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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3577 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 14, 2024

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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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