everything for everyone is not for me
Mar. 4th, 2024 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isunshoweras a leftist who loves speculative future stories and loves oral history as a storytelling device, naturally it followed that i had to pick up everything for everyone. and on the one hand, i really like bits and pieces of it! the entire chapter describing the palestinian liberation, for example, was very hopeful and--and this is a key word ahead of my criticism of the rest of this book--believable. that one was probably my favorite chapter in the book (the cult one is maybe a close second), and not just because of how timely it is. i also enjoyed the quinn and latif chapters about kids taking care of kids the world over and what it means to reimagine the family, and the concept of veterans and rave kids uniting to remake the internet is interesting at least (i'll get into this later).
unfortunately, a lot of stuff in the book just... lost me. what do you mean we're ecologically restoring the planet, but also we're GOING TO SPACE? going to space is like hugely ecologically wasteful, right??????????? or like, the way the authors insert their future selves into the story and talk about "storming uchicago". the language, where everyone is saying "i'm sorry" and "it's okay" in the exact same formulaic way, felt very much like it was tiptoeing through very leftist ways of thinking where you have to be so so precise with your language or everyone will yell at you. the characters don't seem to have an individual voice: regardless of age, place of origin, or whatever, they all talk without using any contractions and with the exact same slang. the trans narrators talk in very in-depth ways about their genders, but none of the cis people do; this is something that as a gender expansive person i'd LOVE to see in the utopian society! cis people having just as intimate relationships with their genders and sexualities as trans people do! but the cis narrators never mention it. also... and maybe this is just my own isolationist, anti-tech worldview talking, but somehow i fail to see how the world gets reconnected through a new internet and it's just... peaceful because everybody's communist now i guess. i get that the holo stuff has an interesting origin story, and that's great, i like the origin story. but there have got to be drawbacks to this kind of thing, right? to me personally, i think a lot of the problem with the world these days is that we're too interconnected, and that the best way to heal the earth and our relationships with each other is to massively downsize and idk not be in service to everyone all the time and not be able to access literally everything and not have one massive monoculture develop (as happened here). and finally, WE NEVER GET AN ANSWER ABOUT WHAT TF IS GOING ON IN AUSTRALIA! they can't just keep dropping hints and not explaining, otherwise i'm going to think it's literally the plot of mad max fury road down there.
so in conclusion there are good bits of worldbuilding and there are bad bits of worldbuilding and they don't always play nicely together. i don't regret reading this book in any way and i've definitely read worse. but like... y'all.
unfortunately, a lot of stuff in the book just... lost me. what do you mean we're ecologically restoring the planet, but also we're GOING TO SPACE? going to space is like hugely ecologically wasteful, right??????????? or like, the way the authors insert their future selves into the story and talk about "storming uchicago". the language, where everyone is saying "i'm sorry" and "it's okay" in the exact same formulaic way, felt very much like it was tiptoeing through very leftist ways of thinking where you have to be so so precise with your language or everyone will yell at you. the characters don't seem to have an individual voice: regardless of age, place of origin, or whatever, they all talk without using any contractions and with the exact same slang. the trans narrators talk in very in-depth ways about their genders, but none of the cis people do; this is something that as a gender expansive person i'd LOVE to see in the utopian society! cis people having just as intimate relationships with their genders and sexualities as trans people do! but the cis narrators never mention it. also... and maybe this is just my own isolationist, anti-tech worldview talking, but somehow i fail to see how the world gets reconnected through a new internet and it's just... peaceful because everybody's communist now i guess. i get that the holo stuff has an interesting origin story, and that's great, i like the origin story. but there have got to be drawbacks to this kind of thing, right? to me personally, i think a lot of the problem with the world these days is that we're too interconnected, and that the best way to heal the earth and our relationships with each other is to massively downsize and idk not be in service to everyone all the time and not be able to access literally everything and not have one massive monoculture develop (as happened here). and finally, WE NEVER GET AN ANSWER ABOUT WHAT TF IS GOING ON IN AUSTRALIA! they can't just keep dropping hints and not explaining, otherwise i'm going to think it's literally the plot of mad max fury road down there.
so in conclusion there are good bits of worldbuilding and there are bad bits of worldbuilding and they don't always play nicely together. i don't regret reading this book in any way and i've definitely read worse. but like... y'all.
