> As soon as the hypnotoad pill touches your tongue, you will immediately and permanently become convinced that physical reality is a training simulator constructed by some being about which we cannot possibly know much of anything. You will be perfectly confident that something created the universe, and that this was done in order to evaluate possible AI agents for release into an exterior world.
This. Is. Amazing. I laughed out loud multiple times. I've read the Thousand and One Nights, loved the recursive elements (by coincidence, I had recently also read Godel, Escher, Bach), loved the intricate interlinking of themes, and this review brought all that delight back.
I know we aren't allowed to know who wrote these, but once the competition is done, I would love to read anything else you've written.
> I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works
Mind. Blown. I'd reckon just about everyone familiar with Arabian Nights but who has never read it thinks this.
What's the proper strategy to follow if you believe yourself to be in a simulation but don't believe your life to be interesting enough to be any kind of central protagonist? It's all well and good for the person who fantastically is in communion with a mystical sultan or a prophetic simulation to try and take meta-advantage of the situation but how can I appease our new confusing overlords as a humble worker drone of a fortune 500 company?
"There's no hint of anyone wishing for world peace or eternal life or anything like that, and no suggestions that genies could or would grant it."
Djinn seem to know where all the treasure in the world is and fly like a jet and have super-strength or telekinesis to move stuff they know about around. No mind control or reality-warping, so they don't need strict limits like the Dungeons & Dragons Wish spell.
"I worried was anachronistic until I looked it up and found there was a massive slave trade between East Africa and the medieval Middle East."
The medieval Middle East is the source of stereotypes that black people are hyper-masculine but otherwise only useful as slaves, yes.
Freeing people you owned was supposed to be a good thing to do under Islamic law, but this doesn't seem to show up in the stereotypes.
"I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence."
That's a tough one. I've seen references to "white slaves and black slaves" in primary sources, but no corollary that free people are a certain color, or any concept of "brown people."
"The moral of the story seems to be something like - Allah will bless you if you are generous and forgiving, but at some point He would also like you to develop at least some tiny shred of common sense or self-preservation."
God helps even those who don't help themselves, but COME ON man...
"Your other option for powered flight in the Idealized Middle East is some demon-men who live on an island in the Indian Ocean. They sometimes turn into birds and go flying, and if you ask them very nicely, they'll take you along. Unfortunately, once you get too high, you'll hear the angels praising Allah in Heaven, and it will sound so beautiful that you'll be compelled to join in. This will wound the birds, who are demons and allergic to Allah's name, and they'll get angry and drop you."
I remember one of the stories having a virtuous hero being offered a boat ride by a brass robot, only to praise Allah and stranding himself because the God-hating robot blows up.
Loved the review. But I'm confused about the claim that Scheherazade was convinced that she was not the highest link in the chain that she'd created. I just thought that she was manipulating the king. She told him enough stories so that he would fall in love with her, and that the outcome of those stories had nothing to do with the outcome of her life.
I was going to point out that the reason the errant wives were having affairs with black men was because of slavery, but this is mentioned later in the review.
It makes sense because if the women are mainly confined to the household, then the only men they will meet will be the male slaves, and if they are not married for love or are in dissatisfactory marriages (if your trader husband is constantly off on trips or getting carried off by rocs) then their option for discreet affairs will be with such slaves. And sub-Saharan Africans were often such, as mentioned about the slave trade from East Africa.
The "tale within a tale within a tale" is a motif found in Indian literature as well, I can't put my hand on it right now but I did read an anthology of stories from Classical Indian literature and *so many* of them follow this pattern of storyteller sitting down to tell king or queen a story, in which the characters tell a story about the characters in that story telling another story and it can get to crazy levels of story-in-story-in-story. I suppose the idea is that "oh everyone knows this story about A and B, so they'll know what to expect if I have my characters start telling it" and that makes it easier for the listener/reader to keep track of what is happening. The variety and novelty of how you recount this version of the story about A and B is what keeps it fresh.
After reading half of this and thinking "well, we have a clear winner here", I scrolled back to the top to find the info about how to vote in the competition... so please let me add my voice to those pointing out that you just do it best.
"I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence."
From what I recall from Race and Slavery in Islam, probably light-coloured people from western Eurasia. Arabs, Persians, Turks, whatever they call people from the Caucuses, etc...
> Pessimistic realism: Western fairy tales end with "and then they all lived happily ever after". Stories in the Arabian Nights end with "and they lived a pleasurable and delightful life, until they were visited by the Destroyer of Delights and Sunderer of Societies."
Fun fact: Norwegian fairy tales often end with "and then, having killed the evil land-owning troll, the Ash-lad carried off all of his gold and silver, with which he was able to pay off *most* of his debts."
I'm not sure why, but I initially thought this was part of the book review contest, and I was like, holy, cow, this is the one.
This reviewer not only nailed the humor, but also simplified the text, made it memorable, tied in rationality, man, he is just punching on all cylinders.
Then I got to the comments and saw people saying "congrats scott" and I'm like, damn. Well, at least there's a reason he's a big shot blogger these days.
Because I thought it was a review for the contest, I found myself thinking critically about what could be an improvement. What I would suggest, if anyone cares, was that I found myself sad that the author (scott) didn't read the longer version with more stories, to confirm hypotheses about magic carpets, etc.
You left out an important bit! The king of the genies's wife was a human woman he kept in a glass coffin he carried about with him. The coffin had no holes in it. Scheherazade points out to Shahryar that human women need to breathe, so the genie's wife must in fact have been a genie herself, which means that the genie is knowingly carrying around his genie wife pretending to he human, so rather than the genie's wife cheating on him, it was actually a conspiracy between two genies to fuck with Shahryar and Zaman!
The key plot line here reminds me of the stories of King Vikramaditya and the ghost (a "vetal"), from India. The vetal would not get off his back. It would keep telling him stories.
"When you're telling a story, you can suggest things that would get you in trouble if you were just stating your own opinion. And you can suggest even more if you wrap one tale inside another. So if you're telling a tale about a merchant, and the merchant tells a tale about a barber, and the barber tells a tale about a fisherman... Well, inside the fisherman's tale you can put the most provoking and mutinous truths. Because the tale is so far removed from you.
That's what Shahrazad did. Wrapped up morsels of truth in a confection of tales, which she served to the Sultan each night. She was hoping that in time those truths wouldn't seem mutinous anymore-- just *true*."
-"Lessons in Life and Storytelling," from "Shadowspinner" by Susan Fletcher - actually-good YA fiction, and totally-not-Scheherazade-fanfic
"I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button."
The recursive elements of Arabian Nights always delighted me as well.
