Terminus Est

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 43 on February 5th, 2025)

Terminus Est (as seen on the cover of The Shadow of the Torturer, (Wolfe, 1980))

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/16530739-e0043-appendix-w-99-terminus-est

In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, some things come to and end. Join us as we look at the impact of the Appendix W on real world events through a look at one of the most iconic blades in fiction: Severian’s Terminus Est from Gene Wolfe’s 1980 novel The Shadow of the Torturer.  But much like the blade, there is much, much more hidden below the surface of this episode.


In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, some things come to an end. So too with Appendix W, as we have reached the final episode, where we take a look back at what has come before. Since the launch of this podcast, real world events have disturbingly breached through from the chaos of the warp into this reality.

We will look at the root causes of why, in this Appendix W episode, The Implausipod. Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this special Appendix W episode, I wanted to get to the end point of what Appendix W is all about, because since we started it, I’ve always known where the end point is going to be.

There’s a line I remember from my childhood, from the theme from Mahogany. Not the original song by Diana Ross, but a cover out of Europe. Do you know where you’re going to? When it came to Appendix W, the answer was an emphatic yes. I had a good idea at the outset where this would lead since the initial post back in 2021.

This comes with the benefit of hindsight and experience, where one can develop a good idea of the feasibility of a project at the point of inception. However, while you may have a destination in mind when you start a project, the place you may wind up at may be wildly different, or at least the path may be more circuitous than expected.

So if I didn’t discover anything new along the way, it would have been fine project, but I would have been a little disappointed. And we did uncover some new things, and that’s been fantastic. Of course, anyone familiar with that rather famous song knows the next verse starts with, did you get what you’re hoping for?

And the answer to that is, not quite. So in this penultimate episode of season one, and I say penultimate with the biggest bunny ears possible, we’ll get into the whys, wherefores, and what we learned along the way. The original endpoints of this project can be seen in some of the sections that we started with.

The descriptions of technology, the methods of travel, the aliens encountered, all overarching aesthetic elements by which we classify something as sci fi. And while we were off hunting for the origins of things, we began to weigh how much these tales had directly influenced their descendant that they had heavily inspired.

That inspiration can be seen directly in how some of those aesthetic elements were portrayed by their modern descendant, Warhammer 40, 000. But there’s more to it than just the aesthetic dimension, as the beliefs and ideologies of those authors were also embedded in the fiction they wrote as well.

Sometimes explicit, as seen in Starship Troopers or The Forever War. Sometimes more tacit or obfuscated. These beliefs were those of the post war era, in tales written by men who often served or came of age during World War II. Their science fiction reflects that era. We see large militaries and bureaucracies, hierarchies and authoritarianism.

Of the belief in the rightness of one’s cause, of being on the winning side. Sometimes this is questioned, as in Dune, and sometimes it is exaggerated to the point of satire, as in Judge Dredd. But regardless, they were common enough that the tropes and stereotypes begin to be repeated. I’m looking at you.

So, part of our original goal with Appendix W was to see how the impact of these ideologies can be traced as well. That line that follows through fiction throughout the decades. The continuous feedback loops between fiction and the real world. And this is still one of the goals. But, the real world has funny ways of moving faster than you might like, and real world events are starting to see the manifestation of these ideologies in ways that it wasn’t thought possible.

While real world events were perhaps the main reason that Appendix W wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, those real world events also offer us an opportunity to frame and focus our story, and to understand why we’ve come to the end. Terminus Est Why Terminus Est? Well, in Latin it quite literally means, It’s the end.

But it means something rather different in the context of science fiction and Warhammer 40k. In sci fi, it is one of the great swords of fiction, in a pantheon of named blades along with Stormbringer and Dragnipur and many others. Terminus Est was the sword of the executioner Severian in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun.

We mentioned it in passing when we talked about that book back in episode 24 of Appendix W. You can see an image of it from the cover of the paperback edition of the book in the thumbnail episode of the show. It is from this iconic presentation that all of its other manifestations flow, whether in Castlevania and Path of Exile, to the manga of Blade Dance, to all of the other ridiculously oversized two handed swords and daiclaves that show up in anime, D& D, and Exalted, to an appearance in Warhammer 40, 000 itself as the name of the flagship of the Death Guards we’ve covered before.

