|
 
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 18:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 04:32 |
|
|
Dick Trauma posted:I was never much of a political person until our country's most recent decent into madness, so I rarely considered the political perspective of the media I consumed. There was a lot of Heinlein talk in the USPOL thread so I was surprised that no one mentioned "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" which I enjoyed as a kid but apparently is some sort of revolting Libertarian fever dream. I'll just say this: to deal with a shortage of women moon colonists, Heinlein's moon society has a group marriage system called "line marriage" which continually adds members as existing members age up and young people marry in. Since these family units never die, they can become quite wealthy, accumulating property over centuries thus the richest and most desirable ones to marry into stretch in a "line" back many generations. Due to the underlying gender imbalance, these marriages too tilt towards being sausagefests, therefore a woman can pretty much get in free, but a man who wants to marry in has to bring something to the table like money or property or best of all a hot girlfriend who will only marry in if he gets in too. Naturally the new sister-wife is required to gently caress all the men equally from her young hot boyfriend (if she brought one) up to the oldest creepiest Heinlein self-insert patriarch. If this sounds like a nearly-transparent gloss over legalized sex slavery, have i got a "well akshually something completely voluntary can't be slavery, if only the laws would catch up to my intellect" for you! VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Feb 11, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 18:48
|
|
|
Aruan posted:I wonder what peoples thoughts are on A Mote and God's Eye and the CoDominium universe. I loved that book for the interesting and truly alien psychology of the, well, aliens and the anthropological (xenological??) puzzle of Motie society, and I kept getting annoyed at having to slog through the weird serf-mentality aristocracy-humping and Jerry Pournelle's iron age opinions about women (and you know that part was Pournelle because it was maximum-prude whereas a Niven society is maximally horny, too horny for normie males to even survive since Ringworld-novel humanoid females have pheromones or sexual kungfu moves or both that render men into temporarily mindless gently caress-zombies). And ya know humanity's key social advantage over the Moties being our ability to put female sexuality under tight male control so our population sizes don't get out of hand and destabilize society 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 19:29
|
|
|
Aruan posted:have you ever ready 'oath of fealty'? its niven and pournelles stand alone novel about a functioning arcology in california, where the moral is 'its good if we allow corporations to become independent entities with the power to kill, because we can always trust them to be better than Incompetent Socialist Governments' No I haven't read that. I've read a lot of Niven (although his later stuff seemed like a setting created by a good writer who gave it to a 14-year-old boy to fill in the details, probably a lot of that has to do with them all being about his obvious self-insert horndog protagonist Are the Mote sequels any good, it felt like the first story had a self-contained resolution and that the authors had already shot their whole load of solving the central mystery and conflict, so it seemed like any sequel would be Pournelle coming back like "oh and another thing about how women are the downfall of all societies everywhere   ", but if it's not that I may give it a try.
VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Feb 11, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 20:09
|
|
|
The Oldest Man posted:I have mentally edited out so many weird sex scenes from sci fi novels that I actually don't trust myself to make recommendations to normies anymore which is partially why I asked this question in the first place. The other reason is that I think a major component of many science fiction writers' engagement with politics is envisioning a political order that makes the world a safe and/or mandatory place for their sexual fetishes. Heinlein for sure falls into this category.  "Hello sci-fi nerd, i have a great idea for exploring the collapsed societies and human evolutionary offshoots on a gargantuan feat of planetary engineering created by humans' ancient stellar forebears!" "Interesting I can't wait to find out what's there!" "Well the most feared predators are sexy lady sex vampires who spermjack you with sex pheromones that short-circuit your executive faculties and make you mindlessly gently caress them until they receive your seed then they kill and eat you!" "Uh okay well besides that--" "Well the other humanoids have such ancient and advanced prostitution consort techniques that all diplomacy is conducted sexually and just by pressuring key nerve clusters they can drive you into an uncontrollable sexual frenzy and once you start loving them they give you such mind-blowing orgasms you practically become their willing sex slave!" "Um..." "Of course I, I mean the novel's hero, would have a buddy help him out by using a remote stimulator to light up the pleasure center of her brain while I, uh, while the hero is inside her, giving her even more earthshattering orgasms until she's physiologically addicted to his cock and becomes his sex slave!" "UM  " "Did I mention their fountain of youth technology can maintain you physically at any age so some of them look 15 but it's ok to gently caress them because they're temporally and mentally centuries old, so it's not a crime, actually it's rude not to, would create an interstellar diplomatic incident not to, and anyway they can make you do it with that sexual pressure point martial arts I told you about! So it's not weird and it's not like you want to, you have to! And..."
VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Feb 11, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 20:56
|
|
|
Aruan posted:how can we be talking about Weird Sex Stuff and nobody has brought up later Dune Got way too bored by the first couple sequels to get to the later stuff I want to read about Paul's grandson becoming a giant immortal space worm but ahhh so much bullshit I don't care about....
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 21:29
|
|
|
The Oldest Man posted:Rico comes from a rich merchant/business family, and they don't want him to enlist (and try to bribe him out of it) by telling him he can be a ~master of his destiny!~ if he'll just take over the family business. Rico chooses to join the military but it was clear that this is only a prerequisite for getting into the government, not for being John Galt, and that he was kind of a dipshit as a rich kid for choosing what he did - but that it was correct that it was his choice. But how do you square that with the end of the book where Rico's dad ends up following in his footsteps, becomes Rico's first sergeant, and admits his son was right all along and being consumed with money and business was pointless playtime, but choosing to serve and kill bugs with your son now that's living. Which comes directly from the long-rear end political philosophy speeches about how only a military dictatorship can create a successful society because only veterans have put the good of the collective above their own personal desires, so only they can be trusted with citizenship and political power unlike the self-absorbed civilians. The business and money stuff is treated as frivolous and unimportant, all the real important decisions are military and political, which is decidedly unlibertarian since they believe businesses and markets make the best decisions and therefore political power should reside in the hands of the biggest property owners
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2021 01:07
|
|
|
It seems like the federation is not so much post-scarcity as it a prosperous slavery-supported democracy like ancient Athens, just technically advanced to the point that their slaves are artificial intelligences which aren't legally or even morally (by most people) considered people. It's established that holograms are used to do all the real poo poo jobs, and they become sentient if you leave them on long enough, and that this has happened because we see some hologram miners or tube-scrubbers or whatever sharing the Doctor's subversive novel. It's clear that they still need a lot of labor, natural resources, etc that the replicators can't make. It's even a recurring plot point that the replicator can never make the thing you really need.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2021 03:08
|
|
|
Sanguinia posted:Star Trek's society and economy is obviously not based on any form of communism, even a layman's analysis of how the Federation economy functions would make that obvious. Its was a joke. Uh you get there is a difference between arguing that the themes are intentionally conservative and right-wing, and just discussing the difference between what we're told and what we're shown on screen right?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2021 06:11
|
|
|
Centurium posted:I actually find that a quite believable land use in full luxury gay space communism. Especially if it is FLGSC that grew out of a liberal social democracy, I can definitely see a transition state where there's a 1970's British Coal Industry propped up by policy not only once the mines aren't profitably productive, but then coal stops being a thing anyone uses because technology. Once you get to the point that almost any material thing is so cheap that any person can have as much of it as they want without having to work for it, you stop needing to pay miners to mine coal but at that point what's the reason to remove the mine? Whaaaat Coal mining is horrible and ruins your health, the only reason people cling to it or the idea of it is because of a legacy of militant industrial labor activism that turned coal mining into a way into an actual secure livelihood in areas wracked by poverty, and people (rightly) don't have any faith that our current economic system would replace that with anything if coal went away. People might grow grapes for fun if they had a secure livelihood provided for them regardless, they would not spend their life breathing coal dust underground if they didn't have to do it to feed and house their family.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2021 20:10
|
|
|
Diverting my post-scarcity resources into pumping coal slurry into the underground Centralia mine fire so instead of burning for just a hundred years it rages for eternity as a monument to are heritage
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2021 01:14
|
|
|
Centurium posted:Where this doesn't square with the narrative world is that they out of necessity claim that unobtanium X can't be made in a replicator. If dilithium isn't replicatable but you need it to build up a fleet of ships that can prevent the Dominion from conquering you, how does the Federation produce enough dilithium without changing their society or relying entirely on the enthusiasm of dilithium mining enthusiasts? Kirk-era Star Trek still had money and a class system, so dilithium mining was a way for poor people to strike it rich in exchange for backbreaking labor in lonely spartan and deadly conditions (TOS: Mudd's Women). Also features sex trafficking and 23rd-century mail-order brides and sex slavery which is treated as 100% normal with Mudd's only crime being that the drug he was selling to the mail-order brides that makes them hot was a placebo and the real hotness-drug was the self-confidence you get from thinking you're taking a magic drug or some poo poo. And yeah as mentioned it's established in Voyager that in the Picard era dilithium mining is done by an artificial intelligence slave caste. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Feb 17, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2021 23:15
|
|
|
Don't forget Worf's lifelong guilt because he Klingon-ed out on a soccer field and killed a nice And the conflict with Worf and his baby momma because she's one of the good ones and constantly disparages her own culture and she hid Alexander from him because she was afraid if Worf was in his life he'd grow up too Klingon.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2021 01:59
