Essays

Essays on fiction, technology, institutions, science, history, games, and the systems that shape imaginary and real worlds.

This page is organized by topic rather than publication date. Some posts are pure essays; others are review-adjacent pieces where a book, film, show, or game becomes a way to think about a larger question.

On this page

• Start Here
• AI, Technology, and Discovery
• Energy, Infrastructure, and Climate
• Economics, Institutions, and Failure
• Science, Mind, and Identity
• Fantasy, Myth, and Power
• Urban Fantasy and Genre Evolution
• Adaptation, Screens, and Games as Systems
• Reading, Books, and Culture

Start Here

A few useful entry points into the essay side of the blog: technology, institutions, genre, and the recurring question of how systems shape what people can do.

• AI Energy Use Is a Real Problem. But It Is Not the Whole Question — AI power demand as a real constraint, but also as part of a larger argument about infrastructure, priorities, and technological trade-offs.
• The Low-Hanging Fruit Theory of Innovation Is Only Half Right — Innovation as both opportunity and exhaustion: what happens after the easy gains have already been taken.
• Who Pays for Failure? The Hidden Role of Venture Capital — Venture capital as a system for absorbing failure, concentrating upside, and making risky experimentation survivable.
• Urban Fantasy in the Age of Smartphones - How the Genre Hides Its Monsters (or Stops Trying) — A genre essay on secrecy, investigation, and what modern technology does to the hidden-world premise of urban fantasy.
• Copies of Ourselves: Cloning, Identity, and the Problem of Being You — A philosophical SF essay about copies, continuity, identity, and why duplication is not as simple as survival.
• Inadequate Equilibria — When Smart Systems Stay Stupid — An essay on systems that remain broken even when many participants can see the problem.

AI, Technology, and Discovery

Essays about artificial intelligence, automation, copyright, knowledge work, scientific discovery, and the future of human expertise.

• AI and Scientific Discovery: More Paths, or a New Map? — Whether AI simply accelerates existing research paths or changes the map of possible discovery.
• If AI Can Create New Knowledge, Why Do We Still Need Humans? — A direct look at what remains humanly valuable if machines can participate in discovery.
• Artificial Intelligence as a Discovery Engine — AI considered less as a chatbot and more as a machine for finding patterns, hypotheses, and new routes through knowledge.
• When the Machines Learn to Paint: AI, Copyright, and the Future of Culture — AI image generation, creative ownership, and the unsettled future of cultural production.
• The Future Might Not Be AI — It Might Be Copies of Us — A speculative essay on copied minds, emulated labour, and a stranger alternative to conventional AI futures.
• The Singularity Is Nearer — Acceleration, Optimism, and Uneasy Futures — Technological acceleration, optimistic forecasting, and the unease underneath grand predictions of the future.
• Chasing a Ghost: Reflections on The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto — Bitcoin, anonymity, invention, and the strange cultural afterlife of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Energy, Infrastructure, and Climate

Essays about the physical systems beneath modern life: electricity, energy demand, climate risk, nuclear power, logistics, and the politics of infrastructure.

• AC vs DC Again: Is Direct Current Winning the Second Electrical Age? — Direct current, electrification, batteries, data centres, and the changing architecture of the grid.
• AI Energy Use Is a Real Problem. But It Is Not the Whole Question — AI energy use placed inside the wider problem of power grids, incentives, and competing claims on infrastructure.
• Re-Greening the Edge: What China’s Green Belt Gets Right—and Where It Stops — China’s green belt efforts as practical environmental engineering with real achievements and clear limits.
• The AMOC Question: From Distant Risk to Plausible Concern — The Atlantic circulation risk as a case study in how distant climate threats become politically and practically harder to ignore.
• Was Europe’s Retreat From Nuclear Power a Strategic Mistake? — Europe’s nuclear retreat viewed through energy security, decarbonization, and long-term strategic capacity.
• The Box — Marc Levinson: The Invisible Machine That Remade the World — Containerization, logistics, global trade, and the infrastructure that quietly reorganized the modern economy.
• What We Learned from Ukraine—and Why It May Not Matter — The war in Ukraine as a lesson in energy, industry, resilience, and the limits of learning from crisis.