It is funny how the Western idea of a genie is so different from the source material. They're basically just superhuman/supernatural beings who occasionally command legions of lesser djinn - so when you make a "wish" you're just asking a superhuman entity to do something cool for you. "I wish for a castle" just involved the djinn and all his underlings building a castle for you overnight with their super-speed, vast wealth and resources.
Huh. I also recently read Arabian Nights, the Andrew Lang version. I find the above thesis entertaining, and not wildly inaccurate, but I do think it slightly exaggerates some particulars for humor, and to make its point land.
(Some spoilers.)
For example, Sinbad's arc is seven full chapters, and really just about a guy who constantly gets trapped on islands full of monsters, while his entire crew dies or leaves him for dead, and somehow ends up richer every time. This is in spite of his luck at sea, which is objectively terrible by any other measure. (Why would anybody crew with this guy?)
Adultery and sultans killing random people is totally a thing that happens in the book, but stories about dealing with unexpected wealth and fortune seem more common than adultery. If I wanted to draw a line through it, I might say it's a book about people massively changing social and economic strata, and succeeding or failing at it, which might be great escapist lit if you live in a society where almost no one escapes so much as their fathers' profession.
Well, and dealing with genies. But we all need to learn more about how to deal with genies. ("Geniuses" in my edition, which was jarring at first, but has a fascinating overlapping etymology back to Latin. Apparently there was some kind of similar spiritual entity in Rome that I somehow never read about in ancient mythology, and it was probably completely different, but early collectors of foreign accounts will say a rhino is basically just a unicorn and call it a day.).
I found the review's note about "it's not really cliffhangers" a bit jarring. The recursive stories are almost always told right before someone is killed, those recursive hops are clearly what the folk summary is gesturing at when it says they're all cliffhangers. Just before the sultan brings the sword down on somebody, they say, "oh, wait, have I told you about my second cousin?" and they resume the next night. Usually (not always) the first guy is spared. Cliffhanger + recursion, usually in one step.
I think most of the recursion resolves, but I'm not sure all of it did... I often lost count of the nesting. Maybe my edition left out a closing story or two.
The most bizarre example is the traveling Calenders (now "Qalandar," a wandering Sufi religious devotee). These three are each blind in the right eye. They come independently to a house where they are all allowed to stay, and the one rule: "You must not ask any questions about what you see tonight."
Obviously they see some crazy ritualized stuff, probably some kind of sorcery. They naturally ask about it. Or a disguised sultan does, I forget. They are all told to leave, per the agreement, but then each stay to recount the different stories of how they each lost their right eye.
The whole time you're thinking, "oh, we're totally going to figure out why the people in this house have this weird ritual, I can't wait."
But... after they tell the last story, they're just all told, "no, really, get out." Which makes diagetic sense! They said that was the deal! But there's just no hint of resolution for the reader, as far as I can tell. I think they were just playing with audience expectations at that point, but maybe we lost the real ending sometime in history. A bit like Sopranos or Lost, doing more setup than they can deliver on. Feels a lot like modern serial storytelling on TV at times, for better and worse.
One problematic story is about the King's favorite jester, who collapses dead while visiting the town. Different members of society, hoping to escape blame for his sudden death, all successively try to frame someone from a different minority religious or ethnic group. After they explain it all to the Sultan, they all have a good laugh and move on. But it really felt like "don't frame random religious or ethnic minorities" really really really needed to be instantly promoted to a first level crime, with a specific punishment beyond "just tell a good story about it and everything's fine."
In some ways 1001 Nights is the mother of all shaggy dog stories. The recursion keeps a story alive while completely refreshing the characters. I think it would make a really bold television adaptation, if you could really commit to the recursion, and constantly change the cast and setting and protagonists, just to leave audiences feeling totally adrift the whole time. Suddenly characters from seasons ago come back and you're back in their world.
Probably impossible to pitch a concept quite so hostile to audiences. But it would be fun.
I also have a suspicion that at least some of the stories were propaganda written on behalf of Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, who tends to out-hero a handful of the incredibly plucky heroes.
Those are all my thoughts.
Also, don't mess with the Roc, it will mess you up.
By the way, not all Western fairy tales end with "and they lived happily ever after". Hungarian fairy tales also end with the more realistic "and they lived happily until they died" phrase.
Imagine The Stanley Parable did this. CYOAs within CYOAs within CYOAs within CYOAs, such that in each one there were options to violate or continue established themes.
Count me in as yet another reader who thought this was a peculiar contest entry and came to the comments prepared to say, “Put a fork in it, it’s done; this is the one.” I found myself chuckling aloud in recognition as I remembered reading the Arabian Nights two decades ago. Imagine my sudden lack of surprise as I realized this was a post of Scott’s. Well done.
More seriously, Indian story collections are the obvious inspiration. The panchatantra and somadeva are easy enough to find, and almost certainly Burton was rather familiar with some of these motifs (deeply nested stories, frequent supernatural intervention, wise kings, etc.)
Wasn’t there a dreidel involved in the recursive stories? Or am I thinking of something else? Maybe something with that little Juno gal in it. [my obligatory goofy joke]
Yep, a very funny review, Scott. This one may my wife to read ACX.
Regarding merchants, that’s all the ancient Arabs had going for them, given the barrenness of their lands. Furthermore being a merchant was an esteemed and respected profession, unlike in the Roman world view inherited by the Church. After all the Prophet Muhammad himself was a merchant, who married his female boss, and earned a reputation for fair dealing and honesty that later made people receptive to his message.
As for Jinns, they are mentioned extensively in the Quran as elemental beings of energy who are morally the equals of humans (no anthropocentrism here), but there is no suggestion that they inhabit the same universe as us and may be living in a parallel one.
Wandering professional storytellers were a popular form of entertainment and news back then, just like skalds, bards or trouvères in the Middle Ages, and just as Hollywood loves to make movies about making movies, storytellers loved to spin tales about storytellers.
I read Classical Persian (Rumi, Nezami, Ferdowsi, Hafez, etc.) and also learned Arabic through reading the medieval Arabic of the Thousand and One Nights. The most accurate and complete version available in English is (unless something has changed in the last ten years) that of Malcolm Lyons (Penguin, 3 fat paperback volumes). I believe that Lane was bowdlerized and Burton was the opposite, adding all sorts of material, though I haven't read either of those. Any abridged edition will cut out a lot of less-interesting material, but that does prevent an understanding of what a grab bag the work is: pious and profane, old and new, long and short, learned speech and common speech, etc. I don't know about the Arab world, but I do know that storytellers worked in Persian tea houses, at least until recently, spinning out long tales from the Shahnameh (the Persian national epic). There may still be a few around. It's wonderful to think of such traditions stretching back to the Iliad and Odyssey, the Tale of Gilgamesh, and surely much farther.