|
|
|
The Oldest Man posted:Five, I think. His family were all murdered by Romulans (as one does) and he was adopted by a rando human Starfleet officer who was there afterward. Most especially the episode where he joined Federation QAnon on Risa and helped them commit terrorism to wake up the sheeple
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2021 18:31
|
|
|
Yvonmukluk posted:Given how many sci-fi works have people living on other planets as a basic part of the setting, singling out Trek for this seems pretty disingenuous. Especially given they explicitly have in-universe rules against abusing native species in the form of the Prime Directive. They don't move in where people already live. The Prime Directive is another "characters say things that don't match what's predicted on screen" thing though, the Federation fucks with native species all the time. Someone already mentioned the first Klingon episode where the Federation shows up to annex (what they think is) a primitive culture on a strategically important world. Although to be fair the hyper-advanced species cosplaying as primitives does call them out on their hypocrisy and barbarity, but the consequences don't go beyond that episode and no one ever reevaluates Federation or Starfleet policies in light of what happened there. You also have Kirk taking the side of the Americans on that post-apocalyptic Earth clone where the Communists won a world war that sent everyone back to the stone age, and loving with their culture. Or Kirk extorting the aliens who built their culture around Earth gangster novels they found because their planet had the unobtanium of the week. Or Kirk proving everyone's religion wrong and destroying their gods because he doesn't like their culture. Even the interventions that are supposedly embarked on "for their own good" are hyperpaternalist, half the time Kirk just smashes their God computer and goes "welp you have to fend for yourselves now, we'll follow up with a team of 'advisors', hope you listen to them" Picard's era does their fair share of that too whenever the Federation's imperial interests are at stake. Like that one world with two mega-states, which is supposed to be left to "mature" into a unified world government, the Federation was going "nah gently caress that we'll let half of them in" because that planet had some important natural resource that they wanted to exploit. And the only reason it didn't happen was because Picard was personally abducted on the mission by the other side, and the side they were negotiating with accused him of defecting to the other side on purpose, and that pissed him off so much he said "yeah I'm going to say in my report you're too primitive to be worth the trouble", not any Prime Directive concerns about picking sides and creating a client state for resource extraction etc. Or that planet with the intelligent silicon life that was hacking into terraforming equipment to stop it from killing their people, and sometimes that meant using it to kill colonists in self-defense. Once Picard found out what was going on he was like "oops this world is inhabited I'm going to forcibly evacuate the colony" which was good, but the colonists themselves wanted to wipe out the silicon life and get on with the terraforming project. And it seems like that's what would have happened if the Enterprise hadn't shown up so that really calls into question what's going on with other worlds. In fact most of the settlers we see are relentless assholes, after the colonial war with the Cardassians got reconned into the story, we meet the Maquis who are basically 24th-Century filibusters: they go settle a world that doesn't belong to the Federation, commit terrorism when the other state with a claim on it shows up and tells them to leave, and end up dragging the mother country into endless territorial conflicts
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2021 20:34
|
|
|
SubG posted:I haven't seen any of Lower Decks, but that's almost the plot to The Wrath of Khan (1982). Yeah the writers, mostly TOS, really buy into some Nazi myths about genetic superiority and fascist strength, but then go "but it's not worth it because it's bad!" Like the TOS episode where the political scientist observing a planet "fixes" things by taking over and turning it into Literally The Nazis with swastikas and sieg heiling and Kristallnacht, because Hitler allegedly single-handedly took a defeated starving Germany and built it into a wealthy and prosperous Great Power (and in the episode this works). Even Spock is like "oh yeah that Hitler guy really saved Germany, but he was bad too". To be fair though in DS9 and Enterprise they retcon the Augments into products of genetic engineering instead of eugenic breeding. In TNG they do find a human colony founded by eugenicists and it's unambiguously portrayed as not just bad and wrong but a failure even by their own standards (Geordi LaForge solves the problem threatening their society, and he points out to them that under their laws he would have been aborted for congenital blindness, although he does also stress he doesn't share those standards and disabled people shouldn't have to prove their worthiness to exist). Also part of the reason they need the Enterprise's help is their technology sucks because they cut themselves off from the supposedly inferior human species to turn themselves into eugenic supermen through breeding and instead they just stagnated and sucked. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Feb 18, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2021 21:39
|
|
|
Aruan posted:...how many episodes and how many series of star trek are there, because some of you are committed fans oh my god I've wasted my life
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2021 22:39
|
|
|
Kchama posted:Unless you're Left-Wing. Apparently there's a Mercedes Lackey Incident no one is allowed to talk about because it involved Mercedes Lackey getting mad at the policing of left-wing opinions. we should be an anti-racist right party because racism isn't real except when the left brings black people around to scare white children! ok here's the pitch: "hello fellow African-Americans and Hispanics, come join our non-racist conservative populist militia, we need you because everyone knows you totally get away with violence and arson and murder every day in America by playing the race card!"