The aesthetics of Gene Wolfe’s work in the Book of the New Sun, the imagery and use of language can be seen redolent throughout the lore of 40k. That idea of a fallen humanity long in the future dealing with technology that they no longer understand is seen throughout the work. Perhaps we can best show this in how Terminus Est is introduced to the readers on page 106 of the Timescape edition from 1980.

Quote, the sword herself. I shall not bore you with a catalogue of her virtues and beauties. You would have to see her and hold her to judge her justly. Her bitter blade was an L in length, straight and square pointed, as such as swords should be. Man edge and woman edge could part a hair to within a span of the guard.

Which was of thick silver with a carven head at either end. Her grip was onyx bound with silver bands, two spans long and terminated with an opal. Art had been lavished upon her. But it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so. And so Art had nothing to give her.

The words Terminus Est had been engraved upon her blade in curious and beautiful letters. And I had learned enough of ancient languages since leaving the Atrium of Time to know that they meant, This is the line of division. End quote But Terminus Est is an unusual blade, and she holds some secrets within her.

Quote, There’s a channel in the spine of her blade, and in it runs a river of hydrogyrum, a metal heavier than iron, though it flows like water. Thus the balance is shifted towards the hands when the blade is high, but to the tip when it falls. So, light to raise, weighty to descend, as we hear so often throughout the series.

And, if this is to be the end, then there is no more fitting artifact to focus on for this episode. So let’s take a moment to look back at Appendix W through the lens of the Executioner’s Blade.

While we’ve covered an incredible amount in the previous 98 episodes of the series, I’d like to mention some of the highlights for me. Of course, whenever channels look at the influence of 40k, there is a focus on the obvious ones. Dune, Starship Troopers, and Judge Dredd. And we did touch on all those, but for me.

The delight was in finding and uncovering those hidden little gems that found their way into the lore. Star Trek isn’t generally mentioned as a direct influence on Warhammer 40, 000 in the way that those other titles are, mostly due to the more utopic view of the future that that series held, though the 40k orcs have a lot of parallels to the Klingons.

It was the revelation of the origins of the Terran Empire that surprised me the most, that Alternate universe version of Star Trek, first seen in the episode Mirror Mirror, where Spock famously wore a goatee, so you knew he was one of the baddies. The agonizers and the punishment that has become staples of both the Imperials and Dark Eldar in the Warhammer 40, 000 universe showing up there was a nice touch, and I’m glad we spent several episodes going through our deep dive on the original series.

These small influences showed up again in our very first episode, where we saw the enslavers from the Rogue Trader rulebook appear as they did on screen in an episode of Space 1999 in the episode titled Dragon’s Domain. This is sci fi with a more British feel than Star Trek, and this difference can be seen when we looked at Blake’s 7 back in episode 17.

Yeah, I know it would have worked out better if I had planned that one ahead, but I enjoyed our further look at the instrumentality in Episode 7 instead. That same instrumentality played a huge part of our review, as we spent three episodes on it throughout the series. The amount of influence that Cordwainer Smith’s writing had on Warhammer 40, 000 was perhaps understated, and he indirectly impacted Dune as well, but this gave us birth to so much of the day to day of the Imperium, the warp, the mechanicum, and the relationship they have to technology.

It was a real pleasure to share that with you. Of course, Smith’s work was a very American, West Coast view of sci fi, as was Herbert’s, and Gene Wolfe’s too, who we looked at as we reviewed each of the four books of the Book of the New Sun, and here again in this episode with the Blade, Terminus Est. All three of these series, the Instrumentality, Dune, and the New Sun, touched on the themes of the Earth in the distant future, of the dying Earth genre, though we only spent a little bit of time on Jack Vance’s work of the same name.

Deep Time appeared repeatedly as seen in Foundation series we did back in episode 50, though I’ll admit it was hard to separate the book from the TV adaptation on Apple. And here we can see some of the commonalities of the authors of the early influential science fiction as Asimov, Heinlein, Smith, and Vance all worked for the U.

S. military in various capacities during World War II. We’ll pick up on this thread in a moment. Of course, even though much of the sci fi of the quote unquote Golden Age was written by Americans following their experience in the war, there was no shortage of British influence as well. We mostly skipped over the rather obvious Tolkien influences, opting for just a quick episode there discussing how those contributions to the fantasy genre as a whole found their way to 40k through the influence of Games Workshop’s fantasy series, the original Warhammer.

