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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on the Iliad and Dialectic of Enlightenment. Picking up McLuhan's The Classical Trivium.
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.
I didn't mind books 1-2 dystopian dark comedy style at all - quite the opposite, that is one of my favorite settings. I think that all ultra-large/monopolist organizations can easily go down terrible paths, and that obviously includes megacorps. Even in book 3, it started to become obvious to me that the author really hates capitalism in general, but it was still somewhat easy to ignore. But in book 5 the core plot itself is very much about how amazing the feminist environmentalist communist etc. preservation alliance is, how everything bad in the world is because of evil profit-maximizing companies, and how SecUnit just has to join the Klassenkampf to bring forward the great revolution and everything will be great. Also, I'd say that SecUnit is if anything somewhat constrained, it's the humans from the alliance who are worst.
Also, the author herself is openly very far left and has in interviews quite clearly talked about the anti-capitalist messages in the murderbot series.
For me it looked very light on details on how exactly amazing it is - like, how their economy actually works? I get it, everything is free and there's no money, but how does it work? Is it just a huge hippie commune? BTW, how huge - how many people actually live there - it is 100 people, a thousand, a million? Never discussed. Who's in charge and what being in charge actually means? How the governance works - who decides what to do and where the external money - which they use - come from, and who decides how much of that money is spent on what? There are some officers - like chief of police - but who appoints them and how? Pretty much none of that is covered except as a third-hand mention in passing by Murderbot who barely understands what it means and really can't even contextualize it, so it just accepts it as "it's how it is with those weird humans but it's my humans so whatever they do must be a good thing". Again, this looks very much like indoctrination process of a college freshman who's not great in critical thinking because it has been successfully educated out of him. This vagueness is a double edged sword and the Murderbot is explicitly an extremely unreliable narrator in all matters human.
That's why I usually avoid authors' interviews (and same for actors, producers, etc.) as much as I can. Usually nothing good comes from it but spoiling a good work of art.
Interestingly enough, in the movie they also felt the decision processes are not specified at all so they felt it's necessary to introduce a scene where Dr. Mensah essentially tells everybody what to do and then they stand in a circle, hold hands and hum (literally). Given that the show makers can be assumed to be extremely woke by default, it's interesting how they decided to present this. First, they obviously see the need to make decisions, and they go for the natural authoritarian approach (not even a vote!) but then they insert some kind of obscure ritual to woke-wash it and resolve the natural question of "how other people who have no decision power tolerate it?". Simply - they hum.
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