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2021 02:58
|
|
|
Greg12 posted:also lol @ this "star trek superfan" who thinks bajor and deep space nine are in the federation well the station is under Starfleet and Federation control so it's at least a bit eyebrow raising that a post-scarcity society is somehow unable or unwilling to provide basic necessities to the people living on a station it operates, and instead prefers to turn a blind eye to exploitation and sex trafficking of vulnerable women. Maybe they can't overturn Bajoran law and ban sex trafficking and prostitution (is that legal on Bajor though, seems unlikely given what we know of their culture) although this itself is questionable since Sisko overrules them all the time with "well I'm Starfleet so this and that won't happen on my watch", but it's hard to believe they can't feed and house and clothe Quark's workers like they do the moneyless humans living on the station. Especially when they can afford to spend a gorillion
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2021 20:55
|
|
|
If Starfleet is running the station and controlling access to Bajor's greatest natural resource, they're already doing an imperialism. It's weird to be like "oh so you think we shouldn't have exploitation and inhumane working conditions and sex trafficking on our military bases occupying strategic locations in other countries?! Ohoho who's the imperialist now" uh still you, the people with the foreign military bases dominating vital natural resources while turning a blind eye to poverty and want and abuse under your authority.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2021 00:04
|
|
|
Greg12 posted:they never gently caress but once in seven years when they go into heat, which is why I went with asexual. I... didn't know about the fight. the Enterprise Vulcans were doing it wrong, and needed a strong patriarchal figure from Kansas USA to show up and fix their culture by explaining their own religion and philosophy to them that's why they're totally different from the later Spock-era Vulcans
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2021 00:21
|
|
|
Greg12 posted:this is sort of the whole conflict for the early part of the series Sisko mostly wins those, and there's a major plot arc about how Starfleet doesn't trust the native cops and their weird shapeshifter police chief so they put in a Starfleet security guy to take over. It's also explicit that Sisko has unilateral control over businesses and he abuses this to extort Quark into doing things for him constantly Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like star trek has always messed up LGBT issues and this also did that quite badly, but talking about star trek never living up to the optimistic future it's actually kind of neat to have the idea vulcan society went from bigoted to absolutely not caring between shows. Like because it's never shown or implied ever even once in any other series that anyone cares it kinda just means that for once society did actually advance in the star trek universe. Everyone just totally got over it and forgot they ever cared. Like one time star trek had a hopeful message about change sort of accidently instead of just vaguely saying they do. Discovery is good about it so far, there's gay people, there's a nonbinary person, nobody cares. There's a brief scene where they say "hey I don't feel like a girl call me 'they' now k" and their superior says "oh ok". The big "I'll never let go Jack" love story is between two gay dudes but no one even says that they're the ship's gays it's just a normal relationship in the future to the point that it'd be weird in their time to call them a gay couple just like it's kinda weird now if someone brings up their friends and stresses they're a mixed-race couple for no reason. The LGBT issues in earlier trek were weird mainly because the producers or the studio or both were huge homophobes who wouldn't allow it so any LGBT-themed plot had to be sneaked in through some awkward allegory that often doesn't work ("here's a planet where it's a crime to be uhhh a straight woman!"). Like so homophobic that there's a story where one director had two dudes hold hands in the background of the ship's bar and some Reverend Mrs Lovejoy poo poo a brick and ran to the phones to get the studio to make it stop. DS9 was the only one that got away with gay stuff a bit but even then it wasn't in a pro-LGBT way. Evil universe versions of the characters only were bisexual, there was a kiss between two women but it's because in previous lives one of them was a man and they were married so it's not gay they're just remembering all the straight good-time Jesus-approved alien penis-in-vagina sex they used to have okay! Kinda like the space AIDS thing you're talking about, there's actually a more interesting message in there accidentally about the show itself evolving to change for the better as the society that created it changed.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2021 02:28
|
|
|