Having recently finished reading the Decameron (Rebhorn's translation), I'd love to see you review that and compare-and-contrast it with the Arabian Nights. I think you'd find it a fun exercise and it'd be a neat bit of education in comparative medieval-era literature and mythmaking.
>Also, don't try to tie yourself to the foot of a roc. This almost never helps.
It's been a long time since I read 1001 Nights, but I thought that this actually worked out pretty well for the guy who did this (Sinbad). I mean, you can't control where the roc goes, but when you're a shipwrecked sailor and you just want to go "anywhere but here" it'll do the job. The only hard part is finding the roc.
"Scheherazade's stories are set in an idealized Middle East. The sultans are always wise and just, the princes are always strong and handsome, and almost a full half of viziers are non-evil."
I've noticed stand-up comedians constantly tell jokes about women sleeping with them. I assume it's for the same reason that medieval Arabian storytellers tell lots of stories about kings richly rewarding their storytellers.
Re:Black Slaves, yes, this is a common misunderstanding. People think only white people took black slaves. Nope, it's only that whites are saying they feel bad about it now. Black slaves were, traded as far away as China where they were known as "Devil Slaves", with stereotypes that make Jim Crow look tolerant.
The Islamic middle east imported an estimated 20 million black slaves (depending on which source you read), and they were particularly favoured as eunuchs for the harem (because if someone screwed up the castration, it was obvious which kids weren't the Sultan's). Also, even as I type this, a thought occurs what's going on here.
In Gore Vidal's "Creation", its mentioned that castration prevent eunuchs from ejaculating, not from getting an erection. So, from the ladies point of view... Do I need to spell this out? Plausible source of the stereotype of extreme, ahem, stamina?
I started reading Scott after reading The Last Psychiatrist and looking for someone similar. This has such a similar feel to his review of Echo and Narcissus. I really enjoyed reading this review.
> you start to worry that one of these stories will have a branching factor greater than one, and you'll just keep getting into deeper and deeper frame stories forever
Borges mentions that at some point in the book, a character in a story starts to tell the story of the sultan and Shahrazade from the beginning once again. However, I've checked the reference and it turns out that Borges was just making things up.
>I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works
In the Burton translation, at least, the early episodes do end with fairly explicit cliffhangers. Checking the text for Night 001, "Now when I heard those hard words, not knowing her object I went up to the calf, knife in hand..." and then Scheherazade conveniently notices the first light of dawn, so it's time for morning prayers and then her execution.
The almost fractal branching of the stories (I counted seven levels of nesting at one point) facilitates this, but I noticed a few volumes in that Burton and/or Scheherazade had mostly dropped that conceit and the stories were coming to clean endings.
But in the conclusion, when Scheherazade asks if her husband might pretty-please not kill her so she can continue raising their children, the King says basically "don't be silly; I pardoned you on like night fifty, I just wanted to keep hearing the stories." To which her response was "...and did you notice how in those stories there were all sorts of men from kings to commoners who suffered every sort of misfortune and betrayal particularly including their wives sleeping around with black slaves, and *didn't* become insane misogynistic serial killers?" OK, I paraphrase a bit. But Burton's Scheherazade, at least, understood the score and was playing the game as you describe. As did his King Shahryar, who acknowledged having picked up on that point and thanked her for it.
Is this a real Rationalist legend or did you pull a Tyrion?
(I probably would have made the story more cautionary, and make the student do the kind of stuff a careless student is more likely to do, like deleting the sun (it's also probably easier to implement than to make himself win a lottery without a ticket))
I quite enjoyed Part I, but found Part III much less interesting. In Part I the writing was tight and witty, and I was being reminded of the richness of this work, all kinds of tidbits I remember well, although I haven't read anything from the 1001 Nights in decades. It was quite interesting seeing an old friend through somebody else's eyes.
But Part III seemed to tail off into a half-hearted rousing of the story-within-a-story hall o' mirrors literary trope which has been used for centuries (the best modern example that comes to mind immediately is Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler"). I guess this would be OK if something new and different was being said about it, but asking whether you, the reader, are in fact yet another character in the story is...well, the opposite of original.
The idea of "training data" delivered via stories in Part II is much more interesting, and I would have liked seeing that expanded instead. These stories date from a time when almost everything was passed on by memorization and oral repetition, and so they must have been worn smooth by the friction of many fallible memories, have been eroded down to their pure functional essence.
But what *is* that essence? Entertainment, to be sure. But as Part II hints, they must also have more subtle purposes -- to educate on the shibboleths, perhaps, to warn (cf. Grimm's tales), to preach (cf. Aesop), to indoctrinate. Who is the real sultan? Who is the real storyteller? One can of course make a plebeian psychoanalytic guess -- the Original Storyteller is mother, and the child is the ultimate Arabian sultan -- id-driven, irresponsible, enormously powerful (in his own eyes, which if he closes destroys the universe), and yet with a mind empty of the guiderails of experience. But there are surely many more interesting possibilities, too.
The merchant business is probably accurate to the social world of the time--or at least instructive about that world. In Latin Europe, the traditional medieval conception of society consisted of clerics, peasants, and warriors. But as things began to solidify toward the year 1000 and agriculture began to stabilize, more kids lived to adulthood and they couldn't *all* take over the family's allotment or castle. A few could get church jobs, but that still left a bunch--and also surplus agricultural products going to waste. The obvious opportunity was for some of the surplus kids to trade surplus stuff on the road. Cities begin to form (or re-form) at this time, initially as off-season bases of operation for merchants, and that created other opportunities: service-sector jobs (serving merchants), value-adding industries (giving merchants more interesting stuff to sell), municipal work (regulating marketplaces for merchants and guilds for artisans), education (training municipal workers). But it all starts with merchants: the first people to break out of the old fight-or-pray-or-labor-in-the-fields triad. My sense is that this process simply got going earlier in the Islamic world.
To all the commenters saying that Scott's reviews are superior to guest reviews: consider that we have self-selected as people who enjoy Scott's writing. Of course we like his reviews more! If a guest review had a blog & hosted a similar contest, I'd guess that the readers of that blog would prefer his review to all others (even Scott's)
a. The flying carpet comes from The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou, which maybe isn't included in some abridged versions. And if I remember correctly, the text doesn't say it flies - more like teleports you places, which is not great for 'I can show you the world'-style sequences but lovely if you have motion sickness.
b. As far as I can tell, the "genie that lives in a confined space and when you release him must grant you three unlimited wishes" thing is a mixture of the genie from the fisherman story (who considers giving you three wishes but will settle on killing you), the Aladdin slaves, and the Thief of Baghdad (1940). Genies are a separate species of free fire-based spirits, so the lamp-wishes-reality warping combo is more of a circumstance they sometimes find themselves in than a biological imperative.
