The Sovereign Mirror

What finally worked was conversation. For years I’ve explained TSR to anyone who would sit still for it, and lately to AI, every generation of it. Each one started where any smart skeptic starts. It asked a reasonable question. I answered, and the answer broke something in the picture it had built. So it asked a better question. Somewhere around the twentieth question the pieces started holding each other up, and it stopped seeing a list of strange words and started seeing a system.

That’s this book. The questions are real ones. People have asked them, machines have asked them, and I asked most of them myself years ago. I kept the ones that were wrong in useful ways, because you’ll probably ask them too. The questions are in bold. The answers are mine.