Ughhh. I wonder how many times you can do it? Basically re-write the lords of the rings but give the characters different names? They’re all the same too, every. Single. Time!!! There’s always a great big fat POS like that who eats a side of beef washed down with a keg of ale. There’s always a skinny, noodle armed twink like Aesop starring as the effeminate elf, an unwholesome midget that smells like death and excrement - Cederq, a wise old geezer like Joe for a wizard and a couple a women… one a beautiful demure flesh pot, the other a ghastly lesbian bull dyke girl boss. The misfits go on a quest facing overwhelming odds and they always win.
Science fiction today is basically the same but with tech instead of magic.
Somebody please… tell me a story..? Where the hell are you, WL?
In the third orbital ring above New Canada - popularly known as Gay America - lay an orbital monument to excess, performance, and impeccable lighting—the city just never slept. It pulsed because stopping would require self-reflection and outlawing puberty blockers - something that could NEVER happen.
ReplyDeleteLight slid along the inner hull in slow tides, simulating dawns no one needed. Transit trams whispered through vacuum-sealed corridors. Screens bloomed and dimmed like obedient flowers. Everything worked because everyone behaved.
Karen Karyn was very good at behaving.
She worked in the Memory Archive, a quiet division of the Civic Authority responsible for curating experiential records —compressed emotional logs donated by citizens to preserve history not as fact, but as pure feelings. The first grief after off-world migration. The first awe of seeing Jupiter rise like a demi-god through a station viewport. The soft contentment of long, scissoring sessions and memories of musk and tuna.
Karen catalogued them all. She labeled, indexed, and anonymised the most intimate moments of other people’s lives, then went home to Evan.
He was an engineer for the ring’s structural AI, one of the minds that kept the habitat from tearing itself apart under tidal stress. He talked about redundancy and resilience the way poets once spoke of love.
At work, she reviewed a memory from an early settler: a woman standing alone on a red plain, helmet off, lungs burning as she tasted alien air for the first time. The emotion tag read Terror / Exhilaration / Choice / Sexual Arousal.
Karen paused the playback.
She wondered what it felt like to choose something that might destroy you.
She met Julie Hearty at a symposium on sensory ethics. She was older, a private contractor specialising in neural interface calibration—one of the few allowed to work outside Civic oversight. Her badge was unadorned, her presence dense, as though she occupied more gravity than the room allotted. Being an old fashioned land-whale did that. Being large enough to have her own gravitational field was healthy - just like the old Terran leaders said - Julie was healthy at any size.
“You’re an archivist,” she said, after Karen Karyn's NSFW joke about emotional fidelity in recorded memory. It was not a guess.
“Yes.”
“You spend your life observing heat,” she continued calmly. “But never touching the naked flame.”
Karen's face warmed. She laughed, too quickly.
They spoke afterward, then again the next day. Julie had a way of listening that made silence feel deliberate, not awkward. She asked questions Evan never did.
With Julie, Karen Karyn felt only heat. Heat and attention.
She showed her a prototype interface one evening after the symposium ended. A private rig, unregistered. Battery operated and totally illegal, strictly speaking.
“It amplifies somatic feedback,” she explained. “Not memories. Presence. And burning desire”
Karen hesitated. Thought of Evan. Thought of how safe everything was.
The sensation was not pleasure exactly. It was awareness, sharpened and stripped of narrative. Her own breath sounded loud. Her skin remembered itself. No actually it was pleasure, as she felt her secret folds swell and the humidity "down-there" rise.
Affairs were not uncommon on the ring, but this one was meticulous.
Julie scheduled around Evan’s rotations. Karen learned how to lie with ruthless efficiency she didn't know she possessed, but quickly began to admire in herself. Evan was weak. Unworthy. Just so . . . . BORING.
With Julie, she learned to articulate desire. The interface allowed direct nervous coupling—no recordings, no archives, just raw battery-powered dishwasher safe exchange. She told herself it was exploration, not betrayal. Evan would never understand this version of her anyway.
When she told her, she stared at her for a long moment, then exhaled. Herpes. “That’s not my problem,” Julie said. “You’re an adult. You manage your own safeguards.”
Someone stated that there are only 7 basic plots in the world, and every story ever told is one of those 7 plots. Same story, different names. That's why Star Wars is always the plucky little rebellion against the fascist empire. No matter how many times the rebels win, the empire is always in charge and the rebels must remain plucky and defiant. No one wants to read/watch where the empire finally just gives up and the rebels have to, uhhh, learn how to govern, collect taxes, make laws, enforce laws, collect more taxes, and put down other rebels cause they are a nuisance. BORING.
ReplyDeleteRaconteur Press has the fix you need at affordable prices. They have a new batch every other week. Novels and anthologies. Call me a pusher if you like, but I'm a fellow addict.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.raconteurpress.com/
https://x.com/ShamashAran/status/2011129269234384919?s=20
ReplyDeleteThat pic of Ronald Raygun features teletype paper tape. SO high tech!!!
ReplyDeleteLooks like ya lost some weight
ReplyDeleteI'd read Lord of the Rings and was hungry for something else in the fantasy genre. A new paperback just appeared in Waldenbooks (That tells you how long ago this was.) The Brothers Hildebrandt had done the cover art and it looked very good. It had a dwarf, an elf, and a probable fighter all gawking at the titular Sword of Shannara. I bought the book and eagerly read it. After about 100 pages I thought, "This sounds awfully familiar." By the time they went into the mountain tunnel I was pissed. If they'd fought a Balrog I wouldn't have been surprised. When I finished the book I was disheartened. I threw the book down in disgust and have not reread it for at LEAST 48 years. I've never read another fantasy book since, except The Lord of the Rings, which I read annually. Oh, and The Hobbit, but that doesn't count. It's been nothing but a steady diet of Science-Fiction and Science fact ever since, with the occasional historical fact book thrown in for good measure.
ReplyDeleteIf you think that's derivative, all the other Shannara books are retreads of the first book. Beat for beat, scene for scene. Only some of the names change.
DeleteMy favorite part of Shannara is when the young heroes walk across the vast plains, teeming with millions of goblins - in an afternoon, without seeing anyone.
I've been out to lunch, but I'm back.
ReplyDeleteIf you haven't read it, I recommend Bored of the Rings by The Harvard Lampoon. There is no fourth wall; the characters know who and what they are, and they aren't happy about their plight.
Meantime, I'll set up my new monitor tomorrow and start playing the keyboard blues.
Nuclear Jellyfish by Tim Dorsey. Trust me. It’s right up your alley.
ReplyDeleteMarvin the Martian had a cool one also.
ReplyDelete