Random, in the very specific early C21st sense of the word - gorillas in unexpected places, men in dresses, vicious gang leaders with secret feminine Random, in the very specific early C21st sense of the word - gorillas in unexpected places, men in dresses, vicious gang leaders with secret feminine sides, and so on. Chapters are 6 pages, setup and gag, setup and gag, hundreds of times. And he’s not very good at drawing movements. And most of the characters are pretty similar - credulous, chatty, pedantic, loveable thugs. (Maeda is sensible and so put-upon by the cracked logic of the comedy world.)
But it’s actually funny, actually earning its fourth wall violation and dumb nonsequiturs. Half of the comedy might be in how deadpan everyone is. I don’t know anything about the genre it’s parodying and I still loved it....more
A Toy version of the scientific method, with Senku just intuiting things and progressing ridiculously quickly. But having even a toy version of sciencA Toy version of the scientific method, with Senku just intuiting things and progressing ridiculously quickly. But having even a toy version of science is more sophisticated than most fiction....more
Standard shonen hero’s journey... with breadmaking instead of monster hunting or martial arts or treasure. Very daft but not as stupid as it looks. PaStandard shonen hero’s journey... with breadmaking instead of monster hunting or martial arts or treasure. Very daft but not as stupid as it looks. Parts could come from a satire of shonen, like the standard brutal academy exam.
I also appreciate the implicit point that anything can be a profound mission, if you are lucky or gifted enough to lend something grandeur and telos....more
So soothing, so winsome. Gives me the same feeling as Wodehouse; of dropping into another, simpler world. In fact they both rely on social tension andSo soothing, so winsome. Gives me the same feeling as Wodehouse; of dropping into another, simpler world. In fact they both rely on social tension and innocent deviance for their laughs....more
Decent mind candy, quick work. 80% of it is pretty much one intermittent action sequence.
The only literary flourish is the protagonist constantly tryiDecent mind candy, quick work. 80% of it is pretty much one intermittent action sequence.
The only literary flourish is the protagonist constantly trying to distract himself - from a sheer drop, from the prospect of assailants above, from his culpability, from his impotence.
Necromunda (focussing on the under-underclass of a world-city) is much less Gothic, mystical, triumphal than the usual 40k stuff. But still nasty, unredeemed, temporary, claustrophobic....more
The most interesting piece in Games Workshop's vast, clanking archives. It isn't canon: Watson does too much in this, messes with the profitable stasiThe most interesting piece in Games Workshop's vast, clanking archives. It isn't canon: Watson does too much in this, messes with the profitable stasis of the last years of the 41st millennium too much. The nearest thing to Illuminatus! or Snow Crash....more
It's difficult to explain ok. What looks like tasteless idiocy - or, not much better, tastelessly ironic tasteless idiocy - is actually a new, hilarioIt's difficult to explain ok. What looks like tasteless idiocy - or, not much better, tastelessly ironic tasteless idiocy - is actually a new, hilarious literary style. I hate Twitter, but use it for this.
'dril' is a self-aware idiot, a boastful masochist, a fanboy, a shill, a disgusting but hapless man. He graduated high school in 2005 but also has grandchildren. He can't spell very well but he breaks out ten-dollar words quite often. That is: he is Everyman, online.
He thinks he's a social critic but he's also an open shill (and this is notunheard of). His mix of self-regard and incompetence is done better than Ignatius in Confederacy of Dunces.
Missing from this book is the nastier strand of the project, where he resurrects ten-year-oldtweets by real accounts with impressively stupid names which accidentally share the aesthetic. (He mostly targets inactive accounts, though.)
Remarkable book, mining Marxism’s great SF potential at last. Deeply politically incorrect somehow. I skipped Macleod until now, assuming that I alreaRemarkable book, mining Marxism’s great SF potential at last. Deeply politically incorrect somehow. I skipped Macleod until now, assuming that I already had the Scottish radical SF angle from Banks. But this is completely different. It’s detailed and tragic and filled with left self-sabotage. Clearly written by someone who has spent one too many evenings in vitriolic, pedantic, and useless Organising meetings.
Stone hauled a tattered tabloid from the inside of his jacket and spread it on the table. ‘Red Star,’ Stone said. ‘It’s a bit extreme, but some of the things they say make sense. Thought you might be interested, Moh.’ Does it show? Kohn wondered wildly. Is there some mark of Cain branded on my forehead that identifies me to everybody else, no matter what I say or don’t say, no matter how much I want to put it all behind me? He picked the paper up reluctantly, took his shades off to read. There it was, the banner with the strange device: a hammer-and-sickle, facing the opposite way from the traditional Soviet one, with a ‘4’ over the hammer. He didn’t read beyond the masthead. ‘The only red stars I know about,’ he said, ‘are dead, off the main sequence, and consist mostly of faintly glowing gas.
