As it turned out, there were people who listened. There are far, far more of you than I ever would have thought. And you have no idea how grateful I am for that.
Writing on Substack has been lifechanging,, in numerous ways, all of them positive. A few years ago it would never have occurred to me that I could get paid for writing, well, whatever I want to write about, that there would be people out there who would actually give me money because they enjoyed what I write. That’s simply amazing. Every single one of you that has contributed has my deepest appreciation and gratitude. And yes, that includes those of you reading this who, for one reason or another, chose to withdraw your financial support – whatever your reasons, the fact that you supported me at all with your hard-earned money is incredibly meaningful.
Then there’s the emotional support. I’ve been a writer since I was a kid – I read a Larry Niven autobiography when I was in grade school, and decided then and there that I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I’m the only person I know who dropped out of a lit program to study theoretical physics instead (usually people switch majors in the other direction), and I’m also the only person I know who majored in theoretical physics specifically because he thought it would make him a better science fiction writer3.
People have always told me that I write well, although I don’t really think my prose is anything particularly special … no one is as acutely aware of their shortcomings as a writer, as the writer himself. With the exception of a brief foray into the world of spoken word poetry, however, I never really put myself out there. After my undergrad I wrote a couple of novels4, which I never submitted. In retrospect it’s probably for the best: by the time I was ready to start writing in earnest, the publishing world had gotten eaten by Woke, as evidenced by the whole Sad Puppies fiasco5. I had no real idea this was happening at the time, having drifted away from science fiction as the offerings on the shelves of the bookstores had already become rapidly less appealing by the late oughts. The last decade or two in scifi has been something of an interregnum. And, well, not just in sci-fi; the first part of the 21st century has been a cultural dark age in general.
The point that I’m getting around to stating, in my usual long-winded fashion, is that having such a remarkable number of you praising my writing has meant a lot to me. It has been a vast boost in confidence, giving me the motivation to stretch my capabilities, tackling larger projects that require deeper and longer treatment, and experimenting with different writing styles.
Thank you for that.
I’ve also met a wide range of impressive and fascinating people thanks to this blog. Some of them I’ve been reading for many years, and having them reach out to compliment my writing, knowing that I have some small measure of their respect, has been quite the experience. Others I discovered here as they were building up their own audiences, and they have become close friends and comrades. Still others got their start in my comments section, or have told me that they were inspired to write because of this blog. It’s very difficult for me to think of something more humbling, as a writer, than that, especially when you’re quite certain that some of them are better writers than you are.
There were other sources of discontent with the academic life, beyond the contextual problems of ideology and medical tyranny, predicaments that were deeper and more systemic. A few days ago, I came across this video by the science YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder: My dream died, and now I’m here. I’ve been vaguely aware of Hossenfelder for a few years; having first being introduced to her by a very feminist undergraduate student with a Future Is Female sticker on her laptop, I wrote Hossenfelder off as probably another lame Woman In Science with boringly conventional takes on both science and gender politics. I may have been a bit hasty in that evaluation: while Hossenfelder is certainly some variety of feminist, she’s explicitly opposed to quotas or other systems that seek to artificially increase representation in science. That’s not really the point of her video, however, which is a brutally honest retrospective on her own scientific career, one that she says she almost didn’t post, but which I am glad that she did.
Hossenfelder sees quite clearly the structural problems in academic science. She describes how most of the scientific enterprise has devolved into an elaborate and cynical combination of parlour game and financial scam. Principal Investigators get grants, in order for the bloated university administrations to rake off their overhead surcharges. In order to get grants, papers must be published. Since the PIs spend much of their time either writing grant proposals or schmoozing with the other PIs who may well end up on the committees that decide whether or not their proposals are approved, the PIs need postdocs and doctoral students to write the papers. It doesn’t matter if the papers are true, or interesting, or useful. It doesn’t matter if they advance human understanding. It doesn’t matter if they represent significant advances with profound real-world applications. All that matters is that they pass peer review, get a few citations, and can be added to the PI’s publication list.
