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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1665 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 18, 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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Just finished Murderbot series. Very fun reading. I hope the author writes a dozen more, if she doesn't get tired of it.

Didn't you get tired of the politics? The first two stories or so were okay, but at some point it became abundantly clear to me that it isn't just a dark satirical setting, the author genuinely just thinks that capitalism is that terrible, and that everything would be better in communist feminist utopia.

I just ignored those parts. Given that most critique of the capitalism is given in the voice of the character which understands very little about how humans work and derives most of its knowledge on the subject from soap operas and actively avoids getting any personal knowledge there, on top of being beset by a rich bouquet of psychological issues, it can be even taken as a satirical critique of the contemporary (and, really, all) left. I am not sure if that was the author's intent, but it certainly lends itself to this way of reading.

That said, "evil megacorp" is a staple villain in SciFi, at least in the settings where corporations exist at all, so it's nothing really new. And in general, economics and politics is almost never properly explored at all - the author doesn't seem to be interested in how that all "free stuff" works on Preservation Alliance - you just reverse the polarity and apply transquantum flux capacitors. Same, never explored what exactly motivates the corps and how they work and why, or why they need so many humans working in "mines" at all, given how advanced their tech is. If one can't get over it, the range of enjoyable SciFi would be greatly reduced. Fortunately, all that stuff is pretty easily ignorable for me, and most of the content is not about that at all.

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