My first project on Lesswrong is publishing a book I wrote for my little son. Read this intro to decide if you might be interested.
Who might be interested
The target audience of my book is, basically, modern nerds with kids. If you read fiction to your kid, or if your kid reads on their own, check it out. If you and/or your kid are nerdy, weird, high-IQ, tend to dig things outside of mainstream, then you might like it. If you don't have a kid, you can still read it, and hopefully enjoy :)
Why I wrote this
Reading to young kids improves all kinds of outcomes, on top of being a lot of fun for both adult and child. I always practiced proactive reading where I would skip, reword, play with the text, take pauses to explain and muse about it, explore illustrations, question what might follow, etc. But then, as my kid grew older and graduated from picture books to text books, I found it increasingly difficult to find material conductive to such interest-driven reading style.
Almost everything I could find felt stale, pedestrian, or just plain irrelevant to a child growing up in 2020s. The world is already vastly different from what the authors of these books experienced — and it's on the verge of becoming even more unrecognizably different. I was looking for anything to prepare my child for what might be just around the corner.
In the end, I wrote my own story.
Why I am publishing this
I read my book to my boy. He enjoyed it. That's all recognition I should wish for.
But then, my wife enjoyed it too. She suggested others might like it too. I was skeptical (see below on why you might dislike this) but decided to give it a try. If someone likes this, and maybe suggests improvements, it's a win-win!
The titular child
The RL boy who is the original audience and the main character of this book is turning seven soon. His nerdy obsessions include astronomy, geography, Minecraft, and languages, especially alphabets and phonetics (he always has browser tabs open with IPA charts and Unicode lists). Outside of that, he is a pretty normal and reasonably happy child, well-adjusted in school and universally loved in the family.
The subject matter
This is a book about virtual companions, space travel, and benevolent but still scary superintelligences. Considering my boy's interests, there are elements of language-themed worldbuilding as well. It's a book for kids, but I wanted to make it interesting for adults too — at least, for adults who are somewhat similar to myself.
One of the book's themes is cheating: with so much help available from the increasingly sentient technology, when using that help becomes cheating? Another core topic is happiness: what makes us happy? How to achieve and maintain that state? Can there be a cheated happiness?
"Sëbus" as literature
The list of my literary inspirations is probably too long to be interesting, but I'd like to single out two classics: Carrol's Alice (quoted and alluded to on many occasions in the text) and The Little Prince by Exupéry.
Why you might dislike it
This is not a book about rational thinking. It's more concerned with psychological ABCs relevant to young kids: dealing with overwhelm, emotions, attachments, obligations.
Despite sounding sci-fi, it's not serious sci-fi. The story does not imply real, or even to any extent realistic, world. It's basically a fairy tale. Sometimes, it chooses to be whimsical or absurd at the expense of coherence.
My book is quite idiosyncratic to our family, so parts of it may sound confusing or even off-putting to others. And the writing style is weird: it is basically written as a script for performing to the child.
Privacy matters
The boy and his mom gave me permission to publish this work, but we would like to keep our privacy. The name of the boy, which is the title of the book, is real but it's only used in the family — his official name is different. All other characters in the story are either nameless or fictional. I took an effort to disguise some of the details to make it harder to connect the story to the real child.
My first project on Lesswrong is publishing a book I wrote for my little son. Read this intro to decide if you might be interested.
Who might be interested
The target audience of my book is, basically, modern nerds with kids. If you read fiction to your kid, or if your kid reads on their own, check it out. If you and/or your kid are nerdy, weird, high-IQ, tend to dig things outside of mainstream, then you might like it. If you don't have a kid, you can still read it, and hopefully enjoy :)
Why I wrote this
Reading to young kids improves all kinds of outcomes, on top of being a lot of fun for both adult and child. I always practiced proactive reading where I would skip, reword, play with the text, take pauses to explain and muse about it, explore illustrations, question what might follow, etc. But then, as my kid grew older and graduated from picture books to text books, I found it increasingly difficult to find material conductive to such interest-driven reading style.
Almost everything I could find felt stale, pedestrian, or just plain irrelevant to a child growing up in 2020s. The world is already vastly different from what the authors of these books experienced — and it's on the verge of becoming even more unrecognizably different. I was looking for anything to prepare my child for what might be just around the corner.
In the end, I wrote my own story.
Why I am publishing this
I read my book to my boy. He enjoyed it. That's all recognition I should wish for.
But then, my wife enjoyed it too. She suggested others might like it too. I was skeptical (see below on why you might dislike this) but decided to give it a try. If someone likes this, and maybe suggests improvements, it's a win-win!
The titular child
The RL boy who is the original audience and the main character of this book is turning seven soon. His nerdy obsessions include astronomy, geography, Minecraft, and languages, especially alphabets and phonetics (he always has browser tabs open with IPA charts and Unicode lists). Outside of that, he is a pretty normal and reasonably happy child, well-adjusted in school and universally loved in the family.
The subject matter
This is a book about virtual companions, space travel, and benevolent but still scary superintelligences. Considering my boy's interests, there are elements of language-themed worldbuilding as well. It's a book for kids, but I wanted to make it interesting for adults too — at least, for adults who are somewhat similar to myself.
One of the book's themes is cheating: with so much help available from the increasingly sentient technology, when using that help becomes cheating? Another core topic is happiness: what makes us happy? How to achieve and maintain that state? Can there be a cheated happiness?
"Sëbus" as literature
The list of my literary inspirations is probably too long to be interesting, but I'd like to single out two classics: Carrol's Alice (quoted and alluded to on many occasions in the text) and The Little Prince by Exupéry.
Why you might dislike it
This is not a book about rational thinking. It's more concerned with psychological ABCs relevant to young kids: dealing with overwhelm, emotions, attachments, obligations.
Despite sounding sci-fi, it's not serious sci-fi. The story does not imply real, or even to any extent realistic, world. It's basically a fairy tale. Sometimes, it chooses to be whimsical or absurd at the expense of coherence.
My book is quite idiosyncratic to our family, so parts of it may sound confusing or even off-putting to others. And the writing style is weird: it is basically written as a script for performing to the child.
Privacy matters
The boy and his mom gave me permission to publish this work, but we would like to keep our privacy. The name of the boy, which is the title of the book, is real but it's only used in the family — his official name is different. All other characters in the story are either nameless or fictional. I took an effort to disguise some of the details to make it harder to connect the story to the real child.