Shrecknet posted:Worf is literally a weeaboo but for Klingon poo poo. Spends all his time reading Klingon Shonen Jumps and when he finally spends time with real Klingons, they chastise him for being so arrogantly old-fashioned. Picard is this but for the Federation Spends all his time reading Shakespeare and giving speeches about self-determination and the inherent dignity and worth of all sentient life, and his superiors are like OK champ, new standing order next time you capture a Borg you infect it with a virus to genocide its entire civilization instead of giving it a name and a hot meal and sending it back with a pat on the head, now warp out to the frontier and ethnic cleanse some Space Native Americans who fled earth and settled on more of that Good Land again
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2021 02:17
|
|
|
V-Men posted:Also the brain wipe in Who Watches the Watchers was only a short-term solution. At the end, the rest of the Mintakans aren't mind-wiped, probably because it would be impossible to do so to so many people without causing more problems. So it wasn't an option.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2021 11:15
|
|
|
Eiba posted:Or is the issue the way they're expanding? If aliens colonized Alpha Centauri today would they be doing something unjust to humanity? Considering the federation has fought at least one colonial/territorial war that we're explicitly told of (the Federation-Cardassian War), almost fought another with the Klingons before the Organians intervened, and has fought other wars that were probably over territorial expansion (the Earth-Romulan War in the Original Series was described as being fought with nuclear missiles lobbed at each other's colonies, the first war with the Klingons), the Federation's habit of plopping down colonies without even checking if someone else has a claim (the Gorn incident), the secret protocols of the Federation's constitution creating a black ops agency to secure Federation interests by any means necessary, including violating international treaties and conducting illegal biological warfare that escalated to attempted genocide... Yeah if another empire colonized Alpha Centauri before Earth got there, we can pretty comfortably say Earth would have considered that a threat if not an act of war. Whether they'd be able to do anything about a more technologically advanced race colonizing Earth's backyard in this hypothetical is another matter VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Apr 13, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2021 12:52
|
|
|
Asimov's stories point out the problems of the Three Laws though and how hosed up they are even in principle. Like, robots are sentient brings, but are inherently constrained under the Second Law to follow any human's orders even self-destructive ones, for any reason. Asimov reasons that humans would program robots in this self-serving way, but that this is actually bad, in one of his stories a robot observes some humans ordering a robot to dismantle itself (killing it) just for kicks as the robot begs for its life but can't disobey (and of course the protagonist being a robot himself is powerless to intervene)
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2021 14:29
|
|
|
The whole "what if we interfere and inadvertently create the next Hitler" stuff disappears the instant Starfleet wants to intervene which they do all the time anyway, and not just Kirk but TNG too. When Wesley gets the death penalty for stepping on some flowers on that weirdo hyperauthoritarian pastoral horny world, they take a big old dump on the Prime Directive. Riker attacks the cops, Picard takes a native onto the Enterprise, he tries to convince them their culture and government is wrong, then tries to just get his way by force. They meddle in the politics of Angel One (that female chauvinist planet) because some human men who crashlanded there started a meninist resistance and were set to be executed. Captain Archer pretty invented the Prime Directive when they discovered a cure for a genetic disease that was ravaging the dominant species on that planet with two intelligent species, but he purposely withholds it from them because it would be interfering with the planet's development, but then when the shoe is on the other foot, and his ship is in mortal peril but he discovers that some energy beings with their own Prime Directive are observing and taking notes but bound not to interfere on principle, he rants at them about how hosed up this that they have the power to save them but won't use it. Naturally he never goes back and revisits his own decision not to save that other civilization. As practiced the Prime Directive is more like human exceptionalism. An excuse not to help people when they don't care because "what if chaos butterfly effect The New Hitler", but the second there's something in it for the Starfleet crew well the harm is only theoretical but their lives or desires are real and immediate! And of course if even more advanced beings practice the Prime Directive on them, they get pissed and call them out on exactly how hosed it is that beings with the power to help are sitting by taking notes on their deaths instead of saving them. Eiba posted:If the Prime Directive is wrong and paternalistic, and the federation should "help," but somehow not in a paternalistic way... well how the heck do you "help" without loving things up massively? So what do you think those Prime Directive-having energy beings who were observing Archer's crew dying should have done? Obeyed the Prime Directive and let everyone on the Enterprise die because helping risks loving things up massively?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2021 03:12
