Chase Duncan > Recent Status Updates

Apropos of recent events:

“I have no answer, no way to describe the magnitude of this slaughter. It is mindless. Blasphemous. As if we have forgotten dignity. Theirs, our own. The word itself. No distinction between innocence and guilt, condemned by mere existence. People transformed against their will into nothing more than symbols, sketchy representations, repositories of all ills, of all frustrations.”

“…Had you been able to, you'd have demanded the truth from Vesemir. From the elders. But you turn to me."
"Because you've never lied to me."
"Can you be certain? Or perhaps I lie so well no one sees through my untruths. Neither a child, nor a precociously grown-up eighteen-year-old. You aren't telling me everything, my boy."
This time he told her everything. Though he occasionally faltered.

“We live in an inimical time. But then, they are all inimical times.”

Starts with a banger “Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions” Psalm 25:7

My sweet wife surprised me with this and I’m so excited for it I had to put down Midnight Tides.

No clue what’s going on sometimes but Erikson’s formula of world building, proper noun hypnosis, and deeply-grounded politics / metaphysics / warfare / internal conflict keep you locked tf in. The most ambitious author aiming for a more sophisticated high fantasy.

You forget how inspirational Arthur Conan Doyle, rather than Ian Flemming, is for spy fiction until Le Carré does the Reichenbach Fall

Le Carré cooking w a thriller worth 450 page of slow burn detective work.

“She was shivering. He thought she
had been shivering ever since he laid the gun on her and he wished he hadn’t done that, because it was beginning to dawn on him that she was in as bad a state as he was, and perhaps a damn sight worse, and that the mood between them was like two people after a disaster, each in a separate hell.”

“There is a kind of fatigue, sometimes, which only fieldmen know: a temptation to gentleness which can be the kiss of death. Jerry lingered a moment longer, […]. And he had an overwhelming feeling—only for a moment, but dangerous at any time-of completeness, as if he had met a family, only to discover it was his own. He had a feeling of arrival.”

“Meanwhile, sometimes with Guillam for company, sometimes with silent Fawn to babysit, Smiley himself conducted his own dark peregrinations and marched till he was half dead with tiredness. And still without reward, kept marching. By day, and often by night as well, he trailed the home counties and points beyond, questioning past officers of the Circus and former agents out to grass...”

Fight with a shoggoth beneath Urithiru and talks with Taravangian gave a shot in the arm to Sanderson’s standardly sluggish pacing

Banger

Work audiobook this week. Absolutely fascinating left turn from pulp dying earth fantasy to A Farewell To Arms-style war story based on Wolfe’s time as a conscript in Korea. Interested to see how Gene lands this plane.

“‘Autarch, what of the New Sun, if at last he comes? Will you be his enemy too, as you were the enemy of the Conciliator?’

‘Swear to me, and believe me, when he comes I shall be his master, and he my most abject slave.’

I struck then.”

I would be lost without the Shelved by Genre podcast’s to help dig out the literary references I missed. Wolfe’s writing can be dense and frustrating when he moves between modernist Proust-like mode to pulp sci fi fantasy. But the summit is worth the hike.

“Every man fights backward to kill others. Yet his victory comes not in the killing others, but in the killing of certain parts of himself.”

Harrowing and deeply painful read. A more detailed review to come after I finish.

Two standout quotes: “Your Jihad will be a summer picnic on Caladan by comparison,”

And

“It suffused his body and he felt himself to be large, very large, not a child at all. And his skin was not his own.”

All Hail the God Emperor

"Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise? I thought not. It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you. It’s a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life… He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying…”

“There’s no mystery about a human life. It’s not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced”

My work audiobook is pleasantly surprising

“The one-eyed view of the universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend too the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside m not even exist.”

“Starspangled Kingdoms bedecked
in dewy joint –
DON’T IGNORE OTHER
PARTS OF YOUR MIND, I think,
And my clever brain sends
ripples of amusement
Through my leg nerve halls

And I remember the Zigzag
Original
Mind”

Ginsberg gets the rightful praise for his poetry but Kerouac has some juice in Mexico City Blues’ spontaneous prose technique

“Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself--a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.”

“The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth”

Harrowing