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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3925 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

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?

My backlog isn't budging much. Adding Ender's Shadow to the pile.

I just finished Jilly Cooper's Rivals, I'm going to do a big write up of it after I rewatch the Hulu series that just got made out of it. Absolutely fantastic worldbuilding and a book with a lot more depth than you'd think.

I'm going to start Fewer Rules Better People, which is practically speaking a pamphlet. I'm thinking of bulk buying copies and highlighting them and giving them to my local politicians for Christmas.

I'm still slugging through Seeing Like a State, I'm finally through all that boring shit about farming and gotten to his concept of Metis.

On Audible I finished up Iron Kingdom, which was so boring but I wanted to finish it. Just started Clavell's Noble House, which I was hoping would be good like Shogun and King Rat, but so far seems closer to its direct prequel TaiPan, which I found mid. Clavell just seems to handle the Japs better than the Chinks.

I just discovered and have been binging "The Years of Apocalypse" on Royal Road. Probably the most succinct summary I can give is: "It's almost Mother of Learning." Less rational, less super deep in depth worldbuilding, less comedy, less overarching grand mystery time loop shenanigans. But only very slightly less. Second best time loop story I've ever read, it's fantastic.

Another (finished!) Royal Road story you might want to scratch your Mother of Learning itch with is "The Perfect Run". YMMV, especially if you don't like superhero stuff, but I thought it was quite good.

Perfect Run is too much of a comedy and is too "wacky" for me. Where as both MoL and YoA are overall pretty serious.

I read a few dozen chapters back when it was coming out. It was okay, but I didn't care for it a ton. It's on my list of stories I might go back and finish some day, but probably won't actually get around to.

I finished the two novels I started in Feb a couple weeks ago.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

I picked this up digitally after seeing @SubstantialFrivolity 's review. I largely agree with what he wrote but have some additional observations:

A society with a dearth of women is an interesting concept. Historically, what it's led to is almost exclusively heavily utilized prostitution (this is fresh on my mind, given that I just read about the American West). Heinlein goes the opposite way here and posits that men in a more cultured society would revere and protect women even more than they do so now, that consent would be cherished, and that rape would be considered far worse than murder. Once again, this is a concept close at hand for me, given that I happened to stumble across Lara Logan's horrifying story and have had the concept of rape just.... appear more than normal in various contexts.

I'm less down on the polycule aspect, and I think that the idea of linear marriages is compelling. The archetype of a man trading in his wife for a younger one is widespread for a reason. Frankly, I think many of them would keep the older wife if they could, but ultimately make the choice for sex over love and wisdom. The fact that this sort of familial structure simply doesn't exist even with widespread acceptance of polyamory means probably nobody else finds it appealing, though.

The Lunar pidgin dialect that the book is written in made it read "fast" for me. It was very businesslike and to the point, with very few extraneous details. Sometimes this felt more like a textbook on how a revolution is run instead of a story because of this pacing.

My primary criticism is perhaps twofold: The character of Wyoh is introduced and essentially disappears for the back 2/3 of the novel, and the computer as a character is more of a deus ex machina than anything else. Speaking of the latter, it is truly hilarious how much Heinlein undershot computing power estimates in many ways.

Conversations with Friends

After having such a great time reading "Normal People" I decided to dig into this one. In short, a disappointment.

Compared to the first of Sally's books I read, this one had far more unlikeable characters and dug into more culture war crap than I had hoped. The protagonists are insufferable Irish college students (two of them spoken word poetry phenoms if that gives you any indication of where this is going) and basically details a couple of unrealistic relationships in a group.

I can't help but wonder how much Sally knew these people sucked. I get the impression she's pretty into lame, midrange-for-the-uk political views and just got lucky keeping her opinions to herself in "Normal People".

On the plus side, the protagonist is a 21-year-old girl and is actually as stupid as we all were at that age (making immature and emotional decisions, etc.), so that at least felt realistic. As always, the sex scenes are pretty nice, and the build-up to them is paced well. I don't feel like I wasted my team reading it but there are better books out there for sure.