>> I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.
That's not what happened. The prince was shown both buttons but he wanted to keep the flying machine for himself. Therefore he slandered the sage, bribed the judge and got what he wanted.
"In one story, when a prince is declaring his love to a princess, he says "I am your slave, your black slave", as a hyperbolic declaration of servitude."
Not at all—he's just hoping that she'll genuinely want to fuck him.
More seriously, though, the highly un-modern idea behind everyone cheating with black slaves is that the medieval Islamic world basically regarded blacks as the lowest, filthiest form of human and so they assumed no woman with any self-respect at all would sleep with them. Thus the reoccurring insistence on the slave being "the lowest of the household" or being assigned various animalistic descriptors: the point is that the women are monstrously immoral. If you read the whole thing, you'll find frequent cases of cheating between Arabs, Persians etc. and these are generally far more sympathetically described, often with the young man sneaked into the fair wife's bedroom as the protagonist.
On that note, I would strongly urge you to read the unabridged Burton translation. I realize that's a bit like recommending that someone read the entire Pali Canon, but no abridgment I've seen has been able to resist bowdlerizing Burton, and his footnotes are a great part of the value.
Oh, and finally, as regards all the looping/nesting stuff, a passage Borges is fond of pointing out is the bit where Scheherazade begins to tell the Sultan the Tale of Shahryar and his Brother Shahzaman, thus putting them all in peril of entering a nested time loop of infinitely retelling the first part of a perpetually unfinished series.
Well, this is awkward. I've thought of myself as some kind of protagonist, based on the ridiculous amount of luck I seem to have. You're making my delusion worse! (Great review.)
I'm wondering, does the Arabian Nights narrative appear to contain any "open brackets"? I.e. nested stories where one of the frame stories is dropped and left unfinished, like Hofstadter's Harmonic Labyrinth.
That was delightful. Reviewing a fiction work was a risk but the reviewer pulled it off, capturing the gist of the original while also presenting some fascinating commentary from a rationalist perspective. I do wonder how much the observations from section I apply to 1001 Nights stories specifically versus fairy-tales in general (which I've made a small hobby of reading) but that doesn't invalidate any of the... should I call them conclusions? They feel more like riffs or interpretations. There isn't a definite thesis being defended, exactly, which normally would make me worry that the review wasn't informative. But somehow I still feel like this one was.
There's an old Rationalist legend about the starving college student and the supercomputer. The starving college student fantasizes about being wealthy, so he gets access to the school supercomputer and runs a simulation of his life where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. This has an unexpected result.
It takes much more compute than he was expecting. The supercomputer freezes for around fifteen minutes and finally crashes with a stack overflow. He investigates, and finds that simulated-him also fantasized about being wealthy, got access to the local supercomputer, and started running simulations where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. In retrospect this was predictable - computers cannot recurse indefinitely.
Sorry to be a spoilsport, but if we want our fables to provide illumination on our existence, we must have a way to actually bring them back to reflect on the real world. That's why genies give you riches, but not world peace and why you every time you think "the simulation argument could be interesting to bring up here" you are wrong.
This is absolutely hilarious. For a moment there I thought this was a user review, and realized I probably couldn't vote for a review that made me laugh over ones that made me think, but I sure as hell was tempted to.
Sorcery and witchcraft* are pre-Islamic practices in North Africa practiced by its indigenous peoples (see https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b9fb61e7.html). Around 700 AD, most of North Africa was taken over by Arab Muslims (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_the_Maghreb). As Islam forbids the practice of sorcery, this and other aspects of indigenous culture were suppressed. This was least successful in Morocco, which continues to have a large indigenous population, a lot more than other North African countries (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers). (Heads up that many/most indigenous North Africans consider "berber" a slur.) So basically Morocco has (and continues to have**) a reputation for witchcraft because it's the country where witchcraft culturally survived campaigns to eradicate it. :-)
*Not sure how the book defines sorcery versus witchcraft, there's probably some translation issues at hand here. Hence me using "witchcraft" as that's how I see it talked about today.
**There's a lot of practicing witches in Morocco today, but that's easy to read about with google etc.
> I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.
I have no idea how you can be smart enough to build a doomsday device but also tell the British spy your evil plans then throw him into an easily escapable deathtrap and not make sure he dies ;)
It reminded me of something I did as a child, when I was about 10. I had read a (super abridged, and very "disnified") version of Arabian Nights. Our teacher gave us an assignment to read one fairy tale of our choice for the class. I had a scheme to read the whole book, like I was Scheherazade and I could trick them into letting me go on forever. It didn't work- the teacher just cut me off as soon as the first chapter ended.
One of the most remarkable characteristics of the stories now gathered in the pages of “The Thousand Nights and One Night,” to take just one example, is the almost complete absence of religion. Lots of sex, much mischief, a great deal of deviousness; monsters, jinn, giant Rocs; at times, enormous quantities of blood and gore; but no God. This is why censorious Islamists dislike it so much.
A friend just recommended this piece to me, and I think it is one of the single greatest things I have ever read. Absolutely hilarious, but at the same time so incredibly profound. Thank you! I enjoyed that immensely.
> As soon as the hypnotoad pill touches your tongue, you will immediately and permanently become convinced that physical reality is a training simulator constructed by some being about which we cannot possibly know much of anything. You will be perfectly confident that something created the universe, and that this was done in order to evaluate possible AI agents for release into an exterior world.
https://apxhard.com/2021/01/18/the-hypnotoad-pill/
All glory to the hypnotoad!
This. Is. Amazing. I laughed out loud multiple times. I've read the Thousand and One Nights, loved the recursive elements (by coincidence, I had recently also read Godel, Escher, Bach), loved the intricate interlinking of themes, and this review brought all that delight back.
I know we aren't allowed to know who wrote these, but once the competition is done, I would love to read anything else you've written.
Rationalists: God does not exist, and the entire premise of an all-powerful creator is without merit
Also rationalists: There is an excellent chance we're all part of a simulation
(obviously, the tongue is in the cheek to a certain extent here, but I'm also curious if there's a serious rebuttal)
Not one MTG reference?
> I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works
Mind. Blown. I'd reckon just about everyone familiar with Arabian Nights but who has never read it thinks this.
My impression was that East African slaves sold into the Middle East were always castrated if they were males.
What's the proper strategy to follow if you believe yourself to be in a simulation but don't believe your life to be interesting enough to be any kind of central protagonist? It's all well and good for the person who fantastically is in communion with a mystical sultan or a prophetic simulation to try and take meta-advantage of the situation but how can I appease our new confusing overlords as a humble worker drone of a fortune 500 company?
