I just finished reading the Russian novel “Lena Squatter and the Paragon of Vengeance” by SF author Leonid Kaganov. It’s not exactly a Harry Potter fanfic, but it’s very similar to MOR in that it tries to present an explicitly rationalist hero, and IMO Kaganov has handled the task better than Eliezer.
The protagonist is an unattractive and immoral woman whose only strength is extra rationality, which she applies to the sordid and corrupt world of Moscow corporate politics. Using the familiar LW intellectual ammunition—from Pascal’s Wager to evolutionary psychology—she gets people fired for talking back to her, gives and takes bribes, blatantly manipulates men (driving one to attempted suicide), and then in the end when she’s found the perfect boyfriend her plans neatly backfire, forcing her to kill him and then herself. Lena’s exploits are shown with a lot of detail and believability, and overall the book has punched me harder than anything Eliezer wrote. Unfortunately it’s unlikely that it will ever be translated into English.
Given that one of the catchphrases around here is “rationalists should win”, i’m curious why the main character of this story loses in the end. Why would her plans “neatly backfire” in the end, or is it enough for us to admire her rationality that she almost achieved her goals, despite her lack of obvious assets?
Just out of curiosity, how much does a week of your time cost?
Your recommendation of the book, plus the very fact that it wasn’t originally written in english and has a genie AI, makes it fascinating on a number of levels. If there was a translation, I would probably want to buy and read it.
He has an English website: http://lleo.aha.ru/e/index.htm , which suggests that asking about buying the English-language rights might not go amiss.
Thanks for the link! I sent Leonid Kaganov an email expressing interest in a translation and directing him to this URL. Hopefully something comes of it :-)
I was thinking to introduce some English-speaking audience (represented by i.e. Less Wrong and Hacker News) to Leonid Kaganov for quite some time. I absolutely don’t feel able to translate a whole novel (and I haven’t read Lena Squatter yet, as it’s quite recent) but I think I can pull off translating a short story or a blog post.
The best story of him that I’ve liked so far is Predator’s Epos (2001) which depicts a dramatic incident in space and tries to analyze human ethics through the eyes of an alien studying human epos and comparing it to other species’. The short story, as author noted in his blog, was written on a crunch for a short story competition, which had a theme “a knight quests for saving a princess from a dragon” and, would I say, the author had his fun with the theme. To my mind, the story remains one of his best to date. Definitely best of short stories; I haven’t read the more recent of his novels; he might have improved in the recent years, but as of several years ago, I had an opinion that Kaganov is the kind of author for whom the short story format and good crunchtime is an optimum format; the longer stories I read feel watered down. I appreciate that it takes more work and skill to forge a novel while maintaining reader immersion and the pace of the story, and everyone has to start somewhere, but still—I liked his short stories and some of the blog posts best.
Which brings me to the topic that Kaganov raised that I wanted to translate and link to on Hacker News. At the time when he finished Lena Squatter he wrote a very detailed blog post where he said he is at the turning point in his career where the sales of his new book (Lena Squatter) will determine whether he will be able to support his family by starting to write novels full-time or will have to earn money the other way (programming) and have little time for writing. So he asked everyone who would consider reading his books to go buy Lena Squatter in paper form, and not steal it from the internet. The post was very clearly written, addressed nearly every possible concern and the author answered many of the comments (which he always does btw.) Despite of that, the post was met with less than full understanding. So I was going to ask the respective English-speaking audience: do we really have the situation so horribly bad here in Russia that the author, who has written some enjoyable stories, contributed every possible story in the past to the public domain, and now came to depend a little bit on the sales of his book for the well-being of the family, has to beg his fans to not steal his books and yet not meet with total understanding?! Or is this more or less what goes on in the rest of the world as well? The book Lena Squatter seem to have sold well, by the way, exceeding the publisher’s very modest expectations, and there should be second printing underway. The rights for publishing should belong to the publisher for several years, I think, but maybe they can be interested in the international edition. At any rate, Kaganov can be expected to be geeking out with author’s contracts, not giving an unnecessary extra bit of his rights to the publishers and giving every bit to the public domain ASAP.