Economics, Institutions, and Failure

Essays about incentives, risk, markets, bureaucracy, democratic systems, institutional traps, and why obviously flawed arrangements can persist.

• Who Pays for Failure? The Hidden Role of Venture Capital — Risk capital as a mechanism for funding experiments most institutions could not survive.
• The Low-Hanging Fruit Theory of Innovation Is Only Half Right — A critique of simple stagnation stories and the idea that progress merely slows once the easy gains are gone.
• From Liar’s Poker to the Financial Crisis: How Wall Street’s Culture Created Modern Risk — Wall Street culture, incentives, and the institutional prehistory of modern financial risk.
• Stable, but Stuck: When Nash Equilibria Fail Us — Why stable systems can still be bad systems, and why rational actors may not be able to escape them.
• Inadequate Equilibria — When Smart Systems Stay Stupid — A systems essay on competence, coordination failure, and broken institutions that keep reproducing themselves.
• On Bullshit — What It Is (and What It Isn’t) — Truth, indifference, and why bullshit is not simply another word for lying.
• The Box — Marc Levinson: The Invisible Machine That Remade the World — A nonfiction review that also works as an essay about markets, labour, infrastructure, and hidden institutional change.

Science, Mind, and Identity

Essays and nonfiction reviews about consciousness, personal identity, evolution, quantum mechanics, brain health, rationality, and the limits of explanation.

• Copies of Ourselves: Cloning, Identity, and the Problem of Being You — Cloning and copying as a way to test what we think a self actually is.
• Teleportation, Death, and the Illusion of Continuity — Teleportation as a philosophical trap: survival, death, continuity, and the comfort of narrative identity.
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat? – Thomas Nagel — Subjective experience, consciousness, and the problem of explaining a mind from the outside.
• Something Deeply Hidden — Quantum Mechanics, Many Worlds, and the Limits of Understanding — Many-worlds quantum mechanics and the tension between mathematical explanation and human intuition.
• From Wonder to Uncertainty – A Reading Journey Through Cosmology — Cosmology as a movement from awe to uncertainty, and from simple wonder to stranger questions.
• River Out of Eden — A Compact Map of a Much Larger Territory — Evolution, genes, explanation, and the compressed power of Dawkins’s short nonfiction book.
• The Icepick Surgeon – Sam Kean — Science, ambition, ethics, and the darker history of discovery.
• The Age-Proof Brain – What We’ve Learned About the Brain (and What I’m Taking From It) — Brain health, ageing, and which practical lessons seem worth keeping.
• Rationality – Steven Pinker and the Trouble with Being Human — Reason, bias, institutions, and the difficulty of being rational in everyday life.
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy — A Usable Philosophy, Not a Perfect One — Stoicism treated as a practical toolkit rather than a complete answer to modern life.

Fantasy, Myth, and Power

Essays about fantasy and science fiction as ways of thinking about power, prophecy, empire, death, identity, social order, and the kinds of stories cultures keep retelling.

• Minds That See Too Much: Intelligence, Power, and Its Limits in Speculative Fiction — Superintelligence, prophecy, analysis, and the narrative burden of characters who see more than everyone else.
• From Merlin to Hari Seldon: Prophecy Across Fantasy and Science Fiction — Prophecy as magic, mathematics, narrative control, and a way of turning the future into structure.
• At the Edge of Death — Fantasy’s Most Dangerous Boundary — Death as the boundary fantasy keeps testing, crossing, bargaining with, and mythologizing.
• From Chosen Ones to Self-Made Heroes: What Fantasy Stopped Believing In — A genre essay on destiny, agency, merit, and the changing shape of heroic legitimacy.
• The Power of Manners in Fantasy and Science Fiction — Manners as social technology: etiquette, hierarchy, danger, and power made visible through behaviour.
• Why Humans Are Drawn to Revenge Stories — Revenge as narrative engine, moral fantasy, and emotional structure.
• Rome and the Illusion of Empire — Rome as historical memory, fantasy template, and recurring dream of order and decline.
• When the Mask Becomes the Self: Identity and Impersonation in Fiction — Masks, roles, disguises, and the point at which performance becomes identity.
• Sisterhoods of Power: How Female Orders Shape History in Fantasy and Sci-Fi — Aes Sedai, Bene Gesserit, and other female orders as institutional power rather than decorative worldbuilding.
• Beyond “Lesbian Necromancers in Space”: How Necromancy Evolved in Modern Fantasy — Necromancy as more than shock value: death magic, power, theology, and modern fantasy’s changing imagination.