Compulsory review of the 1001 translations from Borges:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1936-borges-thetranslatorsofthethousandandonenights.pdf
(If Gwern hosts it you have to read it!)
"There's no hint of anyone wishing for world peace or eternal life or anything like that, and no suggestions that genies could or would grant it."
Djinn seem to know where all the treasure in the world is and fly like a jet and have super-strength or telekinesis to move stuff they know about around. No mind control or reality-warping, so they don't need strict limits like the Dungeons & Dragons Wish spell.
"I worried was anachronistic until I looked it up and found there was a massive slave trade between East Africa and the medieval Middle East."
The medieval Middle East is the source of stereotypes that black people are hyper-masculine but otherwise only useful as slaves, yes.
Freeing people you owned was supposed to be a good thing to do under Islamic law, but this doesn't seem to show up in the stereotypes.
"I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence."
That's a tough one. I've seen references to "white slaves and black slaves" in primary sources, but no corollary that free people are a certain color, or any concept of "brown people."
"The moral of the story seems to be something like - Allah will bless you if you are generous and forgiving, but at some point He would also like you to develop at least some tiny shred of common sense or self-preservation."
God helps even those who don't help themselves, but COME ON man...
"Your other option for powered flight in the Idealized Middle East is some demon-men who live on an island in the Indian Ocean. They sometimes turn into birds and go flying, and if you ask them very nicely, they'll take you along. Unfortunately, once you get too high, you'll hear the angels praising Allah in Heaven, and it will sound so beautiful that you'll be compelled to join in. This will wound the birds, who are demons and allergic to Allah's name, and they'll get angry and drop you."
I remember one of the stories having a virtuous hero being offered a boat ride by a brass robot, only to praise Allah and stranding himself because the God-hating robot blows up.
Probably the most humorous contest entrant yet. Maybe because I'm familiar with the source material, I found this one very entertaining!
Loved the review. But I'm confused about the claim that Scheherazade was convinced that she was not the highest link in the chain that she'd created. I just thought that she was manipulating the king. She told him enough stories so that he would fall in love with her, and that the outcome of those stories had nothing to do with the outcome of her life.
I was going to point out that the reason the errant wives were having affairs with black men was because of slavery, but this is mentioned later in the review.
It makes sense because if the women are mainly confined to the household, then the only men they will meet will be the male slaves, and if they are not married for love or are in dissatisfactory marriages (if your trader husband is constantly off on trips or getting carried off by rocs) then their option for discreet affairs will be with such slaves. And sub-Saharan Africans were often such, as mentioned about the slave trade from East Africa.
The "tale within a tale within a tale" is a motif found in Indian literature as well, I can't put my hand on it right now but I did read an anthology of stories from Classical Indian literature and *so many* of them follow this pattern of storyteller sitting down to tell king or queen a story, in which the characters tell a story about the characters in that story telling another story and it can get to crazy levels of story-in-story-in-story. I suppose the idea is that "oh everyone knows this story about A and B, so they'll know what to expect if I have my characters start telling it" and that makes it easier for the listener/reader to keep track of what is happening. The variety and novelty of how you recount this version of the story about A and B is what keeps it fresh.
After reading half of this and thinking "well, we have a clear winner here", I scrolled back to the top to find the info about how to vote in the competition... so please let me add my voice to those pointing out that you just do it best.
"I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence."
From what I recall from Race and Slavery in Islam, probably light-coloured people from western Eurasia. Arabs, Persians, Turks, whatever they call people from the Caucuses, etc...
this is an absolute gem, congrats Scott!
> Pessimistic realism: Western fairy tales end with "and then they all lived happily ever after". Stories in the Arabian Nights end with "and they lived a pleasurable and delightful life, until they were visited by the Destroyer of Delights and Sunderer of Societies."
Fun fact: Norwegian fairy tales often end with "and then, having killed the evil land-owning troll, the Ash-lad carried off all of his gold and silver, with which he was able to pay off *most* of his debts."
I'm not sure why, but I initially thought this was part of the book review contest, and I was like, holy, cow, this is the one.
This reviewer not only nailed the humor, but also simplified the text, made it memorable, tied in rationality, man, he is just punching on all cylinders.
Then I got to the comments and saw people saying "congrats scott" and I'm like, damn. Well, at least there's a reason he's a big shot blogger these days.
Because I thought it was a review for the contest, I found myself thinking critically about what could be an improvement. What I would suggest, if anyone cares, was that I found myself sad that the author (scott) didn't read the longer version with more stories, to confirm hypotheses about magic carpets, etc.
>There's an old Rationalist legend about the starving college student and the supercomputer...
"I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility"
https://qntm.org/responsibility
Anybody who appreciated this should definitely read qntm's "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility": https://qntm.org/responsibility .
And possibly also Eliezer's "The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover", which he describes as a "Vernor Vinge x Greg Egan crackfic": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XSqYe5Rsqq4TR7ryL/the-finale-of-the-ultimate-meta-mega-crossover
You left out an important bit! The king of the genies's wife was a human woman he kept in a glass coffin he carried about with him. The coffin had no holes in it. Scheherazade points out to Shahryar that human women need to breathe, so the genie's wife must in fact have been a genie herself, which means that the genie is knowingly carrying around his genie wife pretending to he human, so rather than the genie's wife cheating on him, it was actually a conspiracy between two genies to fuck with Shahryar and Zaman!
The key plot line here reminds me of the stories of King Vikramaditya and the ghost (a "vetal"), from India. The vetal would not get off his back. It would keep telling him stories.
This was really funny—reminded me of Dave Barry, if Dave Barry spent a lot of time talking about simulations.
"When you're telling a story, you can suggest things that would get you in trouble if you were just stating your own opinion. And you can suggest even more if you wrap one tale inside another. So if you're telling a tale about a merchant, and the merchant tells a tale about a barber, and the barber tells a tale about a fisherman... Well, inside the fisherman's tale you can put the most provoking and mutinous truths. Because the tale is so far removed from you.
That's what Shahrazad did. Wrapped up morsels of truth in a confection of tales, which she served to the Sultan each night. She was hoping that in time those truths wouldn't seem mutinous anymore-- just *true*."
-"Lessons in Life and Storytelling," from "Shadowspinner" by Susan Fletcher - actually-good YA fiction, and totally-not-Scheherazade-fanfic
(deleted prev. post b/c spacing.)
The review is marvelous. But you neglected to mention my favorite tale: "The Night Abu Hassan Brake Wind".
"I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button."
High INT low WIS.
Wonderful review - we can never have too many tales...
