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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I’m finally on ‘The Far Side of the World’ – perhaps the most famous novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series.
Captain Jack Aubrey, expert sloth debaucher, knowingly recruits enough lunatics and mutineers to fill out the complement of the ‘Joyful’ Surprise, before pursuing an
Americancough ‘French’ Man of War around Cape Horn and into the Pacific.And after spending nine novels vociferously proselytizing his hatred of alcohol abuse to anyone who will listen, Dr Stephen Maturin has now chewed, injected, snorted, smoked, enema’d, or otherwise ingested most drugs found anywhere in, on, or adjacent to, the entire Seven Seas.
Aware of his addiction to the laudanum from his own medicine chest (that somehow didn’t make it into the screenplay), junkie Maturin decides that the only sane course of action is to wean himself off with the aid of a new wonder drug; Cocaine.
And that’s before he tries to cover up a fellow officer’s cuckoldry.
Unhappily, Peter Weir somehow felt the need to rewrite the film version to appeal to a broader audience.
For shame.
Ian M. Banks Surface Detail.
Any others here read the Culture books? It's interesting to me the way fans of the series read them as so overtly anti-capitalist and generally liberal/progressive works. This is the fourth or fifth I've read and I'm just getting a depiction of a post-scarcity society where market economies don't exist. Maybe I just haven't read the right book yet though or I'm missing it.
I think they're well-written. They're anti-capitalist in the Star Trek sense where they have a set understanding of what the author pretty clearly considers to be a good-if-not-perfect future, that future happens to be extremely left-liberal, and the works are really trying hard to imply that it's so obviously the correct and inevitable answer that Marx would be proud, but they're also not waving Ferengi in your face all the time, and The Culture is at least presented with some level of warts-and-all.
Player of Games is the most (early-TNG-) Ferengi-esque one. The villains are bad in more ways than just beingfake meritocratic capitalists, and there's a bit of a twist about how they're bad, but they're the pretty standard grab-bag of sexism and racism and all the other isms that Ian Banks both didn't like and wanted to paint non-leftists as operating under.
I was kinda put off by the villainy in Player of Games. It would be nicer if their "extreme meritocracy through McGuffin" concept have been addressed on merits, instead Banks just goes for "but akshually they are all liars and don't do what they profess at all, and instead just do evil things and hypocritically hide it". This is easy - of course people that use plausible sounding concepts to hide being bad are actually bad, especially if the author demonstrates to us that they are bad and then asks "aren't the people I just showed you being bad actually bad?!" Of course they are, you wrote them this way, what do you expect! This just feels lazy to me. I like my villains to be a bit more chewy, to require at least some work to figure out why their position - in which they see themselves as righteous - is untenable, or at least unacceptable to me. Even Ferengi have been given more fair treatment than that (remember, they reached pretty high level of developed society without any wars or atrocities like slavery. For an obvious caricature, it's pretty decent achievement).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link