Next in the Queue is:

  • Cryptonomicon
  • My Brilliant Friend
  • Anathem

Didn’t stick with Conversations with Friends but found Normal People very perceptive and, in many ways, a perfect representation of the experience of many parts of rural and urban Ireland and especially where those two things collide. (I’m Irish.)

I'm glad you can vouch for its "authenticity." I've always known that the romantic rhythms in Ireland are different from those where I grew up, and seeing them represented in a novel is one of the reasons I really liked it.

Yes 100% - I was at university in Dublin about 20 years before the setting of Normal People but a lot of what Conall experienced was exactly my experience too and it was good to see it represented

I just finished Metro 2033. I'd liked the game some time ago, was bereft of things to do (not terribly sick, but just enough to deter me from my usual weekend plan of socializing at the bar) and figured I'd brush back up on it before deciding whether or not to go for purchasing Metro: Exodus because I wasn't really feeling another replay of Far Cry 4, 5, or New Dawn (FC6 was just too bad to play through IMO).

It was a slog for most of it, the (translated into English) prose not entertaining enough in its own right to carry the slow pace before the plot got into gear. The last third of it was good enough to make me consider Metro 2034 and Metro 2035. If nothing else, reading Metro 2034 will be a shorter time investment than replaying the first two games.

For more fun junk food, I recently polished off the latest of Blaine Pardoe's Blue Dawn series. Basically, imagine a Tom Clancy novel set in a contemporary American civil war-like scenario and see also: Kurt Schlicter's People's Republic* series. Both are fun if cheesy, the perfect sort of book to kill a long day of flying with, but IMO Blue Dawn was just a bit better/more compelling even if the editing could've used some work.

Piranesi, by the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It's a very different book from her first - the whole book is entries from the protagonist's journal, and it takes place almost entirely in a weird magic pocket dimension. It's oddly reminiscent of the journals you find in the Myst series, as the journal-keeper has a suspiciously large vocabulary and erudite manner for someone who lives alone in a giant labyrinth with no books, little company, and no memory of ever living anywhere else. (A deliberate choice here - you get hints quite early on that he did in fact once live somewhere else but something has happened to his memory. I will spoil no further, because I highly recommend this book.)

Also featuring a protagonist with memory issues, we have Across the Void, a thriller author's first venture into science fiction. Alas, I cannot recommend it, and therefore will spoil away. We've got the first-ever manned mission to Europa! But oh no Europa's icy waters contain a virus which promptly causes a mini-pandemic among the crew! But the head guy at NASA had a contingency plan for this - kill them all and make it look like a space accident! But the protagonist isn't actively ill anymore, so now we're going to forget all about the virus and focus on getting her back to Earth, while head NASA guy tries to kill her so she won't reveal his crimes. At no point does anyone wonder about the broader implications of alien planets having diseases that can infect humans, nor whether such a virus may have any long-term effects on a human who survives the initial infection.

I loved the Shadow series. Much better than the non-ender books in the original series!

Just finished book 1 of The Villianess is an SS+ Rank Avenurer, and while it's... adequate, I didn't find it compelling enough to want to continue the series.

On the subject of Ender's Shadow, I personally didn't appreciate the liberties it took with the original Ender's Game, and did not continue that the Shadow series either.

Edited for clarity.

I didn’t like Ender’s Shadow very much. That being said, I do think that the Shadow series improved as time went on. The sequels have much more geopolitics and social commentary vs retcons and use Peter and Petra as a protagonist regularly enough to get a break from Bean.

I didn't care for the character of Bean as a protagonist. He just didn't work for me and I didn't connect to him at all. It was a shame because I actually liked the idea of exploring the geopolitical situation on Earth. But rewriting Bean like that, besides the deficiencies in his character, really ret-conned Ender's Game, and not in a good way.

