Oh lord one of my less online friends posted this in a group chat. Love that group, but I am NOT happy about having to read so much of Scott’s writing again to explain the various ways it’s loony.

John McPhee’s so goddamn good, one of the best nonfiction writers out there. The absolute master of nonfiction narrative structure, imho.

And yeah, Deep Time is… a hell of a trip.

Super late response (sorry!), but yeah, history of science is great stuff. And your point about TESCREALS engaging with science fiction over science is entirely spot-on. (Which was me as a teenager. There but for the grace of god go I…)

Btw, if you want to read a FANTASTIC book dealing with people grappling with plate tectonics, John McPhee’s Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Ancient World spans literal decades of interviews with geologists, and you get to start with geologists being deeply skeptical of this newfangled plate tectonics (not dismissive, but not convinced of the breadth of its explanatory power), and work to it being fully accepted science over the course of the book.

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn

Bit of philosophy of science is a useful bit of immunization against Rationalist bullshit. Maybe not on its own, but it helps.