Unsong is a web novel by Scott Alexander who is best known for the popular Slate Star Codex blog. I’m not really a regular reader but I do pay attention to it. The saga of the blog and the person behind it makes for a fascinating story in its own right but I won’t go into that here. This novel is set in an alternative history in which the Apollo 8 mission breaks the firmament around Earth as described in Biblical scripture and causes disruptions in the nature of reality. It turns out that everything described in the Talmud is literally true. Angels exist, the laws of physics are broken and the United States is broken up into fiefs led by local powers. People who learn to speak the Names of God can invoke magical effects and a worldwide organization called Unsong is formed to regulate their use.

Aaron Taylor-Smith works a lowly job, pronouncing syllables out loud as a computer program feeds it to him to test if they are Names with power. He is a skilled Kabbalist himself and is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church which has turned into an underground organization to spread knowledge of Names in defiance of Unsong. At work one day, he stumbles into a new Name that grants a soul to a previously inanimate object. He immediately realizes the implications as that would allow a computer to systematically search for new Names. With the help of Ana Thurmond, the woman he is married to through a Kabbalistic ritual, he empowers his personal laptop but is almost immediately discovered by Unsong. Meanwhile a parallel story portray Sohu, a little girl, learning the Kabbalah from Uriel, the archangel who is frantically patching reality using his personal power.

There’s much more to this as I’ve only read the first book so far and will be slowly working my way through the rest of it. I found that the main plot, so to speak, about Aaron and Unsong moves too slowly for my liking but the author’s real interest is in the worldbuilding and that’s what I love about the series as well. Its motto is that nothing is ever a coincidence and so everything that happens, happens for a reason and everything is connected to everything else. It’s the ultimate conspiracy theory fantasy but everything leads back to the Judeo-Christian version of God. As anyone familiar with the writing of Scott Alexander and the rationalist community he is a part of might expect, Kabbalistic magic works a lot like computer programming, the characters are well aware of how to min-max magical effects and the entire world is irrevocably changed. Plus there are a lot of references to the lifestyle of this world’s equivalents of the Bay Area techbros, evil corporations and their legalism, dumb puns, and all manner of craziness and wonky humor. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all great!

The most impressive part of this project is that it manages to make you wonder how much of it is true. The amount of research that must have gone into it is mindboggling as you get little facts like how many high priests the early Jews went through and what that must mean about how the Ark of the Covenant supposedly kills everyone who tries to open it but isn’t pure enough. Like all good conspiracy theories, there’s just enough fact mixed in with the bullshit that it sounds vaguely plausible and wonderfully alluring to think about. As someone who has always enjoyed learning esoteric facts, been fascinated by the structural differences between various languages and knows at least a little bit about computer programming, all this is right down my alley and I really should have started reading this earlier.

There are still many ways that the series could go wrong of course but one strong sign that it won’t is that despite the endless jokes and lighthearted tone, it doesn’t shy away from the fact that this world is in a terrible place and likely doomed. Countless people have already died and untold numbers suffer in hell. This is a series that takes its worldbuilding seriously and so every change that is made in this alternate version of history is explored in a consistent and logical way. I look forward to reading more of it.