Rory

So, Terry Pratchett was once asked what books aspiring fantasy novelists should read if they hope to write great fiction. His advice was telling. He encouraged authors to avoid reading much of what passes for contemporary fantasy (what he called “Extruded Fantasy Product,” derivative of Tolkien). “Do not write it,” he said, “and try not to read it. Read widely outside the genre. Read about the Old West (a fantasy in itself) or Georgian London or how Nelson’s navy was victualled or the history of alchemy or clock-making or the mail coach system. Read with the mindset of a carpenter looking at trees.” Any great fantasy series you can name, from Star Wars to Narnia to Discworld, was written by authors who read voraciously, who read old books and loved old myths, whose minds were so steeped in history and folklore and obscure pulp fiction that they couldn’t have written derivative works if they had tried. We’ll only have great fantasy in this century if we can recover the reading habits of the authors of a previous era.

I hate this cliche: "In a million years, nothing will matter" And I love Jordan Peterson's response to it: "Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters. Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the mind"

After DOGE, Elon came to a conclusion most people missed. He tried to reform the state from the inside. He failed. And he said it plainly: the government can't fix its own deficit. Nobody in power actually wants to cut. The machine protects itself. So he drew the only logical conclusion. If the state can't be reformed, there are only two ways this ends. Either global bankruptcy. Debt keeps compounding, interest payments eat the budget, and the system collapses under its own weight. Or robots. AI and robotics grow the economy so fast that the debt becomes manageable, and abundance makes the old fights over scarcity irrelevant. Here's the part almost nobody sees. For two centuries, capitalism has had a marketing problem. Its gains are real but slow and invisible. 2% growth a year doesn't feel like anything. Your life gets better over 30 years and you never connect it to the system that did it. Meanwhile, the left's promises feel immediate and concrete: a check, a subsidy, a benefit. That's why the left wins on promises even when it can't deliver them. Capitalism produces the wealth, socialism takes the credit. Robots break that asymmetry. When productivity doubles in a few years instead of a few decades, people will see it. Things get cheaper, services get better, opportunities appear, in real time. For the first time in history, people will connect capitalism and their rising standard of living directly, almost instantly. The causal chain becomes visible. And that changes everything politically. So there are two scenarios. Scenario one: we stay in the current inertia. No breakthrough, or a breakthrough we regulate to death. The debt wins. Living standards stagnate, then fall. A frustrated electorate turns to whoever promises the most, and that pushes toward a hard collectivist left. But collectivism fails, as it always does. And when it fails, the most organized, most disciplined collectivist force left standing isn't the old left. It's radical Islamism. Bankruptcy, then communism, then something worse. Scenario two: robots win. Abundance arrives, and it arrives visibly. The link between free enterprise and prosperity becomes obvious to everyone. And this is the key point: it becomes obvious to everyone, including the minorities the left was counting on. Because their long-term incentive is the same as everyone else's. A kid in the suburbs gains infinitely more from a booming, abundant West than from a bankrupt state handing out promises it can't keep. Abundance is the most powerful integration machine ever built. That's the Western renaissance. The West doesn't need to win the culture war by arguing. It needs to win it by delivering. And for the first time, it has the technology to deliver fast enough for people to notice. The race isn't left vs right anymore. It's robots vs bankruptcy.

Tolkien used 'cooked' in precisely the modern sense.

science is solved it’s over

Your second draft is where the book actually shows up. The first is just you finding it.

We have such a beautiful world. It is by nature a shared world. We should all be working together to protect it and each other.

THEME, PLOT & WHATNOT: Want to enrich your tale? Don’t only put an external conflict in place. Make your protag question herself with an internal conflict to face. #AmWriting, #Writingtips, #Writers, #WritingCommunity, #5amWritersClub (Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash)

WotC says the “overwhelmingly successful” art direction of NuD&D is here to stay. Players apparently prefer fantasy worlds where everyone is smiling, nothing looks dangerous, and even the monsters look like they sell candles on Etsy. Future books will keep leaning into it. “After all, the dungeon was always the least important part of Dungeons & Dragons.”

What makes being remembered matter?