dgitc
Read the first 23 chapters then pretend the final four were mysteriously lost and cannot be recovered. This will be a much better experience than finishing the story.
-Goodreads review of The Northern Caves
I hate feeling this way about such a cheap (and not wholly deliberate) trick but it’s so much fun seeing a bunch of internet posts about the TNC, its ending, whether people think the ending can be “salvaged” somehow, various (sometimes out-there) interpretive frameworks that might help, etc.
It’s just like in the story!!! And the thing in the story was also called The Northern Caves oh my god soooooo meta
wait where can I find these posts, their existence makes me deliriously happy and I’m not even the writer :D :D :D
Read the comments on AO3, or the tumblr tag. There have also been relevant comments in various other places, like this one.
(via segfaultvicta)
I hate feeling this way about such a cheap (and not wholly deliberate) trick but it’s so much fun seeing a bunch of internet posts about the TNC, its ending, whether people think the ending can be “salvaged” somehow, various (sometimes out-there) interpretive frameworks that might help, etc.
It’s just like in the story!!! And the thing in the story was also called The Northern Caves oh my god soooooo meta
I keep getting these comments about TNC that are along the lines of “I’m disappointed that there wasn’t some clear explanation at the end that everything together.”
And while I think the story has huge flaws, I just … can’t see that as one of them? The whole story is about things like mysticism, and books / idea systems that are so confusing and complicated that it’s hard to really understand them without them making their own mark on you. If the reader could come away with some clean, fulfilling interpretation, and still not end up acting like one of the story’s more fanatical characters, wouldn’t that make those characters seem silly? If only they could have been given the Official Explanation For Salby’s TNC™ in time, they could have been spared all that messy “the abyss also gazes into you” stuff!
I tried to make the characters seem like shrewd enough (albeit biased) interpreters that the reader would think: “if these people can’t figure it out, I doubt I’ll be able to either.” I guess I thought that would come across more obviously?
segfaultvicta asked: Floornight was literally so good I discovered entirely new things about my aesthetic sense from reading it. I don't think there's anything else I can even SAY that about. I feel like I have more to say about it, it hit a lot of buttons, DISTINCT from the buttons TNC hit, which is, uh, impressive also, usually authors hit a particular set of buttons for me over and over. I badly NEED to read it again. You're an /excellent/ writer, ser. Thank you.
Thank you!!
TNC for offline reading
A little while ago someone asked me if there was an “official” way to read TNC offline. There isn’t, and I’m still not sure if there’s any need for one.
If you want to have a copy of the work that you can read on any full-featured web browser, you can just click “Entire Work” on AO3 and then save the resulting page to your computer. I could make an “official” copy of the result and put it on Dropbox, but this seems superfluous.
OTOH, I’m actually not sure if it would be possible to render the forum sections faithfully on something like a Kindle – obviously the colors would have to go, but the Kindle can do CSS so maybe it’d be possible? (I’ve heard that the AO3 auto-generated Kindle version is readable, but not visually faithful.) Maybe I’m just being lazy, but I kind of want to say that the answer here is “don’t read TNC on an e-reader.” It’s an internet story, read it like you would read the internet. (I mean, yes, technically you can browse the internet on a Kindle, but do you?)
the forum sections are actually pretty confusing on the ao3 epub (which is how i read it, using fbreader on android). you should have a look. basically the extended header and sidebar bits are put inline. this got a bit confusing. have a look yourself and decide how you want readers to see it. (i’d suggest cutting the header/sidebar bits, but of course you’re the author.)
The epub is pretty messed-up when I looked at it in Calibre, though not unreadable. I think the central issue is that even if I got everything looking on an e-reader just the way it looks on AO3, it would still be a strange reading experience; because of the small screen size, you’d have posts taking up a number of screens vertically, with giant mostly-empty sidebars to the left. This is a reflection of the basic fact that reading forums on a e-reader is awkward.
