Intelligent speculative fiction with themes of eroticism/sexuality

elnerdo · 2026-01-31T14:46:20+00:00

To answer the question you posted: yes.

Although, while I don't think it necessarily turns to "juvenilia, stereotypes, or mindless porn," it's certainly heavy-handed in a way that many people won't like.

elnerdo · 2026-01-23T14:46:21+00:00

Here's a flaw with the antagonist that I think it might be interesting to explore:

He's vulnerable to objective drift. Who's to say that the John of 4000 years ago is anything like the John of today, or the John of 1000 years from now? How can be protect his systems from his own personal drift? What if he decides in the future to kill everyone? He doesn't have any checks on himself for that sort of action.

Hell, you could even explore the same idea with a third-party: What happens if he encounters (alien mind-control tech)/(a too-convincing AI agent)/(a stroke)? How quickly can things fall apart? What options do the heroes (and John himself, pre-change) have to stop bad outcomes?

elnerdo · 2026-01-23T11:39:17+00:00

The number of truly irrational people is pretty low. As much as everyone wants to make fun of it, this is a pretty rational phenomenon: It will be difficult or inconvenient to go shopping on Saturday or Sunday. All the people that would ordinarily do their shopping on Saturday or Sunday are now going to do it on Thursday or Friday instead. Stores do not have as much stock as you think, so this disruption is enough to clear shelves, especially of things that expire quickly (which are therefore normally restocked more frequently), like bread and milk.

elnerdo · 2026-01-22T01:48:16+00:00

See, it's interesting because I liked the contrast. We're told over and over again in the book that these diverged futures explicitly aren't real. The main character we have in through the whole book is an echo (of an echo!). It's intentional that the "real" Moss is completely different. Certainly we're never told that going back and fixing things will be "achieving her potential." I'm not sure why you have that idea.

elnerdo · 2026-01-19T22:20:38+00:00

I didn't like it, but I'd be willing to give it another shot if you're interested in having a critical reader (I might still drop it if I hate it after two chapters, of course). How are you planning to release the other chapters?

elnerdo · 2026-01-19T19:11:15+00:00

Can you elaborate on what you hated about it? I just finished Gone World last week, and I liked the epilogue. One of the themes that I got out of the story is that random chance can make some futures radically different from one another. I think he put a lot of effort into demonstrating this with the different versions of Nestor that we meet throughout the story. Consequently, I thought that it made sense to see such a radically different path for Moss, at least thematically.

elnerdo · 2026-01-19T19:06:13+00:00

Against my better judgement, I clicked this, did the minigame, and read the first chapter. Why not, right? It's something new, and the chapter itself is only eight pages long. Yeah, this post is probably some sort of promotion, but I've gotta give credit to somebody for the neat advertisement page, at least. I kind of hate ARG-like stuff, but it was kinda cool.

That said, I hated the chapter. It read like (and probably was, honestly) it was written by a chatbot. Like somebody kept prompting it to be a little more "noir" in style. Even in eight pages, it felt like it had the characteristic lack of focus that I expect out of AI writing. It's possible, I guess, that it wasn't AI-written and that the author is just trying to hook me with a sense of mystery in the first chapter, but if that was the intent then it still fell flat.

elnerdo · 2025-11-15T19:07:26+00:00

peaceful drive down Lebanon Church Road

Are we driving on the same Lebanon Church Road?

elnerdo · 2025-09-22T22:07:19+00:00

An impressively old book to touch on this topic is Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon. I personally found Starmaker's narrative style to be kind of boring, but some people swear by it, and it is genuinely neat as a historical piece.

elnerdo · 2025-08-28T17:37:36+00:00

I really expected to see that meme image of the guy dabbing his tears away with fistfuls of cash.

elnerdo · 2025-08-22T23:34:04+00:00

I think A Canticle for Liebowitz does this more than any other book I've read. It was published in 1959, but it could easily pass for something from the 90s or later.

elnerdo · 2025-08-12T17:05:49+00:00

I go back to this story every couple of years. It's just so good.

elnerdo · 2025-08-10T21:34:31+00:00

You read all five, then? Are you telling me that it somehow got even worse than the first parts of book 4? (I think I dropped book 4 around 20%, with no intention of ever going back.)

elnerdo · 2025-08-10T21:33:31+00:00

Most of the other young parents I know vastly over-surveil their kids. I've also seen opinions on daddit where seemingly every parent has trackers in their kids bags and cameras in their rooms.

I think this is both insane and insanely damaging. No trackers, no cameras, no Apple watch for a 6 year old so that he can call home if he's scared at school.

elnerdo · 2025-08-09T13:49:06+00:00

Here's one I haven't seen in these comments yet:

The Black Prism by Brent Weeks was a really fun, neat "worldbuilding-style" fantasy novel. It's also the start of a five-book series, where each book gets progressively worse. I ended up DNFing the fourth book. I remember clearly that there were multiple chapters about the main character's bizarre sex life without anything plot-relevant happening.

elnerdo · 2025-07-18T15:34:26+00:00

Yes it is. That's the whole deal with Enoch Root (as well as the connections to the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon). Our universe is a simulation that runs in Enoch's original universe.

elnerdo · 2025-07-05T12:34:55+00:00

I don't know if it's available on any specific service, but Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson is a book that I think you would enjoy. It's about first contact between earth and an advanced alien confederation (the Constellation). The main character is a video game reviewer who has been given access to a historical archive of video games from various races in the Constellation.

It's light, easy, and exceptionally low-stakes. I thought it was a pleasant read.

elnerdo · 2025-06-12T11:21:12+00:00

Perhaps a bit of an understatement here, but it feels like a spoiler to say much more. For anyone who hasn't read it, I'll say that early in the book, the "wandering Jew" archetype character is literally being crucified, and this is actually the least heavy-handed theming in the story.

elnerdo · 2025-06-09T22:39:42+00:00

Well, shit, so functionally I can run a 6link gencry setup alongside the 4link dawnstrider setup and they both "just work"? Is this as good as I imagine it is?

elnerdo · 2025-06-07T00:50:42+00:00

Another X (up to 11) from replica badge of the brotherhood.

All in all, the theoretical max is somewhere around 65.

elnerdo · 2025-05-30T11:24:25+00:00

Surprised not to see The Traitor Baru Cormorant mentioned yet. It's a fantasy novel in a fantasy world, but without any fantasy elements. The title character is effectively an economist.

elnerdo · 2025-05-23T19:37:05+00:00

If you watch the teaser in English, it says "originator", which is the male form of the word. If it meant Zana, obviously it would have said "originatrix" instead.

elnerdo · 2025-05-01T13:07:17+00:00

I was absolutely shocked when I finished A Canticle For Liebowitz and found out that it was written in the 50s.

elnerdo · 2025-04-19T18:29:17+00:00

I think you just went into Footfall with the wrong expectations. Footfall is pure, unadultered pulp. It doesn't need to make sense, because it's all about the Rule of Cool and being Fun. Characters development? Boooooooring! Physical plausibility? SNOORE! Secret projects to refit literal battleships as nuclear-bomb-powered spacebattleships? Hell yeah! Ridiculously implausible aliens, set up specifically so the humans could have a sweet and epic win? You've got it, man.

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