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Pill identifier wizard 8373/12/2024 ![]() Neptune's Brood deals with space opera, slower-than-light, economics, ponzi schemes, finance, water worlds, family feuds, Age of exploration, robots are people too, bildungsroman, fraud investigation, space pirates Rule 34 murder by machine, Scottish detectives, everyone's queer, MMOs/VR/AR, hacking, AI (in the LLM sense), spam blocking with extreme prejudice, criminals who are not terribly bright, printcrime (speaking of which, this news broke today and all I can say is, I'm surprised it took so long) spy (internet edition), cybercrime, fraud investigation, Scottish detectives, MMOs/VR/AR, hacking, self-driving cars are baaad Saturn's Children robots are people too, bildungsroman, Heinlein pastiche, planetary romance, gothic graveyard robbery on Mars, don't raise the dead. Turns out writing Wodehouse is hard, but at least it got me into the right frame of mind for. Wodehouse in spaaace, gender comedy ( all the genders), robots are people too, ethnic stereotyping. Also a John Varley "Eight Worlds" tribute novel, in which respect I think it is probably unique. Glasshouse deals with war crimes, singularity, body modification, annoy the TERFs, murder investigation, space prison, oppressive milieu, and self-discovery. Missile Gap (novella): Aliens, Age of exploration, Cold war, group minds, mammals v. spy, crime family doing crime, civil war, nuclear holocaust. The Merchant Princes (Original Series) deals with Orphan with destiny, portal fantasy, family feuds, but also development economics, causes of revolution, nuclear terrorism, intelligence agencies, dynastic politics, spy vs. Also deals with superintelligence, mind uploading, Fermi paradox, group minds, dysfunctional families, Future Shock (a distinctive form of Culture Shock arising from too much change). Finally, Time paradox, weirdly without any actual time travel on-screen.Īccelerando This is a Singularity novel, 110%. Also Singularity and Religion (I mean, "kill them all, the unborn god will know his own" is definitely a theme). Iron Sunrise Starts off with Space Colony life, adds bildungsroman (Wednesday goes on one), but gets dark with ticking bomb hunt, war crimes, and Space Nazis. We can add Aliens but I cheated insofar as they're our cousins from a long way away (maybe this is another aspect of Culture Shock). Singularity Sky As noted above it's Space Opera, Singularity, Culture Shock. So pencil it in the columns for Space Opera and Culture Shock, and a tentative question mark in the column for Singularity (it's mentioned, but mostly off-screen: the title was pinned on it by the editor, it was originally going to be called Festival of Fools). What do I mean by trope in this context? Well, for a glaringly obvious example: Singularity Sky largely got written because I was really irritated by David Weber-esque space opera in the mold of Hornblower in Spaaaace-it seemed far likelier to me that, given FTL travel, our Nelsonian fleet of ships of the line would make hard contact with a nuclear powered hunter-killer or a carrier battle group (or, if they were lucky, some terrified fishermen in hide coracles). A smarter me would do this as a gigantic spreadsheet exercise with columns for tropes and rows for stories-after all, one novel can embrace more than one trope-but that's far too systematic and anyway I'm allergic to pivot tables.
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