Seems like the obvious winner...
i didn't fall for it this time
The recursive elements of Arabian Nights always delighted me as well.
It is funny how the Western idea of a genie is so different from the source material. They're basically just superhuman/supernatural beings who occasionally command legions of lesser djinn - so when you make a "wish" you're just asking a superhuman entity to do something cool for you. "I wish for a castle" just involved the djinn and all his underlings building a castle for you overnight with their super-speed, vast wealth and resources.
Huh. I also recently read Arabian Nights, the Andrew Lang version. I find the above thesis entertaining, and not wildly inaccurate, but I do think it slightly exaggerates some particulars for humor, and to make its point land.
(Some spoilers.)
For example, Sinbad's arc is seven full chapters, and really just about a guy who constantly gets trapped on islands full of monsters, while his entire crew dies or leaves him for dead, and somehow ends up richer every time. This is in spite of his luck at sea, which is objectively terrible by any other measure. (Why would anybody crew with this guy?)
Adultery and sultans killing random people is totally a thing that happens in the book, but stories about dealing with unexpected wealth and fortune seem more common than adultery. If I wanted to draw a line through it, I might say it's a book about people massively changing social and economic strata, and succeeding or failing at it, which might be great escapist lit if you live in a society where almost no one escapes so much as their fathers' profession.
Well, and dealing with genies. But we all need to learn more about how to deal with genies. ("Geniuses" in my edition, which was jarring at first, but has a fascinating overlapping etymology back to Latin. Apparently there was some kind of similar spiritual entity in Rome that I somehow never read about in ancient mythology, and it was probably completely different, but early collectors of foreign accounts will say a rhino is basically just a unicorn and call it a day.).
I found the review's note about "it's not really cliffhangers" a bit jarring. The recursive stories are almost always told right before someone is killed, those recursive hops are clearly what the folk summary is gesturing at when it says they're all cliffhangers. Just before the sultan brings the sword down on somebody, they say, "oh, wait, have I told you about my second cousin?" and they resume the next night. Usually (not always) the first guy is spared. Cliffhanger + recursion, usually in one step.
I think most of the recursion resolves, but I'm not sure all of it did... I often lost count of the nesting. Maybe my edition left out a closing story or two.
The most bizarre example is the traveling Calenders (now "Qalandar," a wandering Sufi religious devotee). These three are each blind in the right eye. They come independently to a house where they are all allowed to stay, and the one rule: "You must not ask any questions about what you see tonight."
Obviously they see some crazy ritualized stuff, probably some kind of sorcery. They naturally ask about it. Or a disguised sultan does, I forget. They are all told to leave, per the agreement, but then each stay to recount the different stories of how they each lost their right eye.
The whole time you're thinking, "oh, we're totally going to figure out why the people in this house have this weird ritual, I can't wait."
But... after they tell the last story, they're just all told, "no, really, get out." Which makes diagetic sense! They said that was the deal! But there's just no hint of resolution for the reader, as far as I can tell. I think they were just playing with audience expectations at that point, but maybe we lost the real ending sometime in history. A bit like Sopranos or Lost, doing more setup than they can deliver on. Feels a lot like modern serial storytelling on TV at times, for better and worse.
One problematic story is about the King's favorite jester, who collapses dead while visiting the town. Different members of society, hoping to escape blame for his sudden death, all successively try to frame someone from a different minority religious or ethnic group. After they explain it all to the Sultan, they all have a good laugh and move on. But it really felt like "don't frame random religious or ethnic minorities" really really really needed to be instantly promoted to a first level crime, with a specific punishment beyond "just tell a good story about it and everything's fine."
In some ways 1001 Nights is the mother of all shaggy dog stories. The recursion keeps a story alive while completely refreshing the characters. I think it would make a really bold television adaptation, if you could really commit to the recursion, and constantly change the cast and setting and protagonists, just to leave audiences feeling totally adrift the whole time. Suddenly characters from seasons ago come back and you're back in their world.
Probably impossible to pitch a concept quite so hostile to audiences. But it would be fun.
I also have a suspicion that at least some of the stories were propaganda written on behalf of Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, who tends to out-hero a handful of the incredibly plucky heroes.
Those are all my thoughts.
Also, don't mess with the Roc, it will mess you up.
By the way, not all Western fairy tales end with "and they lived happily ever after". Hungarian fairy tales also end with the more realistic "and they lived happily until they died" phrase.
Imagine The Stanley Parable did this. CYOAs within CYOAs within CYOAs within CYOAs, such that in each one there were options to violate or continue established themes.
Count me in as yet another reader who thought this was a peculiar contest entry and came to the comments prepared to say, “Put a fork in it, it’s done; this is the one.” I found myself chuckling aloud in recognition as I remembered reading the Arabian Nights two decades ago. Imagine my sudden lack of surprise as I realized this was a post of Scott’s. Well done.
I vote for this one.
More seriously, Indian story collections are the obvious inspiration. The panchatantra and somadeva are easy enough to find, and almost certainly Burton was rather familiar with some of these motifs (deeply nested stories, frequent supernatural intervention, wise kings, etc.)
This is amazing and wonderful and very funny and please write more reviews of historical books (Canterbury Tales would be a good next step).
I studied Arabic for a while, and the Arabic title of this book highlights one of my favourite things about the way the language works.
The Arabic title is 'Alf Leila wa Leila', which translates to '(A) Thousand Nights and (a) Night'. For some reason I find this inexplicably lovely.
Wasn’t there a dreidel involved in the recursive stories? Or am I thinking of something else? Maybe something with that little Juno gal in it. [my obligatory goofy joke]
Yep, a very funny review, Scott. This one may my wife to read ACX.
Regarding merchants, that’s all the ancient Arabs had going for them, given the barrenness of their lands. Furthermore being a merchant was an esteemed and respected profession, unlike in the Roman world view inherited by the Church. After all the Prophet Muhammad himself was a merchant, who married his female boss, and earned a reputation for fair dealing and honesty that later made people receptive to his message.
As for Jinns, they are mentioned extensively in the Quran as elemental beings of energy who are morally the equals of humans (no anthropocentrism here), but there is no suggestion that they inhabit the same universe as us and may be living in a parallel one.
Wandering professional storytellers were a popular form of entertainment and news back then, just like skalds, bards or trouvères in the Middle Ages, and just as Hollywood loves to make movies about making movies, storytellers loved to spin tales about storytellers.