Also, I might add that he’s an interesting guy, quite a rationalist and sceptic. He’ve got two or three higher educations; one in Computer Science and the other in Medicine (psychopharmacology)
It looks from my casual observations like the difference between pirated and not pirated (as opposed to plagiarized and not plagiarized, which is a different matter) isn’t whether something is in the public domain, but whether it is freely available. As long as it is easy to get a work for free from the author’s preferred distribution method, there’s little to no incentive to get it with more hassle from a different distribution method. So putting his prior works in the public domain probably isn’t getting this author many bonus points, compared to an author who retains copyright or Creative Commons licensing but still makes the work freely readable.
There is no way that he addressed every possible concern to the satisfaction of his audience while charging money for his book. Money is a concern, and while his book might be inexpensive, adopting a general policy of buying inexpensive books when someone asks nicely isn’t, and making many individual decisions about when to buy them and when not to isn’t either. To an audience accustomed to getting reading material for free, a demand that they shell out money for a new book feels like extortion, and that provokes negative affect indeed. So it does not surprise me that—with the sort of audience he would have cultivated by making his prior works freely available—he’d encounter backlash when attempting to extract cash from them.
His approach might work as a business model in the sense that he’s selling books. But of course he is not meeting with “total understanding”.
So I was going to ask the respective English-speaking audience: do we really have the situation so horribly bad here in Russia that the author, who has written some enjoyable stories, contributed every possible story in the past to the public domain, and now came to depend a little bit on the sales of his book for the well-being of the family, has to beg his fans to not steal his books and yet not meet with total understanding?! Or is this more or less what goes on in the rest of the world as well?
Yeah, things like that happen in the rest of the world, too. Creators of software are hit pretty hard, as do people who make things that are easily converted to digital format. (Printed books are kind of hard to pirate, because you have to put every single page into a scanner, one at a time, instead of just sticking a CD or DVD into a drive, but it still happens.)
Given the generally awful quality of translations into English done by Russians, I hope the eventual translation will be by a native English speaker who knows Russian, not the other way round. That was actually one of the reasons I refused.
I just finished reading the Russian novel “Lena Squatter and the Paragon of Vengeance” by SF author Leonid Kaganov. It’s not exactly a Harry Potter fanfic, but it’s very similar to MOR in that it tries to present an explicitly rationalist hero, and IMO Kaganov has handled the task better than Eliezer.
The protagonist is an unattractive and immoral woman whose only strength is extra rationality, which she applies to the sordid and corrupt world of Moscow corporate politics. Using the familiar LW intellectual ammunition—from Pascal’s Wager to evolutionary psychology—she gets people fired for talking back to her, gives and takes bribes, blatantly manipulates men (driving one to attempted suicide), and then in the end when she’s found the perfect boyfriend her plans neatly backfire, forcing her to kill him and then herself. Lena’s exploits are shown with a lot of detail and believability, and overall the book has punched me harder than anything Eliezer wrote. Unfortunately it’s unlikely that it will ever be translated into English.
Given that one of the catchphrases around here is “rationalists should win”, i’m curious why the main character of this story loses in the end. Why would her plans “neatly backfire” in the end, or is it enough for us to admire her rationality that she almost achieved her goals, despite her lack of obvious assets?
She makes a poorly considered wish to an unfriendly genie AI. As a result, she has to kill herself and her boyfriend to save the world. No kidding.
What was the wish? And can you at least write a short summary of the story?
“Can you make some paperclips for me?”
Is that where that’s from?
O_O
I wonder where I can procure an ebook version. I still read russian.
Would you be willing to translate it?
No, it’s too big. Would take me weeks of full-time work.
Just out of curiosity, how much does a week of your time cost?
Your recommendation of the book, plus the very fact that it wasn’t originally written in english and has a genie AI, makes it fascinating on a number of levels. If there was a translation, I would probably want to buy and read it.
He has an English website: http://lleo.aha.ru/e/index.htm , which suggests that asking about buying the English-language rights might not go amiss.
Thanks for the link! I sent Leonid Kaganov an email expressing interest in a translation and directing him to this URL. Hopefully something comes of it :-)
Thanks for trying. Please keep us updated.
