So Scott Alexander, the guy behind the blog Slate Star Codex , has written a novel called Unsong , w

So Scott Alexander, the guy behind the blog Slate Star Codex, has written a novel called Unsong, which I have beeen reading for a while now, but I highly recommend it. I only found out about it because he wrote some note in one of his blog posts that flagged it. It came out a while ago. I am so, so into it, but it's taken me forever to read because he only has it up on a Wordpress site and since I do a lot of my reading in places where I don't have internet access, this has stymied my ability to read it.

I was complaining about this to a friend and she just did a quick google and found that one of his fans had processed the pages and turned them into PDF and epub and mobi formats, making it suitable for any kind of offline electronic reading you might want to do. Why did I not think to do this? Obviously one of his many geeky fans would do this. They are posted on Github.

It's very hard to explain the book. It's a sort of mix of internet culture and Jewish mysticism. The key technology in this version of the world is the names of God, which work a lot like magic spell, but aspects of God are also major characters. There's also this character called the Comet King and when it came to his origin story I was crying on the subway as I always do when I encounter stories of really amazing heroes.

So you might like it I don't know. It's a great book and for some reason the author is making it as difficult as possible to read. He has so many fans! If he just released this as an ebook himself he'd basically print money, because all his fans would buy it and then that would ping the algorithms who would show it to lots of other nerds who don't know him but they would buy it and they would like it (because it's pretty great) and then boom. Bajillions. But no one asked me.

By the way if you are skeptical about that last paragraph I did a series of interviews with people who are basically printing money writing books self-published on Kindle. Here's one likely relevant to folks who would like Unsong, and another, just for fun.