Charlie Stross
Horrifying thought:
Given RFK Jr.'s insanity about raw/unpasteurized milk, and the whole Opus Dei-soaked incel-themed Project 2025 …
Is whoever's pulling Trump's strings behind the scenes—Leonard Leo, maybe—actually stanning for Piers Anthony's "In The Barn" as their end goal?
Naomi P
@cstross where’s the brain bleach when I need it. I had forgotten that story existed and I liked it that way!
Parade du Grotesque 💀
- me: ooooh, something seems recommended here, let me take a look!
- also me, 5 minutes later, reading a summary of "in the barn": nope, Nope, NOPE, DO NOT WANT.
Charlie Stross
Somebody on Bsky just suggested, "don't worry, they seem to be going for a perfectly normal Hellstrom's Hive."
Hive with added Jesus, I mean, I can just about see that …
Charlie Stross
I'm ignoring the possibility that they based it on my own "The Apocalypse Codex" because the bad guys in *that* novel were based on *them* and we really do NOT want to be living in a future where the dystopia is identifying and amplifying its own worst tendencies.
Charlie Stross
@v_perjorative @gannet It's a story, collected in "Again, Dangerous Visions", and brain bleach won't cut it this time you'll need to irrigate your eyes with piranha solution.
Sam H (he/him)
@gannet @cstross as an avid kid reader with easy access to the library, I read an awful lot of his stuff. Fortunately appear to have missed that one.
Naomi P
@cstross @v_perjorative indeed. Utterly repulsive.
Graydon
@cstross In the sense that they really want to enforce "women, cattle, and slaves" as de-jure and de-facto categories of property held by men, with a caste system? Absolutely.
One of the things about the Indian caste system is that there's a take on the current genetic testing of the population of the sub-continent that says, oooh, caste system comes in ~3 kyears BP and genetic mixing stops and stays stopped.
All these supremacist billionaires want an economic caste system real bad now.
Angus McIntyre
@cstross Maybe it's just a case of “Any sufficiently advanced fictional dystopian regime is indistinguishable from contemporary conservative government.”
One could also add that “any barrel full of meth-crazed clowns is indistinguishable from contemporary conservative government,” an assertion that might seem hyperbolic if the incoming Trump administration weren't working so hard to confirm it.
Charlie Stross
@max @zarfeblong Well y'see, Louis Pasteur invented the first Rabies vaccine, as well as pasteurization for milk, so OBVIOUSLY they're connected which means pasteurization is a plot to implant 5G radio receivers in every milk-drinker in order to mind-control the sheeple who—
No, I can't go on, someone might think I was serious.
Max
@zarfeblong @cstross Also “unpasteurized milk” is so weirdly in the same woo woo homeopathy complex as anti-vax and “paleo diets” and “vitamin” supplements that aren’t actually vitamins. The distrust of experts and “science words” makes “pasteurized” sound like a dirty word and “raw milk” somehow a better, more “natural”, “return to simpler times” alternative. Just intentionally oblivious to the high death tolls of “simpler times”.
Andrew Plotkin
@cstross I would believe if if “unpasteurized milk” weren’t a transparent excuse for “legalize selling spoiled food to save on food handling costs”.
Charlie Stross
@rogerriddle You are looking for the solarpunk microgenre, along the hall, second door on the left. It's "micro" because there isn't much of it because it's kind of hard to see how to possibly fix all that's broken around here …
Chilly Dee Williams
@cstross I have been thinking this for quite a few years now once I started noticing that what I see happening in our world often closely resembles dystopian fiction I have read.
Why haven't we started to see fiction that tells a story about how humanity fixed all the messes we see? What if a plot was based 50 years on the other side of us overcoming the most difficult issues we are currently facing and people are now trying to understand what it means to live in this new reality?
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