Terra Ignota
Article
Terra Ignota is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 16, 2022 and July 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “If I were in Terra Ignota , my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel”; “If I were in Terra Ignota, my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel”; “Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota , a sci-fi story”. It most often appears alongside Charity, 1984, Apollo Mojave.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: March 16, 2022
- Last seen: July 30, 2024
Appears In
- Justice Creep
- Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep
- Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Related Pages
-
- Charity (3 shared issues)
-
- 1984 (2 shared issues)
-
- Apollo Mojave (2 shared issues)
-
- Christianity (2 shared issues)
-
- climate justice (2 shared issues)
-
- economic justice (2 shared issues)
-
- environmental justice (2 shared issues)
-
- O’Brien (2 shared issues)
-
- Rawls (2 shared issues)
-
- Sniper (2 shared issues)
-
- iamverysmart (1 shared issues)
-
- 4chan (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Here’s a crazy theory: the moral transition from other virtues to Justice mirrors the literary transition from utopian fiction to dystopian. In Utopia, people practice virtues like Charity, Industry, and Humanity, excelling at them and making their good world even better. In Dystopia, Justice is all you can hope for. If I were in Terra Ignota, my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel, bringing glory to my Hive and giving its already-brilliant shine extra luster. But if I were in 1984, my fondest wish would be to bring O’Brien and the others to justice; to watch them suffer, to undo the wound in the world caused by their scheming.
“If I were in Terra Ignota, my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel, bringing glory to my Hive and giving its already-brilliant shine extra luster. But if I were in 1984, my fondest wish would be to bring O’Brien and the others to justice; to watch them suffer, to undo the wound in the world caused by their scheming.”
This part probably deserves more prominence - sports are a notable holdout of master morality, and an easy way for most people to appreciate it. Some of the most popular criticisms of slave morality come from imagining it being overapplied to sports (eg everyone getting participation trophies). A full treatment of this topic could touch on Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota, a sci-fi story where one of the remaining civilizations is descended from the International Olympic Committee and has managed to preserve humanist values in a sort of Olympics-centric way.