But if you never continued on to Speaker of the Dead, etc., I do recommend giving it a shot. SotD and its followups go in a very different direction from Ender's Game but really introduce some fascinating ideas about contact between alien species, different modes of consciousness, that kind of thing. And they have one of my favorite Christian characters in fiction, FWIW.

I completely agree, for me that book diminished the characters of both Bean and especially Ender, gutted the emotional impact of Ender's journey, and twisted the entire narrative of Ender's Game into a lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy. Weak.

When I said that I didn't continue the series, I meant the Shadow series, which I've edited my original post to clarify. I appreciated the different direction that the sequels took, even if I found the ending of Xenocide a little ham-handed and the portrayal of OCD a little stilted and one-dimensional. I have not read Ender in Exile, though I'd be open to checking it out if I had a decent reason to do so.

I completely agree, for me that book diminished the characters of both Bean and especially Ender, gutted the emotional impact of Ender's journey, and twisted the entire narrative of Ender's Game into a lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy. Weak.

Doesn't Ender think that the plot of Ender's Game constitutes him being the victim of lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy? The setup for the Speaker/Xenocide/Children trilogy is Ender's struggle to atone for/undo the xenocide he was the unwitting tool of.

Good question! I think from Ender's perspective the answer to that question would be a qualified yes. Explanation follows.

I referenced Xanatos with the trope of the Chessmaster in mind, and the main dramatic conflict of the original Ender's Game, ie the fate of the third invasion, just isn't a good fit for that style of character to begin with. It is true, however, that adults and leaders are repeatedly portrayed as a bunch of Manipulative Bastards shamelessly forging Ender into a weapon capable of defeating the buggers formics. This is absolutely a major theme of Ender's Game, as is his awareness and understanding of that even as he resentfully accepts its necessity. The motivation for this, however, is the survival of humanity itself; the formics are, in the parlance of the sequels, varelse for all intents and purposes. It isn't until the Biggest Reveal of the novel that we learn that the formics had come to understand that humans were sentient and that the third invasion was completely unnecessary. So while it was undoubtedly manipulative to frame the actual fleet battles against the formics as a continuation of the original battle school games with Mazer Rackham as an opponent, the third invasion as shown in Ender's Game was always portrayed as a desperate gamble for mere survival rather than a deliberately manipulated outcome and the lameness of the manipulations of the various adults and leaders is only visible in retrospect and was never something that any of the adults in charge could have predicted.

Now I'm going to slag on Ender's Shadow in a little more detail to show more of my overall thinking. One of the major challenges of telling Bean's tale is that the backstory of Ender's Game is a known commodity and so the dramatic tension of the original is absent. Achilles can't hold a candle to the extinction of humanity here. A second challenge to telling Bean's tale is that Bean and Ender share a lot of similarities in their overall character, which I think makes it exceedingly difficult to make Bean's story strong and compelling enough in its own right without diminishing Ender's character arc from the original book. Card fails to thread that particular needle, playing up the stress that Ender is under and portraying him as beginning to break down, thus allowing Bean to covertly ride to the rescue again and again. Bean's aggrandizement starts with drawing up the roster for Ender's Dragon Army and inserting himself into same but progresses to outsmarting the adults of battle school and the many unfair advantages they give the opposing armies. Later, by way of having Ender make more and more mistakes, Bean becomes an ever-better leader, tidying up by issuing his own orders and repeatedly saving the day. By the time that the oldest fleet has arrived at the final Formic homeworld, this angle has been so played up that Ender's initial disbelief at the impossible scenario is retconned into him being unable to come up with a plan and Bean is given the option of commanding the fleet himself, which allows him to formulate a strategy for victory. IMO Card never does a good enough job of showing us why Bean wasn't a superior leader and as a result Bean the character comes off as largely as a smarter version of Ender, who we are nevertheless told struggles to understand what makes Ender the better leader. There just isn't enough of an emotional or dramatic arc there for me. Hence, lame.

