A short stack that hits the spot

Reflections on my new Substack, the internet, humour, reading... and, let's face it, everything in the whole world!

A little reflection after two months of Substack activity, and a question for you all.

Before we get to that, there have been a chunk of new subscriptions over the last few weeks, so here’s a catch-up on this little prose enterprise. So far we’ve had:

On the non-fiction front,

1. Two “Oppenheimer”-related articles.

   1. My reactions to “The making of the atomic bomb”, by Richard Rhodes. In short: what an incredible book! Read my piece, then read the book!

   2. That was me gearing up for the Oppenheimer movie, so I wrote about that as well. Yeah, it was Ok.

2. Three pieces on consciousness and free will, prompted by reading Erik Hoel’s recent book.
   Part 1 is my 30-year-old youthful take on the topic.
   Part 2 talks about Hoel’s book, and how nothing seems to have meaningfully changed in the intervening three decades.
   Part 3 tackles his argument for why we do have free will; nice try, but no cigar.
   Plus a bonus piece on how to make sense of a deterministic universe.

Then there’s fiction,

1. Travel with Children, imagining academics as toddlers, and their grad students as hapless parents. To be honest, very little imagination was required. (2 parts)

2. The Scientist’s Revenge. A scientist fantasises about exacting revenge on moronic crackpots, and this is the story he produced. (4 parts)

Enough of the past, now to the future.

My main ambition for The Fictional Aether is to write fiction. You can find plenty of Substacks under the heading “fiction”. A lot of those are only about fiction: they discuss literature, or give writing advice, or act as writer therapy sessions. In terms of actual fiction, most of what I find is science fiction or fantasy, or steps along that difficult path to so-called literary fiction. And a lot of people appear to be into story “prompts”.

That’s not me. My motivation comes, among other sources, from a reaction to the vast Substack forest of opinion writing — and, even more, by the even vaster internet/social-media landscape that is dominated by hand-wringing about the state of the world. For me, and I think for a lot of people, the bulk of our reading over the last decade has been taken over by “content” from the internet, and the overall tone has been deadly serious, and by turns morbidly pessimistic and apoplectically outraged.

It’s been a drag.

If you look for humour — and I love humour — chances are you’ll find political satire. Guess what: by turns morbidly pessimistic and apoplectically outraged. Have you heard about political polarisation? Apparently we don’t like it. But we find that cranking it up gets lots of hits, and it helps even more if we insist that all social and political topics are perilously important and it is crucial that we think about them all the time.

Oh look, I just started off on a little state-of-the-world commentary of my own. It’s hard to resist.

I want to step out of that pot of boiling frogs. I want to read stuff that is fun. I want to read stuff that also makes me think — but to think interesting things, new things, things that make my world bigger, not smaller. The workings of my mind get seized up by all the nonsense and horror I read everywhere, and I want something to loosen it up and let it function again. Not with goo and platitudes, but with stuff that’s just damn good and damn good fun.

I haven’t found much, so I guess I have to write it myself.

If there are other people on Substack (or elsewhere on the internet) who are doing the same, please let me know. Lots of my new subscribers appear to be into AI and technology, given that they came here via all that consciousness malarky, so maybe you’re not the right people to ask. That’s fine. Please share this far and wide, to help me track down everyone else who’s dreaming of an internet revolution of humour and fiction.

For those of you are who are not into humorous fiction inspired by the world of science and academia (at least for now), I hope I will provide you with a bit of variety, and maybe cheer you up. There will also be interludes of portentous intellectual pondering, so there’s that to look forward to.

Finally, as promised, a question for my new subscribers. I’ve taken a look at the Substacks some of you read, but I haven’t done this very thoroughly, because you read so many things. How do you do it? I see people who read 27 Substacks, or 52, or 94. Do you read them all? If not — I assume not — then what do you do? Is this, ultimately, just another source of inbox bloat and I-really-should-read-that guilt? I hope not. I’m parsimonious in what I sign up to (I know, I know, engagement is the key to growth!) because I really can’t handle the thought of reading my 20 Substacks for the week or, even worse, feeling bad that I didn’t read them. I’m curious to know what you all do. And which of the Substacks you read you would class as the best hidden gem that deserves more attention.

And with that, here are your favourite buttons, and I’ll (hopefully) see you next week.