Why Marxist fiction (and not Marxist politics)?: the grand conflicts, the frustrated utopian futurism, the sweat and blood, the technology-first view of history. And also a lot of literary potential in the dwarfed, self-defeating, and famously speciated real-life cadres. Macleod includes aching details about British leftist culture - calling your parents by their first name, Levi jackets as some kind of statement, the pompous set phrases of resistance ("comrades, this is no accident"), the paranoid tint the whole world takes when history is your foe. I miss the sincerity and spurious clarity, the cussed, blessed obliviousness to which century it is.
The lunchtime crowd was so noisy she no longer noticed it, nor the wall-covering black-and-white portraits of Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill and Bobby Sands and Wei Jingshen and others to whose memory various factions had successively dedicated the place…
Others moved through the shadows of the trees around him and he recognized them, the old comrades, the dead on leave: John Ball in his rough robe, Winstanley building a hut in a clearing, Tom Paine slipping him a wink as he and Blake stepped over the sleeping Bunyan; Harvey and Jones, Eleanor Marx and Morris….
The foreword is essential reading - KM reveals himself to be a rare bird, a leftist who understands the dreadful force of Mises’ calculation argument.
Unfortunately, there’s no reason why the Economic Calculation Argument and the Materialist Conception of History couldn’t both be true. What if capitalism is unstable, and socialism is impossible?
As a result, the main conflict in this is not socialism vs capitalism (the ancap zone is the nicest place in the book) but progress vs primitivism and resistance vs (American and UN) empire
There were times when Kohn loathed the Left, when some monstrous stupidity almost, but never quite, outweighed the viciousness and venality of the system they opposed. Ally with the barbarians against the patricians and praetorians… think again, proletarians!… His co-op had lived by defending what he still saw as the seeds of progress – the workers’ organizations and the scientists and, if necessary, the capitalists – against the enemies of that modern industry on which all their conflicting hopes relied…
(She’d often wondered just what molecule or compound was responsible for hysteria and ineducability in the middle classes: it must have seeped into the food-chain sometime in the nineteen-sixties, and become ever more concentrated since.)
‘Fuck them and their nazi economics.’ He punched his palm. ‘Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep ecology. Give me deep technology any day. They don’t scare me. I’m damned if I’ll crawl, my children’s children crawl on the earth in some kind a fuckin harmony with the environment.
…a permanent party – in both senses, an occasion and an organization of the privileged
The OTT cynicism about the UN here contrasts well with the soppy treatment of the last fictional UN I encountered (Ada Palmer’s wise ancient saviour order).
The antagonists are done well. They're actually fighting to prevent billions of people dying, and their plan is (view spoiler)[actually the exact same as the one executed by The Gun deus ex machina. They also have some sense of AI x-risk, unlike the happy go lucky protagonists. (hide spoiler)]
The AI stuff is good, and the antagonists are suitably scared of it. (view spoiler)[The expert system architecture is quaint but he did his best. The death of the AI civilisation, billions of apparently sentient and highly enhanced minds is not treated very seriously, not half as seriously as losing Moh alone. But I suppose they are easier to redo than humans. (hide spoiler)] Yep:
the whole [AI] rumour was so apocalyptic that she had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them. But she also knew there would be no end of false alarms, lying wonders, false prophets with a Lo! here and a Hi! there, before whatever the real thing was came along. Indeed, they were part of the reason why the real thing always came like a thief in the night or… like a secret policeman in the early hours of the morning.
There are limits to Macleod’s scepticism. Trotsky looms large here as a wise prophet (never mind his own peasant-murdering and purely opportunistic democratic pivot).
‘I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and a clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.’ The gentle words, harshly spoken in a polyglot accent, made Kohn’s eyes sting. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We haven’t done very well.’ The Old Man laughed. ‘You are not the future! You – you are only the present.’
Also notable for a negative portrayal of Archipelago, voluntary ideological nations with exit rights. The only real critique is that they war on each other all the time (millions of deaths a year), and indoctrinate their subjects so that people don’t exercise their exit rights. Looking at real-life migration patterns in the face of violent borders, few authoritarian regimes have so far managed to indoctrinate so successfully.
New Situationists, Alternative Luddites (they wore space-rigger gear and blew up wind-power plants), Christianarchists, cranks, creeps, commies, tories – all had had their say, in colour.
Macleod is aware that the themes in this 1995 book aged badly in the next decades - revolution lost its hold even among radicals, American hegemony beclowned itself, and the greens took over the left.
And closer to hand, nearer than infinity, she could see the other free wheels turn. Stars and stripes and hammers and sickles flaunted their fading colours to the real stars that held no promises, only hopes and endless, endless lands.
More mind candy than Grand Synthesis, but a strong first novel anyway....more
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