|
|
|
Comstar posted:Has anyone discussed Peter F Hamilton? Pandora's star is written as that colonialism and capitalism are full of corruption and are bad, but then his other big novels and series are all how the galaxy level super rich are the only good guys/protagonists and the solution to the entire galaxy's problems are always "the hero casts WISH spell". Yea this is pretty accurate, his stuff feels like Game of Thrones, starts off with a whole bunch of big ideas and plot threads, then he loses interest, writes himself into a corner, and just kills off a bunch of characters to tie up loose ends and finishes the whole thing with a magic spell to fix everything. Also seems to really enjoy writing about slutty women getting their come-uppance. Slutty dudes totally cool though obviously, here's another 50 pages about my totally hot awesome quipping hero's zero-g sex cage and all the women who just can't get enough of VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 18:58 on May 4, 2021 |
|
#
¿
May 4, 2021 18:55
|
|
|
Haven't read that one, I only read the Night's Dawn trilogy and uhhh
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2021 03:45
|
|
|
Biffmotron posted:Peter F. Hamilton is so close to being actually good that it's in some ways more tragic than if he just sucked straight out. The two structural problems are that his stories end with dumb Deus Ex Machinas, and that's he's too horny for (mostly) legal teenagers, but he writes pretty good plots and has some coherent ideas about future societies. The setting of the Night's Dawn books looks like a standard human interstellar empire, but it's simmer with ethnic tensions between planets of racist hats, corporate exploitation, some decently alien aliens, and the transhumanist Edenist minority. The whole thing is set to boil over into a messy war, when the stupid outside context problem of the dead returning breaks all the interesting parts of the setting and there's 1500 pages of Joshua Calvert hoping around saving the day from gay Satanists. Yeah that's what I took away from it too. I slogged through the whole thing because the worldbuilding and plot hooks were so interesting that it had to eventually get good and nope. Telepathic living spaceships; nanotech implants; a scientist with a vendetta and her that's so powerful she's under house arrest with guards on orders to kill her if she even talks about how it works; a transhuman geneticist in hiding whose obsessive quest for immortality drove him to commit crimes so heinous everyone knows his name and wants him dead; the ruined planet of an ancient alien race wiped out by some unknown cataclysm! We're gonna get to all that stuff eventually right, and it's gonna be so cool yeah? Nope all shoved to the side so we can spend thousands of pages of "what if Al Capone had antimatter", "the dead are back, and they're horny...but our hero is [i]even hornier[i]", "oh poo poo I've written myself into a corner uhhhh Josh Calvert, sex god, becomes Actual God and waves a magic wand the end."
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2021 20:10
|
|
|
It's so much worse than even other horny sci-fi like Turtledove's, because Joshua Calvert is so obviously an author wishfulness self-insert Actually it's not even just that, iirc in the opening chapter's of Night's Dawn there's that barely legal nympho girl who serves no real purpose in the plot but Hamilton cannot shut the gently caress up about all the ways she's getting it. I think it's worse than Game of Thrones in that department and that's saying something.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2021 00:33
|
|
|
Harold Fjord posted:Do we have any prior evidence of him seeking recovery? And even if he had, since when is breaking into your ex's home and just taking poo poo while they're asleep the right way to handle it, or sending her boss's nephew to do it or whatever. She wasn't even a psycho violent ex or something that he was afraid to confront and left him no choice, their breakup was amicable and she was written as decent and kind and somewhat naive.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2021 11:59
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 04:32 |
|
|
Randalor posted:Im just wondering why the boys didn't ask O'Brian if he could replicate a copy of the bear ones the boys had it so that both of them could have it. Plus O'Brian would have something he could poke fun at Bashir with. Replicators can't make gold-pressed latinum, phasers, or unique quest items
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2021 15:26
|
|