This is where the works of Michael Moorcock showed up as well, back in episode 10 when we looked at Stormbringer. The sword with a trapped demon within that inspired the whole mythology of daemon weapons within Warhammer. For me personally, the biggest revelations came from my first exposure to much of the British media that I had only rarely glimpsed growing up.

As a Canadian, we tended to get overlapping coverage of both British and U. S. culture, but it was very selective, and there was some stuff I really hadn’t seen at all. So whether it was Doctor Who, or Blake’s 7, or the various comic series included as part of 2000 AD, Discovering how those filtered into Warhammer 40, 000 was fascinating, and I’m glad I got to share those with you in the multiple episodes we did.

I’m also happy we brought in some outside experts for a look at the Gundam series with an interview with veteran modelers and fans of the franchise. Even the Gundam influence on Warhammer 40, 000 didn’t really start showing up until later in the 1990s with the release of the Tau Empire, but big stompy robots were there from the beginning.

But, uh, no exploration of sci fi influences would be complete without looking at the impact of Hollywood. Perennial franchises like Star Wars, Aliens, and Terminator all showed up in various ways, and I’m glad we got to those franchises eventually. But as we mentioned in those episodes, they are widely popular and well known, so I’m also happy we waited as long as we did before taking a look at them, as the little details of the earlier, smaller titles would have been eclipsed by the giants of the genre.

However, it is in the films that we can most easily see the differences in the sci fi ideologies that are represented within the series.

And what are the ideologies that we see? Well, as with most popular culture, what we see is a reflection of our own society. Which is why we see militarism, corporatism, hierarchies, and a focus on the commodities and trade in many of the stories. Some aspects of our society seem inescapable, what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, where it is easier to imagine a far future than a coherent end to capitalism.

Which is why, even in the far future of the Dune universe, filled with religion and medievalism, we have a monopolistic corporation like CHOAM controlling the economy behind the scenes. But the underlying ideology and our relation to it can change over time, and while this might not be stated explicitly, we can see it in the changing visual representations of pop culture.

Within sci fi, cinema, and television, we can see certain eras that are most clearly identified by their aesthetic. We start in the 60s, the clean era, where shows like Star Trek, the original series, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 both draw in inspiration from the space programs of the time. The clean lines and shiny panels everywhere, with hardly a mote of dust to be seen.

A show like Space 1999 serves as a transition piece, as the space station becomes more worn down over time, reflecting the diminishing resources of the station, and the economic malaise and uncertainty of the time, bringing us the era of grit and grime. Exemplified by the late 70s pieces of sci fi like The Star Wars and Doctor Who.

And as the 70s drew to a close, that grit turned into grease and grime, to the greasy production of shows like Alien and Ice Pirates. With steam filling the atmosphere and hiding the sets, and condensation and grease liberally applied across the surfaces. The grit was still there, of course. The recently deceased director David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune and the frenetically paced post apocalyptic Road Warrior still had much dirt and dust, but the bright future of the 60s had definitely drifted over to the dark side.

So too in the fiction. While we noted that the foundational elements of 40k consisted of a blend of British American and occasionally Japanese or European sci fi and fantasy, there was a strong showing by American writers of sci fi that focused on the deep history in the dying earth, Asimov’s foundation, Smith’s instrumentality, Vance’s dying earth, and Herbert’s dune, if we were to lay them out roughly chronologically.

But this underlying ideology has connections to U. S. military policy. As noted by Chris Hables Gray, not only has science fiction predicted many of the recent changes in war, there is a strong argument that it has influenced them to some extent. Military science fiction and military policy coexist in the same discourse system to a surprising degree, and we have sci fi as policy.

And for Gray and others, this can be seen again and again. Gray notes how H. Bruce Franklin looks at how superweapons occupy space within the American collective imagination, that space we talked about back in episode 26, Silicon Dreams. There, we were introduced to the idea of the collective imaginary with respect to virtual reality and artificial intelligence, but we find it again here too in terms of superweapons and mechanized warfare, which even Thomas Edison was talking about as early as 1915.