IMO Card never does a good enough job of showing us why Bean wasn't a superior leader and as a result Bean the character comes off as largely as a smarter version of Ender, who we are nevertheless told struggles to understand what makes Ender the better leader.

I mean, the answer is pretty simple, to the point of being implied- Bean is an alien(almost literally) who struggles to connect with humans and can't properly motivate or connect with his subordinates. I agree that Card didn't do a good job of showing this, but in backgrounds where leadership is prized(like Card's Mormon subculture) it just kind of comes off as obvious. Ender having an elan of leadership while others don't is a minor theme in Ender's game, so it fits with the way the series sees things.

I totally agree with this. I know I'm nitpicking in that particular complaint! Also, the detail about Mormons prizing leadership is one I hadn't thought about. Thanks!

Ender in Exile is an entertaining read. If you’re just a fan of the setting, or if you really want to bridge Ender’s Game and the sequels, it’s worth reading. But that being said, you can definitely go without it, and it’s thematically more like a shadow series than like either the original novel or it’s sequels.

I liked it. If you didn’t like Shadow of the Hegemon, you might not. It suffers from treating Ender like, well, not a person- it’s not that he doesn’t have flaws, it’s that he’s a vehicle for philosophical exploration and social commentary rather than a believable character. The scenes on the colony world are good, the love story on the ship is… more of a series of monologues.

TLDR, read it if you want to frame the sequels the way Card wanted you to. If you didn’t like the shadow series I’d not expect you to like this for its own sake.

Thanks! I'll keep that in mind if I ever see a cheap copy of it, or if alternately the Kindle version goes on sale.

the liberties it took with the original

I know what you mean. I've read most of this book before, but never managed to get past the last few chapters. Didn't quite seem like the Bean we knew. Still, it has some punch in its writing, and maybe the series is interesting.

The problem is it's not AT ALL the Bean that we see in Ender's Game. You can tell because his personality changes drastically when he has conversations with Ender (since those were already canon). The book tries to excuse it as him "feeling nervous around Ender", but that's incredibly weak. Similarly, the only reason all his manipulations of Ender (and his backseat ro have to be so subtle and behind-the-scenes is to be compatible with the original narrative; there's no good in-universe explanation.

Orson Scott Card just thought up a neat new OC and shoehorned him into the original story, and it shows. And I hate how completely it invalidates Ender's choices. But hey, that new character does come into his own in the sequels, at least, when he's not undermining a previously-written story.

Just finished Theft of Fire, a hard scifi novel about a down on his luck asteroid miner being roped into a heist far above his paygrade. Good stuff, I was frankly surprised by the sheer overlap between both the setting of the story and the author's style and my own. Funnily enough, counting from the date of publication, my work precedes his.

I could critique things like writing a scifi story set a hundred years in the future where the state of the art in AI ignores how good ChatGPT was at the time of publication, but eh.

After barely recovering from the shock of finding out that China Mieville is a man, I've made it about a hundred pages into Perdido Street Station. I'd been meaning to getting around to reading his work eventually, as I've seen strongly positive sentiment. That being said, I'm not super impressed so far, he's one of those literary types who really leans into florid and slightly overwrought prose.

could critique things like writing a scifi story set a hundred years in the future where the state of the art in AI ignores how good ChatGPT was at the time of publication, but eh.

Maybe it's aimed for the rocketpunk audience?

I could critique things like writing a scifi story set a hundred years in the future where the state of the art in AI ignores how good ChatGPT was at the time of publication, but eh.

Are we going to start doing retrofuturism about how cute the predictions were in 2019 now?

Now I want to reread some of Robert J Sawyer's books. He wrote a few "day-after-tomorrow" science fiction stories in the early 21st century, and it would be interesting to see how well they've aged.

Theft of Fire came out at the end of 2023! I can cut anyone from the old, old days of 2019 slack haha.

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