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Perhaps the Stars (manuscript), Ada Palmer. This won't be out until 2021, but the author is a friend. As I said elsewhere "It is very good and will make you optimistic for humanity but also put you through the wringer". Which is why I'm writing this now rather than tomorrow, because it's still on my mind. There are parts of it that are great fun -- it's a very intertextual book -- but also things that are very distressing, and the nature of the unreliable narration makes it even more so.
It is a very LARPy book in some ways, which is unsurprising given the author, but not in a way that I found distancing: I think it uses the same toolkit that LARPs do to make the fictional seem real.
The series makes me think of the line from the Christian Bible: "God so loved the world..." as it interrogates it from so many different directions. What does it mean to love a world? What does it mean for a God to love, and how do Gods show their love? What else would a God love? What would one sacrifice for the world, or to remake the world? What is meaningful sacrifice for a God to make?
But that's just one thread: also there's lots of Illiad fanfic and good stuff -- and watching Ada smash to pieces and rebuild this brilliant edifice of worldbuilding she's built up in the first three books.
It is a very LARPy book in some ways, which is unsurprising given the author, but not in a way that I found distancing: I think it uses the same toolkit that LARPs do to make the fictional seem real.
The series makes me think of the line from the Christian Bible: "God so loved the world..." as it interrogates it from so many different directions. What does it mean to love a world? What does it mean for a God to love, and how do Gods show their love? What else would a God love? What would one sacrifice for the world, or to remake the world? What is meaningful sacrifice for a God to make?
But that's just one thread: also there's lots of Illiad fanfic and good stuff -- and watching Ada smash to pieces and rebuild this brilliant edifice of worldbuilding she's built up in the first three books.