While the earlier sci fi had militaristic themes, as those early authors like Heinlein drew on their military backgrounds, showing us vast navies, hierarchical organizations, authoritarian systems, and War Amongst the Stars, this shifted in the 70s and 80s with the rise of the subgenre of mil sci fi. We covered some of it, from the hover tanks of David Drake’s Hammer Slammers, to the eternal wars between Man and Kzin in Larry Niven’s known space universe, to the Janissaries universe of Jerry Pournelle.

Jerry Pournelle, who passed in 2017, was a former Korean war vet who worked in the aerospace industry and entered academia, earning degrees in psychology and political science. While we didn’t cover much of his work directly, save for our discussion of orbital bombardments in the episode on Satellite Warfare and the origins of the Exterminatus in Warhammer 40k, he did collaborate with a number of other authors we looked at and was a prolific writer in the field.

However, he may be more influential on the field for his academic writing rather than his sci fi. Specifically, 1970’s The Strategy of Technology, co authored with Stefan Possony, where they argued for the demonstration of technological superiority as part of a country’s doctrine. And this was seen in the American pursuit of stealth technology, and Reagan’s SDI program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars.

It could be argued that these are all elements of what Mary Kaldor calls the Baroque Arsenal, and we can see that Baroque style seeping through in the arcane elements of A Forgotten Technology in Terminus Est, and Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, in Dune, and in Warhammer 40, 000 itself. I bring up Jerry Pournelle because his political views were embedded within his work, and he recognized and acknowledged this.

He self described as being, quote, somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan, but his conservatism tended more to the isolationist view, what is now described as paleoconservatism, that was opposed to the Roosevelt New Deal, and has been supplanted by neoconservatism in the US. And like, Many of his sci fi colleagues, he worked as a consultant, an advisor, or a futurist for various organizations during the Cold War.

And this is part of our rationale for ending. It leads us into why we’re wrapping up this chapter of The Appendix W. Or speedrunning to the end at least. Since we started this project the world has gotten darker and those dark elements of our entertainment are escaping the turbulence of the warp and manifesting in our reality.

Khornate imagery and iconography adopted by troops fighting on the front lines of the Russo Ukrainian war with sayings such as Blood for the Blood God being bandied about everywhere from internet commentary to the pro wrestling forums, the brutality of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe is seeping into our public discussion, stripped of the irony and satire attached to it in the in universe materials, where every text is issued by an unreliable narrator.

The audience still realizes that, right? That it’s satire? Sometimes I question this, as dank memes in support of certain public figures as the god emperor of mankind are posted in earnest on the internet, or if Posted with an ironic wink by the commenter, perhaps taken up and spread less ironically by the followers and algorithms that lift it up to virality.

Spreadable media of the most infectious kind. Papa Nurgle would be proud. 

And of course, there’s the cosplay, which has grown in recent years to become an industry unto itself, but has also seen growth in the fandom of the adversaries in the various sci fi universes that we enjoy. While many cosplay conventions have adopted explicit rules against historically fascist or racist imagery, They are much more lenient when it comes to allegorical representations, and as we’ve mentioned throughout this episode, and series, sci fi is rife with allegory.

Elements that were clearly presented as allegorical in the original fictions were shaded in with grey during the intervening years and have been embraced by the fandoms at different points. Elements of clear satire, Starship Troopers and Judge Dredd most specifically, were taken at face value. And so, The critique they presented on the police state or militarization of fascism gets subsumed by the larger sci fi trappings of the settings.

These fandoms have become groups unto themselves, with groups like the 501st, a now international troop of cosplayers that wear stormtrooper armor and march around conventions and other events. The group that represent the baddies in Star Wars, wearing armor and helmets designed to look like skeletons and skulls, were originally patterned off of the Americans in Vietnam.

The rebels of which Luke and Leia were a part of were the Viet Cong, according to an interview George Lucas gave with director James Cameron in 2018. And the 501st is not alone in groups of bad guys that find representation within the cosplay community. But the issue is that fashionable cosplay becomes fashionable dress rehearsal, and from there it seeps into everyday life.

So too with Warhammer 40, 000. The grim darkness of the 41st millennium finds no shortage of representations of evil. From the grinding military machine of the Imperial Army, the Astra Militarum, with its Commissars and the World War I German inspired Death Korps of Krieg, To the transhuman space marines, the Adeptus Astartes draw an inspiration from the armored soldiers of Starship Troopers, the Forever War, and the Sardaukar of Dune.