Hence I think the correct response is “don’t read TNC on an e-reader,” rather than trying to make the forums look less like real forums as a concession to the fact that e-readers are bad at displaying real forums. They’re supposed to look like real forums.
(ETA: one could even give this limitation a cute meta interpretation – “well, Cafe Chesscourt existed before these sorts of things were an issue, so … ”)
(via reddragdiva)
TNC for offline reading
A little while ago someone asked me if there was an “official” way to read TNC offline. There isn’t, and I’m still not sure if there’s any need for one.
If you want to have a copy of the work that you can read on any full-featured web browser, you can just click “Entire Work” on AO3 and then save the resulting page to your computer. I could make an “official” copy of the result and put it on Dropbox, but this seems superfluous.
OTOH, I’m actually not sure if it would be possible to render the forum sections faithfully on something like a Kindle – obviously the colors would have to go, but the Kindle can do CSS so maybe it’d be possible? (I’ve heard that the AO3 auto-generated Kindle version is readable, but not visually faithful.) Maybe I’m just being lazy, but I kind of want to say that the answer here is “don’t read TNC on an e-reader.” It’s an internet story, read it like you would read the internet. (I mean, yes, technically you can browse the internet on a Kindle, but do you?)
@neurocybernetics, thanks for the long TNC impressions post – I really enjoyed it, and would reblog it here except there are a lot of spoilers and I don’t really have a tagging system in place for that
Responses to a few bullet points:
- I don’t really believe in “entryist nerds” or “fake nerds” – while there is certainly some cultural distinction being pointed to by these terms, I think the people who get accused of these things generally have backgrounds and knowledge as deep as that of the accusers. (The so-called “entryists” were there from the beginning.) I tried to capture this – and I hope I succeeded – by having Damien and Walter refer to a number of different fantasy authors, sometimes positively, so that they sound like fantasy fans and not people who consider themselves superior to the whole genre.
- I do think that there’s a tendency to be overly quick and reductive about these kinds of things these days – to jump from, say, “I think Ayn Rand was a bad writer and had incorrect politics” (fair, many people agree) to “Ayn Rand is valueless and anyone who sees any value in her work is just wrong” (I dunno, I have heard several people who were not at all stereotypical “objectivists” tell me that they found Rand resonant in one way or another). I don’t think the people making these hasty judgments are lacking in knowledge or background – it’s just that hasty, culture war-related judgments are how you get clicks in 2015. (I swear, over half the articles I see shared on Facebook these days are culture war clickbait, and it wasn’t like that 5 years ago, even with roughly the same people.)
- TNC and Floornight are both pretty autobiographical in a lot of ways, and usually if I’m describing some unusual mental state, it’s either one I’ve been in or a (sometimes severe) exaggeration of one I’ve been in. Recurring themes and stuff like that tend to correspond to “things I think/feel often.”
- About “seeing the organized elements” – I don’t think I’m likely to do this in the future more than I have in these two stories, since I guess I’m trying to make the fictional world feel “big” by showing the reader a few elements of it and implying that there are a lot more where they came from. In particular, the more details I specify, the more chances there are for explicit self-contradictions – e.g. I’m not sure there’s a middle ground between “give the reader relatively few details about the Chesscourt books” (which is what I did) and “go wild making incredibly detailed notes about the Chesscourt plot so I can be sure none of the details I’m giving the readers are self-contradictory.” In other words, if I wanted to do a bit more worldbuilding, I’d have to do a lot more.
rangi42 asked: At the end of TNC chapter 18, is the "never-achievable ideal" referring to something like satori with respect to Mundum? That is, a full enough understanding of Reverse Face instructions/duties that one can be at peace with the state of the Obverse Face world, without feeling compelled to change things one way or another. A third option between "deny that things need rearranging" and "despair over how rearranging them won't fix anything." See also absurdism's "acceptance without resignation."
Not exactly.
Today in TNC responses: someone on 4chan’s /lit/ says that “Lugnut made it too obvious.”
I … can only speculate as to what it is they think Lugnut made obvious.