This, I think, was really at the root of my disquiet when I started Postcards From Barsoom. I’m something of an idealist, but by that point in my career I was starting to realize what life as professor would actually be, and the foundational dishonesty of what academic science had become elicited nothing but a great weariness and nausea within me. I was looking at a life of writing grant proposals, of sitting on proposal review committees, of travelling to conferences to hear the same old talks about the same timid, marginal, impossibly narrow ‘progress’, and of grooming students to go down the same ultimately meaningless path. All in service of the sordid imperative that the mediocrities in administration be kept floating in the unearned luxury of their warm ocean of overhead cash.
It was demoralizing, and I think my soul had sickened as a result.
There was this nagging sense that I wasn’t made for this. That life was supposed to be more than this. That I was off track.
And you, my wonderful readers, saved me from that.
Because of you, I’ve largely been able to put that behind me.
Because of you, I can see the possibility opening up before me of a life in which I never have to worry about grant committees or peer review or diversity statements or vaccine mandates or sensitivity training or any of that nonsense ever again.
A year ago, I wrote Isekai, as the one-year retrospective on the highlights of the blog to date, doubling as a handy one-stop shop for new readers to find my best work:
Isekai
·
APRIL 11, 2023
But another year has passed, much has been written, and it’s time to revisit the state of the blog.
For entirely unrelated reasons, reader
put together a script to scrape metadata from Substack pages, as a result of which I was provided with a rough word count. In two years of writing, Postcards From Barsoom has published over 400,000 words. That’s the equivalent of four long-ish novels. Obviously, quality is more important that quality, but I was still a bit taken aback to find out how much I’d written in such a short time.
In the year since the last retrospective, I’ve published 42 essays, averaging a little bit less than one a week. This isn’t counting the Write Wing Roundups, stylistically inspired by Social Matter’s This Week In Reaction feature, which I published on a weekly basis between April and August of 2023. Those were well received, especially by the authors whose work it helped to promote, but to be honest it was a relief to stop. Trying to read and summarize essentially everything that came out on Substack in a one-week period was exhausting, and was severely cutting into my own writing. Since then
’sNew Right Poasthas filled the niche, and he’s been doing an admirable job of it. I for one look forward to every one of his poasts.
Of the 42 original essays, 4 were guest posts, which I began accepting towards the end of 2023. All of them were unsolicited; in all cases, I helped with the editing, and provided some degree of feedback to the authors before publishing.
Monopoly on Knowledge: The Era of Epistemic Security
·
DECEMBER 7, 2023
A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement
·
JAN 15
The Zetetic Blade
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FEB 6
Make Demon-Slaying Great Again
·
FEB 26
My vague intention going forward is to put out one guest essay every month or so. It isn’t that I’m short on content …
… but rather that I’ve realized these can generate quite a few subscriptions for the guest authors.
’sA Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangementhas been the most striking success story to date: guest publishing her blog’s inaugural essay provided her with a big first-day subscription boost, in which she picked up as many subs in one day as I got in my first two months6. Currently there are a few more guest essays queued up. I think you’ll enjoy them. In fact, I know you will.
Before getting into the essays themselves, I’d like to mention a couple of book reviews I did, for the launch of
’s delightfulProfessor Copper’s Tactical Primer
Professor Copper’s Tactical Primer
·
SEPTEMBER 1, 2023
And for
’s first science fiction novel,Theft of Fire:
Theft of Fire
·
DECEMBER 26, 2023
Both of these were successes, meaning that in both cases you, my beloved readers, came through. Elliott told me that it was the best first-day release he’d ever had, and while I’m sure this has something to do with the audience he’s patiently cultivated for years7, I like to think I gave him a small boost. In the case of the Eriksen’s book, I was informed shortly after publishing that they’d had their biggest one-day sales bump since launch day, and Theft of Fire climbed several places in the Amazon rankings; now, Devon got in a fight with a big-name tech guy on X around the same time, which certainly played a role, but I like to think I had some effect as well.
