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Huh, I actually hadn't noticed that; I did enjoy (most of) the characters. Was it really so blatant?
No, what turned me off Years of the Apocalypse (somewhere around the end of book 2; haven't touched it since) was the author's near-total incuriosity towards economics, which was becoming an increasingly large part of the story. There was a line -- and I'm still floored someone could actually write this -- claiming that industrialization increases the cost of household goods. Like, you show the natural land being stripped bare for resources -- where do you think it all goes? Where do the cartoonishly evil (naturally) industrialists get all their money if not by selling the massive quantities of stuff they produce? It's not like people were limiting their consumption out of ecological consciousness before (lol), they just couldn't afford it. So... who's buying all this stuff, then?
I just don't see how you can design a functional world with such a broken perspective on how society functions-- Well, you can't, actually, and that becomes obvious once you start paying attention. It's not like this is some background detail, the on-going industrial revolution is central to the plot, and the author apparently has done no research into how industrial revolutions affect society or even seriously thought about it. It's just the laziest sort of anti-capitalist screed about how greed is destroying the world -- any proper Marxist would be embarrassed to write something so uninspired and thoughtless.
It is otherwise pretty good -- if it weren't I wouldn't have suffered through that as long as I did. The best time-loop fic since Mother of Learning (at least in the fantasy-progression genre)... Well, I'll reluctantly admit that's true, but MoL was a lot better. That particular niche-within-a-niche is just sadly under explored. (Though I'm liking Throne of TIme a lot so far!) Still, it's enjoyable on its own merits when it keeps the focus on anything else.
What is Mother of Learning and what makes it good? I skimmed the internet and it is about a young wizard on a wizard school (inspired by HP?)
Mother of Learning is a prominent webnovel which is particularly popular in rationalist circles (currently the top voted post on /r/rational, beating out Worth the Candle). It's about a young wizard, Zorian, who gets trapped in a one-month time loop after his academy is attacked by mysterious invaders. He must now use the loop to grow stronger and investigate leads until he can find a way to escape the loop and stop the invasion. You can read a longer review from ACX's contest.
Personally, I am firmly of the opinion that Mother of Learning is an inferior version of Time Braid, but others disagree.
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(I'm going to try to keep this more or less spoiler free, so sorry if anything's too vague.)
The school actually doesn't play that big a role in the story after the first several chapters; perhaps in a broad sense it's inspired by Harry Potter, in that most people writing in English today have probably read it and it is about a young man learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up, but it's a tenuous connection. It certainly feels nothing alike. Way, way more focus on world building and a world that (more or less) makes sense, a much more developed magic system (the story is reasonably restrained about when it decides we need to know all those details, but they certainly exist), and it is really primarily about learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up (mentally, at least). (And not petty social drama, poorly designed fake sports, or school life -- even as a kid I got frustrated at how bad Harry Potter was at keeping the focus on the things I wanted to hear about.)
The main conceit is the time loop; every month, time resets. Everything and everyone go back where they were before and (almost) everyone loses their memories of the intervening time, but not our protagonist. So, fantasy Groundhog
DayMonth. But while Groundhog Day is primarily concerned with the time loop itself (it was a much more novel idea back then, granted), MoL uses it as a vehicle to exhibit an intricately designed world, to section off a short stretch of time to explore how everything fit together in that moment. At first it all feels pretty painfully generic: run-of-the-mill D&D style fantasy world, one-note characters (of whom our protagonist likes roughly zero, so you only see them when they decide to come annoy him), disconnected and uninteresting events, and a very straightforward goal. But by going through that month again and again, we slowly uncover the rich detail that was hiding under the surface of all of those things, how many of them were just reflections of our protagonist's limited perspective and immaturity, and how he grows as a result.The character work is... actually just good, without qualification. So with the qualification that almost every character is literally incapable of learning or growing in any durable way because they're reset every month, it's impressive. All the more so because of how hard it is to find any decent characters at all in stories quite so autistically obsessed with detailing an intricate magic system. Part of that is just focusing on the protagonist, who can learn and grow, but it accomplishes a surprising amount through evolution of our understanding of characters that can't undergo actual evolution inside the time loop. I don't want to oversell it, nothing here is groundbreaking, but it's a plus instead of the minus it really should have been by all rights.