Urban Fantasy and Genre Evolution

Essays and reread posts about urban fantasy, hidden worlds, monsters, religion, crime structure, and what changed as the genre matured.

• Urban Fantasy Reread: Anita Blake, Dresden Files, Mercy Thompson, and October Daye — A gateway post for the wider urban fantasy reread project.
• Urban Fantasy in the Age of Smartphones - How the Genre Hides Its Monsters (or Stops Trying) — What phones, cameras, search, and surveillance do to the premise of a hidden supernatural world.
• When Urban Fantasy Was About Monsters — and When It Became About Something Else — A genre-history essay on monsters, danger, intimacy, and the changing centre of urban fantasy.
• Revisiting Anita Blake – Urban Fantasy’s Early Pulse and Why the Magic Faded — Anita Blake as an early urban fantasy signal, and why its original charge changed over time.
• Urban Fantasy, Wicca, and Crime Fiction: A First Look at Harm None — Witchcraft, investigation, and the overlap between crime fiction and early urban fantasy.
• Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs: Vampires, Violence, and the Problem of Evil in Urban Fantasy — Mercy Thompson, vampires, holy power, and the theological pressure inside urban fantasy.

Adaptation, Screens, and Games as Systems

Essays about adaptation, television, games, and what changes when stories move between books, screens, and interactive systems.

• Why Red Rising Is Almost Impossible to Adapt (And How It Could Work) — The structural difficulty of adapting Red Rising: violence, scale, interiority, and spectacle.
• The Wheel of Time and the Architecture of “Awesome” — A screen-focused essay on fantasy spectacle, adaptation, and the problem of making wonder feel earned.
• Rereading The Wheel of Time Alongside the TV Adaptation — A reread shaped by adaptation: what changes, what survives, and what television cannot easily carry over.
• Brandon Sanderson, the Cosmere, and the Perils of Screen Adaptation — Why the Cosmere is attractive to adapt, and why its strengths may also become obstacles on screen.
• Dark – Time Travel Done the Hard Way — A television essay on recursion, consequence, and time travel that refuses to make itself easy.
• Actual Play Podcasts — Actual play as a hybrid of game, performance, improvisation, and serialized storytelling.
• Darkest Dungeon – Stress, Madness, and the Cost of Survival — Game systems as moral pressure: attrition, fear, and survival as design rather than decoration.
• Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri – Still the High Point of 4X — A strategy game remembered for ideology, atmosphere, faction identity, and worldbuilding through systems.

Reading, Books, and Culture

More personal or meta essays about rereading, returning to old fictional universes, children’s reading, and the habits that shape a reading life.

• Reading in 2025: A Year of Cyberwar, Consciousness, and Familiar Comforts — A year-in-reading essay about cyberwar, consciousness, familiar worlds, and the patterns that emerged across the year.
• Rediscovering Hard Science Fiction – and Why “Fantasy in Space” Doesn’t Quite Scratch the Same Itch — A reading-life essay on why hard science fiction offers a different pleasure from fantasy dressed in space imagery.
• Returning to Old Universes: On Reading Eisenhorn — Returning to a familiar fictional universe and discovering what has changed in the reader as much as the work.
• Books That Define Us — A short reflection on formative books, taste, memory, and the works that become part of a reader’s self-image.
• Reading for the Kids — Children’s reading as shared culture, family practice, and a reminder that books also live through recommendation.
• A Very Late Worldcon Report — Convention memory, fandom, genre culture, and the belated record of a literary gathering.