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I’ve received so many strong specific and utterly conflicting recommendations to read Ra. People have described this story so many different ways to me, and most of them are right because this narrative is all over the place.

I love that we start out with “Imagine magic, but like in a society.”. Great premise; you love to see it, definitely go run with that. I could navel-gaze all day about the rules of magic and how civilization can build on it the same way we use other technologies.

But the right turn into space war just feels bland, and a let down. It’s like someone trying to teach you how a magic trick is performed by explaining an unnecessarily difficult method which they can’t quite get right, when a simpler approach is right there, and you’d rather just watch the rest of the magic show anyway.

The meta-narrative is so deep in the genre of rationalist fiction that it rapidly gives up what’s fun about the novel for some pretty boring upload conflict deep future stuff. A lot of that feels like an excuse to bust out more neato whizz bang sci-fi vibes, but the stakes are just too far from any of the character beats, and the whole thing blunders off into Accelerando without anything to add.

Disappointing. There are the bones of a novel here and there, but the writing deliberately avoids those elements at every turn.

I read Debt right after The Dawn of Everything (also by Graeber), and my opinion of these two books is closely interlinked. The combination is an extensive unwinding of the sort of economic and social history I learned in school. I've had to re-imagine the ways that humanity developed our relationship with agriculture, with technology, and with the interplay of social obligations which we now categorize as money and economics.

The core insight and question isn't any of those individual revelations. What Graeber is trying to get you to think about is the stickiness of contemporary social relationships & structures, and the ways that we have lost the ability to imagine the possibility of change. No economic or political system has ever been as committed as ours is to narrowing the realms of the possible and foreclosing the ability to imagine other ways of organizing society. Historically, social dynamics have been much more fluid, with a significantly greater ability for groups to deliberately redefine the parameters of their politics, or simply to walk away from situations which no longer serve their needs.

In this sense, I'm reminded of Le Guin's famous statement that:

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

In fact, Le Guin was underselling the case! The divine right of kings was a relatively short-lived novelty as a political system, which many people routinely walked away from, and which suffered umpteen disruptions and overthrows. Our contemporary political systems are at once more brittle than monarchy, and more intent and effective than any before seen at punishing defiance and making other systems seem impossible. I cannot imagine a society which aspires to total surveillance and imprisons so much of its population being anything less than terrified about the possibilities of change and people's ability to manifest that.

Truly an eye-opening pair of reads which I highly recommend.