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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3585 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 14, 2024

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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There’s the post-collapse genre exemplified by Foundation. It shifts back to focusing on recovery pretty fast, but the idea of planning for population decay and instability is there. Dune flirts with the subject for similar reasons. I haven’t read past God-Emperor, but I hear the last couple Frank novels are weirdly desolate.

For more modern stories which play around in the post-apocalypse, maybe Revelation Space? Or influenced works like the sandbox space game Starsector. These are settings where humanity has not coped well with the collapse of major technologies. You really get a sense that humanity is limping along even when there are insane accomplishments in the setting.

You might appreciate an explicit (if minor) theme in A Fire Upon the Deep. The sympathetic alien leader of Woodcarvers is specifically struggling with the eugenics required to keep continuity of consciousness in an organism made of multiple separate brains. Shit’s wild. The whole book is great, and straddles the line between bleak and triumphant. I suspect the sequel, featuring a few humans marooned on a primitive planet, would hit similar themes.

On the fantasy side, Prince of Nothing. It’s also post-apocalyptic, and it’s very clear that the squabbling institutions of men are losing ground. The first apocalypse was triggered by summoning an entity which prevented live births so long as it remained in the world, and the group which summoned it is still around. Great series. Absolutely horrible.

So yeah, good question.

Prince of Nothing

Well, the Sranc certainly aren’t suffering from depopulation…

The Nonmen are a race explicitly suffering from depopulation as all their women were killed by the Womb Plague iirc, so you have a society of immortal individuals slowly dying off from war and madness. I think it’s The Unholy Consult that has the section exploring the last of their extant Mansions. Haunting and beautiful stuff, Bakker is easily one of the best fantasy authors living.

I second the Starsector recommendation, although do note that the game is still in development and the main storyline is currently only half-finished.

A Fire Upon the Deep

I suspect the sequel, featuring a few humans marooned on a primitive planet, would hit similar themes.

I will highly recommend the sequel, A Deepness in the Sky. That primitive planet? It circles a star that dies out then flashes on. The natives? Spider-aliens. The deepness? Their word for where they hibernate during the sun's darkness, and the place that protects them from the explosion of light. Thus, the Deepness in the Sky is their place of safety, off their bipolar world, somewhere outside of the constraints their world has imposed upon them.

And I haven't even mentioned the humans, yet.

Shit's wild.

It's pretty wild, but it suffers from the fact that the aliens are just humans who happen to look like spiders. Their psychology, politics and history are identical to that of western countries in 20th century Earth. Nothing about their strange history or biology makes them any different from humans. They have nuclear families, they have constitutional monarchies, they are just Spider-Alien Britain. Hell, the competing human factions and sub-factions in the book are more alien then the aliens.

I think this is by choice since the author seems to believe in a kind of Whig view of history that liberalism is the only real way to advance and anything else is doomed to slow death or stagnation.

The Three-Body Problem did a better job of showcasing actually bizarre aliens, instead of people who look bizarre.

Their psychology, politics and history are identical to that of western countries in 20th century Earth. Nothing about their strange history or biology makes them any different from humans. They have nuclear families, they have constitutional monarchies, they are just Spider-Alien Britain. Hell, the competing human factions and sub-factions in the book are more alien then the aliens.

Wasn't that how the weaponized autists interpreted them for the masses? When one of the protagonists meets them in real life, he's immediately weirded out.

Wasn't that how the weaponized autists interpreted them for the masses? When one of the protagonists meets them in real life, he's immediately weirded out.

Yes and no. The spider society really does have nuclear families, a class system, constitutional monarchies and a World War and Cold War that mirror that of 20th century Britain. The physical descriptions and names are made to more mirror human culture by the autists, but fundamentally the spiders' history and social structure is like 20th century Britain in reality, that part isn't made up.

Also, although, the humans are weirded out, the spiders find humans extremely cute; because, spider children can only look in one direction like humans and spiders find the way humans stare at them while speaking, adorable.

Yeah I loved their 'house of congress' analog turning out to just be a giant pit full of spiders.

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