Gwern.net — Literary Criticism

On First Looking Into Tolkien’s Tower, by Gwern · Gwern.net

Gwern — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

N/A

Wolfe’s ‘Fat Magician’: Marx Brother?, by Gwern · Gwern.net

Gwern — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Was Gene Wolfe’s opaque short story ‘Fat Magician’ inspired by a scene from the famous Marx Brothers movie, A Night at the Opera, and the vaudeville gags solve the mystery of the short story?

Borges’s Tlön: Fascist Idealism, by Gwern · Gwern.net

Gwern — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Analysis of Jorge Luise Borges’s short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ as a satire of authoritarian dynamics, where the regime often declares something to be ‘true’ and people scramble to make it so—flipping philosophical idealism on its head.

Marvel: Humanizing Mythology, by Gwern · Gwern.net

Gwern — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Marvel’s Silver Age of Comics was due to inventing a new kind of mythology, humanizing it, providing an appealing new formula which could be mined for decades.

The Second Apocalypse: Freedom In An Unfree Universe · Gwern.net

Gwern — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Bakker’s Second Apocalypse vs Frank Herbert’s Dune: time loops and finding freedom in an unfree universe. In Dune, humanity is liberated by growth and development and escaping the predeterminism of prescience; in Bakker, they are destroyed by it, and liberation is achieved only by death and reunification with a deeper underlying block-universe/monistic reality.

Interpreting ‘Suzanne Delage’ as Dracula · Gwern.net

Gwern — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

On the interpretation of Gene Wolfe’s short story ‘Suzanne Delage’ as inversion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula horror novel.

Timecrimes: Time Travel In Hell · Gwern.net

Gwern — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The 2007 indie SF film Timecrimes shows the horror & metaphysical implications of stable time loops: over a single day, the protagonist commits escalating crimes while trapped in a 3-iteration loop enabled by a time machine-or rather, caused by it.

The Tragedy of Grand Admiral Thrawn · Gwern.net

Gwern — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I explain the somewhat arbitrary-seeming death of the popular Star Wars character Grand Admiral Thrawn as being the logical culmination of a tragic character arc in which his twisted (or ‘thrawn’) cunning & scheming, one of his defining traits, ultimately backfires on him, causing his bodyguard to betray & assassinate him.

The ‘Screwfly Solution’ Solution: Bi-Sexuality · Gwern.net

Gwern — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Alice Sheldon’s SF short story ‘The Screwfly Solution’ is misread by most readers as an alien attack driving men to insane violence; a closer revisionist read shows that the alien attack affected women as well, into suicidal passivity.

‘Scanners Live in Vain’ as realistic SF · Gwern.net

Gwern — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Discussion of Cordwainer Smith SF story, arguing that the pain-of-space is based on forgotten psychological issues in air travel, and concerns about worse ones in space travel, which were partially vindicated by the existence of interesting psychological changes in astronauts.

‘Story Of Your Life’ Is Not A Time-Travel Story · Gwern.net

Gwern — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Famous Ted Chiang SF short story ‘Story Of Your Life’ is usually misinterpreted as, like the movie version Arrival, being about time-travel/precognition; I explain it is instead an exploration of xenopsychology and a psychology of timeless physics.

Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy · Gwern.net

Gwern — Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in Death Note and considering fixes

Who Wrote The Death Note Script? · Gwern.net

Gwern — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Internal, external, stylometric evidence point to live-action leak of Death Note Hollywood script being real.

Death Note’s Ending · Gwern.net

Gwern — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ambiguous ending of Death Note means even the victor is unclear; who was right?