/h/lit

911roofer he/him Always a wallflower, never a wall 1yr ago (reddit.com) 1,254 thread views #184078

R/books can’t understand how Orson scott card could qrite enders game when he’s such a meanie

https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/14mmmu0/how_can_orson_scott_card_be_so_bigotted_but_the

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LowAPM they/them draft our dramatards 1yr ago #4480679

The interesting part is they critique him on the premise that he is somehow a racist or anti-immigration/anti-multiculturalism. Card doesn't like gays, but he is super-progressive on the things they mention. The whole point of the ender series is that what he did was wrong lmao. I think redditors just don't have good reading comp.

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Prof_YeetusMcNasty un/dead LowAPM 1yr ago #4482545

I'm convinced it's being low IQ and lacking empathy. It's too much to ask them to consider that someone could have those views and still be a decent person (taken as a whole). That's one of the reasons that modern movies/TV are so boring. You know that you would virtually never have a "good guy" main character who was transphobic or racist or misogynistic. That would put them in the "bad guy" category, where they are beyond redemption. :marseydisney:

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nuclearshill gau/cho LowAPM 1yr ago #4480775

Speaking of not liking gays, has Frank Herbert been cancelled yet? He had super chuddy social views.

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Dramamine seed/feed If you look in the mirror and don't like what you sneed :marseysneed:

nuclearshill 1yr ago #4480879

Frank died before I was born. I don't think anyone cares anymore.

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nuclearshill gau/cho Dramamine 1yr ago #4480941

Dune is still a very popular book series though, and redditors love projecting current year social views into the past.

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911roofer he/him Always a wallflower, never a wall Dramamine 1yr ago #4481022

I hate Dune because it has no aliens or robots. I hate the Dosadi Experiment because the system designed for producing strong bodies to steal wouldn’t produce strong bodies. It would produce clever and vicious cripples, and a sharp mind is the last thing you want your cattle to have. An Eloi-style human farm would work better for this scheme.

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Dramamine seed/feed If you look in the mirror and don't like what you sneed :marseysneed:

911roofer 1yr ago #4481038

I've never heard of that. Is that even part of the Dune canon? It sounds like it's unrelated. (Brian books also don't count)

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911roofer he/him Always a wallflower, never a wall Dramamine 1yr ago #4481089 Edited 1yr ago

That’s the Dosadi Experiment, a completely unrelated book he wrote. I presume he was making it up as he went along. He also includes a species of frogmen who ritualistically mass-murder their young and feel horribly guilty about it. I like to think Kermit was one who refused and instead brutally murdered the other Gowachins in the room so they wouldn’t kill Robin. He was tried, found guilty, and subsequently released after his prosecutor committed suicide. The Gowachin’s are proud of their legal system, but it’s really really stupid.

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Dramamine seed/feed If you look in the mirror and don't like what you sneed :marseysneed:

911roofer 1yr ago #4481133

Okay, but I was confused about why this made you hate Dune. Pretty much every sci-fi author of that era and earlier ones wrote a few hundred books and most of them sucked; that was just a part of the publishing game when they were serialized or dimestore novels :marseyshrug:

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911roofer he/him Always a wallflower, never a wall Dramamine 1yr ago #4481149

I hate Dune because there’s aristocrats and no aliens or robots. The Gowacchins may not really work as a society or species, but they’re at least weird and interesting. You could, theoretically, get the entire species to commit auto-genocide through a court case.

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Dramamine seed/feed If you look in the mirror and don't like what you sneed :marseysneed:

911roofer 1yr ago #4481243

because there’s aristocrats and no aliens or robots

That's part of the appeal, imo. Not having robots becomes an interesting lore point. They're socially forbidden technology that everyone sorta knows of, but would take a huge effort to build. Even today, producing chips is a hugeass multi-national effort that takes huge amounts of manpower. So there's an obvious enforcement mechanism where you can't keep tens of thousands of people quiet who also need a huge variety of specialties from various background and educational levels so you can build processors... and then have to keep all the programmers and IT guys also quiet too.

Not having aliens doesn't have to be explained because it's still possible that there's really not much other sentient life out there. I'd rather that vs some lazy poorly written alien species that really doesn't seem viable.

Overall it doesn't seem world-killing to me among hundreds of books that will lazily use robots/super fast computers/alien technology as basically magic to solve their narrative problems.