We see this continue in the Judge Dredd inspired Adeptus Arbites, the space cops that police the regular population, and the Inquisitors that purge out heresy with the ferverance of the now expected Spanish Inquisition. Games Workshop has repeatedly stated that their work is satire, but how much weight do those statements carry, especially compared to the evidence of all the other material published for their universe?

In a statement made on their website in 2021, Games Workshop stated, “The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40, 000, the Imperium of Man is satirical.

For clarity, satire is the use of humor, irony, or exaggeration, displaying people’s vices or a system of flaws for scorn, derision, and ridicule. Something doesn’t have to be wacky or laugh out loud funny to be satire. The derision is in the setting’s amplification of a tyrannical, genocidal regime turned up to eleven.

The Imperium is not an aspirational state outside of the in universe perspectives of those who are slaves to its systems. It’s a monstrous civilization, and its monstrousness is plain for all to see. That said, certain real world hate groups and adherents of historical ideologies better left in the past sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment, and to co opt them for their own agendas.”

This statement was issued as a response to someone wearing full Nazi regalia to a tournament in Spain in 2021. But it’s indicative of the larger issue, and I think we need to look forward for solutions. Games Workshop may disavow the use of their material by hate groups and claim that it is satire, but it’s not clear that some groups are getting it, or rather, that the preponderance of darkness within the universe provides cover for those who would use it for nefarious ends.

The issue is that you run the risk of being that kind of bar. Now, it’s not that I think that Warhammer 40k is irredeemable, it’s just that the Grim and Dark is just that, Grim and Dark, and that sometimes the best way to combat the dank memes is to know where they come from, to detoxify them. And I know some of the audience loves the dank, and think the dankness is their ally, but you merely adopted the dank.

I was born in it, molded by it, I didn’t see Mr. Rogers until I was already a man, and by then it was nothing to me but blinding. But I digress.

Warhammer 40, 000 Rogue Trader was originally published in 1987, and it collected its inspirations, wove them together, and wore them on its sleeve, adding more fabric to the quilt as time went on. Early editions became incorporated into the design such that the sources are forgotten, and this is what we are highlighting here, especially with the more obscure titles.

But eventually, 40k grew to be enough of an influence in its own right that it was influencing the culture that it had previously assimilated. In 2025, it’s something that needs to be stressed, that the media environment that 40k was released into was vastly different than the one that existed even 10 years later, as the 20th century drew to a close.

Some of the concurrent and subsequent influences of Warhammer 40, 000 can be seen in other media titles, titles like Aliens, which was released in 1986, or Star Trek The Next Generation, originally starting in 1987, and their subsequent introduction of the Borg as an antagonist in episodes like Q Who in May of 1989, and June and September Two Parter The Best of Both Worlds in 1990.

Big sci fi movies like Independence Day came out in 1996, Starship Trooper’s movie was released in 1997, the video game Starcraft came out in March 31st of 1998, and Terminator 2 was released in 1991, and the Star Wars prequels coming out in 1999, and all of these had subsequent influences on Warhammer 40, 000.

As we go forward with the Appendix W, and we will be going forward, we will be looking at the interplay that took place during the early 1990s, a fallow period in sci fi which allowed, or forced perhaps, 40, 000 to build on its own mythology and become the cultural icon and brand that it turned into. Why are we doing this?

Well, As I stated, partly it’s a speedrun in order to catch us up to the present as current events have forced the timeline along and we don’t want to be looking at stuff that’s so hopelessly dated that it has no impact or anything to say about what’s going on currently in our world. And from this point forward, episode 99, we’ll be looking both backwards and forwards at the various titles that influence and shape what’s going on.

This will be shaped a little bit by whatever gives me joy in the moment, but I’ll do my best to announce in advance whatever it is I’m working on so that you, the listener, can follow along. I don’t know if many podcasts have tried something like this before, or if some have but have scrapped it because it’s a bad idea, but We’ll give it a shot, because it gives me a little bit of joy to do so, and that joy is critically important.

As you may have noted, since it’s been over ten months since we last published an Appendix W episode, I’ve been struggling a little bit with that joy, with that creativity, and this has taken place over the holidays and has been through into the new year as well with the seemingly unending flood of bad news.