I read Classical Persian (Rumi, Nezami, Ferdowsi, Hafez, etc.) and also learned Arabic through reading the medieval Arabic of the Thousand and One Nights. The most accurate and complete version available in English is (unless something has changed in the last ten years) that of Malcolm Lyons (Penguin, 3 fat paperback volumes). I believe that Lane was bowdlerized and Burton was the opposite, adding all sorts of material, though I haven't read either of those. Any abridged edition will cut out a lot of less-interesting material, but that does prevent an understanding of what a grab bag the work is: pious and profane, old and new, long and short, learned speech and common speech, etc. I don't know about the Arab world, but I do know that storytellers worked in Persian tea houses, at least until recently, spinning out long tales from the Shahnameh (the Persian national epic). There may still be a few around. It's wonderful to think of such traditions stretching back to the Iliad and Odyssey, the Tale of Gilgamesh, and surely much farther.
Bravo!
Having recently finished reading the Decameron (Rebhorn's translation), I'd love to see you review that and compare-and-contrast it with the Arabian Nights. I think you'd find it a fun exercise and it'd be a neat bit of education in comparative medieval-era literature and mythmaking.
>Also, don't try to tie yourself to the foot of a roc. This almost never helps.
It's been a long time since I read 1001 Nights, but I thought that this actually worked out pretty well for the guy who did this (Sinbad). I mean, you can't control where the roc goes, but when you're a shipwrecked sailor and you just want to go "anywhere but here" it'll do the job. The only hard part is finding the roc.
"Scheherazade's stories are set in an idealized Middle East. The sultans are always wise and just, the princes are always strong and handsome, and almost a full half of viziers are non-evil."
Favorite part.
> or whatever God rules the level above hers
This would be a GOD Over Djinn of course, in the style of Hofstadter
I've noticed stand-up comedians constantly tell jokes about women sleeping with them. I assume it's for the same reason that medieval Arabian storytellers tell lots of stories about kings richly rewarding their storytellers.
Vunderbar! Best thing I've seen all day.
Re:Black Slaves, yes, this is a common misunderstanding. People think only white people took black slaves. Nope, it's only that whites are saying they feel bad about it now. Black slaves were, traded as far away as China where they were known as "Devil Slaves", with stereotypes that make Jim Crow look tolerant.
The Islamic middle east imported an estimated 20 million black slaves (depending on which source you read), and they were particularly favoured as eunuchs for the harem (because if someone screwed up the castration, it was obvious which kids weren't the Sultan's). Also, even as I type this, a thought occurs what's going on here.
In Gore Vidal's "Creation", its mentioned that castration prevent eunuchs from ejaculating, not from getting an erection. So, from the ladies point of view... Do I need to spell this out? Plausible source of the stereotype of extreme, ahem, stamina?
That was beautiful (my misgivings about the Simulation Argument aside).
I started reading Scott after reading The Last Psychiatrist and looking for someone similar. This has such a similar feel to his review of Echo and Narcissus. I really enjoyed reading this review.
> you start to worry that one of these stories will have a branching factor greater than one, and you'll just keep getting into deeper and deeper frame stories forever
Borges mentions that at some point in the book, a character in a story starts to tell the story of the sultan and Shahrazade from the beginning once again. However, I've checked the reference and it turns out that Borges was just making things up.
>I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works
In the Burton translation, at least, the early episodes do end with fairly explicit cliffhangers. Checking the text for Night 001, "Now when I heard those hard words, not knowing her object I went up to the calf, knife in hand..." and then Scheherazade conveniently notices the first light of dawn, so it's time for morning prayers and then her execution.
The almost fractal branching of the stories (I counted seven levels of nesting at one point) facilitates this, but I noticed a few volumes in that Burton and/or Scheherazade had mostly dropped that conceit and the stories were coming to clean endings.
But in the conclusion, when Scheherazade asks if her husband might pretty-please not kill her so she can continue raising their children, the King says basically "don't be silly; I pardoned you on like night fifty, I just wanted to keep hearing the stories." To which her response was "...and did you notice how in those stories there were all sorts of men from kings to commoners who suffered every sort of misfortune and betrayal particularly including their wives sleeping around with black slaves, and *didn't* become insane misogynistic serial killers?" OK, I paraphrase a bit. But Burton's Scheherazade, at least, understood the score and was playing the game as you describe. As did his King Shahryar, who acknowledged having picked up on that point and thanked her for it.
Billionaires are modern-day geniies.
Discuss :)
Is this a real Rationalist legend or did you pull a Tyrion?
(I probably would have made the story more cautionary, and make the student do the kind of stuff a careless student is more likely to do, like deleting the sun (it's also probably easier to implement than to make himself win a lottery without a ticket))
I quite enjoyed Part I, but found Part III much less interesting. In Part I the writing was tight and witty, and I was being reminded of the richness of this work, all kinds of tidbits I remember well, although I haven't read anything from the 1001 Nights in decades. It was quite interesting seeing an old friend through somebody else's eyes.
But Part III seemed to tail off into a half-hearted rousing of the story-within-a-story hall o' mirrors literary trope which has been used for centuries (the best modern example that comes to mind immediately is Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler"). I guess this would be OK if something new and different was being said about it, but asking whether you, the reader, are in fact yet another character in the story is...well, the opposite of original.
The idea of "training data" delivered via stories in Part II is much more interesting, and I would have liked seeing that expanded instead. These stories date from a time when almost everything was passed on by memorization and oral repetition, and so they must have been worn smooth by the friction of many fallible memories, have been eroded down to their pure functional essence.
But what *is* that essence? Entertainment, to be sure. But as Part II hints, they must also have more subtle purposes -- to educate on the shibboleths, perhaps, to warn (cf. Grimm's tales), to preach (cf. Aesop), to indoctrinate. Who is the real sultan? Who is the real storyteller? One can of course make a plebeian psychoanalytic guess -- the Original Storyteller is mother, and the child is the ultimate Arabian sultan -- id-driven, irresponsible, enormously powerful (in his own eyes, which if he closes destroys the universe), and yet with a mind empty of the guiderails of experience. But there are surely many more interesting possibilities, too.
I liked Errol Le Cain's illustrations, they reminded me of The Thief and the Cobbler. I looked into his WP page, and sure enough...
The merchant business is probably accurate to the social world of the time--or at least instructive about that world. In Latin Europe, the traditional medieval conception of society consisted of clerics, peasants, and warriors. But as things began to solidify toward the year 1000 and agriculture began to stabilize, more kids lived to adulthood and they couldn't *all* take over the family's allotment or castle. A few could get church jobs, but that still left a bunch--and also surplus agricultural products going to waste. The obvious opportunity was for some of the surplus kids to trade surplus stuff on the road. Cities begin to form (or re-form) at this time, initially as off-season bases of operation for merchants, and that created other opportunities: service-sector jobs (serving merchants), value-adding industries (giving merchants more interesting stuff to sell), municipal work (regulating marketplaces for merchants and guilds for artisans), education (training municipal workers). But it all starts with merchants: the first people to break out of the old fight-or-pray-or-labor-in-the-fields triad. My sense is that this process simply got going earlier in the Islamic world.
