• barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      18 days ago

      How is Echopraxia btw? I enjoyed Blindsight and thought the Rifters was pretty good (except for the last book which is extremely pessimistic about the human condition imo).

      • Nacarbac [any]@hexbear.net
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        17 days ago

        Good! It doesn’t seem to be rated as highly as Blindsight, but I think it’s actually the more interesting book - possibly since I’d already navelgazed about many of the same ideas in Blindsight just from exposure to Daoist stuff, Lovecraftian scifi, and reading it a decade after it had its influence on other media.

        Echopraxia is trying to reach further towards the experience of meeting unknowable forms of existence, this time with our theological circuitry as one of the main mental tools for grappling with the unknowable used by the super-humans, with the viewpoint character being a baseline human lumbering around like a caveman without a clue as to why the priests and tigers and thunderstorm are all throwing hands, just that it fucking sucks.

        It’s a bit messy and confusing, and some bits are outright implausible… but that’s genuinely the point, and I think that can be charitably extended even to the parts that weren’t intended.