The overarching plot is fine-to-good, I'd say. It keeps the pressure up, which isn't easy given the premise, and there are enough twists and turns to keep you engaged. And, like everything else, there's a lot more going on with it than it seems at first. Still, it feels pretty distant most of the time, and for the vast majority of the word count it's just motivation to accumulate ever more knowledge and power. Which is fine by me, that's what I'm here for. It has the standard progression/incremental game hook of number-go-up and getting to do bigger, cooler things as the story progresses, finding shortcuts and new avenues to explore in the time loop -- all pretty basic, but fun. Like, a big goal early on is learning the teleport spell, because that allows us to reach places we couldn't before and to get to critical areas sooner in the loop. And with that power we can save the life of someone recommended as a mentor for another sort of magic we need to do something else, and so on.
Pacing is... eh, let's say 'deliberate.' The whole story is around three thousand pages. I wouldn't call any of it filler -- and in fact I enjoyed it enough I wish there was more; I've re-read it twice -- but it definitely takes its time and you've got to be ready to meet it on its own terms. I don't mind it, but I can certainly understand why someone would. I think it would be relatively easy to put down and pick back up later when you're in the mood, but I read it straight through all three times.
And, like I've said, the best part is the world building and magic, with satisfying mechanics and connections and almost fractal complexity.
On the whole... maybe this is an out-there take, but it kind of feels like Project Hail Mary to me (the book much more than the movie), in that it's focused on learning about and interacting with complex systems, understanding how they fit together and how they might be re-combined to accomplish a new objective. It's lonely in the same way at first, and less lonely later on in the same way too (though that is a bit of spoiler). And they both have an element of piecing together past events from limited clues, though of course that's handled very differently. Otherwise... Outer Wilds? For reasons that should be obvious if you've played it (which everyone should).
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Well, this is why it's good to get a second opinion. Thanks. I guess all this culture warring really has made me too sensitive.
I'm pretty economically ignorant myself, so I guess that side of things didn't bother me as much. But I do have a related criticism that a barely-industrialized world clashes with modern libertine sexual and gender politics. Magic or no magic, it makes no sense to pretend that gay relationships and casual sex are "just normal" in a society that's barely above subsistence level. I suspect that's just what Royal Road readers are used to: shipping characters they like with no respect to realism or gender, and naive anti-capitalist ideals.
So I guess I agree that the worldbuilding just doesn't hold up under even casual scrutiny. Still, I do appreciate the rational way the MC goes about trying to figure things out in the time loops. It's got the nice quality that the plot is mainly driven by lack of information, not bad decisions (or at least, not unrealistically bad ones).
I'll have to check it out!
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I'm pretty tuned to be instantly turned off by CW bullshit but I didn't really notice.
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Ah, well, maybe I'm just not sensitive enough. I'm bad at noticing patterns like that if I don't know to look for them -- I didn't even realize almost all the villains and almost none of the heroes in the new Star Wars trilogy were white men until I heard someone point it out.
Oh, this one I noticed. But yeah, I think it's just table stakes for modern low brow fantasy -- that or some caricature of oppression the protagonist has to overcome, though that's thankfully less common. The latter is maybe more realistic in some sense, but it means we're spending a whole lot more word count on the subject than if society is just inexplicably already perfectly in tune with modern progressive attitudes. It bothers me way less than the economics, and I can't really explain why. Just personal interest, I guess.
Oh, I agree. If it weren't otherwise good I wouldn't be so upset about the lost potential. But for a story to actually be rational it has to be rational all the way through, or it just unravels from there. I'm not totally against giving it another shot at some point, regardless of my complaints, but so far there's always been something I've wanted to read more.
... I was going to warn you it's still pretty early days, but I just checked and its at nearly 700 pages. Definitely flew right by. Still, biggest problem right now is there's not enough of it, which is a good problem to have. Fast updates, too.
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