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An essay on the novels
The Measured and the Missing: Grief, Delusion and the Ethics of Seeing in the Novels of Troy Taliancich reads the whole shelf together, from The Sextant Protocol and The Deep End to The One Who Asks, Ferry Weather and The Record series.
Every book on the shelf contains an instrument for reading a person, and each one loses the person in the act of knowing. The essay follows that idea through grief, delusion, silence and consent, and traces how the novels move, book by book, from the person holding the instrument to the person it is pointed at.
The essay was written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, from a reading of the complete works. It discusses the endings of several books, so it opens with a spoiler note.