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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   4074 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on This Star of England.

Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread starts off as a surprisingly typical communist screed, but it starts distinguishing itself after it denies the labour theory of value, saying that new forms of production must yield new forms of consumption. An interesting discussion of liberty soon follows. He has a keen eye to underappreciated people, which ameliorates his otherwise combative style.

Just started Ruocchio’s Empire of Silence.

On one hand, it rubs me the wrong way: it feels like a sausage made of three parts Frank Herbert (brazenly stolen tropes: parallel backstory to the Butlerian Jihad with tech limitations and mentats, a galactic empire with rigid classes, personal shields against high velocity weapons, family atomics) to one part Gene Wolfe (first person with an overload of archaic vocabulary. Too early to tell, but I’m about certain that the narrator will turn out to be unreliable as well), with an epsilon of originality in the casing. Or maybe there’s a third influence I’ve never encountered that I’m mistaking for originality.

On the other hand, it is interesting and more accessible than either influence so far.

Edit: Maybe more Wolfe than I thought. The genetically engineered nobility reflects The Fifth Head of Cerberus and its clones.

I read Empire of Silence and had the same feelings you do. There's an extensive appendix and glossary at the back of the book, and I regret not reading them before I started. They provide a lot of much-needed context that made the book -- for me, when I was about 75% done -- more enjoyable.

For Howling Dark, I read the glossary and appendix, and, boy, I'm glad I did because there's a bit of a time jump with explanations of some major events that are mentioned in passing in the story.

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