As you can tell by the existence of this podcast, we managed to get things moving a bit, but the first step was turning off the fire hose and following through with some steps that you can do to make constructive actions to your own media and mental health. The second step was to keep creating. I mentioned my struggle in passing towards a friend, it was pointed towards an interview with Heather Cox Richardson that she had made with the National Press Club.

The relevant bit 57 minute mark in the clip and I’ll link to it in the show notes. The gist of her advice is to behave with joy as a means of resistance. Do the things that matter to you and that you can bring to the people around you, end quote. We can meet the moment and as scholars be honest and by doing the best scholarly work we can, we contribute back to humanity.

And the Appendix W and the podcast at large are both Scholarly works; it’s stuff I studied in grad school, and I want to continue bringing that knowledge and information back to a larger public. Even though contributing back to humanity seems like a lot to ask from a blog and media channel that mostly focuses on the intersection of sci fi and technology, it is 

what we’re doing. Maybe our project is a little bit wider in scope than we initially thought. But the big takeaway, at least for me, is that moment of reflection that I like what we’re doing here and I enjoy doing the podcast, the blog, the newsletter, and YouTube, which I hope to publish more on in 2025, and the various other bits that we have going on here.

So, after a brief period of stasis, we’ll get back to the things that bring us joy and find the joy in sharing them with you as well. So let’s pick up that long, finely honed blade of Terminus Est one last time. Though, not to wield, but to return to its scabbard and look toward the future.

Thank you for joining us on this special Appendix W episode of the ImplausiPod. We’ll return next episode with the start of our series on cyberspace and examine some of what is being built around us, what this is all about. After that, we’ll be looking at the first season of and or, and we may have just a few other surprises to throw your way.

In the meantime, I’m your host, Dr. Imp plausible. You can reach me at Doctor implausible@implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows @implausipod.com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4.

0 share alike license. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow from word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two. and pass it along. There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show at Implausiapod.

com which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes, and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time, so consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes.

Until next time, take care and have fun.

Bibliography

Chris Hables Gray- “There Will Be War!”: Future War Fantasies and Militaristic Science Fiction in the 1980s. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2023, from https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/64/gray.htm

Kaldor, M. (1981). The Baroque Arsenal. Hill & Wang Pub.

https://www.amc.com/blogs/george-lucas-reveals-how-star-wars-was-influenced-by-the-vietnam-war–1005548

https://fanexpohq.com/fanexpovancouver/costume-policy

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/1Xpzeld6/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not

Heather Cox Richardson interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDX0hxyYcJw

Dr Implausible’s Book Club

“Read a book!” This is more than just the catchphrase for Handy, the supervillian puppet and partner of the Human Ton in The Tick animated series (1994) (pictured to the right). Its also one of the more effective ways to spread knowledge. And while there may be an anxious pressure in the first month of 2025, that reading is a distraction or ineffective, there’s no time like the present.

“Read a book!” (Handy, 1994)

While TikTok is seeing a nice resurgence in learning with the #HillmanUniversity and #TikTokUniversity programs, here we’ll just focus on going through some critical books, one at a time. This is a expanding and evergreen project so we’ve created a page for this project over in the pages section: Dr Implausible’s Book Club and we’re also mirroring the content over on the indie version of the blog here.

This one is focused on academic content, but there are a couple concurrent and overlapping genre-specific themes that we’ll dip in and out of too. We’ve introduced both of those on the podcast, in the early days, with the Cyberpunk 101 episode, and the Introduction to Appendix W (which we mentioned here way back in… 2021? Whoa). We sorta-kinda did the Appendix W as it’s own thing, and that may still continue, but we’ll try and keep everything contained here as well, in case you don’t feel like following three separate things. For those that only interested in a specific element, the companions will help narrow that focus.

We’ll start with Technology Matters: questions to live with by David E. Nye (2006). This was a text that was used as a supplementary reading for one of the classes I taught in the past, a “sociology and ethics for engineers” type of class in the STS vein. It’s approachable, and written for a non-technical audience, which makes it especially worthwhile. As Nye mentions in the preface, these are big questions, and such big questions defy simple answers (or at least ones that are easily testable), and as such we have to come at them with some empathy. Or at least, that’s my take.

Technology Matters (Nye, 2006)

We’ll start with the basics, and check back in over the next week or so, and then publish a full post (on at least one of the platforms). Trying hard not to overcommit at the outset though. Let’s see how it goes…