Speaking of books, some of you might have noticed that publishing has slowed down here a bit recently. This is partly because I’ve been serving as
’s editor for his upcoming workThe Bushido of Bitcoin. Editing an entire book is, it turns out, a lot of work. It will be worth it.The Bushido of Bitcoinwill come out soon, and I think many of you will enjoy it.
Also speaking of books, a few of you have been bugging me to publish one. The most common request is for me to bundle up a ‘best-of’ essay collection; given the interminable length of my turgid prose, it is doubtless easier to settle in with old-fashioned paper, rather than try to stay focus while uncomfortably hunched over the obsidian distraction glass. So, that’s certainly a possibility. However, the fiction bug has been tugging at me again. It’s my intention this year to take one of my unfinished novels, polish it up to a readable level, and publish it. Hopefully I can balance this while continuing to publish quality writing here; after all, that’s what you’re paying me for, not for filthy sci-fi. Some long-time readers might recall that I disappeared entirely for a few months at the end of 2022; partly this was because I got sucked into writing the first half of the first draft of a novel. Of course, I didn’t have paid subs turned on at that point, so didn’t feel guilty in the slightest for abandoning all of you. It’s a bit different when you’re getting paid. So, we’ll see if my sanity can survive blogging and writing simultaneously.
Somewhat in the spirit of the Write Wing Roundups, and to help readers find the topics they’re most likely to find intriguing, I’ve organized the list thematically. I’ve put the two works that I think really stand out at the top, one my own choice for favorite essay, the other the one that has gotten by far the strongest response from my readers. After those two, there’s:
Experimental Schizosophy, where I’ve collected all my wyrdest writings on consciousness and so forth;
Cultural Futurism, where I’m mainly speculating on the social responses to developments in artificial intelligence;
Rare Political Meat, probably the largest category, where I’ve collected my more topical fire-breathing invective on various subjects of interest to those whose main focus is the culture war;
Political Philosophy, which is exactly what it sounds like;
Musk-poasting, where I have a couple of essays looking at our would-be private sector Purple Caesar;
UAP-poasting, which as the name implies concerns flying saucers and saucer people;
The three-part Depopulocalypse series, which examines the fertility crisis from the perspective of first principles, and on that basis offers some suggestions to address it at a structural level;
And finally, the collected DIEing Academy series, starting with the three entries added this year but including the full series back to Postcards From Barsoom’s inaugural essay.
Without further ado.
Oh yes and plz
Upgrade to paid
The coolest thing I’ve written this year (in my opinion)
Pixel Valhalla
·
AUGUST 21, 2023
The best thing I’ve written this year (in my readers’ opinions)
Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare
·
MAR 1
Experimental Schizosophy
On the progressive God, retrocausality, Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, Indo-European cosmogony, and Nietzche’s Eternal Return
The Eye at the End of Time
·
FEB 11
Are the left and right wings of politics better thought of as the hemispheres of our collective brain?
The Internet is a Brain With Schizophrenia
·
SEPTEMBER 23, 2023
Grappling with a power structure that has become so diffuse it is impossible to determine where power lies:
Cryptocracy
·
NOVEMBER 13, 2023
Ruminations on civilizational death, on the occasion of a death in the family:
Determined to Die
·
APRIL 16, 2023
Is consciousness something that emerges from the brain? Something transmitted from the brain? Or … is there a third option?
The Permittivity of Free Thought
·
MAY 10, 2023
Cultural Futurism
On the psychic benefits of limiting one’s direct exposure to the public Internet, particularly for girls:
Digital Purdah as a Solution to Female Internet Brain
·
FEB 14
Which way, Western man? Will you be UBIomass, useful only for biomedical testing? Or will you retvrn to tradition, and become farmers of ecosystems?
reGenerative AIgronomics or UBIomass
·
MAY 3, 2023
Rare Political Meat
On Bloomberg revealing that corporate America simply isn’t hiring white men (big post that got a lot of attention):
If No One’s Hiring White Guys, What Are They Doing With Themselves?
