Are they really so confident they can win a regional war?
Looking fowards to seeing Hezbollah, Syrian, Rojavan, and Turkish brigades aimed in the same direction for the first time ever.
Mardoniush
joined 5 years ago
The other option is of course "Just As Panned/ I meant for you to sin all along sucker because the reconciliation is the point".
Biden ruling like an aging Mycenean King, people keep coming for him but his fading mind is replaced only by violence and paranoia and his body remains strong
He's more about large unit operations, logistics, and large scale civil engineering.
You are in absolutely no danger of writing like Saunders. His prose has been described as "making a heroic attempt to seem like English" and he likes it that way.
This sounds very libertarian but isn't.
They live in a world where a sufficiently powerful mage can mind control an entire continent without actually being conscious of the fact they're doing it. Or if they are being able to stop.
When they finally got free, the former slaves vowed they'd never compel anyone ever again. In practice they still have a state and judges and punishments, but most punishments are fines.
Additionally, none of the mage autocracies around them know how their secret socialist cumbstomp magic works so once you join, you can't leave, ever.
Their whole civilisation is held together by a massive social hive mind geas that requires voluntary committment to it's rules (which is both a good countermeasure against subversion by outside mages and also prevents them going all War of the First Coalition.)
If you're a sufficiently powerful mage, you need to bind your soul to it and physically show the geas that you can live in society all the time, or it will delete you (or at least part of you). A main character sacrifices themself to defend the republic at one point because of this.
They do keep one person in prison. A mad mage they can't kill. This is considered to be a massive civilisational failure.
Series name by Graydon Saunders. The first book is a deconstruction of military fantasy. The second and third a deconstruction of Magic School. After that it sort of merges as the Big(er) Bad becomes less of a threat on the horizon.
Be warned in that the writing is deliberately opaque and obtuse, as if it was a direct translation from the Commonweal language (for example, there is gender in the language/society (broadly matriarchal in the local area), but it very, very rarely comes up, to the point that we still don't know the gender of some main characters, if they have a gender.) There are almost no info dumps unless a local citizen needs to be infodumped.
I am once again asking people to read the Commonweal for a materialist depiction of what this sort of fantasy world would actually be like. (most sub-species designed by mages of varying degrees of insanity, many for battle or servitude, the entire biome permanently hostile from weaponised species unless a god-king is physically suppressing it, history so fucked from time travel that if you dig too far into time you get a sea of pure evil where humanity was probably wiped out) and how to solve it (Revolutionary Socialist Republic with a commitment to agency that readers will find unsettling (they're prison abolitionists, if someone can't live in their society they just kill them straight up)
There was an experiment at my uni that involved opening up live kitten skulls and attaching electrodes to their open brains. They got PhD student applications.
Trust me there's always someone whose marks are low enough and who's desire to be a scientist is high enough.
I don't think this is a particularly problematic experiment if proper ethics procedures are taken, we do shit to brain tissue all the time.
Of course proper procedures were not taken.
Would love to see the ethics committee report on this one.
Dumbass uses the database analogy, but apparently has never encountered the situation where a database is fundamentally ill-equipped to handle the task you require, and attempts to bolt on band aids will result in collapse of the database.