(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[Gwern Branwen]

http://agrumer.livejournal.com/491118.html

> About half-way through Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires, I gave up. Why?
>
> ...The crazy right-wing politics. There’s the North American Union, with its single currency. There’s the European Union, where thieves get their hands cut off because of sharia. There’s the UN, which always takes the sides of the poor nations of the world instead of the NAU.
>
> The tech illiteracy. The setting is Earth, in a resource-poor near-future. Our protagonist has a cellphone, but nobody else seems to, and from what we see in the half of the book I read, it’s just a phone. Websites exist, but there’s no sign of social networking. When pirates hijack an enormous, luxurious cruise ship, the protagonists talk for a while as if there’s a possibility of keeping the news under wraps, as if there wouldn’t have been hundreds of people tweeting “OMG pirates!” within ten seconds of the first shots being fired. When the protagonists talk (via some kind of video-phone communication) with the authorities on shore, they argue a bit over the location of the ship, as if there’s no such thing as GPS. The whole thing could’ve been written in the 1970s...

Not that _Home Fires_ is the first time the currency right-wing stuff
shows up; I recall pointing it out elsewhere. Wonder if _Home Fires_
included _An Evil Guest_'s post-birth abortions...

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net