·
OCTOBER 2, 2023
On the Bud Light Military (another big post that got a lot of attention):
The Bud Light Military
·
NOVEMBER 9, 2023
On Bud Light itself:
Omni-Boycott
·
MAY 31, 2023
On free fentanyl vs the demonized American leaf
The Death Cult vs The Demon Weed
·
JUNE 5, 2023
So how did those Canadian forest fires start, anyhow (this was the first piece that got attention on Xitter, back before Musk banned Substack)
Canada Burning
·
JUNE 6, 2023
On the Irish finally having had it with the violent criminals the traitors posing as their government have relentlessly inflicted on them:
The Day The Irish Snapped
·
NOVEMBER 24, 2023
On the Texans finally having had it with the open border the traitors posing as their government have inflicted on them:
There’s a Crown Lying in the Gutter
·
JAN 23
Thoughts on free speech during the first of the failed attempts by wokescolds to SHUT. IT. DOWN! on Substack.
Lexical Liberty and Conceptual Freedom
·
APRIL 17, 2023
Political Philosophy
Thoughts on the abortive ethnogenesis of Canada’s United Empire Loyalists, in the context of the possibility of a globe-spanning Anglo civilization-state:
Remembering Who We Are
·
APRIL 26, 2023
How much of our religious enthusiasm is just a cope?
The White Man’s Ghost Dance
·
JUNE 19, 2023
Musk-poasting
“Interesting.”
·
MAY 11, 2023
Cracking the Shell of a Dead Future
·
DECEMBER 12, 2023
UAP-poasting
Memetic Judo, Biopolitics, and Exopolitics
·
AUGUST 4, 2023
The moral evidence for sprites
·
OCTOBER 18, 2023
The Depopulocalypse Series
Depopulocalypse
·
MAY 16, 2023
Depopulocalypse II – Solutions That Don’t or Won’t Work
·
JUNE 12, 2023
Depopulocalypse III – From SINK to FLOAT
·
JULY 27, 2023
The DIEing Academy
Outside the Walls of the Crumbling Tower
·
JAN 4
Fake, Gay, and DIEing of AIDS
·
DECEMBER 29, 2023
DIEing Confidence in the Academy
·
JULY 13, 2023
The DIEing Higher Ed Budget
·
JANUARY 16, 2023
The DIEing Prestige of the Academy
·
APRIL 25, 2022
The DIEing Academic Job Market
·
APRIL 21, 2022
The Price We Paid for the DIEing Academy
·
APRIL 14, 2022
The DIEing Academy
·
APRIL 10, 2022
Yep, it’s one of those posts.
A lot of red states have been putting the universities in legislative armlocks over the last year and forcing them to drop the diversity statement nonsense, which they have, but I strongly suspect that this just means the ideologues are now simply expecting to find the required oaths of ideological fealty in teaching statements, without of course telling anyone they’re doing this, and simply assuming that those who know, know, and those who don’t, are enemies.
I reasoned that on the one hand, the lit program had nothing to teach me – it was too easy – and furthermore, looked like it would mostly be learning how to write abstruse literary criticism about books I didn’t particularly want to read, such as the terribly depressing modernist literature so beloved of pretentious English professors. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn’t be learning the principles of complex analysis or the solution to the Schrodinger equation on my own time, I’m much too lazy for that, I need to be forced to do math; but even without the cattle-prod of coursework to motivate me, I would certainly be reading and writing for fun. And I did.
They’re terrible, for which reason you will never see them. But also I have no idea where the files are.
If you’ve not heard of Sad Puppies, the incomparable
has provided a quick and very readable description of this era-defining conflict in the literary science fiction world.
Nope. Not jealous. Not jealous at all.
Check out his Wee Havamal. A friend of mine just picked it up. He says it’s awesome.’