RobotLadyErin

Wants To Create, Procrastinates

  • She/They
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in reply to @RobotLadyErin's post:

Brigador has a novel. Prose seems good from the preview.

for sci-fi weirdness, Blame! is great.

The Bolo series is a set of shorts/novellas/novels about gargantuan sapient sci-fi tanks.

Thank you! I've been meaning to pick up Blame! for a little while now but my brain can't hold on to information for more than .5 seconds it seems, I'll definitely check out the rest of these too as they sound great.

How the hell do you get from Cthulhutech to Lancer? Cthulhtech: the game with rape camps and Islamaphobia. People clown on Cthulutech on Pilot.NET because it’s reactionary edgelord material.

You know what, that's entirely fair. It's been a long time since I've read one or two borrowed volumes of that material, and it's clear that quite a lot of sludge in it simply didn't stick when I read it the first time. It's an uncomfortable feeling to go back to something I last looked at over a decade ago and realize how much of has aged like milk. But the truth is, every time, it was always the work that was rotten, the work hasn't "spoiled," because it's frozen in amber. It's the reader on whom the blame falls for that mismatch between the work and the memory; if I didn't encode it, clearly I wasn't paying attention, or was otherwise clueless. I would hope those toxic elements would be obvious to me now, and I can only beg forgiveness for the enormous blind spots I've tried to gradually shrink over time. This isn't the first time someone has handed me back something from my own past like I had passed them roadkill, and it's a sobering moment every time it happens.

So I couldn't really tell you how I got from one to the other - as someone who almost entirely consumes sourcebooks in isolation, and almost never in community, all I can say is that when I discovered Lancer, what I recognized was the pearl of an idea that I apparently had burnished over many years. "Oh, this! This is turning gears in my head that I've not felt turn since that!" It's categorically not a vibe I've felt from other mech-oriented worldbuilding I've encountered, and I now feel unqualified to articulate why.

So, I suppose that leaves the recommendation rescinded. Now I need to mull over whether to simply burn that particular bridge to a shard of my past, or else venture back across it and see what other unforgivably noxious trash I was uncritically consuming at the time.

I’ve only just started reading the series, but Iain Banks’ ‘Culture Series’ definitely evokes some of the same vibes for me. Most of the spaceships are A) sentient, B) weird little guys, and C) have very good names (Irregular Apocalypse, No More Mr Nice Guy, The Hand of God 137).