So I read and liked Unsong, back before Scott Alexander’s Trump post (You are still crying wolf) started my sneerclub conversion. I was thinking about it again recently, and it occurred to me that I haven’t reconsidered Unsong since my realization of how closely adjacent to the alt-right Scott is. Searching sneerclub for “Unsong” didn’t bring up anything so I thought I would ask. Any coded neo-reactionary elements I missed in Unsong? Or simply heavily privileged viewpoints or problematic elements? I suppose the Comet King is initially kind of a NRXer’s dream, but considering how he worked out, I wouldn’t call him a case for neo-reactionary viewpoints…
Unsong takes (secretly this is an Unsong review, but I’m too lazy to put it together properly):
If you enjoy really dumb puns, or convoluted and nonsensical conspiracy theories, or deep dives into trivia about Jewish theology, Unsong is pretty good reading page-to-page.
Everything /u/TheHiveMindSpeaketh says about Scott’s deficiencies with character writing is true. Also there’s some weird stuff with the way the male lead pines after the (asexual) female lead that feels like it’s indicative of some of Scott’s grosser tendencies.
There’s some shockingly offensive stuff buried in there. There’s a thing about how some groups of people (you can probably guess) are secretly p-zombies, so their suffering is okay. I hope I’m mis-remembering that somehow, but I don’t think I am.
The story is kind of dumb, and I barely remember it. I think it’s generic Rationalist monomania about “defeating death”, but in an explicitly religious setting?
Unsong feels like exactly the kind of book Scott would write, and Scott feels like the exact kind of person who would write Unsong. I think there’s some deep mathematical or philosophical sense in which the two are equivalent. Everything about the story reflects something about Scott, and everything about Scott is reflected by something in the story.
Even beyond the “holy crap that’s bad” moments you notice while reading the text, I’m pretty sure that if you think about the themes at all, they’re even worse.
Unsong is actually not all that bad when judged by the standards of “random web fiction”. It’s not good, but it’s not nearly as the worst of rationalist fiction (specifically: HPMOR).
Overall, I think Unsong is kind of interesting, because it’s a book that (to me) is clearly trying to be smart, but only really works as dumb fun. If you stripped out the narratives and just presented it as “here’s a bunch of intentionally bizarre takes and complicated puns”, I actually think it gets better, which is really not something you should be able to say about a book.
I read Unsong after falling out of the vaguely rationalist sphere and found it fun. There were some weird little interesting takes / trivia / ideas (the sort of think I’ll sock away for throwaway ideas in a D&D game), and I’m a sucker for that kind of worldbuilding. I think there were some questionable parts, but Scott Alexander’s questionable opinions are not really something that stick in your mind because there are just so many of them.
The thing I found really revealing was the main cast- he wrote a bunch of people who all had the same set of weird personality traits, making me suspect that Scott just can’t write characters who aren’t like him or his rationalist friends, which would work if they’re not all very unlike, well, anyone I’ve ever met. I always like fiction which is an odd little window into the author’s weirdnesses.
I may write a top-level sneer about this at some point, but two things: Scott is completely incapable of writing a character who is underprivileged (the ragtag band of sympathetic main characters are trust fund college kids, even in a dystopian hellworld he can’t write from the perspective of an actual poor person), and the fucking placebomancy(?) character who through the story is a burn-it-down revolutionary claiming to be from an underprivileged group but who in the end is revealed to be a rich white kid with so much guilt about being rich and white that he has to make up sob stories to justify LARPing as a revolutionary. Like fucking really? This is what he actually thinks about leftists.
I’ve got a hot take: it was bad
It hasn’t caught my interest, yet. I may take another crack at it, some day.
My hottest take is that I never got past the first chapter of Unsong cause it didn’t seem especially good, perhaps because Scott considers fiction easier or less important than his other pursuits, and the best examples of something almost never come from someone who considers it easy. On the other hand, maybe it’s just not to my personal taste.
I basically enjoyed it but the setup was far, far better than the execution. I don’t remember how it ended at all, unless you count recalling it being both abrupt and disappointing as remembering it.
Which is basically what you’d expect from someone who sometimes has interesting 50,000 ft views of the world and society but has very little understanding of how that relates to actual human minds and lives (despite, you know, going to grad school for it)