Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
So, the "What are you reading thread" or whatever it was called seems to have vanished. I can't even find it searching and it doesn't show up in the last two months, apparently, so I assume it's in thread necro territory. So, let's start a new one.

In my current quest of reading sci fi novels that have won awards, but that I haven't read yet, I got The Space Merchants. Now, I haven't finished it, I'm about two thirds through, but I need to talk about it.

So, what is this book. It's satire, and a pretty biting one. It's also Cyberpunk. Which is astounding, because it was written in 1952, which is at least 20 years before other proto-Cyberpunk works, and 30 years before anyone coined that name for the genre. Now, being written in the 50s, it doesn't feature cyberspace, or computers. Not a single one. But every other element is there.

Megacorps run the world. Costa Rica earns 90 percent of its taxes from a single company, which farms algae in vertical towers. The US has restructured its government so that every company share is a vote, not every person. India has restructured into a corp called Indiastries. Overpopulation is massive. The proletariat live 30 a room in hotbunks, and work 12 hour shifts at jobs they are indentured to. There's even SINs that determine the amount of rights you have, straight out of Shadowrun or Cyberpunk. Ads constantly running on TV screens are absolutely everywhere, plastered on every surface. In the dorms, in transport shuttles, at work places, even inside the "fancy" one-room corpo apartments. Corporate feuds are legally regulated and regularly leave a few dozen employees dead when one company loses a contract to another.

What sets it apart from other Cyberpunk and makes it more of a satire is that the main character is a Corpo. And not just any Corpo, a major ad executive, an utter scumbag and a true believer. Exploit more natural resources, increase the population, create more consumers, create more demand, create bigger markets, expand the consumer base again, rinse and repeat. Good for everyone. His job is writing raunchy limericks to sell coffee. Not just coffee, Coffiest! Everything you love about coffee, plus several new addictive chemicals which are totally harmless!

The plot starts when he is given the new and totally impossible job of selling people on being Venus colonists. Six months aboard a spaceship, followed by living in a tiny bunker for the rest of your life, being slowly cooked alive and poisoned. For no good reason, since there's nothing on Venus anyone wants.

I had to check the front page about once a chapter to make sure this was really written in the 50s.

It's also cited by the Oxford English Dictionary for inventing the terms "3D", "soyaburger", "RnD", "muzak" and "to survey (customers)" used as a verb. Which is astounding.
Ok, i'll have to put that one on my list, it sounds quite interesting. Especially with that release year.

I've been reading some non-fiction lately, after getting some recommendations from friends: the most recent one I finished was Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow", which is a very interesting work on intrinsic bias in thinking, the systems of thinking, expert and layman intuition and such. A really interesting, and at times somewhat confronting, read, considering he makes a lot of use of small "tests/questions" to provide examples.

Now working my way through Harari's "Sapiens", and.... I can tell that it's a quite well-written pop-science book, to the point where calling it pop-science feels slightly insulting, but it definitely wasn't meant for people with a background in history/archaeology or related fields. The biggest thing I got from it thus far, is the realization that a lot of what I saw in my (very) early bachelor studies is apparently "eye-opening" to people I know with the same amount of schooling, who recommended it. Feels arrogant to say, but it feels a bit surreal to find out that historical events and longue-durée themes that I consider basic knowledge is this interesting/novel to other people.

Then again, this must be what (for example) the guy who does experimental particle physics must feel like whenever his field comes up in group conversations. It's just the first time I experience it this closely.

After that, I'm looking to give Clausewitz' "On War" a try: I like political/war theory, and found Sun Tzu's "Art of War" and Machiavelli's "The Prince" quite interesting, so I'm fairly certain I'll enjoy it.