Category: Uncategorized

prokopetz:

I love genre bending as much as the next guy, but there’s a difference between mashing up tropes to see what shakes out, and
[nerdvoice]exploring the logical implications of the setting[/nerdvoice]. I understand that kids are calling it “rationality fic” these days (i.e, after the infamous Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality), but the genre itself is old as dirt, and I’ve seen enough of it to last me a lifetime.

Like, I grant that bad writing exists, but absent some compelling evidence to the contrary, I’m gonna give a work’s worldbuilding the benefit of the doubt. I am magnificently uninterested in anything that starts with the assumption that the only reason a fictional setting exists in its present state is because its inhabitants are just too stupid to work out the blindingly obvious implications of their own technologies and practices, and that all they need to set them on the path to technocratic utopia is for some smarmy nu-atheist fuckboy to wander by and show them what’s what.

This is not what cleverness looks like.