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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2607 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 17, 2023

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.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Paradise Lost. In my opinion, all epic poetry should be printed as prose. It reads well reformatted. So far it's hard to think of it as a cautionary tale, though this dubious crowd of lost gods do not inspire full confidence.

Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.

Paper I'm reading: The follow-up paper from Quandt et al., Dark participation: Conception, reception, and extensions.

I'm reading The Atrocity Archives on @self_made_human's recommendation. It's pretty great, lots of good ideas. It tries a little too hard to be funny sometimes, the main character quite frequently blacks out and misses all the action, and the plot is a bit scattered, but it's a very enjoyable read. The writing style feels SO SIMILAR to @self_made_human's own--is there a whole genre of books like this, do you just really like these ones, or am I imagining things?

The writing style feels SO SIMILAR to @self_made_human's own--is there a whole genre of books like this

Can you link something they published?

Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum over on Royal Road:

Dr. Adat Sen has been having a bad week.

Not only was his teleporter wife drafted to Alpha Centauri to fight a K2 offshoot of a K3 civilization, his promised pay raise hasn't come through, and it turns out that someone has it out for him to the extent of trying to kill him with a Basilisk hack. Who would have thought that being a a cyborg psychiatrist for the UN would be this stressful?

Then there's the matter of publish or perish, handling nasty cognitohazards on a daily basis, convincing suicidally depressed superhumans not to take everyone else with them, and living under the shadow of hostile advanced aliens building a Nicoll-Dyson laser in the solar system next door. Oh, and the one Superhuman AGI that humanity produced might be out to get them.

Welcome to the world of ENNS, where superheroes have actual jobs and don't run around in costumes fighting muggers, humanity faces existential threats around every corner, and Adat has the bad luck of finding himself fighting threats way out of his pay grade.

It's probably my best work, and I'm about to resume posting after a few months of hiatus (during which I wrote a Xianxia novel of all things).

That's high praise, since Stross is a great author, and I consider my best efforts only a pale imitation at best.

Truth be told, there are quite a few similarities between my work and his. There's a certain way of approaching massive, epoch-altering events from a realistic, mundane perspective, and both our protagonists are bureaucrats who kick ass, while hardly being the top dogs in their relative spheres. There's a strong dollop of black humor, hard scifi intermeshing with insanity, and then figuring out how that plays out. Strauss's recent works are significantly restrained in exploring the absolute bonkers shit that would happen without writer fiat, but I can hardly hold it against him when he wrote Accelerando, a great example of how shit goes weird during a singularity.

I don't know how much to chalk up to him outright inspiring me, versus me liking his works and thus reproducing similar patterns when I write, because I explicitly write the kind of books I want to read.

Sadly there's no real genre of similar works to read, that I'm aware of, because I'd be reading more of them instead of exhausting the well and being forced to write one myself!

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