To all the commenters saying that Scott's reviews are superior to guest reviews: consider that we have self-selected as people who enjoy Scott's writing. Of course we like his reviews more! If a guest review had a blog & hosted a similar contest, I'd guess that the readers of that blog would prefer his review to all others (even Scott's)
a. The flying carpet comes from The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou, which maybe isn't included in some abridged versions. And if I remember correctly, the text doesn't say it flies - more like teleports you places, which is not great for 'I can show you the world'-style sequences but lovely if you have motion sickness.
b. As far as I can tell, the "genie that lives in a confined space and when you release him must grant you three unlimited wishes" thing is a mixture of the genie from the fisherman story (who considers giving you three wishes but will settle on killing you), the Aladdin slaves, and the Thief of Baghdad (1940). Genies are a separate species of free fire-based spirits, so the lamp-wishes-reality warping combo is more of a circumstance they sometimes find themselves in than a biological imperative.
(Great review BTW)
It's storied all the way down!
>> I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.
That's not what happened. The prince was shown both buttons but he wanted to keep the flying machine for himself. Therefore he slandered the sage, bribed the judge and got what he wanted.
"In one story, when a prince is declaring his love to a princess, he says "I am your slave, your black slave", as a hyperbolic declaration of servitude."
Not at all—he's just hoping that she'll genuinely want to fuck him.
More seriously, though, the highly un-modern idea behind everyone cheating with black slaves is that the medieval Islamic world basically regarded blacks as the lowest, filthiest form of human and so they assumed no woman with any self-respect at all would sleep with them. Thus the reoccurring insistence on the slave being "the lowest of the household" or being assigned various animalistic descriptors: the point is that the women are monstrously immoral. If you read the whole thing, you'll find frequent cases of cheating between Arabs, Persians etc. and these are generally far more sympathetically described, often with the young man sneaked into the fair wife's bedroom as the protagonist.
On that note, I would strongly urge you to read the unabridged Burton translation. I realize that's a bit like recommending that someone read the entire Pali Canon, but no abridgment I've seen has been able to resist bowdlerizing Burton, and his footnotes are a great part of the value.
Oh, and finally, as regards all the looping/nesting stuff, a passage Borges is fond of pointing out is the bit where Scheherazade begins to tell the Sultan the Tale of Shahryar and his Brother Shahzaman, thus putting them all in peril of entering a nested time loop of infinitely retelling the first part of a perpetually unfinished series.
Well, this is awkward. I've thought of myself as some kind of protagonist, based on the ridiculous amount of luck I seem to have. You're making my delusion worse! (Great review.)
Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, Op. 35 (1888) is also great, my favourite is the 2nd movement: https://youtu.be/jR_Q7NbLzyU?t=652
Amazing review!
I'm wondering, does the Arabian Nights narrative appear to contain any "open brackets"? I.e. nested stories where one of the frame stories is dropped and left unfinished, like Hofstadter's Harmonic Labyrinth.
Brief review-of-the-review:
That was delightful. Reviewing a fiction work was a risk but the reviewer pulled it off, capturing the gist of the original while also presenting some fascinating commentary from a rationalist perspective. I do wonder how much the observations from section I apply to 1001 Nights stories specifically versus fairy-tales in general (which I've made a small hobby of reading) but that doesn't invalidate any of the... should I call them conclusions? They feel more like riffs or interpretations. There isn't a definite thesis being defended, exactly, which normally would make me worry that the review wasn't informative. But somehow I still feel like this one was.
There's an old Rationalist legend about the starving college student and the supercomputer. The starving college student fantasizes about being wealthy, so he gets access to the school supercomputer and runs a simulation of his life where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. This has an unexpected result.
It takes much more compute than he was expecting. The supercomputer freezes for around fifteen minutes and finally crashes with a stack overflow. He investigates, and finds that simulated-him also fantasized about being wealthy, got access to the local supercomputer, and started running simulations where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. In retrospect this was predictable - computers cannot recurse indefinitely.
Sorry to be a spoilsport, but if we want our fables to provide illumination on our existence, we must have a way to actually bring them back to reflect on the real world. That's why genies give you riches, but not world peace and why you every time you think "the simulation argument could be interesting to bring up here" you are wrong.
This is absolutely hilarious. For a moment there I thought this was a user review, and realized I probably couldn't vote for a review that made me laugh over ones that made me think, but I sure as hell was tempted to.
This is the most entertaining and descriptive book review I've read in a while!
Re: The stereotype of Moroccans as sorcerers:
Sorcery and witchcraft* are pre-Islamic practices in North Africa practiced by its indigenous peoples (see https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b9fb61e7.html). Around 700 AD, most of North Africa was taken over by Arab Muslims (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_the_Maghreb). As Islam forbids the practice of sorcery, this and other aspects of indigenous culture were suppressed. This was least successful in Morocco, which continues to have a large indigenous population, a lot more than other North African countries (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers). (Heads up that many/most indigenous North Africans consider "berber" a slur.) So basically Morocco has (and continues to have**) a reputation for witchcraft because it's the country where witchcraft culturally survived campaigns to eradicate it. :-)
*Not sure how the book defines sorcery versus witchcraft, there's probably some translation issues at hand here. Hence me using "witchcraft" as that's how I see it talked about today.
**There's a lot of practicing witches in Morocco today, but that's easy to read about with google etc.
> I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.
I have no idea how you can be smart enough to build a doomsday device but also tell the British spy your evil plans then throw him into an easily escapable deathtrap and not make sure he dies ;)
Thanks for the review, this was great!
It reminded me of something I did as a child, when I was about 10. I had read a (super abridged, and very "disnified") version of Arabian Nights. Our teacher gave us an assignment to read one fairy tale of our choice for the class. I had a scheme to read the whole book, like I was Scheherazade and I could trick them into letting me go on forever. It didn't work- the teacher just cut me off as soon as the first chapter ended.
Excellent writing!
One of the most remarkable characteristics of the stories now gathered in the pages of “The Thousand Nights and One Night,” to take just one example, is the almost complete absence of religion. Lots of sex, much mischief, a great deal of deviousness; monsters, jinn, giant Rocs; at times, enormous quantities of blood and gore; but no God. This is why censorious Islamists dislike it so much.
Ask Yourself Which Books You Truly Love
https://nyti.ms/34fLYBK
A friend just recommended this piece to me, and I think it is one of the single greatest things I have ever read. Absolutely hilarious, but at the same time so incredibly profound. Thank you! I enjoyed that immensely.