s a perfect slice of contem­po­rary Japanese pop: a tangle of fates, simul­ta­ne­ously cosmic and comic. I loved my voyage through The Tatami Galaxy.

Ernest Rutherford: “We have no money, so we shall have to think.”