I was thinking to introduce some English-speaking audience (represented by i.e. Less Wrong and Hacker News) to Leonid Kaganov for quite some time. I absolutely don’t feel able to translate a whole novel (and I haven’t read Lena Squatter yet, as it’s quite recent) but I think I can pull off translating a short story or a blog post.
The best story of him that I’ve liked so far is Predator’s Epos (2001) which depicts a dramatic incident in space and tries to analyze human ethics through the eyes of an alien studying human epos and comparing it to other species’. The short story, as author noted in his blog, was written on a crunch for a short story competition, which had a theme “a knight quests for saving a princess from a dragon” and, would I say, the author had his fun with the theme. To my mind, the story remains one of his best to date. Definitely best of short stories; I haven’t read the more recent of his novels; he might have improved in the recent years, but as of several years ago, I had an opinion that Kaganov is the kind of author for whom the short story format and good crunchtime is an optimum format; the longer stories I read feel watered down. I appreciate that it takes more work and skill to forge a novel while maintaining reader immersion and the pace of the story, and everyone has to start somewhere, but still—I liked his short stories and some of the blog posts best.
Which brings me to the topic that Kaganov raised that I wanted to translate and link to on Hacker News. At the time when he finished Lena Squatter he wrote a very detailed blog post where he said he is at the turning point in his career where the sales of his new book (Lena Squatter) will determine whether he will be able to support his family by starting to write novels full-time or will have to earn money the other way (programming) and have little time for writing. So he asked everyone who would consider reading his books to go buy Lena Squatter in paper form, and not steal it from the internet. The post was very clearly written, addressed nearly every possible concern and the author answered many of the comments (which he always does btw.) Despite of that, the post was met with less than full understanding. So I was going to ask the respective English-speaking audience: do we really have the situation so horribly bad here in Russia that the author, who has written some enjoyable stories, contributed every possible story in the past to the public domain, and now came to depend a little bit on the sales of his book for the well-being of the family, has to beg his fans to not steal his books and yet not meet with total understanding?! Or is this more or less what goes on in the rest of the world as well? The book Lena Squatter seem to have sold well, by the way, exceeding the publisher’s very modest expectations, and there should be second printing underway. The rights for publishing should belong to the publisher for several years, I think, but maybe they can be interested in the international edition. At any rate, Kaganov can be expected to be geeking out with author’s contracts, not giving an unnecessary extra bit of his rights to the publishers and giving every bit to the public domain ASAP.
Also, I might add that he’s an interesting guy, quite a rationalist and sceptic. He’ve got two or three higher educations; one in Computer Science and the other in Medicine (psychopharmacology)
It looks from my casual observations like the difference between pirated and not pirated (as opposed to plagiarized and not plagiarized, which is a different matter) isn’t whether something is in the public domain, but whether it is freely available. As long as it is easy to get a work for free from the author’s preferred distribution method, there’s little to no incentive to get it with more hassle from a different distribution method. So putting his prior works in the public domain probably isn’t getting this author many bonus points, compared to an author who retains copyright or Creative Commons licensing but still makes the work freely readable.
There is no way that he addressed every possible concern to the satisfaction of his audience while charging money for his book. Money is a concern, and while his book might be inexpensive, adopting a general policy of buying inexpensive books when someone asks nicely isn’t, and making many individual decisions about when to buy them and when not to isn’t either. To an audience accustomed to getting reading material for free, a demand that they shell out money for a new book feels like extortion, and that provokes negative affect indeed. So it does not surprise me that—with the sort of audience he would have cultivated by making his prior works freely available—he’d encounter backlash when attempting to extract cash from them.
His approach might work as a business model in the sense that he’s selling books. But of course he is not meeting with “total understanding”.
Incidentally, some online content creators have been able to support themselves through means other than selling their work directly.
Yeah, things like that happen in the rest of the world, too. Creators of software are hit pretty hard, as do people who make things that are easily converted to digital format. (Printed books are kind of hard to pirate, because you have to put every single page into a scanner, one at a time, instead of just sticking a CD or DVD into a drive, but it still happens.)
Given the generally awful quality of translations into English done by Russians, I hope the eventual translation will be by a native English speaker who knows Russian, not the other way round. That was actually one of the reasons I refused.
Any update?
The email still hasn’t been answered. I’m not planning on sending a second if he wasn’t into the first.